Trump is the rule, not the exception

My one earnest newsletter of the year

I’m not a very earnest guy, as a rule. I care about things, sure, but in a mostly cynical way. I joined the UK’s Labour party at the age of 16, an act that might be seen as one of precocious political sincerity, but for the second half of my life (til now) I’ve used that fact, that allegiance, mainly to feel disappointed by the directions taken by the party. I support the Labour party for the same reasons I support West Ham United: misery loves company.

And yet, when I saw President Trump giving his inaugural address on Monday, I was gripped by a resurgent earnestness. With each drumbeat of his new march, my heart sank. Attacks on migrants are to be expected with Trump, though the rhetoric is now so broad-reaching as to appear proactively xenophobic. Insults to trans people are now ingrained in the ruling discourse. Dumb, dumb stuff – like renaming the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America, or re-renaming Denali as Mount McKinley – are just small, depressing parts of jinogism reasserting itself. The speech was not just offensive to some core beliefs I hold (look, a large proportion of politics offends my sensibilities, such is the nature of pluralism) but it was also provocatively disingenuous. Disingenuous on climate, disingenuous on geopolitics, and, most profoundly, disingenuous on economics.

Like so many defanged liberals, I turned, in my outrage, to social media. The so-called echo chamber of social media means that you can find plenty of spirits kindred in their disgust. The siloing of opinion has been profoundly deepened in recent months by the creation of opposing poles: X for rabid nationalism, Bluesky for impotent liberalism. On Bluesky I found myself surrounded by people who had, like me, tuned into Trump’s speech and had, like me, found themselves knocked for six. On Instagram – where I follow mainly athletes, movie actors and pop stars (for research!) – the same messages kept appearing.

Donald Trump is doing THIS bad thing. Donald Trump is REPEALING this good thing. Donald Trump wants to join THIS bad thing. Donald Trump wants to withdraw from THIS good thing.

The list of stuff that I don’t like, that Donald Trump is in the process of doing – or will end up doing – is long. The temptation of revulsion is to focus on this, to share examples of his egregious desecration of the rule of law or the fundamentals of Western democracy. It is an act that serves as a constant reminder not just of the ways in which the incumbent is insulting the Presidency, but our inability to do anything about it. What it fails to do is offer a plausible alternative.

It has been hard to watch the rightward lurch of the digital ecosphere without lamenting a degree of complacency. At Trump’s inauguration there were a line of technology leaders seated in a row behind the new President. Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and, of course, X’s Elon Musk. “The owner’s box,” one Bluesky user pithily called them. But while they are naturally in bed with the new President because it is a mutually beneficial relationship (from a power standpoint as well as a financial one) that’s not the part of it that troubles me. What I find more concerning is the way that the internet, and digital media, has accepted a form of macho individualism as its default.

Trumpism is built on individualism. Both the individualism of the individual, naturally, but also the individualism as America as a player in the global arena. It’s not isolationism, per se – it’s more a form of aggressive selfishness. And this sort of defiant self-interest is something that has always marked the internet era. That’s because the creation of a digital habitat for humanity has exaggerated a pre-existing temptation towards independence. To have a conversation you used to have to be face to face – then they invented the telephone and you only needed to be voice to voice – and then they invented the internet and you just need to be mind to mind. Over the past twenty, thirty years, the internet has been eroded by anonymity and automation, to the extent where even that idea – ‘mind to mind’ – has become fragile.

America’s technological leaders are lining up behind Trump II partly because its expeditious. He is anti-tax and anti-regulation, and that’s the surest double whammy to get Silicon Valley on side. But they’re also bolstering him because they share a belief in refining society back to a mass of individuals. It is a fundamental credo of the internet era, where even the idea of a nation state becomes meaningless. Free speech is just a part of this – the part that is, by its nature, the noisiest – but it is by no means the only ideological similarity shared by these parties. Unfettered consumerism, unshackled content, unbridled data points. Meta, Google, X, whoever: they’re all incentivised for you to behave as individuals, to prioritise the rational consumer mindset over collectivism or social movements. Trump is out there trumpeting the clarion call of self-interest, Randian objectivism, and they love it.

How did the internet era fall for this? One of the fundamental objectives, baked into the spread of the internet, is decentralisation. Decentralisation of knowledge, decentralisation of commerce, decentralisation of social interaction. Everyone gets to be a journalist, a broadcaster, an archivist; everyone gets to set up a shop, sell themselves, make their millions; everyone gets to talk to everyone, to shout at them, all the time, anywhere in the world. And so when we enter an era of regression and retrenchment, it’s natural for the internet to feel itself heard in the global dynamics. Anti-globalism – anti-federalism – is a form of decentralisation.

Of course, it’s all complete bollocks. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk and Donald Trump are spreading a status quoist narrative, where the rich stay rich, Americans stay American, and people trapped in a biological sex that causes them nothing but psychic pain remain trapped in that biological sex. It is not truly individualist, it’s prescriptivist. They want you to be normal according to a set of ideals laid down by normal guys like them. This is not a word of unique snowflakes – they hate that word – but cookie cutter drones licking the boot of the man.

As a child of the 1990s and 00s, I was consistently taught that progress was linear. Slavery had been ended, the civil rights movement had happened, and now, in the new millennium, affirmative action would rebalance the scales for people of colour. Women had been second class citizens but, through time, had earned the vote, spread the ideology of feminism, and now, in the the new millennium, would be afforded equal opportunities with men. Homosexuality had been stigmatised and penalised, but had been decriminalised and now, in the new millennium, men and women would be able to marry and love other men and women. Progress was heading in one direction.

I hope that children, today, are not being taught such complacency about the path of history. Progress is not linear: it is a fragile thing that needs defending and nourishing.

And in the midst of all this, we are part of a media class that doesn’t know how to deal with this reversion. Jeff Bezos – one of the world’s richest men who sat chuckling beside his fianceé Lauren Sanchez at the Trump inauguration – owns the Washington Post, the US’s second most important newspaper. The Post didn’t make an endorsement at the 2024 Presidential election and has subsequently attempted to reposition itself as a paper for all viewpoints, leading to 400 staff members writing to Bezos to express their belief that “trust” in his stewardship (by which they mean avoiding editorial interference) has been eroded. As a private citizen, Bezos is entitled to his own politics, of course. But he bought a liberal newspaper – one that hasn’t endorsed a Republican Presidential candidate since 2000, and only very occasionally (1976 and 1980) before that. Now it seems captured, just as Bezos and co seem captured by Trumpist grandstanding.

The big problem that all news media faces, now, is how to survive in this environment. Big tech and social media is against liberal news and opinion. X has gone from being a major traffic driver for journalism to a complete desert. Meta has systematically suppressed links on Facebook in favour of native content and deprioritised political content on Instagram (though users are now seeing the Instagram accounts of both President Trump and VP JD Vance being heavily pushed by the service). TikTok posted a message to all users in the United States this week, personally thanking President Trump for helping them subvert a ban (call that what it is: propaganda). More level playing fields – like Bluesky or Reddit – are too small to make a material impact.

Add to that the fact that money floods into right-wing causes with an alacrity rarely seen on the left, and these are worrying times. Scott Galloway called 2024 “the podcast election” – if he’s right, it’s an indictment of the medium. But look at the top charts in the US right now: Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Shawn Ryan, Steven Barlett, Tucker Carlson, Andrew Huberman, Candace Owen etc. Podcasting has been captured by conservatism; even grassroots distribution outlets are now in thrall to the political establishment.

It may just been that we are living through a turn of the wheel. Every major election in 2024 ousted the incumbent. Liberalism has been the orthodoxy for some time, and perhaps the wheel has turned back to conservatism. But that promise, that the wheel will spin again, feels far from assured. As I said at the top of this piece, I am not by nature an earnest guy. But if you want to build a successful media business at the moment, make it a conservative one. If you want to make a successful social media business right now, make it amplify conservative ideologies. Liberal media is stuck in Substacked silos, playing to 10,000 subscribers, while a great flood of content celebrating Mount McKinley is washing across millions of passive eyeballs. Why assume that the wheel will keep spinning when all financial and political interests dig in the brakes?

Liberal media cannot continue to just point out that bad stuff is happening. We have to make a positive case for what could be done differently and better. ‘Criticism fatigue’ is a real phenomenon – let’s enter the age of ‘solutions amplification’.

And even though it’s painful (to me at least) to be earnest and admit that I actually loathe, in my core, what’s happening in the United States and across our decentralised digital ecosystem, we have to maintain this perspective. We’ve seen that compromise (“there are real problems being addressed”, “both sides have good points”, “free speech means allowing all voices to be heard”) is just a gateway drug to concession. The political journeys of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg – from vaguely liberal techno-optimists through to conservative free speech essentialists – is the journey of the American people. If we want the wheel to turn, we have to stop giving quarter to that.

And perhaps most importantly, from a media perspective, we cannot continue to simply vacate the financial imperative. If the business case for liberal media improves, the quantity (and quality) of liberal media will improve. This means paying for newspapers and websites, listening to good podcasts and amplifying their voices, subscribing to and sharing a wide variety of newsletters. It means understanding that it costs money to hold people to account, to interrogate political structures, to change the world.

Here endeth the depression.