It’s Been 2,448 Years Since Donald Trump Took Office

If you’re experiencing Trump-Induced Time Dilation.

Petrovich9/Getty

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

From the first moments of the Trump administration, many Americans began to feel that time had slowed down. This phenomenon had already been noticed during the seemingly interminable 597-day presidential campaign. But the past year has magnified this effect and provided sustained observations of a phenomenon that might be described as Trump-Induced Time Dilation: the 45th president’s ability to alter temporal perceptions; more specifically, his unnatural knack for making time slow to an excruciating crawl.

Just 17 days after inauguration day, John Oliver noted that the past weeks had felt “like 114 years.” A few days later, a writer for India’s Economic Times stated that “It has only been three weeks of Donald Trump as president but seems more like three years.” After 100 days, a USA Today reader issued a typical gripe: “One hundred days? Feels like 100 years.” Six months in, a guy on Twitter said “It feels like 10 years already.”

In late December, the New York Times quoted New York Attorney General Schneiderman’s lament that “it feels like this year has been a hundred years long.” (It also “feels like it shot by,” he added; suggesting further warping of space-time.) Just the other day, Greg Barker, the maker of a new documentary about ancient American history told the Toronto Star that it “feels like 10,000 years” since Trump took office.

 

There are scientific explanations for why people are experiencing Trump-Induced Time Dilation. Yet there is no agreement on just how much the president has inhibited the flow of normal time. A CNN.com commentator wrote that “100 days with Trump feels like two years with any other commander in chief.” Time seemed to be moving even more slowly to the Vulture.com writer who said the first two weeks of the new administration had felt like five years.

In Oliver’s perception, 17 Trump days seemed like 41,610 normal days, meaning that the president had made time unfold more than 2,400 times slower. In Barker’s view, 364 days of Trump was the equivalent of 3.65 million normal days, or more than 10,000 years. 

For a sense of the magnitude of these effects, perhaps it’s best to think of in terms of planetary time. Imagine that everyone experiencing Trump-Induced Time Dilation is living on a planet in which the length of a year is dictated by Trump time. In this scenario, a year for Schneiderman’s planet lasts about 101 Earth years. In comparison, a year on Uranus lasts 84 Earth years. For the Twitter user mentioned above, a year in the orbit of a turbulent orange gas giant is the equivalent of 20 years on Earth. Jupiter, meanwhile, takes 12 years to circle the sun.     

 

The most extreme effects of Trump-Induced Time Dilation appear to be on a scale that scrapes against the outer limits of science—and science fiction. For John Oliver, more than 2,400 Earth years unfold during a single Trump year. The closest analog may be the exoplanet Fomalhaut b, which, according to NASA, follows a 2,000-year “rogue orbit” around a distant star.

Greg Barker’s glacially slow Trump year recalls the watery planet of Interstellar, where the gravitational pull of a nearby black hole dilates time to the point where one hour on the planet elapses in the same time as seven Earth years. So far, no one has suggested that Trump can stretch time to such a fantastic extent. But if he does gain this ability, we have a long 183,960 years ahead of us.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate