The summer after I got married, one of my bosses bit me on the arm. I had a lot of jobs that summer, and a lot of bosses; at the time, I was recreating the sort of interchangeable, poorly paid jobs I’d had throughout my twenties in exhausting freelanced aggregate. The boss that bit me was the co-owner of a real estate agency that paid me more or less minimum wage to jam search keywords into apartment rental listings, write bios for their agents and copy for their website, and oversee whatever other writing or editorial work needed doing. There was a lot of that; unpaid college interns and international employees churned through the office nonstop, and their combined labor and movement kept the agency’s burgeoning online presence stocked with fresh spam. Agents came and went as agents do, as did various ostensible eminences—I remember one, after being told by my boss that I had written for The Wall Street Journal, excitedly launching into a speech about “a disease called PC-itis” like a child actor at an audition—and prayer group buddies and transient subletters and an intense Georgian named George, whom I liked and sometimes brought me strange Georgian desserts. It sucked.
When my boss bit me, I had just questioned his wish to include an easily disprovable lie in his bio, which I was writing on his computer, at his desk. I was shocked by the bite, but less surprised by the look on his face afterwards—he was flushed and eager, like a child that has just discovered how to be naughty, his eyes shining and a little wet. As with the cohort that generally does that sort of thing, which is weird little kids acting out in daycare settings, there was a question implied in that look—what would be the consequence for doing a thing that you are absolutely not supposed to do? In retrospect, I wonder if he was waiting to see if I’d hit him.
Instead I said something like “what the fuck was that,” although I already knew what the fuck it was, and had known it from within the first few weeks of starting the gig. I had known since then that I would leave the job as soon as I could figure out how; I knew what kind of place it was, and what kind of person was running it, and if I didn’t literally know until that moment that my boss could be described as A Biter, it was more startling than actually surprising to find out for sure. I think I understood at some level that this boss was not merely the sort of person who might bite me—hard enough that I could show the imprint to my wife when I got home and she asked how my day was—but the sort of person who would eat me if need be, or just if he thought he could.
I knew, too, albeit in an abstract way, that there were a lot of people like that out there, certainly in real estate but also just in the world. One of the most important lessons of adult life is understanding people like this for what they are and learning to identify them as quickly as possible; keeping people like this away from those you care about is, in no small part, the work of being an adult. Not being able to do that—putting your trust in people like this, or letting yourself believe that there is any kind of fair and mutually advantageous deal to be made with them—means that you will get victimized a lot.
That is the easiest and most direct way to learn that particular lesson, but also no guarantee that any actual lesson will be learned. There is something elemental to the signal that this sort of predator gives off, but there is also all this noise and load-bearing derangement obscuring it. The culture has long struggled to tell the difference between strength and mere power, and its reflexive abhorrence of even the appearance of weakness has minted generations of desperate and anxious aspiring bullies; this is a predatory place, and the managed and longstanding precariousness of every aspect of daily life here sadistically steepens the stakes on every assertion of self-respect. A person in those circumstances will absorb the bite of some dipshit boss and think not “that isn’t going to happen again” but just that things like that are what bosses do, and then reason a way backwards to justifying it. Some of them will accept biting as a Habit Of Highly Successful People and become more determined to do it themselves. If given the chance, they absolutely will, either because that appetite has been bred into them, or because they don’t know and can’t imagine what else power could look or feel or be but that.
I can’t really fault anyone for trying to impose some order on how evil everything is every day. For the decade or so in which Donald Trump’s singular brand of toxicity has dominated American politics, people whose job it is to think or write or talk about him have wrestled with how to bring their analytical skills to bear on a man and a movement that so defy analysis. Not in the sense that anything about him or it is unknowable, but in the sense that it is all instantly identifiable as precisely what it is. Trump’s first term, even into its last low days, inspired a strange elite fantasy that he might somehow grow into the job, or that the responsibilities of it might chasten or change him.
Even after it so manifestly didn’t, the idea that there might be something more to this—that, even if Trump and his lieutenants cannot or will not actually articulate it, some sort of strategy being carried forward through all this frantic lashing out and random acts of unkindness. The academic Adam Tooze wrote about one such attempt, which is to parse Trump’s manic campaign of tariffs feinted towards and imposed as a reflection of something that economists have called The Mar-A-Lago Accord. This is not a mobster demanding protection money, according to this reading, but in fact an initiative to devalue the dollar and force America’s trading partners to finance the re-industrialization of the American economy, at figurative or literal gunpoint. Tooze weighs the various arguments pro and con, but is finally unconvinced. “We avoid facing the conclusion that the vision of a Mar-a-Lago Accord may have more in common with grift, a protection racket or a facelift pandering to the ignorant vanity of an old man than with economic policy as we have hitherto known it,” he writes. “Faced with Trump, the risk is that conventional realism is a form of escapism.”
Again, this impulse is hard to fault at some level; it is important, in terms of a nation’s sense of itself, that Important Things be treated as if they are important. You don’t have to believe that the mainstream media was somehow in the tank for Trump to see why that particular story might appeal to them, if only because of how such a thing would reflect upon their work, and the systems it celebrates and serves. That Trump himself was so obviously vile—bigoted, vain, shit-stupid and proud, a bloated and hideous being of pure appetite—would only make that narrative more appealing. Even this gnarled and nasty creature that has never cared about anything but itself might, when faced with the awesome responsibilities inherent in the office he’d implausibly won, become something more like a man. Instead, he just kept on being Donald Trump.
This was always and obviously very stupid and kind of sad, but even as it is disproven every day, the impulse remains. Even during the campaign that re-installed him to office, Trump was receding into something memetic and abstract. This version was not so much a leader who would bring his will to bear on the direction of the state—he couldn’t really remember his lines well enough anymore to pull that off, but also Trump has always worked better as a fantasy of business mastery than as the real and shabby thing he actually is—as something more like a gilded Trojan Horse. That rotten piñata would, after getting through the doors of power, burst to release a payload of chittering ideologues who would not otherwise have been able to breach those gates on their own. Trump himself would be free to watch television and go on television and wheeze and drawl from behind his big messy desk during ceremonies in which he signed whatever order those goblins handed him; the goblins, for their part, would be free to feast and shit and caper hideously about as goblins do.
It did not change him and certainly did not improve him, but Trump’s experience of power clearly made an impression on him. His lack of interest in the work that the administrative state actually does was and remains total; that work benefits other people, and so would naturally be of no interest to him. He grew to hate it, and has now survived long enough to watch on television as the people that he picked to oversee the project go about that work in haphazard and sadistic fashion, pausing frequently to celebrate and thank Mr. Trump and heatedly demand apologies on his behalf.
The collection of degenerates that make up Trump’s cabinet makes sense mostly if you think of it as Trump, in his role as executive producer of the end of the American Century, casting the various roles in the cable news television programming he watches. These are, more or less without exception, people who would not be able to hold down a regular job; they are, all of them, instantly and obviously identifiable as predators, and the violence and harm that they have done to more or less everything they’ve touched over the course of their reckless lives proves it all out. But they are also the faces that have represented various broad archetypes—War, Computer, Medicines, Crime, Gold—on rightwing media, and this most avid and credulous consumer of rightwing media would instantly have understood them as credible.
The ways in which these grasping and venal incompetents manage both towards and like Trump were all right there on the emoji-strewn page in the classified war-planning chat to which they mistakenly invited Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg earlier this week. They are thoughtless and reckless, terrified of being assigned any kind of personal responsibility but blithe and breezy about the prospect of blowing up a few dozen bystanders in a country they know nothing about; their concerns are transparently self-centered and fatuous; there is no evident strategy, only the classic Trumpian interplay of grievance and impatience. There is nothing like collaboration, because these are not the sort of creatures that collaborate; these are all inveterate biters, and have long since given up wondering about consequences. Whatever the state once was, it is now this—a bunch of middle-management gangsters fucking each other over or doing each other favors according to their sense of how doing so will benefit them, with no other consideration ever entering the equation. This is how it works, from one day to the next: a bunch of absolutely amoral gangster boss types and various industry elites scratching each others’ itches and cutting each other in and making business decisions; the mores and moral logic of Jeffrey Epstein’s island, but everywhere.
Outside of this and downstream from it, some things happen. A grad student is gang-tackled on a street corner by masked ICE thugs in tactical Old Navy and renditioned in defiance of a court order, and that is just how it is for people like that; the Secretary of State later acknowledges, in a tone that suggests he finds it disrespectful even to have been asked, that the op-ed she had co-authored in support of her university divesting from Israeli businesses was the justification for this act. The state sells a bunch of asylum-seekers to a foreign country as prison labor, seemingly at least in part because of all the Sicario-scented social media content it can mine from having done so. All of this happens right where everyone can see it, and the cynicism affirmed by that somehow serves only to perpetuate it. Faith in the concept of accountability is dead without acts; the idea of it, and the concept of lawful governance, does not erode so much as it curdles; the mechanism that holds society together becomes a sad kind of joke, and the institutions charged with enforcing that bargain become not just complicit in that betrayal but representative of it—not a gang of bank robbers who show up dressed as cops, but just a bunch of cops robbing a bank in uniform.
One possible result of sufficiently long exposure to this sort of elite impunity and incompetence and sadism is something that the journalist Matt Pearce called Cultural Putinism, and which he described as “pervasive social cynicism under a kind of senile imperialism.” You won’t have to look very far or very hard to see this already, but it is not the only possible outcome. Every day, the people in charge of the government do great damage to it; they carve away at its brain and guts and wield its crushing bulk against the people it is supposed to protect. Every day, institutions that notionally represent countervailing cultural forces to that destructive enterprise capitulate or compromise or seek to enter into negotiations with it, some with unseemly eagerness and others bowing to what seems to them like a business decision.
But for all the ways in which this feels like the end, and all the ways in which it really represents something like the final surrender of a power structure that seems to have lost faith or just lost interest in itself, it is not actually an end. That cynicism, too, is Trumpian; the world will cease to matter to him the moment he leaves it, and so he is more than happy to decree that everyone and everything be buried alongside him. It will be important to remember the shame of this moment, both how it felt and how it worked, when it is time to build whatever will rise from it—to remember the blithe and brutal and self-delighted contempt with which this elite set out to devour every other better thing, and to work to build a life and a world that is not just strong enough to resist it but dedicated to its opposite.
