Why does it feel like Donald Trump still runs America? We know he owns the news hole, if such a thing still exists, but why does his every proclamation set the media agenda? Is it because he can claim all 220 House Republicans as dependents? or because late-night monologues practically write themselves when he adds new riffs to his rally rambles?

The nightmare America that Trump’s presidency conjured always made me think of the gangster-run metropolis in The Triplets of Belleville, Sylvain Chomet’s 2003 animated comedy. Trump certainly made our country an omerta system of thugs. Throughout 2019, he leaned on Jerome Powell, the man he picked to run the Federal Reserve, to lower interest rates. By September, he was demanding that Powell cut interest rates to zero or even usher in negative rates, normally a break-glass option during economic crises. At the time, the U.S. economy was growing solidly and consumer spending was strong. Negative rates mean that savers are penalized and borrowers rewarded: there was no logic for such market manipulation.

Who in Trump’s United States of Belleville needed all this extra cash? Maybe it was the gamblers. In 2018, the Supreme Court in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, which made it illegal for states to authorize sports betting. Thus commenced the fastest expansion of legalized gambling in American history. Nationally, 36 states and the District of Columbia offer legal sports betting. Americans have legally bet over $250 billion on sports since the guardrails come down in 2018.

It hasn’t yet got as ugly as the cartoon Belleville, where the people bet on enslaved athletes being run to death, but FanDuel, DraftKings, and most major casino companies have hammered Americans with relentless, unregulated advertising to bring sports betting to tens of millions of phones, enabling people to gorge on potentially addictive behavior from the sunken recesses of their sectionals. This has changed how millions of Americans consume collegiate and professional sports. In May, the New York Times reported that “Chris Boucher, a forward for the N.B.A.’s Toronto Raptors, described on a podcast in March one of the hateful messages he received from a bettor. ‘I chose the wrong slave today,’ the person wrote to Mr. Boucher on social media after losing his bet.”

Trump did a great job of re-creating Belleville in American, but like many cartoon villains he messed up. COVID under his watch left us with several hundred thousand needless deaths. He pushed the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen and pressured his Vice President and Congress not to certify Joe Biden’s electoral win. Mar-a-Lago ought to have functioned for Trump like Palm Springs did for the paroled mob boss in white shoes and nylon golf shirt sinking into his poolside Acapulco chair. The Belleville meme should’ve been stashed away in that bathroom with the classified documents.

To American’s great misfortune, the election of Joe Biden did not decrease the appetite for authoritarianism. There was the shock of January 6th for a few days, followed by an immediate neutralization of said shock, another failed impeachment attempt, and further amplification of political hatreds. The percentage of Americans saying that the country is on the wrong track has been close to 80% in various polls since 2020. We have come out of COVID, inflation is leveling off, and we’ve avoided a recession. But polls still show Trump beating Biden in 2024.

What happened to us? Why have Americans carried on with Belleville even without their clown of a boss?

This is more than COVID’s stinging economic aftermath. We are in a situation that we all, right and left, have contributed to—a bad one of Silicon Valley-style anarcho-capitalism, of tech-bro- and wellness-driven hyper-consumerism, of the gladiatorial acquisition of real estate not just on Fifth Avenue but in suburban subdivisions everywhere, of the commodification of fragility, of the self over the community. One of the wisest comments about Trump’s 2016 election came from the playwright Wallace Shawn: “A lot of people turn out to have been sick and tired of pretending to be good.” During those years we heard a lot about “moral coarsening” and the wearing away of the capacity to recognize what we’ve become. But it’s more than just the coarse and cruel among us; it’s the blithe and unbothered among us.

During Trump’s presidency, it felt like a badge of honor to live in Manhattan, where 90% of votes were cast against him in the 2016 election. It seemed that the moral rot of his Belleville shenanigans would never infect the people of New York. After being played out of the White House with “YMCA,” he seemed done with Manhattan. It was just the place where Melania would live out her parallel life.

But 2020 upended a lot of our city’s defenses. One of the most arresting images of that year was the McCloskeys, Patricia and Mark, pointing an AR-15 and a handgun at George Floyd protesters marching through their private neighborhood in St. Louis, Missouri. That image made me think of Saul Steinberg’s iconic New Yorker cover showing a View of the World from 9th Avenue. His 1976 map details Manhattan’s bustling west side streetscape, right down to a dog being walked; the country beyond “Jersey” is just a green rectangle in front of the Pacific. Now when I picture that map, I see the green rectangle occupied by giant versions of the McCloskeys and their guns, daring anyone from Manhattan to cross over the Hudson.

Three years on, it’s painful to think about that summer. Young Americans of every race made global headlines chanting “Defund the Police,” and then they just left it, walked away to their next appointment. Three years on, all they want to talk about is where they flew to see Eras or Renaissance and where in Europe they’re going to see the same show next year.

Although New York City still hasn’t recovered from 2020, it keeps attracting ever more young people who come to spend their parents’ money. They like the escalating grit that gives them the esthetic feel of the seventies. They see the city as a transaction rather than a home. They do add to the tax base, but they don’t vote. They Uber it everywhere and roll their eyes at concerns about public safety—about cars with no plates running every red light down Broadway, scooters going 30 miles an hour on sidewalks—reminding old people that “It was worse in the seventies.” There are no consequences when you have nothing invested, when you’re just trying out life here so you can do it better when you buy your house in Houston or Atlanta.

New York has been coasting on myth for generations, crossing its fingers that the world’s richest people want to own property and spend money here. We’re the most heavily taxed state in the country, and yet our infrastructure and services are crumbling. Even before COVID, the city’s tax revenue was failing to provide affordable housing or an efficiently run MTA or services for homeless people and those with mental illness. Mayor Eric Adams keeps up with the crime vote bloc while ignoring the two things that may bring the city to its knees: empty commercial real estate and a public transit system teetering near collapse.

The Belleville metropolis of Chomet’s film is a mashup of historical eras, but it’s definitely pre-digital. If you wonder what that metropolis would look like with our technology, just look around New York. Sometimes I think that the digital life of play is so easy and fungible that people discount the importance of reality. It feels absurd writing that, but we live in a culture where people need reminding that marrying the wrong person cannot be corrected with a ring-light. In reviewing Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man, Joe Klein wrote that “Trump’s success is a reflection of our national failure to take ourselves seriously.” The last Republican primary debate quickly descended into a Babel of crosstalk. The candidates seemed to be competing to see who could take himself the least seriously. In the last midterm elections, only 33% of registered New York City voters cast ballots, compared to 41% in 2018 and an abysmal 23% in 2014. The 67% of city residents who couldn’t make the effort to vote last year certainly don’t take themselves seriously.

When you look back at the many articles the New York Times wrote about Trump in the 1980s, what’s unsettling today is not his bravado or the many situations in which he is either exaggerating or lying. What’s unsettling is the wink-wink recounting of conversations where he is being mocked to his face. You could argue that his behavior cannot be taken seriously and that this is part of his own publicity game, but it was a mistake to present Trump’s narcissism as entertainment. In 1984, for instance, here’s how the Times described his meeting with esteemed architects Philip Johnson and John Burgee at their office: “Models are brought in of Mr. Trump’s next—can it be!—proposed building, a 60-story castle, Trump Castle, six cylinders of varying heights with gold-leafed, coned and crenelated tops to be built at 60th Street and Madison Avenue. There is to be a moat and a drawbridge. ‘My idea,’ says Mr. Johnson with a mischievous grin. ‘Very Trumpish.’ ”

Insinuating something about a person that you are unwilling to explicitly articulate is always a losing proposition, because it could very well be that the person just doesn’t give a fuck what you think. The media lost that one on Trump across the board. There is no debating that Americans initially looked at Trump as entertainment. But it’s not accurate to say that he was entertainment that they eventually began to take seriously. Rather, what he did was present Americans with an immersion tank of entertainment that they never had to leave. That’s how he got many millions of people to be just as unserious as himself. That’s how he got us to be Belleville. §