Donald Trump's Generation X Betrayal

He's managed to con us into believing he's authentic.

I’m not lying when I say I’ve probably listened to Nirvana’s Unplugged album 300 times in my life. Even before it was released as a CD, I dubbed a cassette tape off of a VCR tape so I could listen to it in my car. (If that last sentence made sense to you, it’s time to schedule your colonoscopy.)

So imagine my surprise when I ran across a YouTube video of a professional voice coach offering an analysis of Kurt Cobain’s vocals on the Leadbelly song “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.” Vocal coach Bethany Hickman goes through the song, line by line, praising Cobain’s careful utilization of different vocal styles to make the song as powerful as it is:

The lesson, of course, is that Cobain worked very hard at making his vocals sound so effortless. Nobody would look at the Grunge Era and say the bands were perfectionists - the whole idea was to sound sloppy and unpracticed, as if every performance was brand new. This was, in fact, Nirvana’s ethos - to create order from chaos.

But as numerous Nirvana chroniclers have noted, while Cobain outwardly embodied the “slacker” label given to Gen Xers (their breakthrough album was called “Nevermind,” after all), he always wanted to be in the biggest band in the world. (Until he discovered he couldn’t handle it when it happened.)

“Famous is the last thing I wanted to be,” Cobain told biographer Michael Azerrad. But recently his bandmate, bassist Krist Novoselic, said it was all an act.

"Kurt was counterculture but then he also really wanted to be really famous," said the band's former bassist. "He was like a windmill, and he would just say one thing, and then he would change his mind on it."

Cobain’s position was a requirement of rock stardom because the idea of publicly courting fame was the worst thing a musician could do. “Selling out” was a death sentence, which is why bands like Pearl Jam spent years trying to sabotage their own fame, battling with Ticketmaster and for many years refusing to film music videos.

As perhaps the most Gen X of the Gen Xers (I was born smack dab in the middle of the generation), I can attest that succeeding while making it look like you’re not trying was always a foundational trait of my generation. It was fine to work hard and achieve success, you just had to make sure it all appeared as if God had tapped you on the shoulder and endowed you with a preternatural gift.

It’s why bands pretended like everything they played was made up on the spot and began, as Gen X chronicler Chuck Klosterman has noted, referring to themselves as “Losers,” (Beck), “Zeros” (Smashing Pumpkins) and “Creeps” (Radiohead.)

Further, the supermodels of the 1990s never dared admit they got their figures through exercise, eating right, and airbrushing tricks—when interviewed, they always pretended they threw back as many jumbo burgers as the average frat guy. Admitting you had had cosmetic surgery was absolutely forbidden. You had to succeed without being too thirsty.

Most importantly, you couldn’t be a “sellout.”

As Klosterman noted in his book The Nineties, “selling out” meant “someone was compromising the values they originally espoused in exchange for something superficial (which was usually money, but not necessarily.)”

Of course, it was all a question of authenticity. Actors, rock bands, and politicians alike had to be their authentic selves—seeking fame or financial success immediately turned an individual into a fraud. Just look at the defining movie of Gen X, Reality Bites, where (spoiler alert), Winona Ryder’s character opts for the authentic artist who is mean to her (Ethan Hawke) over the buttoned-up TV executive (Ben Stiller) who treats her with kindness. As Klosterman notes, the lesson of the film was “An authentic jerk was preferable to a likeable sellout.”

And it all made perfect sense in 1994!

Contrast all of this with today’s social media era, in which authenticity is seen as a roadblock to a life of internet virality. The whole idea of TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms is to create an entirely new you that’s completely disconnected from the doldrums of your normal life.

“Fake it ‘til you make it” is the new generational ethos - today’s successful internet celebrities recreate themselves in entirely inauthentic ways to promote themselves and their lifestyle brands. You can post pictures of yourself in a house you don’t own, use a filter to make you look the way you want to see yourself, and promote products you wouldn’t dare use.

And this culture of inauthenticity has seeped into politics, where candidates and elected officials are now free to just become completely new people based on who leads their party. Millennial Vice President JD Vance can go from a free-market conservative who thought Donald Trump was “America’s Hitler” to advocating for industrial policy while serving as Trump’s right-hand man.

Gen Xers like Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and others can slap on the “MAGA filter,” abandon all their principles, and simply decide to be other people as long as it keeps them in office. They fake it ‘til they make it, then continue faking it once they have succeeded.

It is undoubtedly my status as a committed Gen Xer that I find the idea of political inauthenticity so disgraceful. The idea of standing before a group of people and saying something I know to be untrue horrifies me. I spent a decade as a newspaper columnist, and the handful of times I had to amend a column with a correction, it ate away at me for weeks afterward - I was always humiliated when I got something wrong.

(Further, my reticence to blow my own horn is why I am typically terrible at marketing my own work - the idea of bothering people to promote my columns or books makes me cringe. But since you’re reading this, you found me, so I am doubly appreciative!)

Since you are smart, you have no doubt asked the question (preferably out loud and during an intense lovemaking session) “If Gen Xers value authenticity, why do so many of them like Donald Trump?”

It is true that my generational cohorts tend to favor the current president, who is perhaps the least authentic person on this or any other planet. (Perhaps there is a life form on Mars vowing to build a wall to keep earthlings out and promising to make Earth pay for it, but it seems unlikely.)

My friend Christopher Scalia recently broke down the numbers: Gen Xers voted for Trump over Vice President Kamala Harris by a 52% to 46% margin, an even larger gap than Trump earned from his fellow Baby Boomers (51% to 48%.)

Scalia suggests a few reasons why Trump fares well with Gen Xers. He notes (with help from Mark Judge) that our age group grew up with coarse entertainment, so we are used to rude, dirty jokes. He posits that Gen Xers get irony, the art of which Donald Trump is a “master.”

These are fine suggestions, and no doubt contribute to Gen X’s tolerance of such a ridiculous public figure. But I’ll slather on another possibility: To a lot of people, Trump is genuinely authentic because he is singularly inauthentic.

Those of us in our late 40s and 50s have seen it all from our politicians, and we know when they are lying to us. We spent the 1980s and 1990s finely tuning our cynicism radars (cynidars?), and the more politicians claimed they understood our needs, the more our contempt for them grew.

Then Donald Trump - a name all of us knew - emerged as the anti-candidate. He lied with every breath. He couldn’t control his contemptible public statements and behaved boorishly. He appeared authentic in that he was the idea everyone had of the typical politician, with one important difference: he was honest about the fact he was dishonest.

And that likely had great appeal to people who had only seen the government break its promises. If we’re going to have an ineffective public sector, why not at least elect someone entertaining to lead it? If politicians are going to lie anyway, why not elevate the guy who’s pretended to be a decisive leader on his game show? What feels more relatable than a politician who berates his opponents the way we’d like to yell at our coworkers?

But Trump isn’t Kurt Cobain, an entertainer playing up his “realness” to seem authentic. He is a modern fraud like Theranos’ Elizabeth Holmes, who lied about building a blood testing machine, or like Belle Gibson, who faked having brain cancer to build her own lifestyle brand. Trump was elected entirely on his own self-mythology with the help of cowards unwilling to face him down.

Unlike musicians or models, Trump's universe of fakery endangers people, whether they are residents of Ukraine or people who rely on government information to get vaccinated. His lies about tariffs are currently tanking the economy, leaving retirees with diminished savings. His philosophy appears to be “fake it ‘til you break it.”

And all his Gen X sycophants are the real sellouts, betraying the defining ethos of their generation. If Trump told Ted Cruz to eat dog food off the floor of the Oval Office, Cruz would immediately produce a can opener from his jacket pocket. Even Rachel Dolezal is probably thinking, “Man, Ted Cruz seems like a real phony.” (Dolezal now goes by the name “Nkechi Diallo,” while the Texas senator goes by the far more embarrassing name “Ted Cruz.”)

As Gen Xers, we are proud that nobody ever talks about us. That’s where the “X” comes from - it’s the mark of anonymity we gave ourselves after the insufferable Baby Boomers dominated culture and government for so long. (The Douglas Coupland book Generation X helped a lot with the name, too.)

But maybe we shouldn’t have so thoroughly embraced “whateverism” in our quest to appear coolly disinterested. Now we are facing a future in which no Gen Xer ever ascends to the presidency. We will never be led by someone of our generation who either believes in authenticity or who hasn’t completely humiliated themselves in service to Donald Trump (sorry, Nikki Haley.)

Our only hope is for someone to rally our generation to demand younger politicians who actually believe in things. Gen X can still be a political force if we stick to our principles.

As long as those principles don’t make us choose anyone as president who has been mean to Winona Ryder.

ALSO:

My most recent piece for National Review discusses how Trump is operating from a position of weakness, even though he thinks he is operating from a position of strength:

Trump is a man who has been elected to the world’s most important office twice and never stops litigating his grievances against people whom he believes to be insufficiently deferential. At the same time that he claims to be a champion of free speech, Trump has filed a lawsuit against a newspaper that published an unflattering poll about him before the 2024 election. In a petty attempt to punish a news organization, the White House has barred the AP from press conferences because it won’t use “Gulf of America” to refer to the Gulf of Mexico. When addressing the unfavorable media he receives, Trump has said he’s been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln.

Trump’s weakness further manifests itself through the lies he tells, specifically those fired off as a pretext for abandoning Ukraine. Strong people do not need to buttress their arguments with falsehoods, yet Trump said it was Ukraine that started the war with Russia (only to sarcastically deny having said the preposterous thing that everyone heard him say). He has called Volodymyr Zelensky a “dictator” while refusing to apply that label to Vladimir Putin. Trump continues to claim that the U.S. has sent Ukraine $350 billion to fight the war, around twice the actual number.

ALSO:

The Saturday Night Live Season 43 episode of my SNL Podcast, Wasn’t That Special, is now up. Listen to a free preview here.

We also interviewed Entertainment Weekly reporter Andy Hoglund about his experiences interviewing SNL cast members. You can see a digital representation of what I look like while asking questions here:

FINALLY

As we watch through SNL, sometimes we catch great musical performances that I had completely forgotten. Here’s Kacey Musgraves’ wonderful performance of the song “Slow Burn” from 2018: