The doom that Trump is now facing in the midterms is the result of getting exactly everything he wanted: A cabinet and a Congress of fawning enablers. So now like every authoritarian who banishes ground truth from his inner circle, he’s genuinely lost touch with planet Earth.
In his interview with Time magazine last week Trump spent most of the session blaming the “corrupt” press and pollsters for numbers which are worse than Biden’s after his terminal debate and worse than Bush in his post-Katrina hurricane slump.
He’s almost as low as Nixon before he resigned, which is perhaps why there’s a growing MAGA call to re-open Watergate and prove that Nixon was a victim of the deep state.
He told Time: “I never get fair press. Doesn’t have to be good. All it has to be is fair. So at a certain point, you say, ‘What’s the purpose of like this crazy Kaitlan Collins?’”
Chapeau, Kaitlan. Your purpose seems very clear: A young, pertinacious CNN reporter who responds to Trump’s abuse with an unblinking stare back and has gotten under his skin like nobody else.
It’s an outrage for Trump that Republicans fighting for their lives in the midterms are sidling away from his halitotic blast radius. His response has been to blanket the airways with ads touting his own economic record with a choir reciting Love Me in the background. He’s passed off the norm breaking malfeasance of paying for ads for himself with tax payer money by branding them ‘public service announcements’. On the campaign trail he’s lumbering around ruby red states hollering “pretend I’m on the ticket” when candidates are trying to pretend the exact reverse.
Trump has clearly lost the working class touch from the days when he deftly fought back against Biden’s dumb comment that MAGA supporters were garbage by riding in a garbage truck to his Wisconsin campaign stop in a high visibility vest.
Every president complains of living in a ‘bubble’. Trump loves his own. His bubble is not just presidential – it’s the surround sound echo of his circle of self dealing billionaires, first and foremost himself.
I suspect the average American voter will never be able to penetrate the stew of crypto corruption and conflict of interest deals and the pay for play favor bank that has almost doubled Trump’s net worth from $4.3-billion in 2024 to $7-billion today, according to Forbes. But by now they do understand the casual disregard he displays for their economic pain brought on by his war and his tariffs and his tax cuts for the rich even as he builds Ozymandian triumphal arches and threatens to tear down the Kennedy Center unless it features his name. Most of the GOP incumbents voted against invoking the War Powers Act to assert Congressional authority in the hated Iran war, so the last thing they want to talk about is its success.
Bubble Trouble
It has always been one of the biggest ironies of Trump’s appeal that many of the MAGA base who idolized him were the very people he has stiffed all his life – the construction workers, bartenders, plumbers; the list is legion in his lifelong habit of unpaid bills. The $5000 checks he’s promising to pay voters to turn out now are in the mail like all the rest.
Trump’s gift was to play the rich guy they always wanted to be: accessibly vulgar, big tipper, draped in glamorous women, the get-the fuck-out-of here boss who flew on his private plane but still ate Big Macs with fries and a Coke. Elon Musk’s arrival in Trump world reinvented his bubble. At first, he was a thrilling new magnet of cool nerdiness for the young MAGA bros – Iron Man himself leaping around at the old school rallies. But Musk’s insertion into government with his DOGE chainsaw smashed up thousands of lives and his accelerating, world-dominating wealth morphed him into a James Bond villain. You couldn’t make it up that he’s now back, with a new role at the Pentagon as one of three co-leads in Pete Hegseth’s just-announced Project Meridian brain trust on the future of war.
Hell on Wheels
The Tech Lords’ vaunting detachment and insatiability closely follows Musk’s notorious statement on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast that “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”. Silicon Valley’s Hannibal Lecter Peter Thiel named critics of technology or artificial intelligence ‘legionnaires of the Antichrist’. In his June 2025 interview with Ross Douthat in the NYT, Thiel demurred when asked to confirm that the human race should endure and only answered affirmatively after a long pause and Douthat’s repeated prodding.
Is it surprising that the geeks who once embodied endearing, if awkward, innovation and success have alienated the masses who once admired them? Or that public revulsion for Data Centers suddenly exploded into such a motivating voter issue for Democrats? Their gargantuan, energy gobbling presence in the cornfields of the midwest are a stand-in for a deeper moral resentment.
The sight of the AI gods surrounding Trump at his White House luncheon for Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities said it all: the combined fortunes round the table were in the multi trillions but the combined EQ of his guests was less than Trump’s age.
Without ever being asked to either vote for or design it, humanity is being hijacked and bent into a direction dictated by an uber race of emotional metronomes and the money slaves who promote them.
What in God’s name was Meta’s moral vacuum Mark Zuckerberg doing at an AI safety convening? It’s as if the multiple injuries wrought by social media never happened. After years of bobbing and weaving in congressional hearings Meta has just paid the first $45-million installment of a circa $17-billion dollar settlement for the harm done to the mental health of America’s kids. Even when he was recently offered the chance by YouTuber Joanna Stern to show he’s responded to the privacy hazard of Meta’s new creeper glasses, he said that the new audio-only version is for people who will always want them lighter or cheaper. It beggars belief that Zuckerberg drew up the first draft of the ‘White House AI safety accord’, added notes from his fellow tech deities and handed it over fully baked to the analog Bozo in the Oval Office. Trump, whose every action has blowtorched the mere concept of presidential restraint called the “self-policing” pledge the tech barons all signed “morally” binding.
The whole chilling scene reminded me of the great set piece in John Milton’s epic 17th century poem Paradise Lost, when Satan assembles a grand infernal council of fallen angels to debate whether Hell’s forces should openly confront Heaven or devise a more sinister plan.
Maybe Milton was reporting from our future and Trump and The Broligarchs were compiling the Final Part of our own Paradise Lost.
I live in Washington DC. I retired from the Smithsonian where my career was in architectural history and historic preservation. It’s sickening and depressing what Trump and his sycophants are doing to culture. I hope people are beginning to see what this disastrous administration is doing to the US -and to them.
This is Tina at her best: insightful, wickedly accurate and eerily prescient. I’ve forgiven her for the I’ll-advised interview with creepy “Lord” Spencer.