I’ve spent the past weeks wondering which outrageous act would prompt me to write about Trump 2.0. Keeping up with the firehose gush of ratfuckery emanating from Washington is exhausting and demoralizing.
Today’s televised White House meeting between Trump, J. D. Vance, and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was the tipping point. The meeting degenerated into a shouting match where Trump and Vance scolded Zelensky for being insufficiently grateful to Trump.
It should go without mention that Trump and Vance’s conduct was beneath the dignity of the American presidency. But so has so much of what has transpired since January 20th. Elon Musk’s gang of teenaged incel tech-bros hiding behind an imaginary government agency randomly wrecking actual government agencies is probably the worst of them. The dismantling of USAID alone will diminish our standing in the global community. Our holding NATO at arm’s length will do the same. Cuts to Medicaid will imperil the health of millions of economically vulnerable Americans.
Just as troubling is Trump’s slavish sucking up to Vladimir Putin. Putin was undoubtedly the target audience for this morning’s public dressing down of President Zelensky. This, coming on the heels of Trump’s repeated assertions that Ukraine was the aggressor in its war of with Russia, was a perverse form of virtue signaling to ingratiate himself with Putin.
Then there are the more mundane policy proposals, particularly tariffs. In the fantasies of the MAGA-verse, these will be a “Take that!” to our imagined rivals. In reality, they will drive up the price of imported everyday commodities. Tariffs will also provoke retaliatory tariffs, dampening the market for U.S.-made goods. Then again, few in the base will believe that rising prices will be the fault not of tariffs but of—take your pick—Biden, congressional Democrats, irresponsible blue-state governors, DEI, ad nauseum.
The media are falling eerily in line this time around. Not that they have a choice. First, the Associated Press was banished from the White House press pool over the AP’s insistence in calling the Gulf of Mexico…the Gulf of Mexico. Then, the White House press office wrested selection of the reporters in the press pool from the White House Correspondents’ Association. The confrontational, occasionally belligerent demeanor of MAGA Barbie press secretary Karoline Leavitt does little to ease media relations.
The squeezing out of mainstream news services is accelerating. Fox News Channel has long been the most-watched of the cable news nets. Fox and the popularity of alt-right outlets appear to be incrementally taking control of the national narrative. Really, the dominant message taking hold is little more than a string of tropes. Here is the right’s narrative reduced to a few words: A mob of trans drag queens, along with the illegals, will descend upon Real Americans to take their Bibles and guns while grooming their kids in woke ideology.
Or maybe it is more than making the world scary for the base. While inflation is slowing, prices are
sticky. The received wisdom since November
5th is that voters were attracted to Trump because the Democrats had
not done enough to make daily life affordable.
Sounds true. Probably true.
In closing, I have just one question for those non-MAGA voters who went with Trump last November.
Still worried about the cost of eggs?
© 2025 The Unassuming Scholar