Trump Age: How the Planet Got Stuck on One Man’s Broken Clock

Trump Age: The Entire Planet Learns to Live on Someone Else’s Timeline
by Our Correspondent, filed from an airport lounge that still smells of 2016

It began, as most global disasters do, with a shrug. One minute the planet was minding its own business—Brexit tantrums, Chinese credit bubbles, Eurozone austerity cosplay—the next, a 70-year-old New York real-estate mascot declared the international order obsolete via Twitter at 3 a.m. The rest of us have been living in what polite diplomats now call the “Trump Age,” a chronological cul-de-sac where every news cycle feels like déjà vu with worse lighting.

From São Paulo to Seoul, the phrase “Trump Age” has become shorthand for a peculiar form of geopolitical jet lag: no matter your time zone, you wake up to headlines already fermenting in the orange glow of Mar-a-Lago. Brazilian soy traders check their phones before coffee to see whether Beijing or Washington has flipped the tariff table overnight; German car executives schedule earnings calls around the likelihood of a 3 a.m. CAPS-LOCK missive. The entire planet, it seems, is stuck on someone else’s circadian rhythm—and nobody can find the snooze button.

The numbers, like everything else these days, are both hilarious and horrifying. Global Google searches for “emigrate” spiked 350% between 2016-2020, then leveled off only because every search result now reads “Sorry, New Zealand is full.” Meanwhile, satire sites from Lagos to Lisbon have shuttered; how do you parody a press conference that already sounds like a lost Monty Python sketch? Even the North Koreans have given up, replacing their usual hyperbole with a terse “¯\_(ツ)_/¯” in the state newspaper Rodong Sinmun—proof that when reality becomes self-satirizing, propaganda is out of a job.

Foreign ministries have adapted in ways both ingenious and tragic. French diplomats now keep a “Trump-to-Logic” phrasebook; the entry for “very stable genius” translates as “mercurial interlocutor, proceed with champagne.” Japan quietly added an eighth floor to its Ministry of Economy, staffed entirely by psychologists tasked with interpreting presidential mood swings for supply-chain planners. Australia, ever the pragmatist, simply built a giant red “RESET” button in Canberra; rumor says it’s connected to nothing, but pressing it makes ministers feel briefly empowered, like retweeting a meme before doomscrolling resumes.

The economic fallout is best measured in absurdities. Swiss watchmakers pivoted to countdown clocks labeled “Days Until Next Policy Whiplash.” Cryptocurrency markets now rise and fall with the half-life of a Trump tweet; analysts call it “volatility squared,” retail investors call it Tuesday. Even the staid London Bullion Market Association reports that gold’s traditional safe-haven status has been complicated by the discovery that bunker-dwelling billionaires also hoard commemorative MAGA hats as “non-correlated assets.” Diversification, 2024-style.

Culturally, the Trump Age has flattened irony until it’s thin enough to see through. Iranian state TV runs reality shows where clerics compete to craft the most creative insult for “the Great Satan’s golf courses.” In Kenya, matatu minibuses blast remixed rally recordings instead of reggae; nothing gets commuters moving like the dulcet tones of a 2019 rally in Tulsa promising to bring back steam power. And in Canada—sweet, apologetic Canada—immigration officials now hand newcomers a pamphlet titled “So You Fled One Narcissist, Now What?” Its final page is just a picture of a very large moose and the words “Good luck, eh.”

Perhaps the cruelest trick of the Trump Age is how it exports domestic chaos while pretending to be isolationist. Tariffs ricochet like stray bullets; climate accords collapse faster than a casino in Atlantic City. Yet the spectacle is streamed everywhere, turning sovereign nations into binge-watching subscribers of America’s longest-running reality show. We complain, we meme, we clutch pearls—then tune in again at 3 a.m. because, deep down, we fear missing the season finale.

So here we are, circling the globe on a jet fueled by schadenfreude and Diet Coke. The flight map shows no arrival time; the pilot keeps tweeting about the “fake horizon.” Fasten your seatbelts, fellow passengers. In the Trump Age, the only certainty is turbulence—and the in-flight entertainment is us.