Escape from Crazytown: How Life in the Trump Era Has Become Like “Groundhog Day”

As we lurch toward the half-way point in Donald Trump's presidency, I can't help thinking about the movie “Groundhog Day.”

In the 1993 film directed by Harold Ramis, Bill Murray plays a cynical, self-absorbed weatherman sent by his Pittsburgh TV station to dreary Punxsutawney to cover festivities around the local groundhog’s mid-winter forecast, based on whether or not it sees its shadow.

Meteorologist Phil Connors (Murray) is disdainful of everyone around him, communicates via caustic one-liners and treats his production crew with scorn - he even disparages the groundhog, calling it a rat.

Desperate to get out of town the moment his blah-blah story is filed, he encounters a driving snowstorm on the highway, forcing him back to Punxsutawney, where he enters a Twilight Zone wrinkle in time, reliving the same day over and over - from waking to the same grating Sonny & Cher tune on the clock radio in his stuffy B&B to getting repeatedly sloshed with icy puddle water by an glad-handing insurance salesman he went to high school with, plus countless other indignities.

As Phil (whose name echoes the groundhog) moans of his no-exit dilemma: “What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing you did mattered?”

It seems many people lately feel trapped in a Groundhog's Day of national dimensions – rising to the same mean tweets from the President, the same outraged memes on social media, and the same screeching reports about lies, fake news, impeachment, the 25^th Amendment, the Wall, idiots and morons, and even treason. In the movie version, instead of Sonny & Cher hitting us with the romantic “I Got You Babe,” we'd be jolted every 6 AM by Barry McGuire's classic lament, “Eve of Destruction.”

It’s natural for those on the outs of any administration to feel they’ve been exiled to a long, cold winter of discontent – ask a committed conservative how endless eight years of President Obama’s two terms seemed, or a progressive what it was like under Bush-Cheney. The whining from both sides still reverberates.

But the Trump presidency is a unique kind of boxed-in reality – or rather, reality show, where name-calling, pitchfork-raising and rabble-rousing overshadow politics, policy and ideology. Mr. Trump’s volatile, bullying personality make it all but impossible to switch channels – or refresh any conversation – without landing in the same outrageous place we were yesterday, and the day before, even if the names and faces appear to change, or resign, or plead guilty.

You can obviously fault the President – after all, he appears to exhibit a massive case of arrested development; as Defense Secretary James Mattis reportedly told aids, their boss has the understanding of a “fifth or sixth grader.” And so, all the world’s events are perceived as a personal grudge, as when Mr. Trump claimed recently that revised death toll estimates in Puerto Rico from last year’s Hurricane Maria were the work of Democrats out to “make me look as bad as possible.”

Yet, in some ways, we’ve all become the groundhog – seeing only shadow and darkness, fixated by the running checklist of falsehoods by major news organizations and susceptible to the most dire narrative about the state of the union. Even Harold Ramis would have a hard time snapping us out of such a negative feedback loop.

In Hollywood’s hands, this could be the point in our story where we begin to discern signs of an awakening in a Presidential Bill Murray. We might catch him reading a briefing book, looking up mid-tweet to ponder a wrenching TV report about a refugee family, or trying his hand at the New York Times crossword puzzle (at first filling in the answers the day after to impress his staff, then realizing that’s a cheat and struggling in pencil like everyone else).

In the final act, the President would let his hair go gray and lose the comb-over. He’d invite Colin Kaepernick golfing at Mar-a-Lago and Elizabeth Warren to join him for a private screening of “Last of the Mohicans.” He’d host the White House Correspondents Dinner at the White House, switch out his MAGA cap for a Black Lives Matter T-shirt, and praise Maxine Waters as “an extraordinary High IQ person.” Ultimately, he’d weepily admit in a televised interview with Rachel Maddow that he never really liked “Fox & Friends” and that John McCain was his hero.

Of course, the chances of witnessing a transformation by Donald Trump into an empathetic and lovable commander in chief seem remote, as does the prospect of lowering the volume about his fitness to serve through his presidency. But that doesn’t mean there’s no hope for those who feel caught in a recurring reel of lunacy. Here are a few simple strategies to escape the throes of Crazytown:

1. Get a pet: Spending time with an animal is a good reminder that there are sentient beings that know how to enjoy the daily pleasures of life without caring a whit who’s in the White House and for whom every op-ed writer is anonymous. Dogs, cats, birds, turtles – they’re perfectly content repeating whatever happened yesterday today and the day after.
2. Learn a skill: Nothing gets you out of Rutsville and provides a sense of progress like acquiring a new talent – cooking, yoga, scuba, speaking Portuguese (sorry, podcasts don’t count). And guaranteed: If you start piano lessons tomorrow you’ll be able to perform a rousing version of “Hit the Road, Jack” on January 20, 2021. 
3. Be civil and generous: I’ve begun sharing my umbrella with strangers, closing cab doors for people with packages, staring others into smiles, and handing out random $20 tips to cashiers. The rewards are priceless and proof that human connections can be made in countless ways apart from Facebook and Instagram.​
4. Take the long view: Ronald Reagan was widely reviled by liberals during his presidency, while Jimmy Carter was practically sainted. History appears to have rendered a different judgment on their tenures – who’s to say that future generations won’t remember Donald Trump favorably for his deregulatory and nationalist tendencies rather than for his unhinged rants and feuds?​
5. Fall in love: Bill Murray was lucky to have someone as radiant as Andie McDowell to set him on a path of self-discovery. But it’s possible to fall back in love with the ones already in your circle – take an extra, quiet look at your wife, child, boyfriend or cross-the-hall neighbor, and you may see the sun and not the clouds in your own forecast.

In the final scene of “Groundhog Day,” Punxsutawney’s streets are still packed with snow and the sky is gray, but the jade has been lifted from Phil Connors’ eyes and with his new perspective – and Andie McDowell beside him in bed – he’s able to rejoice, “Today is tomorrow!”

Living in our own version of Punxsutawney, it’s easy to fall prey to the daily taunts and tirades of the President, the righteous anger of your friends’ newsfeeds or the fear expressed by editorial and social angst-mongers that our democracy is failing. While that cycle isn’t likely to break anytime soon, we all have the capacity to see beyond the pettiness around us and realize that this day, too, shall pass. And if a certain someone is re-elected in 2020, we’re gonna need a bigger groundhog.

Allan Ripp runs a press relations firm in New York.

Note: an abridged version of this article appeared in The Week on September 19, 2018: http://theweek.com/articles/795927/trumps-groundhog-day-presidency