Swan responded: “How? A thousand Americans are dying a day.”
“They are dying. That’s true. And you – it is what it is,” Trump said.
It is what it is.
Prior to this morning I most recently read the phrase in an article on attitudes towards covid‑19 at the New Jersey shore. A young man from Pennsylvania explained that months earlier he had been concerned about the virus, but he was now tired of that. „It is what it is,“ he explained.
On my last visit to the US among relatives there was discussion of The Mueller Report and The Resistance™ led by Nancy Pelosi. I was curious about thoughts as to political actions other than posting ironic memes on Facebook and waiting until the 2020 election. An older relative, a working man, sagely explained the situation with a wry accommodating smile: „It is what it is.“ Here was not a sans-culottes explanation of the inevitability of class struggle. This instead was the resignation of the serf, rationalizing the calluses and the painful blisters on his neck as with a practiced hand he shifted the yoke.