Empire falls
It took just four weeks to reorder the world—and America's place in it.
One of my favorite episodes of South Park is “Gnomes.” It landed in 1998, and the premise is gnomes start stealing underpants from the townspeople and—in a roundabout way for roundabout reasons—are grilled by the show’s main characters to spill the secrets of their apparent business success. The strategy?
Steal underpants
?
Profits
It’s now deeply ironic that Elon Musk directly referenced this—jokingly, I assume?—in a 2016 presentation about colonizing Mars. That’s because when it comes to the Trump Administration and its Department of Government Efficiency wrecking crew headed by Musk and his pimply peons, the actual “strategy” of everything that’s happened in the past month is mystifying, at least when common sense is applied. If I had to summarize it:
Undertake an illegal domestic coup, shatter the post World War II global order, undermine trust and confidence in the United States, piss off allies and cozy up to the world’s worst leaders, likely unleash inflation and a recession, leave millions of Americans and immigrants seeking asylum terrified, use your office for financial gain, and generally do nothing to help the American people
?
Golden age
Even accounting for all possible explanations of the past month—from the theory Trump is a Russian asset to the idea he’s just wreaking vengeance on anyone and anything, irrespective of the consequences—the fall of the American empire has been stunning. In the space of four weeks, the United States has become a country allies can’t trust, run by a fascism-flirty cabal whose lack of economic expertise is exceeded only by their sadistic cruelty.
“America suffered no military defeat. We were not outstripped economically by a bigger or better-organized competitor,” Prospect managing editor Ryan Cooper wrote in a column so accurately titled it hurts, ‘Musk and Trump Are Causing the Dumbest Imperial Collapse in History.’
“Rather, we elected an insane tyrant who is blowing up the foundation of our international power for no reason, all while he lets a South African immigrant ultra-billionaire and his crew of teenybopper fascists tear the wiring out of the federal government—again, for no reason. Never underestimate the destructive power of stupidity.”
The realization the America we knew has gone took a while to sink in. The establishment media has especially struggled with what journalist
diagnoses as status quo or normalcy bias—that is, “an inability to process, accept and confront the dangerous new reality we are in and to focus on the big picture and the pivot of history that’s occurred in the last two weeks.”“The New York Times knows all of the above because there is an abundance of excellent reporting on its site that lays it out,” Cadwalladr said. “But this is what was actually on the front page of the New York Times on Saturday night: on the left hand side is a solid summary of the ongoing illegal seizure of power and its consequences. On the right, is a feature about Ultimate Frisbee. Can you spot the problem here?”
The normalization of Trump has, of course, been a problem for almost a decade. And the day-to-day reality of life here is that while there’s a deep sense of existential dread, everything’s rolling largely as normal. For now. The question is when a tipping point is reached; when the collective impact of the actions of the past month (and the no doubt many more actions to come) begin impacting all Americans.
Egg prices are through the roof, sure. Interest rates seem more likely to increase than fall, especially if inflation flares as tariffs have their entirely predictable effect. Trump will buy time with the sugar high of a tax cut, but paying for even part of that will prompt real-world pain.
“How will this tax plan affect regular folks? It will hurt them, and ‘them’ includes Trump voters, in two ways,” Jared Bernstein, the former chair of President Joe Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers, wrote, having noted “there’s virtually nothing in the new administration’s flurry of activity that would help middle- and low-income families, and much that would hurt them.”
“First … offsets put forth by House Republicans could kick 36 million people off of Medicaid and 40 million could face the loss or reduction of nutritional support. Furthermore, Merrill Goozner pointed out that ‘20 of the top 24 states most dependent on federal funding to run their Medicaid programs voted for Donald Trump in the last election. Eleven of those states have more than a quarter of their populations on Medicaid.’
“Bond market investors are already showing some concern about this worse fiscal path, and the way they show it is by demanding higher interest rates when they lend money to the government. Because the rates of government bonds serve as a benchmark for borrowing rates throughout the economy—think cars, homes, and credit cards—this is the other way tax cuts hurt average Americans.”
That may do the trick to convince non-MAGA Trump voters—those who aren’t true believers, but were fascism curious and maybe thought he wouldn’t be as bad as advertised despite all evidence to the contrary—of the error of their ways. Bernstein thinks they’ll at some point declare “enough with the trade wars, renaming the map, and taking over the Kennedy Center. You said you’d improve our living standards by lowering prices and interest rates, and we’re not seeing it.”
Maybe. But the only bet I’d confidently take today is the depressing reality that the hardcore MAGA crowd will simply never abandon Trump. A third or so of this country will ride shotgun over a Thelma & Louise cliff with this guy, taking the rest of us with them—as well as the international structure that has delivered relative peace and prosperity for the past 80 years.
I used to lie awake at night, wondering how on Earth anyone could be so stupid. But then I started watching so-bad-it’s-good reality TV, notably 90 Day Fiancé. This is a show where Americans presumably unable or unwilling to date anyone here decide to strike up online relationships with people in places like Nigeria and Colombia and Ukraine.
Sometimes, they chat for years before finally meeting and realizing reality is very different than life online. The lack of chemistry is usually palpable, and it’s never long before all sorts of secrets start emerging. One guy is married and on the show purely for publicity. Another has gonorrhea from someone he hooked up with a week earlier. One recorded himself having sex without the partner’s consent. Yet another only filed for divorce days before the show started filming.
The common denominator? They steadfastly refuse to walk away. They’re blowing through relationship red flags with total abandon, usually screaming at each other and threatening to leave but always crawling back. I mean, one guy learned he’d been chatting for years and sending money to a dude pretending to be a woman, yet he still refused to accept the truth.
That’s the MAGA mind. Some cling to their warped vision of Trump as a competent, successful businessman. Others have a sunk cost issue: they’ve invested so much time, energy, and money that to submit to reality would crystallize their utter stupidity (which can never, ever happen). So, instead, they’re at the blackjack table at 3am, desperately throwing good money after bad to try to break even. Still more just follow their idol by never admitting fault, or reveling in sticking it to the “elite.”
Europe and much of the rest of the world got a cold dose of reality in the past week. I’m hoping non-MAGA Trump voters will soon have the same. But here’s when shit will get real: when the American peeps on 90 Day Fiancé—so named because you have 90 days to marry after entering the US on a K-1 visa for engaged couples—start seeking to marry and live overseas. It’s coming, for sure. Can you blame them?
A note about whatever this is …
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.
Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.