I’m an armchair authority on the art of happiness. My acquired expertise began when I was a college freshman and assigned to read John Stuart Mill, who defined happiness as pleasure and the absence of pain, weighted by the pursuit of higher ends. In the years that followed, I consumed countless self-help books and digested innumerable vacuous memes on LinkedIn and elsewhere on the subject. I can spare you the time and effort required to acquire my decades-long wisdom.
There are two principal lessons on achieving happiness.
Rule No. 1: Happy people think happy thoughts.
Yes, I know that sounds obvious. And if, after losing your job or being rejected by your spouse, you can focus on the fact that millions of others are still gainfully employed or happily partnered, more power to you. To some of us, the glass remains half empty because 50 percent of its contents are missing.
Rule No. 2: We can’t control our circumstances, but we can control how we respond to them.
This bit of wisdom has always struck me as more durable, and it feels especially relevant in the era of Donald J. Trump.
There was a time when Trump’s public comments and social-media postings were considered beyond the pale. Even many who supported his policies privately admitted they were aghast at his rhetoric. One might have assumed such behavior would leave him isolated and exposed. Instead, something else happened. His most vociferous critics began to mirror his style, sometimes with even greater enthusiasm.
What began as aberration hardened into habit. Trumpspeak has become a global phenomenon.
During a debate last month over Trump’s musings about purchasing Greenland, Danish Member of the European Parliament Anders Vistisen addressed the president this way on the floor of the EU legislature:
“Let me put this in words you might understand: Mr. President, fuck off.”
Vistisen, who belongs to the right-wing Danish People’s Party, sits on the Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality as well as the Delegation for Relations with Iran. What was noteworthy wasn’t merely what was said, but that it was said in a formal governing body, and some perhaps treated as a legitimate and applaudable form of political expression.
California Governor Gavin Newsom’s anti-Trump social-media outbursts are not quite as coarse, at least not yet, but they are unmistakably Trumpian in form. He favors performative outrage, mockery, and, increasingly, all-caps emphasis. The pattern is familiar to anyone scrolling his feed.
Even corporate media journalists have raised concerns about this mimicry. Meet the Press anchor Kristen Welker asked Newsom whether his Trump-like antics risk “normalizing that behavior.”
Newsom defiantly rejected the premise.
“Quite the contrary,” Newsom said. “The whole expression was to not allow it to be normalized… Trump is normalizing deviancy across the spectrum of issues… It’s madness.”
Perhaps. But behaving like Trump has served Newsom well. He currently leads early polling for the Democratic nomination in 2028.
“California Gov. Gavin Newsom has seized attention like no other Democrat in President Donald Trump’s second term as he works to position himself as a de facto head of the resistance in a leaderless party,” the Washington Post declared. “Influencers on both the left and the right have discussed Newsom online more than any other potential 2028 presidential contender since Trump’s inauguration … The attention has been driven by his response to immigration raids in Los Angeles, his efforts to counter a Republican redistricting push and, most recently, his mocking impersonations of Trump’s social media style.”
Trumpspeak, however, is no longer confined to politicians.
Two of America’s most esteemed business leaders have embraced Trump’s vulgarity as a form of authority.
Elon Musk recently lashed out at critics who questioned his support for U.S. technology companies expanding their use of temporary H-1B workers from India. His response was characteristically profane and dismissive, couched as “telling it like it is,” and instantly amplified across social media.
JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, often likened to the David Rockefeller of our time, has also taken to public profanity. During a town hall with employees in Columbus, Ohio, where the bank has a significant presence, Dimon made clear he would not back down from his order that employees return to the office five days a week, despite an online petition protesting the mandate.
“I don’t care how many people sign that fucking petition,” Dimon said, according to a Bloomberg report citing a transcript first obtained by Reuters.
Dimon also expressed contempt for certain diversity initiatives at JPMorgan.
“I saw how we were spending money on some of this stupid shit, and it really pissed me off,” Dimon reportedly said. “I’m just gonna cancel them. I don’t like wasted money in bureaucracy.”
Trumpspeak hasn’t just traveled across borders. It has traveled across targets as well. Once personal attacks are normalized as a form of authenticity, “telling it like it is” becomes an all-purpose justification for contempt, even when it has no basis in fact.
Consider a recent Substack attack on Jeff Bezos’s stewardship of The Washington Post by Eduardo Porter, a former New York Times columnist.
After declaring Bezos a “sociopath,” Porter went on to offer his assessment of Amazon’s founder’s time-management habits and his spouse.
“Bezos spends too much time working on his obliques, but otherwise he strikes me as the standard rich hedonist, happy to own the very ultrabiggest yacht ever and to buy Venice for his wedding, to parade his voluptuous new squeeze.”
Porter further speculates that “a MacKenzie-less Bezos decided that the future of his most lucrative businesses mattered most, whether democracy died in darkness or not,” implying, without evidence, that MacKenzie Scott, Bezos’s first wife, may have influenced his decision to acquire The Washington Post in 2013.
Scott has donated more than $26 billion to charities and nonprofits since 2019, and I am not aware of any major media organizations among the recipients of her largesse. She would have reason to be skeptical of corporate business media. By most accounts, Scott was instrumental in helping Bezos build Amazon in its early years and may not have appreciated the magazine covers and breathless profiles declaring the company could never be profitable.
Still, some have come to appreciate the perils of trying to imitate Trump, including Sarah Silverman, the comedian who retired the “arrogant, ignorant” character that parlayed her fame early in her career.
“Having Trump win, not immediately, but especially after he was elected and the world changed, that character was no longer really amusing to me because he embodies that completely,” Silverman said.
Vistisen, the politician who told Trump to fuck off on the floor of the EU Parliament, was not speaking entirely to an audience inclined to indulge Trumpian vulgarity.
“If the translation was correct, the term you used is not allowed in this house, and there will be consequences to the message you have used,” EU Parliament Vice President Nicolae Ștefănuță responded. “It is not okay in this house of democracy.”
When vulgarity becomes the lingua franca of power, it stops being subversive, stops being funny, and ultimately stops working, except for the man who made it his brand.