From TPM Reader DC …
I’ve been alternating between depression, anger, and bewilderment today. I see things like
At issue [regarding Jack Smith], per NBC, is the long-standing DOJ policy we became so familiar with in Donald Trump’s first term: that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted.
And I think, at this point who the fuck cares about “long-standing DOJ policy”?! It’s also long-standing DOJ policy that a president doesn’t summarily fire independent counsels investigating him. If only Biden had just fired the investigators of Hunter he could have been done with it. But no, we have to follow long-standing policy. Trump can do whatever he wants, but the rest of us are just chumps.
I know it’s just a fantasy, but I wish Biden would do something outrageously out of bounds, and shrug it off with “the Supreme Court said I’m immune.” Of course Trumpists have no qualms about hypocrisy, and would probably prosecute and maybe even convict him. But do something to rub the Supreme Court’s nose in the travesty they laid on us. Why is Trump the only one who gets to get away with crimes?
On the broader topic of “what happened?”, I find myself continually trying to understand the messianic appeal Trump has to people around me. For too long, we’ve convinced ourselves that reactionary conservatism is the place of those who are poor, uneducated, and dislocated by global change. The middle aged steel worker who is still trying to find work after the mill closed in 1994. But most of the Trump-supporting or sympathetic people I know are highly educated, intelligent, and very successful people, who have done quite well financially during the Biden years. They don’t seem to be angry, they seem to be giddily, childishly optimistic about how awesome the future will be. What I can’t for the life of me understand is, just listening to Trump speak, how does that inspire messianic optimism? How do you listen to his barely intelligible English and literally think “this is the guy who will save western civilization”?
I come from the VC-backed tech and aerospace world, so I see up close some of the giddiness. In the tech world, I feel like something broke in the brains of many otherwise intelligent people over the course of growth of crypto and all its affiliate nonsense like Effective Altruism, AI maximalism, and whatever “e/acc” means. Smart people saying things that sound smart, thinking they are long -term big-picture thinking, attracting more people to the bubble, and they make up this whole fantasy world in their minds, talking in memes and worrying about the heat death of the universe. Maybe the same kind of thing happened among fashionable left-wing intellectuals in the 1930s and 60s. There’s an argument to be made that it happened in the 2010s in the woke movement, too. Combine this manufactured crypto/AI reality with the pitchman/conman personalities of VCs, and you have readymade constituency for messianism?
Last thought is about how rapidly the type of media that holds the major influence has changed in the 21st century. W Bush was the cable news president. Obama was the blogosphere president. Trump was the Twitter president. Biden didn’t really work any medium well, and now Trump 2 is the podcast president. That’s four major shifts in media in five presidencies. The next previous shift before that was Kennedy as the television president in 1960, and FDR as the radio president in 1932. People who worried in 2024 about what talking heads on cable news say were probably worrying into the void.
I wonder how many of us that feel blindsided this election were out of touch with the dominant medium? I’m personally still a blog guy, never watch television news, hold my nose and use Twitter occasionally, have never used Instagram or TikTok, and don’t even know who most of these influential “manosphere” podcasters even are. That probably makes me out of touch. Will the dominant medium shift again in ’28? Will the politicians be trying to fight the previous war?
Finally, I struggle with how to explain all of this to my 12 year old son. It breaks my heart that he has to grow up with this as his formative political era. He absolutely despises politics, and honestly I don’t blame him. When I was his age, I could watch PBS documentaries on TR and FDR and JFK and admire (most of) them, and the presidency as an institution. But now it’s just the asshole-in-chief. We don’t watch Trump speeches as a family. I feel infected by just listening to Trump. How can I want to submit my child to such abuse? He’ll be nearly done with high school before there is another president. What will happen to this generation of politically traumatized kids when they grow up?
Apologies for the meandering. There was some relief in writing it. Curious how it compares to what other TPM readers are feeling.
