Often, when talking politics, someone will say that I worry about Donald Trump too much. Yes, he is a lot, they concede, but why does he trigger you? Why the obsession?
It is an interesting way to frame the discussion, because it shifts the focus from the presidency to me. And I would argue that we are all poorer when a president spends much of his time on social media, attacks the press and allies, starts wars overseas, concentrates power among corporations and government, and fosters unrest in our cities through an aggressive immigration policy. There is more, of course — the East Wing, the self-dealing, the racism, the coins, the market manipulation, the monuments.
But the question remains: how does any of this actually affect me, beyond making the news unpleasant to watch?
Let me try to be concrete.
I left a comfortable interest rate to downsize into the suburbs before the election, assuming I would refinance when rates fell. They haven’t fallen the way I expected. Tariffs, extraordinary federal spending and wars have complicated the inflation and interest-rate picture. At least some of that is Trump. Maybe some is just the market.
Either way, my mortgage payment is quite real.
Everything feels more expensive. The other day I went to the grocery store for a few items — sixty dollars. I filled my gas tank — slightly more.
My daughter, a senior, wants to attend the University of Virginia, where I went for undergrad and law school, and where my son also studied. I’ve given to UVA for thirty years. Trump’s administration has gone after universities aggressively, and UVA has hardly been spared. The Justice Department investigated the university, and President Jim Ryan ultimately resigned amid federal pressure. Admissions have changed as well. Application readers no longer see an applicant’s race, ethnicity, or family connection to UVA.
My daughter can still get in, of course. But a family relationship with an institution that has stretched across decades no longer enters the calculation.
And please do not tell me this represents some newfound national commitment to merit. Pete Hegseth was placed in charge of one of the largest and most important bureaucracies in the world without ever having run an organization remotely comparable to it. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is not a physician, was placed in charge of the nation’s sprawling health bureaucracy after a career primarily in law and advocacy. Businessmen and relatives are conducting sensitive diplomacy. Whatever arguments one makes for those appointments, this administration has hardly established merit as an inviolable principle of public life.
I sell eDiscovery services in the legal space, much of it tied to merger enforcement. When companies hesitate to do deals, or the enforcement environment becomes unpredictable, that reaches my desk eventually.
Or fails to reach it.
I have watched it happen.
I am Black and my wife is white, and my son looks as though he could be Dominican or Venezuelan. My family has been here since before 1800 — most unhappily — and my wife’s family largely the same, with some Eastern Europeans arriving in the 1870s.
But masked federal agents do not do nuance.
When my son goes downtown, he dresses professionally and keeps a scanned copy of his birth certificate on his phone. Hopeful that it’s enough.
I have never believed that we vote solely based on narrow self-interest. Democracy partly depends on our not doing so. I have always held broader ideals: freedom, equality, civil rights for all, a country that does not bully its neighbors, leadership that respects the dignity of every person without identifying them by where they were born.
Perhaps attacks on Black history and civil rights do not personally injure me. Perhaps watching Black officers in the military dismissed without clear cause does not directly harm my household.
I believe they do. They certainly demoralize my kids.
But I also now have a personal scorecard.
Trump has affected my mortgage, my grocery and gas bills, my daughter’s education, my business, and the precautions my son takes simply to go downtown.
He has affected my sense of national stability, institutional competence, and civic dignity.
And for all that, I can’t see the payoff.
People sometimes ask why Donald Trump bothers me so much.
That is why.