Now I'm Back, from Outer Space
You might survive. A lot will come down to how you define "survive."
The most depressing part of the 2024 election was the period immediately following the announcement that Donald Trump was coming back, all the way back. It was the assurances from the big media outlets, the mainstream (The New York Times, CNN) and the openly MAGA (The Free Press, Fox News) alike, that we all knew this was coming and it was the only logical outcome. Joe Biden, who wasn’t on the ballot, had a shitty debate. Somebody took a shot at him, and instead of falling to the deck with a piss stain on the front of his pants like I would have, he glared and pumped his fist. He looked really pissed off in his mug shot. This stuff was undeniable. And so he was unbeatable. There was no point thinking this was one queasy-making, fucked-up development: look, he won the popular vote this time! This is us.
It amounted to a chorus of voice saying that my country was dead, because that’s what the people wanted. 25% of the American population identify as MAGA. That adds up to roughly 70 million people whose hopes and desires for the country are undeserving of any respect at all. Their numbers were fortified by millions of other people who may not be completely sure about the stuff but know a star when they see one and felt this was the movie they wanted to watch. After the 2016 election, Media rushed in to point out that a lot of people who’d voted for Trump had voted for Barack Obama at some point in their lives, which proved conclusively that, despite whatever ideas you might have about someone who built his entire political career on claiming that Obama is not a real America, none of Trump’s appeal could be racist in nature. The second time, he was the choice of more nonwhite voters than before, which was supposed to double-plus prove that his voters couldn’t be racist. The less socialist-leaning opinion staffers at The New York Times had a terrific time kicking back and forth the notion that the man famous for not paying working people and daring them to try suing him for the money was on the verge of forging a true, multiracial working-class coalition and rewarding them politically for their good taste in leaders. Nobody would even miss unions.
The Free Press and its friends outside the bubble, like Bill Maher, loved the idea that we had undergone a great, epoch-changing vibe shift that marked a total reset for the culture. It was exciting! Visit the off-world colonies! The cumbersome rights that had been built up over the preceding century would be sent to live on a beautiful farm off in the country, where they could run and play. New gatekeepers would redefine the nature of journalism and education. These would take as their cornerstone the power of free speech, a precious and endangered resource, and those in charge of regulating it would destroy the lives of anyone who was out of step on the important things, like Gaza and tracing Elon Musk’s flight patterns. And people would be able to laugh again, humor having been all but stamped out by the busybodies and censorial prigs who don’t see the fun and wit of flashing the occasional Nazi salute. As I’m writing this, I can hear the voice of freedom-and-fun-loving comment dispenser Benny Johnson, who finds so much to laugh at in the spectacle of people who see life differently than he does that on almost every occasion I’ve seen his face, he’s been grinning—sneering, really, but I can tell that “grinning” is the idea—like a Dennis Miller jack-o-lantern. This is one of those rare occasions where he isn’t even smirking. He seems pissy and pouty and put out. People with a prankish sense of humor are “protesting” at the site of the Trump-bespoiled Reflecting Pool, holding up signs declaring their solidarity with algae. Benny is complaining that, because we still have welfare services in this county, ungrateful ne’er-do-wells like these can too easily obtain food.
In an essay published shortly after the 2024 election, Sam Harris, one of the people who is officially anti-Trump but thinks many of the people who are anti-Trump in the wrong way are the absolute worst, summed it up like this: “One lesson that I would be quick to draw from this election is that Americans aren't really fond of seeing biological men punch women in the face at the Olympics. And if that sounds like transphobia to you—you're the problem.” In a footnote, Harris, who does not want people reading this to think he’s an idiot, mentions that, “of course”, he does know perfectly well that no biological women punched any women in the face at the Olympics…at least, not “to my knowledge.” A woman—seriously, no shit, Mom, a straight-up, noncontroversial born-that-way woman, Imane Khelif, who was competing in a boxing match, punched her opponent. Who is also a woman. And who did not take it well, but no judgment. She cried, much as I would. And people online who thought Imane Khelif looked a little butch, spread the lie that she is trans and big burly men in dresses and pigtails were beating up little girls in the woke Olympics and what is the world coming to.
Considering that telling the straight-talk truth without any regard for political bias or made-up shit is supposed to be Sam Harris’s brand, it is surprisingly to see him using the spread of baseless lies as an example of the truth about the state of the world, which the lib-labs in their ivory towers are too blind to see, that explains where we’re at. He could just as easily have written that one lesson he would be quick to draw from the election is that Americans aren’t really fond of letting Somalis come into the country, take over an American city, and eat all their neighbors’ pets. It’s the exact same thing, the same principle. JD Vance’s and Trump’s lies about Somalian refugees are as baseless and cruel as the lies about Imane Khelif, and all the people who spread either lie are equally worthless. The fact that either lie caught on and lit a fire under one segment of the voting public proves the same thing.
Although I could be mistaken, I suspect that Harris would be reluctant to take the lies about the Somalis up and wave them as a flag because he thinks that might make him seem a bit racist, not to say unwelcoming to desperate people who have come to America hoping to find sanctuary. He doesn't mind doing it with the lie about Imane Khelif, because he thinks it makes a valuable point about how unfair many ordinary Americans think it is that they have to live in a world that has trans people in it, and maybe also because the thought of the existence of trans women gets up his own nose in a way that the existence of Somalis does not. One thing we can agree on with absolute certainly is that Sam Harris is not one of those people who claim that they have a problem with extending human rights to trans women because they see that as an infringement on the rights of biological women. Since, in the name of extending sympathy to the people who got caught up in the lie about Imane Khelif, he is implicitly endorsing a chain of events that led to a biological woman receiving death threats, the only reasonable conclusion to arrive at is that he could not possibly give less of a shit.
Trump’s comeback and his full-scale transformation of my country and its relation to the world surrounding it presented some challenges to the many people whose basic attitude is, “He’s objectively garbage, obviously, I wouldn’t want anyone to think I can’t see that—and aren’t all the boring, smug people who aren’t absolute garbage so much worse!?” Not all of them have risen to it with the same level of grace and aplomb. Glenn Loury, the celebrated round shitball and acclaimed economist who uses his platforms to talk and write about everything under the sun except for economics, fell in love with Trump during his first presidential campaign, because he was so great at what Loury wants more than anything in a world leader: holding rallies where he told all the people who aren’t absolute garbage where to get off. In his podcasting output, he has even gone so far as to insist that he believes Trump is intelligent, often as a response to fellow gasbags who think he isn’t. Trump has been a public figure since at least the 1980s, and has been talking every minute of it. He isn’t intelligent. To suggest that he is calls into question his advocates’ own grey matter. If Donald Trump were intelligent, he would have run his businesses competently and filed for bankruptcy fewer times, and he would have been too busy to play a brilliant businessman on TV. Trump was not the first person the producers of The Apprentice dreamed of hiring to star in their TV show. No one else would do it, in part because they did not have a pathological need for the attention of millions of strangers so why would they, and because they didn’t have the time to spare because they were intelligent and capable and so were busy actually being successful businessmen.
In his very long memoir, Loury sums up his philosophy of life: “There are Players and there are suckers. I know which one I want to be.” To put it another way: Loury is a hedonistic slimeball who prides himself on knowing how to have a good time and doesn’t actually know of any ways to have a good time that might involve getting ripped and putting his married-mans dick on a leash. He’s a useful prototype for the kind of people who see Trump as their representative: Trump himself is a sociopathic scumbag who prides himself on knowing how to make money and doesn’t actually know of any ways to make money that don’t involve running sleazy games on people and ripping everybody off. (By contrast, Loury has contempt for Barack Obama because he’s “little more than a political operator”—i.e., a normal human being with respect and empathy for others who has developed his political skills and made an honest effort to put them to work. In Louryspeak, that makes him a “sucker.” In his book, Loury rationalizes this contempt by asking, “What struggle did he have to overcome to get where he was?” Which is adorable, because if Obama had made his “struggle” the centerpiece of his identity, Loury would demand to know why anyone should vote for him on the basis of his backstory. But he could happily vote for Trump on the basis of him being a rude and clueless insult comedian. Finally—a real Player in charge of the free world.
Loury loved every second of Trump’s first term up to the January 6 riot, at which point he got cold feet and pulled the rip cord, declaring that Trump’s “repeated attempts to overturn the election results constituted conduct unbecoming of the presidency.” But he was just funnin’. After Election Day 2024, Loury expansively declared that he hadn’t voted for Trump (or Kamala Harris, natch), but he was overjoyed he was coming back. he was “the lesser of two evils”—and if you think “evil” is a strong word for a competent caretaker politician like Kamala Harris, clearly you have some baffling need to prioritize normality over the thrill of kleptocracy and the promise of a State of the Union address that’s like a Dean Martin roast. “Whatever we’re going to get from him over the next four years, it’s not going to be business as usual. And we simply can’t afford—economically, socially, and geopolitically—another term of business as usual. So yes, while I’m wary of some of his stated goals, I’m also excited about the possibility for change.” Translation: I’m in my seventies and I won’t be here when the bills come due. So you bring the shit show, and I’ll make the popcorn! Maybe I’ll even get back on the crack pipe! I’ve kind of been hoping for a good excuse.
Sometimes when someone decides to go on a diet or curb their drinking (or, if you’re Glenn Loury, ease off the crack pipe), they bore everyone in their circle by telling them about it, to make it harder to relapse. Sometimes I get a sense that some of the bloviators who are only MAGA-friendly or MAGA-adjacent, startled that Trump won the popular vote this time and eager, partly to show they’re openminded and partly just because, like Loury, they get bored easy and want a revolution to comment on before they die, bought into the vibe shift to make it harder for them to panic and try to pry open the emergency exit the first few hundred times their much-loved new president says or does something reprehensibly damaging or stupid. That’s the best explanation I can come up with to explain people like David Brooks (akshully, Trump didn’t declare war on Iran, they declared war on us, 47 years ago) and Bill Maher declaring their confidence and excitement in the face of his Iran folly.
Obviously, no one who isn’t fully deranged or a blithering idiot (or both, to the ultimate power, like Niall Ferguson) ever could have thought it would end well. But we seem to have become a country whose bloviators pride themselves on never learning anything, and it seems really early for anyone who was alive during the George W. Bush administration to have not learned that maybe really stupid people shouldn’t be trusted to start wars of choice in the Middle East. The only explanation for people thinking it would be a good idea for Trump and Pete Hegseth to do it now is that Brooks and Maher convinced themselves that Bush’s foreign policy was a failure because he wasn't anywhere near stupid enough. Maher did achieve enough of a mind link with Trump and Hegseth that, like them, he came to clearly believe that Middle Easterners aren’t human beings, except he did it in kind of a nice way. Scolding Westerners who weren’t grateful enough for the diversion, he began urging his listeners to remember how much good Iranians hate their government, and to appreciate that when they saw their own children blown to bits before their eyes, they thought all their birthdays were coming at once. Nothing could make them happier, certainly not their children living another minute under the despised regime that Trump will be leaving intact, except with younger, more energetic leadership and more money. Certain that all good Iranians want what he wants, even should that require their deaths, Maher may have confused them with Shmoos.
Other, more forthright Trump admirers have torn off their masks. Gary Abernathy is a living, walking yawn who, after Trump’s first election, was tapped by the Washington Post to write a column explaining to the big-city jaspers how things look like to folks in your rural America, “voice of rural America” being his whole shtick. For years, he stuck his ass on his cracker barrel and bored the pants off Post readers so they could feel better in touch with the pulse of the heartland. His tone was mostly supportive of the MAGA president, but with an occasional undertone of regret for the tender feelings of any eggs that got broken in the course of the necessary work of realigning the nation’s moral compass, which hadn't quite been the same since Wavy Gravy warned all those gosh darn hippies about the brown acid. Then, he snapped, and in the fall of 2024—before both the election and Jeff Bezos’s midlife MAGA mind shift—he declared that he was leaving the Post, fed up with being sniffed at by all the unpatriotic sherry guzzlers who got their back hair up every time some well-meaning American stormed the Capitol.
Now he maintains a website where he snarls out common-sense headlines like “Trump’s Iran War Strategy and Exit Plan? Win” and “Trump Understands That Extreme Gerrymandering in Defense of Conservatism Is no Vice.” He still has the mild, shit-eating smile of a substitute teacher who’s hoping the principal hasn’t heard about his arrest for shooting his neighbor’s mailbox to exercise his Second Amendment rights and make a point, but he is not the same man, so it can make for a special TV moment when he gets a call about a gig from some booking agent who needs to update his address book. Not long after ICE agents started randomly murdering people in Minnesota for shits and giggles, Gary received an invitation to discuss the events of the week on PBS Newshour with Jonathan Capeheart, because David Brooks went to a party Thursday night and hadn’t found his way down from the ceiling. Capehart said that killing nonviolent citizens and lying about what the video evidence shows won’t lie with the American people, and then Gary averred that it flew just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull with him. He pointed out that people like Jonathan didn’t care for it when Donald Trump believers stormed the Capitol and beat up the cops; how, he asked, is it any different for troublemakers like an Alex Pretti to drive a law enforcement agent to put him down by trying to help a woman up, after agents had gone to the trouble of knocking her down? After Capeheart mentioned five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos, sent to a detention center in Texas where his father was being “detained”, Gary flashed his smiliest smile and said, yes, isn’t it wonderful? He’s with his father. If they were still separated, unreasonable people would be whining about that. A cut to Jonathan Capeheart showed an expression on his face that one is unused to seeing on people on PBS having a friendly chin-wag with their esteemed colleagues. I don’t think I’ve seen that expression since the last time Martha Quinn asked Lou Reed a stupid question during an interview on MTV.
I know that this is what my country is now, and will be for the rest of all our lives. I’m processing it. It isn’t easy, but the truth is the truth. We have democratic elections, and without exception, everyone who voted for Donald Trump—and, presumably, everyone who chose simply not to vote for Kamala Harris—wanted it, must have ached for it. Sometimes, you hear people who are freaking out say that people didn’t vote for this—for the violence, the chaos, the proud and open bigotry, the corruption, the lying, the flamboyant destruction of national landmarks. Sometimes, people who voted for Trump and enjoy fucking with people who didn't say that, gee, they didn’t vote for this. They’re lying, and the people saying it of others are just being stupid. Trump was president for four years, the four years that ended with him urging his followers to attack police officers and trash the Capitol. He was away for a while, and then he came back, touting Project 2025 and promising that he would staff his new administration with the worst people on Earth and devote his time in office to wreaking revenge on the people who believe in common decency and the rule of law. Before the election, the MAGA justices on the Supreme Court decreed that he is, in fact, literally beyond legal accountability and can do whatever he wants, so long as he’s president. That’s why it sounds so crazy whenever someone says that he can’t stay past the Constitutionally mandated end of his current term, because that’s the law. Neither the law nor the Constitution apply to him; John Roberts and his merry band say so. And if he’s still here in 2028, why would he leave? His absolute freedom from legal accountability expires if he ever does.
Before Trump’s second swearing-in, a Slate writer said that people had voted for Trump because they believed that he was going to “make them all rich while suppressing the price of gasoline.” And in a New York Times piece about people who had decided to take a chance on the big guy for the first time in 2024, one subject said that Trump’s plan to eliminate fraud from the federal government would save so much money that he’d probably plow the savings into pumping up the good federal programs, the ones they benefited from, and lavish a much-deserved fortune on them. This is called “trolling.” There is no way in hell that anyone could be dumb enough to think that Donald Trump, whose lifelong history of financial malfeasance and failure were a matter of public record long before he had any political ambitions, could do great things for the economy or anyone’s pocketbook besides his own, and just the fact that he’s a Republican guarantees that no one could think he’s going to lavish the largesse of the federal government on them. Given what’s known about Trump’s own financial history, how could anyone think he would go about making them rich? In what cosmic court is he going to declare the while country bankrupt? Trump has reversed himself on issue after issue, because he doesn't really care about anything. But there is one issue that he’s remained solid on his entire adult life: he really loves tariffs, and wants to enact as many as he can. And the one thing everyone who knows what they're talking about agrees on about Trump and tariffs is this: he doesn’t actually know what they are, or understand how they work. That gets to the core of why his voters love him, and always will: they don’t care if they or their children live or die, but like Glenn Loury, they enjoy the fireworks.
Sometimes people on social media allow themselves to muse about how things will change when, to put it delicately, Donald Trump isn’t here anymore. Donald Trump could disappear by the time I finish the sentence, and it wouldn't make any difference. The rights he’s eradicated are gone for good; the changes in the country are here to stay; the people who voted for him will still be stupid and mean, those being the definitional characteristics of a Trump voter, and they’ll flail about looking for someone who arouses the same emotions in them, who they might hope will be worse. If they warm to JD Vance, they’ll have already found him. In the meantime, Trump’s judges and the oligarchs he’s empowered will remain the true arbiters of our future. Americans had one last chance in 2024 to determine their country’s future, and this is the way they wanted to go. It’s possible to regret it, but not to ever change it, and there’s no point in telling them to want something different. Everyone who voted for Trump loves the chaos and the cruelty, and they don’t mind anything that comes with that, and they want it to go on forever. People never change for the better.
