How to do without the Donald
Face-eating leopard or tantrum-prone toddler? It would be nice to know the answer, because it would tell us how much attention we need to pay to Donald Trump’s latest outburst. (I don’t know what that outburst is, of course. Something new is likely to happen in the time it takes you to finish this page.) If he is just a toddler having a full-blown meltdown, then the best strategy is to ignore him. Put on the noise-cancelling headphones and pick up a good book. If he’s a face-eating leopard, best to stay alert.
Unfortunately, this begs the question. If we don’t stay alert, how can we distinguish between the leopard and the toddler? Laughing and turning your back might be the appropriate response, but try that at your peril. Trump is a master at hijacking the way our attention works; we did not evolve to tune out loud, unpredictable activity in the vicinity.
It may be helpful to start with that, then, “in the vicinity”. Trump certainly seems to be in the vicinity: he’s on every TV screen, at the top of every homepage, in every social media feed. But his proximity may be an illusion. To be sure, if you are seeking a safe abortion in Houston, hoping to receive life-saving HIV medication in Kampala or fighting on the front line near Donetsk, then what Trump says and does matters very much indeed. Yet, every day I find myself talking to people who are as immune as anyone can hope to be from the actions of the most powerful man on Earth, yet spend more time thinking and talking about him than about their own spouses.
Some of the reasons for this are endlessly rehearsed. Traditional and social media both thrive on outrage and on unpredictability. Trump is guaranteed to deliver both. But switching off your phone and going for a coffee with someone is no guarantee of a Trump-free zone, because your coffee date will inevitably start talking about how terrible it all is.
This is particularly true if you don’t know them very well. One of the strange facts about human conversation is that it rarely exists to transmit new information. Instead, people instinctively grope towards topics with which everyone is familiar. Studies of groups making decisions, such as panels of recruiters considering candidates, find that people often fail to bring novel information to the table. Instead we chat about what everyone already knows. It’s the same with small talk. Rather than learning something new and interesting about where to find new knitting patterns, how to train for a half-marathon or the best places to visit on a weekend break in Copenhagen, you will find yourself nodding along as you both agree that JD Vance seems to be a terrible fellow altogether.
In Benjamin Hoff’s The Tao of Pooh, Hoff learns a lesson when he tries to convince Winnie-the-Pooh to listen to the radio. “That thing?” responds Pooh, sceptically. “Certainly,” Hoff responds. “How else will you know what’s going on in the world?”
Pooh suggests going outside instead. When the radio is finally turned on, the news is troubling: “Thirty thousand people were killed today when five jumbo airliners collided over downtown Los Angeles . . . ”
With the radio switched off again, Pooh is unconvinced that he has learnt anything of practical value. The birds are still singing. It’s still a nice day.
It’s a passage that delights some and infuriates others. Confronted with the enormous suffering of people you’ve never met, paying attention instead to the birds and the sunshine in your own small patch of the world is something you can only get away with if you are a fictional bear of very little brain.
An angry, sorrowful Pooh might be more socially acceptable, but would not resurrect any victims of the multi-plane pile-up.
When people solemnly declare that this is no time for complacency, what exactly do they suggest as a response? Voting makes a difference, especially if you happen to be an American citizen. So does political organising. But if your idea of resistance to Trump is actually just a combination of doomscrolling and self-induced insomnia, maybe you should pay more attention to the birdsong and the sunshine.
In his newsletter, The Imperfectionist, Oliver Burkeman offers a sanity-saving perspective. The realm of national and international events is important, but it is not a place in which to live. It’s a place to visit. It’s fine to go there, and perhaps go there often, but after you have voted or organised or donated or volunteered or whatever it is you feel you should do (and many people do none of these things), then come back to the world of your immediate surroundings.
Some people have no choice, of course. Whether or not they are interested in geopolitics, geopolitics is interested in them. But most of us can choose, and perhaps we should try to focus a little more often on our immediate surroundings and communities. Not only is it more pleasant, but the chance of making a positive difference to the world is much greater if you start closer to home.
A few years ago, the writer Austin Kleon highlighted a passage from Leonard Woolf’s autobiography. In the summer of 1939, with war looming, Leonard and his wife, Virginia, would listen with horror to the speeches of Adolf Hitler. One day, “suddenly I heard Virginia’s voice calling to me from the sitting-room window: ‘Hitler is making a speech.’ I shouted back, ‘I shan’t come. I’m planting iris and they will be flowering long after he is dead.’” Six years later, they were.
There have been worse leaders than Donald Trump — much worse — and Hitler was not defeated by being studiously ignored by those whose lives he did not touch. But if there is a time and a place for stubborn resistance, there is also a time and a place to plant iris.
Written for and first published in the Financial Times on 11 April 2025.
Loyal readers might enjoy the book that started it all, The Undercover Economist.
I’ve set up a storefront on Bookshop in the United States and the United Kingdom. Links to Bookshop and Amazon may generate referral fees.
