The one joke I remember from Colin Jost’s address to the 2024 White House Correspondents’ Dinner is that online gambling and Taylor Swift are all that’s keeping the economy afloat. It plays to Americans’ locked-in impression that the economy is terrible and that’s why they have soured on Joe Biden.

The reality behind this contorted belief is that Americans’ own spending habits have created and are sustaining this economy. Their continued spending is what propels corporations to keep raising prices. Their gambling and speculation in crypto despite previous busts is inflating markets to new highs. Their bloated retirement investments are making asset managers richer and richer—and that money is going directly into further speculative pursuits, especially anything related to AI.

With the clearing of the pro-Palestinian encampments on Ivy League and other college campuses at the end of last week, the news media turned in unison to thought pieces comparing the antiwar protests of the 1960s with these student protests.

I’m sure today’s protesters like having their efforts enshrined within history, but it’s odd to be talking big-picture history for a timeline that’s barely seven months old. Some of the encampments had barely reached the plural “weeks” before being removed. The brand-new tents at Columbia seemed to have been arrayed like some aerially appealing formation for homecoming weekend. The bright white scarves still had fold creases like T-shirts given out at the start of an AIDS walk.

With the campus reporting, it’s always “the protesters” and not “the movement” because there is no movement. Columnists have noted that the Vietnam War protests also involved elite college campuses and were not effective at ending the war, but even if the Columbia students of 1968 were free agents, their objectives coincided with the anti-war movement that had been mobilized for years in the United States.

Next to vacuum cleaners and Fuller brushes, Bibles are still remembered as something peddled door-to-door from a suitcase. The meme of the evil Yankee carpetbagger lived on in the post-Civil War South, but that didn’t stop folks from welcoming in a sweet-talking local gent who had himself a way.

The pivotal character in one of Flannery O’Connor’s most famous stories, “Good Country People,” published in A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), is a door-to-door Bible salesman presenting himself as “just a country boy” by the name of Manley Pointer. Proclaiming that “the word of God ought to be in the parlor,” he enters the world of Mrs. Hopewell of the property-owning class and her unmarried, Ph.D.-laden daughter who has a wooden leg owing to a childhood shooting accident. Mrs. Hopewell has crafted for herself a fatuous complacency of benevolence toward the lower classes, while her daughter, Joy (who has changed her name to Hulga), is an atheist whose bitterness toward Southern ignorance prompts her idea to seduce this clueless hick with her sophistication and send him packing.

Fully occupying the cover of the January 15 New Yorker is a Barry Blitt cartoon of Donald Trump. With his foam-board red tie forever pointing down, this Trump is definitely bigger than Elvis, goose-stepping Mussolini-style into 2024. Despite his swollen presence that seems to have displaced all the world’s crises, Trump’s extended soliloquies at his endless rallies have people wondering whether he’s losing his grip on reality.

We know he had one of those grips when young, in the seventies and early eighties, and was able to rationalize his motives to the press to get press. But now he slurs vowels and mispronounces words in what the New Republic has called a “rambling, incoherent auctioneer style.” He mixes up Joe Biden and Barack Obama, Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. Talking to a National Rifle Association gathering in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on February 9—a Friday night—he said: “I didn’t need this; I had a very nice life. Nice Saturday afternoon. I could tell you, if I weren’t doing this, where I would have been, I would have been in a very nice location.”

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.

People in the northern United States will not soon forget this orange-sky summer. The Canadian wildfires causing it are still burning, just one of many simultaneous conflagrations across the continent and the world. After multiple deadly wildfires in California over the past decade, after the huge deadly fires in Greece and Australia, and now with the wildfire in Maui, we have entered the Red Flag Age, where fire weather warnings are as everyday as humidity, barometric pressure, and dewpoint.

The sense of everything being combustible is not confined to climate. The Russian war on Ukraine has generated daily explosions since February 2022. In June, I remember reading of a deadly apartment building explosion in Paris alongside a deadly explosion of a barbecue restaurant in China. In August, there were stories of houses in various parts of the United States (Pennsylvania, Tennessee) spontaneously exploding. Right now it feels like everything can go up in a plume or come down in one, like Putin’s dead man walking, Yevgeny Prigozhin, whose plane exploded midair.

Twice a week, Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, writes a column for the New York Times in which he tries to reassure Americans that the economy is OK, that we are on track for a soft landing after the massive disruptions of COVID. Krugman is popular in the opinion section and, unlike other columnists, is not a niche read. But he has a lot of frenemies. Commenters write that he just doesn’t get it. The chide him for not mentioning price gouging and corporate greed. It’s always the price of eggs they bring up. They also point out things like their wages not having increased in five years. This is one of the rare places in the New York Times where you hear from people who literally don’t have enough cash on hand. Leftist populism lives here, and though this is a small demographic in a non-news-reading America, it’s telling.

The inflation—on top of the MAGA insurgency, the continuing workplace and social disruptions from COVID, Putin’s war, and climate disasters—is making those on the left anxious and uncertain. They find it hard to defend Joe Biden because they want something sudden and new to fix it all. They want a reset from . . . from what exactly?

For the first time since the time of the American and French revolutions, Pluto is in the astrological sign of Aquarius. Astrologers consider this a very big deal—presumably because everything you heard about the Age of Aquarius in that the song from Hair is true. Astrologers seem to love Pluto, which astronomers only discovered in 1930 and then reclassified as a “dwarf” in 2006. Astrologers wasted little time in obsessively following the planet’s 248-year orbit around the sun, and they call this March 23 crossing “Pluto’s return.”

Since I learned what astrologers think about Pluto’s movements a few years ago, this small, cold planet has been my mascot for earthly behaviors that I don’t understand. For instance, it seems to me that American voters who call themselves independents are secretly longing for some extra-worldly force to knock them heedlessly in love with authoritarian rule. Even those who don’t yet feel it—the MAGA craziness—want to feel it. It seems like they intentionally put themselves in places (i.e., watching Fox News) where such a conversion might silently occur. In the face of so many Americans metaphorically holding up theirs arms and yelling “Take me!,” the magical thinking of astrology doesn’t seem all that weird.

Humans lie about everything from sorting recycling to murdering spouses. We do it for love and hate, money and power, convenience and kicks. Lying to the IRS without penalty has become part of the American dream, like having a newly leased Suburban in the driveway. There was already a lot of lying going on in America before Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election. But the consequences of that lie—conjoined as it was with the January 6th insurrection—have changed the country and Americans as people.

In the pantheon of presidential lying, most of it was done for misguided ideology, plausible deniability, or self-preservation: Lyndon Johnson’s insistence that Vietnam was winnable, Ronald Reagan’s insistence that the Soviet Union was going to attack, George W. Bush’s insistence that Iraq had WMD, Richard Nixon saying he was not a crook, Bill Clinton saying he did not have sexual relations with that woman.