Trump and the Infinite Present

Why does it feel like this?

Living through two thirds of a year of Donald Trump’s second term has felt both like an eternity and like no time at all. “Time feels like it has collapsed in on itself,” my colleagues at the Post and I inaudibly gasp at each other as we struggle to keep up.

I asked ChatGPT: the author of this strategy is Steve Bannon. “The Democrats don’t matter,” he told Michael Lewis in 2018. “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”

The zone is indeed flooded, much more so this term. If Bannon is the Steve Jobs visionary, Stephen Miller is Tim Cook: a ruthless optimizer of the supply chain of shit. We journalists are drowning. I imagine it to be “runny, decaying shit,” like in Steve Albini’s famous essay. It makes our eyes water, we can barely see straight. But we keep trying to swim, our chins trembling, held desperately high.

The Trumpies are radically compressing time. As a day is compressed into an instant, it runs into all the other bewildering instants that are accumulating everywhere at a dizzying clip. If you try to count snowflakes in a snowstorm, your mind gives up. You just conceptualize the whole thing as an infinite blizzard. To do anything else courts madness.

I was in Vienna last week at this wonderful annual gathering of interesting people. Someone suggested that the left has ceded the future to the tech bros. The left used to have heroic stories to tell about a better future it was fighting to bring about, this person lamented. But visions of the future now belonged to the likes of space-obsessed Elon Musk.

Too easy. Too pat.

By 1989, the left’s egalitarian visions for the future were widely understood to be murderous. And as Ivan Krastev reminds us, during the Cold War, liberalism was conservative. It was popular insofar as it opposed the glaring horrors of communism. It said it was about balancing plural visions of the good, but its main promise was to keep the idealist butchers from power. JFK could rhapsodize about outer space and progress, but everyone knew the space program had military uses. And while both FDR and LBJ engineered sprawling social programs, they did so to blunt the appeal of communism among the poor.

It’s true that tech bros are obsessed with the future. And there’s an awful lot of unsavory eugenicism flavoring their enthusiasm. But in that sense they’re no different than any other millenarian cult. Futurists and communists both tried to immanentize the eschaton. That’s always a bad idea. Blasphemous, even. Science fiction nerds should be banned from running anything.

Trump’s not that kind of nerd. He’s not a nerd at all. Christopher Clark had him pegged in 2019:

Trump, whose trademarked campaign slogan was ‘Make America Great Again’, brought to the most powerful elected office in the world a political vision founded on a trenchant disavowal both of the neoliberal future of globalization and of the scientific anticipation of climate change.

Clark continues:

At the same time, his febrile communicative style has opened up a rift between the hyper-accelerated present of Twitter and the slow deliberative processes that are the daily fare of traditional democracies and administrations attuned to constitutional norms.

Maybe it’s not Bannon or Miller after all. Trump is the authentic author of the accelerating flood, the Steve Wozniak to their Jobs and Cook — the intuitive, funny, semi-autistic inventor of our moment. The demiurge of time compression, he outright rejects the future. But he’s not exactly a conservative either. He gestures to returning to some better past, yes. But it’s just a theatrical gesture.

With Trump, there is no vision. Just spectacle. You can’t look away, even if you wish you could. Behold it in all its glory. It’s coming at you all too fast, freezing you in the infinite present.