Splinter: This Is Who We Are to the World
Markets are up big today, the day after the president of the United States announced that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” Like everything in the life of the man America elected twice to represent us, this was a lie, as Trump backed down from his genocidal threat for two weeks so his people can do more insider trading in a market desperate to go up at any cost. Oil prices plunged over 15% when the president of the United States declared a ceasefire on the social media website he owns, and markets today have reacted with joy (not the treasury market where smart money trades though, it clearly has its doubts about the durability of this supposed ceasefire). Equity markets are joyous today not necessarily because a whole civilization did not die last night, but because the downside risks to stocks were avoided, at least for a day, which is the only timeframe that these markets seem to care about anymore.
The matter-of-fact way she asks what investors should do if Trump destroys Iran. Absolutely wild.
“Let’s talk about tonight, this deadline that President Trump has set 8 p.m., has threatened to destroy a civilization. How does an investor process that? Is it a bigger upside risk or downside risk?”
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) April 7, 2026 at 11:06 AM
This is how we present ourselves to the world now. It’s unambiguous. The caricature of the boorish, unfathomably selfish and clueless American tourist has now been fossilized into the global lexicon as our Trumpian avatar. It doesn’t matter whether you voted for him or not, we all swim in the same rotting cultural milieu defined by greed, apathy, confusion and a revanchist group of Americans who hate other people more than they can ever love anything. It is our generational project to rebuild what America is and does to the rest of the world after Trumpism inevitably collapses, the only question now is how big of a mess is going to be left to clean up. Our problem is we have more messes than just Trumpism that we have yet to resolve or even acknowledge.
It is a strange thing, to live a day under the ultimatum of a reality TV show host in control of nuclear weapons saying that by primetime, he will let the world know whether or not a whole civilization will die tonight at the hands of your own country, but I guess it is not too distant from the nuclear world my boomer parents inhabited. We like to think of Trump as some great anomaly—and he is in many nakedly autocratic ways—but his fame and TV presence is far from unique in a country who opened the Cold War with a president who won in large part because of how good he looked on TV against his sweaty opponent, while the Cold War closed down under a Republican president who began his career in Hollywood. Trump is simply yet another marker of how shallow our starfucker culture runs.
We are not all genocidal maniacs, of course. Polls show that most Americans are decent people who do love their neighbors and they are largely opposed to this unhinged project to install an evangelical theocracy in America. The main problem is very clearly our 18th century political system that is failing in many ways our Founders warned us about and how it leaves so many of us powerless. But many of those Americans who are now opposed to this fascist project like Theo Von elected it to power after one failed Trump presidency and a failed coup afterwards. No Trump 2024 voter is allowed to feign ignorance about what they voted for, or be surprised that yet again Trump has broken his electoral promises. At best, many non-MAGA Americans have revealed themselves to be indifferent to our society’s crimes against humanity and how Trump sees many of them as something to aspire to.
Politics is a dirty word in mainstream America, existential discourse to be avoided like religion and other things that force you to firmly believe in something, be introspective and consider that the world might be bigger than your own ego. Best to just talk about the supposed apolitical things you saw on TV last night, like the endless array of copaganda shows or The Apprentice. Americans are largely not like Trump, but Trump could only emerge from one vapid and superficial culture on this planet where greed is good, apathy is widespread and celebrity reigns supreme. We all own a piece of this cultural failure that has led us to unambiguously tell the world that we are represented by the most ignorant and selfish man alive who casually talks about wiping out entire civilizations as some demented negotiation strategy that never works.
Who owns what responsibilities to varying degrees is something we will all squabble about over the coming years as our domestic politics gets more fraught and further resembles the breakdown of the 1920s, but this will likely be of little consequence to our international reputation. That is set in large part thanks to the Sell America trade the past year. The world is putting their money where their horrified mouths are. We have all been flattened into just a bunch of untrustworthy ignoramuses like Trump. Every time I log on to my finance Twitter account late at night to see what the European and Asian posting hours look like, I scroll through us “burgers” getting obliterated by some of the meanest posts I have ever laid my eyes on. It’s not necessarily that the rest of the posting world seems to hate us, it’s that they largely pity us for being so cowed, hypocritical and stupid. Here’s just one brutal example I saw the other night.
But what really makes all this depravity stick is how much of it predates Trump, and how he represents an oversized cartoonish version of many of our historic evils. The Democratic Party backed a right-wing genocidal regime in Israel also publicly promising to wipe out a civilization, and then called Jews like me antisemitic for saying the plain fact that Israel is a genocidal apartheid state. America massacred people across the world during the Cold War in the name of combating communism, and the Monroe Doctrine is responsible for immense suffering in Central and South America across multiple centuries, which is probably why Trump has named his hemispheric rebranding the Donroe Doctrine. Manifest Destiny is just another term for the genocide of Native Americans, and this concept is intrinsic to our national character to this very day as Trump attempts to honor past presidents to expand our borders into Greenland. Claiming dominion over another civilization is not a feature unique to Trump—it’s as American as apple pie.
Trump is just a boorish point of no return where the cat is fully out of the bag now. Biden and Obama ran on supposedly restoring the American character in the wake of collapse, only for one to support a genocide while another dramatically expanded George W. Bush’s Middle East drone war he ran against in 2008. Any global credibility that Americans thought they could retain after Trump’s first election has been completely obliterated, and it had been dwindling for decades at this point anyway. Trump is both a symptom and an accelerant of our national decline.
American credibility has even been falling with Americans, as you can plot our mounting distrust of institutions along with increased dissatisfaction over the Vietnam War and the immense pain and suffering across Southeast Asia it caused that we sacrificed thousands of Americans troops in the name of. America began as a compromise between slave owners and slave financiers to build a country on the graves of the natives and on the backs of slaves. Trumpism is just unambiguous proof that we never atoned for our dual original sins, and like Trump, much of what we claim to be is an outright lie.
Slavery isn’t even fully banned in America in 2026. I voted to fully abolish it in Colorado in 2018. “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,” begins the 13th Amendment before it carves out a giant loophole creating a billion-dollar publicly traded carceral industry that Trump is now expanding with his ICE concentration camps. “Except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” A report published in 2018 found over 400,000 people living in “modern slavery” in the United States.
We are liars, both to the world and ourselves. Trump is a far closer avatar for how America has long presented itself to the rest of the world than any of the clueless End of History types who think the key to fixing all our problems is to time travel back to 1996. The CNBC anchors above asking whether genocide is bullish or bearish is shocking to watch, but there is a rank honesty in that segment that does not animate most discussions of who we are. Genocide has never been a red line for the American government, whether it benefits us or not has been the key question ever since the days of Manifest Destiny.
But that doesn’t mean we are hopeless. America is the country that birthed both Donald Trump and John Brown. Abraham Lincoln and James Buchannan. It attracts newly minted Americans across the world ranging from Elon Musk to Albert Einstein. It is easy in despairing times like these to lean into the negative as I have above, which is a toxic trait us lefties will have to ameliorate leading up to an election where we can seize serious power in America. The toxic trait our liberal allies to our right must work on if we are to unify and use this dying imperial star for good is focusing only on the Einsteins and Lincolns, while falsely saying the Trumps and Musks are “not who we are.”
We are both Trump and Lincoln. Both hucksters like Musk and geniuses like Einstein. We create true revolutionaries like John Brown and literal capitalist Nazi sympathizers like Henry Ford. Americans are a lot of things, and unfortunately, we have used up most of the world’s patience to see that nuance. They have been forced to deal with the calamitous consequences of our elected government’s actions, and it’s hard to blame anyone in Tehran living under true terror to look at all of us as the only 330 million people in the world dumb and depraved enough to elect Donald fucking Trump as president twice.