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Trump’s Return: Keeping the Subtle Flame of Integrity Lit

By paying attention to our complex and often contradictory humanness, we can keep our integrity through chaos and disruption

A billboard of Donald Trump at a supporter’s home in West Des Moines, Iowa, in December 2015. Photo: Michael Hiatt/Alamy

While picking up a Golden Globe for his hit Netflix series Baby Reindeer, its writer and creator Richard Gadd told the assembled Hollywood audience that a number of people had asked him why he thought the show had been such a success. In it, Gadd plays a version of himself, Donny, a failing comedian working in a Camden pub, trying to make sense of being sexually abused by a man he admires in the industry, and becoming the subject of vulnerable stalker Martha – who he comes to both need and loathe.

Gadd said he felt “people have been crying out for something that kind of spoke to the painful inconsistencies of being human” and that “any story when done right, it’s universal, and all the weird, idiosyncratic struggles we go through on a daily basis are just as worthy of being committed to screen”. 

On the same night, Demi Moore picked up her first-ever acting award, after 45 years in the industry, for The Substance. Collecting the prize, she shared how a producer had told her early on in her career that she was a “popcorn actress” and she had “made that to mean” that “I couldn’t be acknowledged… and I believed that”.

Moore ended her speech by saying: “I had a woman say to me ‘just know, you will never be enough. But you can know the value of your worth if you just put down the measuring stick’.” Judging by the media reaction, it was a moment that resonated with many who have struggled with low self-esteem.

Draped in the privilege of Hollywood recognition as they were, these moments felt significant – because they were rare snapshots of how powerful the courage of vulnerability in collective public life can be; and how necessary it is for us to explore and share this as humans.

In the days that followed the Golden Globes ceremony in Los Angeles, entire communities in the city were burned to the ground by wildfires spreading viciously via fierce winds powered by the forces of climate change. Many Hollywood personalities lost their homes. Elite wealth provides no ultimate comfort, it turns out. 

This article was originally published in the February 2025 print edition of Byline Times

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While difficult questions about the human condition, and the messy realities that surround us, are explored through art, they are often sidelined in our political culture. 

Although art can spur impactful societal and personal change, it is ‘the media’ that is the mediator of the messages projected onto society as a whole and into our heads. The water we swim in reflects the media narratives that have been poured into it.

And yet, this is barely acknowledged. We can choose to watch Baby Reindeer or Mr Bates vs The Post Office, but we don’t choose the ideas that we are made to carry within us – about any number of the various of aspects of our lives, influenced by a constant stream of information and how it is framed.

The tone and content of our political culture – predominantly communicated to us through the media, both traditional and social – matters. 

And, in this realm, we see the dominance of a ‘strong man’ mentality and ‘easy answers’ culture which leaves little room for acknowledging that there are no simple solutions to any of our problems – practical, political, societal, psychic, or philosophical. 

Donald Trump’s return to the White House signals, in many ways, the triumph of this approach.

Reliant on a tech revolution that is happening all around us – too big for us to begin to seriously grapple with – it is not that it makes no space for emotionality. Indeed, I have made the case in Byline Times previously that emotionality is the politics of our times.

But it seeks to amplify and manipulate that emotionality with clear-cut ‘solutions’ and grievance-and-recognition rhetoric – which is actually the opposite of allowing for human doubt, rationality, vulnerability, curiosity, and empathy. While emotionality, and the fear often underlying its most heightened version, is an important facet of our humanness, it is not the only one.

Meanwhile, our journalists look for the ‘gotcha!’ moment; presenting stories that should be about people’s lives in binary sports terms of ‘winners and losers’ and ‘who’s up and who’s down’. It is no wonder people increasingly turn to social media to develop their ideas about their lives – with millions and millions of different ‘realities’ and ‘truths’ emerging as the only real shared result.

Clicks and likes don’t lie in complexity and collectivism – and our Big Tech social media platforms profit off this ‘truth’ day in, day out. 

In a three-hour interview, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told podcaster Joe Rogan that he believes companies had become “culturally neutered” as they had distanced themselves from “masculine energy”. The Facebook chief – who has chosen to bow down to Trump along with his other media ‘tech bros’ – said that it’s good if a culture “celebrates the aggression a bit more”.

This aggression is on display constantly on the X (formerly Twitter) account of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, who owns the social media platform, and is now a member of the US Government.

Although there have been strides in recent years around the public conversation on mental health, these too are now provoking an ‘anti-woke’ backlash. More fundamentally, we continue to frame ‘mental health’ as a niche topic rather than the mainstream discussion about our basic human needs that it is. 

A true sense of humanity, running as the thread throughout our collective life, is clearly lacking. 

It is this lack of an open, communal, outlet to routinely express our human needs – taking in the good, the bad, and everything in between – that, I believe, is turning politics into a channel for our more heightened psychological drives.

It is the desperate deficit of expression, and recognition, that tends towards the need to release more acute emotions in this way: to have fears, injustice, anger, and insecurity heard. This tendency is weaponised by populist ‘strongmen’ who do so for their own interests, but provide an outlet where others appear to be lacking.

For those Americans feeling dissatisfied with their lives in a deeper way, perhaps Trump’s ‘fighting spirit’ was seen as a means to bring a sprinkle of prosperity many yearn for but cannot manifest in their lives.

During the next four years of Trump’s America – with all the implications his administration may have for UK politics, particularly emanating from the X account of Elon Musk – it will be easy to fall into doom loops and rage. 

Our shared human condition is the most powerful tool we have to remind us that we are not as different and divided as the political culture may lead us to believe. We need to keep in touch with it. And a sense of our difficult and messy humanity alive within us.

This may not tangibly change any of what follows or the fact that we are living through phenomenal change, which by its nature brings chaos and disruption to how individuals and societies function.

But it is only by paying attention to our complex and often contradictory humanness – in an age which seeks to alienate and divide us – that we can keep our integrity. And a belief in the best, as well as the worst, of the human condition.

Sometimes all we can do is keep the subtle flame of integrity lit.

Hardeep Matharu is the Editor-in-Chief of Byline Times


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