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President Donald Trump speaks in the Rose Garden of the White House on Thursday.

Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

This essay has been adapted from a Spiel delivered by Leon Neyfakh on Slates daily podcast The Gist. An edited transcript of the audio recording is below, and you can listen to Neyfakhs Spielby clicking on the player beneath this paragraph and fast-forwarding to the 14:05 mark.

Over Memorial Day weekend, my wife, Alice, and a bunch of our closest friends rented a house in upstate New York with barely any internet, lots of beautiful meadows and mountains to look at, and a big living room where we could sit around until late at night.

Leon Neyfakh is a Slate staff writer.

These are not people I have any trouble feeling like myself around. Hanging out with them is always easy and always natural. I dont ever have to worry that something Ive said has landed badly, or that theyre not having fun with me even though they say they are, or that theyre thinking secret thoughts about me of any kind. These are people who know and get my natural registers. I am legible to them in my authentic state, and I like to think theyre legible to me in theirs.

It was a great weekendwe played Uno, we watched The Wolf of Wall Street on cable, and we tried to get my dog to swim in the pool. Except there was this one thing. Every once in a while, a chill wind would sweep into the house and briefly ruin everything. Now, I dont literally mean that sometimes it was windy, which would not be worth mentioning, though it was quite chilly for most of the weekend. Rather, Im describing a kind of room-transforming social gas that someone would pump into our midst and that infected the air around us. This gas was not emitted by just any someone, but a pretty specific and very famous someone, a guy who has been living in all of our heads for the past year or so, and who now demands our attention every day.

Im talking, of course, about our president, Donald Trump, who came up frequently during our idyllic weekend even though none of us particularly wanted to talk about him. He was like a genie. As soon as his name came up, it was like Trump was summonedlike he was right there with us.

The presidents arrival had an unmistakable and singular effect: In an instant, he would cause us all to stop speaking like ourselves. It was like talking about Trump made our voices come out of our mouths wrongas if, in discussing current events, we were turning ourselves into parrots who generically repeated stuff wed read in the papers, seen on TV, and heard on NPR.

Oh man, I said not long after we all woke up on Sunday morning. Trumps tweeting again.

Whats he saying? my friend asked.

Hes saying, The massive TAX CUTS/REFORM that I have submitted is moving along in the process very well, actually ahead of schedule. Big benefits to all!

Oh, he just got back from his big foreign trip, Alice offered.

He was probably itching to get back to his phone that whole time he was abroad, I said. He was conspicuously disciplined about not tweeting provocative stuff while he was over there.

To engage in krivlyanya means to be artificialto ventriloquize someone else instead of being yourself.

Well, sounds like hes back with a vengeance now, said someone else. OK, back to you, Leon, for the weather and traffic report. This has been Friends Talking About Trump, well see you next time!

OK, so that wasnt a direct transcript of the conversation. But you see what Im getting at: Trump changed us all from human beings into news commentators, spouting off warmed-over reactions to the latest awful thing in the news. Without even meaning to, we would find ourselvesand hear each otherusing phrases and expressing thoughts we would never otherwise say.

A few weeks earlier, Id had the following conversation with Alice while we walked our dog.

I mean, is it time to start thinking about impeachment as a real possibility? she asked.

You would think, but then, the Republicans control all of Congress! Itll never happen, I replied.

True, but even they will eventually reach a breaking point.

Why though? Trumps poll numbers are still finethere is just this one contingent of people who will never leave his side.

Holy shit, what an awful conversation! Afterward both of us felt stupid and, worse, far apart from each other. We had turned into talking heads.

A few weeks after Trumps inauguration, Russian writer Masha Gessen spoke to Slates Michelle Goldberg about life under autocracy. She spoke from the perspective of someone who had left Putins Russia for the U.S. three years earlier and could see more clearly than she used to the toll it had taken on her mind. In the last three years, Gessen said, since I got to this country, I realized what a mental price I had paid for living in a state of siege and a state of battle for a decade and a half. She called this experience intellectually deadening. When you are fighting, you stop learning. You stop reading theory. You stop reading about things that arent part of the immediate fight.

Life under autocracy, in other words, forces everyone to think and talk about the autocrat all the time. By virtue of his power, an autocrat imposes himself onto all of our thoughts, forcing us to adopt his vocabulary and inhabit his mind in order to try to understand what hes doing and why. Ever since his rise to power, Trump has served as a vulgarizing agent. Like a true autocrat, he has situated his stumpy body on all of our shoulders and spends his days burping into our faces while we are forced to connect with the people we love by discussing the tenor and odor of the burps.

I realize this is a lucky way to suffer under Trumpthat millions of Americans who are more acutely affected by his malevolent policies are dealing with much worse. Nevertheless, it feels important to recognize the disfiguring effect that Trump has had on our ability to connect with one another. After all, if we cant talk about Trump six months into his presidency without sounding like dumb pundits, it seems possible that well eventually stop tryingthat well become disengaged from and outwardly indifferent to the obscenities taking place around and above us.

There are two reasons I worry that this kind of intellectual and political retreat might be imminentthat before too long, social engagements and conversations with loved ones will turn into sanctuaries from the news where people like me can avoid the subject of Trump and pretend nothing is happening. One of those reasons is that I dont often have much to say about Trump that qualifies as new or remotely thought-provoking. So much of what the administration does is so obviously corrosive and foolish that it feels pointless to say so. I disagree with the Muslim ban. Congratulations, Leonvery interesting point. Jeff Sessions is dead wrong to try to scale back police reform. Very true, very true. Donald Trump is not competent enough to handle the responsibilities of the presidency. Wow, tell me more about that. I havent heard that one before.

The other reason I worry goes back to my experience over Memorial Day: that saying the words I need to say in order to express my boring and predictable opinions about Trump makes me feel like Im engaged in shoddy, dishonest mimicry.

Theres a Russian word for this, and its one I think about a lot: krivlyatsa. Its a word my parents used with me regularly when I was growing up, always in the context of do not do this. Krivlyatsa: Its a verb that has no direct translation in English, but it means something in the key of acting cartoonishly, in an ugly and inauthentic way. Its often used to describe children who are imitating little phrases and gags theyve seen on TV. Remember when kids used to screech, Did I do thaaaaaat?, copying Urkel from Family Matters? Or when theyd come out of the bathroom and say, "DO NOT GO IN THERE! WOOO! like Jim Carrey in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective? It happens now with the language of memes: Everything is lit af or so extra or bae. While its possible to use such language with style and charisma, these are all stock phrases made up by other people, popularized by large crowds, and then adopted by individuals who would, in a better world, be expressing themselves through their own personal language.

To engage in krivlyanya, the noun form of krivlyatsa, means to be artificialto ventriloquize someone else instead of being yourself. That is roughly how I feel when I talk to my wife and friends about Trump. Even though Im talking to people who understand me as I am, I inevitably resort to words that arent my own, imitating the beats of other peoples observations and arguments that Ive read online.

Top Comment

No, you pundits were already pretty terrible before Trump. For example, with how you helped elect him through non-critical media coverage, obvious bias, and false equivalency. You could have stopped this beforehand, BUT HER EMAILS! More...

I have to disappoint here, because I dont think theres any good solution to this problem. What are we supposed to do, just not talk about Trump? Obviously notlike it or not, he is our president, and we are stuck talking about him, even if its in a language that is not our own, and which makes us feel alienated from ourselves.

The contrast between that feeling and the feeling of hanging out with my dearest friends this past weekend really sharpened this point for me. And it made me realize that, even in a cabin in the woods, Trump is still going to be there, sitting on our shoulders, and reminding us that life will not be the same until this all somehow ends. Like it or not, were going to have to keep talking about this guy for as long as we live. May it never start to come naturally.

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Donald Trump Is Turning Us All Into Boring Pundits - Slate Magazine

New York Times

Donald Trump Poisons the World New York Times This week, two of Donald Trump's top advisers, H. R. McMaster and Gary Cohn, wrote the following passage in The Wall Street Journal: The president embarked on his first foreign trip with a cleareyed outlook that the world is not a 'global community ... America First Doesn't Mean America AloneWall Street Journal all 8 news articles »

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Donald Trump Poisons the World - New York Times

(CNN)Just after 3:30 p.m. ET, on Thursday, President Donald Trump appeared in the Rose Garden to announce the U.S. would formally withdraw from the Paris climate accords. But, before he got to that, Trump spoke about an ongoing story out of the Philippines.

Hours after Trump called it a "terror attack," ISIS claimed responsibility in a statement that insisted "Islamic State fighters " had carried out the killings. But that claim of responsibility didn't seem to gibe with the facts (a lone gunmen) or the repeated assertions by Manila police that the incident had nothing to do with terror.

All of which leaves me with a question: Why did Trump conclusively say that the Manila incident was terror on Thursday afternoon even though ISIS didn't claim credit for it until Thursday night and the Manila police continued to insist today that this was simply not a terror attack?

Did Trump know something we didn't? Or the Manila police still don't?

According to the White House, national security adviser H.R. McMaster had briefed Trump on the situation before he arrived in the Rose Garden. "The president had been briefed that media reports indicated ISIS had taken credit," a White House official told CNN.

What media reports? Where? And, why did Trump feel comfortable calling it a "terror attack" if that conclusion was solely based on unspecified media reports?

Republicans will, rightly, note that Trump's wouldn't be the first administration to incorrectly describe an attack on foreign soil. In the immediate aftermath of the attack against a US consulate in Benghazi, Libya in September 2012, UN Ambassador Susan Rice claimed repeatedly that the attack had been a spontaneous event driven by a controversial video. The after-action report made clear it had been a planned attack and that many of the attackers had links to Al-Quaeda.

But two wrongs on this sort of stuff doesn't make a right. In fact, given the massive firestorm the Obama Administration's handling of Benghazi created, it's incumbent on all future presidents (and their staffs) to be very clear about what they know and what they don't know in these situations.

What's difficult with Trump is that no president in history had had such a casual relationship with the truth. He repeatedly says things that are provably false and, if ever called out on that fact, attributes it to something he heard or read somewhere.

The unfortunate result of that sort of "truthiness" is a numbness that begins to develop around the things he says that are simply not true. There's a tendency to gloss over the smaller inconsistencies to focus on bigger -- or just other -- inconsistencies.

That appears to be what's happening here.

But to reiterate: The president of the United States described an attack in a foreign country as "terror" despite the fact that even 24 hours later the police on the ground insist it's not.

It's possible that the ISIS claims of responsibility will, eventually, be proven out and the Manila police will be shown to be wrong. But, that's not the point. At the time Trump pronounced the Manila episode as a "terror attack" there was no evidence of that claim -- and, in fact, there was plenty of evidence to the contrary.

In short: Trump couldn't have known definitively from "media reports" that this was a terrorist incident. That he went ahead and labeled it as such anyway speaks to a looseness with words -- and facts -- that, more than anything else, have defined his first 133 days as president.

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Donald Trump called the Manila murders a 'terrorrist attack.' Except.... - CNN International

MSNBC

Donald Trump's unhealthy preoccupation with being laughed at MSNBC Yet ironically, no president in history has ever been laughed at as much as Trump. And today there is without a doubt not a single human being on planet Earth who is laughed at more than Donald J. Trump. The Center for Media and Public Affairs ... and more »

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Donald Trump's unhealthy preoccupation with being laughed at - MSNBC

Updated: May 31, 2017 10:27 AM ET

President Donald Trump has told aides he intends to pull out of the Paris climate agreement , throwing into doubt a landmark treaty that scientists have said is vital to combating global warming .

According to two White House officials, the President has not yet decided on how to withdraw from the agreement either through a multi-year formal process or the more extreme act of quitting the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The aides cautioned any decision isnt final until it is announced, and that the President is still being lobbied by others to remain in the agreement.

Amid multiple reports that he had decided to withdraw, Trump said an announcement would come soon. "I will be announcing my decision on the Paris Accord over the next few days," Trump said Wednesday morning on Twitter .

Trump made withdrawing from the agreement, negotiated by former President Barack Obama in 2015, a central focus of his campaign, arguing that it overburdened U.S. consumers and energy producers with carbon pollution limits that didnt apply to developing economies. But since he won the White House, the decision whether to fulfill that promise has been among the most fraught within his administration, dividing the Trump family and top aides along ideological and nationalistic lines.

Trump has also been the subject of ferocious international lobbying from leaders across the globe to remain in the agreement. The subject was a centerpiece of the G-7 meetings in Italy last week, where the leaders failed to reach consensus on climate issues because of Trumps dissension. Trump was also pressed by Pope Francis to remain in the accord, and the Pope gave Trump a copy of his encyclical on climate change. All signatories to the UN climate change treaty have signed onto the Paris accords except for Syria and Nicaragua.

Obama entered the agreement without seeking ratification from the GOP-controlled Senate, making it easier for Trump to quit the agreement.

Within the White House, the divisions tend to break along increasingly-familiar lines: Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency administrator, and chief strategist Steve Bannon favor pulling out, while Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, Director of the National Economic Council Gary Cohn and senior advisor Jared Kushner are all reportedly in favor of staying in. Withdrawal would allow Trump to fulfill a campaign pledge and may appeal to supporters of his inward-looking "America First" platform. But policy experts warn of the potentially significant downsides, including ceding global leadership on climate policy to China and Europe.

Trump could also adopt a third option. Since many of the nation's commitments to the Paris Agreement are voluntary, there are no concrete penalties if the U.S. fails to meet them. As a result, Trump could change U.S. commitments, preserving its role at the table while adopting less-stringent greenhouse gas reduction targets than those set under the Obama administration. Trump has already said that he will cancel U.S. payments to a UN fund dedicated to supporting climate change initiatives in the developing world.

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President Trump Is Expected to Withdraw From the Paris Climate Agreement - TIME