Last week, I was standing at a busy bus stop in the late afternoon and a young man danced-walked up to me (he moved like Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk – while going forward). He was smiling and very happy. He leaned in towards me and announced that, “Black people, we are time travelers! It all makes sense! This is a spaceship! I can see it all so clearly now! Black people are time travelers!” I paused for a few seconds. I then replied, “Damn right. We are.” The young man danced-walked up to another Black person several feet away from me and shared his personal revelation again. He continued dance-walking down the long city block, the time-traveling Black town crier was waking up all those who would listen.

I wondered if I was stuck in my own version of Terry Gilliam’s film “12 Monkeys” or its French original “La Jetée.” I concluded that this time machine, if it does exist, must be broken — or perhaps it is just operating in a way that I do not fully understand.

Donald Trump has now been president for almost five months. It seems like a much longer amount of time has passed. The “anniversary” of Trump’s first 100 days back in power took place in April. That date was met by many essays and other commentaries and analyses by the news media and political class. One hundred days felt like a natural moment to pause and seek out respite from Trump and his forces’ unending shock and awe; the long Age of Trump and the flooding of the zone allows no such peace.

In hindsight, Trump’s first 100 days back in power now feels more like an arbitrary landmark in what will be a very long and very difficult journey. Unfortunately, many Americans who begin this journey will not survive to see the end of it.

As politics and religion expert Matthew Taylor counseled in a recent conversation with me here at Salon, “Here is a warning about this 'first 100 days' framework. It is a media construct that Trump and his people play along with because it’s a Washington convention that they don’t hate. But Trump and his people have no intention of slowing down after the first 100 days.”

There is an America Before Trump and an America After Trump; Trump has cleaved American history into two parts.

The next 30 days between April 20 and May 20 felt even longer while at the same time going by very quickly. Time dilation is a common experience of societies and individuals experiencing great stress.

At the time of this writing, Donald Trump will be president for at least 1,320 more days. Marking every month of Trump’s presidency and his growing authoritarian power is not sustainable emotionally, intellectually, psychologically, physically or spiritually. Thus, the challenge of continuously documenting and sounding the alarm about how abnormal and dangerous the Age of Trump is while never normalizing it as being somehow quotidian, and therefore numbing.

On this, Masha Gessen warns in a very important new op-ed essay at the New York Times that:

The United States in the last four months has felt like an unremitting series of shocks: executive orders gutting civil rights and constitutional protections; a man with a chain saw trying to gut the federal government; deliberately brutal deportations; people snatched off the streets and disappeared in unmarked cars; legal attacks on universities and law firms....

We humans are stability-seeking creatures. Getting accustomed to what used to seem unthinkable can feel like an accomplishment. And when the unthinkable recedes at least a bit — when someone gets released from detention (as the Columbia University student Mohsen Mahdawi was a few weeks ago) or some particularly egregious proposal is withdrawn or blocked by the courts (as the ban on international students at Harvard has been, at least temporarily) — it’s easy to mistake it for proof that the dark times are ending.

But these comparatively small victories don’t alter the direction of our transformation —........

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