“Bad Witch,” your ninth studio album with Nine Inch Nails, is the final record of a politically-minded trilogy you began in 2016. Do you feel that musicians have a responsibility to address politics? I was doing press with somebody in the mid-90s, and they made an argument that stayed with me: that I have influence, and that it’s my job to call out whatever needs to be called out, because there are people who feel the same way but need someone to articulate it. And I think about that today, because it seemed like it was a lot easier to just keep your mouth shut and let it go back then. You don’t hear a lot from the Taylor Swifts of the world, and top-tier, needle-moving cultural youth, because they are concerned about their brand, their demographic and their success and career and whatnot.

Do you think it feels different now? It does feel different. I know how I feel, and I have let it get to me in ways I wish it hadn’t. My worrying about it isn’t helping anything. But what Donald Trump is doing is concerning and infuriating — and it’s not the conservative agenda, it’s not a question of religious preference, it’s not a question of should government be big or small. I don’t have any problem with those topics. But the disregard for decency and truth and civility is what’s really disheartening. It feels like a country that celebrates stupidity is really taking it up a notch.

Some people were introduced to your music through your score for “The Social Network.” I’m sure that what has happened with Facebook is probably more dystopian than you or David Fincher, the director, would have imagined. It’s easy to feel pessimistic now — being a father of young kids, my job is to preserve their innocence as long as possible. Every time I’ve got to jump to turn the TV off so I don’t have to explain the myriad embarrassments that are coming out of the current administration — “What’s a porn star, Dad?” — it affects me in ways that I probably wouldn’t have been this tuned in to a couple of years ago.