Los Angeles, September 6, 2025
Dear Geert —
I’ve been writing “The Present Crisis” letters not only to explain what the America looks like from the inside to those outside its borders, but also to sketch new taxonomies for US citizens to have a mental map for how to move forward. Yet, as the attacks on, well, everything accelerate exponentially, the ability to maintain critical distance diminishes. Writing this from Los Angeles, a deep blue city in a deep blue state, much of the first hundred days’ damage done by the Trump administration felt somewhat distant. So much was centered on Washington itself, and the most blistering punishments of higher education were happening to the east coast Ivy League institutions, Columbia and Harvard in particular.
As I wrote a few months ago, my vantage point was of a storm moving toward me rather than a report from inside the maelstrom. That was then, before ICE agents started raiding LA’s home store parking lots, grabbing day laborers, abducting the fruiteras who sell freshly cut melon and pineapple from pushcarts at the side of the road, and arresting students outside high schools in East LA. That was before ICE agents created clout-chasing calvary photo-ops raiding Macarthur Park on horseback, and massing to intimidate Gavin Newsom, the state’s Democratic governor, when he was giving a speech at the Japanese American National Museum in Little Tokyo (an institution built specifically to commemorate the last time the US government interned what it classified as internal enemies during World War II). And when the people of Los Angeles rose up against this vast overreach, the Trump administration sent in the National Guard and the Marines, a warning to the rest of the country—the blue parts, at least– that they were next. As I write this. Washington, DC has National Guard troops that the Trump administration imported from six red states, four of them former members of the Confederacy. Next up in this reversal-of-fortune cos-replay of the Civil War are Chicago and New York.
It’s not just cities under attack and threatened with occupation. It’s also the intellectual and economic drivers in those cities, namely the universities. This conflict has manifested in multiple ways, but the most serious and significant is the attack on science. Science, based as it is in evidence, experimentation and iteration, all in search of a facticity that can in turn be challenged and improved, serves as an alternate source of power and knowledge to authoritarian rule. This is true in Russia, it’s true in Hungary, it’s true in China. It’s why those countries’ rulers ruthlessly control their science and university faculties. Now it’s manifestly happening in the US, under a mandate that Donald Trump feels deeply, no matter that he won the 2024 election by a mere one and a half percentage of the popular vote. His mandate springs, as I’ve written earlier, from the feels. He and his MAGA followers literally rather than metaphorically feel he has a mandate from God, that it was divine will that saved him from two assassination attempts during the 2024 campaign, two impeachments in his first term, one serious bout of COVID, and an ongoing, exercise-free regime heavy on fast food burgers and Diet Cokes.
Various agendas—personal, ideological, political —intersect in the attack on science. There’s Trump’s own characterological aversion to anyone who claims to know anything more than he does (no American president has ever publicly claimed to be a “smart person” more than Trump). Add in an abiding push/pull towards elite education from someone who touts his and his family’s, and even his appointees’ Ivy league credentials while loathing the culture and traditions of those same institutions. Moving beyond the personal, there was a detailed plan developed during the 2020-2024 MAGA interregnum (aka the Biden administration) called Project 2025 that was explicit in its desire to destroy higher education as an incubator of “wokeness” and in the process “expose schools to greater market forces” (as if the neo-liberal turn the academy took decades ago hadn’t done this already). And so, we come to J.D. Vance, graduate of a top-ranked public university as well as a Yale Law school alumnus, who parlayed his version of couch-fucking populism into his lick-spittle Vice-Presidency. In a speech back in 2021, he was explicit about the politics he wanted to pursue with his boss and the radical dismantlers of Trump 2.0. He titled his speech, “The Universities are the Enemy,” and so we have been treated since inauguration day.
For three-quarters of a century, the federal government and universities worked in tandem, the government funding basic research and supplying monies for grants and loans to build American science into a dominant global behemoth. Yet this interrelationship left universities open to attack, and shamefully defenseless against an administration that simply does not care what happens to basic science, medical research, and non-commercial inquiry. As much as the Trump administration hates Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) and classes in critical race theory (CRT), there just wasn’t enough money flowing to them to hurt universities by turning down the spigot. But federal support through an array of alphabet agencies like the NSF (National Science Foundation) and the NIH (National Institutes of Health), not to mention the big D departments like DOD, DOE and DOA (the departments of Defense, Energy and Agriculture), offered a hundred billion dollar lever Archimedes would envy to punish universities for… well, anything MAGA feels like.
So it was that first they came for the Ivies about “antisemitism” (all justifications will be in quotation marks because even the Trump administration doesn’t believe in them) with funding withheld in the range of 2.2 billion for Harvard and 400 million for Columbia; then for “transwomen in sports” with 175 million at the University of Pennsylvania; and in a non-Ivy move, 800 million from John Hopkins because of “waste, fraud, and abuse” in their administration of foreign aid research and programs. The Baltimore-based university was targeted in the first days of Elon Musk’s aborted yet disastrous DOGE initiative (it’s been less than eight months, but down the memory hole goes the fact that the richest man in the world made the globe’s poorest, sickest children his first target when he and his minions in the Department of Government Efficiency went after the United States Agency for International Development).
These were the clouds I was watching gather during the first hundred days of the Trump administration. On the two hundredth day, the storm hit my institution full force, with a one billion dollar fine imposed for “antisemitism” at UCLA.  For those of us on the Left Coast, and especially we who have a connection to the statewide University of California (ten campuses from Berkeley in the north to San Diego in the south), it’s been disheartening to see how little the national media has covered our extinction-level threat versus that of our private peers on the east coast. Human networks still matter a lot, apparently. The fundamental difference between settlements with a school like Columbia and Brown and the continued extortion of the UCs (“affirmative action” is the pretext for new investigations into UCLA, Berkeley and UC Irvine) is that it will be public rather than private money for the payoffs. In a blue state like ours, with a governor who has positioned himself as the most vocal political opponent of the administration, there’s no surety as we head back to campus after the quiet of summer.
These are the things I “feel” the most acutely right now, but each day brings worse and weirder news. This administration has set the stage for a global catastrophe set off by its trade economic policies; it plans to transfer one trillion dollars from the poor and middle class to the rich via Trump’s signature One Big Beautiful Bill act; and it flouts international law from the Middle East where we support ethnic cleansing, to South America where we summarily kill foreign nationals in international waters because we accuse them of “drug dealing” (which in the United States is not and never has been a capital offense, much less one administered without a trial). There are even semantic assaults, like rebranding the Department of Defense as the Department of War. The glee with which all this chaos is embraced by between one third and one half of the American electorate demands a neologism that combines terrifying and depressing, “depressifying” or “terripressing,” perhaps.
Back in the 1990s, a comedian named Paula Poundstone popularized the phrase, “this is why we can’t have nice things.” The internet picked this up and trended it as way to point out (decades before the term itself was coined by Cory Doctorow in 2022) the enshittification of stuff they liked or liked to do online. Lately though, the “this is why we can’t have nice things” phrase has taken on a distinct racial and class dimension, especially since the reckonings brought on in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. The Movement for Black Lives, better known by its earlier acronym BLM, the public protests they helped to organize, and the associated social disorder that was contemporaneous (though nowhere near as prevalent within the mass social movement as right-wing media made it out to be), brought about a revulsion against the idea of people of color and their allies having access to public space to express their concerns, anguish, and hope. For many non-urbanites, a core MAGA constituency, the vast percentage of peaceful BLM actions were entirely outweighed by the violence that accompanied a few of them. Watching videos of isolated conflict and property crimes looped over and over again was for the Fox News-consuming elders a replay of the summers of rage inaugurated in Watts in 1965, and for overly-online rightest youth they were visible proof of the race wars prophesied on the 4- & 8- Chan boards they shit-posted to.
The ”nice things” we couldn’t have were now those consumer goods locked up in certain “urban” drugstores, a visible sign of the “American carnage” that Trump invoked in his suburban-revival-show-cum-rallies throughout the 2024 campaign. Trump has a visceral “feel” for big cities that is frozen in amber in the period that he first emerged as a public figure. To hear him prattle on about the chaotic dystopia of America’s metropoles is like sitting in a Times Square movie theater in 1980 watching previews for exploitation flicks like Death Wish, Maniac, and C.H.U.D. (the last of which stood for the Cannibalistic Human Underground Dwellers who lived with the also mythical albino alligators in the sewers beneath New York’s streets).
In other words, for Trump, New York will forever be a city in which he rides in a Lincoln Town car through filth-strewn streets next to a cab driven by Travis Bickle, that most deranged Gothamite portrayed by Robert de Niro and put to celluloid by Martin Scorsese in Taxi Driver. Trump’s cities are never the places that urbanist Jane Jacobs discusses where the wondrous and the strange are forever in conversation, gifts that “by its nature the metropolis provides [that] otherwise could be given only by traveling.” No, America’s cities are “lawless” “hellholes” where “bloodthirsty criminals” and “animals,” many of them “illegals,” create “killing fields.” In mid-August he ran down a list: “You look at Chicago, how bad it is. You look at Los Angeles, how bad it is. We have other cities that are very bad. New York has a problem. And then you have, of course, Baltimore and Oakland. We don’t even mention that anymore.” Not noted but always dog-whistled was that the mayors of every one of these cities is Black.
Getting back to white people, Trump tells us that even his “friends” in Beverly Hills have to leave their automobiles unlocked because they are terrified that criminals will shatter the windshields to steal their car stereos. That stereo comment is the tell, because with con men there’s always a tell. Car stereos were discrete pieces of equipment in the 70s and 80s and were easy to steal and sell. In 2025, sound systems are fully integrated into luxury vehicles, and what other kinds of cars would his friends in Beverly Hill have?
This pseudo-apocalypse is yet another obsession of Trump’s that harkens back to the NYC subway systems of his youth, even if he never rode them. The president of the United States is trapped in a ‘70s and ‘80s fantasyland of white retribution against Black and brown people. If Donald Trump has a soul—a proposition that even he seems uncertain of—part of it belongs to a man named Bernie Goetz, another outer-borough white guy who achieved his own measure of fame, or infamy, for imposing his will on urban space.
Bernard Goetz, was born in Queens to a German-American father a year after Donald Trump was born in Queens to a German-American father. Bernie was no nepo baby, though, putting himself through NYU’s engineering program and then founding a small electronics business that he ran out of his apartment. In 1981, after being mugged for the second time, Goetz purchased a handgun that he carried on the streets and in the subway, even though he had been denied a city permit that would have allowed him to do so legally. In 1984, he was on the #2 subway line that runs between Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx. Goetz was approached by four young Black men from the Bronx, one of whom said he wanted five dollars from the seated Manhattanite. At that, Goetz shot all four, three of whom were carrying screwdrivers. He shot one of them, Darrell Cabey, a second time, after saying, “You seem to be all right, here’s another.” The second bullet went through Cabey’s spine, severing it and leaving him a paraplegic. Goetz exited the train and fled to another state, returning a week later to turn himself in. At that point, and throughout the criminal and civil trials that followed, he claimed the shootings were in self-defense. The New York Daily News set up a tip line after the shooting to get information, but the paper’s staff was astonished that most of the calls offered support and sympathy for Goetze. The paper wrote: “It did not seem to matter to the callers that the blond man with the nickel-plated .38 had left one of his four victims with no feeling below the waist, no control over his bladder and bowels, no hope of ever walking again… To them the gunman was not a criminal but the living fulfillment of a fantasy.”
It took decades, but Donald Trump has bested his fellow blond Queens doppelganger, and the fantasy of old men’s revenge is more powerful now that they are both approaching eighty years of age than it was back when they were young. We’ve seen these fantasies of physically powerful old men pop up all over American culture in the past decade, a sign of an aging population that refuses to give up control. It’s not just an entrenched gerontocracy, it’s one that fools via — and is in turn fooled itself by — an imaginary. How does this imaginary manifest in the world? In the AI slop-driven MAGA memes of Donald Trump as a ripped Rambo flexing astride a tank, or an NFT of “SuperTrump” with 8-pack abs and a cape. All this based on a man who believes that the human body is akin to a battery, with a finite amount of energy, which exercise only depletes. 
Yet this waddling golfer and his meme troops are only following Hollywood, which finds it harder to fashion new action stars than to retread aging ones, at times to the point of hilarity. Nicholas Cage, in a seemingly never-ending attempt to pay down back tax bills, makes movie after movie in which he beats up younger and stronger opponents for two straight hours. See The Old Way (2023), The Surfer (2024), and most delirious of all, and with the least believable tile, The Retirement Plan (2024). Yet in his early sixties, Cage is a veritable tyro in comparison to septuagenarian Liam Neeson, who parlayed the revenge fantasies of the Taken franchise (2008 to infinity) into frozen landscapes in Cold Pursuit (2019) and The Ice Road (2021) and Ice Road: Vengeance (2025)); on planes in Non-Stop (2014) and trains in Commuter (2018); and even into the dementia clinic, with the far more believable premise of an aging assassin in Memory (2022). At least Cage and Neeson have an air of humor and a sort of working man’s shrug to their performances: of course they will take a paycheck for pretending to outfight jacked opponents decades their junior in hand-to-hand combat. It’s not called acting for nothing. Denzel Washington is yet another seventy-year old, Oscar-winning actor who has yet to meet a Russian gangster (the Equalizer franchise, 2014-also apparently to infinity) or ex-con rapper (in Spike Lee’s insufferable Highest 2 Lowest, a 2025 remake of Kurasawa’s sublime 1963 film, High and Low) who can slow him down even a step.
Trump feels popular impulses more than he understands them, but regardless he’ll act on either. So it is that while to most of the entertainment industry it seemed odd at best and out-of-touch to demented at worst when Trump wanted “Special Envoys to me for the purpose of bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE!” he appointed actors Jon Voight (aged eighty-six) Mel Gibson (sixty-nine) and Syvester Stallone (seventy-nine) to be his “Hollywood Ambassadors.” All three were vocal Trump supporters in 2024, all three still play action roles, with Stallone having a literal franchise of aging beefcake in The Expendables (four films so far). Trump has already selected Stallone—who called Trump our “second George Washington” during a visit to Mar-a-Lago—for Kennedy Center Honors, another sign of the President’s ‘80s pop culture fixation. More salient here is that the three actors have a combined age of two hundred and thirty four.
Yet even in MAGA world, facts assert themselves. In 2024, just days after Trump won both the electoral college and the popular vote, the old guys of America who had voted for him picked yet another champion in their fight against youth, in a match-up between icons representing two generations of Trump supporters.

In this corner, the 58-year-old, one-time heavyweight champion of the world, a true student of the art even if he did bite off Evander Hollyfield’s ear, a long-time friend of the President, who’d defended him against the rape charges that sent the former champ to prison. Ladies and gentlemen, “Iron” Mike Tyson.
 And in this corner, a 27-year old top Youtuber-turned fighter who understood that the exhausted sport of boxing, on the ropes itself against mixed martial arts (MMA for short), could be taken over by someone who knew more about monetizing eyeballs than what combinations Primo Carnero threw against Max Baer in 1934. Ladies and gentlemen, Jake “El Gallo” Paul.

When Netflix featured the Tyson/Paul fight, it attracted the largest audience in the history of streamed sports. The fans were firmly in the OG’s corner, laying almost seventy percent of the bets on Tyson. I have to think that lots of those punters gambling with such abandon were the very same audience of the aforementioned aging action stars, but this time looking to see the payback for real. Yet the sportsbooks had Paul as the strong favorite, at -205 (meaning you’d have to bet that amount of dollars to get a hundred more back in winnings). Perhaps it had something to do with the thirty-one year youth advantage Paul had over Tyson, who hadn’t fought in two decades. Yet, in the end, the old man did not triumph, his retirement plan did not include victory, and Tyson was shown to be an expendable part of Paul’s rise.
Right now, it sometimes seems like the best we can hope for is the return of the real. That a gimmicky fight like this resulted in the continued upward trajectory of a figure as obnoxious as Jake Paul (El Gallo – the rooster, seriously?) is lamentable but at least it follows the laws of physics and precepts of medical science. It was stupid, but at least the outcome was honest. It wasn’t a nice thing, but in this crisis period, it was a thing we could have. Heaven help us.