Dog-paddling in the Tsunami of Current Events

By Alan Resnick / Detroit

Like many Americans, I’ve found the six months following Donald Trump’s inauguration to be confusing, depressing, horrifying, and terrifying. For me, though, there is an additional stressor.

I conduct a weekly current events discussion group at a senior living facility not too far from my home. It’s great fun, the participants are extremely appreciative, and it forces me to keep abreast of local, national, and international events.

But it is a Sisyphean task trying to prepare each week under this administration.

Preparing for my weekly session was a snap when Joe Biden was in office. Each day I would invest about 20 minutes reviewing headlines from Reuters, AP, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and a couple of news aggregators. I’d click on the stories I thought would generate discussion, then cut and paste a synopsis of the main points into my notes. And, if it was a political story, I’d search for comments from people on the other side of the aisle so as to offer an opposing perspective.

The flow of information out of the White House was stable and manageable. Unless there was a natural disaster like the catastrophic flash flood of the Guadalupe River in Texas, an assassination (or an attempted one), or a major mass shooting, the headlines from Wednesday still were relevant into the next week. So, when Tuesday morning came around, I’d simply organize the stories into an order that I thought made sense, find a “fireman saves mama duck and ducklings from drain” good-news story, and add opening and closing jokes. (The group has a decided preference for blue humor.)

I attempted to maintain this routine for about three months after Trump returned to office, but it was futile. I could barely keep my head above water with the daily deluge of news pouring out of the White House.

To be sure, there have been many stories that have been in the news for weeks, if not months. We’ve engaged in important and spirited discussions on topics such as the ongoing wars between Ukraine and Russia and between Israel and Hamas, the bloodletting of civil servants driven by Elon Musk and DOGE, deportation without due process, the administration’s ongoing attempts to control the hiring, curriculum, and admissions policies of universities, and countless executive orders.

Then there are stories that continue to be newsworthy but change daily due to the President’s mercurial decision-making style. Think back to April when Trump first announced his decision to impose tariffs on the countries he believed were taking advantage of the United States. Countries come and go from his hit list, the products that will have a tariff imposed on them fluctuate, the amounts of the tariffs bounce up and down, and the dates the tariffs begin keep getting moved forward. I sympathize with the manufacturers who are complaining about the need for predictability in order to run their businesses.

But my biggest preparation problem by far has been all the stories that are front page headlines or evening news leads one day and vanish the next, because there is another story or announcement from the administration that is so outrageous, sinister, or frightening that it “trumps” yesterday’s big news.

Here are just a few examples of stories that, to me, would have made wonderful and important discussion group topics. But they either never made it into my final list of topics or never got discussed simply because of the news glut.

We never got the chance to talk about Thomas Fugate, the 22-year-old, one-year-out-of-college newbie who is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention. He replaced an Army veteran with 20 years of experience in national security.

We never got around to conversing about Trump asking Congress to wipe out funding for public broadcasting. And I wish we could have spent some time chatting about Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s ordering the Secretary of the Navy to rename the USNS Harvey Milk, and his alleged review of ships named after Black and Hispanic civil rights leaders and prominent women.

We also never had the chance to talk about turning the front lawn of the White House into a Tesla showroom or turning the Office of the President into a profit center.

Some analysts have speculated that the never-ending tidal wave of announcements from this administration represents a strategic plan designed to overwhelm and subsequently numb the populace into ignoring the news and accepting a new, lower baseline for normalcy. Others feel that the chaos simply reflects Trump’s impulsivity and need for attention, power, and retribution. My guess is that it’s a combination of both.

What I can say with certainty is that half my daily prep time devolved into deleting notes I had typed from one or two days before, as the stories that seemed noteworthy yesterday had become passé.

So, after burning through what seemed like a ream of printer paper and a couple of Epson XL 200 black ink cartridges, I’ve developed a new preparation plan that seems to be working. I now invest no more than 10 minutes each day scanning my preferred news sources.

All I do is clip links to headline stories. I don’t even read what I’ve clipped on Wednesday or Thursday until at least Sunday or Monday, when I can better assess what likely will be in the news on Tuesday. This minimizes my need to rewrite any previous notes.

It’s not a perfect system, but it is an improvement. And it certainly has given me a much greater appreciation of the headache that reporters and editors who cover this administration must be experiencing.

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Alan Resnick is a retired industrial psychologist. He and his wife Anita have been married for almost 23 years. In addition to leading a weekly current events discussion group at a senior living facility, he is on the Board of Directors for the Michigan Jewish Sports Foundation and the Oakland County Selective Service Board. Alan enjoys photography, is continually aggravated by golf, and is currently learning the ins and outs of using the pellet smoker he recently purchased.