President Donald Trump’s presidency is so weird, it is causing ripple effects that is making America as a whole much more weird.
Beginning with an anecdote about right-wing pundit Tucker Carlson claiming to have been physically attacked in his bed by a demon and FEMA Office of Response and Recovery head Gregg Phillips, The New York Times went on to describe how Trump has created a culture that brings out the downright weirdness in American life.
“The backdrop of all this is the peculiar atmosphere of contemporary public life — claustrophobic, faintly hallucinatory, where what we know as real feels like sand shifting under our feet,” wrote The New York Times’ Katya Ungerman on Sunday. “The first lady, Melania Trump, walks a humanoid robot down a White House red carpet and later tells the audience to imagine a future humanoid educator named ‘Plato.’ A former intelligence official testifies under oath that the United States has been secretly retrieving and reverse-engineering crashed U.F.O.s for decades, and that nonhuman ‘biologics’ have been recovered.”
Ungerman added, “Demonic vexation, teleportation, increased interest in religious practice — those phenomena are all signs that life feels, to many, increasingly charged with unseen forces. You might say it has been re-enchanted. There’s a widespread feeling that the material explanation is no longer sufficient; that something uncanny, maybe even numinous, is diffused into the texture of ordinary American life.”
A recent survey by Pew discovered that three out of ten Americans in 2024 consulted astrology, tarot cards or fortune tellers at least once a year. More Americans than ever use alternative medicinal practices like energy healing during pregnancy.
“In 1917, the sociologist Max Weber argued that a long process of rationalization, culminating in modernity, was eliminating ‘mysterious incalculable forces’ from the world,” Ungerman explained. “Science would explain; technology would master; and magic would disappear. For a brief stretch of modern history, he seemed right: The enduring human instinct to believe in the otherworldly declined as empiricism, common evidentiary standards and, for the shortest period of all, mass media produced a rough consensus about what was real. Now we seem to be sliding back.”
Ungerman attributed this change to people being overwhelmed by the information available to them in the era of digital technology, AI making it easier for people to doctor evidence and people losing faith in institutions like governments, churches, businesses and established scientists.
“In a Rolling Stone article about A.I.-induced spiritual crises, the writer Miles Klee spoke to an unnamed source whose partner had messaged extensively with ChatGPT,” Ungerman wrote, describing a piece about a serial stalker and supporter of the so-called “manosphere” who ultimately pleaded guilty to 11 counts of various stalking-related charges. “Eventually, the partner came [to] believe he was God. He had an ecstatic experience with a product that has a stake in keeping him engaged; his story might have ended differently inside a spiritual community, where someone could have told him to slow down.”
He added, “The world we’re moving into will look more like the one before the modern era than like the one we grew up in. It will be saturated with the supernatural. Everyone will believe in something. The question is in what.”
There are signs, though, that Americans are rejecting the “weird” fixations of Trump and his movement. Earlier this month Semafor journalists Shelby Talcott and Burgess Everett reported that "Trump is still facing questions from within the GOP about how determined he is to keep control of Congress, as he seeks longer-term, legacy-defining foreign policy achievements amid declining approval ratings."
Even though most Americans are opposed to Trump’s primary focuses, including building a White House ballroom and promoting AI, a Republican insider told Semafor that Trump is “clearly not” motivated about winning the midterms and said “his mission goes so far beyond one election cycle or one midterm.”
