This Wreckage Courtesy of the Enshittification Administration: Notes On Late-State Trumpism
In 2022, the tech critic and privacy advocate Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification to describe what's happened on the Internet to a lot of the most widely used platforms: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Spotify. He writes: "First, platforms are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." That could serve as a model for Trumpism too. Trump promised vengeance and cookies to his base, promised he could deliver whatever the hell Make America Great Again meant, even while he failed to deliver much besides corruption and destruction.
He got a lot of business leaders on board with the usual Republican incentives of tax cuts and deregulation. Now the USA is a platform he's downgrading as he, yes, per Doctorow claws back all the value for himself – quite literally with his utterly corrupt side deals, including the self-dealing with Qatar, the Trump family cryptocurrency scams, the extortion of the news media and law firms for tens of millions of dollars, and most recently and outrageously, his demand that the US Justice Department hand over over $230 million to him for compensation for prosecuting him for crimes we know were real and he continues to lie about. Your tax dollars at work.
Final-stage enshittification because the most powerful and wealthy country in the world is in crucial respects being run for the benefit of one man. That includes the fact that the obsequious Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, has largely shut down the business of Congress for months in order to protect Trump from whatever's in the Epstein files and is refusing to swear in Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who will be the crucial 218th vote to release the files. (That Trump is all tangled up with history's most famous child rapist should upset some of them.) Johnson himself has become a habitual and outrageous liar in order to serve his master.
More broadly both houses of Congress under Republican leadership have surrendered the power of the purse to Trump, letting him yank money away from funded programs or reallocate those funds. Now the federal government has been shut down because Democrats will not yield on another step into enshittification with the Republican attempt to undermine tens of millions of Americans' access to (relatively) affordable healthcare. These attacks on Congress on behalf of Trump are less dramatic than the one on January 6, 2021, but ultimately more impactful.
Trump himself is telling us it's enshittification. Saturday night, after the No Kings demonstration became the biggest single-day demonstration in this country's recent history, Trump symbolically shat on you and me and us and the first amendment's guarantee of "the right of the people peaceably to assemble." He did so by means of a grotesque AI video he posted on Truth Social shared by Republicans in his circle (and by others in outrage). In it, he wore a crown and piloted a bomber that literally dropped shit-bombs. Some scenes in the short piece showed the diarrhea-like payload streaming out of the plane; later ones showed shit-covered protestors, including the quite recognizable young Democratic influencer Harry Sisson, who protested on Twitter, only to have Vice President Vance respond snarkily.
Monday the president began tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build his casino-style ballroom, a decision that both echoed the violent January 6, 2021, attack he instigated on Congress and French Queen Marie Antoinette's (fictional) "let them eat cake" response to news that the people had no bread. The East Wing was built under Teddy Roosevelt in 1902 and remodeled and enlarged in 1942 under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, when the latter's administration was ardently fighting fascism on behalf of democracy. It makes a certain kind of ugly sense that it's being torn down by a pro-fascist anti-democracy administration (which can't stop saying loopy stuff about antifa, its fictional left-wing terrorist group). Unsurprisingly, he promised that the ballroom wouldn't involve any demolition at all and then came the wrecking ball.
To destroy the East Wing of a historic structure that belongs to us and not him, and to build this vanity project as people are being devastated by rising prices, tariff-ruined businesses, loss of public services, climate chaos, the threat of a huge jump in healthcare prices – or unable to even go to work or school because ICE is hunting brown people in too many places – is an insult and an outrage. "Yes kings" seems to be the message as federal workers without paychecks start to show up at food pantries and states report that funding for SNAP, which feeds more than 40 million of us, are running out. "The test of our progress," said President Roosevelt in 1937," is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little."
The fact that much of the money for what we might as well call the Billionaire Ballroom was donated by oligarchs and big corporations – or accepted/extorted as bribes from them – makes it even more of an assault on the founding "all men are created equal" principles of this country. The list includes corporations headed by the same oligarchs who created the social media and AI that let lies, manipulation, and information warfare like the shitbomb video proliferate and be normalized and impactful: Alphabet (Google), Amazon, Meta (Facebook), OpenAI, and Peter Thiel's Palantir.
Per Doctorow, they're not only enshittifying their own products, but global society. They have long been in charge of the degradation and corruption of information, communication, collective consciousness, and politics and the sabotage of our privacy, and it's all been fine with them as long as the profits roll in. In a sense they made Trump, who is the Internet incarnate; his mind works in the same soupy way that it does – in amnesiac claims that contradict each other (including a recent complaint about being called a king even as he claims to be one), memes, boasts, attacks, slogans, lies, conspiracy theories, and bullying.
Part of the White House has been smashed into wreckage, and that's as symbolic as it is literal. Part of the collapse of coherence in this country is the metaphorical and literal becoming one, the real and the representational being mashed up into one mess. Trump posted that video of himself shit-bombing the US while launching all-too-real aerial warfare. The US military, in violation of international law, launched the sixth and seventh lethal attacks from the air on small vessels in the southern Caribbean on October 15 and 17 and the eighth and ninth on October 21 and 22nd. The Navy's admiral in charge of the Southern Command resigned abruptly, an act thought to be taken in opposition to these extrajudicial murders or concern about being given illegal orders.
Also on Saturday, in a display that for some unfathomable reason was described as celebration of the Marines' 250th anniversary, the US military fired on itself and on American soil while Vice President Vance and Defense Secretary Hegseth watched. Artillery from the beach was directed toward Camp Pendleton, the marine base that lies between Los Angeles and San Diego. Governor Newsom was mocked for his precautions in closing the stretch of the I-5 highway which runs between the base and the coast. But sure enough some shrapnel hit a patrol car there as part of Vance's security detail. To me it read as a symbolic attack and invasion of the US by the US, a little New Civil War enactment. They are at war with us, in so many ways, these enemies inside the gates.
Vance later that day posted a picture of Trump putting a crown on his own head and brandishing a sword; the AI video cuts away to show Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi and President Joe Biden among others who kneel. The White House official account then posted two pictures, one of Trump and Vance both wearing crowns, paired with Schumer and Jeffries wearing sombreros, that Mexican headgear having caught on in Trumpland as visual shorthand for racist slurs. Incidentally a January 6, 2021, insurrectionist pardoned by Trump was just arrested for making death threats against Jeffries.
Until now every president has been housebroken. I mean that figuratively as in comported himself publicly with some degree of dignity, though because Trump's accusations and attacks often contain a fair amount of unconscious confession, it could be literal. Does the shitbomb video has something to do with the allegations that he's incontinent, or wears diapers, or stinks terribly, either because there's some truth to it or because the allegations rankle him? Trump's accusations against his rivals – of corruption, incompetence, stupidity, venality – are often confessions of sorts, and he gets before the global public the way normal people get before their therapist to talk about himself and his preoccupations – windmills, water pressure, Hannibal Lector all last year, his score on his cognitive functioning tests.
The fact that he doesn't comprehend being given such a test is a very bad sign is itself a cognitive test he's failed. A few weeks ago, in front of the icy glare of all the leaders of the US military, he went into a bizarre soliloquy about how Obama bops along without holding onto anything, Joe Biden fell every day, and as for his own perambulations, he confessed: "I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for, like, a month, stairs, like these stairs, I’m very — I walk very slowly." It seems entirely possible that his cognitive decline is not just aging but because he's surrounded by sycophants and manipulators in real life and spends much of the rest of his time in the delusional and distorted realms of right-wing internet sludge. That is, he's unanchored to reality in his daily life, as is the condition of more and more of the overly online and otherwise isolated. Other ultra-rich men like Elon Musk likewise seem to have come apart in the zero gravity of maximum privilege.
Democracy is also a force in private life, when there's people to whom we're accountable, who will tell us know when we're foolish, mistaken, harmful, and so forth. The purpose of domestic violence and other tactics of coercive control is to prevent this domestic democracy, to strip rights, agency, and voice from victims and prevent victimizers from having to hear unwanted truths. (The persecution of those who criticize Charlie Kirk is a splendid example of coercive control on the national scale.)
In the king-pilot video Trump confesses that he's shitting on us, as he boasts that he has the power to do so. It is a very fake video of the type known as AI slop and it is also reaffirming an important truth about who he is and what he does. The person who promised to drain the swamp is himself a swamp or a swamp creature (and I've alway perceived him as a sloshing, semi-liquid thing, like slime, jello, vomit, an animated meltdown, a blob of flesh in the process of liquefaction). What remains largely unsaid, except in the symbolic language of the shitbomb video, is that Trump and his gang are destroying this country to the best of their ability, by dismantling the functionality of the federal government and the ways it's supposed to serve us, sabotaging everything from nuclear stockpile stewardship to public health to FEMA to education to the rule of law and the Bill of Rights.
How did we end up so (all but literally) in deep shit? I have long believed the mainstream media has played a role, by downplaying, normalizing, dismissing, and ignoring the outrages, threats, and crimes of Trump and his party and by more broadly offering a wildly distorted picture of this country. It has been notable how muted official response to both the unprecedented No Kings marches and rallies and the shitbomb video has been by both the press and politicians.
Michelle Goldberg at the New York Times was an exception, with a powerful Sunday column there in which she wrote (gift link): " This weekend, I was surprised to learn that Donald Trump seems to see himself in the same way I do: as a would-be monarch spraying the citizenry with excrement.... A perverse delight in defilement has always coursed through MAGA circles. Describing the profoundly cynical, curdled atmosphere in which 20th-century totalitarian movements took root, Hannah Arendt wrote, 'It seemed revolutionary to admit cruelty, disregard of human values and general amorality, because this at least destroyed the duplicity upon which the existing society seemed to rest.' A similar giddy nihilism has long surrounded the president and his devotees, who often treat his unlikely ascension as a world-historical feat of trolling."
The administration is stuck in a cycle of becoming more extreme as it becomes more unpopular and becoming more unpopular as it becomes more extreme. Polls show that Trump is hitting new lows with the public. The frantic efforts to redistrict some red states show that the Republican Party is afraid it will lose the House and maybe the Senate in 2026. Opposition is cutting closer and closer to the regime itself as a Navy Admiral, a Marine Colonel, a Republican fundraiser, and a conservative lawyer who was cool with prosecuting immigrants but not with lying have all just resigned. That feels like a sign the disaffection and defection are getting closer to the center. The economy is in shambles from his idiotic tariffs and the whiplash of his wavering policies at home and abroad, and the pain of shrinking employment and rising costs will only get worse in the near future.
The Trump Administration's apparent theory of power is stupid: "we have it and you don't." Because we do have power and now more than at almost any time in this country's history it is going to become crucial that we use it. The relative stability of this country over 249 years is over, and its fate is up for grabs in the chaos they're creating. The shitbomb video and smashing of the East Wing are useful self-portraits they're giving us. The open corruption, cruelty, and destruction are insults, degradations, crimes – but most of all they're wake-up calls. To get ready, to find something to join in order to exercise the power that civil society always has and tyrants always fear, to live out our principles and commitments, to stand up for and with each other. The time to do it is now.
p.s. Doctorow expanded his theory into a book.
