The solution is to look hard in the other direction

Oh, well, we can all relax, because everything’s fine. The people who know least about it say so, so what more do you want?!

Those silly excitable people who pay attention think it’s a massive dangerous clusterfuck, but that’s only because they pay attention. Paying attention is so elitist and coastal and wrong. Everybody should pay no attention and then we could all drink beer and watch football and be happy!

In record time, the 45th president has set off global outrage with a ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries, fired his acting attorney general for refusing to defend the ban and watched as federal courts swiftly moved to block the policy, calling it an unconstitutional use of executive power.

The president has angrily canceled a summit meeting with the Mexican president, hung up on Australia’s prime minister, authorized a commando raid that resulted in the death of a Navy SEAL member, repeatedly lied about the existence of millions of fraudulent votes cast in the 2016 election and engaged in Twitter wars with senators, a sports team owner, a Hollywood actor and a major department store chain. His words and actions have generated almost daily protests around the country.

“I’ve never been so nervous in my lifetime about what may or may not happen in Washington,” said Leon Panetta, a Democrat who served as chief of staff, secretary of defense and C.I.A. director during a 50-year career that spanned nine presidents from both parties.

“I don’t know whether this White House is capable of responding in a thoughtful or careful way should a crisis erupt,” Mr. Panetta said in an interview on Tuesday. “You can do hit-and-miss stuff over a period of time. But at some point, I don’t give a damn what your particular sense of change is all about, you cannot afford to have change become chaos.”

Ah but you see he is badly handicapped by knowing so much about it. That completely distorts his thinking and makes him overlook Trump’s many accomplishments in the past 25 days.

Those accomplishments are catnip for the president’s most fervent supporters across the country, said Sarah Fagen, who served as a senior aide and political director for former President George W. Bush. The perspective on the White House is very different far outside the interstate freeway that rings Washington, she said.

“If you’re someone inside the Beltway, you think it’s been really rocky,” she said. “If you are outside the Beltway, you think, ‘That’s why we sent him there.’ There has been a lot of chaos and a lot of growing pains, but they have gotten a lot done.”

For sure. By the same token – if you know a lot about, say, dams, you might be worried about the Oroville dam and the people who live in the valley below it, but if you’re hundreds or thousands of miles away from the Oroville dam and never heard of it and couldn’t care less about it – why then you think everything’s fine! It works every time. Just be far far away geographically and know nothing at all about the object of worry, and hey-presto, you won’t worry about that thing.

Problem solved.

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