From My New Collection of Poetry, Waiting for Word, a poem, “Impolitic Manifesto”

A. Jay Adler
6 min readDec 22, 2020

After four years, I almost don’t remember what I used to talk about politically besides Donald Trump. I exaggerate, but only to tell a truth. My first ever essay on Medium well over four years ago, in March 2016, was “The Necessary, Honorable Thing: Denounce Trump,” with a stop along the way for “Unexceptional America” and ending, almost, with my most recent, “Existential Choice in the Time of Trump: Conscience and Human Judgment.” Along the way, too, at Areo Magazine, I published “Donald Trump and The ‘Partisan Divide’: A Senseless Account of American Discord” and “The Illegitimate President: Donald Trump and the Faking of Democracy.” If someone did an analysis of my tweets over the past four years, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that 80–90% of them in that time were in some way related to Trump.

You might say that Trump has been on my mind.

I was hardly alone. There are working journalists, and I don’t mean reporters working the White House or…

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A. Jay Adler
A. Jay Adler

Written by A. Jay Adler

Writer. Reader. Roper of stars and Professor of English. New York and Los Angeles. Essays, poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, memoir. ajayadler.com

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