We Just Live Here
Sovereign is he who does whatever the hell he wants
The president of the United States has ordered decapitation strikes against two foreign governments in as many months. In neither case did the commander in chief make the case that the target country posed a threat to American lives or American interests—not to the public, not to Congress, perhaps not even to himself. The rationales he did bother to offer were so laughable and self-contradictory that they amount to a mockery of the very concept of persuasion. Can anyone seriously believe that the president of a sovereign nation is also leading a drug gang with the express intention of harming Americans, or that fresh strikes are urgently necessary to prevent Iran from getting a weapon even as the official story remains that the previous strikes utterly obliterated their means to do so?
One almost longs for the good old days of George W. Bush, who at least respected us enough to elaborately lie to us—to the public, to Congress, to the United Nations—and whose administration was defined, despite the inarticulacy of the “decider” himself, by memorable bons mots. Truly, democracy was still alive back in the Bush days, when popular opinion majorities were induced to support illegal wars of aggression and programs of torture, when our leaders put the politics aside and reached across the fabled aisle to provide legal cover for war crimes. How foolish Bush must feel now, realizing that it was all unnecessary—that he could have simply done whatever he wanted and told everyone else to fuck themselves, and they would neverthless support his actions.
That’s what’s truly frightening and infuriating about this moment, the fact that everyone is lining up to concede that Trump “has a point.” Both target regimes were, after all, international pariahs and domestically illegitimate. The people of Venezuela and Iran had done what the people are supposed to do to change their government—respectively, voting them out of office and engaging in peaceful protest—and they were thwarted by Maduro’s more or less open theft of the election and Iran’s murderous repression. There may even be a small chance that one or both countries could even be better off in the long run, though the intensity of the strikes against Iran render that improbable (and in any case I don’t trust the mainstream Western media to keep me properly informed about that). And yet—not like this. Not like this.
One single man should not be in a position to decide things like this unilaterally. I’m on record as saying that the office of the presidency simply shouldn’t exist, but if we must have this dangerous concentration of power, surely we can do better than the most wicked, spiteful, and willfully ignorant person alive. And yet the Supreme Court endorsed the unitary executive theory knowing he would be the one to use it (knowing, too, that Biden wouldn’t dare to use the unchecked powers they had implicitly granted him). His brutality, his stupidity, his impulsiveness—we can only conclude that for his acolytes on the Court as for his followers, they are features, not bugs. They want to empower him because he’s unworthy, because he will abuse his authority.
The question about Trump’s trajectory all along has been how he kept the scam going. He can’t code-switch or self-censor. Everyone who encounters him knows exactly who he is, immediately. The answer, I believe, is that he uses his manifest incapacity as a kind of superpower. Everyone who enters into business with him and sees his gleeful desire to cheat and steal and defraud thinks to themselves, “I can use this.” They don’t realize that he is too impulsive to be durably manipulable and that he has elevated betrayal into a perverse Kantian maxim. Everyone, everyone who joins forces with him loses, but everyone equally thinks that they are the ones who have seen through the ruse and can use him “as a tool,” to use a popular current-day phrase. The fact that they are obviously—even definitionally—smarter than him blinds them, makes them stupider than the stupidest man alive.
This is how he wins, again and again, and this is what’s happening right before our eyes. The international community—including even Resistance Heroes like Canadian prime minister Mark Carney—sees Trump’s stupid impulsive violence as something they can use. We regret the way he did it, but goll-durn it, something had to be done. The only price of getting rid of a couple genuinely evil regimes was normalizing decapitation strikes as a tool of geopolitics, and we know that couldn’t possibly come back to bite, for example, the leader of a country that Trump has repeatedly expressed a desire to annex.
But here even I’m falling into the trap. There are no norms or precedents anymore. There are no laws. There’s just Trump, a living state of emergency who has declared himself global sovereign. The entire decision-making capacity of the U.S. government has been replaced by Trump’s toilet and his smartphone. The United Nations is in the process of being phased out in favor of a pay-to-play scam called the Board of Peace. A man with no impulse control and no connection to external reality holds the nuclear codes, and he is obviously doing things just because he can.
Humanity has objectively never been in such grave and immediate danger. And everyone is still in the bargaining phase, wondering how they can use it, how it could possibly be good in the long run. I guess Europe did need to become more self-reliant. I guess wokeness and pro-Palestinian protests at universities have gone too far. I guess something needed to be done for those loveable Rust Belt fetanyl addicts who long to return to the assembly line.
Maybe we can use this. But here’s the thing—you can’t use someone who is not operating in the sphere of utility in the first place. Utility requires calculation, it requires responding to reality, it requires negotiation with others. Trump just wants to act. He violates laws and restraints on principle, and that includes rejecting objective reality when it is unfavorable to his immediate demands. He chose to use emergency powers with no legal basis as the foundation for his signature economic policy simply because that would allow him to act unilaterally—so that he could personally bully and coerce every country on the face of the earth at his own sole whim. Now that that scam has run its course, he’s playing whack-a-mole with rogue states, again simply because he can. Once he gets bored with that, he’ll do something else, without consulting or explaining. (I am afraid to even joke about what it might be, lest I somehow call it into existence.)
There are a lot of emotions to feel about this situation, but for me, the main one is humiliation. It is absolutely humiliating to live in a world where everyone’s life and livelihood is ultimately at the mercy of that worthless ugly motherfucker. Personally I’ve been fortunate so far, but it is very much within the realm of possibility that his next project could be to destroy the higher education sector altogether—effectively ending my life as I’ve known it. All I can do to prevent that is to kind of hope it doesn’t happen, hope it doesn’t occur to him to (for instance) start picking and choosing which schools get access to student loans. Others are much more vulnerable, and many have already lost vastly more than I fear losing—but no one, no one on the face of this godforsaken planet, is truly safe.
We all, the entire human race, should feel humiliated that our political and economic systems have led to this result. And yet, crucially, there are many who do not feel humiliated, but empowered. It’s a perverse twist on one of the most memorable phrases from my late mentor Ted Jennings: contagious sovereignty. He used the phrase to describe what he felt in the presence of the South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko and therefore what it must have been to be around Jesus—a kind of power and charisma that didn’t dominate, but spread, emboldening everyone he encountered, infecting them with a new kind of hope and fearlessness.
Sadly, it turns out that it’s not only the good kind of sovereignty that’s contagious. Trump’s resentful, childish sovereignty is spreading like a disease, disinhibiting his followers in a way that they seem to find profoundly satisfying. Yes, he’s jacked up the prices he promised to lower and violated his supposed isolationism with multiple wars of choice, but they get to use the word “retard” again! They realize they can’t use him and they don’t care—because he gives them permission to enter the sphere beyond utility and calculation, where life has no meaning and there’s no real pleasure but cruelty, where everyone’s a fucking loser and some of us are just more honest than others.
I can understand that intellectually, as it were, but not in my gut. Something within me recoils. When I remark that Trump gets to do whatever the fuck he wants, I spit it hatefully. The fact that there are people in whom it inspires admiration and emulation—that drives me to despair. You can’t run a world like this. But then, we may not have to for long.
The big difference - and I think Adam points this out - is how nakedly power now announces itself. There’s no shame or embarrassment, no gesture towards justice or legality, nothing but “I want. I do.” I’m in my 70s and I’ve never been so despondent about world politics. As a citizen of the UK, I’m well used to being sidelined but Trump’s random dissolution of any and every pretence of alliance with other nations (Putin’s excepted…) has me seriously disturbed.
But thank you, Adam, for articulating sharply and with righteous anger what many of us have felt in our bones.
On the heels of the releases of “Shadow Ticket” and “One Battle After Another” and upon rereading some of his older stuff, I’ve been thinking lately about Thomas Pynchon. For the most part his writing, past and present, still reads as fresh and irreverent, but there’s one area that I think has not aged well: all the paranoia. The paranoia just doesn’t resonate with me, as an unwilling subject of 21st century brain-rotten statecraft. Jittery, chain-smoking Tyrone Slothrop, daydreaming of a V2 rocket-bomb with his name painted on it — "Ah, how quaint," is my kneejerk reaction. It's what my kid might call a "grandpa meme," a screengrab from a moment in time whose sense-making context no longer exists.
Two state capacities have been lost since Pynchon’s heyday, both of which are necessary for a conspiracy theory to have any punch: secrecy and planning. The Trump administration has neither. All the evil happens out in the open, and impulsively. Think of Jared Yates Sexton writing about Don JR and the Russians in 2017: "I chased this story for a year and he just . . . tweeted it out." The phenomenon has only gotten more extreme in the intervening almost-decade. "Bomb-bomb-bomb, bomb-bomb Iran" went from a kooky inside-baseball news-junkie joke to a tangible historical fact, overnight, on the whim of a guy with a phone and a toilet, like you said.
At this point, a return to a geopolitics where actual conspiracy is a possibility would feel like a return to, dare I say it, normalcy. As others have written, with different phrasing, I would peg the moment that Consipiracy died to the 2007 to 2009 era, when two big lies (the phrase "weapons of mass destruction" and the word "HOPE" in all capitals on the election material of a candidate who rescued perpetrators, abandoned victims, and bombed weddings all in the holy name of "reaching across the aisle") were revealed. Those revelations made all subsequent conspiracy-making impossible. In retrospect it's not surprising that someone like Trump would take the mantle of power. He's the one who's most internalized the lesson: nothing matters, never apologize, fuck everyone and everything else.
As for 21st century literary fiction, I keep searching for writing that captures our moment the way Pynchon captured the 20th century's boogey men, the CIA's invisible Cold War tradecraft and the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower mike-dropped about. Pynchon reads in 2026 like somebody else's history. Literary fiction written of and for our enshittified, banally horrific Present has to begin with different priors: our leaders are idiots who don't have a clue what they're doing today, nor why they're doing it, except maybe that old saw: lib-ownership.