The Personal Is the Political for Publishers and Presidents Alike

Looking at the personal motivations of the various actors in our mutual Trump 2.0 era polycrisis is a sometimes useful lens for analyzing current events.

This post is my personal attempt to capture the 2025 zeitgeist using that lens to complement previous attempts to understand whether Trump and his opponents are delusional, drugged, or disinformed.

Before we drill down into the personal lives, motivations, and pecadillos of several American political figures, I want to detail something that’s personal to me, millions of rural Americans and thousands of small business owners.

Rural America Is a News Desert Because of Google

I’ll start with some systemic context that helps explain how Trump has gained such a hold over rural America: the continuing death of local news and information in many parts of the United States, via Axios (don’t worry this is going to get surprisingly personal very fast including a reveal of my secret identity):

pic.twitter.com/11Mbl81Pys

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) October 23, 2025

By the numbers: Half of the 136 newspaper closures in America over the past 14 months have been from independent, for-profit newspaper chains that own five or fewer for-profit papers, according to a new report from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism.

By comparison, only eight newspapers owned by investment firms shuttered in the same time period.

Researchers began sounding the alarm about the rise of “news deserts” a decade ago, back when private investment firms began gobbling up and consolidating local papers.

But most of those closures occurred in suburbs where newspapers could more easily be rolled up into bigger, nearby city papers. Unlike the independent newspaper closures we’re seeing today, fewer hyper-rural outlets were impacted by the large investment firm rollups.

More than one-third (38%) of the 8,891 U.S. newspapers that existed 20 years ago have since shuttered.

Around 50 million people in the U.S. today live with limited or no access to local news.

While these details are new and horrifying, one angle that isn’t ever mentioned is the impact of Google’s monopoly control of the web advertising industry.

Things Got Personal for Nat Wilson Turner, Formerly Known as Kid Nate

This one is personal to me as it destroyed the very successful web site I had run since 2007, forcing me to sell at a loss and find myself unemployed post-50 with kids and a mortgage (please don’t be confused by my real name rather than my Naked Capitalism nom de pen.)

I tweeted about it from my dead name account:

Google did this in October of 2023 with the "Helpful Quality Update" which targeted independently owned web sites: pic.twitter.com/6VfZd2Oj1x

— Thoht, Doge of Wisdom (@KidNate) October 21, 2025

While my web traffic, revenue, and ultimately my business was being destroyed from October 2023 to February 2024, I knew it was because of Google’s Helpful Content Update. What I did not know was that the HCU was not punishing my site because of “poor mobile response” or bugs with their “Discover” system.

What I only found out later, after I’d spent all my capital moving to a new server set up and paying a fee to escape my “ad partner” was that Google’s Helpful Content Update systematically attacked sites with independent, non-corporate ownership.

It is believed they did this in response to ChatGPT’s threat to their core search business and only wanted to drive traffic to major companies they cut deals with to use the news content for their AI engine. This is believed to be why Reddit suddenly surged in traffic from Google following a $60 million dollar deal in February 2024.

Columbia Journalism Review explains what this deal has meant in the 18 months since struck:

n the past few years, Reddit’s place in the media industry has undergone a dramatic shift. Once regarded primarily as an unruly forum for toxic discourse, it is now a consequential player in the evolving relationship between tech platforms and media companies.

That’s partly because Reddit has offered itself up as a vital supplier of data for AI companies. In February 2024, the same day it filed for an IPO, the company announced a content-licensing deal with Google for sixty million dollars a year. The agreement gave Google access to real-time content from Reddit’s vast user-authored forums. A few months later, Reddit struck a similar partnership with OpenAI that is estimated to be worth around seventy million a year.

These deals mean that when people search for content online, Reddit surfaces more often. The analytics platform Profound showed that, between August 2024 and June 2025, Reddit was the most cited domain by Google AI Overviews and Perplexity, and the second most cited by ChatGPT. Also, an update to Google’s algorithm that boosted forums like Quora and Reddit in its search rankings nearly tripled Reddit’s readership between August 2023 and April 2024, from 132 million to 346 million visitors.

I didn’t know any of this at the time.

It wasn’t until consumer product review site Housefresh published this in February 2024 (per the Wayback Machine) that I realized what was happening.

Google regularly launches updates to its algorithm to continuously improve search results quality. Think of these updates as a refresh of the system where rankings change: some websites see an improvement while others see a decline.

At HouseFresh, we keep an eye on Google’s news and documentation because these updates can literally make or break our website. That said, we don’t write for Google’s robots and always make editorial decisions with our readers in mind.

We know that at the end of the day, Google will reward us if our readers find our articles useful.

Or that’s what we thought.

You might have noticed that no matter what you google, there’s always a selection of the same publishers showing up at the top of the results:

pic.twitter.com/z1bgyyPlYV

— Nat Wilson Turner (@natwilsonturner) October 23, 2025

The article goes on to explain how big corporate web sites moved into the product review space despite not doing actual product reviews. At the time they were hopeful Google would adjust the protocols, but by May they were giving up.

This tweet explains what was going on in the product review web space fairly succinctly (it’s too long to embed), but it wasn’t limited to any particular content niche.

It was a full-on apocalypse of independent bloggers as documented in pieces like: “Google Has Destroyed the Independent Bloggers” or “Google Search Changes Are Killing Websites in an Age of AI Spam” or “How Google’s Helpful Content Update Keeps Destroying Websites” or “Google Killed My Six-Figure Blogs Overnight — And I Never Saw It Coming.”

The death of so many independent news publishers means that the oligarchs have much wider latitude to pursue their personal interests.

Let’s start at the top.

Enough About Me, Let’s Get to Trump’s Personal Motivations

Following my “Who’s Delusional, Who’s Drugged, Who’s Disinformed? It’s Hard to Tell” post which struggled to parse POTUS Donald Trump’s motivations I happened to catch Russian news analyst John Helmer on Dialogue Works and he cut the proverbial Gordian knot with something that should have been obvious to anyone but a mark like me.

Nima R. Alkhorshid: What does President Trump really care about?

John Helmer: Well, presidents, and he’s nothing new about this, care about their power.

He cares a bit more, or lots more, than some presidents about turning his power into immediate balance sheet cash in all his businesses, the businesses he runs directly through his sons.

So turning power into money is number one and number two is preserving that power, reclaiming it from the Congress if that’s necessary and protecting it at the next midterm election, always two years away from election, right? And then protecting it and preserving it uh for your next term if you can run for reelection, as most presidents hope to do, or if you can’t, as Trump’s position is at the moment, it’s to make sure that your successors or possibly yourself (if you can come up with a constitutional way of doing it) to preserve your power.

Helmer goes on to explain that the massive amounts of money being spent by NATO member countries on arms for Ukraine and the possibilities for the Trump family to personally enrich themselves are likely irresistible, so we shouldn’t expect any peace deals.

Trump Extorting the Department of Justice for Cash

Trump proves Helmer’s point with this unprecedented demand, per the NYT:

President Trump is demanding that the Justice Department pay him about $230 million in compensation for the federal investigations into him, according to people familiar with the matter, who added that any settlement might ultimately be approved by senior department officials who defended him or those in his orbit.

The situation has no parallel in American history, as Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate, was pursued by federal law enforcement and eventually won the election, taking over the very government that must now review his claims. It is also the starkest example yet of potential ethical conflicts created by installing the president’s former lawyers atop the Justice Department.

Mr. Trump submitted complaints through an administrative claim process that often is the precursor to lawsuits. The first claim, lodged in late 2023, seeks damages for a number of purported violations of his rights, including the F.B.I. and special counsel investigation into Russian election tampering and possible connections to the 2016 Trump campaign, according to people familiar with the matter. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because the claim has not been made public.

The second complaint, filed in the summer of 2024, accuses the F.B.I. of violating Mr. Trump’s privacy by searching Mar-a-Lago, his club and residence in Florida, in 2022 for classified documents. It also accuses the Justice Department of malicious prosecution in charging him with mishandling sensitive records after he left office.

Obama’s Cynicism Set the Table for Trump

Trump’s brand of flagrant corruption would not have been possible before 2016. It took eight years of bait and switch from Barack Obama to make voters cynical enough to vote for Trump.

This TikTok video from Shaking Sheets does a great job of reminding everyone just how much Obama’s personal cynicism impacted the personal mental state of the whole American electorate:

@shakingsheets If you take stock of all the average adult in the US has experienced in the last 2/3 decades of our political apparatus… everything starts to make a whole lot of sense! #fypシ #politics #leftist #blacktiktok #history ♬ original sound – Nia Òla 💗

Partial transcript:

In 2008 when then senator of Illinois Barack Hussein Obama launched his campaign for president and was seeking the official nomination from the Democratic Party his campaign promises and policies included but were not limited to: …

[Nat: She lists many of Obama’s specific empty promises and progressive campaign platform items and continues] ..this is why he was “the hope candidate” “the change candidate” and in 2008 the people overwhelmingly voted for this man voted for left wing populism and he shitted on his constituents heads.

He got less than 40% of what he said he would done and most of his promises, he immediately rolled back. Famously when he was asked about his day one promise to codify abortion access cause he had the Democrat super majority he said it was “nowhere near a day one priority” despite promising that on the campaign trail.

It’s quite literally how he swung the women’s vote in (the 2008 primary) and if you ask the average American about that in 2025 they wouldn’t even know this is what Obama ran on and the ones who did [remember] do know and that’s where they get their political disillusionment from.

There’s a reason people were excited about Obama and it was not just because he was young and an orator and black, it was because he was the closest we had gotten to real progressive politics in a decade and in all the ways that mattered to the people that voted for him he capitulated to the right.

…(Obama’s) deceit has produced apathy and until people are willing to answer to that to apologize, to reconcile with the American people we’ll be in this place and I don’t know how many other ways to say that

Since Obama destroyed the electorate’s hope for change, the western public has had a number of horrifically gross scandals come to light: Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, Jimmy Saville, etc.

But let’s look at one very personal scandal involving a politician that hasn’t gotten as much attention as maybe it should.

I’m referring to long-time U.S. Speaker of the House of Representatives and convicted sex offender Dennis Hastert.

The Pedophilia Was Personal, but Exploiting It Was Systemic

I’ve quoted from this Aaron Good interview with BettBeat Media in a previous post but it’s full of so much insight I’m going back to the well.

The conversation turns to the Jeffrey Epstein pedophilia scandal and it’s likely links to zionism when Good brings up Hastert, a largely forgotten figure and connects it to the bigger polycrisis faced by the U.S. empire:

Dr Aaron Good: The kicker to this is if you understand how many people the US political system kills annually in terms of the structural violence: maybe 9 million people a year die of like malnutrition, lack of access to portable water, lack of access to basic health care. This is like a holocaust year in year out.

And so Dennis Hastert, (former) Speaker of the House, prolific pedophile, his pedophile crimes are actually in the aggregate almost nothing. They don’t amount to anything. They’re insignificant compared to the actual system that he protects.

But on he individual level, my God, this is horrendous. How can this be? (But Hastert’s pedophila and possible political exploitation of same) captures a lot of the the evil of this system.

And it it’s starting to register with people with the Epstein things like how can this be? How can they get away with this? We tolerate all sorts of political abuses and corruption but the trafficking of children to people in high places to blackmail them so that they’ll act against the public interest. This is unacceptable.

I think that that this sort of gradual understanding, even incomplete as it is, and not with good political analysis, especially when you’re talking about the right, is showing an empire that is facing a legitimacy crisis like it’s never faced at the same time that it’s losing its material wherewithal to successfully determine the outcomes of military confrontations.

I think that Israel lost the war with Iran. That NATO is losing in Ukraine. A war in Taiwan would be a disaster. I think a war in Venezuela would be a disaster. Although I don’t know if it would have success in the short term or not.

The empire in terms of soft power and hard power is in the worst position in my lifetime, probably in the history of western civilization because it’s been consolidated under this US leadership and now this whole project is just so tainted and illegitimate that it can’t be defended unless you just ignore enormous amounts of of reality. You have to have a made up version of reality to even argue remotely on behalf of the prevailing order that we live under.

Good also speculates that Hastert’s pedophilia might have been the entire basis of his political career as the man was a completely undistinguished wrestling coach who went on to climb the heights of the American political system despite never displaying any talent for…anything.

Hastert was widely seen as a pawn of House Majority Leader Tom DeLay for much of his tenure. DeLay was so powerful at one time that his biographer Lou Dubose called him “perhaps the first Prime Minister in American history.”

DeLay was also so notorious and controversial that he wasn’t viable to run for Speaker of the House, so the easily controlled Hastert was a perfect stooge.

Speaking of stooges, let’s pivot to a more current American politician whose personal mental health having a huge impact on many. I’m speaking of Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman.

Senator John Fetterman’s Personal Mental State Becomes Very Political for Pennsylvania

Earlier this year Fetterman’s staff began leaking details of his personal mental state. Keep in mind Fetterman had a stroke mid-campaign in 2022.

The New York Times got some scoop:

The former chief of staff to Senator John Fetterman, Democrat of Pennsylvania, was so alarmed with his ex-boss’s erratic behavior last year that he wrote a lengthy letter to his doctor warning that the senator was spiraling out of control and that his mental health issues could cost him his life.

“I’m worried that if John stays on his current trajectory he won’t be with us for much longer,” Adam Jentleson, the former chief of staff, wrote on May 20 to a doctor who had treated Mr. Fetterman at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
…
have also long been warned never to get in a car if Mr. Fetterman is behind the wheel because of his dangerous driving habits. His volatile and concerning behavior, which aides noticed last year was taking a turn for the worse, has only increased since the election, people who have spent time with him said. That has coincided with a period when his politics have become more conservative, as he has watched his home state of Pennsylvania swing for Mr. Trump.

“He does not see his doctors,” Mr. Jentleson wrote last year to the medical director who oversaw his 2023 hospitalization for mental health issues. “I am not sure when he last saw a cardiologist, but I don’t think he’s seen one since he was released. He long ago ordered us to stop putting regular drop-bys with Dr. Monahan on his schedule, despite the fact that he had agreed to those as part of the plan.” Dr. Brian P. Monahan is the Navy doctor who has served for nearly 15 years as the on-site physician in the Capitol.
…
Fetterman was discharged March 31 from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Washington, where he had been receiving treatment for clinical depression. He checked himself in for treatment on Feb. 15, with staff members citing a mental health battle that they said intensified during his recovery from a stroke he suffered on the campaign trail in May 2022.

New York Magazine had more:

When Fetterman first caught the attention of the national press, journalists wrote about him like he was a benevolent ogre crossed with a folk hero. More specifically, that’s how I wrote about him.

“This is the tale of Big John Fetterman, the giant who lives in an abandoned car dealership beside a steel mill,” my 2018 profile in the Washington Post began.

“He’s six-eight, arms covered in ink, head as bald as a wrecking ball.”

At the time, Fetterman was mayor of Braddock, which looked a lot like the left-behind corners of the country that had flocked to Donald Trump. He was running for lieutenant governor of the state, and it was easy to see his appeal: He was a bit introverted and curmudgeonly, but funny, smart, and passionate about the fate of communities like Braddock, tattooing the date of each murder that occurred in the town during his tenure on his arm. Endorsed by Bernie Sanders, but also sympathetic to fracking and other positions that cut against the progressive grain, he cruised to victory that year.

The stroke in 2022 made it difficult for Fetterman to communicate, which was painfully evident in his one televised debate with Oz.

As Republicans piled on with claims that Fetterman was incapable of doing the job, Democrats rallied to his defense and confidently predicted he would still be fit to serve.

Now, even though he requires the help of captioning on an iPhone to deal with an auditory-processing impediment, he remains a promising politician, at least to casual observers. He still exudes an elusive sense of authenticity, someone who can chop it up with manosphere chieftains like Joe Rogan while maintaining his strong stance on trans rights.

A recent poll from Morning Consult found that his overall popularity is on the rise, with 50 percent of respondents approving of the job he is doing, against just 35 percent who don’t. With the Democratic Party out of power and fighting with itself about how to move forward, it would be easy to imagine a “Fetterman 2028” machine kicking into gear.

Instead, many of his former staffers are hoping it never happens. “Part of the tragedy here is that this is a man who could be leading Democrats out of the wilderness,” Jentleson said. “But I also think he’s struggling in a way that shouldn’t be hidden from the public.”

Things were bad enough that Fetterman had to “come clean” with the public confession so beloved of the American MSM in an interview with NBC News:

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., said in candid remarks about his struggles with depression that he feared seeking treatment would be the end of his political career.

In an exclusive interview with NBC News’ “Meet the Press,” the first term senator, who was discharged in March from inpatient treatment for clinical depression, recalled a “very dark” moment in December 2022 when he was unable to get out of bed while “dreading” his Senate swearing-in ceremony on Jan. 3.

“People hear all their lives about ‘I can’t get out of bed,’ and you really can’t understand what that really means. You can’t get out of bed until it happens to you. And it did,” he told moderator Kristen Welker.

“And I was scaring my children, and they were confused,” he added. “And, of course, my wife was concerned, and I think she understands better than the kids did.”

Asked how he was feeling compared to a year ago, before he sought treatment for depression, Fetterman said that “things are so much different” now.

“The line [is] ‘I’m living my best life,’ and I really am, because I just am so grateful,” he said. “And I’m always talking about mental health, because I want everybody that can hear that is that help works, and you should get help. And please, don’t suffer any longer, because you deserve to be better. And I’m so grateful to do that, and I’m paying it forward by talking about it.”

Fetterman’s numbers have nosedived among Democratic voters, unfortunately for his staff he’s doing great with Republicans and just fine with “independents”:

From NJ.com:

The new Quinnipiac University poll, released Oct. 1, showed 46% of Pennsylvania voters approved of how Fetterman was handling his job as senator while 38% disapproved. Another 16% did not offer an opinion, according to the poll.

However, the poll found that more Republicans than Democrats approve of how Fetterman was handling his job. This comes as Fetterman has frequently criticized his own party and bucked Democratic leadership in key votes, including voting for the GOP-led spending bill earlier this week.

Even President Donald Trump has praised him in several instances for splitting with his party, saying Fetterman is the “most sensible Democrat.”

The new poll found that 62% of Republicans approved of Fetterman’s job performance while 21% disapproved. In contrast, 54% of Democrats disapproved of Fetterman while 33% approved.

Independents are evenly split, with 43 percent approving and 43 percent disapproving.

“One-time Democratic darling John Fetterman flips the approval script as Republicans embrace him and Democrats give him low marks nearly two years after GOP voters wouldn’t give him the time of day,” Quinnipiac polling analyst Tim Malloy said in a statement.

Unfortunately for Fetterman’s Democratic staffers, the numbers he’s polling are still a strong statewide majority.

It’s hard not to be sympathetic to Fetterman. He’s certainly been through a great deal. Nonetheless, his personal issues are impacting the public he’s nominally been elected to serve.

I hope this post has been a useful exercise in better understanding what is motivating some of the people in power.