Trump Won (SIM #82)

I'm in a fairly depressed place when it comes to the direction of our country. I'm disheartened by our choices for President and if I didn't think that Trump is the most unqualified candidate possible, I'd vote for some alternative candidate as I've done in previous elections. That said, if RFK Jr. represented the alternative, I’d pass on him too, thinking he is the manifestation of our current fixation on believing that all information that doesn’t align with our worldview must be compromised. I too, like RFK Jr., can point out a lot of problems with perfect hindsight and blame our institutions and corrupt system for them. 

I’ve heard reference to the world being in a post-truth era. I believe that we’re actually in a post-honest era, as the value of honesty has been diminished to being inconsequential. Truths can be hard; honesty shouldn’t be so hard. The echo chambers created by tailored and fragmented information sources have eroded trust to a place that feels unrecoverable. It seems that the only “trustable” information is that which confirms your prior beliefs or is from a source that you believe is aligned with your overall beliefs. I reference confirmation bias frequently and in our modern, algorithmic world, it might be our single biggest human flaw (SIM #24 - Confirmation Bias and SIM #50 - Confirmation Bias Squared).

It’s true that all of our information sources come with their own agenda, often profits, sometimes power and seemingly not often enough, unbiased information. I believe Trump has won regardless of this upcoming election because we can no longer have reasonable discourse; Trump represents the lowest form of “othering” and his narcissism has him constantly attacking anything that doesn’t respect his ego (or his genius as he has said) with his frequent use of the words evil, enemy, stupid, filthy, disgusting, etc. I’m not suggesting he’s alone, but by having the Republican Party elevate and defend him, while empowering those that have blind faith in his patriotism, I don’t see how we get back to finding common ground as a country. It feels like every piece of news is being politicized with lines drawn, often over silly things. And because Trump is so outrageous, it leaves more room for the outrageous parts of the Democrats’ political machine to have an audience.

I have an unpublished, fairly raw SIM from two years ago that was in response to seeing Peter Thiel speak at an event where he was introducing a Republican political candidate. The amount of time at this event that was spent highlighting how evil, not wrong, but evil, Joe Biden and the Democrats are was incredibly unsettling. How are we supposed to function as a country when we’ve gone from disagreeing about how you approach things to simply dehumanizing the competing views as our default setting? Politicians knew using fear and disdain was effective, but the algorithms have now confirmed this to the fullest extent possible for power and profit.

An unfortunate byproduct of this is it also allows the Democrats to shift farther left, as running against Trump and down-ticket Trump acolytes is often as simple as not being the candidate spewing nonsense. It’s somewhat sad (would be humorous if not for my state of mind) that Trump isn’t even really a Republican; he simply attached to the convenient political party and wrestled control. And as a follow on, I’d guess that it then became convenient for folks like Thiel and Musk to validate Trump for their own benefit, knowing full well they’d never let Trump anywhere near a leadership position in any of the companies they’ve built and supported.

If you’re a Trump supporter, not just a Trump voter, and not just anti-Harris or anti-Democrat, but an actual Trump believer, I’m genuinely curious what he would have to do for you to change your mind in supporting him. Blind trust is dangerous and that’s what Trump has secured. I can’t see other politicians securing this blind trust, mostly because Trump has sucked all the oxygen out of the room leaving nothing behind for others. And blind trust is why Trump chooses loyalty over competence; those with competence seem to exit stage left if they’re on the inside for long. 

I don’t see Trump going away if he loses this election. He’s created a movement based upon the premise that the mainstream media is evil (again, not wrong or misguided, but evil), that liberals are evil, and that he single handedly has the country’s best interests at heart. In this echo chamber, there’s nowhere to go for trusted information to the contrary and all other information is coming from evil sources. The Republicans normalized him and his methods into a much more powerful movement in the pursuit of retaining and increasing power. Anyone that speaks against Trump has effectively ostracized themselves from the Republican Party. Currently, Trump has a reasonable chance to win this election despite most of the folks that have worked for him noting publicly that he’s not fit for office. Think about this, it’s unprecedented for anyone from a prior administration to speak publicly with disdain about who they worked for, yet for Trump, it’s the majority of the folks that he put in senior roles within his first administration.

It’s so hard for me to comprehend how folks like his children, Rudy Guliani, and Michael Flynn are thought to be trusted advisors for the President of our country. The fact I can even write these things without it being a parody is proof to me that this movement doesn’t go away. Trump already won as he made himself powerful, richer and relevant and we’re stuck in a dystopian political environment of normalized hatred and complete mistrust.

Josh