Something is seriously wrong with the American presidency.
Not just politically. Psychologically.
One president appeared on television like a disoriented nursing-home resident who had accidentally been handed the nuclear codes.
And the next behaves like a permanently online casino owner with a severe gambling addiction who somehow ended up running a world empire.
AI images. Aliens in chains. Messiah fantasies. Superhero nonsense. Endless posting. Endless chaos. Endless stimulation.
And the truly insane part is: people are already getting used to it.
Five years ago, if the president of the United States had started posting AI-generated fantasy propaganda of himself arresting aliens while simultaneously improvising geopolitical escalations in real time, people would have assumed he was having a severe psychiatric episode.
Now it survives one news cycle.
Then everybody scrolls on.
That is no longer resilience.
That is learned helplessness wearing the mask of irony.
The American presidency once projected at least the appearance of gravity. Maybe it was partly theater even back then. Fine.
But now the theater itself has collapsed into the feed.
True, the feed did not create the demagogue from nothing. It selected for and amplified tendencies already latent in democratic mass politics.
Marshall McLuhan once said: “The medium is the message.”
The medium itself reshapes consciousness.
And that is exactly what happened to politics.
The presidency no longer stands above the media environment.
It has fused with it.
There once existed structures that at least attempted to contain the president: speeches, ceremonies, protocols, institutions, advisors, delay, friction.
All of those things slowed the personality down.
The feed does the opposite.
The feed rewards: instant reaction, constant presence, constant outrage, constant movement.
And so the office no longer contains the personality.
The personality infects the office.
Trump may simply be the first president perfectly adapted to the logic of the feed.
Constant stimulation. Constant escalation. Constant performance.
Even criticism feeds the machine. Maybe especially criticism.
The man behaves less like a head of state than like a content engine that accidentally gained control over an empire.
And the truly disturbing part is: the system increasingly rewards exactly these kinds of personalities.
Stillness loses. Restraint loses. Reflection loses. Silence loses.
Everything must: react, perform, stimulate, dominate attention, generate clicks, produce emotional turbulence.
You can now feel the nervous system of the culture itself inside the presidency.
The whole thing feels like ADHD at civilizational scale.
And yes, many people originally supported Trump for understandable reasons: endless wars, elite arrogance, media dishonesty, bureaucratic stagnation, economic frustration.
All understandable.
But look at this now.
The presidency increasingly feels like a man live-streaming his own nervous system directly into global politics.
Random escalations. Personal vendettas. Permanent improvisation.
Meanwhile the entire world economy sits there reacting to the emotional weather of one hyper-online personality.
And perhaps that is the real point.
The same logic that transformed newspapers into outrage machines.
The same logic that turned social media into systems of permanent emotional activation.
The same logic that transformed politics itself into engagement.
The systems no longer optimize for: truth, stability, resolution, relationship, governance.
They optimize for activation.
And activation feeds on: outrage, novelty, instability, constant stimulation, emotional volatility.
That is why absurdity now normalizes itself almost instantly.
Nothing remains still long enough anymore to feel historically shocking.
The next stimulus arrives immediately.
And that is where things start becoming genuinely unsettling.
Because perhaps this is no longer really about Trump himself.
Perhaps a culture shaped by: feeds, rage-bait, TikTok attention spans, algorithmic stimulation, constant emotional activation, eventually begins selecting precisely these kinds of leaders.
Not despite the chaos.
Because of the chaos.
The American presidency is slowly becoming something else.
Not government in the classical sense.
But another node inside the attention economy.
Another feed.
Another stream of stimulation.
And perhaps that is the real crisis.
Not that unstable personalities reach power.
But that the logic of entertainment itself has begun taking over the structure of power.
And perhaps Neil Postman’s warning has finally reached its final form.
We are no longer merely amusing ourselves to death.
We are now governing ourselves through the logic of entertainment itself.
The feed turns everything into stimulation: wars, tariffs, alliances, threats, human lives.
But bombs are not content. Dead people are not memes. And real wars do not disappear when the next thing starts trending.
That is the dangerous illusion of the feed: it makes reality itself feel reversible.
Like everything can simply refresh, pivot, escalate, de-escalate, and scroll onward forever.
Meanwhile somewhere in the real world, people bleed, cities burn and families bury their dead while the empire posts another image and the public keeps scrolling.