Certain uncertainty
What do you do when a country implodes? Sell America.
“There are known knowns. These are things we know that we know,” former US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld famously said in February 2002 when pressed on the lack of evidence that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. “There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
America today is suffering through a different strain of a similar problem.
For 80 years since the end of World War II, there were certain certainties—things we knew the world could rely on. Things like the US being the bulwark of the international order. The greenback being the planet’s default currency. US Treasuries being rock solid. There were also uncertain uncertainties, the kind of random shifts that are unpredictable but usually fleeting; just stupid decisions the country purges over time to return to the norm.
Today? We’re reeling from certain uncertainty. The only thing we know for sure is that we know nothing for sure. And, like everything in life, it’s uncertainty that kills you. Whether it’s a driver running a red light or an ex deciding to move your kids to the country’s tightest property market for no good reason, what you want are dumb decisions made decisively. At least then you can take stock of your new circumstances, adjust, and move forward.
We don’t have that today. America is gripped daily by jarring shifts in policy and rhetoric, often unconstitutional and usually nonsensical. The ground shifts quickly and decisively, for sure, until it changes again. And these dramatic swings aren’t even well reasoned, rational course corrections. They’re typically random posts on Truth Social by President Donald Trump, who decided yesterday was a good day to brand Federal Reserve chairman Jay Powell “a major loser” and send markets tumbling.
“The issue is, right now, you’ve got to be a Trumpologist. And I don’t know anybody who has edge there,” the CEO of hedge fund Muddy Waters Capital, Carson Block, told New York magazine in a feature titled “Nightmare on Wall Street.’ “Trump, at best, is a coin flip. But I don’t even think you can create a situation where there’s just a binary question, Will he do X or Y? Because quite often it’s like Z! And you never even thought of Z.”
The net result of all of this is what markets are calling “Sell America.”
“What we’re seeing now is something familiar to those of us who have studied economic crises in other countries, usually but not always emerging markets,” Paul Krugman writes. “For this is looking more and more like a ‘sudden stop.’ That’s what happens when a country that has relied on large inflows of foreign capital loses the confidence of international investors. The inflow of money dries up — and the economic consequences are usually ugly.”
So, where are we today? At a standstill. Businesses can’t make investment decisions today because they have no certainty Trump won’t change course tomorrow. Tariffs on most countries are sorta kinda maybe paused, but they could roar back in a couple of months—or tomorrow. Individuals can’t seek new jobs or buy homes or commit to spending because there’s so much deep uncertainty about the state of the economy.
The country feels weird and nervy and paralyzed, gripped by the whims of a president whose agenda appears grounded in ignorance—the notion that America has been screwed for decades and tariffs are the answer—and motivated by the exercise of raw power simply for its own sake, damn the consequences. Of course, none of this is happening solely because of Trump. It’s enabled, particularly, by Congress, which has decided it’s no longer an equal branch of government but instead a body in service to a wannabe king and fearful of his loyal electoral subjects.
The Canadian novelist Stephen Marche published an essay this week which resonated deeply with me as someone who consciously chose to build a life here. In one section, Marche wrote about reporting on the first stirrings of Trumpism back in 2015—he was in Ohio, not long after being on assignment in Senegal.
“I was stopping for gas on the way to a rally, and at the station they were selling a hotdog with as much chilli and cheese as you liked for $1.99,” he wrote. “The chilli and cheese came out of the wall. You pressed two buttons, one for chilli and one for cheese.
“On the streets of Dakar, children hawk packs of peanuts and plastic bags of clean water on the street, and I wondered if you could even explain to them that there existed a place, on the same earth, where chilli and liquid cheese came out of a wall, and you could have as much of it as you liked for the equivalent of 20 minutes’ work at the minimum wage, and that some of the people in that place considered themselves so hard done by that their resentful fury threatened the political order, that they just wanted to burn it all down.”
Telling people their lives could be worse is never a winning political strategy. But it’s impossible to breeze past anecdotes like Marche’s given the reality you see every day here: massive pick-up trucks festooned with Trump stickers, pulling into multi-million-dollar homes. In the richest country in the history of the world, people are perched in front of their massive, Chinese-made, cheap-as-chips flatscreen TVs, devouring more food than the majority of the world can dream of, washing it down with water (or, more likely, soda) that flows without a second’s thought, and nursing a deep sense of victimhood and seething grievance at how bad they have it.
And, so, they lash out. I suspect historians will never stop examining this peculiarly (but not exclusively) American strain of self-sabotage, as well as the pathologies driving Trump. We may never get a full picture. For his part, Marche argues the country’s founding promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness “is why success in America does not lead to gratitude but to an intense sensation of loss.”
“The elite take any deviation from their fantasy existence as a broken contract,” he writes. “They’ve been ripped off. That is a big feeling among the most successful people in America: the sense of being ripped off. The country clubs are rife with men and women, in incredible luxury, complaining bitterly about the state of the country. The richest and most powerful, the Americans who have won, who have everything, are still not happy, and why? Their answer is that the American dream must be broken. There is no one who feels more betrayed by the American dream than the world’s richest man. Why else do you think he’s out there with a chainsaw?
“The American elites of the past 20 years have called their foremost principle freedom, but what they meant was impunity. That’s what the original slave masters built: a world where they could do whatever they wanted to whomever they wanted, without consequences. That’s what the techlords dream of today.”
Well, we’re getting a taste of that. Marche’s essay was titled ‘The America I loved is gone.” I know the feeling.
Sell America.
Note: The image accompanying this is by Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images.
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After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.
Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.
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