Oh yes, my brothers and sisters, it is a golden age, just as promised.
But it is not exactly the kind of golden age we were hoping for.
It is a golden age for bad presidenting. It is a golden age for crappy leaders making crappy decisions. It is a golden age for corruption and destruction. It is a golden age for billionaires f---ing over America and the world.
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And as it happens, it is also a golden age for gold, because that’s what the world buys when we’re all heading to Hell in a handbasket.
In the vernacular of over-educated, latte-drinking Bluesky users, it is a golden age for kakistocracy. It is a golden age for polycrises. It is a golden age for stochastic terrorism. (I beg you, friends, please never use such language. It only irritates ordinary people, like those of us from New Jersey who prefer to express our anger in more colorful bursts. For us it is a golden age of getting screwed 10 different ways by “our” government; a golden age for America’s assholeocracy to crush us under their bootheels.)
What it is not a golden age for, as it happens, is the term “golden age.” That’s dead. President Trump has killed it. No one will ever be able to use it again without making people think of the era of redolent deep brown s--t through which we are all now living.
And don’t think I’m just talking about the arrogance and idiocy that produced this week’s market cataclysm. Or the recklessness that produced Signalgate. Nor the abandonment of our allies and the sordid betrayals that have led to the support of our enemies. Nor the gutting of our health-care system, education, culture and science that are part of an unprecedented war on truth and knowledge. Nor our government’s police state tactics. Nor the contempt shown by our leaders for the Constitution they have sworn to uphold.
Each of these things is egregious and horrible in its own right, of course. Take the current economic disaster that is unfolding on the world stage. Our golden leader deserves immense credit for a historical financial first—he has taken a robustly health economy and put it on the critical list, in record time. Trump alone is responsible for crushing the U.S. economy like it was a bug or, worse, like it was one of the many businesses he ran into the ground during his benighted “career.”
But see here’s the thing: It’s not just the stupid guy doing stupid things to the economy, stupid. Heck, even Mussolini made the trains run on time. (Or so they say.)
What we’re witnessing now is something so different that we can barely comprehend or communicate it. In every major area of policy, the Trump administration is embracing actions and promulgating policies that are not just bad, but rather contenders for being the worst in the nearly 250-year history of the nation.
For many of us, the problem is that with so many simultaneous disasters unfolding at once—each of them infused with ugly ideologies and bent characters, and almost all of them promising to get worse—it’s impossible to direct our outrage constructively.
Should it be at what my friend Ed Luce of the Financial Times calls “the recession of choice” that is being triggered by the Trump tariffs? The mass layoffs at RFK Jr.’s HHS that will cause death, disease and suffering? The threats to our national security revealed by Signalgate? The MAGA budget plans that will increase the deficit by $5 trillion to $9 trillion over the next decade just to accommodate more tax cuts for the very rich, costs that will be borne by the rest of us as they cut away at Social Security and Medicaid?
We know that some of the defective characters responsible for this debasement of American values should be fired—ideally far into the heavens, perhaps on one of Elon Musk’s Space X boosters. But where do we start? Obviously, the simple answer is Trump. But we also know that is not going to happen. Ever. The problem is, he knows it too. There are no more elections for Trump. There is no one who will ever hold him accountable again. For anything.
Thanks, Chief Justice Roberts. Nice job.
And so this is where we are, in a period unlike any other in our history, a golden age of WTF and SMH, and exploding head emojis, and not being able to sleep at night for worrying about the ones we love, and groceries that are too expensive, and racism, and lies, and an ever larger tsunami of s--t heading our way. That’s the golden age we’re in.
And as golden ages go, well, I think we can all agree, this one sucks.
