Go back and look again
Trump is a trailing indicator of long-present elements of American fascism
Within a broader and more historical context, Donald Trump’s public vulgarity and lack of basic decency ends up looking more like a trailing indicator of a much earlier, deeper erosion of political norms and institutional constraints that accelerated rapidly after September 11, 2001. The disgusting, irresponsible, racist language from Trump and the MAGA movement only follows the criminal actions of past rulers: once institutional constraints and elite norms have been weakened sufficiently, performative vulgarity by politicians becomes more likely to be tolerated and then amplified by the partisan media ecosystems. Vulgar, offensive rhetoric is just the visible symptom, with the more consequential, but less visible causes being the earlier transgressions that changed what the Washington ruling class and the people consider permissible. I believe now, as I said at the relevant times, that the actions of the American ruling class (including, for example, illegal, aggressive wars of choice, based on cooked intelligence and outright lies; the government’s official endorsement of illegal indefinite detention and torture programs the world over; and the normalization of secrecy, unconstitutional surveillance, and even the extrajudicial murder of Americans; etc.) have opened us to real peril and have fatally undermined the possibility of a free, fair society. These actions have eroded normative and legal constraints on executive power and on the public rhetoric of political leaders. Many of the social and political costs of the post-9/11 constitutional and human rights abuses are only now becoming clear. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence determined that pervasive secrecy around illegal detention, interrogation, and targeted-killing programs reduced public corrective pressure, with norms degrading out of sight for years. Trump is an effect of our decline and dissipation, not their cause. This is where a bloated, corrupt, and profoundly evil imperial system lands a country and people. We allowed our rulers to govern by permanent emergency for decades, shredding the Bill of Rights and violating international law with impunity, and then we acted surprised every time the envelope was pushed, whether by Bush, Obama, Trump, or Biden.
While some civil liberties groups and progressive media outlets condemned the Obama administration’s murders of American citizens, there was certainly no mass political or electoral condemnation or movement against Barack Obama over this shocking break with precedent. Obama’s approval ratings remained high through the period of the story breaking. Americans simply don’t care very much about very much of anything outside of popular culture, meaningless consumption, and appearing to be rich, so a Trump or someone similar was inevitable. It is clear that our failure to contest Obama’s lawless and authoritarian practices on substantive grounds—our inability to properly oppose his kill lists, ramped-up deportations, and unconstitutional mass surveillance—further entrenched a political culture of mindless entertainment/reality television in which Trump could inherit and intensify the authoritarian apparatuses without real pushback. Within this context, Trump’s vulgarity and poor taste absorbs most of the outrage. From a structural standpoint, both Bush and Obama (to say nothing of Cold War-era presidents) set precedents and normalized practices that made Trump’s excesses possible and less shocking inside the Beltway, paving the way for Trump’s current strongman tactics. Perhaps contrary to popular belief across the political spectrum, once Americans learned of the imperial presidency and the deep state, there was a massive movement to normalize these undemocratic, authoritarian structures. Because Bush and Obama’s deep and material violations of the Constitution and our broader political norms were not treated as red lines, or really anything close, the executive branch itself became even more powerful and insulated from accountability. Because they have not understood what they’re watching play out, because they lack a real criticism of the state and our overall political economy, Americans have often directed their outrage largely at symbolic, vibe-based issues. We got Trump precisely because we weren’t (and still aren’t) ready to face the real issues.
Almost ten years ago, then-CEO of CBS, Les Moonves, summed up the Trump incentive dynamic when he said, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.” Jeff Zucker’s time in CNN leadership is famously associated with Trump’s political rise, and he has similarly acknowledged that this storyline was good for business: “Owing to the strong ratings that Trump-themed programming earned the network during the election season, Zucker constantly pressured his staff to keep the focus on his campaign.” Zucker’s CNN readily embraced the entertainment core of political coverage in the United States, adopting a professional sports approach and saying, “The idea that politics is sport is undeniable.” While we like to say that our politics became more polarized, this is probably not the best way to understand what has happened, given that substantive policy positions in Washington never really polarized all that much.
The structure of economic incentives wanted more of the Trumpian bullshit machine, not less. Major media outlets, particularly in cable news, benefited from keeping Trump in the headlines, from keeping the attention off of the post-9/11 crisis of unchecked presidential power; his cultural offensiveness and contrast with an allegedly woke culture was perfect for the outrage- and attention-driven model, whereas criticisms of unconstitutional mass surveillance or drone warfare are complex, harder to explain to normal consumers of news, and, most importantly, risk alienating the bipartisan elites who support war and imperialism more than anything else (that’s the reason they are in power at all). We have to be honest about what just happened: the major media corporations were in structural alignment with the Donald Trump spectacle because it guaranteed an audience, produced stupid and easy narratives ideal for Americans, and avoided talking about anything that would actually disrupt war-business as usual in Washington.
In politics, earned media is coverage or exposure a candidate gets without paying for advertisements, that is, through interviews and commentary. While campaigns must rely on a mix of paid and earned media, the latter is often more difficult to obtain consistently and at scale because it depends, in theory, on doing things that are newsworthy. “If you really matter, you will be at the focus of mass attention, and if you are at the focus of mass attention, then you must really matter.” Early Trump was an anomaly in that he generated a media buzz worth billions in free coverage, according to journalists and media analysts. Harvard professor Thomas Patterson has argued that the coverage of Trump represented a major distortion, with the coverage overwhelmingly focused on controversy rather than policy, functioning as free advertising for a candidate that didn’t bring much to the table. Although Trump spent far less during his first run than his major rivals, he dominated media coverage and visibility because the idiocy of the spectacle was so irresistible to our media and entertainment system. “Trump saw the weakness. He played to the press’s desire for controversy and its disdain for substance.”
Understood within this context, Donald Trump is less a policy rupture than he is the culmination of the trends that have defined American domestic politics and foreign policy for many decades. By the time he emerged on the political scene, the institutional ability to constrain him had long ago fallen, if it had ever seriously existed. The presidency was already substantively a kingship by the time Trump found it, almost totally insulated from real constitutional limits and able to operate with a free hand in areas touching national security — i.e., everything by today’s standards. The existence of these powers itself is what should have generated the shock and moral outrage, but in Trump’s case, the anger and outrage were directed at something else. People could love him or hate him without having to know anything about either his politics or politics more generally. Unlike presidents before him, who were able to hide the most serious violations of the constitution and international law behind the mystique of the office, Trump revealed the monstrous dimensions of the problem of unlimited executive power by disrupting our expectations around who should hold such power. We didn’t mind when Obama held it because the vibes were immaculate, even when he was directing the extrajudicial murder of our fellow citizens, spying on us en masse, illegally bombing other countries, and detaining prisons indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, etc. Media coverage, driven by ratings and the logic of the spectacle, amplified Trump’s visible breaches of norms while almost completely ignoring the clear structural continuities of executive power that made these possible. Symbolic outrage substituted again and again for substantive critique, deflecting attention from the imperial presidency and the substantive crisis we face. Trump is what happens when a people make vibes so important to them for so long.
The inability to understand or limit Trump is less a failure of chance or individual resolve than it is the entirely predictable result of decades on end of Congress, the judiciary, and political elites generally abdicating any responsibility at all under the Constitution, permitting the executive branch to do virtually anything, including killing Americans far from any battlefield, without any charges or process. The imperial presidency was steadily built up and normalized by the entire political and media establishment long before Trump came to power. Our culture’s popular and institutional obsession with branding and performative bullshit allowed the underlying accumulation of executive power to remain uncontested for decades. The embarrassing surprise expressed by observers today is a reflection of their lack of attention and analytical power, their negligence and irresponsibility. Trump is the inevitable product of longstanding structural trends in U.S. politics and culture. What many of us are wondering now is where were you all? Why only now? Were you really that blind?
The absorption of public energy by politics-as-entertainment and personalized outrage looks an awful lot like something we might discuss in terms of false consciousness. Consider that the popular masses seem to have mistaken personality for policy and spectacle for substance, and so have internalized the ideologies of the ruling class and failed to challenge the very structures that perpetuate their subordination and exploitation. If you think the problem is Donald Trump, you are still fast asleep—if you think what we are looking at is about any individual person at all, you are still most assuredly asleep. Americans must begin to understand that we live in a deeply entrenched, authoritarian political-economic system (of something like state-capitalism, monopoly capitalism, corporate-statism, fascism, neocolonialism or imperialism) that no elected official, including Donald Trump can change in one or two presidential terms.
I have criticized Trump for his lawlessness and criminal authoritarianism since he announced his candidacy, but be assured that there isn’t a single major violation of the Constitution or other transgression that does not have several substantive precedents in past presidential administrations, often with even greater severity. Trust me: I don’t like it either, but it is true in the most straightforward sense. While Trump has drawn extraordinary levels of scrutiny as he has violated international law, ignored Congress and the courts, used the criminal justice system cynically against his political foes, repeatedly violated the First Amendment, and unlawfully brutalized and deported both legal residents and American citizens, etc., these abuses have obvious historical parallels that shout from the past to anyone who knows our history (I strongly encourage everyone to give at least a cursory glance to some of the completely unhinged criminal behavior of past U.S. presidents). Of course, almost no one today does, as even a 30-second clip is too demanding for most Americans in 2025. We don’t have a Donald Trump problem—or even a W. or Obama problem. Americans have a “we are over-entertained, illiterate dupes who care about nothing” problem, across the mainstream political spectrum. The reality is that Donald Trump marks neither the beginning nor the end of anything, but sits somewhere in the middle of a story of American fascism that long predates him and will long outlast him. For every year of my four decades, smart, interested people in both major political parties, and of course within radical and outsider circles, have warned urgently and repeatedly that the prerogatives of all three constitutional branches were concentrated in a presidency of almost unlimited power and discretion.
Good stuff David.
I think you have the big picture accurately understood.
Since you are correct in your diagnosis, all supporters of freedom, equality and real democracy are currently suffocated by a large majority abiding in consumerism, leisure narcissism, and almost complete detachment from a long term political crisis fully evidenced by accurate history. Then there are those who explicitly support authoritarianism, corruption and fascism, highly concentrated in the high income strata which co-opts middle income operators. All these groups are unable to engage with justice and democracy and uninterested in truth telling for political and economic reform. Bought and sold, sealed and delivered, exactly as desired by political economic manipulators.
Collectively, this vast inertia establishes corrupted power as normal and "great". All good hearted systemic reformers are greatly challenged to summon their country persons into a patriotism they have never heard about nor care to envision. The intense gravity of ignorance, distraction, paid-for corruption and rhetoric must be overcome by widespread knowledge and an activism that ends fascism as normal with real democracy. Ending the rule of minority wealth and deception necessitates a free, just and equality producing democracy.
Keep tellin' it like it is till the cows come home!