I recently read a New York Times article describing a UFC event held on the White House lawn to celebrate Donald Trump’s 80th birthday.
The article described politicians, cabinet secretaries, billionaires, celebrities, and other power brokers gathered ringside as men battered one another inside a cage. Corporate sponsors surrounded the event. Pyrotechnics lit the sky. Between bouts, scantily clad women paraded around the ring while thousands cheered.
I found the entire spectacle unsettling. Not because I oppose mixed martial arts. Adults are free to enjoy whatever entertainment they choose. Nor because I believe beautiful women should hide themselves from the world. I admire beauty as much as the next man. However, I could not help asking myself what values were being celebrated—violence, spectacle, celebrity, power, influence, the objectification of women and, perhaps most disturbing of all, the sight of influential people enthusiastically lending their approval to it.
I thought about my wife, daughters and granddaughters. I want them to live in a society where women are respected for their character, intelligence, and achievements. Yet these powerful men were cheering a spectacle in which women once again appeared primarily as decorations surrounding male aggression. I found that disappointing.
As I read the article, however, I found myself less interested in the event itself than in the people surrounding it. The fight was not the story. The audience was the story.
It reminded me of a theory I have held for some time. I call it the Cockroach Theory.
Anyone who has ever encountered an infestation knows what happens when the lights go out. Creatures emerge from cracks and crevices. They venture into the open. They become bold. When the lights come back on or someone stomps their feet, they scatter back into the walls.
For most of my life, I believed society worked in much the same way. There have always been people who are prejudiced, intolerant, resentful, selfish, angry, or simply unwilling to think beyond simplistic explanations. They existed before Donald Trump and they will exist long after he is gone. Trump did not create them. He turned out the lights.
That is what so many people misunderstand. When commentators ask how Donald Trump transformed America, I think they are asking the wrong question. Trump did not manufacture the people we now see. They were already here—they always were. They were in our communities, workplaces, institutions and governments.
For decades, social norms, professional expectations and simple public decency kept many of these impulses in check. People understood there were limits to what respectable people could say and do publicly.
Then came Donald Trump. What he offered was not merely a political movement. He offered permission to mock, insult, demean, substitute slogans for thought, place tribal loyalty above principle and to abandon standards that previous generations considered essential to public life.
Suddenly people who once whispered began shouting. People who once hid their conduct began displaying it proudly. People who once feared consequences began expecting rewards. The lights went out. The cockroaches emerged.
Yet if I am being fair, many of these people are not inherently bad. They are often frustrated, frightened and angry. Some have watched jobs disappear, can no longer afford homes, feel ignored by political, economic, and cultural elites and genuinely believe the system no longer works for them.
Many of those concerns are legitimate. The hunger, frustration and insecurity are real. That is precisely what makes them vulnerable. When people feel secure and hopeful, they are usually willing to accept that difficult problems have complicated causes and complicated solutions. When people feel desperate, they want certainty, simple answers and someone to blame.
History repeatedly teaches this lesson. The economic and social problems facing Germany after the First World War were extraordinarily complex. Adolf Hitler reduced them to a simple explanation and a convenient scapegoat. The explanation was false. Its simplicity was its strength.
The same pattern appears throughout history and across political movements of every stripe. Complex problems are reduced to simple villains—immigrants, foreigners, elites, intellectuals, bureaucrats, minorities. The target changes. The formula remains remarkably consistent.
Donald Trump did not invent the formula. He simply used it. Many Americans were struggling with legitimate concerns about affordability, opportunity and economic security. Trump pointed to immigration and offered a simple explanation for problems that were anything but simple.
Simple answers are comforting. That does not make them true. This is where my theory takes an important turn. The cockroaches are not the true villains of the story. They are the followers, the frightened, the frustrated, the gullible, the people willing to exchange complexity for certainty, the people willing to accept answers because they are emotionally satisfying rather than because they are true.
But neither are they harmless. That is the mistake many people make. These followers vote, organize, donate, campaign and influence their families, friends, and communities. Some become police officers, military officers, legislators, judges, media personalities, business leaders and even presidents.
The cockroaches do not remain in the shadows. Over time, they acquire influence. Influence becomes power and that is why the phenomenon should concern us. The leaders who exploit them may light the match, but the fire spreads because there are enough people willing to carry the flame.
That brings me to the people I find most troubling—the politicians, billionaires, media personalities, influencers and business leaders who should know better and the opportunists who look at a frightened and frustrated population and see not fellow citizens, but opportunity. These are the people who convert fear into votes, outrage into ratings, division into profit and resentment into influence. They understand something that history has repeatedly demonstrated: frightened people are easier to mobilize than contented people. Angry people are easier to lead than confident people. People searching for simple answers rarely demand complicated evidence.
The recent UFC spectacle struck me as a vivid illustration of that ecosystem, not because of the fighting, pyrotechnics and women parading around the ring, but because of who showed up—the senators, cabinet members, billionaires, celebrities, power brokers and the people who know better and nevertheless choose proximity to power over fidelity to principle. Trump is not the mystery. The people surrounding him are.
Whenever I raise concerns about Donald Trump, someone inevitably responds, “But he was elected.” That is true. Democracy matters. Election results matter. But elections do not transform bad conduct into good conduct. They do not convert spectacle into statesmanship. They do not make character irrelevant.
Nor should we comfort ourselves with the belief that this phenomenon will disappear when Donald Trump eventually leaves the stage. If the problem were one man, time would solve it.
I fear the problem runs much deeper. Trump did not invent the phenomenon. He revealed it. He normalized it. He demonstrated how many people were willing to abandon long-held principles when doing so advanced their interests, validated their frustrations, or secured their place within the tribe.
This is not uniquely American. Every country has its cockroaches. Every society contains people susceptible to simple answers and convenient scapegoats. Every society contains ambitious individuals eager to exploit them. Canada is not immune. Europe is not immune. No democracy is immune. The names, accents, flags, grievances and temptations all remain the same.
A free society depends upon more than elections. It depends upon citizens and leaders who value truth over convenience, principle over tribe, and character over power. Without those virtues, institutions become hollow, laws become tools and power becomes an end in itself.
The lights are still off. The cockroaches are no longer hiding. Many now occupy positions of influence and authority. Others continue to profit from them. The question is whether enough principled people are prepared to turn the lights back on — and stamp their feet.