Somewhere on the world wide web someone is writing a deeply urgent piece of literature: a Zohran Mamdani × Donald Trump fanfiction. Yes, none of us asked for it. Here we are anyway. 

I personally have nothing against fanfiction. In fact, I think it deserves far more cultural respect than it gets. It’s probably the freest form of writing we have left: uncensored, unedited, unmonetised. Fanfiction is democratic in a way literature rarely is. But what happens when fascism enters the chat? When elections come with fan edits? When “ship” videos of political opponents float around with pink sparkles and sped-up Lana Del Rey in the background? It’s about what happens when the political imagination collapses into entertainment logic.

Unseriousness is politically corrosive. Entertainment logic is swallowing democracy. 

Radicality never comes from conformity, sure. It’s normal to experiment, to push boundaries, to reinvent discourse. And our generation is so violently tired of intellectual snobbery—this cult of sounding articulate, performing eloquence, switching registers even when we have nothing to say. We’ve mastered the performance of insight without ever risking the substance of it.

But while we obsess over eloquence, we’ve developed a massive problem on the other side: we trivialise the inhuman. We turn dangerous political figures into memeable characters. We laugh them into harmlessness. We soften their edges until they start to feel like sitcom villains rather than architects of actual harm.Until they are no longer monsters. We get too unserious about figures whose decisions have already left real bodies behind.

When you look at Trump and he becomes this goofy, unserious man—so absurd he stops seeming ideological altogether. When Trump becomes giggly, orange-blurred, a harmless sitcom uncle you think you could maybe get a drink with, something has gone profoundly wrong. For all we know, he’s blushing under the spray tan. Cute, right? No. Because this man’s “quirks” sit on top of structural cruelty.

 Even if it’s not your country, even if the absurdity makes you laugh—humour cannot, and should not, erase power.

And when activism targets the individual instead of the system, we get this grotesque spectacle: a crowd circling a collapsing woman insisting, “We didn’t touch her, she fell on her own.” Well congratulations, fuckers, so did your democracy.

Nostalgia is a recession indicator, not a political project. And yet look at political theory: how little new models emerge. Even the progressive spheres cling to communism like it’s a limited-edition, ignoring the messy, state-capitalist realities of countries pretending to practice it. Why are we worshipping old promises instead of acknowledging their failures? So yes: thrift your clothes. Just please, for the love of everyone’s remaining brain cells, do not thrift your political thoughts.

If politics is an extension of the people, as it should be, then why does it now resemble the “us” that we exist and believe in? What are we supposed to read in the static of this overly curated reality (past or present) where everything is spectacle and nothing is sacred?Decentering sounds liberatory until you consider the temptation of “dumbification”: maybe it would be easier to do to the powerful what they historically did to us—turn them into jokes, into edits, into objects of unserious.

 But should we? Does it help? Or does it just trivialise the stakes?

 Dumbification becomes a way to shrink terrifying power into something childish enough to laugh at. But reducing the powerful to fools doesn’t redistribute power—it only blinds us to how they use it.

And yes, digital footprints matter. Should they be brought into the political sphere? Probably. You deserve a private life, sure, but if you want to run a nation, maybe you should also be held to a slightly higher standard than “has cute pics on Instagram.” Political figures should not be treated like Calico Critters—adorable toys to project narratives onto. Even if Zohran Mamdani does vaguely resemble the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen, we do not know that man.
Read his father Mahmood Mamdani’s Neither Settler Nor Native before you make an edit of the son.

Parasocial politics are rotting us from the inside and they dehumanise both leaders and the public.

Patti Smith once wrote in Just Kids about her adolescent crush on Arthur Rimbaud—a moment anyone educated in a French-adjacent system will find alarmingly relatable. But even Patti understood the difference between admiration and delusion.

The problem with today’s edits of far-right men is not just that they’re in bad taste. It’s that when jokes circulate suggesting an extremist politician is secretly queer or secretly submissive or whatever else the meme demands, it’s always progressive audiences who amplify it—because sexuality and queerness aren’t taboo for them. But the people who end up self-discrediting for fun are the ones with the least access to mainstream platforms. Think about the realities of those taking the blunt of the damage. It’s a losing game, and the joke simply isn’t worth it.

Not everything is meant to be pure entertainment, especially not politics.

It’s not always funny. Almost never what you actually want out of it. It’s supposed to be the mechanism by which we build the conditions of our collective life. And I don’t know about you, but nothing I’m seeing right now resembles that.

What we are doing is setting the precedent that presidents can behave like absolute fools on the world stage, and we’ll shrug. We’ll laugh. We’ll duet it on TikTok. The more unserious the political class becomes, the easier it is for them to commit serious harm without consequence.

At what point is the world allowed to declare itself bleak enough that we can collectively sue our leaders for failure to assist a person in danger? When do we admit that we’re not taking any of this seriously? In his book  Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror Mahmood Mamdani says: “So long as democracy is a living reality at home, democratic empires are potentially self-correcting.” But what happens when democracy stops being a living reality? When all of this outnumber the policies? When the narrative overtakes the consequences? Maybe that’s the real crisis.

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