The Space He Occupies Isn’t Rent Free
The price we're paying for Trump cannot be ignored
I got the following comment recently. Usually, ignoring haters and trolls is a sound policy, but I found that this comment represents something worth responding to.
“The Dad Briefs — you talking about the same guy every day shows he owns you. He lives Rent Free in your life. Rent Free every day just like the echo chamber you live inside. You went to a No Kings protest. America doesn’t have a King. Trump Owns You.” — E.O.
On “Rent-free”
The concept is sound: don’t let people who don’t matter consume your mental and emotional energy. Don’t obsess over an ex. Don’t fixate on someone who wronged you at a job you left five years ago. Protect your peace.
That’s good advice.
But it makes no sense when applied to the President of the United States.
The person who controls the largest military in human history, who appoints the judges who interpret your rights, whose executive orders shape the economy your children will inherit, whose foreign policy decisions determine whether your country is at war — that person’s words and actions have a significant impact on us.
Paying attention to power a responsibility of citizenship. Conflating that with an obsession is either a mistake or a strategy.
This is too expensive
Institutions built over generations — imperfect, worth improving, but load-bearing — are being dismantled not to make them better but to settle scores and consolidate power. Programs that feed children, support veterans, fund medical research, protect workers: cut, gutted, or eliminated, often by the same people who campaigned on protecting them.
We have watched the Justice Department turn toward political enemies. We have watched agencies staffed with loyalists instead of experts, at the precise moment those agencies needed expertise. We have watched the deliberate erosion of the independent press, the courts, the civil service — not because these things were broken beyond repair, but because they were functional enough to say no.
History has a name for this pattern. It doesn’t require a crown to qualify.
Populist authoritarianism is an ill fit
Populism mixed with moral authority is excellent at generating a feeling.
The feeling of finally being seen. Of the right enemies finally being punished. Of a leader who says out loud what you’ve been thinking and doesn’t apologize for it.
What it cannot do is build lasting relationships — with allies, with institutions, with the people it governs. Because it is structurally incapable of it. It demands loyalty without offering accountability. It asks you to trust the man, not the system, and that man is always loyal only to himself.
This is not a new story. Timothy Snyder has written about it. Heather Cox Richardson has charted its American roots. Hannah Arendt described its mechanics with terrifying precision decades ago. The details change. The architecture doesn’t.
And some of the people who felt that feeling — who showed up to the rallies, who wore the red hats, who told people like me to calm down — are peeling away. Not because they were always wrong about what made them angry. Some of what made them angry was real. But because they are beginning to see that the thing they signed up for is not delivering what it promised, and it is costing them things they didn’t agree to pay.
That matters. It is worth acknowledging without gloating.
Now or later
History informs us that someday, everyone will claim to have been against this. Even our buddy, E.O.
It happened in Germany. It happened in Hungary. It happened in every country where a democratic backslide moved slowly enough that the people living through it could tell themselves it wasn’t happening, until suddenly the telling stopped being comfortable.
The people who said they didn’t know. The people who said they were just doing their jobs. The people who said they disagreed privately. The people who said it wasn’t their place to speak up.
They were everywhere. They were the majority. And history did not record their silence as neutrality.
If this hasn’t touched you yet, it will. Tariffs touch everyone eventually. Economic instability touches everyone eventually. The erosion of institutional checks on power touches everyone eventually.
The question is whether we address it while we still can or explain ourselves afterward.
Who owns whom?
E.O. said Trump owns me.
I’d point out that I don’t make a habit of going to Trump’s Truth Social posts to leave comments. E.O., however, is often in my comments section, arguing not the merits of my content but insulting my personal character.
All I’d ask is that he own his own behavior.
I want E.O. to be okay. I want his family to be okay.
I want the people who voted for this — out of frustration, out of genuine grievance, out of a belief that the other option was worse — to come through the next few years without having paid a price they didn’t agree to.
I am not their enemy. I am the person saying: this is what I see, this is what history says, this is what the data shows. You are free to disagree. But I am not going to stop saying it because it makes you uncomfortable.
Civic attention is a minimum requirement. It’s the rent I owe to a country that gave me the right to pay it.
So if I’m in E.O.’s head, he can send me a bill for the rent.
I like to earn my keep.
The Dad Briefs covers the civic, political, and quietly human stories that shape family life in America. Food, Fun and Fatherly Wisdom.
Best thing I've read all day! Thank you for putting my thoughts into words!
Thank you for challenging that post. Other lines we should challenge is "let's agree to disagree" or not to talk about politics. We are way past that point. Democracy is important.