Discourse As Governance

If you’re feeling inundated by all the news from President Donald Trump’s first two days in office don’t feel bad. That’s the point, to make both his supporters and opponents feel as if he’s doing something. I don’t mean to downplay the onslaught of executive orders Trump unleashed his first night in the White House or the immediate political violence they will undoubtedly inflict on Americans, but that’s secondary to their real objective. They are part of a new Trumpian political strategy that’s quickly coming into focus. One I’m going to call Discoursepolitik.

As much credit as Elon Musk has been getting for his hand in the Trump 2024 campaign — and for his hand making a “gesture” at the inauguration that suspiciously looked like someone Sieg-Heiling two times in a row — and, as desperate as outlets like The Times are currently to find some new cringefail middle-aged Gen X fascist to credit America’s further slide into a shambling techno-oligarchy, Trump’s big first week has been, in many ways, the culmination of everything Steve Bannon has been trying to do to both the internet and American politics since he first put on two button-up shirts at the same time and crawled out of his mysteriously acid-destroyed Florida condo a decade ago.

Bannon’s two most important political theories are that politics “exist downstream of culture” and that the only arbiters of culture that matter are the media, who can easily be distracted or manipulated by “flooding the zone with shit.” During Trump’s first presidency, this felt true enough. Trump, a creature of pop culture and reality TV and tabloids, conquered the White House and then spent the next four years ruling via a media loop built from livetweeting Fox & Friends. But American mass media is effectively over now, replaced by tech platforms whose algorithms determine culture and, thus, politics, and run on a business model that requires an ever-constant flood of shit. And it turns out the monopolists that own these platforms are just incel-adjacent enough to gladly sell their networks’ influence over to the Trump administration if Joe Rogan agrees to call them alpha males and Trump’s team promises not to regulate them. And Trump’s playbook — or rather, the playbook concocted by powerful white nationalists and religious fanatics content to use his never-ending appetite for corruption as an institutional wrecking ball — has evolved to meet this new information landscape. We’re now seeing an updated version of Trump’s govern-by-tweet strategy from 2016, but shrewdly inverted. Not tweets dictating policy dictating laws, but laws as swift and disposable as tweets, generating discourse that feeds back into the online platforms owned by all the billionaires that just swore allegiance to him. A perpetual motion machine of bull shit. Full stack Trumpism.

Trump has, so far, signed over 25 executive orders. He’s threatening at least 100 by the end of the week. He has also rescinded over 75 of Biden’s executive orders. Axios has a good running list of what’s been signed so far. But the difference between passing an actual law and an executive order, at its most fundamental level, is that executive orders come directly from a sitting president, can only be removed by a sitting president, and, most crucially, as The Truman Library explains, “are subject to judicial review and interpretation.” This is key.

It doesn’t matter if these executive orders are unconstitutional or illegal — and many are. Like his “Protecting The Meaning And Value Of American Citizenship” executive order, which aims to strip birthright citizenship from the children of illegal immigrants, and redefine what an “illegal” immigrant even is. The point is the institutional chaos and sudden cruelty that follow them. Currently more than 20 states have sued over the birthright executive order. But as it makes it way through the courts, countless Americans will be harmed and lost inside our byzantine immigration system. Now, multiple that by 100 and apply it to every vulnerable community in the country. That’s the plan.

But as I alluded to above, Trump is not a political mastermind. On Monday night, he didn’t even seem to know he was signing an executive order to remove the US from the World Health Organization. And I doubt he even cares about most of these. No one person possibly could. Which is why Trumpists spent the last year building out Project 2025 as the blueprint for Trump’s first year in the White House and he is, dutifully, following it (for now). As NBC News’ Kat Tenbarge wrote this week, “Everything from Project 2025 is happening and people won't even connect the dots because so few people are willing to read a 922 page document.” And adding proof to the idea that these laws aren’t meant to actually achieve anything besides mayhem is that many appear to have been AI generated. As Futurism reported this week, the orders have the typos and formatting consistent with using a program like ChatGPT to write legal documents. Or, possibly, he used Musk’s AI Grok.

This makes his current “negotiations” with ByteDance especially dangerous. TikTok is the new TV. It is the primary mass media-ish platform of America. And it has already been leaning more pro-Trump since November. And, as of writing this, ByteDance is signaling they may be open to Trump’s proposed 50% US ownership compromise. And Trump just so happens to think Musk would be a great US partner for the platform. The final piece of the puzzle.

But it would be naive to say that this first week will define the next four years. I’m not saying it’ll get better, but that it will certainly shift. As we learned during the first Trump presidency, he operates almost in TV seasons, which, now, with the bulk of the Republican party behind him and no one to get in his way, will feel more like phases. This is phase one. And as helpless as you may feel and as destabilizing as this all is, if we have any hope of surviving what’s to come, we have to learn to operate at the same speed. And, most importantly, learn how to see through the bull shit.

I’m Over In The Coda Story Newsletter This Week

I’m writing about the weird and frustrating fracturing of the web that’s happening right now. My issue drops on Thursday. If you want to check it out and subscribe to Coda’s newsletter, you can do that by clicking here.

Tall Barron

And here’s some additional Barron content if you’re looking for it.

Menswear Guy Vs. Fascism, And Also Everyone Else

Following Elon Musk’s inscrutable and mysterious hand gesture that some online are referring to as Sieg Heil-like in appearance, X user @David_Rudnick wrote, “The menswear guy is going to do a post about how Elon couldn’t hit the Sieg Heil comfortably because his suit shoulders were poorly tailored isnt he?”

And, yes, Derek Guy, The Menswear Guy, did end up doing that. According to Guy, the low armhole on Musk’s suit made it harder for Musk to lift his arm in a manner that some this week have compared to an arm movement popular among supporters of Adolf Hitler. Perhaps, Musk should have worn something from Hugo Boss.

But Guy has never shied away from duking it out online and had more than few dunks ready. “‘The baseball guy is going to talk about baseball isn't he?’ Listen to yourself,” Guy wrote. “Good news everyone, a twitter user called it a Sieg Heil. This has made Elon reconsider his views and now he's a socialist. Your tweets are as useless as mine. The only difference is that mine actually piss people off.”

This is probably the closest an X user has come to earnestly reciting the Rorschach prison scene.

Another X user named @tricil fired back at Guy, writing, “Except he called it and you played right into it.” To which Guy replied, “Imagine if everyone called you stupid guy and I said ‘tricil is going to post some stupid shit’.”

We may never know what Musk truly intended when he lifted his hand to his chest and then extended it vertically not once, but twice, possibly due to his social awkwardness, in a motion not dissimilar from a 20th-century salute and greeting common in Nazi Germany and one we continue to see among white nationalist extremists to this day. But at least we do all now know that you should probably not try and go toe-to-toe with The Menswear Guy.

Trump Pardoned The Silk Road Founder

I gotta say, this one surprised me. President Donald Trump this week pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the creator of the Silk Road. This has been a massive cause for crypto evangelists. I remember seeing “Free Ross” posters at most of the crypto conventions I was covering a few years back. So more than anything, I’d say this is a good yardstick for determining exactly how influenced Trump’s administration is by the crypto industry.

For those unfamiliar with Ulbricht, he created the dark web marketplace The Silk Road in 2011 and was arrested in 2013 by the FBI. He was facing a sentence of double life in prison plus 40 years, which, is astonishing, regardless of what you think of the charges that were levied against him (I, personally, think some of them were a little dubious).

If you’re looking for more clarity on how the conservative embrace of crypto is going to play out, Pastor Lorenzo Sewell, who performed a sermon at Trump’s inauguration on Monday, immediately launched a memecoin, which pumped up to $4.3 million in market cap this week before dumping 90%.

As writer Hamilton Nolan wrote this week about Trump’s crypto turn, “Do you understand the level of corruption that is on full display here? This is — I don’t want to be hyperbolic here — a level of public corruption that is, let’s conservatively say, one thousand times worse than the Watergate scandal. That was just an instance of a paranoid president trying to steal secrets from his political opponents and then covering it up. This, on the other hand, is the president-elect of the United States of America putting out a big bucket that says ‘BRIBE ME’ right before he takes office.”

Invasion Of The Bluesky Disagree Bots

Bluesky is awash right now in reply bots that basically just fight with you about whatever you post. I didn’t notice them right away because most Bluesky users also act this way. The question is why?

Pivot To AI has a good blog post with some theories as to what is actually going on, the leading one being that these are actually part of a wider test of what kind of engagement farming works best on Bluesky. Worth putting a reminder here that sowing general discord has long been a favorite tactic of state-funded troll farms like Russia’s Internet Research Agency.

Cursed Mads Mikkelsen JPG Plushie

I came across this thanks to an X user named @AniiKiira. There is a user on Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, that goes by 走为上计之策, which, based on some Google Translation and a little research appears to be a reference to the Chinese idiom, “in a dire situation, running away is the best strategy.”

走为上计之策 keeps sharing photos of their fucked up weird doll made from blurry low-res JPGs of Mads Mikkelsen. I love this for a few reasons. First, there are internet weirdos in every country and I think that’s beautiful. And, two, this actually seems like something Mikkelsen would actually really love.

A Good TikTok

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s billionaires prostrating in front of a giant AI head that hovers over a fountain of piss while it shoots lasers and Jakob Fugger meme coins at you.

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