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

Sat, 25 Jan, 2025 - 02:00

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.