The Unbearable Cynicism of Trump 2.0
Who cares, nothing matters, cry about it
There were several stories I considered writing about this week… and then just didn’t.
I thought I might write about Elon Musk’s Nazi salute. There’s a fun gotcha game that we play on the internet, where any politician who raises their hand in a certain way gets accused of doing the Nazi salute. I was going to write about how most of the time it’s BS, but with Musk it wasn’t a normal gesture captured at the wrong moment. It’s just the Nazi salute. Decide for yourself if it’s the same as other instances:
I was going to talk about how normally we should give people grace if their arm is in a weird position for a half second, but that you don’t get infinite grace when you’ve overseen a rise of antisemitic accounts on Twitter, you’ve said that Jews push hatred against whites, and you openly campaign for anti-semitic parties in Germany. It probably would have been a solid article, and it certainly would have gotten a lot of engagement. But I couldn’t bring myself to write it. Who cares that Elon did that? It’ll be forgotten in a few days.
Then I considered writing about the Trump coin. Trump, if you missed the news, launched a new crypto coin called $TRUMP just days before his inauguration. His fans piled into the new coin and made him billions of dollars overnight. It was so successful, and made them so much money for so little effort, that they repeated it with $MELANIA two days later. The market cap of $MELANIA quickly rose to $2 billion.
It’s an astonishingly brazen scheme to monetize the presidency. Trump owns most of the $TRUMP coins. So if you need a policy change? Just buy $50 million worth of coins, Trump gets $50 million richer as the market cap rises, and you’ve got a foolproof, plausibly deniable and essentially legal way to directly bribe the president. And the same crowd who were up in arms about Hunter Biden selling paintings seem to be dead silent now. Curious.
This seems directly up my alley - at the intersection of Weird Internet Stuff and politics - but once again I didn’t write about it. It doesn’t matter. We already re-elected the guy, we all knew this was coming.
One more example - I saw a tweet yesterday with explosive allegations that Elon manipulated Twitter and deployed AI bot farms to spread pro-Trump sentiment. Reader, I didn’t even click the link to read further. I’m too tired of hearing about it, and once again, none of this surprises me. Elon is a hypocrite? No shit.
But what I realized at some point was that my reactions themselves are what’s important. The real story isn’t that Trump is corrupt, or that Elon has neo-Nazi ties. The real story is that we’ve become too beaten down and too pessimistic to bother putting a fuss any longer. Trump’s second term marks a new age of deep cynicism in politics.
It wasn’t always like this.
Sure, there’s always been some amount of cynicism involved in politics. Especially inside the halls of power, politicians have to make deals and operate in cold-blooded, cynical ways. And on the campaign trail, politicians have always been prone to making big promises they might not be able to keep. But research shows that contra your expectations, most of the time politicians do try to keep their promises. If they campaign on something, you can usually trust that they are going to try to make it happen.
Beyond the politicians themselves, previous political eras felt different from the outside. Obama’s campaign slogan was ‘HOPE’. The Obama campaign, despite running during the worst recession to hit the US in generations, was fundamentally optimistic and idealistic. There was a real sense that America was a great place and we only needed to unlock its potential. Even if you grew angry or frustrated with Obama, you grew angry because you believed in an idealistic way that he should be doing better than he was. It’s an incredible contrast with the suffocating sense of cynicism we feel today. It is *unfathomable* to imagine Obama having done something like making a crypto coin to make himself billions of dollars while in office. Today, it’s business as usual.
Even the first Trump term wasn’t entirely cynical. For most of us it felt like a fever dream, like it was hardly real. Some people held out hope that Trump would moderate and end up being more sensible than he appeared. There were Republicans in his cabinet who worked to ensure he didn’t damage things too much. The anti-Trump crowd became the #Resistance, which we now think of as cringe precisely because of how naïve and idealistic they seem now. When Joe Biden defeated Trump and started passing ambitious bills, it seemed like the resistance crowd had been vindicated. There was light at the end of the tunnel, optimism had triumphed over cynicism, and we could all get back to normal politics.
That turned out to be mistaken. Idealism is dead. Having principles is dead. They took optimism out back with Old Yeller. If there’s one image I could choose to define the second Trump term, it would be this:
I see the goddamn scorpion everywhere. I see it when the Republicans who claim to be pro-police celebrate the release of Jan. 6th rioters who assaulted and killed police officers. I see it when conservatives who demanded Trump’s impeachment and removal now celebrate his return. I see it every time a tech billionaire bends down and kisses Trump’s feet in order to avoid retaliation, or when the term “Democrats” just happens to be unsearchable on Meta during the Trump inauguration. What a coincidence! I see it every time a Trump crony suddenly thinks inflation is fine when it happens under Trump. I see it when upstanding Jewish conservatives are shocked and dismayed that their movement harbors neo-Nazis. It doesn’t matter that they’re lying. It doesn’t matter that they’re hypocrites. It doesn’t matter that the stuff they protested is now going to happen (just not to them). It doesn’t matter that they’ve sold their souls in the most obvious and degrading way possible. “lol” said the scorpion, “lmao”.
This nihilism starts with Trump and the cowards in the conservative movement who have enabled and empowered him. But it’s spread to the rest of politics as well. Pro-Palestine leftists who protested Kamala Harris and Joe Biden relentlessly stopped protesting as soon as Trump won the election. LOL, nothing matters. Trump is now restarting the sale of one-ton bombs to Israel? He’s allowing Israeli settlers to steal more Palestinian land with impunity? With his approval, Israel launched a new invasion of the West Bank? Trump’s ambassador says Israel has a ‘biblical right’ to the West Bank? Lmao, said the scorpion, as the leftists protest none of this. The left wing of the Democratic party has revealed that their politics are based around oppositional-defiant disorder rather than actual values, and the mainstream resistance liberals are so beaten down that they can no longer muster the energy necessary to react to each and every fresh outrage from Trump. We tried that last time. Look where we ended up.
The feeling that nothing matters has sunk deep into my bones, and I hate it. I’m an optimistic and idealistic person by nature. I like to think that I have core values that I hold strongly, and that I don’t deviate from those values. But I’m exhausted and overwhelmed by the sheer volume of cynicism in the first few days of Trump 2.0. That cynicism will be the defining feature of this political era.
We’ve talked before about how anti-elite sentiment is the most powerful force in politics right now. Part of what drives anti-elite sentiment is distrust and cynicism. People no longer believe that politicians, academics, or elites of any kind have their best interests at heart. They’ve reacted with a burn-it-all-down mentality. They’ve reacted against the elites, paradoxically, by electing an openly corrupt billionaire. Twice. At some point, you begin to realize that the open corruption is a feature, not a bug. At least Trump makes the other elites mad!
The lack of shame is one of the most galling parts of this experience. It doesn’t matter that Trump openly solicits bribes, it doesn’t matter that Elon does Nazi salutes, it doesn’t matter that the pro-Trump movement is breathtakingly hypocritical. They can do it all in the open, without shame. They advertised they were going to do it, they won, and so now they’re going to do it with a smile on their face. There’s no punishment, no shame, no reason to hold back. And if this bothers you, then you’re just a cringe triggered soyboy. Are you gonna cry about it? Conservative influencers are now deliberately doing the Nazi salute just because they know you hate it.
I think we’d all be better off if this wasn’t the case. I want to live in a world where idealism is celebrated and brazen corruption and hypocrisy are punished, not the reverse. I want journalists and voters and politicians and academics to keep pushing back. But man, it’s hard. It’s hard to care when it’s so clearly the case that everyone else has given up caring. It’s hard to protest when it feels like you’re doing it alone, and by next week nobody will even remember what you’re protesting today. I wish I had a more optimistic take to end on. I don’t. Welcome to the new era of cynicism.
What has helped me is adjusting my expectations. We, meaning liberals, are not in a “growth” era anymore. Big sweeping structural changes to benefit American society as a whole are probably off the table for now. We are in our “survival” period. If we can get to the other side of this without having devolved completely into oligarchy, that’s success. We have to be a little less like Obama and more like Churchill imho.
Not an American but whatever, US politics dominates all English speaking social media anyway. Despite my euroness I feel exactly like this. Exhausted by the hypocrisy. Over it. Looking for a new hobby.
What I really do not understand is: What do these nihilists (republican and terminally online anti-electoral leftists alike) get out of all this? What’s the point of deciding nothing matters? Why doesn’t your hypocrisy depress you? I guess if you’re shameless there’s no downside to lying/having no principles. But what positive emotional thing are they gaining?