It’s the Trendiest Term in the Tech World. It Perfectly Explains What Trump Is Doing to America.

Yes, that Donald Trump rally at Madison Square Garden last Sunday was an hourslong performance piece of flagrant misogyny and racism, fascism and free-range hate. The use of the word “slaughter”? That should probably have been the tell.

Yet a few days later, the real surprise is not that it played out as it did, but that it seems to have engendered sufficient backlash—inside both the campaign and the country—to warrant some uncharacteristic backpedaling. In many ways, the debate about whether this particular event somehow went too far in celebrating the very hate and rage it seeks to help it surf to a victory next week is almost too on-the-nose to be believed. That the adjudicated sexual abuser and convicted felon who sought to violently overturn an election might get tagged for someone else’s vile joke almost beggars belief.  

And yet, behind the lurid carnival barkery of Hulk Hogan and Rudy Giuliani and BeDazzled Alina Habba and the ghoulish malevolence of Stephen Miller and Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk, perhaps the enduring message here was not the blatant “banality of evil,” or even that “the cruelty is the point,” but the ease with which the enshittification of democracy itself is the real endgame of the Trump campaign. What was on full display at Madison Square Garden as the Trump machine coughed out its alleged closing argument for this campaign was not just the racism they are now catching grief over. It was also their conviction that the entirety of the democratic experiment is now played out; it no longer serves. In their center-court telling, democracy is a vestige of a long-dead bucket of services and promises on which nobody should plausibly rely anymore.

The term “enshittification” was coined in 2023 by Cory Doctorow to describe the ways in which digital platforms that had once been invaluable to us slowly became worse and worse. The American Dialect Society chose enshittification as its word of the year in the year of its invention. As Doctorow put it: “Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

Doctorow’s concept about online platforms has since been applied everywhere and anywhere you can find capitalism hollowing out public goods. And while we continue to debate whether the word “fascism” is appropriately directed at the Trump campaign, we forget to debate whether the word “democracy” still applies to this country in any way. Because every signal called out in these waning days of the Trump campaign is a clarion call to further enshittify democratic systems and protections.

Take the value of public protest; the right to vote; the ability of the free press to hold power to account; and the rule of law. These core American values have been so degraded that they all become laugh lines at the Garden. And the chumps like us, who believe in them? We are told that we are the ones at fault for the degradation.

What Trump and his acolytes have finally perfected, with their attacks on the fundamental pillars of democratic participation, reflects their absolute contempt for the consumers of democracy itself. Trump and his oligarchs and his tech bros and his nativist white supremacists have worked tirelessly to enshittify each entity that exists to ensure the continuation of voters’ ability to decide their future. But there is also no way to exit the system, unless you want to belong to the mob of anarchy that is the opposition to order. And so we cling to democracy because we have nothing else.

These cornerstones of democracy are failures, they tell us, as they toil away to ensure that it is so. The press? Liars. Your vote? Stolen by noncitizen voters. Government workers? Deep staters. Elected officials? Enemies from within. Rule of law? Witch hunt. Civic virtue of any sort? For suckers. Lawful protest? Unamerican, believe it or not. And as they blame each of these institutions for failing democracy, they buy them on the cheap for fun and profit. We’re left to stand around holding the rumpled sack.

The free press, as evidenced by the rank cowardice on display at the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, has lost the public trust. But it is also no coincidence that Trump devotes his time (as he did in the past two elections) to attacking the media in general and the attending journalists in particular as an enemy of the people. Elon Musk has done more than most anyone to ensure that you are lied to fluently and for profit—and now he is pouring money into ensuring that only Hulk Hogan stands as a trusted voice of democratic values. A free press enshittified is how democracies die. Check.

Your vote, which is, like it or not, the one thing that ensures that the government serves you and not vice versa, is also enshittified every time Trump calls the results of the 2020 election into question, as he did once again at the Garden this weekend. It is enshittified when drop boxes are set on fire and when the GOP files lawsuits attempting to toss ballots. When poll workers are too afraid to do their jobs because they are afraid of violence, we lose confidence in voting, too. Every single time they lie and say noncitizens are voting en masse when they are not, the vote is slowly enshittified.

Claims that they intend to use a law from the 18^th century to detain millions of migrants in camps before deportation represents a slow-rolling enshittification of citizenship, naturalization, immigration, and the basic idea that America was ever a country of immigrants. Stephen Miller squealing that “America is for America and Americans only” is peak devaluing what it is to be an American at all.

And the threats about throwing Jack Smith out of the country, and using the military to prosecute lawful protesters, including military tribunals for Liz Cheney and Nancy Pelosi? All ways of telling people that the law exists to reward allies and punish defectors—a plan to replace the American justice system with a protection racket.

The problem with enshittification is that there is no exit as the systems on which we rely really begin to break down. There is nowhere to go, and for those of us who still believe in the ideals of voting, a free press, the rule of law, and fundamental equality, there is nothing to be done but to keep trying to perfect those same systems as they are being jacked up on cinder blocks and sold for parts.

I keep hearing that Americans don’t vote for vague concepts like “democracy.” But it’s hard to listen to Trump and his followers without understanding that it is the thing he is decidedly running against. In doing so, he is also running it into the ground.