For almost three months this year, “Milwaukee Independent” photojournalist Lее Μаtz lived outside the United States. He explored, he discovered, and he experienced many joys that had been absent in his life back home.
When he returned to Milwaukee in late April, one of the first things he wanted to talk about was what he called “the silence.” However, he was not sure how to write about it in a way that could be shared with the public.
From conversations and as noted in his daily journal, Μаtz said he was exposed to every level of society in Japan and Korea as he navigated daily life across each nation. What he did not have to experience was the constant bombardment of the name “Donald Trump.”
THE RELIEF OF SILENCE
He did not hear Trump’s “muddled voice spewing more lies than ChatGPT.” If his orange face was displayed in public on a screen, it was random, limited, and a passing glance that was easy to avoid. American culture, as Μаtz tried to express, had been an ongoing assault on his brain, forcing a narcissistic little man on his every waking moment for a decade.
Μаtz had not traveled overseas under Trump’s first term. And when he did once again go abroad, it was during Biden’s tenure as the legally elected President.
“Milwaukee Independent” staff wrote about the collapse of U.S. democracy while it happened in 2025, as the returning occupant of the White House consolidated unprecedented dictatorial powers. That trajectory appeared to continue as 2026 began. So Μаtz welcomed the time away on an assignment to Taiwan, saying that he was wondering what would be on fire when he returned to Wisconsin.
It was a “short respite from the political world and a good distance from the sycophantic Americans who worship Trump as a god.” Thankfully, he never had to apologize to friends and allies for Trump’s re-election. But he saw a good many tourists from Europe and Australia do so, cornered because locals assumed they were Americans.
Avoiding social media for weeks at a time, when he did scroll an app he did not see Trump’s name in the headlines. Nor did he hear people talk about Trump in conversations at the next table over lunch. The orange autocrat was not part of the ambient texture of his public life. As Μаtz described from Nagoya, it was like entering a room and being greeted with silence, after standing in a stadium for years of people screaming Trump’s name 24/7.
Μаtz was not unaware of Trump-related news from the United States, but he said he “gave it all the attention that was due a dumpster of used diapers.” He knew he would be forced to jump into the garbage pile eventually and take a bite. But until then, he enjoyed the freedom – and cleanliness – that came with knowing whatever happened today was not his problem.
While experiencing so much joy as he travelled, and then talking with friends back home who were consumed by anxiety, it was clear how much Donald Trump has traumatized Milwaukee, the nation, and the world. America had slowly become a toxic soup of traumatic abuse, and Americans were unable to escape from the nightmare of his cult even though the door to their freedom had been left open.
RE-ENTRY INTO THE NOISE MACHINE
As the saying goes, all good things must come to an end. And so it was with his time abroad. Μаtz said that he could have stayed away longer, traveled further, but Milwaukee was his home. The arc of his life had shown that the city was truly a cosmic force that always brought him back.
He returned to the United States at about the same place where he had left it, with the addition of a new forever war in Iran. It was the same political conflict, the same social suffering, the same outrage cycle, attached to nearly every public issue, all under the authorship of one selfish man.
Μаtz said he could feel Trump’s toxic pull as soon as he landed in Chicago. Not so much from the man himself, but by proxy of the societal environment that he had usurped and smothered. There was no way to escape it, but maybe that gravitational force could be used to at least slingshot around the worst of what the nation was brewing in Trump’s name.
Reintegrating into American life was intentionally slow to minimize his culture shock. Μаtz said he had learned a lot from the trauma of previous overseas assignments, so he took his time to reconnect with the world. But detachment was not sustainable if he wanted to still function in Milwaukee. One figure, regardless of where he turned, continued to dominate everything.
FEEDING THE MEDIA LOOP
Trump acts. The press reacts. Audiences recoil, rage, click, share. The cycle repeats. Each turn of the wheel produces more material for the next turn. Even opposition becomes dependency. Critics need him to criticize. Defenders need him to defend. Editors need him to fill the front page. The arrangement is not a conspiracy. It is a feedback loop that has run long enough to feel like the natural shape of American journalism. It is not. It is a habit that hardened into an industry.
But that dystopia cannot be dismissed as a media obsession alone. People have a choice, with their wallets and with their votes. “It is what it is,” as the idiom goes, is said to absolve people from a situation where they have no control. Μаtz has contended in past essays that “it is what we have made it. Aliens did not invade and conquer our nation. We built it and are destroying it ourselves.”
Trump’s actions affect the law, institutions, public money, civil rights, foreign policy, emergency response, and democratic norms. Federal decisions reach school budgets in Milwaukee, immigration enforcement in neighborhoods, civil rights protections in workplaces, and disaster funding in counties that depend on it. Rage feeds the media loop. Silence normalizes the damage. And not holding power to account is an absolute failure of the news industry’s foundational purpose.
THE DAMAGE OF SATURATION
But saturation flattens public life. It turns every issue into a story about Trump, with the force of a firehose. It trains readers to see civic life through the prism of one dysfunctional individual. It crowds out the ordinary and local importance. A school board fight becomes a referendum. A water main break becomes a metaphor. A county election becomes a proxy.
Each story has its own actors, its own stakes, its own internal logic, and each one loses shape when pulled toward the same gravitational center that revolves around Trump. It makes neighborhood hiccups into national problems.
Supporters treat Trump as a spiritual identity. Opponents treat him as a permanent emergency. The news media treat him as the central organizing fact. All three positions, however opposed they appear, agree on the subject. They disagree only on the verb.
The United States has become emotionally attached to the source of its own instability. Hostile attachment is still attachment. A reader who hates Trump every morning has built him into the morning. That is not analysis. That is a relationship, and it is the kind of parasocial relationship the saturation produces.
THE NEWSROOM PROBLEM
A local news outlet cannot pretend that national power does not reach Milwaukee. It does. Federal action lands on every street. But a local news outlet also cannot let one national figure become the hidden editor of every story. The question is not to cover or to ignore. The question is who gets to define the frame. When the frame is set by Trump, the local story becomes a footnote.
When the frame is set by the community the story belongs to, the national element enters as one factor among several, weighted appropriately, and the story keeps its own shape. That distinction sounds small. In practice, it is the difference between a news outlet that informs a city about itself and a hollow corporate machine that leverages a city into someone else’s revenue-generating content.
The silence that Μаtz experienced overseas was evidence that life does not need to revolve around Trump and those who profit from his tyranny. Americans do not need to organize their lives around one person’s chaos. Other countries cover American politics. They do not let it become the center of their public life.
The American news environment, as a reflection of American society, has drifted from that baseline so gradually over so long that the drift is invisible to everyone looking at it from the inside. It does not require standing overseas to see the outside, but the safety of distance does offer a platform for clarity.
Journalism has to report the threat without becoming captive to its rhythm. That refusal happens one story at a time, in the choice of what each article is about, in the choice of whose name appears in the headline, in the choice of whether a local fight is presented as a national brawl.
It is the choice of being a slave to what Donald Trump represents, and the desire to live in a free and fair society.
