to Fox’s The Five, a roundtable discussion of current
events, as the show’s hosts were shouting over each
other. Ducharme, who says she doesn’t align with ei-
ther major political party, could feel herself getting
aggravated. After scolding the screen out loud, she
tweeted at The Five to start listening to one another. “I
just came from trauma,” Ducharme remembers think-
ing. “I don’t want this. I want to watch Mrs. Maisel.”
ironically, people wHo scale back on their
political-news consumption sometimes feel equally
stressed, fretting that they are abdicating their
civic duty. “How can I not watch?” they ask. “It’s
irresponsible.”
Amy Smotherman, a Democrat who works in the
nonprofit sector in Nashville, Tenn., knows this train
of thought. She has tried to pull back from following
politics and even got rid of her cable subscription, in
part because she feels exhausted—and often embar-
rassed—by Trump. She cites the president’s scathing
Twitter attack on London mayor Sadiq Khan during
Trump’s state visit to the U.K. in June. “He called
Khan ‘a stone-cold loser,’ says Smotherman. “That
is so mortifying.” It is the type of news she says she
does not need to hear. But at the same time, Smoth-
erman worries about falling out of touch. “I don’t
want to appear stupid if something has happened I
should know about.”
Perhaps Vogue was on to something when it sug-
gested Botox as a way to deal with stress from the
news—or not. A couple of years ago, model Chrissy
Teigen, who has feuded publicly with Trump, took to
Twitter to announce that he was causing her “crip-
pling anxiety.” The situation was so bad, Teigen said,
that she was grinding her teeth and had to shave a
tooth down and get Botox injections to relieve her
jaw-muscle tension. “I was not like this before,” Tei-
gen tweeted. “Pay my bill, POS POTUS.” The mes-
sage received nearly 20,000 likes.
Then came the backlash. Among other com-
plaints, the Twitterati accused Teigen of being a so-
cialist and an out-of-touch Hollywood elitist who
“should take responsibility for her own mouth.”
Siding with Trump, one Teigen critic griped: “Why
should he pay your bill? You caused your anxiety
yourself by obsessing over him.” •Some companies have removed cable news networks (with opinionated hosts such
as Rachel Maddow and Sean Hannity) from their public TV screens.