Week one in Trumpland: The first step is seeing what’s in front of our faces

We should resist the voices attempting to tell us it’s all fine

Elon Musk, left, and US President Donald Trump. To address the elephant-sized dork in the room, we had a useful test case in media literacy this week. Picture: AP Photo/Alex Brandon

A week on from Trump’s inauguration, I have a few predictions about what will happen next. People will offer the usual big-ticket quotes from Orwell, Arendt, and Niemöller giving a quasi-intellectual sheen to one very simple observation: this is all bad, and obviously bad, and we should resist those voices attempting to tell us it’s all fine.

Another prediction is that those voices will continue to be everywhere. To address the elephant-sized dork in the room, we had a useful test case in media literacy this week. When Elon Musk, the world’s richest man — and a person I am truly sick of writing about but who refuses to disappear long enough for me to stop — took to the post-inauguration stage and, behind the seal of the American president, gave a fascist salute to the watching crowd. Immediately, people attempted to derive meaning from what seemed, to me, an obvious and deliberate gesture.

The same sturdy media apparatus that so assiduously pores through court documents — or uncovers spending gaps or analyses executive orders — is not well positioned to tackle a movement entirely predicated on bad faith gestures designed to shock and confuse — not least one whose roots are in labyrinthine internet subcultures that modern, professional journalists will have avoided their entire lives. And so, buffering at the sight of the world’s richest man delivering a fascist salute to the cameras of the world, they froze on the spot. Within hours, the sensible and serious moderates everywhere from the BBC to the New York Times caveated their coverage with quote marks or qualifiers; “what looked like”, “what some are calling”, “what many interpreted as”.

More outwardly right-wing organs tied themselves in even stranger knots, with the Telegraph insisting it was a “Roman salute”, presumably in the hopes that it would dilute its meaning. Since “Roman salute” is literally a synonym of the fascist salute, as co-opted by the Nazis from Mussolini’s regime, this accidentally had the opposite effect.

Many who, like me, had no doubt what Musk was doing mentioned Musk’s upbringing in apartheid South Africa, or the fact that his own father claims Musk’s grandparents were enthusiastic Nazis. Personally, I felt such deep historical cuts were unnecessary, since he’s spent much of the past month boosting far-right parties in the UK and Germany, and last year offered to pay the legal fees of hate groups in Ireland. Just 14 months ago, some guy tweeted that Jews were replacing the white race and Musk replied “you have said the actual truth”. These are not signs which those within the intelligence-gathering community would call “subtle”.

Elon Musk: Immediately, people attempted to derive meaning from what seemed, to me, an obvious and deliberate gesture. Picture: AP Photo/Matt Rourke)

I have no interest in the inner workings of Musk’s soul. There is no evidence that probing his mind for motivation would turn up anything more interesting than if you used telepathy on that one guy in your office who wears keyboard ties and stands too close to new female employees. Musk and his ilk are not a mystery. The horror of them is how knowable they are. My best guess is he gave a fascist salute to impress the online edgelord politics dorks whose attention he craves, the type who want to own the libs at any opportunity and frequently co-opt fascist rhetoric and imagery for these purposes.

This may seem like a “he didn’t really mean it” defence, but I assure you it is not. The only people who do this are those who have fascist tendencies to begin with. People who, like Musk, constantly post anti-immigrant bile or lobby for the release of far-right agitators like Tommy Robinson. Many may start from a position of hating the people who, say, called your favourite computer game racist, or put a black person in a ‘Star Wars’ movie, or “made their child come out as trans”, and from there self-radicalise into the sort of person who thinks goose stepping and gas chamber memes are funny.

It is a deliberate nudge and wink to the far-right ideas you actively hold, bathed in a self-defensive layer of irony from which you can always wriggle, on the grounds that it was just a hilarious joke. “I’m an edgelord, not a Nazi,” you continue to tell yourself even as your every viewpoint calcifies toward the politics of Genghis Khan.

This kidding/not kidding tactic forms the entire story of the last two decades of angry nerds on the internet. We have seen it play out everywhere sad men congregate to complain about their unhappy lives and get told that someone else — someone foreign, different, or weird — is to blame. None of it is mysterious. None of it is innocent. None of it is new.

It’s so old in fact, that Jean Paul Sartre was writing about a near identical phenomenon in 1945. “They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge” he wrote in ‘The Portrait Of The Antisemite’. “But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”

If you’ve seen people posting those words in the past few years, it’s likely because Sartre articulated, 80 years ago, that the shock, the amusement, the “did they really just do that?” factor of far-right posturing is not merely part of the package, it’s their entire gameplan. And it works. Both by normalising fascist
rhetoric until it’s no longer even named, and lampooning those who name it regardless.

My final prediction is they’re going to play this game a lot for the next four years, and we need to stop it being normalised even further. The first step is seeing what’s in front of our faces. It used to be said that American fascism would be too subtle to arrive with goose-stepping parades and salutes.

Well, in 2025, it has. So now what?