In 1949, the German historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Europe for the first time since fleeing to America during the war. A year later, she wrote an analysis of what she called “the aftermath of Nazi rule.” She found the Old World lacking in civic maturity and commitment compared with her new home, the then-booming United States, noting that “the peoples of Western Europe have developed the habit of blaming their misfortunes on some force out of their reach.” She believed that her adopted country, by comparison, enjoyed a kind of clarity of public vision: “With the possible exception of the Scandinavians,” she wrote, “no European citizenry has the political maturity of Americans, for whom a certain amount of responsibility, i.e., of moderation in the pursuit of self-interest, is almost a matter of course.” Arendt wasn’t celebrating a perfect America; rather, she was lauding a people who approached political life with an adult sensibility and a reserve of self-control.
Arendt, and any judicious observer, could not make the same assessment of America today.
The United States is now a nation run by public servants who behave no better than internet trolls, deflecting criticism with crassness and obscenity. The White House press secretary answers a question from a member of the free press—a serious question about who planned a meeting between the American and Russian presidents—by saying, “Your mom did.” The secretary of defense cancels DEI and other policies by saying, “We are done with that shit.” The vice president calls an interlocutor on social media a “dipshit.” The president of the United States himself, during mass protests against his policies, responds by posting an AI-generated video of himself flying a jet fighter over his fellow citizens and dumping feces on their heads.
These are not the actions of mature adults. They are examples of crude people displaying their incompetence as they flail about in jobs—including the presidency—for which they are not qualified.
The republic will not fall because Vice President J. D. Vance has decided that swearing is edgy, and the juvenility of American public life did not begin with the Trump administration. But the larger danger under all of this nastiness is that President Donald Trump and his courtiers are using crass deflection and gleeful immaturity as means of numbing society and wearing down its resistance to all kinds of depredations, including corruption and violence. When the U.S. military kills people at sea and Vance, responding to a charge that such actions might be war crimes, responds, “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” the goal is not just to boost Vance’s hairy-chest cred; it’s also to grind others down into accepting the idea of extrajudicial executions.
The collapse of a superpower into a regime of bullies and mean girls and comic-book guys explains much about why American democracy is on the ropes, reeling from the attacks of people who in a better time would never have been allowed near the government of the United States.
For years, Trump has attracted acolytes by being the patron saint of the third string, gathering people who seem to feel, for various reasons, that they were iced out of national politics. Some hold opinions too extreme for any but a Trump administration. Stephen Miller’s odious views, including his echoing of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric and his accusation that the president’s critics are terrorists, would make him a liability not just in any other administration but even at a family dinner, as remarks from some of his own relatives have suggested.
Other Trump appointees, however, have used personal loyalty as the bridge across the chasm that separates their lack of ability from the jobs they occupy. The experiences of prior Trump appointees suggest that many of the current crew know they are in over their head, which could explain much about their churlish and unprofessional behavior.
Consider the candid admissions of Stephanie Grisham, a press secretary in Trump’s first term who later walked away from Trump. In 2021, she explained to New York magazine why she took the job in the first place.
For people like me—and I’m not proud of this—you have a sick sense of pride. All the people who told you how terrible he was? You’re like, Oh? He’s the nominee, buddy! I’m not proud of that. And then he wins, and you get into the White House, and you’re in the White House.
To be fair, many reasonable people have the same kind of awestruck moment when they arrive in Washington. (I certainly felt overwhelmed many years ago when I showed up for my first day of work in the Senate.) But Grisham admits to a deeper insecurity: “I thought that they”—the Trump team—“were the only ones who would ever get me there. My lack of confidence in myself as a single mother and someone who has made mistakes in my past, I thought, Well, this is my only shot. Nobody’s gonna ever want me, really, but these people did. So I’ll stick around.”
This kind of private insecurity can manifest in public life as childishness and trollishness. Or maybe such behavior is simply a reflection of the man at the top. Like all schoolyard bullies, Trump is crude and surrounds himself with people who will not challenge him. Thus his appointees, instead of rising to their responsibilities as public servants, emulate their boss’s shallow swagger. Instead of advising the president, they seek to placate him. Instead of showing leadership, they replace their own dignity with loyalty to Trump and do whatever it takes to stay out of the Eye of Sauron.
Whatever the reason for their immaturity, the effect is miserable policy and a corroded democracy. The public is poorly served and does not get answers to important questions. Tariffs? Inflation? Immigration? Peace or war? Who’s responsible for these choices?
Your mother, apparently.
The corruption, mendacity, and incompetence of those in charge are perhaps less astonishing than the willingness of Trump’s most loyal supporters to tolerate them all. By now, any other president would have been restrained by Congress or, as happened in 2020, by voters. In Trump’s second term, however, his base seems almost eager to forgive him for anything, with the possible exception of his involvement with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
But Trump’s popular support (which is probably firmest in the range of some 35 to 40 percent of the U.S. population but much higher within the GOP) is not as much a mystery as it might appear. Americans of all political leanings have been poisoned for years by memes and disinformation. They have marinated in the nihilism of a culture that regards everything with a kind of post-ironic glib dismissal. (As usual, The Simpsons was ahead of its time: A 1996 episode shows two teens at a music festival, where one asks the other, “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” The other, crestfallen, says: “I don’t even know anymore.”)
Perhaps Trump’s voters have become like the members of the administration, delighting in the crassness and obscenity that pours out of the president and his circle whenever they are challenged. The White House’s approach to social media in particular, as my colleague Ali Breland wrote recently, “now resembles the polemical, trolling, vicious manner of posting” pioneered by white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes and his fans, who have become more visible participants in the MAGA movement during Trump’s second term.
Friedrich Nietzsche created a concept that can help us understand this political moment. He imported a word from French to describe a kind of deep-seated anger that goes beyond transitory gripes: ressentiment, a feeling that comes from a combination of insecurity, an amorphous envy, and a generalized sense of resentment. Citizens engulfed by this emotion want to bring others down to what they think is their own underappreciated station and identify scapegoats to bear the blame for their misfortunes, real or imagined. They are driven by grievance and a continual, unfocused sense of injury. Accordingly, they see politics as a way to get even with almost everyone outside of their immediate circle. A Trump voter put out of work during the 2019 government shutdown captured this mentality when she exclaimed: “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
Sociologists and political scientists have long been aware of the effects of ressentiment on entire nations, not least because it is often a red flag: a marker of a society ripe for decay into authoritarianism. And that is where the danger lies in the juvenility and coarseness among both the Trump elite and its most loyal supporters, some of whom treat grave issues of national and even global importance as little more than raw material for mean-spirited jokes and obscene memes. This shallow behavior leads to a deadening of the moral and civic spirit that undergirds democracy.
People who are willing to accept “your mom” as an answer to important questions are people who have already decided that democracy is a rigged game. The political process, for many of them, doesn’t seem to be a means for solving common problems and developing solid policies. Instead, they treat it as just another opportunity to excoriate their fellow citizens. They may support candidates such as Trump (and the late Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and the now-imprisoned former leaders Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil) not because they expect responsible government, but because such candidates promise to hurt the right people—to humiliate them, impoverish them, and perhaps even shoot them.
What can other American citizens do when faced with a government that offers trolling and obscenity as replacements for governing? How do people who care about democracy and the rule of law deal with fellow voters who keep electing a class of public officials who seem to be all id and no superego?
Perhaps most important, other Americans should model the behavior they hope to foster in their friends and neighbors. Populist ressentiment is not necessarily produced by inequality. It’s driven by a perception of inequality, a sense of being looked down on by others. It is a demand for attention and emotional engagement. But trying to answer that demand is a fool’s errand: On social media, for example, some of Trump’s voters seem especially enraged not by arguments but by indifference. The whole point of their trolling is to gain attention and then intimidate others.
Both online and in daily life, Americans who are part of the pro-democracy coalition should resist such invitations. Responsible citizens must hold themselves to a higher standard than officials who are acting like grade-schoolers. The national figures, from Trump on down, who put out rancid bait may do so because they want others to argue and lower themselves, and thus prove that no one holds the moral high ground. (Perhaps this is why Trump and so many of his supporters resort to whataboutism when confronted with their behavior.) When these leaders and their followers swear or behave rudely, they may hope and expect that others will do likewise.
As tempting as it is to trade punches to the groin, the better approach is to model mature behavior and demand it in return from people being paid to serve the public. When the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt answered the journalist S. V. Dáte’s text-message question about who chose the location of a possible U.S.-Russia summit with “Your mom did,” Dáte texted back: “Is this funny to you?” Leavitt then went full Regina George, calling him a “far left hack” and refusing to answer his “bullshit questions.” Leavitt later posted the exchange on X, where Dáte responded: “Feel better now? Now can you answer the question? Please and thank you.” That’s the only way to go: Ask the question, and then ask it again, and keep asking.
This is not Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” argument. (Even she seems to have abandoned that strategy.) Rather, it is a recognition—and a plea—that the voters and candidates who wish to replace this current government must present themselves as stable, responsible, and adult alternatives to a claque of trolls and incompetents. (Even California Governor Gavin Newsom’s troll-back of the president, as clever as it was, has run its course.) The right answer now to the faux-macho silliness of someone such as Pete Hegseth is not to produce clever memes and nicknames for the secretary of defense; it is to remind people that Hegseth is acting like a teenager and trying to distract Americans with idiotic slurs about fat soldiers because Pete Hegseth is terrible at his job.
Like most things that require some adulting, this approach is emotionally unsatisfying. And it may not gain much ground if enough Americans have decided that they are satisfied with poop jokes as public policy. The “No Kings” protests, however, are an example of how people can mobilize to mock ridiculous behavior (and do so festively, even) without the mayhem that Trump and his lieutenants seemed to hope would arise.
In addition to marching, Americans who care about democracy must organize and vote in every election, no matter how small or local. And in their personal lives, people who want to restore maturity to national government must be clear with those around them, even if it means risking their personal relationships, that some things, such as glib schoolyard taunts and scatological nonsense from the commander in chief, are not acceptable.
Americans have learned that guardrails are easily destroyed. Restoring them will take time—because they have to be repaired by each of us, one person at a time, making small but important decisions about how we want to live.
The post America, the Juvenile appeared first on The Atlantic.
