Which will pop first—AI or Trump?

Hope you're making plans to be a part of No Kings on October 18. It has to be bigger than the bubbles.

It would be funny if Donald Trump's "Katrina" turned out to be Jimmy Kimmel.*

The regime's move to cancel a second late-night show ignited the one truly inspirational backlash of 2025. For the first time in this ice age of the American spirit since Trump won the 2024 election, we woke the hell up. 

Consumers quickly managed the basic gist of "non-cooperation" (we will not abet your bowing to dictatorship or even an electric slide towards it) and said, "Nope." Elites recognized they could still say "Woh, woh, wait!" to this regime and have well over half of the country not just behind them but cheering for them. And the regime ended up staring at their fingernails speckled with a wintry mix of gold fleck and Trump-branded feces, wondering where the wizardry was. (Meanwhile, trans, Black, and brown activists who'd been trying to summon similar responses to *any* of the regime's sick abuses cried to the ages, "WTF? Where have you been? You all can just do that? Why don't you do it all the time?")

You could see why even a venerable critic of the right like Paul Krugman might ponder, "[I]s the Jimmy Kimmel affair the harbinger of a failed Trumpian putsch?"

He reasons through recent examples of authoritarian U-turns, comparing Trump's sprint for the crown to the defeat of democracy achieved by Vladimir Putin and, to a far lesser extent, Viktor Orban, and finds "America is not yet lost."

That is definitely true. As Andrea Pitzer notes almost weekly in her podcast that I produce, "We are singularly poised to act in ways that most citizens and residents of other countries that got mired in hardening authoritarianism were not." And we may never be freer to act than we are today. That's the regime's plan at least.

Krugman's primary metric for comparing Trump's ascent to his role models is popularity. Doubtlessly, our flailing, fake Führer is unpopular, about as unpopular as he was in 2017, with a larger and more persistent opposition to his systematic demolition of the federal government and America's role in the world.

But America in 2025 is not the country we were eight years ago. You can debate when the slide toward fascism really began, but 9/11 has to be the inflection point. Still, I trace the key trigger to Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter and the GOP taking control of the House in early 2023, replacing a focus on January 6th with an assault on any attempt to limit the right's domination of digital media.

With Trump allies taking over CBS, TikTok, and possibly CNN to create a media monster poised to infect minds in a way that will challenge our ability to approximate reality, which has already been decimated, in ways most of us cannot yet imagine.

All of this is to say that we may no longer be a country capable of a "Katrina." That would require the media to fixate on an issue for weeks, digging deep to unpeel an onion of controversies, something only Fox News is capable of doing in 2025. We are a country of competing realities and algorithmic and cultural bubbles that make it nearly impossible to share a common reality. And even before right-wing billionaires seeking an end to social democracy purposely quartered our consciousness, we've always been a country where a Herbert Hoover could get almost 40% of the vote at the pit of 1932's despair and John McCain could get nearly 46% as his party was losing two wars and most of the global economy.

Driving Trump's support down to the 30s, where Bush ended up as the Great Recession began and his term ended, cannot be fated to end the project of Trumpism the way it sank George W. Bush's approval ratings so severely that he hasn't appeared at a Republican convention since.

We are still at the end of the beginning of an authoritarian consolidation that is progressing rapidly in hopes of sabotaging elections in 2026. The upcoming midterms so obviously favor the Democrats that the entire GOP is rewriting any rule they can to rig those elections, as the president's top henchman has made it clear his goal is to ban the Democratic Party (more on that tomorrow).

However, I don't think we can honestly say how this will all progress until two enormous and obvious bubbles burst, which they may soon do and should have done months ago.

We have the AI bubble, which makes more sense than the second one, but not much! We all know AI will be with us for the rest of our lives, at very least like "asbestos," as Cory Doctorow wrote. 

The most suspect aspect of this revolution, generative AI, is clearly swallowing some creative and coding jobs while dousing our brains with slop. The world will never be the same with the ability to transcribe, edit, and create media now as simple as using Microsoft Word. And every day, it becomes an even more seamless salad shooter of utility and disorientation.

But as readers of Ed Zitron's newsletter, and only the readers of Ed's newsletter, know, it's also "unprofitable, and has always been unsustainable.

The second bubble is as unsustainable yet possibly more enduring because it is immensely profitable, especially—and perhaps only—for those at the very top of our economic caste system. This bubble remains inflated and swells with the delusion that "Trump is only coming for them."

Watching the elites surrender to Trump one by one, like they're failing Republican candidates for president in 2015-16, is astoundingly painful in the way that has revealed my own naivety. Of course they did. 

Once the wealthiest man alive was all in on Trumpism, as he was by 2022 at least, it was an invitation for every greedy and/or shortsighted bastard to follow. And maybe they're smarter than I am. Definitely richer, which is the only metric that matters to them, much like the stock market is the only poll that matters to Trump.

Our economy is floating at record highs as Elon Musk has become the first American to tip toward trillionaireness even after he's destroyed his brand, tied his future to the perpetuation of this regime, and bet his company on robots that are entirely the product of fabulation and fraud in a way that dwarfs the remarkable amount of fabulation and fraud that go into his cars and rockets. 

Are these two bubbles feeding each other the way they are gorging Musk's wealth? Surely. We'd have had AI either way. We must assume that the mission to save John Connor failed. But the way Trump has unleashed the industry and the requisite dirty power generation it demands harmonizes with all the ways he's inviting corporations to ravage us and our future. And it's making the bubble bigger and longer.

But it will burst.

We are now losing jobs. Inflation is endemic. The costs of Trump's controlled disintegration of the global economy and the federal government cannot even be safely estimated yet.

Yet a record stock market—a bull run that feels like it will simultaneously never end and yet cannot last another day, much like the feeling right when everyone figured out Trump had been lying to them about COVID.

But America is different now. Those who favor dictatorship over worker power and/or multiracial democracy have far better and incomprehensible tools. We've numbed by death and inculcated to horrors on our street that serve nothing but a lust for power.

So which will happen first? 

Will the elites recognize that Trump wants to be our Putin, and there's room for only one Putin in a country? And they'll act, or at least back off their enthusiastic support, before the windows start opening around them. 

Or will the entire economy double over? Will we begin heaving people out of jobs and homes, as Wall Street is forced to realize that the only thing keeping us out of a deep recession is the technological equivalent of rich people keeping Tinkerbell alive by applauding? Or could the false belief in the rapid profitability of an impossibly overhyped technology be kept alive for months or years more by the lust for the true promise of AI: The destruction of the value of labor?

Or will the popping of one bubble force a sudden reframing of the other, as some of the forces that could create a "Katrina" reassert themselves and the survival instinct of this union erupts through the crust the billionaires and the authoritarians have shoveled upon our dignity? 

We cannot know. And we have to find a way to keep ourselves and our souls despite that. As Andrea notes in the most recent NEXT COMES WHAT, you can swallow a frog or two. But then nature rebels.

But you know by now that we're living in a moment where are meanaced by two giant bubbles. And when they burst, the frogs will rain down on both the wicked and the good.

*A "Katrina" for anyone who isn't old, or sopping in the lore of the mid-2000s, is a tragic event of impossible incompetence that breaks the "spell" a president has on the media and the country, allowing everyone to see just how corrupt fools are dooming us. Ron Fournier—who would become the drum major of "But her emails!"—was famously in search of Obama's "Katrina." And his best take was a shoddy rollout of a program that ultimately insured tens of millions.

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