On Nov. 8, 2016, I watched the state race calls for Clinton v. Trump come in from my spot at the dive bar on the corner, rather quickly progressing through my regular PBRs and Jim Beams neat. The problem with that — beyond the obvious problem for America and the world with that — is I had been about seven weeks clean.
It was my second run at an outpatient alcohol treatment program. Earlier in that year, I had gone through a fairly low-intensity program, testing my tolerance for sobriety, but ultimately finding it not to my liking. I had been married less than a year. It wasn’t working out. Friendships were dwindling. I was trying all kinds of alternatives to addressing my drinking. Addressing my depression, addressing my anxiety, insisting my drinking was a tertiary problem at most. By the fall, I was again on the verge of being completely alone, in a town I didn’t love, in a job that had lost its shine and bloated on creative disappointments, so I gave a slightly different low-intensity outpatient treatment program at the same addiction treatment center a go. It was mostly tolerable. I’d leave work and gather with a handful of other addicts and an agreeable counselor and kick around smoking cigarettes on the sidewalk instead of going to the bar. The corner bar was my favorite place, though. It’s where I felt like I finally broke through the membrane that protects the glowing heart of this city from the bloodless transactional square dance at its surface. Everybody at the bar was great, and not a hopeless drunk, because neither was I. Eventually, though, it was dawning on me there might be a miraculous human specimen out there somewhere for whom alcoholism gets better over time, but I wasn’t it.
We were all packing up our things after one of the last sessions of the program. Everybody felt reasonably steady. I said, generally, to the group:
“But what if things go bad tonight?”
The counselor looked as if he truly hadn’t thought of that. Then he said, “I hadn’t thought of that…
“Call us. Call. Please just call. Seriously.”
It was right around when Ohio went for Trump at 10:36 p.m. (or, as I now understand, in the moments before I asked the question) that I decided I wasn’t going to call. I stood outside my front door and lit a cigarette. Zouzou begged me not to leave. I left anyway.
In Alcoholics Anonymous, you don’t really talk about how you hit bottom because Trump got elected. Nobody wants to hear that. They rightly call you a bullshitter. But they were so nearly coterminous for me that I still have trouble separating that first year of Trump outrages from the abuses I was showering on myself and my wife and my friends. The memories of one resurrect those of the other. I recently told an old boss this story, and she apologized for not having noticed any of it. Not noticing it was still intermittently possible before Nov. 8. In the 11 months between then and Sept. 27, 2017, when I finally checked into the hospital for detox, followed by a 30-day inpatient program, it very much wasn’t.
On Nov. 7, 2024, I was 7.11 years sober.
So that was something I worried about a lot last fall as we neared the nail-biter of an election and came out the other side covered in Proud Boy goo. For one thing, seven years isn’t a long time at all. Also, if another victorious election night for Trump was a thing that could be avoided, it’s something that every old-timer in the rooms of A.A. would heartily exhort me to avoid, at least until forever. Even though the triggers aren’t the disease, it’s just good practice to place some distance between yourself and those triggers. Living through this authoritarian takeover generally — and the ongoing cleansing of federal employees more specifically — is also, then, a direct confrontation with a very large and imposing adversary I’ve spent years evading.
The MAGA mind is in so many fundamental ways the mind of an addict: the malignant narcissism, the core weakness, the paranoia, the insecurity, the defiance, the grievance, the vengefulness, the imagined precarity, the insatiability, the fixation on perceived injustice, the certainty that if only the world would stop doing what it’s doing and listen to me, everything could be nice again. America could be great again.
We gave these people the keys to the kingdom, and now — like all addicts — they’ve taken a hell of a lot more than what we gave them, crossing out the hard-won compromises of the Constitutional order and replacing them with have you even said thank you once. A geopolitical doctrine of childish resentment.
Processing what they’re doing to the civil service every day is a lot like processing a nasty extended bender. This experience summons our persecution delusions from the realm of addled unreality and sets them loose to rampage across the observable world. When Russ Vought says “when [civil servants] wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as villains,” he is describing an experience I know intimately — those desolate, feverish mornings of terminal alcoholism. Wishing I hadn’t woken up. Staring at the high crossbeam of my Scandinavian modernist iron bed frame and wishing I had a rope to throw over it. Every alcoholic has her favorite song lyric about alcoholism, and mine is “Don’t the sun look angry at me,” from Warren Zevon’s “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.” Inflating my ego out of all proportion, to the point where that burning eye 92 million miles away is somehow aware of my existence and thinking about me, my addict mind overflows with such self-loathing that I’m convinced even the sun is pissed-off at me — finds me, personally, villainous and repugnant.
“Remember that we deal with alcohol — cunning, baffling, powerful! Without help it is too much for us.” This reminder from the foundational text of A.A. — known as the Big Book — also pretty accurately describes the brigade of jackals shredding our shared resources and our civil liberties. Suddenly, with their arrival, it’s present again. The humanity eater. A fearsome companion who will not let you alone for the space of a single breath. This feels like that. What Steve Bannon described as “flooding the zone” is designed to feel like that. Addiction wants you to cast everything out of your life that doesn’t feed it; it wants you to jettison your passions, your interests, your connections to others. Likewise, a runaway sociopathy (the kind required for a person to accumulate a billion dollars) is now invading and infecting all aspects of communal life: history, nature, travel, music, sports, food… kill everything that doesn’t serve the machine.
That’s why in these last weeks, careening from one earthquake to the next, I cling even more tightly to the things I know help me maintain my spiritual condition. Anger is a pretty unsafe emotion for me (for most alcoholics), and yet in a lot of ways it’s the only rational response to what’s happening. Creating distance from that anger is not only part of the ongoing work of recovery, but a method for absorbing the blitzkrieg of daily iniquities from the putschists and nourishing any small hope of deliverance. Self-righteousness is also dangerous. It’s easy to form the resentments that lead to a drink as soon as the world fails to validate that sense of righteousness. I think it’s also fair to say that the brand of resistance that dominated from 2017-2020 (emphasis on brand) was a failure; doom and nihilism are attractive and appear ascendant. The only thing more upsetting than each new Reichstagsbrandverordnung is the daily capitulation of one more institution we thought stood for something. Amidst all these inadequacies, where does one turn?
I flat-out don’t understand how anyone is getting through this emergency without the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. Now obviously, listen, people are spending day after day in a relentless hail of godawfulness, and they absolutely need a goddamn drink. Have a drink or many if you’re not someone for whom alcohol is cunning, baffling, powerful. Sláinte. If you need more than a drink, though, there’s good praxis here. Because the 12 steps are designed to counter a form of insidiousness that walks and quacks remarkably like the one storming around Washington.
Most everyone knows that there’s a religious aspect to A.A. that’s a pretty big obstacle for a lot of us, including me. What the program specifically tells us we must do is “turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understand God.” More experienced recovering alcoholics tell the non-believing newcomer to choose anything, anything at all, and make it God — as long as it isn’t yourself. Seven years ago, I chose an emerald toucanet I saw from a distance once on a hike in the cloud forest in Ecuador. It’s silly, but it got me to the next part. Later, we are advised that, in order to avert the death sentence of the disease, we must “improve our conscious contact with God as we understand God, praying only for knowledge of God’s will for us, and the power to carry that out.” (Like many other alcoholics, I replace the masculine pronoun in the original literature with a repetition of the word God, because anthropomorphizing and gendering God trips me up and makes it even harder for me to accept God’s existence. I suppose that alone is enough to turn me outlaw in Libs of TikTok’s America.) Having adopted these steps in the end, I can’t deny that I’m advocating in some way a need for God or spirituality to survive from day to day in the Trump II Era, and if that’s not useful for everyone — recognizing, too, the Christian Nationalist character of what we’re up against — I understand that, but things like knowledge of ourselves and the power to live and act in harmony with what that knowledge tells us applies, I think.
For me, this contact with a power greater than myself is what makes it possible to return to the office every day — where every email, Microsoft Teams message and news alert is a seduction to annihilate myself through an overdue reunion with bourbon — and persevere. It’s only been 60 or so days since Jan. 20. If I wasn’t sober, I’m not positive I could’ve made it this short distance. The tools of recovery may even have allowed me to be of some use to others in this period, to provide some grounding for fellow federal workers as the traumatic blows rain down. I have a reputation as a cool customer at work, which always shocks me. It’s not the way I see myself at all. I see myself as a needy little whirlwind of drama, because, yeah, I have a disease characterized by distorted self-perception. If that steady presence conveys to the people around me permission to take care of themselves, it’s a decent enough reason to keep hauling my ass into this graveyard of public goods.
The only thing that may be as important for a recovering alcoholic as humility before a higher power is service. Service is really just another version of humility before a higher power. It’s fellowship that gives us the courage to proceed boldly, facing both the harms we have caused and the daunting work of rebuilding our lives. We take “service positions” at our home groups (the AA. meetings we attend most regularly): making coffee, lining up speakers, leading the meetings. These are all negligible labors. The significance or the (bureaucratically speaking) impact of this service isn’t much. Not compared to USAID or the National Science Foundation. If service wasn’t important, they wouldn’t be so intent on wiping out its most effective and far-reaching institutions. We’ll certainly not want for opportunities to engage in acts of service, as this administration continues to harm a widening circle of innocent people. I’m not fully equipped yet to turn enough of my energy to that service — and that’s all right, too — but I’ve learned how important it is to get there. I’ve learned that getting there restores us to sanity.
I should note that one of the most important precepts of the program is this: “Alcoholics Anonymous has no opinion on outside issues; hence the A.A. name ought never be drawn into public controversy.” I hope it’s clear that I’m not saying A.A. endorses my characterization of Russ Vought as a bottle of gasoline tequila in a suit. This is my experience. Opinions my own. Its abstention from politics does not mean “the members of Alcoholics Anonymous, now restored as citizens of the world, are going to back away from their individual responsibilities to act as they see the right upon issues of our time.”
Why am I writing about all this? This highly personal account that doesn’t shed any new light on the plans or tactics of the hijackers? It’s my job to “carry this message” (Step 12) to other alcoholics, and there are plenty of active alcoholics out there suffering more acutely because of these overwhelming feelings of impotence and despair at the unstoppability of it all. I hope if this reaches any of them, they might perceive some mechanism for relief. But it’s even simpler than that. All of this is also another true thing in the present crisis. It’s as true and vital as the reporting about who from DOGE is crashing the gates at what agency in a given day. An underground narrative in parallel with untold other underground narratives that, when combined, will constitute the record of this time. If that narrative isn’t centered on human beings and their mess, it means we will have lost. I love seeing Tesla stock bottom out as much as anybody, but the story cannot be anchored to the plot structures of corporate valuation, or the unemployment rate, or even the results of the next election. These are, in fact, the digitized and commodified stories they want to impose over everything.
I don’t really think everyone needs the 12 steps. But everyone needs something. Almost everyone I know is dealing with paralyzing levels of stress, both inside and outside the federal workforce. Mortgages, where our kids will go to school, health care, surveillance, our city budget, our next job, unrest, what happens this summer when the helicopters do not stop circling over my house for even a single moment. “What am I going to do about it?,” each of us asks, a thousand times a day. Between waking and putting away our phones at night, we encounter a thousand new and appalling versions of what that “it” is. We cycle through a thousand answers. The one part of the question that remains constant is the “I.” Wherever you go, there you are. The “I” deserves time and attention and correction and care, too. Even now. Even within the collapse.
Very early on in sobriety, only a couple of weeks after detox, while I was still away at rehab, I was sitting near the fire pit outside the house in the suburbs where we stayed. I was talking to somebody who had been through the same rehab, not sober long himself, following his program by carrying the message to us. We were talking about prayer. It’s strongly suggested that we make prayer a part of recovery. I remember all my prayers from childhood, but none of them seemed like they would help me. He taught me his prayers, which aren’t uncommon ones among recovering addicts:
When you wake up in the morning, you say (to the faraway tropical bird if that’s what it takes): “please, God, help me stay sober today.” Before you go to sleep, you say: “thank you, God, for helping me stay sober today.”
Appreciate the bravery in fighting and sharing. I have known many who fell in battle.
Thanks for sharing, and thanks for fighting.
Coming up on 13 years clean and sober in April. There is zero chance I will let three puds like Trump, Musk and Vance destroy my progress—but, man... do I get the impulse.