Selena Gomez fell prey to Trump-trashing one-upmanship: the game no one can win | Emma Brockes

One certainty we can rely on in these distressing and turbulent times is that while every right-thinking person is looking with horror towards Donald Trump, many of us also reserve significant side-eye for each other. What is a political opposition without instant, feverish infighting, the pettier the better? I refer you to Selena Gomez’s now-deleted Instagram video on Monday in which the actor sniffled and wept about Trump’s immigration crackdown. The 32-year-old was instantly trolled by Trump-loving monsters, but there were plenty of sighs and tuts coming at her from Trump haters, too. Gomez had Done the Wrong Protest and would have to pay.

The difficulty of course is that Trump’s “flood the zone” approach in his first week of office has made organising a response to him incredibly hard, not just collectively but at the individual level. What is the right reaction to a president who, five minutes into his tenure, launches a crypto coin in his own name, appoints a TV host to run the US military and attempts to freeze billions of dollars in federal funding – and that’s before you get to his interesting take on the 14th amendment?

One response – which achieves absolutely nothing but can be hard to resist – is to cave in to the guilty suspicion that, in this bleak new world, all displays of frivolity are wrong. Not just frivolity, but anything that might be deemed trivial, self-serving or irrelevant to the calamity at hand. A similarly queasy vibe took off in the weeks and months after September 11, the so-called death of irony period that was dispatched pretty much overnight when people started tagging the joke phrase “or the terrorists have won” on to the end of any statement announcing a trivial desire.

As in 2001, part of the anxiety of this moment isn’t so much the possibility that doing something silly or fun while millions are at risk of deportation is wrong, but that it will look wrong to those keeping score. And there are a lot of scorekeepers out there, the self-appointed hall monitors who pop up on social media to scold and one-up their friends and acquaintances for, as they see it, doing or saying the wrong things about Trump. Over the past week I have seen online skirmishes between Trump haters in which one might call out another for being too “giggly” or self-satisfied or irresponsible in their statements – or, using the strongest language available to people of British origin, accuse someone of “being unhelpful” in their pushback against Trump. The subtext of which is: “I am taking this more seriously than you are.”

Of course by criticising people for wrongly criticising others, I’m aware I am merely expanding the ever-increasing circles of leftwing policing so that, eventually, the dog will eat not just its own tail but its own shoulders and head. I’m also being disingenuous about the amusement there is to be had here – in these dark times, there is a certain low-level enjoyment in watching bun fights take off between people one was inclined to hate before Trump took office and with whom one claims no solidarity now. I spent fully an hour last night sharing screen grabs from social media with friends that captured the huffy and frankly hilarious moral one-upmanship of some of these people.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Gomez and the problem of celebrity involvement in current affairs. Popularised during the pandemic, this is the phenomenon of famous people making sad faces on social media in what is either a well-meant but misguided effort to put their social capital to good use or else a cynical piece of attention-seeking. In the Gomez video this week, the star of Only Murders in the Building sniffed and sobbed and covered her face while offering muffled condolences to those getting deported. She said: “I’m so sorry, I wish I could do something.”

As these things go, it was a good deal less skin crawling than Ariana Grande’s post-election threat to hold “the hand of every person who is feeling the immeasurable heaviness of this outcome today”, a statement that around my way triggered a wave of prim “no thank you!”s. And it seems likely to me that Gomez, who is of Mexican heritage, was acting out feelings she genuinely had. Fair play to her, I say.

Anyway, when things kick off between people on the same side, everything always ends in a pissing contest along the lines of: “You see fit to criticise me, but what are you doing to help the cause?” To which the aggressor may respond with versions of: “I’m not telling you because I don’t need to boast about it.” Which I take to mean: nothing at all.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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