History will record that the Trump Bubble burst on January 6, with a coup attempt organized by Donald Trump. (The picture is from Doc Searls' blog.)
I have seen many bubbles pop in my experience as a business reporter. The best-known was the dot-com bubble. It popped on January 10, 2000 when Time Warner announced it would “acquire” AOL.
The precise date of the popping is only remembered in retrospect. At the time, business went on. That spring I attended a trade show called ad:tech, on my employer’s dime. Even a year later I was able to take my wife on a trip to Hawaii because of an Internet commerce conference on the Big Island.
My most vivid memory of that ad:tech conference was on a bus, heading back to our hotel after a day spent on the water, sponsored by an Internet ad agency that eventually sank with the rest. A young entrepreneur was complaining that each new round of funding was requiring more equity from him and generating less cash. “It’s unfair,” he whined.
I’m a cruel man. I laughed until I cried. Later, at the event’s award show, a block “CNN” ad won awards for creativity. I laughed until I cried again. The people around me thought I’d gone crazy. It was just that I saw the handwriting on the wall.
The point is that even after a bubble pops, many people will remain unaware of it. They will continue to take the bubble as a real thing. They’ll go in even-deeper. They’ll consider falling prices an opportunity, telling folks to “buy the dip.”
That’s what I thought when I saw what Tucker Carlson did last night. Having jumped the shark by supporting the Insurrection, he found a bigger shark. In this case it was to claim, falsely, that Derek Chauvin was convicted of George Floyd’s murder only because the jurors were afraid that protesters would target them if they didn’t.
There’s some plausibility here. I know a young man, then a student in Minneapolis, who railed at me for cheering the verdict, claiming the protests had “burned down my city.” His anger, generated close-up, is like that entrepreneur from 20 years ago. It’s short-sighted, but it’s very real.
Bubbles don’t pop. They are more like tides. They recede. By 2002 I made zero dollars covering technology. All my employers from 1999 were out of business. Our family suffered reverses we have yet to fully recover from. But life went on.
That will happen with Trumpism. Analysts are right to fear its return. “Ignorance and fanaticism is always busy, and needs feeding,” as Clarence Darrow said. (The quote was later lifted wholesale for Inherit the Wind.) But we’re passing through the worst of it.
I can’t tell precisely what the future holds, just as I can’t tell you which stocks to buy today. In the near term, I suspect industrials will do well. I believe in the end of oil, the Machine Internet, and DNA as a programming language. But these are all themes, not headlines.
The future is what we make of the present, guided by the past. It’s all in our hands.
