By Ross Douthat / The New York Times
If a striking thing about the period just before Donald Trump’s second inauguration was the feeling that America was genuinely shifting to the right — wokeness crumbling, more minority voters and elite factions joining the GOP, every branch of government in conservative hands — a striking thing about the Trump administration is that it has governed as though none of this were the case.
Instead, its approach belongs to a world where both the conservative position and the wider American situation are simply desperate and there’s only the narrowest of windows to wrench the country away from some apocalyptic fate.
The best term for this mentality is “black-pilled,” an online reference, based on a famous scene in “The Matrix,” to different pills that allow a choice regarding reality. A red pill lets you in on secret truths. A blue pill allows blissful ignorance. Adapted by online culture, a black pill lets you know just how doomed we really are.
A merely red-pilled Trump administration would still be doing much of what the actual one is doing; pushing the envelope on executive power, making a bid to revive American manufacturing, trying to find ways to increase deportations, picking fights with Ivy League universities.
But the black pill helps explain the hyperactivity with which Elon Musk’s DOGE project set about cutting jobs and programs; no pause for assessment, just the chain saw. Or the chaotic haste that yielded a list of sweeping demands being sent to Harvard apparently by mistake. Or the no-pain-no-gain maximalism of Trump’s trade war. Or the impulse to engage in brinkmanship with a conservative Supreme Court. Or the seeming lack of concern for whether newly Republican constituencies might be alienated or freaked out.
The administration’s mentality exists in symbiosis with its most fervent online supporters, who have responded to each new foray with all-or-nothing takes. If we can’t bring all the jobs back/deport all the illegal immigrants/smash the Ivy League, we don’t have a country.
Let me take one illustration of this mentality, from a commentator who goes by the nom de guerre FischerKing and has more than 200,000 followers on X. Calling the American situation an “emergency,” with an added expletive, he writes: “The USA has elected a series of administrations from both parties who have given us a $37 trillion national debt, probably 30-50 million illegal aliens, woke ideology, and a series of pointless wars. But we’re supposed to care about ‘norms.’”
I like this post because it lets me make two points about the problem with the black pill.
First, it overstates the direness of the situation. The United States almost certainly does not have 30 million to 50 million illegal immigrants. A high-end estimate from an anti-immigration advocacy group puts the figure at 18 million to 19 million. That’s a big number; it makes a case for deportations. But it’s far less transformative than 50 million would be.
The 21st-century United States has indeed been embroiled in “a series of pointless wars.” But the debacles of Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya are in the past, and U.S. foreign policy has turned in a more realist direction under Democrats as well as Trump. Even if you take a maximally skeptical view of our support for the Ukrainians, the war in Ukraine is a classic proxy conflict, not another Iraq or Vietnam.
Meanwhile, the peak of woke ideology is, for now, in the past: Today, Ibram X. Kendi is increasingly a punchline, the British Supreme Court is vindicating JK Rowling, and affirmative action, as well as DEI, is on the ropes.
So at the very least, some “emergency” aspects of our situation are less grim than the black-pilled view would suggest. But just as crucially, many norm-busting responses of the Trump administration are either nonresponsive to the alleged emergencies or arguably counterproductive.
The national debt is a real problem. But the Musk attack on federal spending has savaged important programs for the sake of trivial savings, and the profligate budgets being pushed through the House and Senate will very likely swamp any savings.
On immigration, the bitter fights over sending alleged gang members to a Salvadoran prison are not necessarily relevant to the White House’s ability to carry out deportations on a larger scale, since the administration desperately needs more resources for that project, not just more authority.
In the culture war, conservative success in the struggle against wokeness depends on continuing to convert centrists and even liberals to the cause, and the administration’s all-or-nothing strategy risks making liberal academia sympathetic — a truly counterproductive feat.
Finally, the trade war looks like a debacle. Full stop.
One reason to stress these aspects of the Trump agenda (and the falling poll numbers that indicate their costs) is that black-pilled conservatives are understandably allergic to being lectured (especially from elite pulpits) that the situation isn’t as bleak as they believe.
Better for the critics to meet the black-pilled halfway; with the suggestion that even in a dire situation, you still need a response calibrated to reality, rather than a furious flailing that most likely guarantees defeat.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times, c.2025.
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