The significant problems we face today cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.

Albert Einstein

There is always an easy solution to every problem — neat, plausible, and wrong,

H.L. Mencken

The world is not about Batman and Robin fighting the Joker. Things are more complicated than that. And nothing is scarier than the people who try to find easy answers to complicated questions.

Marjane Satrapi

I’m writing this piece on Saturday April 5th, after a week of market carnage and free-floating economic chaos. It’s hard to believe that we’re still within the first 90 days of Trump 2: A Very Shady Sequel (‘and this time, it’s personal’). With the wreckage piling up fast and furious, it is tempting to confuse volume with complexity, crediting Trump’s actions with more depth than breadth, But while there can be no doubt that Trump’s reckless deconstruction of the American social compact is wreaking serious damage to our finances, to science, and to millions of individual lives at home and abroad, it should not be forgotten that, ultimately, Trump represents easy answers and small ideas, things that are completely unsuited to the complicated, interlocking set of problems that constitute our current polycrisis.

More specifically, the easy answers that Trump embodies come mostly in the form of stark dualisms: patriot vs. traitor, free market vs. government, strong vs. weak, conservative vs. liberal, and the US vs. everyone else. There are some other simplistic assumptions that are also essentially dualistic: trade as a zero sum game with only winners and losers; and, if you don’t see America as exceptional and great, then you must hate it.

But the master easy-answer motifs are undeniably Christian: the world is a battleground of good vs. evil, and one chosen person can deliver salvation to the faithful. Trumpism mirrors the easy answers of Christianity itself. Despite the centuries of beautiful tradition and the intricate mysteries of faith, Christianity ultimately boils down to a very simple idea: believe in Christ and saved, or disbelieve and be thrown into the lake of fire for all eternity. This Christian desire and necessity to have faith in just one guy has leaked into and all over Trumpism, to the point where it is likely that Trump considers himself to be a Messiah.

The desperate desire for the easy Judeo-Trumpian answer to our troubles is a result of the creeping realization, largely subconscious in many, if not most, people, that our entire civilizational system is unsustainable. People who support Trump seem to not mind that he is tearing everything down, because they welcome collapse, either as the end of history or as the ushering in of a new type of society altogether. For those with the latter hope, the new type of society will be a radical reversal of all the current trends: men will be in charge everywhere again, especially over women’s bodies; white people will be in charge everywhere again; Christians will be in charge; shopkeepers and small-business entrepreneurs will be in charge, instead of a global elite of bankers/Jews/Illuminati, etc.

As mentioned above, the master easy-answer cog of Trumpism is Good vs. Evil. Everything else spins out from this hub. This accounts for the leeway his supporters are giving him now, even as things are seemingly falling apart. And it’s not just that Trumpsters are content with him taking action for action’s sake, as in the familiar “hey, at least he’s doing something.” No, the key is that Trump is doing something TO the evildoers. That’s what makes them happy. In the Trumpian calculus, immigrants are bad, so deportation must be good. Trans people are bad, so erasing them is good. DEI is bad, so massive layoffs are good. Government is bad, so massive spending cuts of any kind must be good.

The Good-v-Evil motif is evidence-proof and outcome-proof. Its assertions literally cannot be disproven, once the adversarial stance has been assumed. As we have seen time and time again, the evildoers (just a reminder, libs are the evildoers) can cover their tracks expertly, so lack of evidence (say, of voter fraud) is not a problem. And should Trump’s policies and plans fail, it can just be chalked up to the entrenched power and villainous treachery of the evildoers.

This crypto-Christian dualism also explains how Trump can be so quick to claim how awesomely everything is working, before the ink is even dry on his executive orders. He is not worried about providing factual evidence of success. Rather, he’s just reiterating that his victory is itself the success. This is why he endlessly talks about his election wins, the size of his wins, the expansiveness of his electoral mandate, etc. Again, it’s back to that desire for the easiest of answers: “believe in me and you are already saved.”

In general, people don’t like complexity, unless it takes the form of a six-way parlay on Draft Kings, or the intricate history of double-crosses in pro wrestling and General Hospital, or the exploding catalog of Tik Tok dance moves. As such, most people are not at all ready for the complicated repercussions that come out of acknowledging that our entire way of life is unsustainable and is quickly collapsing, not because of gay marriage, secular humanism, and critical race theory, but because every natural support system on the planet is in steep decline, due to damage caused by human numbers and human activity,

Compared to the easy, breezy message of “believe in me and be saved,” the thudding reality that our species may be another evolutionary dead end is not something that gets you humming a happy tune to start another day of work. But nonetheless, the tyranny of the easy answer, of the small idea, must be thrown off, if we are to have any chance of salvaging some semblance of our civilization, and perhaps of our existence itself.

Brave, audacious truth-telling must become the order of the day, and pretty damn quickly. But one piece of good news, if you could call it that, is that Trump has opened the door for boundary-smashing rhetoric and action. The only thing that can meet and defeat Trump and his successors (and there will be many vying for the throne) will be the boldest telling of truth that our country has ever seen: that our current way of life cannot survive, and that we must make plans now for a radically different future, or else nature itself will do the rearranging, which will not be pretty.