Somerville librarian Kevin O'Kelly has been a news hound since forever. But the past weeks have found him listening to music played on reconstructed historical instruments, watching British comedy reruns on YouTube, and learning about radioactive wild boars.
Welcome to acute-onset Trump Detachment Syndrome, a last-ditch, self-protective behavior that involves: not watching, listening to, reading about, or discussing you-know-who. It's perhaps the final, fatal, stage of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
Its sufferers are people who were once so up on current affairs that they could have stepped in as CNN commentators -- who threw around references to "the Selzer poll," and carried on parasocial relationships with the hosts of Pod Save America. Now? They're too fatigued to even think of knitting a pink protest pussy hat. Too dispirited to even hate-read or thrive on the rage.
They're reading actual books, listening to music, enduring silence. Some are avoiding not just Rachel Maddow, X, and Donald Trump supporters (if they even know any), but even fellow die-hard Democrats.
"Friends have called and said, 'Please can we talk? I need to cry,'" Shirley Milgrom, a retiree from Brighton, said. "I'm like, 'Not with me.'"
Getting angry is "futile," she said. So why engage?
Some people want to engage, of course. Call them Trump supporters. And for them, this is a glory period. Donald Trump Jr., for example, has been tweeting with glee. "Woke is dead!" read a Nov. 14 post on X. "Long live common sense & merit."
In a world where many feel that Trump is coming in through the cracks, achieving a Trump-free lifestyle takes more than just staying away from obvious triggers like Don Jr.'s feed.
For Marci Darling, it meant speeding away from a gas station when the owner came out to fill her car's tank wearing a red MAGA baseball cap.
"The hat felt like a knife to the gut," said Darling, an author, educator, and filmmaker from Manchester-by-the-Sea.
She is pretending the election never happened, she said, and in conversation with a reporter, when she needed to say the president-elect's name, she instead spelled it, as if it were a slur.
But wherever you look, there Trump is. As one TikToker put it: "Does anyone else feel like the red heart emoji has been totally ruined for them after this week?" newsletter writer Casey Lewis asked in a Nov. 8 post. .
Before the election, Lewis gleefully punctuated her communication with the beloved emoji, but now its MAGA-red vibes have rendered it "dead" to her. "I guess I'll have to go back to using, like, an exclamation mark," she said. And thousands of commenters felt her pain.
"I accidentally used it yesterday and QUICKLY had to clarify," one person wrote. "I unfortunately bought [a] very cute red sweater last month that i also feel is ruined for me," wrote another.
But with Trump, many people feel, nowhere's safe. Since the election, so many professional athletes have started doing the "Trump dance" to celebrate touchdowns or other successes that the New York Post proclaimed his stilted, two-fisted, hips-a-swaying dance a "global phenomenon," and the BBC ran an explainer (as if anything could explain it).
"I'm very good at compartmentalizing, but you can't escape him," said Lamont Price, a Boston stand-up comic and actor.
"The best way I can describe it is like that scene in 'The Matrix,' when Neo [Keanu Reeves] is dodging bullets in slow motion, but the bullets keep coming."
Like Harry Potter's Voldemort, Trump doesn't have to be seen or even named to trigger people.
"He's the elephant in the room," said Hailey Fuqua, a Salesforce administrator from Waltham. "Even just saying, 'How are you?' [to a friend] is tinged with feelings of disappointment and fear. We all know what we're talking about."
There Trump was, unnamed on a sandwich board outside a Brookline restaurant. "This cannot be happening again," the chalked message read.
There he was unnamed again on X, in a viral post showing a photograph of a sign apparently hung in the window of a bookstore. "The post-apocalyptical fiction section has been moved to Current Affairs," it read.
Trump is two months away from taking office, but even those who have gone to great lengths to insulate themselves from the reality of a new Trump presidency are having trouble keeping their bubbles from being popped.
Sometimes Trump news is overheard, when someone on the bus or in line at the coffee shop looks at their phone, and shouts: "What? RFK for Health and Human Services!"
Other times, people don't want to know, but also they do. Amanda Kennedy-Paige, a research scientist in Salem, is in a group chat made up of fellow head-in-the-sanders but for one friend who "can't look away."
In a way, the friend sacrifices for the group. "She gives us the short version of what's happening in small doses that we can tolerate," Kennedy-Paige said.