Intermission

Tired of the Trump Show? Time to change the way you watch.

It’s been a long, lonely year with so many people lying. I keep waiting for nightmares, but my dreams have all gone blank.

I’ve been here before. William Gibson described it in 2003:

“We have no future,” he wrote in his novel Pattern Recognition. “Not in the sense that our grandparents had a future, or thought they did…For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents' have insufficient 'now' to stand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile...We have only risk management.”

Nowadays old political science reads like dystopian sci-fi and dystopian sci-fi reads like new political science. Or self-help, if your goal is to be less despondent. A hall of mirrors is a lonesome place when you’re trying to escape yourself.

In 2016, Donald Trump was proclaimed the president of the United States and immediately prepared to rule like an authoritarian kleptocrat. I had warned of that outcome all year long, and people called me paranoid. After the election, a book I had written four years before, The View from Flyover Country, became wildly popular. Articles about me appeared with titles like “A Cassandra in Trumpland”. People took my warnings seriously now, enough to want to kill me.

In 2024, Donald Trump was proclaimed the president of the United States and immediately prepared to rule like an authoritarian kleptocrat. I had warned of that outcome all year long, and people called me paranoid. After the election, a book I had written four years before, Hiding in Plain Sight, became wildly popular. Hundreds of social media posts calling me “Cassandra” appeared. People took my warnings seriously now, enough to want to kill me.

I’m banking that my aspiring assassins are too tired to follow through. Aren’t we all?

* * *

It is intermission in the Trump Show. Full-time programming will resume in January. The Trump Show is the only show Americans watch together, but we can never change the channel.

The remote got lost, like truth and the rule of law. The remote is buried in the couch cushions of the American subconscious. You dig under the seat but all you find is dirt and chump change. Your couch is the media economy.

You sit and surrender to the screen, remembering when the damn thing turned off. There can be no competition for the Trump Show. In a spectacle state, there is only one star — and in a mafia state, he can do anything.

Over the last four years, massive shifts in technology and culture made that much easier. Network television — the last gasp of the American pop monoculture — is no more. The partitioning of TV into streaming silos followed the dissolution of the music industry and foreshadowed the downfall of Hollywood. Cheap entertainment, one of the last unifying American pastimes, was sliced and diced away.

Days after the election, Yellowstone, the most popular TV show in America, returned after a two-year hiatus. For one night, Americans united: not to watch Yellowstone, but to bemoan their inability to find it.

Yellowstone was not streaming even if you subscribed to its streamer. It was said to be on TV, but TV no longer has TV in it. When you googled how to watch it, lying robots gave conflicting bad advice. Yellowstone, the tale of an American who refuses to leave his ranch, now resides in no man’s land.

William Gibson called it: the sky is the color of television, tuned to a dead channel — dead because it is owned by oligarchs. The oligarchs kill fictional politicians and purchase real ones. The same oligarchs who program your TV program your president and your sky, where Starlink slithers. You can’t watch television, but you can watch the sky — and the sky watches you back.

It is not a coincidence that plutocrats are attempting to own everything at once: entertainment and politics and information and transportation and nature. Digital technology is the barbed wire binding their corral, inside which Americans are told to graze on less and less.

Shared American entertainment had to be annihilated, because it fuels comradery and imagination. You might bond with a stranger whose politics don’t align with yours, and the overlords cannot have that.

Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook had to be drastically restructured. You may have a serendipitous exchange, maybe lend an offer of support, and that can’t happen either.

Journalism, archives, accurate search results — those had to go too. You may want to really do your own research — the much-derided concept that is and always was necessary — but it is trickier than ever before.

* * *

I had a mantra in 2016 when people would ask how I knew so much about Trump’s dark ambitions.

“It’s in the public domain!” I would exclaim.

I was not predicting the future so much as I was rehashing the past. I researched public figures and ventured that they would continue the same corrupt activity they had been carrying out for the past half century.

I assumed that institutions would allow it, because those institutions would have never allowed Trump and his criminal cohort near federal power unless they were already rotted.

This was common sense: conclusions verifiable through public documentation of crimes.

But now that documentation is gone. Print archives, digital-native sites, even the time-stamped Twitter accounts that tracked Trump’s first term: much of it is erased or locked behind prohibitively expensive paywalls.

The oligarchs purchased history — and then they rewrote it.

Free information is still out there. It is on YouTube channels that proclaim the glory of the incoming administration, on TikTok influencer informercials, on partisan podcasts hosted by hired hands. I don’t trust them, for obvious reasons. I don’t trust the Democratic versions either, the ones that intone Trump is a fascist and then ask for your money instead of your refusal, like a cuckoo clock endlessly striking thirteen.

I don’t want to be influenced: I want to be informed.

But it’s hard. As I wrote in my book They Knew, there is no longer a public sphere, but there is a public flat earth.

* * *

Since 2020, we lost the shared experiences of TV, movies, and social media. Unfortunately, we did not lose the shared experience of Donald Trump — with the consequence that there is but one national pastime left, politics. There was one national story, and few told it true. As a result, folks began to tune out.

News outlets like MSNBC and CNN are baffled that their ratings have plummeted since the election. Trump used to run like a gravy train with biscuit wheels, fattening network coffers. Those days are over.

For cable news heads failed to understand something essential about their audience: they actually care about their country.

During the Biden Placeholder Presidency, networks created a Trump legal soap opera that sucked in both the well-meaning and witless. In their narrative, Trump’s imprisonment was always imminent yet mysteriously derailed each time. These plot twists were framed as “luck” instead of “corruption”. The Trump legal soap opera ignored a more compelling backstory — the mafia, Jeffrey Epstein, what it means when the DOJ abides sedition — in favor of false saviors and bullshit legalese.

Some folks really believed it. They thought the pundits were bad guessers, not paid liars. They thought the DOJ worked to protect the people and not to protect its own secrets — which requires that they protect Trump, an operative privy to their corruption. They trusted they were getting real news instead of watching a career criminal run out the clock while networks profited off their fear.

And they wonder why ratings are down.

* * *

I am writing about intermission because I am still getting my bearings. The second Trump administration will proceed much like the first, in the sense that superficial changes will happen very fast while the broader crisis of corruption — a transnational crisis — will quietly deepen and become more dangerous.

Reporters will waste time on appointments that never occur, on threats never carried out, because Trump is the president, and they feel they have to cover whatever he says. Actual threats will be carried out, but because those threats reflect his mafia and espionage roots, they will be ignored. Crimes will be covered up with scandals.

The deadliest situations will be the most difficult to assess — not only because of a paucity of information, but because of new restrictions on free speech.

Americans may move even further from political participation, as often happens in autocratic states. Many have already done so due to the terror and disappointment of the past four years. A pandemic that wouldn’t end, skyrocketing inflation, genocidal wars, unpunished state crimes, unaddressed national trauma, the end of rituals — even something as simple as watching television — that held our country together.

The American psyche is worn from paying so much attention and learning so little truth in return.

Americans are battered by hypocrisy: Trump is a fascist, Dems say, yet they look forward to accommodating him? This is a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”, the CDC says, yet both the unvaccinated and vaccinated keep getting infected? “Cancel culture” is a scourge, the GOP says, yet the right-wingers bitching about it are the ones restricting speech and violating privacy? The economy is “booming”, Dems say, but everything is less affordable — and bank statements that prove it are dismissed as “vibes”? And now that the GOP is in power, they’re going to rehash that lie too?

It is intermission and the first half of the show sucked. But intermission is a time to take stock of why it sucked and figure out how to handle the rest.

* * *

One option is to stop watching. I recommend that when it comes to the minutiae of the Trump administration, but not when it comes to the big picture. Because the big picture is you — not him, but you. Not the officials and oligarchs, but you — your family, your community, your country. This is not a show, this is not a game. This is your goddamn country.

You don’t have to love it, and you don’t have to leave it — but do not ever forget it is yours.

As we lose more of our rights, along with the means of discussing them, do not forget that these rights are what you are owed. You have been betrayed. Betrayal is theft. Powerbrokers took your money and your time and your trust in your fellow man and told you to give it to parties and corporations instead. Out of fear, many complied.

Those parties and corporations direct you to detest your countrymen, because that’s a battle you might win, when the big battles — against the plutocrats and the surveillance state — seem impossible.

They are not impossible, but they will require you to retain your curiosity and compassion. These are among your greatest weapons in the years to come.

Intermission is a good time to get to know fellow members of the captive audience. You might as well see what’s really on everyone’s mind. Not memes and mantras, but the human beings behind the screens.

They might be scared too. They might be more on your side than you think. They might have useful information, like how to rid your property of predatory oligarchs.

Or at least how to watch that on Yellowstone. You gotta start somewhere in America, even if it’s the final season.

* * *

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Two patriots out for a stroll in Missouri