When the News Stops Mattering

BONUS: A personal-political journey through race, respectability, and the failure of the American center.

Note: I’m making the second half of the newsletter free today. Usually, it’s behind a paywall. If you enjoyed it and are still only getting the free version of this newsletter, I encourage you to use this deal to subscribe at a reduced holiday rate.

Photo by The Now Time. Paris, France. Published on November 7, 2024. NIKON CORPORATION, NIKON Z. Free to use under the Unsplash License.

I’ve been wondering lately if the mainstream, donor-driven, and corporate media have become so thoroughly delegitimized that their weekly coverage of Trump administration controversies no longer matters. Not because the issues aren’t real, they are, but because the coverage has become irrelevant to how power actually functions.

Take the current “down cycle.” Some pundits are selling the idea that the administration is unraveling, citing Republican defections, Marjorie Taylor Greene's attacks on Trump, and grumpy polls about the economy. It might feel like a win if you live inside the 24-hour cable news coliseum. But for the millions of people who only tune in occasionally, Trump still radiates the aura of stability, not because of what he does, but because of what he represents.

The symbolic power of Trumpism isn’t tethered to the daily headlines. It doesn’t wobble because of an indictment or a few angry donors. It’s cultural, emotional, almost religious. And no amount of reporting about judicial reviews or internal GOP drama is going to puncture that. Especially not when the media ecosystem profited so insatiably off of scandalizing him for years, only to deliver nothing but more polarization, justified or not.

This has been gnawing at me each morning as I sit down to pick apart the latest news cycle. Most days, it feels like I’m sifting through static.

What is the point of parsing the noise when the underlying signal hasn’t changed?

Trump is in power, again, after openly trying to overturn the last election he lost. He was rewarded for leading a legal, media, and ultimately violent campaign to subvert democracy. And he won again on the back of a platform that treats immigrants, journalists, and legal norms as enemies of the people.

That isn’t a political comeback. It’s a regime shift.

He returned to the office not in spite of the January 6th insurrection, but because of it. Pardoning the foot soldiers who attacked the Capitol wasn’t a betrayal of law and order. It was a flex of power. It was Trump telling the nation that the future belongs to the militant, the loyal, and the unrepentant. Meanwhile, the police state he emboldened is now a daily terror for Black, Brown, and Global South communities who are forced to live under surveillance, suspicion, and siege.

So yes, some observers will point to the cracks in the machine: the feuding, the legal setbacks, the chaotic optics. They’re desperate for a sign that it’s all falling apart. And maybe, for their own sanity, they need to believe that. But that’s yesterday’s framework. The real story is that Trump and his administration don’t seem the least bit rattled, because the deeper gears of power remain intact: White grievance as ideology, donor networks as fortification, and international alliances with despots as diplomatic insulation.

We are not watching a presidency in peril. We are watching a slow, swaggering entrenchment of absolute power, enabled by spectacle, immunized by disbelief.

So when I see headlines about party fractures or polls showing “growing disapproval,” I can’t help but laugh, bitterly. We’re not in a news cycle. We’re in a long coup.

And if we’re waiting for a poll or news anchor to break that story, we’re already lost.

(Generative AI)

What the Trump Years Took From Me

I was raised in the Black middle class: private schools, professional trainings, church communities, and social clubs filled with other families whose children were being groomed for prestige. I had the benefit of multigenerational wisdom too: grandparents who lived through pre- and post-Civil Rights America, who held the living memory of both segregation and the struggles that followed.

But in 2025, we are starting to look a lot more like that pre-Civil Rights America again.

Over the course of the Trump era, I’ve come to realize just how particular my upbringing was. Raised in the Mid-Atlantic, close to world cities, I grew up with multiculturalism as the norm, not the exception. Education, scholarship, business, and knowledge were treated as the pathway to security and dignity. It wasn’t just expected that I would go to college; a bachelor’s was table stakes. A master’s was the goal.

And so I bought in.

I absorbed the myth of post-racial progress that Millennials were spoon-fed from kindergarten through Obama’s first inauguration.

What Black Lives Matter Taught Me, And What Trump Proved

During the height of the Black Lives Matter movement, I was still in college. I remember debating my father about intracommunity responsibility, whether we, as Black Americans, had to focus more energy on class divides and income gaps within our own communities. But as Trump’s presence metastasized from curiosity to catastrophe, my position shifted.

I began to align more closely with progressive Black thinkers who argued that systemic racism must remain front and center. That those internal debates, while important, would always be manipulated by White institutions to dull the sharper truth: that racism is not a glitch in the system. It is the system. And America has been moving backward, not forward.

Before Trump, I still believed in the good faith of center-right and center-left discourse. I thought they represented the reasonable boundaries of American political life. But the longer the Trump years dragged on, the more evident it became that this centrist faith, this institutional North Star, was not only insufficient it was part of the disease.

The “reasonable” class, the Pod Save America liberals, and The Bulwark conservatives seemed more committed to defending the fiction of a normal past than confronting the reality of a broken present. They treated Trump as an anomaly rather than the consequence of a bipartisan failure to reckon with white supremacy, militarized capitalism, and the commodification of politics itself.

The Symbolism of Trump Is the Real Legacy

As someone who entered politics through communications and later earned a master’s degree in it, Trump’s return to power feels like the final nail in the coffin for everything I was taught.

So much of my training felt confident, even smug, in assuming that demographics, reason, and polished messaging would win. It was centered around persuasion, surface optics, and voter outreach. Not structure, history, or power. We were taught to “meet voters where they are,” as if that place wasn’t being flooded with resentment, racism, and conspiracy theories.

Why was it so hard for the donor-backed independent media and corporate press to say the quiet part out loud? That race and hierarchy were always central, and that many Americans were not reacting to economic hardship, but to the perceived loss of their place in a social order they were never willing to share?

And did that timidity, that refusal to name the truth, help usher in authoritarianism?

A Historic Failure Dressed as Stability

It’s a deeply sad thing to admit, but I believe now that the consensus that paved the road to Trumpism, and strangled the promise of the Obama years, will be remembered as one of the great American failures.

Not just a failure of politics, but of moral clarity.

Careerism, willful blindness, and greed allowed another Gilded Age to take root, this time built by people who were smart enough to know exactly what they were repeating. There were so many moments when the system could have been interrogated, reimagined, or rebuilt. Instead, we were given think pieces, focus groups, and PR campaigns.

And so we find ourselves here again, with a president whose rise didn’t expose the weakness of our institutions, but the emptiness of them. Trumpism succeeded because the people who were supposed to stop it were too committed to the performance of civility, to the comfort of myth, and to the illusion that we were better than this.

The tragedy of Trump isn’t just that he broke the country.

It’s that he revealed how many people in power never really believed in it to begin with.