Los Angeles, March 24, 2025
Dear Geert,
Greetings from the Formerly United States of America. It’s almost impossible to understand what’s going on day to day here, and to explain it to old friends in Europe harder still, but I’ll try. We are not even ten weeks in, but Trump’s resurgent administration has drawn from on-again off-again advisor (and convicted & pardoned felon) Steve Bannon’s experience as a keyboard warrior, and flooded the zone with so much shit that the opening months of version 2.0 staggered even those of us who fully expected the worst. Much has been made of the right wing game plan that is Project 2025, but almost no one discusses it as an augur not for the 21st century, but rather as a reflection on the 20th. Which is to say, Project 2025 wants to return the US to 1925.
The United States in the 1920s had survived a terrible global pandemic (known here as the Spanish influenza), and was run by Republicans like Calvin Coolidge and Warren Harding. Both were both avid protectionists in favor of tariffs and isolationism, both were staunch in their opposition to taxes and to regulations. The automobile tycoon and world- famous entrepreneur Henry Ford purchased The Dearborn Independent newspaper to spread his theories of capitalism and antisemitism to as many fellow citizens as he could. The Johnson-Reed Act established a national origins quota system based on the census of 1890 and barred almost all immigration from Asia (the act and its restrictions stood for forty years). 1925 was the year of the Scopes trial (made famous by the play, Inherit the Wind) and was emblematic of the attack on educators for teaching unpopular theories.
In 1925, it was not critical race theory, but instead the theory of evolution that challenged prevailing orthodoxies. Historical parallelism is interesting but not always productive, and the fact that the 1920s ended in a world-wide depression that led to the first truly global conflict may mean less than the fact that the present crisis is driven by opposition to the solution the 1930s offered to the 1920s, the New Deal, which moved America closer to a social safety net and real regulation of “survival of the fittest” capitalism (the only Darwinian theory that the right seems to fully embrace).
But back to the present: the last few weeks have overwhelmed people’s capacities for empathy, much less understanding: for a week one expresses a deep concern about the defunding of science; this is followed by grief over the abandonment of Ukraine amidst a sense that 80 years of US alliances was being abandoned for…what?; no time to think about that anymore, as the anguish about the unlawful deportations of immigrants to hellish Salvadorian prisons morphs into dread that the administration’s defiance of court orders will bring on a full-blown constitutional crisis. Then, as an academic, I feel existential anxiety about the attack on American higher education—an attack that can literally strip billions in funding from what just a few weeks ago was considered one of the country’s bulwarks of excellence.
All of this has been happening with, and been supported by, a staggering explosion of meanness. Rage and fury are one thing, but this pervasive meanness embodies a smallness of spirit that circles around spite and acts of petty retribution. A full third of the American people are coming across as not just angry, but “nasty,” to reclaim one of the words Trump uses to define his enemies. Politicos, the chattering classes, intellectuals, assorted liberals, left-wingers and anyone else who opposes what’s happening right now have got to accept that Trump is not stupid. He may have no interest in history, politics, or aesthetics (to name just three realms of knowledge), but he does have a genius for ferreting out what will keep him in the spotlight and how to translate that attention into support and thereby power. He intuits rather than cogitates, but in this he exhibits what Aldous Huxley identified decades ago as post-verbal knowing. His MAGA movement runs on the “feels.” It’s hard to tell how much this aspect of the American experience right now is exceptional, but in this country celebrity has replaced charisma as the central magic of totalitarianism. It’s not that Max Weber and Hannah Arendt were wrong about Mussolini, Hitler and Mao, so much that charisma means less in an era of spectacle triumphant, when the endless scroll of social media rewards only attention.
This evolution from charisma to celebrity began in the televisual era. John F. Kennedy looked like a movie star, and the truth was he was simply better on camera during the 1960 televised debate than the sweating, pinched-faced Richard Nixon. Nixon’s grit and grind, combined with a considerable intellect and a will to power, eventually got him to the Oval Office, and his ruthlessness was an inspiration to Trump from a young age, but the celebrity aspect of American power really accelerated in the 1980s with the election of Ronald Reagan, our first actor-president. Reagan had spent decades honing his message to meld seamlessly with his public presentation, and he was able to create a disjunction between his folksy demeanor and the plutocratic policies he enacted. He was also expert at deploying his own celebrity to usher back into political discourse ways of dealing with race that Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society initiatives of the 1960s were to have relegated to the dustbin of history.
Reagan started his campaign in the heart of Dixie, at the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi, only a few miles from where three civil rights workers had been brutally murdered by the Ku Klux Klan only 16 years earlier. Reagan told his almost all-white audience that, “I believe in states’ rights” (long a Confederate and then segregationist dog whistle) and made it though he whole speech without once mentioning the Klan’s three victims. His deployment of the so-called “Southern strategy,” which was predicated upon breaking off the white working class from the Democratic party, continued through his endlessly repeated—and frankly false—anecdotes about a “welfare queen” (always a code for Black women) and a “strapping young buck” (another dog whistle phrase, this time to conjure predatory Black “thugs”) buying “T-bone steaks” while “you were buying hamburger.” The use of “you” as a marker of race and gender is something that Trump turned up to 11 in his extremely successful trans-baiting 2024 campaign ad, which ended with the words,“Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you.”
Ever since Trump rode down his golden escalator a decade ago, the dog whistles have become megaphones: immigrants from Mexico are criminals and rapists, Black-majority countries are “shitholes,” COVID-19 is the “China virus” and “kung flu,” trans members of the military are incapable of leading an “honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle,” the list goes on. Yet in the 21st century media economy that Trump “feels” so expertly, the fact that the meanness never ends is a feature not a bug. The meanness leads to outrage, and the outrage brings attention, not just from the news but even more importantly from social media. The meanness keeps the light burning brightly on Trump and his actions (to call them policies is to fall into the trap of trying to intellectualize instinct).
Trump’s four years out of power had the same effect on him and his supporters as we’ve seen with other autocrats like Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi, and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump honed his mean streak and expanded its appeal via the now separate channels by which Americans are algorithmically fed what we once called news, but which now must simply be seen as content.  Trump has mastered triangulation in our infinitely fractured mediascape. A legendary misogynist, Trump garnered the votes of white women with threats of rapists of color and gay and trans groomers. To men of color, especially the young ones, this out-and-out racist was able to play up their dislike of female bosses, and to caricature his opponent as an avatar of the officious Human Resources professional. To the immigrants he was demonizing one moment, he would pivot to present himself as the only strong man capable of channeling their aggrievement at changing notions of masculinity. To his white base, dispossessed by economic upheavals, he was always able to blame a distant other, from cultural elites who despised them to foreign globalists who ripped them off. His richest supporters, who had benefitted the most from the policies that hollowed out MAGA country, knew that however he retriangulated, he would in deliver tax cuts in 2.0 as he had in 1.0, and that was more than enough.
Trump was defeated in his 2020 reelection campaign because of COVID, but in many ways his successful 2024 return to power depended on the sublimated grief and rage that the pandemic generated in the United States. To understand what’s happening in the first quarter of 2025, it’s vital to think though the intersections of the viral outbreak, the public health response, the racial reckoning after George Floyd’s murder, and the white backlash to all of the above. There was a huge segment of the population that didn’t just chafe at the restrictions imposed by public health professionals and government officials, but saw them as a fundamental attack on freedom itself. The individualism that most Americans see as their core ethos (whether they live by it or not) was fundamentally out of sync with the communitarian impulse to sacrifice to protect others, especially others they didn’t know and who didn’t look like them.
A new “feels” emerged about the pandemic—the only people who were actually dying were poor, fat people, which in the MAGA imaginary translates as Black and/or immigrant. Ignore, for the moment, that almost three-quarters of the American population is categorized as overweight or obese, and that whites accounted for sixty percent of all deaths. What stuck in MAGA’s head was that Indigenous, Black and Latino people were dying at a faster rate than white people, especially when adjusted for age. For a subset of people who were already incensed by the civil unrest that followed in the wake of Floyd’s murder, this was just more grist for a racial assessment of the events of 2020. This reaction is just so mean: to assume that the poor and the dispossessed were responsible for their own deaths in the midst of a global pandemic. Dying in a country simultaneously famous for its wealth and the impossibility of accessing healthcare if you are poor was victim-blaming at its most vicious.
The economy was central to Trump’s comeback after the seditions of January 6th and the convictions in court, but this election was a game of inches, to use a metaphor football-crazy politicians love, and every grievance stoked, every hatred enflamed, and every blame shifted was going to be important. It was here where Trump’s feral understanding mattered, and he is continuing to ferret out ways to keep these temperatures high as he governs by edict alone. Celebrities exist in the spotlight, and though they have writers, directors, crews and co-stars, their singularity is their appeal. It’s no wonder Trump has shown no interest in the legislative process this time round. Even in aggregate, the whole of the Republican-controlled House and Senate can’t hold a candle watt to Trump’s blinding luminescence. Why shouldn’t the rest of the Republican party fall in line? They are now his Greek chorus, but stripped of tragic sensibility, reduced to fans waiting to take selfies with the star.
The attack on a professional civil service that keeps planes in the air, national forests from lighting on fire, social security payments on time, and nuclear weapons safely stored doesn’t make any rational sense. In a seven trillion-dollar budget, there will be some waste, fraud and abuse, but over decades, the right wing has never been able to identify enough to even make a dent in the US’s two-trillion dollar deficit. But the feels and the meanness explain the gleeful destruction wrought by Elon Musk and his boy army at DOGE (the Department of Government Efficiency, which isn’t a department, and is only using efficiency as a cover). The reality is that government jobs are one of the only sectors of the American economy that really did diversify and become more inclusive over the past half-century, at the very same time that the civil service was a hold-out of unionism and generous pensions. To MAGA, the response to having less secure jobs in right-to-work states (a rebranding of anti-unionism) is not to organize for better wages and worker solidarity, but instead to strip “those people” of their jobs. How dare “they” have it better than “us?” Here the meanness translates as a constriction of ambition, an inability to see the gains of others as anything but a loss for the self in the zero-sum game that is life in MAGA world.
Of course, the Pax Americana that Trump 2.0 is dismantling was not a zero-sum game. For any and all of the myriad problems of extractive capitalism, the period after the Second World War saw the largest reduction in poverty that the world had ever witnessed, and the greatest beneficiaries of all were the American people. Yes, conditions have changed and new sources of inspiration and innovation are required, but to destroy the world order, such as it is, without cogent and thorough planning for what is to replace it, is to substitute feels for thinking, a process that Trump and MAGA drive via a meanness of spirit and inchoate longings for revenge.
I am, of course, writing all of this as a tenured academic at a major research university. This means I am literally despised by the MAGA movement. I’d never felt what has been called town/gown tensions, in part because I live in a metropolitan metropolis, but also because I had enough experience in other jobs before academia to be able to talk to strangers about aspects of what I do, even if the idea of being a “media philosopher” seems beyond esoteric to most (including family, to be honest). But like the majority of people in “the profession,” I’ve been caught off-guard by the meanness that’s emerged around the very idea of higher education. In the comments section of nominally center or even vaguely left legacy media like the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and New York magazine, it can seem like a third or more of the posts are cheering on attempts to end tenure, defund academic research, expel student protesters, and denigrate the search for knowledge.
Social media is, naturally, even more vituperative in its support for the gutting of campus life. Higher ed has a public relations debacle on its hands, and no discussion about how universities and research labs are where cures for chronic diseases and the Internet came from seems to make a dent in the desire to bring the sector down a peg or ten. In 2024, for the first time, the least informed voters went for Republicans, not Democrats. The Democratic pollster David Schor sees the 2024 election as the new normal, a time in which, “the lower your political engagement, education level or socioeconomic status, the less engaged you are in politics, the more Trumpy you are.” I might add in mean here as well, but without Schor’s analytics to back me up.
As I was concluding this long letter, I found out that my own alma mater, Columbia University, capitulated fully to Trump’s threat to strip it of almost half a billion dollars of funding. At this writing, there’s no way for me to know if this submission will actually yield anything positive for the institution, but things don’t look good for the rest of the sector in the coming months. My institution is under investigation for exactly the same things that Columbia was accused of, mostly having to do with the handling of Gaza-related protests and statements, as well as DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives. Universities, particularly the much maligned “studies” departments, are the very origin places for the language and conceptual apparatus needed to analyze and fight this confluence of celebrity-driven meanness. It’s no wonder we’re under mortal attack.
The only solution I can see is solidarity, direct action, and strikes. If the only content we see are feels spotlighted by celebrity, all else will wither into nothingness.
Yours—
Peter
—
Peter Lunenfeld lives in California. His most recent book is City at the Edge of Forever: Los Angeles Reimagined. He is a professor the Design Media Arts department at UCLA.