We will all celebrate this weekend of relative peace, prior to Trump’s war on America which will start on Monday.
Just a few thoughts because I know we are all burnt out already.
The official portrait of President-elect Donald Trump. Remember when you were a kid and you shined a flashlight under your chin to make yourself look scary?
18 January 2025 — Donald Trump is a cartoon character. He always has been. His election is a sign of national degeneracy and decay. It is a symptom and an answer to decades of unrequited arrogance from America’s political, media and business elites. He is the match and gasoline arson kit sitting on the lowest shelf imaginable. It is the one that people reach for when they decide to commence a burning season. Make no mistake that this is what is coming.
Fire is something that cannot be understood by seeing. It must be felt, experienced and smelled. Conflagrations are part of the natural world, and also human existence. It has been 80 years since the world drifted into the abyss. When it emerged intact, the victors and survivors said, “Never Again,” and tried to build a world where it could not.
They (kind of) succeeded, but their imagination for the future did not see past this point.
It’s not news that Trump is a creature of the society of the spectacle. Creature and master, emanation and accelerant. He is the image. The mugshot. He’s the picture of himself on Fox he sits watching for hours each day – rightly understanding that doing so is doing politics, politics as our society now practices it.
Governing? He will leave that to his servants. What a lovely bygone sound there is to Michel Foucault’s term of art “governmentality”. Only ascendant powers think the state is for governing. Leaders of empires in decline look across at China and Xi Jinping and wonder if he can be serious about infrastructure and censorship and party discipline and the size of the army. Wasn’t that yesterday? What in hell is that Chinaman up to?
Define the society of the spectacle. Oh, come on – you know what it is. What do you want, a street scene via drone shot of children looking at their iPhones? The question is not what the spectacle consists of – the spectacle goes on making a spectacle of its least change of apparatus, the least descent down its ladder of conformity – but what in the long term it does, above all to the other term in the portmanteau. You know. That strange word. “Society”. Just what in hell is that?!
Part of Trump’s genius is that he knows, against much of the tide of the time, that an apocalyptic answer to the question just posed is wrong. The pedestrians on their iPhones may look like isolate, properly subservient individuals, carrying their commodity world with them, locked into TikTok immediacy.
But they aren’t there yet. The spectacle is always hybrid, partly embroiled in the past – society lives on in it, feeding it lines, interfering with its vacuum pack. As Timothy Clark (the British art historian and writer who writes about image and illusion on his blog) noted this weekend:
Look at the faces of the iPhone conversationalists, look at their hands, their arms. Fragments of face-to-faceness live on in them – indelibly, redundantly – as they launch their words into virtual space. They still have expressions. And they’re not even the set pouts and leers of selfie world. They look like real flowing unconscious embodiments of whatever’s being said, of what’s being imagined or anticipated as response. The speakers are still round the campfire.
Hence Trump’s old-fashionedness: his need for rallies and town halls, his belief in the importance of crowd sizes, his dance to the music (that gift to the comics), his tolerance of ‘summits’. Even the hours spent dreaming in front of Fox are nostalgic – he is scenting out the reaction of a virtual audience, sitting there in some ranch house in Grand Rapids or Duluth wondering what ‘woke’ means and how high you really can get on fentanyl.
Think of Helsinki in 2018! Only true masters of the medium know how to perform in front of the cameras like this. Signalling power, impatience, suspicion, superciliousness – not so much aimed in the direction of one’s fellow leader (that was part of the scandal), more at the spectacle itself. ‘We have to do this, but it isn’t what we really do.’ Spectators need to half believe that something called politics is happening behind the scenes. Summits are a nod to the past.
But the Trumpers of 2025 – here’s the difference between 2018 and now – are entirely aware that nothing is happening, that the scene is all there is. (The Helsinki summit – how could you have forgotten? – produced zero results on all the ‘issues’ it was supposed to confront. In particular, it left Putin, Hizbullah and the Quds Force propping up Assad in Syria and agreed to disagree about the invasion of Crimea. Trump used the summit’s closing press conference to denounce the FBI. Why hadn’t they found Hillary’s lost emails?)
When writing about Trump, there’s a question of distance. He gives every sign of being an odious human being, and he flaunts the odiousness, knowing that it maddens his opponents and electrifies his cult. What he did as president last time, and what he promises to do next, will cause misery for millions of people.
As political pundit Matt Dwyer noted:
Supposing we take the whole form of politics and leadership described so far, including its ludicrous deficiencies and so far unanswerable strengths, as a phenomenon, an expression, of an empire in decline.
In particular, of an empire whose immense superiority over its rivals in terms of military power, control of (most) dependencies, dictatorship of ‘innovation’, image of the good life, and sheer mind-boggling wealth, remains unquestioned, but depends now on an economic system that fails to satisfy its own ordinary middle (read, working) class.
This for reasons that have been analyzed to death. Globalization, offshoring, the end of manufacturing, techno-feudalism, vast inequality, the necessity (for growth) of a world of un-tax.
Some of the terms are new here, and certainly the scale and specific form of overreach and overrefinement. Financialization, interlinked derivatives, intricacies of sovereign debt, monopolies of suddenly indispensable raw materials, the road to the sweatshop in Zhengzhou ever more vulnerable. Saudi fist bumps. Crumbling borders (or the claim they are crumbling). “The only democracy in the Middle East”.
But however berserk or bizarre the particulars of U.S. decline, it is easier and easier to look through them to the simple bitterness of those who once, so recently, were empire’s low-level beneficiaries:
• Where did my job go (and with it my health plan)?
• What are my kids on?
• What the hell is racial sensitivity training?
• Replacement theory?
• Elites?
• That lab in Wuhan?
• Abortion?
• Democrat Marxists?
• The Pizza Paedophiles?
• The Hollywood woke crowd?
• Muslims?
• Mexicans?
• Anthony Fauci?
• The goddamn EPA?
See? Really easy to figure out now, yes?
The politics of an empire in decline are invariably a mixture of the cruel and the ludicrous. Just ask the Brits. They are experts.
Nonetheless, the American case is distinctive, and its special character worth examining, if we’re to understand the kind of imperial disintegration that might take place over the next 4 years. Oh, hell. The next fifty years.
We’re at the beginning of the end of American hegemony. But a preponderance so crushing it will resist to the very, very last. It is that which will bring horror and misery and death to so many.
Yes, the Chinese century will come in along its belts and roads – but at a dreadful, very slow-motion speed.
One power will replace another in a world system whose integument – military infrastructure, apparatus of surveillance and repression, shadow world of non-union factories and plantations, marionette theatres of *democracy* (guffaw, guffaw) – will make any previous empire’s seem makeshift.
Just think what it will take to dismantle the U.S.’s 200 plus military bases across the continents. Try to imagine the eventual fate of Israel, its “indispensable nation”. Or decipher the depth of contempt – for one’s subjects, for oneself, for the non-reality the spectacle has made – evident in every pixel of the image that opens this post.
Trump is an early warning signal. He’s a phenomenon of transition, only half adjusted to emerging reality. Of course, he’s not such a fool as to believe that he will, or anyone could, “Make America Great Again”.
But his politics has to steer a course between those in his audience who do believe it, or make-believe it, and those, perhaps the majority, who are there for fun. They’re as cynical as he is. Or rather, they are serious about spectacle. About the chanting, the hats, the latest insult. They know that’s what politics now is. They know what politics is not allowed to interfere with: that is, everything just described about empire.
The point often made about MAGA voters voting to worsen their own condition may be correct (for most if not all of them), but it has no bite when voters are persuaded that the other party has no intention of bettering it. Shallow state, deep economy. The Democrats failed not just at this election but over the last 15+ years.
And Trump’s style? Brilliant. His mixture of insult, ressentiment and buffoonery is a work of genius. In 2016, almost everybody watching the Republican debates unfold felt their jaw drop. I’m as cynical about politics as anybody, but Timothy Clark captured it for me:
This couldn’t be happening. This wasn’t politics at all. The country club name-calling. “Sleepy This” and “Little That”. The smut about small hands and penis size. And the complete refusal to let one’s face – that glowering, hard-done-by Trump mask of contempt – relax for a moment and signal that really, ultimately, we (we members of the political class) don’t mean it, we’re in this together. Trump broke the system. They (we) all said “He will fail!” Nope. We got that wrong. He launched a new era in American politics. Perhaps even Western politics.
And I get it. Up to that point U.S. politics, like most politics, was nothing if not a love-in with some harmless (ideological) rough stuff thrown in.
But I don’t love you in the least, Trump said, and if I scratch your back it will hurt. I want subservience, and I’ll laugh in your face when I get it. And he nailed it at his press conference earlier this week:
My first term, everybody was fighting me. In this new term, everybody wants to be my friend. I don’t know – my personality changed or something.
No. Trump made it clear. He wants subservience, because he never really had it, or had enough of it. He wants you to grovel, because that’s what his voters want. Yeah, yeah, the prices at the gas station make them cross. Really.
But that’s not it. They had power – the anxious provisional imaginary power that the sociologists once called “status” – and they’ve lost it. Imaginary power is a dreadful thing to lose. Their aggrievedness – my aggrievedness – at having had it taken away is endless: it’s MAGA’s reason for being.
Ressentiment, Nietzsche taught us, is a deepfeeling – a determinant fact of our being in the world. We all look around hungrily for someone to blame, someone to wreak vengeance on – for everything we were denied back then, at the beginning. We know we’ll never find the culprit, really; we know we’re making things up; we’re bewildered by our feelings, half ashamed of baying for the scapegoat’s blood – but boy! It feels good!
Timothy Clark one more time:
To have made ressentiment the main form of politics, to have made himself the very image of it, to have it written it into every shaking of the jowls and “It-wasn’t-me-Sir” stare – that’s Trump’s achievement. Here I am: rich, bankrupt, fraudulent, criminal, surrounded by toadies, destroyer of politics, president. And I still haven’t been given my due!
A sceptic might say: All this is nasty, yes, but is it anything new? Especially as an episode in American history. Isn’t Trump just another Andrew Jackson, another George Wallace or William Jennings Bryan? “The people have a right to make their own mistakes”. Nah, the American people are always looking for a charlatan. Even the spectacle is nothing new. Demagogues are demagogues, always in love with the latest technology: newsprint, the back of an endless railroad car, the billboard, the boob tube.
Last week Meta unleashed a flood of announcements: ending their DEI programs, shifting content moderation policies, and Mark Zuckerberg appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast to lament the lack of masculinity in corporate culture. The sheer volume of updates made it nearly impossible to keep up — a tactic often used by political figures like Trump and tech leaders like Elon Musk.
These tactics overwhelm, distract, and reshape the narrative faster than anyone can process. Meta’s announcements last week were overwhelming in scope and significance.
Flooding the zone with announcements is not new. Remember Steve Bannon and his advice as to how to control the media: flood the zone with shit. Musk was the master at this when he first took over Twitter. And he still is. Look what he is doing to Europe.
Trump’s team is planning spectacle from Day 1. A “shock and awe campaign”. On his first day in office he’ll sign over 100 executive orders. By releasing a barrage of information, his team will make it nearly impossible for anyone to keep up or dig into the details. This tactic is remarkably effective in an era of fractured media and information overload.
The impact goes beyond frustration. It creates a sense of helplessness and exhaustion, making it harder to hold these figures accountable. For those in journalism, advocacy, and public affairs, the challenge is clear: adapt to this new reality and move faster than ever.
Another component of these tactics is to focus people on just one particular issue that they can understand, while more meaningful changes that are harder to understand receive less scrutiny. This is exactly the tactic Trump’s campaign used to great success.
And as we grapple with these changes, we must also look at them through the lens of artificial intelligence, which will play an increasingly critical role. Way too much to cover in this post so just my main point:
For those of us in the media biz, AI tools are already used to manage information overload, summarize content, and generate news. But they are being updated and released at a dizzying pace. We keep having breakthroughs that have changed where we thought things were going 3 months ago. Our world will look dramatically different in 3 years than it does today.
So the reaction to Meta’s announcements isn’t just about Facebook. It reflects a broader reckoning with how tech giants shape our world and what we’re willing to accept. Moreover, as Trump prepares to take office, we’ll see these tactics of “overwhelming the playing field” play out nationally and globally.
We will need to adapt, dig into the nuance, and stay focused despite the chaos.
As always, my mantra remains: panic, but panic responsibly. We can navigate these changes. We can stay diligent, we can stay informed.
