11/04/2025
“The United States is now a nation run by public servants who behave no better than internet trolls, deflecting criticism with crassness and obscenity,” Tom Nichols argues. https://theatln.tc/jLBoGuOj
Since Donald Trump was elected, the administration has been using “gleeful immaturity as means of numbing society and wearing down its resistance to all kinds of depredations, including corruption and violence.” The White House press secretary answered a serious question from a member of the press about who planned a meeting between the American and Russian presidents by saying, “Your mom did.” The vice president called an interlocutor on social media a “dipsh*t.” The president of the United States posted an AI-generated video of himself flying a jet and dumping f***s on his fellow citizens’ heads.
These “are examples of crude people displaying their incompetence as they flail about in jobs—including the presidency—for which they are not qualified,” Nichols argues. “Trump has attracted acolytes by being the patron saint of the third string, gathering people who seem to feel, for various reasons, that they were iced out of national politics … This kind of private insecurity can manifest in public life as childishness and trollishness. Or maybe such behavior is simply a reflection of the man at the top. Whatever the reason for their immaturity, the effect is miserable policy and a corroded democracy. The public is poorly served and does not get answers to important questions.”
“The corruption, mendacity, and incompetence of those in charge are perhaps less astonishing than the willingness of Trump’s most loyal supporters to tolerate them all,” Nichols writes. “People who are willing to accept ‘your mom’ as an answer to important questions are people who have already decided that democracy is a rigged game. The political process, for many of them, doesn’t seem to be a means for solving common problems and developing solid policies. Instead, they treat it as just another opportunity to excoriate their fellow citizens.”
🎨: The Atlantic. Source: bgwalker / Getty
