When American Exceptionalism Becomes an Excuse for Lack of Discipline

I have been thinking about writing this essay for a long time. Then this past Monday May 18, 2026 on the Daily Show, Jon Stewart argued how incompetent Trump is and how college graduates today should take note to similarly fake your way to success. There was one specific comment meant to be funny and casually ironic. Stewart said it so quickly and in passing that you’d miss it if you weren’t more personally invested in it. It is a comment at the root of the subject of this essay. And while “dated,” the comment captures a pattern of taking certain characteristics, and then associating them with a polarized identity. This association of certain characteristics with a polarized identity, which switches depending on what’s currently morally in fashion, which usually changes when people no longer can ignore the hypocrisy of certain compartmentalizing. It’s the denial of this hypocrisy and the resulting tension in the name of self-righteousness that make up the backbone of corporate capitalism and the strategy those in power employ to divide and conquer the masses throughout human history. But how can we see through this better? It takes discipline and awareness. And comments like the one Stewart made highlights how much of a hard sell “discipline” can be, depending on how you associate with it or lack thereof (I discuss this at length in chapter 28 Why I Am a Nerd – Top Down Binary Processing of my book Novelty Act: Memoir of a Dancing Trombone Player.) And ultimately, it’s this lack of discipline and its associations that arguably has led to Trump coming to power. So, what was the comment?

“It’s graduation season. Thousands of graduates are going into the world to interview for their dream job and maybe the advice that we’ve been giving them all along about honesty and hard work and all that other ‘gay shit’ (laughter for five seconds) is completely wrong. Maybe we should all be students at Donald Trump University which obviously you can’t be because it was a fraud and got shut down but metaphorically. And so that’s what we’re gonna do tonight, class of 2026 everybody gather around the whatever it is you watch TV on…”

                  It sounds so petty and potentially offensive. But I argue that this casual humorous association of “hard work and honesty” with, “gay shit” is at the very root of how Trump came to power and is symptomatic of the Gen X morality that has helped shape the polarization of modern politics, morality, and economics, (and now potential fall of an empire,) not because of any association with a particular sexuality but because of the game of associating characteristics at all, which occurs during a current fashion of moral hierarchy, and is always problematic regardless of the time.