Trump reflects on how he made American culture greater than ever
By David Scharfenberg, Ideas staff writer
Did you see me in the “Superman” movie? You probably did. Everyone says I was tremendous.
The fake news wants you to think Warner Brothers only made me Superman because I threatened to block their merger with Paramount. But that’s not true. ABC News reported it, but they made it up. That’s why I call him George Snuffleupagus. Not Stephanopoulos. Snuffleupagus. An imaginary reporter. Except he’s real. Big Bird showed his friends one day. He’s real. But he still says fake things. So many fake things. Which is why I told PBS, you have to stop showing “Sesame Street.” And they did.
There were some angry kids. But not all of them were angry. Kid Rock wasn’t angry. And we love Kid Rock, don’t we? He did that benefit concert for the January 6th patriots after they got out. Then he rewrote the national anthem. And what a beautiful job he did. “Trump riding the rockets red glare. Crazy Nancy Pelosi bursting in air.” A song of love.
They play it before the UFC fights now and the crowd goes crazy. It’s one of the most patriotic things you’ll ever see. And after they’re done, one of the fighters takes the flag, wraps it around his knuckles, and beats the hell out of the other guy.
Tremendous.
They’re holding some of the UFC fights in the Manosphere, now. The Manosphere! They said we couldn’t build it. But we did. Down in Texas. A shiny double dome — two shiny balls, really — with a big Elon rocket on top. Sometimes, I like to ride the elevator to the top of the rocket and just look out at our beautiful country. Look out at all the beautiful people — and the haters and losers, too.
Losers like Beyoncé. I call her Be-TWICE-é. You know why. There’s a “once” in her name: b-e-y-O-N-C-E. But she’s two-faced. So I call her Be-TWICE-é. Seems so nice, but she’s really not nice. She’s a radical left socialist. I knew it as soon as she put out her polka album a couple of years ago. Polka started in Lithuania. Or Czechuania. Either way, it was a Communist country. And Be-TWICE-é is a Communist. Be-TWICE-é the Communist. That’s what I call her. That’s what everyone calls her now.
So I’ve had a tremendous impact on the culture.
But many people are saying, what’s going to happen when the sicko Democrats take over the White House in a few months? I say, don’t worry about it. We gave a lot of National Endowment for the Arts grants to Dinesh D’Souza. He’s going to be making beautiful documentaries for many, many years.
And soon, we’ll be done with Mount TrumpMore. Right here at Mar-a-Lago. Play a round of golf and visit Mount TrumpMore. It’s going to be great. They’re going to carve my face right into it. A beautiful face. A smiling face. And you’ll be able to walk right in — right in between my teeth. I’ll eat you up, America! Eat you up. Maybe I’ll put some ketchup on there. Should I put ketchup on there? I love ketchup.
Who doesn’t love ketchup?
The next big one
By David Quammen, an author and journalist whose books include “The Heartbeat of the Wild” and “Breathless: The Scientific Race to Defeat a Deadly Virus”
It was no surprise to scientists monitoring such threats that the next big pandemic occurred so soon after COVID-19 and that the virus causing such a horrendous sequel in 2027 and ’28 was a strain of the H5N1 avian influenza. More unexpected was that this global scourge, now infamous as H5-27, which has killed more than 40 million people worldwide and wrecked whole sectors of national economies, had come out of northwestern Arkansas.
The contributing circumstances, known from public records and scientific evidence, include these: First, Arkansas ranks near the top in chicken production among American states, and most of its poultry farms are concentrated in the northwestern corner, including Benton County. Second, wild birds migrating south on the Mississippi Flyway, most notably mallard ducks, have tested positive for a near relative of the H5-27 strain. A third fateful circumstance came to light after the fact: On Jan. 2, 2027, three Benton County men drove five hours to attend the Cotton Bowl football game in Dallas. The three were old friends from high school, in Fort Smith, who all happened to find employment in Benton County’s thriving economy. One of them, the one who had what seemed an incipient cold on Jan. 2, was assistant manager of a poultry farm near Beaver Lake. He had caught the virus from handling a dead chicken, which had caught it from a mallard that had defecated in a pond at his poultry farm.
After the superspreader event at the Cotton Bowl, the virus traveled in the throats and lungs of an indeterminable number of football fans, most fatefully through Dallas Fort Worth International Airport. The first known case outside Arkansas or Texas was detected in Columbus, Ohio. The first known case outside the United States turned up at a hospital in Beijing; this patient, just arrived from Atlanta, was an international metals trader who hadn’t been through Dallas in five years. When the Atlanta man died, China closed its borders to all travelers from the United States. One day later, Russia, Brazil, Hungary, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, and Liechtenstein closed their borders to Americans too.
After the budget slashes of 2025 to the National Institutes of Health, the Vaccine Research Center in Bethesda, Md., had suspended research on novel viruses and mRNA vaccine platforms, as well as most of its other work. The pharmaceutical companies Moderna and Pfizer, after downsizing their American operations, had established cooperative agreements with institutes in Rotterdam and Singapore. Trials for several vaccines against H5-27 began in March 2027, and within 180 days the first approved mRNA vaccines were going into the arms of ordinary people. But not in America.
The internet is truly broken now
By Caitlin Dewey, a journalist who covers technology and the internet and spent six years at The Washington Post, where she served as the paper’s first digital culture critic
We once talked about the internet as a shared open space: a “digital commons,” a vast “worldwide web.” A video “went viral” when everyone you knew had seen it; a “meme” described an omnipresent joke.
But there is no omnipresent on the internet now. Instead, we all exist on a fractured archipelago of semi-gated, self-segregating sites according to our political and cultural predilections.
X is the red-pilled realm of reactionary crypto-bros. Facebook hosts the “just asking questions” crowd and some Boomer moms who never realized they could bolt. Bluesky and Mastodon are generally for lefties, though that of course varies by server, because many people started hosting their own. And TikTok, shuttered in the United States since early 2025, is home to no one at all anymore — though its devotees found new roosts on Instagram, YouTube, and private messaging apps, much as they did in India when the country shut down TikTok in 2020.
The splintering of social media predated the second Trump administration, but Trump’s rhetoric accelerated the trend. Right-wing users first fled mainstream sites for his platform, Truth Social, and other digital havens. Then, as the president villainized mainstream social platforms, many tech giants overhauled their cultures and policies to cater to him. But that also failed to save them, as users’ feeds filled with vitriol and misinformation.
Now most of us congregate in smaller, siloed online spaces: niche platforms, group chats, self-hosted servers. It’s nice, in that these spaces tend to match our values. And it’s easy to leave, should they ever diverge.
But decentralized communities also come with their own dangers. For one thing, it’s difficult to police criminal or harmful behavior across millions of independent networks. It’s also difficult, verging on senseless, to reach anything resembling political consensus or a shared understanding of the world. Most Americans once had at least “a few” friends with different politics from them, but today we rarely share physical or digital space with people who hold conflicting views. Was it our politics or the internet that fragmented first? It’s impossible to say, even with the luxury of hindsight.
Skyrocketing grift
By Adam Hochschild, an author and journalist whose books include “King Leopold’s Ghost” and “American Midnight: The Great War, a Violent Peace, and Democracy’s Forgotten Crisis”
The last four years have been turbulent.
Analysts first thought President Trump might provoke resistance to his Billionaires Protection Act of 2025. Even some MAGA supporters appeared to have reservations about the idea that taxpayers should pay a fee to billionaires for creating jobs rather than collect taxes from them. Other critics asked why Elon Musk needed to back the act when he already had been granted full exemption from all American taxes by claiming his new space station as his legal residence. But then fears of higher taxes were eased by the flood of new IRS revenue coming in from Canada, Panama, Greenland, and the newly privatized National Park Service.
In 2026, after Clarence Thomas died on Leonard Leo’s yacht, Trump’s appointment of Marjorie Taylor Greene to the Supreme Court again threatened to cause pushback against the administration. But the Republicans gained ground in the midterm elections after people had the novel experience of receiving their Social Security benefits in the form of Tesla shares. “You’ll be richer than ever!” Musk radioed down from orbit. Euphoria over this distracted the public from Vladimir Putin’s takeover of Poland and the Baltic states, which might otherwise have caused an adverse reaction.
The turning point came in 2027, most observers agree, when the Tesla shares were revealed to be of a special kind that can never pay dividends. That triggered the fallout between Trump and Musk that many had long been expecting. It also coincided with a whistleblower’s revelation that the Social Security trust fund had vanished. “We are sure immigrants are involved,” FBI Director Kash Patel said. “But the investigation may take a few years.” Efforts to substitute small house lots in the Grand Canyon and in Yosemite and Yellowstone national parks for the Tesla shares met public resistance.
It was the ongoing Social Security controversy, of course, that ultimately prevented passage of the 28th Amendment to the Constitution, which would have eliminated the two-term limit on the presidency. That forced the Republicans to nominate the unsuccessful Thiel-Vance ticket last year. President Trump’s exact whereabouts remain uncertain, but the way his disappearance coincided with that of the funds and with reports that he had been sighted at the new Trump International Hotel in Moscow have of course raised questions in many minds.
As she enters the White House, President-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will certainly have her hands full.
The ‘madman’ approach had its successes
By Omer Aziz, a contributing writer to Globe Ideas, who is working on a book about fascism in America
When Donald Trump took office on Jan. 20, 2025, his threats to foreign nations were initially seen as a joke. All through the previous Christmas break and into the new year, Trump was threatening Canada, Denmark, and Panama, vowing to seize their lands and natural resources. It was a surprise at first, and many people thought he was bluffing, but it turned out the 47th president was serious.
Trump was signaling that he’d govern like a 19th-century president. He implicitly promised to make good on the 1800s doctrine of Manifest Destiny — that land in North America and on the United States’ periphery belongs, by the grace of God, to Americans. Over the next months, he began by seizing the Panama Canal; the international community denounced the act, but Panama put up little resistance and Trump was able to get it done without loss of life. He renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America and made a formal offer to Denmark to buy Greenland.
Eventually, Trump’s bellicosity ran him into trouble.
For starters, Canadians did not want their country to be annexed by America. Canada was not for sale, but that did not stop Trump from waging economic war to hammer Canada into submission. Trump put tariffs on Canadian goods, and the Canadians retaliated, driving up prices on both sides of the border. Given that at least 20 US states had Canada as their largest trading partner, the tariffs harmed the very working-class families who had supported Trump. A recession hit, and after extracting some concessions from Canada, Trump repealed the tariffs and called it a victory.
In other areas of foreign policy, Trump’s aggressiveness paid off. His threats to China forced Beijing to make concessions on trade and dampened Chinese ambitions to take Taiwan by force. His friendship with Vladimir Putin played to the Russian dictator’s vanity, talking him down from starting other wars. Trump struck a deal with the Saudis to further box Iran in and secured an expanded regional peace deal between Israel and its neighbors. The Middle East was quieter than it had been for years.
Still, more than a few times, it appeared the world was fated for war. Trump’s “madman” approach to foreign affairs rattled adversaries and unsettled friends. In the post-Trump era, America will have to repair alliances and rebuild friendships. The world still looks to America for leadership, but the question remains whether this century will be America’s — or if China will soon be number one after all.
Our better angels returned
By Kelly Horan, deputy editor of Globe Ideas
They stopped reading the news. They swore off anything political. They binged a lot of premium television. And then a funny thing happened to Americans disappointed by the 2024 election outcome: They got over themselves, renewed their newspaper subscriptions, and got to work.
All across the country, individual citizens looked around and asked: Who is most at risk? And: How can I help? By late 2025, we began to see the emergence of what have since been dubbed the Empathy Armies: cross-generational brigades of regular people looking out for the most vulnerable in their communities. Not a replacement for the nonprofits and the state-run agencies and the libraries and the clinics and the shelters and the schoolteachers, but a load-bearing supplement.
They came with blankets, hot meals, toiletries, and a sympathetic ear for homeless people. They delivered backpacks of nutritious food to public schools for hungry children to take home. They offered translation and paperwork help and jobs to immigrants seeking a path to citizenship. They opened their homes to refugees from the world’s most shattered places: Gaza, Haiti, Ukraine, Syria, Sudan. They picked up groceries and prescriptions for elderly neighbors and stayed a while to ease their solitude. They offered school pickup and grilled cheeses and reading help to the children of single parents who couldn’t afford either child care or the time off work. They ran in local elections and for school boards on an agenda of listening, not lecturing. They helped neighbors register to vote. They showed up for soccer games and SAT prep and awards nights for students in foster care and became that one person a kid can count on.
Faced with a new administration indifferent to calls for a livable minimum wage, promising zero tolerance policies toward the unhoused and the undocumented, threatening cuts to social welfare programs, and rolling back protections for LGBTQ people and women’s reproductive rights, this quiet movement made friends of strangers and allies of the alienated, and they transformed cities and towns everywhere, regardless of how the majority there had voted.
As word spread, some who’d fled to foreign places returned, their desire to reclaim America galvanized, renewed, and put into action. There were so many ways to help. To listen. To understand.
And then these citizen volunteers, these deployers of eye contact and good listening and a helping hand, experienced curious side effects: They felt better. About their communities and their country. About their neighbors and uncles and friends who’d voted differently. And about themselves. Their lives had more meaning. They learned so much from so many people they might never even have spoken with back when it was all an irremediable catastrophe. Those dark before-times. And the people they helped felt better, too. And when they got on their feet, they paid it forward.
In just four years, the cycle of empathy begetting empathy became unstoppable. Fear and uncertainty and mutual distrust were replaced by fellow feeling and hope so heartfelt, the phrase “we the people” became the slogan of our time. Because, against all odds, the people had delivered a more perfect union. And in 2028, Time magazine named “Average Americans” Person of the Year.
This post was originally published on here
