What is Donald Trump advertising?

Indignity Vol. 5, No. 173

Tom Scocca, JOE MACLEOD

29 Sep 2025 — 9 min read

POLITICAL HORRORS DEP'T.

A Visit to the Presidential Chumbox

THE PRESIDENT WAS busy on social media these past few days, using his Truth Social account to announce that he was authorizing military "Full Force, if necessary" against Portland, Oregon; that he was imposing a 100 percent tariff on foreign movies; and that New York City "won't be getting any" federal money if Zohran Mamdani is elected mayor. He also posted a video of the purportedly "highest quality 24 Karat Gold" decorations he's been pasting up all over the Oval Office ("Foreign Leaders, and everyone else, 'freak out' when they see the quality and beauty"), and he posted and removed an apparently AI-modified video of a fake Fox News segment that featured a synthetic version of himself announced that he would be giving every American free access to special hospitals full of miracle-healing "Medbeds." Beyond that, he accused the FBI of planting "Agitators" in the mob during the January 6 attacks, complained the new NFL kickoff rule is "wrong at every level," and put up a post that read in its entirety "MAKE CRIME ILLEGAL AGAIN!"

Everybody sort of knows this is going on, in principle, to some degree. All the way back in his original presidential campaign, Trump established that Twitter was his main mode of communication; in his first term, he conditioned everyone to expect real presidential policy to happen via tweet; between terms, while still banned from Twitter for trying to overthrow the 2020 election, he switched to the off-brand social-media startup Truth Social, built a multi-billion-dollar meme-stock scheme around it, and began producing long-form Truth Social posts with the kind of rambling structure and esoteric punctuation that journalists are used to seeing in letters from the mentally ill portion of their readership. Then he got elected president for the second time.

Mostly, I encounter the president's contemporary posts through screenshots or in news stories. Consuming them that way, it's almost possible to suppose that this is sort of like it was before, only worse, which is also the dangerously wrong default assumption about Trump's second term overall. Now and then an exceptionally deranged wall of text does escape from Truth Social, or he reposts a particularly overt Nazi AI slop meme or video from one of his monstrous supporters, but generally the knowledge that the president of the United States communicates with the public this way is a kind of background noise.

For the podcast this morning, though, I wanted to look up some of his most newsworthy posts directly, so I went to his Truth Social page. I was immediately confronted by a cascade of images of glistening, lumpy, pallid or meat-colored surfaces—images like spilled viscera, cues to the brain's primal horror centers. The dominant ones were repeated depictions of clogged arteries in cross-section, presumably AI generated, promoting some kind of medical quackery. The presidential feed was spammed with them. The president was running a chumbox.

Image of RFK Jr. at a KENNEDY 24 campaign event: " CLICK HERE TO WATCH - MAHA Doc reveals RFK Jr. BOMBSHELL" — *NOTE: Don't be afraid, this is an image of an ad, not a clickable ad that would take you who knows where in the Chumboxverse*

When I reloaded the page, the Lovecraftian horrors were replaced by a pulsating top ad showing Trump in the Oval Office, with some smirking bearded person beside him and the message "Revealed: Something Big Happening Behind White House Door / 'TRUMP'S NEXT MOVE WILL SHOCK THE WORLD.'" Below that, the feed was littered with ads offering 50 percent off on red Trump hats, a MyPillow discount code, Damascus-steel-look folding knives, and a persistently recurring image of some kind of black-brown fruit, ripped open to expose glistening fruit-viscera, with the caption "Parasitologist: One Teaspoon Kills All Parasites In Your Body!"

Here was the real throbbing heart of the American presidency. I kept refreshing the page, and—when the janky platform didn't stall out—the ads kept coming: precious-metal scams, ivermectin pills, "High Success Rate International Dating." I didn't click on any of them to see where they went, because I value my computer too much:

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Seventy-seven million Americans voted for this. It's the only America they know anymore.

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SIDE PIECES DEP'T.

FOR DEFECTOR, I combined my disgust about the impotence of Congressional Democrats with my disgust about the mediocrity of Baltimore Orioles into a unified theory of non-constructive criticism:

When the experts fail, no one is under any obligation to explain how they personally might have been a superior expert, themselves. Who should the Orioles have signed instead of Charlie Morton or Gary Sanchez? I don't know, somebody who wouldn't get shelled in his first seven starts or break down for the year after 29 games with a -0.4 WAR. Mike Elias is getting millions of dollars a year to identify which players are going to be healthy and successful and which ones aren't. After seven seasons at that job, he's won zero playoff games and currently presides over a last-place team. Mike Elias is a bad baseball executive!

Pundits nowadays all think they're really political strategists, and fans think they're all general managers, but they aren't, and they don't need to be. It's fine to judge leaders and institutions by their results. In 2019, I thought Joe Biden was obviously too old and washed-up to be president. For a while, it looked like I had been wrong, but then, unfortunately, it turned out I was right.

AND OVER AT Flaming Hydra, because Ezra Klein took another whack at trying to defend his terrible column praising Charlie Kirk, I teamed up with Maria Bustillos to take another whack at Ezra Klein:

MB: I would prefer to live in a world where nobody gets shot ever, but I have seen no evidence from Klein or anyone else that Charlie Kirk was going into any of his so-called debates with a view to weighing opposing points of view in good faith.

TS: What is grimly funny about this is that Klein has now demonstrated, across thousands of words and with multiple interlocutors, that he himself is completely immune to persuasion.

People have explained to him over and over again, factually and conceptually, that his version of Charlie Kirk was a complete fiction and that it was genuinely vile and harmful for Klein to insist on cannonballing into the pool with praise for him.

And Klein just brushes them off.

The real and inescapable thing that Klein is saying is that he believes he was in community and fellowship with Charlie Kirk in a more true and important and durable sense than he is in community with the millions of people Kirk sought to marginalize, abuse, and expel from his vision of America.

MB: Yeah because he and Kirk are both “public figures,” people who count.

WEATHER REVIEWS

New York City, September 28, 2025

★★★★ Only a few clouds, little blobs and shreds, made their way into the sky. The light was sparkling and the direct sun was hot, but the shade was able to hold it off. Sun penetrated the water in the outlet of the Pool and made the rocks look as if someone had spilled glitter on them. A chipmunk, cheeks distended with the harvest, darted uncertainly back and forth on a rock. Scooters and a shopping cart and the limbs of a sunbather all flared with equal blinding whiteness.

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.

HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast!

Here is the Indignity Morning Podcast archive!

ADVICE DEP'T.

HEY! DO YOU like advice columns? They don't happen unless you send in some letters! Surely you have something you want to justify to yourself, or to the world at large. Now is the perfect time to share it with everyone else through The Sophist, the columnist who is not here to correct you, but to tell you why you're right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.

SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.

WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of sandwiches selected from British Everyday Cookery, published by Whitcombe and Tombs in 1910 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.

SALMON OR FISH SANDWICHES.
Half a pound cold boiled fish, 2 oz. butter, 1/2 lemon, anchovy sauce, watercress.

Flake the cold boiled fish and pound it with the butter, a little anchovy, and seasoning. Squeeze a little lemon juice (or white vinegar) over from time to time. Spread over thin slices of bread and butter, sprinkle with watercress or nasturtium leaves, press slices together, and cut into shape.

If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net .