When the White House is Run on 80s Pop Culture Icons, Things Fall Apart. Fast.
The United States is in a precarious position. A greedy corporate class and a obedient middle-class have no idea what their personality defects are bringing.
Because corporate swine don’t know when to quit, they just keep taking and taking. They are psychopaths who are rote binary competitive thinkers: it is 1 or 0, and they always have to be the 1 and everyone else must be the 0 by default. They then have to outdo everyone else, and it doesn’t stop until someone stops them, or the system collapses because these are people with no self-control, morals, or common sense.
The middle class think enduring the abuse means that they seem well-off. No, it just makes you a chump and an exploitable unit to harvest. These are people with no backbone, guts, or common sense.
In the middle of this two factions, sits the one expected to make sure neither one of these reality-stunted groups feel the organic consequences of their personality defects: the federal government.
People give Donald Trump way too much credit for his policies. He is too childlike and spoiled to do anything but throw temper tantrums and humiliate himself with narcissistic memes when he’s not being fawned over. Trump of 2016 is not the same as Trump 2020, Trump 2024, or even Trump 2026. You don’t go through so many personality shifts unless you are being stage managed by different groups of people.
The problem is 2016 Trump at least had some people with experience, expertise, and knew how to play the game. But they were all burned out, kicked out, or they marched out. People with equal or superior expertise got the memo: don’t go there.
So the pool got smaller, and the pickings were slim. People who were grifters and goobers with no expertise, had to tell Trump what a Great Man he is, and then guess how to run this whole government thing. Except what they know comes from the movies and television shows they consumed.
The question is why.
The answer is simple: he stacked his cabinet with desperate Gen Xers, whose perceptions of reality were shaped by pop culture more than any other generation, and Trump was a Greed is Good icon of that era. I asked Perplexity to give me a list of Gen X players past and present in Trump 2024’s cabinet, and the list was long:
Gen X Members (Born 1965–1980)
- Boomers (born ~1946–1964): Scott Bessent (1962), Howard Lutnick (1961), Doug Burgum (1956), RFK Jr. (1954), Susie Wiles (1957)
- Silent Generation: Linda McMahon (1948)
- Millennials (born ~1981–1996): JD Vance (1984), Tulsi Gabbard (1981)
Most of Trump’s inner circle are younger than him; so these are not contemporaries, but they are too old to be seen as rejuvenating the scaffolding to align with the future. His second term goons are five years younger than the first term ones, which is a data point in itself. Trump is not Bill Clinton or Barak Obama, who made sure their inner circle were young enough to shape the government to be able to adequately deal with the future. With Trump, it is not a generational baton pass, but a fan‑club takeover.
Trump didn’t crash into Gen X’s world in 2016; he’d been living rent‑free in our cultural headspace since the 1980s, when he was the televised embodiment of gold‑plated success and unapologetic greed. The strange joke of 2026 is that the generation raised on that character, on Trump as archetype, not statesman, is now stage‑managing the real man in the real White House, mistaking the visual grammar of movies and TV for an operating manual on how power actually works.
But having a couch potato regime has its costs. These people don’t know what power looks like, and have to make guesses based on Rambo and Top Gun movies. This quote in a April 15, 2026 Bloomberg article is also intriguing:
“President Trump and the people around him seem not to understand that American power floats on other countries’ voluntary cooperation to drive down the costs and difficulty of anything we try and do in the world,” said Kori Schake, a former George W. Bush administration official now at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute.
This is not someone on the Left sounding the alarm, but a Republican with actual White House cred sounding the alarm. These are peoplpe preserving an 80s fantasy of power well into the 2020s without realizing what was on the script was not how the real world ever worked. Those movies were escapism for the masses.
And the ramifications are disturbing: within less than two years: allies abroad, the ones who did the grunt work do the US could close the deal, have broken away. The US didn’t do anything by itself, and, no, Rambo or Maverick can’t be reproduced in reality to save America. That’s just silly.
The middle-class are just standing there, not pushing back. No, protests don’t work because they are reactive, not proactive. Once you are marching in the street, it’s too late. Whining on the Reddit is slacktivism and that doesn’t work. Going directly to governments, share holders, and corporations and saying, “This ends now,” works. You can do without their services and products. You can vote them out. You can become a competitor or support others who are competitors. You can demand laws and lobby.
The billionaires are gorging themselves and the US to death. They are a metastasizing cancer: their greed is not a sign of health: it is a death drum beating. You can write to Disney CEO Josh D’Amaro and say, “Your company is not in the red. Let go 1000 employees and I never consume another Disney product again. My children will not use Disney as their cultural gateway. Have a mouserific day.”
It’s not that hard. They can ignore Reddit, X, Google Reviews, and Trustpilot. They can’t ignore polite emails in their inbox or people’s refusal to pay more for the same product.
Because you can’t expect the greedy to save you. You also cannot expect a government obsessed with persona to save you, either. The swooping superhero is a lovely pop culture icon, and we know how well they translate in the real world.
Tags: Alberto Nardelli, Bloomberg News, China, Courtney Subramanian, Disney, Donald Trump, Iran, Jennifer A. Dlouhy, Josh D’Amaro, Kori Schake, Propaganda, Russia, United States