We Want Dopamine. Only Trump Gives It To Us.

For as much disdain as I have for John Fetterman, that fascist apologist and collaborator, he was right when he said last month that Trump is a “unique political talent.” 

You don’t, however, gotta hand it to John Fetterman. 

Trump is reportedly involved in the most minute details of his public appearances, down to the shade of red his people use on a carpet or a curtain in his public appearances. He coordinates his ties to fit the mood of the speech and the surrounding color palette. He vets all campaign photos before they are released to the public. Trump, in short, handles his public personae like the most image-conscious reality TV star, because that’s what he is. That’s what he has been for decades. Trump is our reality TV president, in the tradition of the Hollywood actor president he idolizes.

The shadows will continue to be cast on the cave wall until morale improves.

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That Trump made a WWE-style event out of his signing of dozens of heinous executive orders after his swearing in as president of the United States should come as no surprise in this context. The president sat at a fake desk adorned with the presidential seal on a stage before his adoring fans and signed slipshod executive orders created by fascist think tanks to obliterate the rights of marginalized people, accelerate the climate’s collapse, and trick people into thinking the president controls egg prices (which are at a two-year high, curiously). The whole spectacle was that of a unique political talent, of a man who is very much tuned into the collective American Brain. 

Trump’s understanding of the national consciousness is not only superior to Democrats’ understanding, but to Republicans as well. It’s why he annihilated the GOP’s standard bearers on his way to recreating the party in his image, like a hairplug-adorned god. He is tapped in. He is logged on. Trump can see and interpret and manipulate the American Matrix like Neo with that plug shoved into the back of his head. 

I watched with my son on Monday night as Trump signed executive orders before a cheering crowd. The spectacle was altogether hideous and surreal, the most powerful man in the world not named Elon Musk enthusiastically scrawling his name on government memos designed to make Americans’ lives materially worse. Our local news anchors served as the announcers of the twisted little game, excitedly telling their viewers that Trump just signed an order that will lower cost of living for hardworking American families; Trump just signed an order that will save the country a trillion bucks because we won’t have to abide by international environmental standards; Trump just signed an order keeping our families safe from the dangerous immigrant gangs marauding in our streets; Trump just signed an order forcing lazy government bureaucrats to return to the office.

And the crowd goes wild.

My son, in between bites of his enormous pile of chocolate fudge ice cream, wincing at every terrible facsimile or a smile that flashed across the president’s face, asked what all this meant. Had the laws been changed just like that? Was it that easy to undo or create new laws for the federal government? If so, why doesn’t every president do this? 

People Need Simple Narratives

Offered no coherent story or solution to the problems created by late-stage capitalist excesses, people’s anger was boiling over, and in Trump came to leverage it for his own gain, and perhaps to remake the country in his image.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

My son just turned 12. He’s as smart as a whip, as the zoomers say, but he’s 12. He’s in sixth grade. He doesn’t yet have a grasp of the nation’s lawmaking mechanisms or presidential power or the power-sharing arrangement between the executive, the judiciary, and the legislative branches. My kid watched Donald Trump signing executive orders that seemed to instantly change the fabric of American law and life, and without some assurance from his old man, he might’ve thought the U.S. constitution had been forever altered before throngs of MAGA-clad fascists in Capital One Arena. 

It reminded me of when, a couple weeks after winning election, Trump released a slick little video announcing the end of the Department of Education. It’s all gone folks, the message went. We’ve ended the Education Department. Untold millions of Americans with no understanding of how government works interpreted this as fact: With a 60-second social media video, Trump had abolished one of the country’s most vital departments. I recall panicked posts from teachers and public school administrators on my Facebook feed asking if anyone knew of private school openings now that they were out of a job. I saw so much consternation following Trump’s utterly meaningless announcement that I felt compelled to write a Bad Faith Times piece about it. 

Through (almost) no fault of our own, Americans have no idea how any of this shit works. If the president sits at a make-believe desk before a national television audience changing the nation’s laws one by one, then the laws are changed. In this way, Trump has weaponized our civic ignorance. He knows we don’t know shit about shit when it comes to the doings of the government. That a profoundly ignorant man who operates strictly on animal-like instincts has been elected to the White House twice makes terrible sense in this context.

Trump is our ignorance manifest.

He is, I truly hate to say, a unique political talent, as Fetterman said. No other politician living or dead would have had the wherewithal to climb to his feet after a bullet whizzed by his head and create an iconic political and cultural moment amid the chaos of an assassination attempt. But Trump did, and in rising up and pumping his fist with blood trickling down his face, he captured the imaginations of the nerd-gods who are so helplessly attracted to macho displays. Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk practically pissed themselves over the image of Trump defying his assassin, urging his supporters to fight, whatever that meant. Zuck and Musk and the rest of the Silicon Valley technofascists then threw their obscene fortunes behind Trump and ushered him back into power. This all stemmed from a singular moment of astounding political showmanship. It all came from Trump's unmatched political talent, his understanding that it's all a show, and the show must go on.

As I watched Trump – with grinding molars and a churning stomach – sign executive orders in front of a packed stadium, I despaired that no one opposed to Trump has such political imagination. This was tremendous politics. There is no Democrat alive who would dream of putting on such a shameless display of power and entertainment. Democrats and their supporters would see this spectacle as debasing, as beneath them, and that is to the country’s great detriment. 

Democracy Must Be Sold To People

Storytelling is how fascists gain power. Maybe it’s the way they lose power too.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Politics must be sold to Americans. It’s how we consume things – we are told to buy them, and if they sparkle and shine enough, we do just that. Democracy must be sold to people just as fascism has been neatly packaged and sold over this past awful decade.

Americans were told by fascist forces and those who control the algorithms of our lives that the economy was bad, Depression-era even, in the run up to the 2024 election. The economy was good, actually, but that didn’t matter. People were sold the idea of a faltering economy on the brink of catastrophe and they bought it. They were sold the idea that armies of violent migrants were marching into American cities and taking them over, and though there was no evidence that anything like this had happened – or would ever happen – people bought it. All of this was carefully packed and injected into the collective American brainstem and the only solution became even more fascism. 

Weaponizing Ignorance For Good

Imagine with me for a moment, if you will: A swaggering Democratic president gathering their most ardent supporters in a 30,000-seat stadium and signing a pile of leather-bound executive orders purportedly making the country a freer and fairer place, a more equitable and less cutthroat nation in which people could live their lives without the fear that now defines it. 

Imagine this Democrat signing an order eliminating all barriers to abortion and guaranteeing access to abortion care anywhere in the country.

Imagine this Democrat signing an order that creates free pre-K education to every child in the country. 

Imagine this Democrat signing an order re-establishing the child tax credit that Republicans and right-wing Democrats killed two years ago. Call it the freedom credits. People would eat it up. 

Imagine the crowd going wild as our new president signs (mostly) meaningless orders protecting the rights of LGBTQ people in the United States and eliminating voting restrictions in Republican-controlled states and forgiving all student loan debt and creating a million new, good-paying green jobs for a future economy that does not run on fossil fuels. All of it would be immediately challenged in court and much of it would be struck down by corrupt judges sworn to protect the right-wing project at any cost. Then our new president could blame their various enemies for impeding progress and cast them as the victim of an insidious scheme to prevent a better life for the American people. 

Imagine a world in which Democrats ceded to the reality of a culture dominated by the logic of social media, where everything is ephemeral, where nothing means anything, where dopamine generation is the ultimate goal, the button we keep pushing like hamsters getting microdoses of cocaine in our little self-imposed cages. This is life in the 21st century, and Trump is the only one who seems to understand it. And no one is immune to the need for more dopamine, not even journalists who had become bored with the Biden presidency and all its dry and uninteresting norms-following. With Trump back in the saddle, these journalists' dopamine will flow and flow and flow.

Just as our civic ignorance has been weaponized against us, it can – I think – be weaponized for good. People want to be stimulated. They need it. It’s all they want, and until Democrats can offer more stimulation, more dopamine, they will be left to react to Trump and his deeply online fascist movement. 

"Can you imagine Biden doing this?" Trump belched during his executive order signings. "I don't think so."

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.