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It’s amazing how many people have responded to what they think of as the shattering catastrophe of Donald Trump’s victory by crafting: making rag rugs, ceramic pots, knitting scarves. A woman I know from long ago is so traumatized that she has started quilting. I’m not sure what sort of quilt she’s making — a patchwork of Harris/Walz ballot papers, maybe — but I know better than to make a light-hearted enquiry because this is not an ordinary quilt. It is a recovery quilt and part of the healing process.
The most popular flavor of post-Trump soup seems to be spiced pumpkin
Many unhappy Democrat women have announced that they will be retiring from the online battle to intentionally tend their gardens, and for both sexes there’s a huge amount of therapeutic soup-making going on. The most popular flavor of post-Trump soup seems to be spiced pumpkin. You’d have thought the orange color might be triggering, but no, this is “warming soul food at this time of despair.”
“When the larger world feels overwhelming, it’s time to redecorate,” says Rebecca, a popular home decor influencer. It is particularly healing, she says, to organize your shoe rack and to swap out your ugly coat-hangers for a more cohesive range in tasteful solid wood.
Why have so many progressives turned all trad wife under Trump? It’s disturbing. If you really think, as so many do, that American lives are in peril, shouldn’t you be joining a march in the manner of the Gaza protests, or at least putting the pumpkin soup in a Thermos and heading for a demonstration on Capitol Hill?
The answer is that for progressives crafting is not a light-hearted business. It’s not gung-ho, or done in a spirit of wartime chutzpah. Soup-making is vital resistance work. Perhaps a defiant sing-song in a bomb shelter was appropriate when it was only Hitler threatening Europe, but this is Trump. Fascism. There’s nothing for it but to swap out your cheap-looking hangers.
In another era it was admirable to laugh in the face of danger. Now crying in the face of danger is very much the thing. Countless distraught Kamala Harris fans have posted photographs of their sobbing faces online. But then, they wept when Joe Biden won too. When the results of the 2020 election broke, a woman from Planned Parenthood bravely shared her pain: “Upon seeing the news on TV, I started to sob. I mean, really sob — body shaking, uncontrollable tears — and the waves of crying just kept coming. My five-year-old daughter looked at me with concern and tenderness as she put her little arms around me. “Mommy’s just happy,” I choked through my tears, not wanting to scare her. And then I just held her and kept on sobbing — “her small body literally supporting mine.” Poor five-year-old. I don’t dare check to see how she’s faring now.
Anyone who’s kept an eye on the sneaky ethical creep over the past few decades will know that the correct object of compassion is no longer your neighbor, but yourself. So it’s not just advised, but actually a duty for Democrats stressed by Trump to seek therapeutic help.
“One of the hardest aspects of the election is that as individuals we don’t have ultimate control over outcomes,” says Vogue magazine. It suggests a cold-water immersion technique called TIPPS: tip the temperature, intense exercise, paced-breathing, paired muscles, scene-change. There’s so much here that I find more anxiety-inducing than a Trump presidency. Who ever “tipped” a temperature? And if you “scene-change” after you tip, won’t you just have to tip that temperature again?
In my own neck of the woods there’s so much progressive sorrow over Trump that Hackney council has decided to spend public money on what they call a “sauna event” next week. The trans grief sauna, they say, is “a guided process to release grief with your community; to feel and express the complexities of loss, anger, fear and sadness that trans+ people face.”
The trans grief sauna event is not strictly a response to Trump — it’s an annual event put on for Transgender Day of Remembrance — but it sold out in double quick time this year because of all the trans Trump grief that needs processing. One of the Trump campaign’s most effective advertisements showed a clip of Kamala promising to pay for trans inmates to have sex changes in prison, with a photo of the usual insane male athlete towering above the alarmed-looking girls on a women’s baseball team. A narrator says: “Kamala is for they, them. Trump is for you.” This was just further evidence for Democrats that we’re in the middle of a new battle for civil rights. As the nineteenth-century was to gay men, and apartheid and slavery were to people of color, so the Trump era is to trans people. Hence the need for the grief sauna. Martin Luther King would have been first into a grief sauna, if only he’d had the chance.
An aside below the event description reads: “Please note this is a non-sexual/non-cruising sauna event.” Well, it’s a mystery to me how you can be expected to fight fascism in a sauna without shagging strangers, but still, that’s local government for you — always enmeshed in patriarchy however hard they try.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s UK magazine. Subscribe to the World edition here.
