One Week Later
Welcome to the start of America's four-year hangover
Well, we did it America, we made history! For the first time, we elected a convicted felon to the most powerful position in the world, one that is literally immune from criminal justice accountability. Someone who was TWICE impeached and led a failed coup attempt when he lost in 2020. A man whose corruption and profanity is only matched by his ignorance. We have picked someone so cartoonish and monumentally unfit that casting a villain like him would be considered “a little much” for Robocop.
Like many of you, I’ve been processing a lot of emotions over the past week… Anger. Disbelief. Fear. Sadness. Uncertainty. Working through this all-too-familiar grief is going to take weeks to months, if not longer.
While I predicted a Harris victory (again, mea culpa), obviously I did not think a Trump win was impossible. I was prepared for a repeat of 2016, where he got just enough votes in a few states to win the electoral college. I was prepared for a razor-thin Harris margin that would take days or weeks of vote counting and lawsuits to resolve.
What I was not prepared for was a broad, nation-wide victory resulting in a popular vote win. But that’s exactly what happened: 90% of counties across the US voted for Trump in higher numbers than in 2020. In swing states and blue states, small college towns and big cities, across ages and demographic groups, the entire country shifted right:
Clearly, left-of-center people like me are in the minority now.
The Autumn of Our Discontent
One of the most disorienting aspects of last Tuesday’s election was realizing that I was out of touch with the mood of most people in this country. It made me ask myself how someone who prided himself on keeping up with the news was caught so off guard. Whether there was even a point to keep writing this Substack since I’m talking to a tiny audience that likely already agrees with me, and is dwarfed by other far louder voices promoting conspiracy theories and misinformation. At times, it can feel like screaming into a hurricane (ironically the incoming administration wants to gut the National Weather Service that predicts hurricanes). For a small example relevant to my beat, Proposition 129 in Colorado passed, making VPAs a thing and changing vetmed forever.
On the one hand, we should not be surprised at all that Kamala Harris lost. She is the VP of a very unpopular administration. Incumbents all over the world have been tossed out of office by voters angry about inflation since 2021, whether left, right, or center. There are no shortage of other explanations, and every pundit has been arguing for the one that confirms their own priors. It was racism and sexism. This is all Biden’s fault. This is all the elites’ fault. It’s unprocessed COVID trauma and grief. Harris was too progressive. Or perhaps not progressive enough.
Multiple factors probably played a role. The fact that there are so many different theories and some are mutually exclusive suggests to me we don’t really have a unified explanation yet, and may never. Humility seems prudent. I am not going to sit here and call every person who voted for Trump a per se racist or sexist, although it would be useful to ask if there is perhaps a double-standard in expecting perfection from a woman of color while giving a pass to a 78-year-old man whose incoherent ramblings would make you call a neurologist if it was one of your family members.1
What I want to focus on is a bigger problem that affects more than just this election. We live in a world where everyone consumes radically different sources of information of varying quality and people occupy different echo chambers with their own version of The Truth. In fact, the original article I was going to publish on 11/4 (before I had an ill-advised burst of optimism and patriotism) was titled “Elegy For A Shared Reality,” and the message was that whether or not Harris won, this election had disturbing implications for our future.
The “FO” in FAFO
For those who aren’t in the know, FAFO is internet slang for F*@% Around and Find Out. Well, America just F’ed A, and we are now certainly going to Find Out. This is not a call for violence; it is an acknowledgment that we are ALL now going to suffer the consequences of 11/5 for years to come. In what should be news to no one but the most gullible or uninformed, yes, Project 2025 was Trump’s actual agenda:
“Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil.
There are also stories that voters who chose Trump to lower household expenses are unhappy to discover that their undocumented relatives are in danger of deportation. When CNN’s Dana Bash asked Indiana Republican senator-elect Jim Banks if undocumented immigrants who had been here for a long time and integrated into the community would be deported, Banks answered that deportation should include “every illegal in this country that we can find.” Yesterday a Trump-appointed federal judge struck down a policy established by the Biden administration that was designed to create an easier path to citizenship for about half a million undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.”
The pain will be broad-based and felt in many different ways. This summer, I submitted additional documentation in support of the Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) program, and yesterday the Department of Education got back to me letting me know they credited the additional payments. I now have only 3 years left for student loan forgiveness!
Unfortunately, that will never be: Eliminating PSLF is a top agenda item for the incoming Trump administration. In fact, they also want to get rid of Income-Driven Repayment, a key lifeline for borrowers that actually nets the federal government a lot of profit. On top of all of this, they have proposed completely eliminating the Department of Education. Whether or not they succeed in that task is uncertain, although they can definitely hollow it out, slash personnel, and defund it to the point where it functionally doesn’t exist.
In terms of agriculture, drug, food, and medical policy, noted anti-vaxxer and alternative medicine enthusiast RFK Jr is likely to have a major role in the policy direction of the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Department of Health and Human Services, and more. I am personally worried about the effects this will have on universities and scientific research for the next several years, but it should concern everyone who wants to avoid unnecessary infections or unsafe products:
How could so many Trump voters be shocked and upset to learn about his policies? One possibility is millions of people were not aware of them (or didn’t believe him). The other is they were informed, but willing to overlook the bad stuff as long as he brought down the cost of eggs. I find either option depressing.
Infopocalypse
You are weird.
Sorry to be blunt, but you are reading a long-form newsletter written by someone with multiple graduate degrees. Statistically speaking, you are likely to be college-educated, regularly read books and newspapers, have a reasonable degree of trust in our societal institutions, and I can predict with a high degree of confidence most of you voted for Harris.
Last Tuesday’s results showed people in that group are uncommon, at least among those who vote. Indeed, this is how the election results varied by news consumption:
According to Pew Research, only 38% of Americans say they follow the news most or all of the time, and this decline is particularly stark among younger demographics:
Of those who do follow the news, many now get it from social media, podcasts, and other sources besides traditional journalists:
The final factor is credibility. There is a significant (30-40 point) partisan gap in trust of national news organizations at every age level, and a smaller, but persistent gap for local news. Notably, 18-49 year olds who identify as Republican or leaning Republican trust social media more than national news:
This has exactly the effect you would predict: Many people simply have no idea what is true or false anymore, and everything is filtered through a partisan lens. In October, a survey at the Washington Post found that when asked about policy positions without being told which candidate supported them, voters overwhelmingly favored Harris’s plans. When it comes to views on the economy, Republicans—who we’ve established trust news less and social media more—swung from a rock bottom 15% approval in fall 2016 to nearly 100% approval shortly after Trump was elected! I don’t need to tell you that there was no change in GDP, unemployment, or the stock market remotely close to that magnitude. Democrats showed some partisan influence on their views, although it stayed bounded within about a 25-point range.
Here is another perfect example of a young female college student credulously parroting Trump’s “I just returned it to the states” line:
For the record, Donald Trump bragged about overturning Roe, previously supported a national abortion ban, and said women who got abortions should be punished. The fact that he has changed positions repeatedly, sometimes within the same sentence, is not exculpatory.
That so many people are uninformed or outright misinformed is terrifying; we can’t heave a healthy democracy if half the population thinks down is up and black is white.
I am reminded of this article from last summer by the critic
that inspired the title to this section. It is not explicitly about politics at all, merely a deep dive into all of the changes in our media environment from corporate ownership to generative AI content to algorithms that push inflammatory click-bait. It explains a lot about how we got here.
Darkness and Light
As terrible as the many policy outcomes of this election will be, I fear some of the greatest damage will be to the collective psyche and soul of the nation. Donald Trump brings out the worst in all of us, including me. If there is anything “poisoning the blood of our country,” it is a vain, cruel man who is constitutionally unable to finish a sentence without either boasting, insulting someone else, or both. We’re now doomed to spend at least the next four years subject to his racist and sexist rants on TV and in all-caps, typo-riddled screeds on social media.
Hate crimes across the country spiked 17% in his first year and stayed up through his term. I remember just days after his inauguration a man in Kansas shouted slurs and “get out of my country!” at two Indian immigrant engineers before shooting and killing both. Later that year, a neo-Nazi killed a counter-protester at the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally. Hate crimes surged against Asian Americans in 2020 when they were scapegoated by Trump for the pandemic.
The sequel has already begun and is shaping up to be at least as nasty as the original. Women have already reported increased harassment online, such as misogynistic right-wing trolls like Nick Fuentes spreading the meme “Your body, my choice” in a not-so-veiled rape threat. I myself have seen toxicity directed at me as a scientist:
My response has been to implement a zero-tolerance policy online: The first time anyone comes at me with crap like that, I delete their comment/email/post and block them. I’m all for good-faith debate, but life is too short to endure attacks from hateful people who have no interest in changing their minds.
Things seem bleak right now, but I want to close out this post with a glimmer of hope from a recent New Yorker article titled “It Can Happen Here”:
“One of the great spirits of modern times, the Czech playwright and dissident Václav Havel, wrote in “Summer Meditations,” “There is only one thing I will not concede: that it might be meaningless to strive in a good cause.” During the long Soviet domination of his country, Havel fought valiantly for liberal democracy, inspiring in others acts of resilience and protest. He was imprisoned for that. Then came a time when things changed, when Havel was elected President and, in a Kafka tale turned on its head, inhabited the Castle, in Prague. Together with a people challenged by years of autocracy, he helped lead his country out of a long, dark time. Our time is now dark, but that, too, can change. It happened elsewhere. It can happen here.”
I will not stop reading.
I will not stop voting.
I will not shrug and give in, slapping a red MAGA hat on because its easier.
And as my friends and family can assure you, I am congenitally unable to shut the hell up with my opinions, even when they come at a personal cost to me, so I will continue to write.
Will this be enough? I have no idea, I’m running low on optimism these days. But whether or not such civic engagement works, they are a virtue in and of themselves. That is one thing they cannot take from me.
Here Donald Trump’s 360-word answer, in full, to a question about legislation to make childcare affordable:
“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down—you know, I was, somebody, we had Senator Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that—because look, child care is childcare, it’s—couldn’t, you know, it’s something, you have to have it, in this country you have to have it.
But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to—but they’ll get used to it very quickly—and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us, but they'll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country. Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including childcare, that it’s going to take care.
We’re gonna have—I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with childcare. I want to stay with childcare, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I'm talking about, including growth, but growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just—that I just told you about.
We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as childcare is talked about as being expensive, it’s relatively speaking not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re gonna make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world.
Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about ‘Make America Great Again.’
We have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.”
(Source)
This is all so depressing but thanks for writing this post.
A great summary of how many of us are feeling, about what’s going down, will be interesting to look back one year from now and compare and reflect. I’m trying to decide what to do about my investments/retirement, with such incompetence and trade war stuff coming I don’t see how the stock market is going to weather dumb and spiteful. Then again the stock market went up during some of the most abject misery of the pandemic, pretty much nothing is rational these days.