Our life nowadays is geared toward a sense of apprehension and dread — can’t be helped. This terrifying era of the T-Rump is one of chaos and constant clutter of shit-kicking episodes of bat-shit crazy, both on a worldwide scale and in the local neighborhood.
Research has now shown the culprit for this situation is, way-of-course, T-Rump. The orange turd is a lying, vile asshole and the world knows it, with the result that watching the news with that hobgoblin strutting his malevolence sense of terror is making all of us ulcer-ridden sad sacks — from yesterday’s PsyPost:

The study, published in Journalism, indicates that for many Americans the news and the political process are “often experienced as tightly integrated and sometimes even indivisible concepts” in the Trump era.
The study didn’t start out as research on Trump at all.
Instead, the researchers were interested in learning more about people’s media consumption habits in general.
“We started to conduct interviews in 2017 trying to explore the ways in which adults use and interpret their uses of different technological devices, and how they relate to news in their daily lives,” said study author María Celeste Wagner, a PhD candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Our interview protocol started with a very general question about the participant’s last encounter with a news story. While we were conducting this fieldwork, we started to notice that most participants would respond to this first question with high levels of emotionality and most of the time in reference to a news story about President Trump. That’s when we decided to explore the topic more in depth.”
…
Many of the participants reported a significant level of attachment to the news in the wake of Trump’s electoral victory in 2016.
“I have become something of a news junkie on the latest stuff out of Washington so whatever it is that’s being written about the President,” one participant explained.
Regardless of whether they were for or against Trump, the participants also tended to express a high level of emotionality when recalling their experiences with the news.
Many also reported feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or angry.
“Sometimes I just get so disgusted with it [the news]that I don’t even want to know much more about it. But I am interested in all those other things that are impacted by what he does,” a participant told the researchers.
“You watch CNN and they are like ‘everything is a disaster, everything he [Trump] is doing is wrong’ . . . it makes me angry,” another said.

“In general, our study shows that emotions play a very important role in the experience of reading or watching the news among Americans. According to participants own accounts, these emotional experiences when encountering news about politics have heightened in recent years,” Wagner told PsyPost.
“Our study also indicates that people are very aware of their emotions in these contexts, and that they try to preserve their well-being while trying to be good citizens. For some, this means receding from the public sphere, which might be problematic, and for others, it encourages them to participate politically.”
Participants reported coping with the heightened emotionality of the news by avoiding it, reducing their time interacting with it, and being more selective in their news consumption.

The study is most-aptly titled, “Angry, frustrated, and overwhelmed: The emotional experience of consuming news about President Trump.“
And similar musings from the study’s Abstract: ‘Our analysis indicates that: talking about political news often was a synonym of talking about President Trump; people expressed a high level of emotionality when recalling these experiences, which were more intense on social media and among those for whom the news felt more personal; feelings of anger or distress were often tied to wanting to increase political engagement; and individuals frequently develop mechanisms to cope with high levels of emotionality.‘

This level of shit won’t let up anytime soon — the presidential election is still nearly 11 months away, the proffered shit will be way-high between now and then. The T-Rump has no soul, no sense of right and wrong, only how much he’s worth to himself, how much does he benefit. And a goodly push on our community-level anxiety is the shitty way the MSM is handling the T-Rump’s constant lying and bullshit, hate speech and just being an ignorant, nasty asshole. The entire T-Rump ensemble is ‘being extremely disingenuous,’ or just lying their sorry asses off.
And the media should stand-up and say so, even if just for the sanity of us all.

(Illustration: Edvard Munch‘s ‘The Scream,’ lithograph version, found here).