I am not depressed. I don't do depressed. What I am is tired, worn down to the edge of despair. That is why the essays have been late. Protest is hard work, and it gets harder every month.
The polls say the Republicans are in trouble, and the trouble has Trump's name on it. I have lived in Florida for 40 years. I know these people. Right now, they can't afford the left sock they lost. They know right from wrong, though the fog rolls in. My friends are disappointed. They are not ashamed. Ask them and they will tell you their faith in Trump was not misplaced. They were not wrong. So, what are they? They are hurt, the way a man is hurt when the dog he raised bites him. He blames the mailman.
They have watched Trump's offenses against democracy, against the country, against them, and against one another. They are fed up with him and with the Republicans who carry his water, and they say so to the pollsters.
My friends are businessmen. Self-reliant. In charge of the shop, the boat, the checkbook, and the women. They have always been Republicans. So were their fathers, their grandfathers, and their great-grandfathers. What the party believes has nothing to do with it, because the party has believed almost everything at one time or another. Lincoln's Republicans freed the slaves and fought a civil war to do it. Teddy Roosevelt's broke up the trusts and locked away the national forests. Eisenhower's built the interstates, sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock, and warned us about the military-industrial complex on the way out the door. Nixon's created the EPA. Reagan's signed amnesty for three million immigrants and called Moscow an evil empire. Today's buys diesel from Putin, taxes imports like Hoover in 1930, and runs the debt past 40 trillion.
No line runs through that. The word does. "Republican" is not a set of ideas. It is a badge, a handshake, a way of knowing the man across the counter is one of yours. He is like me. The ideas change with the weather. The word stays. And when the word and reality drift apart, my friends do not move toward reality. They move toward the word, because the word is where their fathers are buried.
So, the polls give us hope. Republicans say they are done. The midterms are three weeks out. It will all be over in November. Truth will be restored.
In your dreams.
I have sat in these men's kitchens and on their docks for four decades. I have heard them curse Trump by name, mean it, and finish the beer. Three weeks from now they will stand in a church basement or a fire station with a ballot in front of them, and the last thing they will mutter before the curtain closes is the same thing they have muttered since Nixon: I can't bring myself to vote for a Democrat.
They won't vote for Trump, not exactly. They will vote for the word. The word will do the rest.
I would like to be wrong. I have been wrong about Florida before, though never in that direction. The pollsters count what people say. I count what they do. In this state those have never been the same number.
That is the exhaustion. Not Trump. I expect Trump to be Trump. It is watching good men (women vote for whom they're told to) vote for him again while telling me they hate him, and knowing they are telling the truth both times.