Donald Trump is done, and so is The A.V. Club's coverage of Donald Trump
As of today, Donald Trump is no longer the president of the United States. We’ve talked about Trump a lot here at The A.V. Club over the last five years or so, not because we ever really wanted to, but because Donald Trump was a pop culture nuisance long before he was a political one. In 2016, he was a guy from TV who was running for president, so it made sense to cover his campaign at the time—even if it was just an excuse for us to publicly criticize him and the awful things he tends to say and do. Very few thought he’d win, but he did, and before we knew it, Donald Trump had somehow become another thing that merited coverage at The A.V. Club. We fell into a trap, essentially, where ignoring Donald Trump meant turning a blind eye to the many atrocities of his reign while continuing to cover him, even critically, meant giving him the attention that he has always so desperately craved. We gave in to the cathartic appeal of mocking him and exposing the ridiculous antics of his family and his enablers. Really, though, Trump and his goons managed to pull that same trick on everyone, infecting every aspect of our lives with hate and misery simply because of how omnipresent the MAGA movement became.
So yeah, we’ve talked about Donald Trump a lot here at The A.V. Club because we felt like we had to. Well, dear readers, we’d like to make an announcement in honor of this long-awaited day: We’re done. We’re sick of constantly paying attention to Donald Trump, we’re sick of constantly talking about Donald Trump, and we’re sick of constantly writing about Donald Trump. He is no longer the president—and while the repercussions of his catastrophic behavior in office will be felt for a generation and the impact of his hateful policies will befall marginalized groups long after his lingering presence has been exorcised from the White House, we feel that it’s in the best interest of everyone to leave the analysis of his rotten legacy to the experts. As for us, we would like to do our own little part in ushering him off to a new life in irrelevancy by no longer giving a fuck about what he does or says. Starting now, The A.V. Club will no longer be covering Donald Trump in either Newswires or Great Job Internet posts.
We’re not saying this because we want credit—far from it. If that were the case, we would’ve instituted a policy like this a long time ago. And there will, perhaps, be those rare moments where Trump and/or his cronies cross over into such major news that we can’t avoid acknowledging it, but we will no longer be treating them like a more destructive and pathetic version of Game Of Thrones (as much as Rudy Giuliani may wish he lived in that world). We’re sorry we’ve covered them to the extent that we have, and we know that establishing a cutoff now doesn’t necessarily mean squat. If anything, we’re saying this because we trust you, our readers, to hold us accountable. We don’t want you to let us get away with breathless coverage of Donald Trump anymore just because it’s what everyone on social media is talking about. Again, we’re sick of it and we don’t want to do it anymore, so we’re not going to.
Whether you’re new here or you’ve been with us since the old websites and the old commenting systems: Thank you for reading The A.V. Club. We’re going to go back to writing about whether or not Matt Damon is still alive in the MCU, why The Muppet Show is an important part of television history (if not the most important part), and how Anne Hathaway actually prefers to be called “Annie” but didn’t think to tell anyone until now.