What Trump Is Doing To Us (Or, What We’re Doing to Each Other)

A Gonzo Dispatch from the Anxiety Ward of the American Century

It's three in the morning and I'm staring at the ceiling again, which has become something of a national pastime, and I'm thinking about pigs.

Specifically, I'm thinking about a thing they do with pigs — I read this somewhere once and it has never fully left me — where if you overcrowd a pen and create the right conditions of stress and scarcity and confinement, the pigs will eventually turn on each other. Not because pigs are inherently vicious. Pigs are, by most accounts, reasonably intelligent and socially complex animals. They turn on each other because something in the environment has been engineered, deliberately or accidentally, to make turning on each other feel like the only available option. The crowding is the cause. The eating is the symptom. And if you're the one who designed the pen, you can stand outside it and watch the chaos and feel very clean about the whole thing, because technically you didn't tell anyone to bite anyone.

This is not an essay about pigs. But it might be an essay about pens.

The Anxiety Is the Point

Let me tell you what political anxiety actually feels like from the inside, because I don't think it gets described accurately very often. People talk about it in terms of policy — worried about this bill, concerned about that appointment — as if it's a rational response to specific discrete events, a kind of civic worry that can be addressed by calling your representative and drinking chamomile tea.

That's not what this is. What this is — what it actually feels like in the body, in the hours between two and four in the morning when the rational mind has clocked out and the lizard brain is running the board — is closer to the feeling you get when you realize the building you're in might not be structurally sound. Not that there's a specific problem you can point to. That the whole thing might be compromised in ways you can't see and can't fully assess, and that you are inside it, and that you have nowhere else to be.

The anxiety is ambient. It's in the texture of every news cycle, every conversation that edges toward politics before someone flinches and changes the subject, every moment where you catch yourself doing the calculation of whether it's safe to say what you actually think in this particular room full of these particular people who you thought you knew pretty well until recently. It's the specific dread of watching something that used to feel solid reveal itself to be considerably more provisional than advertised.

And here is the thing about that anxiety — the thing I want to hammer until it's understood — it is not an accident. The ambient dread is not a side effect of difficult times. The ambient dread is a product. It is manufactured, refined, and distributed by people who have correctly identified that a population living in a state of constant low-grade fear is a population that is very easy to manage.

Frightened people do not organize. They hunker. Frightened people do not build coalitions — they eye their neighbors for signs of threat. Frightened people make terrible decisions, consistently, in the direction of whoever is offering them the most vivid story about who is responsible for the fear. The fear is the mechanism. The story about who caused it is the product being sold. And the people selling it are not frightened at all.

A Brief and Non-Comprehensive History of the Oldest Trick

This is not a new trick. I want to be very clear about that, because one of the anxiety's most effective features is that it makes everything feel unprecedented — like this specific moment of chaos and division and institutional vertigo is something history has never seen before and therefore has no tools for surviving. This feeling is itself a lie, and it is a lie that serves the people who are lying to you.

The trick is old. It is very old. It goes back to before there was writing to record it in, and the basic shape of it has not changed in all the thousands of years since some proto-politician first figured out that if you could make Group A afraid of Group B, you could get both groups to forget they had a common enemy standing behind them with his hand in both their pockets.

The Roman bread-and-circuses model is the one everyone cites, and it's a reasonable citation — keep the population entertained and fed at subsistence level and they won't have the time or energy to notice what's actually happening. But I'd argue the circus element is the more important one, because bread is a comfort and circuses are a distraction, and what gets provided in the arena is something more specific and more useful than mere entertainment. What gets provided in the arena is an enemy. A face to put on the fear. Something to watch get destroyed that isn't you, which produces, in the watching, a chemical sensation that is temporarily indistinguishable from safety.

The gladiator in the sand has no politics. He is just the man across from you with a sword, and for the duration of the fight, everything else — the rent, the corruption, the water quality, the senator's villa that cost more than your entire neighborhood — recedes. The roar of the crowd is not just bloodlust. It's relief. It's the sound of ten thousand people exhaling simultaneously because for these few minutes, the enemy is right there and comprehensible and containable, and not the diffuse shapeless systemic thing that it actually is.

The arena just has better production values now. The sand has been replaced with a screen that fits in your pocket, and the gladiators change daily based on who is generating the most engagement, and the crowd never has to go home because the arena never closes. But the mechanism is identical, and the people who built it are standing outside the pen, watching, feeling very clean.

How to Build a Perfectly Functional Enemy from Scratch

You need a few things. Let me walk you through the recipe, because I think it's useful to see it written down plainly, without the dressing.

First, you need scarcity — real or perceived, it doesn't much matter. Economic scarcity works beautifully, but cultural scarcity works almost as well: the sense that something is being taken, that the supply of some thing that used to be reliably available is running low. Jobs, safety, status, the feeling that the country you grew up in still exists and still has a place for you. It doesn't particularly matter what the scarce thing is. What matters is the feeling of depletion, the sense that the bowl is emptying and someone must be responsible.

Second, you need an explanation that is simple, emotionally satisfying, and wrong. Not partially wrong — wrong, in the specific way that points blame away from the actual mechanism and toward a human face or a group of human faces that can absorb the anger without being able to effectively respond to it. The explanation needs to be simple enough to spread without distortion. It needs to produce, in the person who accepts it, a feeling of clarity and righteousness — the specific relief of finally knowing who did this — that is more addictive than almost any substance. And it needs to be wrong, because if it were right, solving the problem would dissolve the anger, and dissolved anger is useless to the people who are managing it.

Third, and most importantly, you need permission. The target of the anger needs to be rendered, through rhetoric and repetition, into something that no longer fully counts as a neighbor. Not a monster — monsters create sympathy, and you can't have that. Something more like a category. A type. A them, as opposed to us, where the boundary between those two words has been quietly moved to exclude people who were, until recently, just people. People you went to school with, worked alongside, shared a fence line with. The permission to stop seeing them whole is the most dangerous product in the recipe, because once it's been granted, the pen basically runs itself.

None of this requires a conspiracy. None of this requires a shadowy council in a paneled room deciding to do evil. It requires only that the incentives of power align with the incentives of division, which they do, reliably, almost everywhere power concentrates beyond a certain density. You don't have to plan to set the pigs on each other. You just have to keep building the pen smaller, and keep the food a little short, and wait.

The Specific Texture of Now

Here is what I know about the present moment, stripped of all the partisan framing that makes it impossible to discuss across any divide: we are living through an era in which the information environment has been engineered — by commercial interest, by political interest, and by the specific architecture of platforms whose entire business model depends on maximizing emotional engagement — to produce exactly the conditions I just described.

The scarcity is real. The economic pressures on ordinary people are not imaginary; they are the result of specific decisions made by specific people, and the rage they generate is legitimate. What has been done with that legitimate rage is the crime: it has been aimed, carefully and deliberately, sideways. Pointed at the neighbor instead of at the architect. Directed at the person across the pen instead of at the person who designed it.

And the result is that we are a population spending an enormous percentage of our collective emotional energy on each other. Fighting on the internet with people we will never meet about things that have been framed as zero-sum — your gain is my loss, your existence threatens mine — when the actual zero-sum game, the one where the stakes are genuinely existential, is being played somewhere else entirely by people who are not spending any of their emotional energy on us, because they don't have to. We're handling it.

The anxiety I described at the beginning — the three-in-the-morning ceiling-staring, the ambient dread, the feeling that the building might not be structurally sound — is real. It's responding to real things. But it's also, in its specific texture, a managed condition. It's been tuned to prevent the kind of clear-eyed, cross-group, this-is-actually-the-problem analysis that might produce something useful. It keeps you in the pen. It keeps you watching the gladiator. It keeps you, most importantly, watching your neighbors for signs of threat rather than looking at the people who benefit when you do.

What You Actually Do With This Information

I wish I had a clean answer. I wish this were the kind of essay that ends with a practical list of steps, a roadmap to collective sanity, five things you can do right now to dismantle the machine. I don't have that. Anyone who says they do is selling something, and you should check the label carefully before you buy it.

What I have instead is a few things I believe, with the conviction of someone who has thought about this long enough to be genuinely uncertain about most of it.

I believe the anxiety is not the enemy. The anxiety is information. It's telling you, correctly, that something is wrong. The task is not to make the anxiety go away — the people who want you manageable would love it if you'd just calm down — but to aim it correctly. To follow it to its actual source rather than the source you've been given. That is harder than it sounds, because the source you've been given is vivid and immediate and produces a hit of righteous clarity that the actual source, which is diffuse and systemic and implicates uncomfortable things, cannot match.

I believe the most radical political act available to most people, in most moments, is to keep seeing their neighbors whole. To resist, actively and with effort, the permission to stop. The person who has been given a different explanation than you — who has accepted a different story about who is responsible for the scarcity — is still a person. They are also, in all likelihood, in the pen with you. Treating them as the enemy is the thing the pen was designed to produce, and the most powerful way to resist the design is to refuse to perform the desired behavior.

This does not mean there are no bad actors. There are. This does not mean that harm is imaginary or that all positions are equally valid or that the person who disagrees with you is automatically acting in good faith. Bad faith is real. Harm is real. The point is not to pretend otherwise. The point is to locate the harm accurately — to trace it back to its source rather than accept the source that's been handed to you, giftwrapped in the colors of whichever team has been assigned to you.

And I believe — this is the most old-fashioned thing I'll say in this whole essay, so brace yourself — that the people who designed the pen are counting, with tremendous confidence and not without historical justification, on the fact that you are too tired and too angry and too divided to notice what you all have in common.

Proving them wrong is, at this particular moment in history, basically the whole ballgame.

One Last Thing, at Four in the Morning

The ceiling is still there. The anxiety hasn't gone anywhere — I'm not naive enough to think that understanding the mechanism dissolves the feeling, any more than knowing how a horror movie works stops it from making you jump. The dread is ambient and it will remain ambient for the foreseeable future, because the conditions that produce it have not changed and will not change quickly.

But there's something else, underneath the dread, that I want to name before I sign off and try to sleep. It's something I notice in the people I actually know — not the people on the screen, not the representatives of team this or team that, but the actual humans I actually share a world with — and it's this: almost nobody wants to be eating anyone else.

Almost everybody, when you get them away from the performance of their assigned position, is tired. Is scared. Is trying to figure out how to live a decent life in a world that seems designed to make that harder than it used to be. Is, underneath the tribal signaling and the defensive posturing, basically a person who would rather things were better and who can feel that they're not.

That's not nothing. That's, in fact, the entire foundation you'd need to build something different on, if you could get enough people to put down the performance for five minutes and look at each other without the pen's architecture mediating the view.

The people who designed the pen know this. It's why they work so hard to keep the performance going.

They're afraid of what happens when you stop.

So am I, actually — but in the other direction entirely.