American Doom: Dispatches

Dispatch #6: Everything is so obvious

Justin Glawe — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 10:01:28 GMT

Hey, some quick thoughts today on the crazy scale of obvious corruption that goes on, you know, every day. For Savannah-area folks, you can join me and Jessica Leigh Lebos for free at an event this Saturday where we’ll discuss my book. RSVP for the event here and order the book here (and get 30 percent off with the code 08TERRIBLE). You can also listen to my full discussion of the book with the fine folks at KAXE in Bemidji, MN at the bottom of this link. As always, the best way to support the work we do here at Doom is with a paid subscription or a contribution to our Coffee Fund.

Shocker: Trump’s plan didn’t work and in fact probably made things worse.

The older I get, the more efficient I seem to be at many things. I know there will be a time in old age when this is not the case, but hopefully by then some of the many things I am required to spend my time on will have passed.

One of those requirements is having to pay a lot of attention to what elected officials say and do. Maybe I’ll always have to spend what I estimate to be a solid 40 percent of my time doing this, which, combined with general news consumption and my own investigations and stories, becomes more like 60 percent of the minutes in a day.

But I have a child now, and a house that needs some work, plus my book is out, plus I’m feeling a bit squishy so I’m at the gym relatively frequently, and I like to play music as often as possible, ideally every day. Family, friends, recovery, paying bills — life gets busy and fast.

So when it comes to paying attention to the many, many things our elected officials say and do, plus the consequences of those actions on people who often don’t have the power to do much about it — like immigrants dying in awful conditions in facilities across the country — I have to be efficient.

Luckily, people like Donald Trump and just about every single person around him makes what they do and how they do it incredibly obvious.

Just days past his latest corrupt gambit — the advertising, marketing, and grift-filled spectacle that was UFC Freedom 250 — Trump is on to his next corrupt project or stunning failure, depending on how it shakes out.

The details of the deal over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program and ending our war there are out and they’re not great, at least politically for Trump. He basically just blew hundreds of millions of dollars — and wasted the lives of 13 American service men and women — on a war that didn’t need to happen, and is now preparing to ink a deal that is no better than the one Barack Obama made with Iran a decade ago.

But Trump, who has spent his life incorrectly believing that he is smarter than every single person in the world, blew up Obama’s deal under the guise that it was a cash-laden handout to Iran. Now, Trump is about to give Iran even more money — not to mention the blood and treasure we’ve expended in our war effort. (Dead American soldiers are just the start. Our munitions reserves are incredibly depleted thanks to Trump and Pete Hegseth’s unnecessary and relentless bombing. Plus, soldiers and airmen are now run down after having spent months screaming across the region in service of Trump’s military adventurism, which he has openly said he’s bored with.)

But it’s not just that Trump’s deal with Iran does nothing new, or that it’s cost us much more than the previous one did, it’s that, like everything Trump touches, it’s probably entirely corrupt.

That’s because the deal promises $300 billion in funds to rehabilitate the Iranian infrastructure we destroyed. The exact language of this bullet point in the deal says those funds will come from both the United States and “regional partners.” That’s vastly more than the $1.7 billion promised by the Obama administration as part of the previous Iran nuclear deal. If you don’t think that those in Trump’s orbit and probably Trump’s own Trump Organization will somehow find a way to profit off all those billions of dollars, you haven’t been paying attention.

Every deal Trump has made during his second term in office has financially benefitted himself, his family and their companies, or the slew of business interests still held by members of his cabinet. The Iran nuclear deal, if it holds, will be no different.

The scale of the Trump administration’s corruption is historic. Sunday’s birthday blood match, in previous times, would have been an impeachable offense in and of itself. Trump’s corruption perverts and harms rules, norms and laws like a steamroller every single day. It will continue until someone puts a stop to it. Republicans won’t do this. It will be up to Democrats, hopefully starting in November, to begin a second reconstruction project that ensures no future presidential administration will be able to get away with all that Trump has.

Trump as president exists for a lot of reasons. Among them is the obvious fact that Reconstruction failed following the Civil War. Since then, a shifting coalition of white supremacists, Christian nationalists, and hyper-capitalist forces have successfully been able to flourish. The systems under which they’ve done so must end in order for a truly democratic republic to continue. The reforms of the Watergate era were a start, and something similar — albeit much more aggressive — must start taking shape now. If not, the historic corruption of Trump will become the norm, not the exception. At that point, people like me probably won’t even be able to make a living. And all of us who aren’t inside the system of corruption and influence will work in service of it.

***

Doom socials:

Dispatch #4: The consequences of November and beyond

Justin Glawe — Tue, 02 Jun 2026 12:01:34 GMT

Just a few quick thoughts for today as I navigate life with a newborn. My book is now out. You can order it here and use the code 08SALE250 to get 50 percent off. You can also hear me discuss the book, much of the American decline and violence it covers, as well as my time as a local newspaper reporter in small Midwestern towns at KAXE in Bemidji, MN. I also sat down to discuss the book with my hometown paper back in Peoria. You can read that story here.

Subscribe now

A photo I took of a guy named Jeff fishing on Lake Bemidji in 2013.

For as long as the internet has been around, there have been people willing to say terrible things online. It used to be that many who expressed racist beliefs and other markers of societal regression did so anonymously, and that’s certainly still the case. But take a scroll through the Facebook feed of just about anything these days — including, most certainly, your local TV news station — and you’ll see members of your own community openly espousing racism and hate.

Many of our friends, neighbors and co-workers no longer feel pressured to keep these beliefs under wraps. They are open with it, and clearly feel there are no consequences. Increasingly, they’re right.

As I’ve gone about talking to people about my book, which has now been published, people have asked me variations of a question: what’s different about America now compared to when I began my career as a newspaper reporter more than a decade ago? If I had to pick a single word to describe a driving factor of the widespread decline the book covers, it would be shamelessness.

Many of our friends, neighbors and co-workers have been emboldened over the last two decades to openly espouse beliefs that many of us grew up believing were in the past. They do not feel shame in displaying their ignorance and racism. I don’t know about you, but I grew up in an era where things like the Civil Rights movement were generally viewed as good things. The people who believed otherwise, I was led to believe, were on the margins of our society. I don’t know if I can say that anymore.

Savannah Mayor Van Johnson does an admirable job combatting the hate and racism that fills the comment sections of his Facebook posts on any given day. Like a lot of us, he might be better off ignoring those comments more often, but I understand why he feels the need to confront them head-on.

His feed — plus that of hundreds of local news outlets across the country — is inundated every single day with people saying things that should result in getting them ousted from polite society. But they’re not doing so anonymously — they’re doing it under their own names, often proudly linking themselves and their racist comments back to their employers.

Maybe some of these folks get a talking-to by their boss at the local car dealership where they work. Maybe some of them even get fired for saying obviously racist shit on the Facebook page of their town’s mayor, where their profile lists them as being employed at businesses whose bottom lines rely on, you know, not being openly racist. But many more of them face no consequences. And why should they? Over the last 10 years, we’ve watched as some of the most powerful and influential people in American life have expressed racist beliefs on a daily basis.

In this type of society, why should anyone be fearful that such comments will have consequences in their own lives? Many of the things that many of us were led to believe would result in dire consequences no longer apparently do so, especially for those at the top, like Donald Trump. Wanton corruption, open racism, abject ignorance — all of these things have led to more success and power for Trump and his vast network of Americans who support these degrading behaviors or are profiting from them.

How do you turn around a society where such behavior is rewarded? That’s the underlying question that will be answered by November’s elections.

Dispatch #3: Light over darkness

Justin Glawe — Mon, 11 May 2026 13:38:17 GMT

A woman protesting ICE immigration raids in Los Angeles on June 14, 2025. - Justin Glawe | American Doom

You might have seen that American Doom beat the Justice Department in federal court last week. Trump’s DOJ will now have to officially reveal the names of some of the witnesses in an affidavit that led to an FBI raid on an Atlanta elections office. Doom was the only publication in the country to motion the court to release the names. To support our work, please choose a paid subscription or drop a few dollars into our Coffee Fund.

Subscribe now

I do not think this summer will be as hot as the last one, but what do I know? I’ve been wrong before. For whatever reason, it seems that many Americans have come to accept the daily drumbeat of chaos and corruption that emanates from Washington, as well as the more recent authoritarian machinations being heaped upon us by Trumpian legislatures throughout the country. Well, maybe accept isn’t the right word. Maybe people are just exhausted.

And when I say us, I guess not all of us. Because lots of people are very happy about the abject power grab that has occurred in recent days following the Supreme Court’s decision to allow Republican-led states to effectively rig the map so that only Republicans can win.

Last summer saw fairly widespread protests over the Trump administration’s mass deportation regime as masked agents stormed American streets. The song of the summer this year seems to be a slightly less obvious one of rising authoritarianism: the quiet, plodding work of Republicans who are using the tools of democracy to undo it. There are many ways to create an authoritarian state. One of those ways includes the masked police that sparked outrage and protests last year. Another involves what we’re seeing now: duly-elected officials ensuring that no one else can come to power by using the very levers of government and elections that are supposed to ensure equal representation under the law.

Simultaneously, Republicans are working to, once again, convince millions of Americans that any election that doesn’t result in a Republican victory is fraudulent. (This is the thesis statement of the election denial movement, whether they explicitly state it or not.) All of this — the war in Iran, Trump administration corruption coupled with a complete disregard for the economic concerns of Americans, attacks on voting rights, sowing distrust in elections — feels like the inevitable, if not openly-violent, end state of decades-long period of turmoil that I’ve reported on in one form or another my entire career.

Today at Luke O’Neil’s Hell World, you can read about some of that chaos in an excerpt from my forthcoming book, If I Am Coming to Your Town, Something Terrible Has Happened – The Life and Times of a Domestic War Correspondent. The book will be published in June by the University of Georgia Press and you can pre-order it here. (Use the code 08TERRIBLE to receive 30 percent off.)

Some folks have been asking me why I wrote this book, which also deals with my descent into and recovery from alcoholism, and the short answer is: I had to. Not only did I have to get all this shit off my chest, but I felt I had to put these events down so that other people who were watching the chaos and violence of American life — and who were wondering if it all was really as bad as it can sometimes seem — were not alone. First, you are not alone. Secondly, it certainly all has been very bad. Third, it’s going to get better. The pendulum never stops at the top, as my dad would say.

All of this pressure and pain will go away if Americans stick to the principles of light, love, justice and progress. It can be hard in dark days to remember that those principles can win, but by remembering that they can defeat darkness we get closer to willing the darkness away.

***

Please follow AD on our social media for a little more doom to scroll. That’s what we all need, right?

Dispatch #2: The state of things

Justin Glawe — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 14:17:13 GMT

Dispatch #1 - Asking is strength; giving is will

Justin Glawe — Wed, 01 Apr 2026 10:05:14 GMT

Watching Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth give another bombastic press conference that seemed like an act of absurdist theater this morning as the chyron reminded us of the ridiculous name of our war in Iran — Operation Epic Fury — I had one of those moments where I’m reminded just how staggeringly dumb much of modern American life is. It inspired me t…