Doing Your Own Time
America has a fixed release date: January 20, 2029. The question is what we do until then.
There’s a distinctive difference between Trump’s first and second term — and I’m not speaking of Trump. What’s alarmingly different is our response to him.
In the first term, the country erupted when Trump stood in Charlottesville’s aftermath and called neo-Nazis and their victims “very fine people on both sides.” It cringed when he stood next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki and sided with Russian intelligence over the CIA’s own assessment of election interference. It erupted over the Muslim travel ban, over children separated from their parents at the southern border and held in foil blankets, over the phone call to Ukraine’s president that got him impeached. And the final, first term blast hit on January 6 — when Trump-inspired rioters stormed the Capitol to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
These were not just controversies. Each one, in any prior presidency, would have been a resignation-level event. Together they represented four years of continuous alarm — a fire bell that rang without stopping.
Now contrast that to today. We are at war with Iran, begun without credible evidence of an immediate threat to this country and justified with arguments that shifted week to week. When Iran responded by closing the Strait of Hormuz — a move that had historically taken the military option off the table—Trump announced that “no one could have known” they would do that. No one. The president of the United States said this, out loud, and it occupied the news cycle for roughly 36 hours.
Then there are the purely unhinged moments: posting an AI-generated image of himself as a Christ figure while claiming it depicted a doctor; attacking the Pope — the Pope — for calling the Iran war unjust; posting a video of Barack and Michelle Obama depicted as apes; claiming, to the German Chancellor’s face, that his father was born in Germany (his father was born in Queens); threatening to annex Canada, Greenland, Cuba, and Venezuela simultaneously, and posting a map of the United States with all four absorbed into it.
The fire bell is still ringing, but no one is running.
It is not Trump I’m concerned about. It’s us.
The most common explanation I hear is “that’s just Trump” — as though impulsivity, cruelty, and a tenuous relationship with reality are personality quirks to be accommodated, the way you might accommodate a difficult uncle at Thanksgiving. We have normalized the abnormal so thoroughly that we no longer notice we’re doing it. And when the rest of the world looks at us, they are not seeing a country resisting an aberrant leader. They’re seeing a country that has quietly decided to accept one.
This Time, We’re Just Doing Time
Here is what I think has happened. We have stopped measuring Trump’s actions against our history, our traditions, and our own stated values. We measure this week’s outrage against last week’s. When it’s not worse — when he hasn’t actually bombed a fifth country or posted something more racist than last Tuesday — we exhale. That exhale is the sound of a country losing its baseline.
We have become, in a very specific sense, prisoners.
Convicts in any society understand that imprisonment is a surrender of control over duration. You cannot shorten the prison entence through outrage. The psychic energy that would go into fighting the clock has to go somewhere else, or it destroys you. And so experienced inmates make a crucial distinction — one that maps, with uncomfortable precision, onto the situation of the American public.
Doing your own time is the stoic posture. You stay in your lane, focus inward, refuse to let the institution break you. You maintain a sense of self that exists apart from the walls. Most critically: you never stop measuring yourself against who you were before you got here, and who you intend to be when you leave.
Letting time do you is the failure mode. You become institutionalized — passive, reactive, defined entirely by the sentence. Your expectations recalibrate downward. The walls stop feeling like walls and start feeling like the shape of the world. You lose the thread of who you were and forget to imagine who you’ll be. One day you realize you can no longer picture the outside.
The difference is everything. It’s the difference between endurance and dissolution. Between surviving the sentence and being consumed by it.
Our sentence, for the record, ends January 20, 2029. That is the fixed release date — barring death, medical incapacitation, or an impeachment that would require two-thirds of a Senate that has shown no appetite for it. Experienced inmates know not to bank on appeals. You do the time in front of you.
The question is how.
What Doing Time “Smart” Actually Looks Like
If that sounds abstract, we’ve already seen what the alternative looks like.
The people of Minneapolis gave us a model. When ICE arrived in their neighborhoods with militarized tactics — and when those tactics turned fatal — residents did not merely protest. They created accountability structures: legal observers, neighborhood networks, political pressure applied at every level simultaneously. The military-style immigration operations in Minneapolis are no longer happening. That is a real outcome of sustained resistance.
The lesson isn’t that Minneapolis won. The lesson is that they never stopped doing their own time. They accepted the reality of the sentence without accepting the reality of the jailer’s unlimited power over conditions. That distinction — surrender the clock, but never surrender the self — is the difference between smart endurance and drift.
That same principle is playing out in churches, local precincts, school boards, courtrooms, and state legislatures across the country. The resistance in Trump’s second term is quieter than in the first. But quiet is not the same as absent, and in some cases, it is more effective — less theatrical, more durable, less dependent on a single outrage to sustain it.
In prison culture , someone close to release is called short — meaning the end is close enough to feel. We are not short yet. There are two and a half years left on this sentence, and the danger in that stretch is not that people will become too angry. It’s that they’ll drift.
The risk is that the baseline will shift again, and again, until the person who walks out of this sentence in January 2029 has forgotten what normal felt like, and mistakes the cell for the world.
The antidote to drift is purpose. For readers of this newsletter, whatever your politics, the most concrete available expression of purpose is the midterms. Historically, midterm results turn on turnout — not persuasion, not argument, but whether people who have a position show up to register it. Voting is, at minimum, the refusal to let time do you — the assertion that you are still a citizen of something larger than this moment, still connected to a country that existed before January 20, 2025, and will exist after January 20, 2029.
Do your own time. What Trump counts on — what every institution counts on — is that the sentence outlasts your memory of what you were fighting for. Two and a half years is long enough to forget. Don’t.