I was eating breakfast at the counter in a diner this week when the owner offered the guy sitting next to me a newspaper. “I don’t read the news,” he said after a pause. I sensed him, phone in hand, reaching to locate the meaning of “newspaper”. “Too much, right?” said the owner. The man replied: “I don’t care about news. I only care about money.” There was another pause. “And,” he added quietly, clearly acting on the assumption his wife can hear him at all times, “my family.”

If the rise of Donald Trump has a single good outcome, it might be assumed to be the death of political apathy. Who can fail to engage with the news when history is hurtling towards us like a fireball? But of course, in the same way that 9/11 didn’t kill irony, no such death has occurred – not least because Trump isn’t a politician with political ideas, but a showman with stunts. What has changed, perhaps, is what it means to be apolitical. To say “I don’t care about news” – when so-called American freedoms are, if not under genuine attack then at least threatened symbolically by the highest power in the land – is not to be neutral but way over to the right, in the same way that Trump’s “neutrality” on fascists is nothing of the sort. Or as Chris Matthews put it, quoting Churchill on MSNBC news last week: “I decline utterly to be impartial between the fire brigade and the fire.”

In the UK, I think of political apathy as a symptom of various wan assumptions that, irrespective of government, the country bumbles on regardless. In the US, apoliticism feels like a more decisive aesthetic, a rejection of government in the libertarian style that is, of course, itself deeply political and yet even now – especially now – has a vast and dishonest appeal. It is Trump’s greatest sleight of hand: vote for me, I don’t care about politics.

Lest we forget



Albert Speer, third from right, on trial at Nuremberg. Photograph: Sipa Press/Rex

It was a good week to sit through four-and-a-half hours of The Memory of Justice, the Marcel Ophüls documentary made in the 1970s that is showing on HBO. It is an extraordinary film, switching between footage of the Nuremberg trials and interviews with its protagonists, among them Telford Taylor, the American prosecutor, who recalls cross-examining Goering in front of the rest of the smirking Nazi high command.

The most affecting interview is with Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief architect and munitions supremo, who was sentenced to 20 years for war crimes and who talks urbanely about how good people, or at the very least, people with no history of homicide, were seduced by the glamour of Hitler’s interest in them.

There are some extraordinary accounts from ordinary Germans, including the inhabitants of a small town recalling a GP who served them after the war. Yes, they said, they remembered Dr Herta Oberheuser, so what? Didn’t it bother them, asked Ophüls, that she had performed experiments on prisoners at Ravensbrück concentration camp and served five years for crimes against humanity. Oh, that, they said: yes. And most looked away with a shrug.

Charlottesville tears



Christopher Cantwell at the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville. Photograph: AP

Unlikely heroes of the resistance, part 25: Arnold Schwarzenegger coming out against Trump. The guys at OK Cupid banning Christopher Cantwell, “star” of Vice’s blockbuster video of the march in Charlottesville, who it turns out was single and looking for love on their site. And James Murdoch breaking loose from his father’s support of Trump, although it was hard not to be suspicious of this and wonder if it was a family-wide hedge.

There was something off about the Vice video, which focused too heavily on the kind of fringe nutter who, even in the company of a bunch of torch-bearing fascists, was clearly a loose cannon. Cantwell is a distraction from the kinds of seriously frightening people who run these militias, who are too canny to mouth off to the lady from Vice. And a week later here he is, trembling, crying and falling apart. Highlighting this joker was a misstep. More instructive to watch the Netflix documentary about Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, for a reminder that those who don’t seek the limelight are the ones to watch.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist