A Fool’s Applause

When contempt becomes currency, and ignorance becomes the crowd’s hymn.

The circus was never beside him—it was inside him. The tent collapses, the crowd still claps. (UNSPUN Illustration, September 2025)

September 18, 2025

“It is the peculiar triumph of power to make a man love the chains that bind him.”
—Taylor Allyn, UNSPUN

Preface

There are things we know but don’t say—truths that sit in our throats like stones we’re too polite to spit out. This essay names one of them.

We live in an era where speaking clearly has been rebranded as terrorism, while actual terrorists get Cabinet positions. Where the DOJ hunts down citizens for their opinions, while billionaires openly purchase democracy. In such a world, silence has become more dangerous than whatever list my name ends up on.

What follows is not another attempt to “understand” Trump’s followers—we’ve endured eight years of that failed project. This is an autopsy of voluntary degradation. A diagnosis of the particular American pleasure found in one’s own erasure.

Some will call this cruel. But cruelty is pretending not to see what’s in front of us: millions of people who’ve discovered that being nothing for someone else feels easier than the exhausting work of being something on their own.

They know exactly what they’ve chosen. The least we can do is have the courage to name it.

The Cost of Naming

I write this knowing they’re collecting names now, knowing dissent has been rebranded as terrorism while their lord and savior’s daily tantrums go unchecked. The DOJ wants people fired for having opinions while Trump and his floating device of a Klan say whatever poison fills their mouths each morning. They’ve discovered something darker than Stockholm Syndrome: you can charge your hostages admission and they’ll thank you for it.

But silence feels more dangerous than their lists.

The Loud Man’s Confession

He didn’t bury it. He didn’t disguise it. He said it straight:

“Smart people don’t like me.”

Not as slip, not as satire. As creed. A hustler laying out the con, daring the crowd to notice, knowing they will choose not to. In the nineties, he told People Magazine he’d run as a Republican because “they’re the dumbest group of voters.” Today, he repeats the insult into a microphone, draped in presidential flags.

And the cruelest joke of all? In America’s great spectacle, a man can call his followers stupid—and the applause only grows louder.