A couple weeks ago, as hundreds of thousands of Americans took to the streets in what may have been the largest single day of protest in U.S. history, the President of the United States responded by… posting a video of himself literally dumping shit on citizens.

Not a policy response. Not an attempt at dialogue. Not even a coherent defense of whatever decisions prompted the protests. Just a middle finger, dressed up as content, optimized for maximum engagement from his base and maximum rage from everyone else.

Welcome to governance-by-trolling, where the entire apparatus of the federal government has been repurposed into a machine for generating likes, shares, and the tears of political opponents.

This is different than normal political combat. Political opponents have always attacked each other, sometimes viciously. But those attacks were typically in service of something—a policy goal, an electoral advantage, a governing philosophy. This is categorically different: a government that has replaced policymaking entirely with performance art designed solely to upset the people who voted against them.

The evidence is everywhere, and it’s getting worse. When a reporter asks the White House a straightforward question about policy, the official response is literally “your mom”—not as a joke that slipped out, but as official White House communications strategy. The Vice President continues to use a racist slur against a sitting Senator, not because it advances any policy position, but because it gets applause from the MAGA base. It takes thirty seconds reviewing any official government account on social media to see them posting childish memes insulting and attacking their political rivals.

This has nothing to do with policy. This certainly has nothing to do with leadership. It’s just a Presidency that is there to troll people it doesn’t like. That’s literally all they do.

Governance is for Suckers

They know exactly what they’re doing. Yes, there are elements of incompetence and a distorted view of how the world works, but this is a deliberate rejection of governance as a sucker’s game—something that gets in the way of what they’re actually here to do.

Actual governing requires building coalitions. It requires incorporating feedback from people who disagree with you. It requires making tradeoffs between competing interests and, at minimum, pretending that you care about the concerns of citizens who didn’t vote for you. It requires maintaining the boring, unglamorous institutions that make a modern society function—the regulatory frameworks, the expert agencies, the diplomatic relationships that took decades to build.

None of that gets you engagement on X. None of that earns you attaboys from the reply-guy brigade and the bro podcasts. And more importantly, none of that lets you loot the treasury and dismantle constraints on executive power while your supporters cheer you on for being “based.”

Yes, this administration has policy goals, but they’re focused on consolidating executive power, massively expanding Trump’s personal army, eliminating any legal limits (including Constitutional limits) on their own power, and imposing their will on the American public. It’s not democratic governance. It’s not “governance” of any kind.

And given that their goal is full and total control over the entire apparatus of government for their own very personal interests, they have no concern for transparency or communicating with the public other than this kind of performative trolling.

What gets engagement is cruelty. What gets shares is dunking on your opponents. What gets applause from the base is demonstrating, over and over, that you don’t give a shit about half the country—and that you’re getting away with your unconstitutional power grab and institutional destruction.

So they’ve optimized for this.

This is what happens when you build a political movement around a single metric: how mad is the other side? The base rewards cruelty, and so cruelty is what gets produced, at industrial scale, from the highest offices in the land. It’s the same dynamic we’ve seen play out on social media platforms that prioritize short-term growth over long-term sustainability—optimize purely for engagement without constraint, and the system fills up with outrage and abuse because that’s what the metric rewards.

Except now that dynamic is running the federal government. And the people running it aren’t confused about this trade-off. They’ve actively chosen engagement metrics over governing because governing is for suckers, and engagement is how you maintain power while you loot the rest of the government.

Meming Our Way to Institutional Collapse

I’ve spent years writing about how innovation and progress depend on stable, functional institutions. How open systems that allow for collaboration and competition create the conditions for advancement. How the “great man” theory of innovation is a dangerous delusion, and real progress comes from the institutional frameworks that enable thousands of people to build on each other’s work.

Governance-by-trolling is the opposite of all of that.

When the primary goal of every action is to maximize the anger of your political opponents, you cannot maintain the institutions that make progress possible. You cannot have stable regulatory frameworks when every decision is made based on “will this own the libs?”

You cannot attract competent experts to government service when the work environment is defined by performative cruelty. You cannot build international alliances when your foreign policy is driven by what will generate the most engagement on social media. Instead, you drive our allies into the waiting arms of our adversaries to protect themselves from being the target of the next big troll.

The goal is obvious: the active destruction of the capacity to govern at all. Who needs “governance” when you’re planning to rule dictatorially? Who needs transparency when you look to control all major media sources? Who needs competent experts when you’re just looting the system?

As such, the only publicity strategy you can bank on is “how mad can we make the libs”?

And here’s what makes it even more pathetic: they’re trying to sell this destruction as strength. Think about what it means that the President of the United States spent his time posting videos of himself dumping shit on citizens. Not because it would change any minds or advance any policy goal, but because he needed the validation of watching his base cheer. That’s not power—that’s the behavior of someone so desperate for approval, so incapable of actual leadership, that they’ve reduced the presidency to a content farm optimized for engagement metrics.

The same goes for the “your mom” response from the White House. You’re supposed to be the communications apparatus for the most powerful government on Earth, and your strategy is middle school cafeteria comebacks? That’s not owning anyone. That’s admitting you have nothing substantive to say and hoping nobody notices if you act like enough of an asshole.

Trolling is easy. Any idiot can post something offensive and get a reaction. What’s hard is actually governing. They’ve given up on that part entirely, and they’re desperately trying to convince everyone—including themselves—that this performance is actually a demonstration of strength rather than an admission of complete incompetence at the actual job.

Performance Art Masquerading As Strength

We know how this story ends because we’ve seen it play out on every social media platform that’s tried to optimize purely for engagement. The site fills up with rage bait, harassment, and spam. Serious users leave. Advertisers pull out. And what’s left is a toxic wasteland inhabited only by the people who enjoy making others miserable and the people too obsessed by the car crash to look away.

Now imagine that dynamic playing out not on a website you can leave, but in the government that controls your healthcare, your infrastructure, your national security, and your civil liberties. And it won’t be advertisers who leave but domestic investment. Who wants to invest in a country that is only focused on making half the population mad?

That’s where we are. A government that’s abandoned governing in favor of looting on the back end and generating engagement on the front end. The comms strategy is entirely about getting love from its base and blinding hatred from everyone else. Leadership that mistakes cruelty for strength and trolling for strategy. An entire administration optimized for one thing: making a massive part of the country angry while its base cheers them on for being “based” enough to loot in broad daylight.

The institutions that enable progress, innovation, and democratic governance are being systematically dismantled—not as collateral damage in pursuit of some policy goal, but as the actual point. Because maintaining those institutions requires caring about more than just the approval of your most rabid supporters. It requires believing that governance matters at all.

And that’s the real danger here: not just that they’re bad at governing, but that they’ve convinced a significant portion of the country that governing itself is the enemy. That “owning the libs” is not a strategy but the entire purpose. It’s like infants who drop food on the floor just to see everyone around them react. All MAGA can do is drop shit on the floor, looking around to see how the adults around them act.

With infants, it’s a cute act. With the entire government of the most powerful nation on earth, it’s terrifying.

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