American politics generates roughly the same amount of noise every week, which is impressive when you think back to, really, any event since Monica Lewinsky. But that’s basically a lifetime ago, a quaint idyll of a less corrupt and stupid era of American Greatness. Since January 20th, it feels like every headline has been more or less The Trump Administration Moves to Eliminate the Department of Good Things that Helps People, and While He Can’t Legally Do This, It Will Be Done By Tomorrow. The news is saturated with nauseating events and bleak developments that somehow transcend the usual dreamlike shittiness of living through every ‘90s Simpsons joke only to attain a state of pure Sinus Headache. Because America is how it is and Donald Trump is how he is, the foremost question at this point in his second term is how much anyone has left.
Our news/social media ecosystem’s insistence on the world-historical significance of every goddamn thing makes anything hard to trust, and the simple mental and emotional attrition born of being online makes it hard to endure. Even under ideal conditions, living under late-stage capitalism is a slog, and imagining a better future seems fantastical. Developments stop and start and are frequently interrupted by voice-over actors bragging at you about what J.D. Power and Associates said about a given truck’s warranty, legions of grown-ass men go online to lose their absolute shit over Snow White, the Democratic Party is defined by willful checked-out dumbassery, there is too much euphemistic fine-parsing around how to properly describe and diagnose what’s going on. There is, in a universe slightly to the left of ours, a version of America that is goofier and definitely more fun than this one and everyone at every level has lightened the fuck up considerably. We live and watch in this one, though, and we get a few dazzling moments of awe, studded at random between the advertisements for trucks and gas station boner pill memes and long periods of watching puffy pink guys pace around.
We had those moments of awe and surprise this past week, if also the usual amount of the J.D. Power-related shouting and pacing puffy pink guys. In the context of the unstoppable force/immovable object conflict that is everyday federal dysfunction, human decency caught a brief win. We learned that there are some things money can’t buy, and in Elon Musk’s case, it’s his children’s affection, but also a seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court. Famously, the masses love it when you put hundreds of thousands of people out of work and cut social spending—especially when you’re a painfully autistic foreign-born nepo grifter with a laminated face and a breeding fetish. He was leaping around Wisconsin in a cheese hat and handing out oversized checks to voters like this election was a special anniversary episode of The Price is Right. Elon’s whole character arc reminds me of the Cats used to be worshiped as gods. They have never forgotten this. meme but instead it’s, Elon used to be loved by Reddit. He has never forgotten this. It’s pathetic. Why doesn’t he just get it over with and suck his dad’s dick?
However, there are different ways for the news to be bad, and Americans have had many opportunities to familiarize themselves with the various substrates and tiers of badness that headlines and developments can deliver. This has been an enervating and unsatisfying few months, a second Trump term full of glaring problems and multiple backwardness and righteous denial; this could be said of most recent presidencies, although there has been something deranging and fun-free about this one even by those standards. The Republican Party is as dominant and powerful as it has been in recent memory, but it is also depressed. Not in the can’t-get-out-of-bed sense, not quite, but certainly in the if-I-died-no-one-would-care one that just feels so cloying and cringe. The flat-affect griminess and self-thwarting tone of all their posting and public displays of MAGA bear this out. There has never been a group of people who have gotten everything they want and are still mad about it.
The libs are also mad, but it’s because we live in a Willy Wonka presidency. When Trump unveiled his Trump Gold Card on Friday, the $5 million price tag to grant foreigners residency in the United States wasn’t particularly jarring, if only because it’s the logical continuation of the same kind of grifty quid pro quo/pump-and-dump scheme that has carried him throughout his used-car-salesman existence. It’s just trashy. The card is laminated—not even printed on PVC—and its tacky ostentatiousness is enough proof that he had a personal say in the design. I am trying to imagine someone showing this to a cop. What happens if you lose it? Would you go to a Wegman’s for a replacement? I assume the only place where it’s valid is Martha’s Vineyard. Anyway, all of this noise doesn’t quite conceal a nation-wide case of ennui; the obviousness of it adds a sort of mocking poignance to how unserious this country has become.
I have spent a good deal of my adult life grappling with the depressing/goofy state of affairs by subjecting myself to attempting to understand it in its totality. I find that what works for me is refusing to deny the suck of it all. Learning how to be sad is one of the great skills in adult life; learning how to persevere through it is the most important one. Now that the markets are melting down and the government is growing more discombobulated and authoritarian, it is baffling that millions of Americans are happy to see this carnage inflicted in the name of banning gender-neutral bathrooms or whatever. The cynical interpretation of all these new (for now?) Trump tariffs is that he’s deliberately tanking the global economy for his oligarchic friends to strip America for spare parts on the cheap. Or, he and his advisors are every bit as stupid and over-aggressive as they appear to be. Maybe the ship is rudderless, and this is all a result of ignorant dipshits voting for an ignorant strongman who has surrounded himself with sychophantic dullards. As the yacht sinks and the panic sets in, Kid Rock gathers the band for one final number as they drop below the waves: I wanna be a cowboy, baby…
Assuming Trump has an actual vision, he’s using a hammer to cobble it together, the same old tried-and-true Diamond Donny dealmaking technique: Act like a bully and maximize leverage. But something like a vision is not the sort of thing Trump contemplates, and this should be evident after his first term happening more or less as vain and lazy as he is—spend all day leering at the television and chasing feuds, watch the big numbers go up and up, bask in the adoration of hooting chuds who roar at every garbled punchline. It has been assumed that Trump exists at the top of the media/culture chain while his devoted fans swim downstream in the toxic sludge canals, devouring refried gobs of culture war muck. But Trump is not the apex; he is the apotheosis. He is every bit as voracious a consumer of cable news as his followers, absorbing it in the same blank and fulsome ways as rage grandpas and 1776 Facebook boomers. He has more power to shape the media and cultural narrative, but Trump essentially just watches himself act as president on TV as he berates the doll-eyed careerists and clammy grifters who come and go through his office to do the grunt work for him. It’s a strange, twisted dialectical relationship: The Big Man and his cult create this homunculus Trump that is a projection of some weird psychosexual feeling about him and how he makes them feel, and this reinforcing lie sustains the whole delusion.
But what matters most, and the thing that sometimes jars me back to the present tense whenever I’m down—and into awareness of all the good things around me that I’d let fade to grey—are the periodic bright moments of grace that flit through even a shitty, shitty reality. At least Cory Booker did a 25-hour protest filibuster, which is one hour longer than it takes for Mitch McConnell to find his seat in the Senate. If he used a piss jug while giving that speech, then I’ll officially endorse him for president. Sure, maybe this ill-defined demonstration would’ve been better if it was directed at a specific unpopular bill or one of the more moronic cabinet appointments, but can’t a guy just have a hobby anymore? I didn’t think Cory “My Top Artist on Spotify is the Hamilton Soundtrack” Booker, had it in him, as 25 hours of continuous talking is what your mom does on the phone after you tell her you need to go. But I’m glad it’s also a form of #resistance. This is not to say that this moment of beauty that blunders through grunty troglodyte-fests will justify or redeem every other thing around it. It’s just useful to remember that they’re there, and that they’re worth appreciating, and hopefully, more of them are waiting over the horizon.
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Author: Sam Colt
Karen O’Blivious – Senior political correspondent who insists she’s neutral but only interviews people who agree with her.