Live by Influencer Logic, Die by Influencer Logic

Trump's arraignment and its long shadow, cast by January 6.

Well, Trump has been arraigned on 34 criminal counts, as everybody with the ability to put words on the internet will have already told you. Will he actually suffer any consequences? Oh, of course not. But I, like you, have non-consensually manned a domestic news desk for the last seven years of social media hellfire, and it does somehow feel like the end, or the beginning, of a chapter SO WE ALL GOTTA FLAP OUR JAWBONES ABOUT IT.

I admit I had a moment, a mere moment, mind you, of worry about what might happen in New York City yesterday. It’s instinctive. My body has learned an immune response to this scrape of talking mucus in a bad suit. Something doesn’t go Little Lord Tauntleroy’s way, my endocrine system goes sour, my stomach tightens, I prepare for yet another “never happened before” to instantly happen. I, and I’m sure most of you, knew January 6th was going to be very bad, because we have internet access and brains. But this?

Yet, part of me knew. And all of me was entirely unsurprised by the sad little turnout for the court proceedings of a sad little man on Tuesday. More journalists than protestors, a lot of braying and honking and bravely turning tail and fleeing from fascist fuckwaddles, because fascists are always, always cowards in the end, and also in the beginning. And the middle. They only seem strong when they can put a hundred layers of PR, bodyguards, and scripted narrative between themselves and regular people.

It was entirely this, but less fun

The problem is, it was just never going to get any better for Donald Trump than January 6th, 2021. And it may never get that good again.

It was perfect. Almost literarily perfect. The narrow, pinched chest of every shit-souled fascist swells with bittersweet longing whenever they imagine just how delicately all the pieces fit together on that long-promised day.

Everything had come together just so: an election close enough it couldn’t be called on the night, enough obfuscation and madness around the certification that mostly-reasonable people could be whispered to that it was all Satan’s Math and to be ignored, a pandemic still in its pre-vaccine phase that had people regressed to pure ids in Friday casual clothing, desperate to get out, to get together, to get into it, to get something, anything. A summer of enormous protests and some violence that Trump’s people had successfully managed to frame as wanton chaos for no purpose and without virtue, disappearing people into white vans with impunity so total we don’t even talk about it anymore. A loyal segment of the population hungry to break any law attached to the concept of COVID and starving for some version of insane apocalyptic post-societal End Times to make their little lives exciting, while their political enemies were still committed to staying indoors as the winter plague season surged and feeling a bit relaxed as the election and dancing in the street was done. The backchannel opposite-land social media networks used almost exclusively by Trump’s ilk were still new and not often accessed by the normals. And Trump was still President, still on Twitter, still protected, still swaddled in bunting by the right wing media machine that had shown how handily it could make anyone believe anything. He wielded all the levers of power: he’d fired half his security and intelligence people and hired new fanatical ones during a period where most outgoing Presidents are just making sure they don’t forget their favorite toothbrush and all the media had to say was “hmm, weird.” He could thin out the police presence, he could manipulate and threaten Republican legislators, no one knew how loyal or not Pence would prove to be, he could theoretically use the military or anything else to stay in power, and it was entirely believable that he would pardon anyone who showed up to his call, and thus, all this fun would be consequence-free.

It didn’t even have the decency to snow. A blizzard in DC in January wouldn’t have been remotely out of place, but it was sunny with temps in the high 50s. Trump and all his people were physically there, on site, watching from monitors, and Tangerine Trujillo was not on his way to trial but utterly free to get up and tell everyone to fight and die so he didn’t have to lose his ill-gotten job. He’d never lost yet. Few of his gibbering horde had been told no since 2016. Everything he’d done wrong had passed through the Murdoch Event Horizon hell-filter to come out smelling of gold and a mutilated rose garden.

And perhaps most importantly, none of what was planned had been tried before, so there was a way to consider going or not going to the party—and they truly did consider it a joyful, thrilling, triumphant party with towers of crustal goblets overflowing with dopamine and hopamine—that was not completely bugfuck stupid: after all, maybe it would work. Maybe the conservative promised land was nigh at last.

While the future is a hot mess and 2024 and beyond not even a little bit certain, while they may in the end actually send this country into the oubliette of full theocratic fascism, there was an element of surprise and uncertainty and chaos on that sunny day that will never, ever come again.

It really was lined up as well as it possibly could have been. They didn’t even know what they were going to do, so any one of them could convince themselves of any purpose to it. Some came to murder lawmakers, some came to say they were there, some came to promote other, weirder conspiracy shit, some apparently came to poop in the halls of power. All came smiling. But when you don’t really know what’s going to happen, there’s an energy and excitement in which you can convince yourself you’re not a fucking psychopath for even being there.

And it didn’t work. And if it didn’t work when it was all fun and wink-wink sneaky-sneaky aren’t we having a lovely time overthrowing the government with our friends and family, it’s pretty hard to convince people to beat a cop to death with an American flag a second time when nothing is lined up, well or otherwise.

And now they know some things they didn’t then. Regular people saw a minotaur in the Senate so they’re much more likely to believe shittery in the first degree is afoot on any given day than half my friends on January 5th who had no idea what I could possibly be talking about when I said I was worried about tomorrow.

But that part is much less important than the fact that Trump’s social media following is much reduced by his not being on any mainstream platform (and god help us all, the nightmare clownfire that is Twitter is still mainstream for now), and though there are many who are still on the slowly-derailing, toxin-oozing Trump train, they all fucking saw he didn’t pardon anyone, didn’t pay their legal bills, let people go to jail, let people die without a care in the world for them. They might LARP about his still being President, but they know very well he’s not running the NYPD—and New York itself isn’t DC. It isn’t the heart of American rule. They sure tried, but there’s no way to spin turning up for his arraignment as taking back the country. The result of even massive protests would not be taking the whole of America for the Wish.com Gilead cause, it might be at best a delay in a mandatory court procedure, and that’s just not sexy. This one was purely about helping him personally, mostly about making him feel better, and he himself has been very open about that.

The message Trump succeeded with was that he could do things for crazy-ass bonkers conservatives no one else would even try. It’s not as seductive to turn that around and demand they do for him when he is in no position to return any favors and won’t be for a good while.

The defining, unifying trait of Trump and all his people is selfishness—and descending on New York for the sake of his dumb ass right now isn’t a good move for anyone selfishly motivated, which, again, is all of them. I’m not saying they can’t be activated again—oh, they very much can. But if your base is selfish people, man, you gotta make them believe it’s worth their while.

It’s a funny place Trump finds himself in right now—he can still fundraise/grift, he’s ahead in primary polls while DeSantis looks like a pathetic balloon-fart getting teabagged by Disney, he’s been asked back to Twitter but can’t really legally land his ass back in all our faces as he now owns his own social media platform, and it owns him. He’s not in every single headline anymore, but everyone’s still afraid of what he might be able to do.

He’s a down but not out influencer, which is kind of what he’s always been. And if you’re gonna rise by the rules of influencer life, you’re gonna die by them, and as a midlist writer with a middling social media presence, I do know a little about those rules.

See, how many followers you have matters a little. Of course it does, it’s how you get noticed to begin with. But what matters a lot more is how many of them you can get to show the fuck up. Whether that means buying something you promote or physically coming to an event, whether or not any of those numbers actually respond to the constant influencer “call to action” is what actually determines success. In my line of work, that’s very well seen by how many people will actually turn up to a reading in a major city vs how many will retweet my clever quip about hedgehogs of an idle Tuesday. One is an indicator of my reach, one is really not.

Out of any large follower-count, there’s the people who just have you in their feed but don’t really look at who posted it, don’t read more than occasionally, or are just too lazy to unfollow you and thus don’t ever engage, the people who read actively but don’t make any point of contact, then those who reply, comment, retweet or reblog or what have you, increasing reach, then you get into much smaller numbers with much bigger rewards: those who buy your products, those who support you outside the buyer/seller dynamic, smaller yet, those who will show up in the real world to your events, and the smallest of all, those who would volunteer to be your street team and do labor for you.

If you’re a good person, you’re quite friendly and grateful and giving with those last categories because they are giving you the very precious gift of their time and care, irreplaceable resources. If you’re a bad person, you…aren’t.

(Ha ha, see, it’s ironical, because of how he’s supposed to be a fucking billionaire—and has any phrase ever had more repulsive brilliance than “blue collar billionaire”—and I’m a dork with a keyboard who has to pay taxes like a stupid asshole and yet he found a way to somehow grift vastly more annoyingly than a mid-essay subscribe button—also, the ADHD involved in having not one but TWO em dash clauses INSIDE parentheses. Pull yourself together, ding-dong.)

The greatest hope I have for the future is that while the money-faucet is still fully on, and so, most likely, is the vote-faucet, Trump appears to no longer be able to get large numbers of people to do those last two, turn up and work hard getting others to turn up for his lame social media stunts.

Because that’s what they are. Even January 6th. His was the world social media finally gave us, the influencer President who made us live real life in a maelstrom of social media tropes we couldn’t escape.

And I do love using the word influencer to talk about any of these heartless posturing cruelty-peddling alpha male half-melted douche-popsicles, because it genuinely seems to bother them to be lumped in with a job they all tend to associate purely with women they disdain, when people like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate and even Joe Rogan have never been any different from a girl in tight pants hawking essential oils and sad neutral home decor on Instagram. And living that life, they are not immune from the cycle of attention or the harsh reality of how small the percentage of followers who will actually do anything in the real world is compared to the big number under your username.

He burned his audience, and you never burn your audience. The social contract between a content creator and their particular cultivated garden is always slightly different creator to creator, but if you don’t provide what’s expected when they do, that garden will wilt.

And what a nice April wilt this is to see.

I am NOT saying he’s no danger. I am not saying those who love him don’t still love him passionately, on a level of worship rarely seen. They very much do. They’re just lazy, as they’ve always been, and selfish, as they’ve always been, so it no longer looks like a fun time to show up for their man, and that can be the beginning of the end. It’s social media. People come for the lolz, as the kids used to say. The lolz are pretty sour and nasty these days, but the kind of people who go hard for 80s Man are as sour and nasty as they come. And it hasn’t really been fun for them since January 7th. The fight is harder and the wins fewer, and that just doesn’t feel the same. MTG doesn’t seem to understand that, interestingly, the part where it has to feel fun to your goblin-friends while you do your evil, not just stressful and weird and risky and uncomfortable to talk about with anyone outside the clubhouse. Trump had the knack of making fascism feel fun to people who never learned what actual fun is, and I’m not sure anyone else has it the way he does just now. I’m not sure DeSantis has ever even had fun once since birth.

So please don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying the conditions that made January 6th possible can’t come together in a swirling garbage singularity once again. It will be harder, it will be less chaotic and naive, but it can happen. We don’t ever get to not be vigilant, not anymore. But it has to be conditions better than the perfect storm of January 6th, because they had a golden moment, and it failed. Anything that looks less than golden might get folks smashing like and subscribe, but it won’t get them dragging all their friends to the IRL show.

I’m not even saying the number of people in those last and most coveted categories of Trump’s influencer/audience relations are zero. Sadly, someone will probably try to hurt that judge or his daughter now that they’re radioactive family is posting their information everywhere. It’s just so much less than it was, and that’s something.

What I am saying is that you live by the motto Fuck You, I Got Mine, you do actually have to give your ravening horde theirs, eventually. You run up a tab on their stunted, miserable, sadistic hopes and dreams, you better pay up. Or you’ll find yourself at the bottom of the Old Meme graveyard with the hamster dance, peanut butter jelly time, and the pernicious idea that fascists have ever been competent.

That is both the comforting and the completely terrifying thing about the moment as it stands. Because if little old midlist me knows they have to make good, so do they, and they are running out of time and space to curbstomp this world into oblivion.

But if there is any good news left in this world, anything at all we can rely on, it’s that Donald Fucking Trump does not ever pay his bills.