The President at Midnight
Donald Trump's Truth Social and the end of institutional restraint
Donald Trump reposted a video on Truth Social depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. When challenged, he refused to apologise. No mistake, he said. No regret. Nothing to withdraw.
Yet this is a man who sues at the slightest hint of personal slight. Journalists, publishers, former employees, private citizens: if they criticise him too directly, if they question his wealth, his business record, his election lies, the legal letters arrive. Defamation claims. Threats. Litigation as intimidation.
The contrast is the point. Trump demands protection from insult while reserving total freedom to insult others. He treats reputation as sacred when it is his own and disposable when it belongs to anyone else. For him, the law is not a standard but a weapon: used, never respected.
Reposting racist imagery of the first Black president and first lady is not a lapse but a demonstration. He can degrade others publicly and suffer no meaningful consequence. He refuses apology because apology implies equality — and equality is precisely what his political style rejects.
Consider what actually happened. The president of the United States, just before midnight, scrolling his own social media platform, saw racist agitprop depicting his predecessor and reposted it. No staff filter. No institutional restraint. The gap between impulse and publication collapsed to nothing.
This is where we are: a head of state operating at the level of racist-grandpa-on-Facebook, except the grandpa owns the platform and commands nuclear weapons. The technology eliminates every buffer between id and broadcast. What once required conspiracy, planning, deniability, now requires a thumb movement.
Baudrillard would recognise this immediately. The simulation has achieved perfect closure. Trump owns the medium, produces the message, consumes the spectacle, and becomes the only referee of what it means. Truth Social is not a communications platform but a closed loop where power generates its own reality without external reference. The racist meme is not representation but hyperreality: it does not depict anything, it simply circulates as pure sign, detached from consequence, accountability, or meaning beyond its own viral logic.
The distinction between president and shitposter has dissolved. There is no “real” Trump behind the performance because the performance has consumed any prior reality. He posts, therefore he is. The office, the institution, the republic itself become subordinate to the feed. Governance is whatever he says it is at 11:47pm on a Thursday.
The GOP has no answer to this because it has already accepted the premise: that Trump's whims constitute policy, his resentments set the agenda, his late-night posts define reality. They cannot object without admitting they have handed power to a man whose judgement, at any given moment, resembles your worst uncle after six beers and a YouTube spiral.
This is not hypocrisy in the ordinary sense. Hypocrisy implies a gap between professed values and behaviour. Trump has no such gap. He believes power entitles him to act without constraint and entitles him, simultaneously, to protection from criticism.
He never apologises because apology suggests mutual obligation. He always sues because litigation enforces hierarchy. The rule is simple. He can say what he likes about you. Try saying the same about him and the lawyers arrive.
Against capital, against empire, against forgetting.
Notes and essays from the wreckage of the present.