Just days before a winter storm overwhelmed much of the United States with snow and ice, President Trump addressed the World Economic Forum in Switzerland and declared that America was “the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
The hottest. It’s an adjective Trump likes to use, whatever the weather. Nearly 40 years ago, when he published “The Art of the Deal,” he described his efforts to promote Trump Tower in Manhattan. “We positioned ourselves as the only place for a certain kind of very wealthy person to live — the hottest ticket in town. We were selling fantasy.”
Yes, hotness is a fantasy and, decades later, Trump is still selling it. The American economy, for example, is “booming” and “exploding” and “surging” and “soaring” its way to the “fastest and most dramatic economic turnaround in our country’s history,” as he put it in Davos last week. In fact, the economy remains much like the one he inherited from the Biden administration, with low unemployment but persistent concerns over affordability.
Trump continues to sell the fantasy that he settled eight wars, that he has brought down prescription drug prices by mathematically impossible proportions and, of course, that he won the 2020 election, with the president now pledging to prosecute people for the imaginary crime of rigging it.
He must sell these past fantasies to prop up his latest one: the fantasy of a popular and successful presidency. “People are doing very well,” Trump said in his Davos speech. “They’re very happy with me.” Yet a New York Times/Siena national poll in mid-January found that more than half of registered voters disapprove of Trump’s job performance and more than half believe that the United States is headed in the wrong direction.
Above all, Trump’s insistence that we are the hottest country in the world is disproved by the reality of ICE. While half the country agrees with deporting immigrants who are here unlawfully, 63 percent of those polled disapprove of how Immigration and Customs Enforcement is handling the task. The poll was taken after the killing in Minneapolis of Renee Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, by an ICE agent, but before the killing of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old intensive-care nurse, by Customs and Border Protection agents.
In both cases, Trump administration officials immediately denigrated the slain American citizens as domestic terrorists — yet another fantasy.
Fantasies have long defined Trump’s approach to politics: the birther lies about Barack Obama, the size of the crowd at his 2017 inauguration, the invocation of “alternative facts,” the suggestion that something must be true if “many people” are saying it, the reimagining of Jan. 6 as a “day of love.” JD Vance let the veil slip briefly during the 2024 campaign, when he said he was willing to “create stories” to harness media attention around his preferred issues (then, it was the notion that Haitian immigrants were eating their neighbors’ pets).
Fantasies are alluring because they are not just about belief; they are about allegiance. The interpretation that suits your side is the one you’ll accept or embrace, no matter video footage that indicates otherwise. When fantasies involve life and death, as in Minneapolis, the stakes only rise, and the cost of abandoning your side seems impossibly high.
Protests against ICE and its state-terror tactics have spread from Minneapolis to cities across the country, including Boston, Houston, Los Angeles, New York, Omaha, San Antonio, Seattle and Washington, D.C. Our politicians endlessly debate the wisdom of putting “boots on the ground” in foreign conflicts, but many Americans are rejecting those boots on the ground in their own cities and neighborhoods. The news that broke Monday night that Greg Bovino, the Border Patrol official who has done so much to inflame the situation in Minnesota and elsewhere, is expected to leave Minneapolis, is a sign that the administration hopes to limit the damage, if not shift its strategy.
In a moment like this one, there is something especially ridiculous about Trump’s claims to national hotness. They remind me of Paris Hilton’s vacuous “that’s hot” catchphrase, or of Will Ferrell as the villain Mugatu in the 2001 movie “Zoolander,” stroking his poodle and declaring a male model to be “so hot right now.”
Trump has even ruminated about whether he was hotter as a young man or as president. “I was sort of like a hot guy,” he said at a 2024 campaign rally. “I was hot as a pistol. I think I was hotter than I am now, and I became president. OK? I don’t know. I said to somebody, ‘Was I hotter before or hotter now?’ I don’t know. Who the hell knows?”
For Trump, hotness is not just about economic success or poll numbers. It’s not just about how good you look. It’s about whether others are looking at you, about remaining the unceasing focus of the country and the world. To get there, and to stay there, you must create spectacle, stoke controversy, even if it means deploying masked federal agents, a virtual paramilitary force, to America’s cities, and letting them round up our neighbors and kill our citizens.
To stay hot, you must keep raising the temperature, because deep down every politician, like every celebrity, realizes that hotness is fleeting — it’s a vibe, a fad, a meme. The administration knows it and admits it. As a Trump aide put it when the White House was caught manipulating the image of an arrested Minnesota protester to make it look as if she was crying: “Enforcement of the law will continue. The memes will continue.”
But being a “hot” country does not make you a good country. Or a decent one. Or one worthy of respect or emulation. We have gone from being a country where immigrants come to pursue their dreams to one where leaders rule by imposing their fantasies. That’s not hot. It’s just sad.
Exactly 10 years and one day before federal agents shot and killed Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, Trump boasted: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK? It’s like, incredible.” Now that his administration is in fact shooting people in the middle of the street, was that statement a fantasy? Or will he be proven right?
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