Threat assessment.
Sunday, October 25th, 2020
The hand of Abe, last fall.
The prescription is often much the same: don’t dwell on social media, don’t micro-examine the polls, don’t stress out over what you can’t control.
I am supremely imperfect at hewing to these wise directions. When I see a tweet (and I did, Sunday evening) that says
Carl Bernstein is reporting that Trump insiders are saying that he is planning “a scorched earth campaign in the final days the likes of which we have never seen.”
My heart rate kicks up and if I wore a fancy Apple Watch various alarms and buzzers would be going off.
But then I take a step back and say: is this real? Where did he report this? Why isn’t this being checked, corroborated, added to? What’s the substance of this unsourced report? And past a certain point, what’s really new about any of this?
We know Trump is going to be a jerk. We can deal with this.
And so I reset the (mental) alarms and go wash the dishes. Threat cast aside…for now.
