The United States of Mar-A-Lago

America, The Country Club

I spent most of President Donald Trump’s first presidency outside of the US, covering the tendrils of the far-right populism wave as they wrapped themselves around the planet. I followed white nationalists and embedded with antifascists and interviewed voters, trying to make sense of what was seemingly happening everywhere between 2014-2019. When I returned home and started writing about the Trump administration’s RussiaGate investigation I was struck by how non-ideological the American populists were compared to their fiery and high-minded international counterparts. I expected blood and soil demagogues, only to find septuagenarian gangsters incoherently blathering on Twitter all day, waiting for Fox News to read the tea leaves and turn it all into something resembling policy.

This isn’t to say it wasn’t a dangerous time in America, but it’s the reason why I’ve written countless times here in Garbage Day that I don’t think Trumpism, or the MAGA movement, is a singular set of beliefs, but, instead, a roaming set of grievances and conspiracy theories. Even with the emergence of Project 2025 last year, I was skeptical that Trump would actually follow it. But now that we’re firmly on the other side of Trump’s second first 100 days, I am starting to see Trumpism as an ideology. Though, still, maybe not a political one.

Last week, Trump hosted a dinner at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia for the holders of the $TRUMP meme coin. By all accounts, the dinner was a very bad — one attendee said they were served “Walmart steak” — and most the guests did not get any access to the president. It’s rumored that the top 25 holders of the meme coin may have gotten a private tour. Which is a clarifying portrait of what Trump wants to turn America into: Mar-A-Lago, a gated hub for fraud and grift.

If you take everything that the Trump’s administration has done this year — the Department Of Government Efficiency, Project 2025’s takeover of the Office of Management And Budget, the aggressive deportations, the meme coin, his unhinged tariff plan — they’re all meant to bake exclusivity into our government, our economy, and our very country. A pyramid scheme that you buy into with money or your vote where, like the meme coin holders discovered last week, there is always another rung you have to buy up into. Trump’s most prominent supporters may try and dress it up in Judeo-Christian values, a desire to return to traditional gender roles, or the language of free-market capitalism, but that’s all just marketing. Marketing that many liberals, and even leftists, continue to fall for.

On X last week, Paul Schofield, a philosophy professor at Bates College, said that he doesn’t understand the “‘state should run/manage private universities and also we should hollow out the very state that would run them’ plan,” recently proposed by prominent Trump supporters like The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo. Rufo wants the state to use the courts to attack Ivy League universities and pressure them to “dismantle DEI down to the foundations.” And, yes, if you believe what Trumpists say, that they are small government conservatives, that is a bit confusing. Why do they continue to consolidate — and even expand — institutional power if they don’t care about it?

I hesitate to handwave Trumpism away as just another oligarchy or a kleptocracy. In many ways it feels bolder, more systemized. Trump’s increasingly close relationship to Silicon Valley has given him better tools to reconfigure America into his beloved Mar-A-Lago. That said, a would-be dictator putting everything under state control, while also gutting the state, and installing loyalists atop its various departments is not new. In fact, it’s basically the definition of authoritarianism. They don’t want the state to run well, they just want to run it. And, in Trump’s case, they want to run it so poorly you have to pay to access a better version. Washington reimagined as a shitty mobile game. And people have already figured this out, thanks to Trump’s recent embrace of crypto. Earlier this month, Javier Selgas, the CEO of the shipping company Freight Technologies Inc., revealed that he had purchased $20 million worth of $TRUMP to hopefully give him access to the president and “advocate for fair, balanced and free trade between Mexico and the U.S.” Now, imagine every American institution requiring the same buy in to get anything done. Or, to flip that on its head, imagine anyone, around the world, who has $20 million, realizing they can influence those institutions. The Qatari government just gave Trump a plane. What did they ask for in return?

But asking these questions is hard. As I’ve written before, even now, amid what is clearly, at the very least, an attempted coup, the Democrats don’t want to, or are functionally unable to, directly face the existential crisis of Trumpism or accept that it is clearly a collection of financial crimes first and a political movement second. So they’re content burning millions of dollars thinking they can put together the perfect focus group to help them vote it all out in four years. Just look at their impossibly idiotic new initiative they’re calling “Speaking With American Men: A Strategic Plan,” or “SAM.” It costs $20 million reportedly and it amounts to, uh, anthropologically studying men to figure out why they listen to Joe Rogan, or some shit. Here’s a cheaper way you can do this. Go to the nicest golf course you can find, track down the guy with the worst clubs, and ask him why he’s paying more than he can likely afford to be there. That’s Trumpism. That’s the masculinity crisis. That’s the whole thing.

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A Good Post

The Emotional Support Kangaroo Is Not Real

The emotional support kangaroo video making the rounds right now is probably the most viral bit of AI misinfo since Balenciaga Pope back in 2023. And it’s likely tricking people for the same reasons. In the case of the pope in the coat, the AI image was convincing because the slice of reality it was rendering already looks strange. Popes wear weird stuff and the average person isn’t paying that much attention — conclaves aside — from what’s going on with the Catholic Church. For instance, have you seen the very real DJ priest?

Similarly, social media over the last decade or so has turned airports and airplanes into content PvP zones, where people regularly surveil each other having emotional breakdowns. Also, I assume no one turned the audio on to watch the AI kangaroo video — if they did, they’d hear that the two people in it are speaking gibberish — and just assumed this was another weird thing from Australia. For instance, here are two adult twin sisters from Australia that speak in unison.

But the release earlier this month of Google’s hyperrealistic video generator Veo 3 is causing some serious problems, as well. The Daily Wire’s Kassy Akiva shared a video yesterday that was purportedly showing, “Hamas set up a roadblock to prevent Gazans from getting aid.” Several pro-Palestinian activists were quick call it AI. The BBC’s Shayan Sardarizadeh verified that it’s not AI, though. The video equivalent of em-dashes being misconstrued as a tell that AI was used because AI was trained on American news content, where they’re typically standard.

If you’d like a frightening vision of where this is all headed, Puck’s Julia Alexander, I think, nailed it, writing, “Not far from a world where we have AI-created commercials selling AI-designed T-shirts to an agentic AI bot searching for a Father's Day gift.”

RIP In Peace Pocket

I thought I was used to my favorite, ahem, pockets of the web shutting down, but I have to say, this one really smarts. Pocket, the bookmarking app, announced this week that they’re shutting down in July. I’ve been a daily Pocket user since 2013. According to a recent export of all my links on there, I’ve saved over 6,000 articles.

In a small way, Pocket shutting down does feel like the end of something larger than just the app. I definitely noticed my usage dropping off over the last few years as the media industry both hollowed out and also instituted paywalls, which Pocket could never figure out how to deal with. There’s just less to read online than there used to be. Also, they never fixed their search functionality, which sort of defeated the purpose of having an archive of everything I ever read online.

Digg founder Kevin Rose reportedly wants to buy it, but who knows if that will happen. And so I do wonder what I’ll replace it with, if anything. Were you a Pocket user? Have you found a replacement? Something with offline sync? Let me know!

The Temptation Of The Bull

—by Adam Bumas

There are many consequences to all social platforms homogenizing into one identical, unstoppable, scrolling algorithmic timeline. One, which isn’t the most existentially awful, but still very annoying to me personally, is how difficult it is to find the original post that caused a trend or in-joke. A great example is how for the last couple days, I’ve seen multiple popular X posts about mechanical bulls, but it still took some digging to find the original.

For the record, the original is from Monday, when an X user posted, “Girl just told me she ghosted me because I got too drunk and rode the mechanical bull three times on our first date.” The post is a perfect example of what goes viral on the homogenized timeline: A private bit of dating gossip presented for public judgement, inviting conversations about gender around a completely random social experience.

It’s gotten all the responses you might expect, from people calling riding a mechanical bull feminine somehow, to trying to segue into sports gambling. My favorites are the memes, however, about the temptation of the bull.

The Winner Of The Rehearsal Did A Reddit AMA

I won’t totally spoil The Rehearsal finale which aired this week, but, for those who have watched it, the winner of the in-show fake reality competition Wings of Voice did an AMA on Reddit this week. (That’s not a spoiler, you’re weird if you care who won. Though, congrats to her!)

The AMA dropped at an interesting moment, though. One of the contestants on Wings of Voice did an interview with Variety, claiming they lost thousands of dollars and felt duped by comedian Nathan Fielder and his team. If you missed all of this, basically, the most recent season of HBO’s The Rehearsal features a fake American Idol-like singing competition, one that anyone in their right mind would have been at least somewhat suspicious of.

You should watch the whole season and then go read the AMA because there’s some fascinating behind-the-scenes details in there.

Doxxed By The Etsy Witch

—by Adam Bumas

@andtheg4gis

So much for supporting small businesses 😭 #etsywitch #lovespell #fyp #foryou

On Monday, a TikTok user made a video tearfully confessing that she bought a love spell on Etsy, only for the witch selling the spell to DM the intended target. Did this really happen? It’s almost definitely a bit, given the other videos on her channel, but either way it’s led to thousands of videos under the #etsywitch hashtag.

It’s been a while since we’ve had some social media witch drama, and a lot of the interest seems to be from the novelty. There are plenty of memes, and sports fans asking Etsy witches to help their team, but many of the videos are offering buying guides or earnestly requesting recommendations.

We’ve written a lot lately about how completely financialized TikTok attention has become, and it figures that any drama or inter-coven sniping would be overshadowed by people who want a Wirecutter for Wicca. But, also, that’s not a bad idea for a publication…

Let’s Check In On How San Francisco Is Doing

Some Stray Links

• “Adam Friedland Could Be the Millennial Jon Stewart. But Does He Want That?”

• “Nick Clegg says asking artists for use permission would ‘kill’ the AI industry”

• “There's more film and television for you to watch than ever before — good luck finding it”

• “The Reenchanted World”

P.S. here’s a good post about aliens.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***