Hello and welcome to week two of the second Trump presidency. And no, I will not be covering every week like this — like it’s the NFL season — but for now this will have to suffice, because there is much to discuss.
Most of it is noise — breathless, press release noise and appearances by Donald Trump in front of the TV cameras he loves so much. But that’s the point of all this, for them, at least. We know this because Steve Bannon said it — “flood the zone with shit.” All the ridiculous cabinet appointments, the press conferences and TV appearances, and the many executive orders that will be challenged in court, it’s all part of the plan to give Trump many wins even if they don’t hold. Because once the “shit” is in the information bloodstream, it doesn’t matter if it all falls apart. For many Americans, the fact that they saw something on TV about something Trump did is enough, even if it’s eventually struck down in court, or never even materializes.
This attention-span politics is why I wanted to talk with Asawin Suebsaeng. He’s a writer and reporter for Rolling Stone who understands how all of this works. But unlike other reporters with sources in Trump world, Swin pulls no punches when it comes to calling out Trump and his MAGA movement for what it is. At its core, this is an attempt to bring America backward, and it will inevitably lead to our downfall, Swin notes. Being America, this inevitable and sad sequence of events cannot come with any sense of nobility — it must happen in the dumbest and cheapest way possible, with a failed business mogul turned reality TV star leading the charge into our collective doom, with a rogue’s gallery of idiots, grifters, and racist nerds helping him along the way.
Or, as Swin wrote on Inauguration Day:
On this cold Monday afternoon in the nation’s capital, a twice-impeached convicted felon was inaugurated in the very building where his attempt to steal an election four years ago left pools of blood. Donald Trump beat the damning federal criminal cases against him because the Supreme Court, and then will of voters, snuffed out any possibility for those historic trials to commence. He was elected, this time with a plurality of the popular vote, on a platform that is somehow more rancidly authoritarian and anti-democratic, proudly corrupt and abusive, and ethnic-cleansing-prone than his and his party’s platforms were in 2016 and 2020. His personality cult and iron grip on the GOP only grew in the years since the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that he instigated, as it did in the years since his first administration produced a four-year-long arterial spray of scandal, barbarism, and abhorrent mismanagement, including during the mass death and economic implosion of the coronavirus pandemic.
He and the Republican Party now have trifecta control of the federal government. Trump retakes the White House with a largely demoralized Democratic Party as his opposition, and a far-right Supreme Court supermajority entrenched. The country is theirs, and we will be ruled by the meanest nerds and most nihilistic dorks, who now pretend to speak for a working class they despise. Every cultist, clampdown zealot, and deliriously boring psycho who Trump appoints to perches of seniority and influence are leering at the American people the same way the protagonists in Natural Born Killers looked at patrons of a diner in the middle of a desert.
Swin isn’t just a reporter with sources in Trump Town. He’s also a great writer and thinker about this particularly harrowing American moment. You can listen to our discussion on today’s edition of the podcast, and support American Doom with a paid subscription. I’m still running a discount on annual subscriptions at $40 a year, down from $50, and I’d love to have your support. For current paid subscribers, you can get a few months free for referring a friend to Doom.
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