Why I Almost Stopped Looking — And Why I Can’t
I was going to write about Trump calling the New York Times treasonous this week.
Then I didn’t. Not because it isn’t outrageous — it is. The President of the United States threatened legal action against a newspaper for publishing an article he didn’t like, called their reporters criminals, and used the word “treasonous” to describe journalism. In any previous era of American life, that single event would have consumed a news cycle for days, triggered congressional hearings, and prompted serious constitutional debate about press freedom and executive overreach.
This week, it didn’t even make my list.
That’s the normalization trap. And I nearly fell into it completely.
I started researching this week’s Outrage Report the way I always do — casting a wide net, pulling threads, following the stories that most people missed. And I found myself making unconscious decisions about what “counted.” Trump calling the Times treasonous? Skip it — too routine. Trump joking at a Medal of Honor ceremony that he wanted to give himself the medal? Worth noting, but file it under “embarrassing” rather than “outrageous.” The $934 million pulled from the nuclear weapons budget to fix up a plane Qatar gave him so he can keep it when he leaves office? Now that one stays.
But here’s what scared me: I was making those triage decisions on autopilot. I was grading outrages on a curve that didn’t exist four years ago. I was letting things through — or not through — based on a new baseline of acceptable presidential behavior that I never consciously agreed to adopt.
That’s what normalization does. It doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t ask permission. It just quietly moves the floor.
The problem isn’t that I’m running out of outrage. The problem is the opposite — there is so much of it, arriving so fast, that curation has become a survival skill. At 19 Truth Social posts a day on average, with sprees of 47 posts in 31 minutes, the sheer volume of material is itself a weapon. It overwhelms the attention span. It makes it impossible to hold any single outrage long enough for it to matter. By the time you’ve finished being horrified by the Qatar plane and the nuclear budget it raided, there’s a new Medal of Honor knot and a new treasonous newspaper and a new July 4th Trump rally and a cult leader who was apparently running American intelligence policy from Hawaii.
So you choose. You have to choose. And in choosing, you risk letting things slip through that would have, in a saner time, defined an entire presidency.
This week I chose six stories. Six. In seven days. And I left out dozens more that were each, individually, genuinely alarming. I left out the Reflecting Pool algae conspiracy theories. I left out the Great American State Fair where multiple performers dropped out rather than be associated with the President of the United States. I left out the hydrogen peroxide workers pouring chemicals into a national monument. I left out the ongoing environmental lawsuit against Alligator Alcatraz, now being “fully demobilized” after costing Florida taxpayers $1.2 billion for eleven months of documented human cruelty.
I left those out not because they don’t matter, but because the six I chose mattered more. This week.
That’s the new calculus. That’s what we’re living inside. And if I’m honest, the act of curating this list — of deciding what rises to the level of “Outrage Report” and what gets filed under “Tuesday” — is itself a kind of loss. Every story I skip is a story the administration is counting on you not to notice. Every atrocity that gets crowded out by a bigger atrocity is one that goes without consequence. That’s not an accident. The volume is the strategy.
So I keep writing. I keep the list. I keep refusing to let “the president called journalists criminals again” slide past without at least marking it — even if I don’t have the bandwidth to make it the lead.
Because the moment I stop being surprised by any of it is the moment they win.