In a Scamelot age of crypto meme coins and 747s as imperial tribute, Trump University is a distant, almost quaint memory. Its blog is even less remembered. But in 2006, the school’s founder decided to do a little gossip blogging on the Trump U. Web site. After Britney Spears’s widely mocked interview with Matt Lauer, in which she wept while he interrogated her about various tabloid allegations, the future Oval Office occupant delivered his state of the union.
“Britney looked terrible,” he wrote. “Her skirt was too short. Her makeup was messy. When she opened her mouth, it only got worse.”
Trump expressed sympathy for the beleaguered pop star, at least until he saw her nude and pregnant on the cover of Harper’s Bazaar. “She has absolutely nothing to promote—no new record, no movie, no book,” he wrote. “So, to a lot of people, it sounds like the only possible thing she could be doing is trying to keep her name in the news.”
He would know. Trump’s greatest talent has always been his Faustian skill at manipulating the attention of a frivolous society. He’s a particle accelerator of controversy, hyperbole, and showmanship, achieving continuous virality by engaging our basest instincts—whether it’s threatening to blackmail professional sports franchises into reverting to their previously racially insensitive team names or accusing former presidents of light treason.
Long before influencers emerged like lobe-finned fish from the primordial ooze of TikTok, Trump intuitively grasped that attention and notoriety would be precious commodities in an anarchic digital age. More than two decades before Spears became tabloid royalty alongside Paris Hilton, Trump was famous for being famous.
Despite their differences, Spears and Trump share a savant-like gift for steering and reflecting the Zeitgeist. To understand the unraveling collective unconscious of the United States in the 21st century, we must study the career arcs of Spears, Trump, and Kanye West, the third avatar in our cultural doom spiral.
The members of this trinity are the most American of Americans. If there is such a thing as a national character, these three possess all of its qualities—vanity, narcissism, impulsivity—in abundance. It turns out that celebrities really are just like us—only more so.
There is no shortage of rich and famous icons in the modern American pantheon. Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have arguably made a larger and more lasting impact than Spears and West have (and are as equally recognizable as Trump), but their flaws and emotional vicissitudes are kept far from the public eye. In Spears, West, and Trump, the messiness is all too visible.
But there is a crucial distinction among them. Spears and West are both artists, which requires a heightened emotional sensitivity and vulnerability. The same attunement to societal frequencies that allowed them to channel their time has led to their instability.
The mental defects of Trump, on the other hand, are perfectly suited for the schizophrenic maelstrom of modern life. He is not merely a manifestation of our insanity; he has mastered the ability to exploit it.
The “American Dream Since I Was 17”
Upon the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb, Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad Gita: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”
For millennials, atomic extinction was a peripheral concern. You can pick the moment when the limitless peace and prosperity of the post–Cold War era was revealed to be a mirage: 9/11, the Iraq War, or Hurricane Katrina. The financial crash of 2008 was its own Rubicon crossing, as was the recent re-election of Trump.
But Spears’s shaving her head in a low-rent San Fernando Valley hair salon in 2007 was a point of no return. We passed through the looking glass, shattered it, and now we walk on the broken shards.
This was no mere former child star rebelling against her pre-fab image. As Spears sang on her masterpiece Blackout, she was the “American Dream since I was 17.” A gleaming ambassador of frosted-tipped Pax Americana at the End of History. She transcended pop stardom to become a symbol, a Rorschach test revealing the nation’s aspirations and desires, fantasies and fears.
Before total cynicism took hold, Spears presented a winking innocence and faux-naïf carnality. She was the obsession of the gossip magazines, blogs, and nightly news-entertainment shows. And at the bottom of the chain were the braying paparazzi, 24-7 scavengers willing to chase her to the edge of the earth. The people couldn’t get enough.
In the early months of 2008, Spears was repeatedly hospitalized after she barricaded herself inside a bathroom with her one-year-old child during a routine custody handover. That February, the courts placed her in a conservatorship controlled by her previously estranged father. The order remained in place for the next 13 years, until she testified in court about the psychological and physical abuse that she suffered.
The fault lines fully ruptured around the time Spears lost her freedom. The financial crisis and election of Barack Obama radicalized opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. Trump joined Twitter, where he alternately stoked the birther conspiracy theory and baited Robert Pattinson about why he must never take Kristen Stewart back after her public affair.
Sure, signs of a reactionary orientation were present when he took out full-page ads in 1989 demanding the death penalty for the wrongfully accused Central Park Five. (Their defamation suit against him is ongoing.) But Trump’s transformation didn’t become entirely clear until he kicked off his 2016 presidential campaign by attacking undocumented immigrants as “criminals, drug dealers, and rapists.”
As Fox News and Breitbart tilted the country rightward, Trump mirrored this shift, a confused and angry grandfather refracting what he watched on cable television onto social media. But because it was him, it eventually traveled downstream to become public policy.
It shouldn’t have been a huge surprise when Kanye West began wearing a red MAGA hat in 2018. His unrepentant narcissism, desperate attention-seeking, and brash public statements had long been a selling point to an audience who saw themselves in his own (often realized) delusions of grandeur. By the late aughts, signs of the once politically conscious backpack rapper were almost completely absent.
In the wake of his mother’s 2007 death, from plastic surgery–related complications, West became increasingly unmoored. Before the decade was over, he’d drunkenly snatched the MTV Video Music Awards trophy away from Swift (who had replaced Spears as America’s sweetheart). Within a few years, he was calling himself a “Black skinhead.” Titling a song “Heil Hitler” wasn’t far off.
West understood the power of shock value in a post-reality age where the official White House accounts are openly trolling. We shouldn’t discount how much his deteriorating mental health (and reported nitrous-oxide addiction) contribute to the antics.
But let’s apply Occam’s razor: West is a divorced Midwestern father approaching 50. His mental health is fragile, he has serious issues with women, and he’s fighting against his waning relevancy. All of which makes him an ideal target for seduction by right-wing extremism, like millions of others.
While most modern entertainers will do almost anything to remain in the public eye, Spears has taken the opposite route. In the three and a half years since her conservatorship ended, she has released only two new songs (both collaborations) and refused to perform live. In 2023, her memoir became a best-seller, yet she refused to do even a single promotional interview. Earlier this month, she dropped a surprise collaboration with Balenciaga.
If her peers treat Instagram as an e-marketplace to shill cosmetics, wellness quackery, and fast fashion, Spears uses it as her lone lifeline with the public. Occasionally, she writes a long diatribe contradicting a TMZ report or shares a black-and-white stock photo that you might find in an Aaron Brothers frame. But mostly the 43-year-old uses it to post scantily clad selfies and videos of herself dancing.
If you’re one of her 41.8 million followers—or belong to a group text with people between 25 and 45—you’ve probably seen these dances. They’re herky-jerky, slightly off-beat whirls that bear little resemblance to the sultry, tightly choreographed routines that made her a star. They are glitchy, crudely stitched together, and amateurish. Here is a thrice-divorced mother living in the suburbs still wearing the outfits and listening to the music of a nostalgically remembered youth, now mediating her life through a screen, addicted to posting.
The most widely circulated of these clips might be the one where Spears dances with a pair of butcher knives, staring hypnotically into the camera, never blinking while the sharp blades come closer and closer to her face. It flashes like a surrealist dispatch from our own deranged subconscious.
Or maybe it’s more accurately captured by a popular meme, in which a picture of a bright-eyed teenage Spears, captioned “The USA We Grew Up In,” is juxtaposed with her haunted, knife-waving adult replacement: “The USA We Now Live In.”
Jeff Weiss is the author of Waiting for Britney Spears: A True Story, Allegedly
