Are You Not Entertained?

MAGA’s Theatre of Cruelty

It's hard to keep track of you falling through the sky
We're half awake in a fake empire
We're half awake in a fake empire

The National

I recently came across a MAGA post on Facebook praising Trump, which went on about how marvellous the Mad Emperor’s second presidency was, and how it was giving his followers everything they could have hoped for. There was no detail about what had actually been achieved, apart from a celebratory quote from Gladiator: ‘Are you not entertained?’

Whoever wrote that post did not seem to realise that this line was not intended to be celebratory. When Russell Crowe’s Maximus hurls it contemptuously at the baying spectators in the Colosseum who have made him a hero, he is actually expressing contempt at their voyeuristic bloodlust. But Trump’s anonymous fan nevertheless summed up a hideous truth at the heart of his hideous movement: that many of those who voted for him have no real interest in policy or even politics per se - they are here to be entertained.

This is not family entertainment. It’s a theatre of cruelty based on sadism and thuggish displays of (white) American power. It expresses itself through big and small things: videos of ICE goon squads terrorising neighbourhoods and dragging weeping immigrants away from their children; performative bullying of allies and weaker countries; insults directed at female journalists; clips of unarmed Venezuelan ‘drug dealers’ being murdered on the high seas, ajd the more recent mash-up videos showing the US military blowing up Iranian targets to a rock n’ roll soundtrack.

It’s the kind of entertainment that the Emperor Commodus might once provided, if he had had Twitter and Instagram at his disposal, and some coked-up teenager in a basement to assemble the footage and count the likes and retweets. The sneering brutishness and contempt that oozes from Trump, Vance, Hegseth, Bovino, Noem et al are all part of the performance.

This is how tough we are, they proclaim. Look how America does what it likes. Look at us demanding Greenland. Look at these prisoners behind bars. Look at those narcos clinging to their boats as we destroy them. Look at Elon Musk’s incel edgelords terrorising unelected bureaucrats. Look at our bombs. This is who we are. This is Team America.

Sit back, get out the popcorn and watch our allies cringe, and our enemies crying and dying.

Of course there must be voters who didn’t sign up for this, who genuinely hoped that Trump would bring jobs back to America, revitalise their towns and communities, get ‘big government’ off their backs, and keep America out of forever wars. Maybe some of them actually read Project 2025 and agreed with it. But millions of Americans voted for Trump not in spite of his manifold defects, but because of them, and they did this because they embraced the toxic vision of greatness that he promised them, not as policy, but as spectacle.

In doing so, these voters, like the Republican Party, embraced the madness, narcissism, and stupidity of a man who made politics fun again by hurting the people they wanted to hurt: liberals, civil servants, leftists, Muslims, minorities, immigrants and any foreigners who got in the way of whatever America wanted to do.

Rejecting the tedious routines of politics-as-usual, they voted for a corrupt, incompetent criminal who is dragging the world towards disaster even as he covers their country in corruption, shame and dishonour. This jaw-dropping embrace of depravity is an expression of political decadence and political nihilism, and a failure of civic education.

It requires not only the wilful abandonment of any notion of democratic politics as an instrument for the common good, but the fervent embrace of fakery, lies and make believe, and the suspension of critical faculties. Consider this three-way conversation, which took place in Memphis, last week, between Trump, his sinister incubus Stephen Miller, and ‘FBI director’ Kash Patel:

MILLER: What President Trump has done on border security and public safety is a national miracle that will be studied not only for generations, but for centuries to come.

TRUMP: So, Kash, see if you can top that. I don’t know, that is tough, Kash.

PATEL: You know Mr. President as I look around this venue... I’m reminded again why we have the greatest warriors on God’s green Earth — the men and women serving in uniform, the men and women serving and wearing the badge and law enforcement, our police, our sheriffs around the state of Tennessee…But what we didn’t have was you. We didn’t have a commander in chief who backed the blue, who resourced the blue, who funded the military, who did whatever it takes to safeguard every single life.

So while we’re out there fighting for the dreams of our children, just know Mr. President how many millions of dreams like mine are going to be lived thanks to your brilliant leadership.

There was a time when a tyrant would have needed the threat of gulags, death or imprisonment to elicit such gross displays of self-abasement. But in MAGA’s would-be dictatorship, ludicrous paeans to the leader are just another expression of the fantasy of greatness on which the entire movement is based.

This is a movement that oozes fakery; where fake-pastors pray with the Trump fake-Jesus and fake-spiritual advisors speak in fake-tongues; where spandex-clad widows perform public displays of fake-grief while selling merch; where the fake-first lady is paid $30 million to make a fake-documentary glorifying her fake-life; where tens of thousands fall in love with the fake-America First Soldier ‘Jessica Foster’ photographed with Trump, who turns out to be just another product of AI slop.

All this fakery requires a credulous audience that wants to believe the fantasy of power and dominance that Trump is offering them, and it also requires spineless minions and sycophants who are willing to help him disseminate the fantasy. Step up House Speaker Mike Johnson, one of the Republican Party’s many moral midgets, who has just created a new ‘América First’ award, which he has awarded to…drum roll…Donald J. Trump!

‘The president has done so much for the American people and we want to honour him, in a small way, some token of our appreciation for his leadership,’ gushed Johnson, without even the hint of shame at his self-abasement. The award consisted of an eagle statuette, or as Johnson put it, ‘this beautiful golden statue here - appropriate for the new golden era in America’, which can now take its place alongside his FIFA peace prize.

This is the kind of behaviour that might have made Stalin or Kim Jong Un blush, but Trump’s cohorts have long since abandoned any notions of dignity, honour or self-respect. When the Mad Emperor tells the US hockey team that America is ‘winning so much that we really don’t know what to do with it,’ they will nod their servile heads like toy dogs in a car.

The problem that Trump, his minions and his cult have - and it’s a problem that is likely to increase in the coming years - is that their fake world is part of a real world that cannot be changed by golden statues, fake peace prizes, Instagram snuff videos, and capitalised tweets on Truth Social - it can only be concealed, at least for a while.

Twilight of the Clods

War has a particular ability to unravel delusions of grandeur, and the current conflict is no exception. When Trump launched this one on bleary-eyed whim, he clearly believed that it would be a Venezuela-style triumph. Just knock off the Supreme Leader, a few days of bombing, and the ragheads would come begging for a ‘deal’ with him. Maybe they would make him Shah.

Instead, Iran defied expectations and pursued a strategy of ‘horizontal escalation’ that has drawn the US to bring of yet another ‘quagmire’, whilst also setting the Middle East on fire, tanking the world economy, and prising apart the geopolitical architecture on which 21st century capitalism is based. Supply chains, movements of essential commodities, petrodollars, stocks, shares and financial markets - all of it has been knocked sideways by Trump’s failure to turn his fantasy vision of American power into decisive victory.

Wiser statesmen might have anticipated these outcomes, but Trump and his minions are neither wise nor statesmanlike: they are yes-men and yes-women bound, like the crew of the Pequod, to the Mad Emperor’s whims, even as he harpoons himself. No point in going to the State Department in search of advice and expertise - these imbeciles gutted it. And don’t property moguls know more about foreign policy than diplomats or nuclear experts, anyway? Aren’t they the smartest guys in any room?

Faced with outcomes that they had not planned for or even considered, they have alternately bragged, threatened, engaged in bloodthirsty celebrations of death and destruction, blamed and alienated American allies, and gaped at the catastrophe they unleashed, with the stupefied excitement of children who set fire to their parents shed only to discover it contained kerosene and camping gas.

In the last week alone, Trump backed off his threat to ‘obliterate’ Iran’s energy infrastructure, while also allowing time for anonymous insiders to make millions betting on oil shares before he made that announcement. Trump then claimed that Iran was desperate to make a ‘deal’, even though Iran insisted that it was not negotiating with the US. He then practically begged the wider world to open the Strait of Hormuz and solve a crisis he was entirely responsible for, while also insulting NATO and other allies for not joining his war.

He also suggested that he might co-govern Iran along with whoever the Supreme Leader is. Otherwise, he promised, America would continue to ‘bomb our little hearts out.’ Meanwhile, Trump publicly blamed Pete Hegseth for convincing for him to go to war, having previously blamed his son-in-law.

According to Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Trump’s hapless envoys, Kushner and Witkoff ignored the genuine concessions that Iran had made during last month’s negotiations, because they ‘didn’t understand what they were being offered…they ignored it and decided to go ahead and strike anyway.’

Let’s pause it there for a moment: two negotiators representing the world’s only superpower in the most delicate and dangerous matters of war and peace had failed to understand the proposals in front of them. Whatever else can be said about such an outcome, one thing is clear: nations do not become great again in the hands of men like these. On the contrary, watching this cascade of geopolitical gibberish and outright lies is like watching foreign policy put together with crayons and playdough in a primary school project.

It may that Trump’s base find these antics as entertaining as one of Hegseth’s rock n’ roll snuff videos. But there are millions of people across the world who even before this latest calamity, have watched the last thirteen months unfold with amazement, horror, dismay, alarm and disbelief. The MAGA movement may not care what the world thinks about America, but the bombs, the bluster, and the pseudo-victories cannot conceal the unmistakable stench of a flailing superpower that is rotting from the head down.

Of course, America is still the world’s dominant military power. It can still blow things up anywhere in the world. But this power is not much use, if it cannot be translated into long term strategic dominance. And fantasies of American greatness cannot conceal the chasm that is opening up beneath this administration’s feet as the war spins out of control.

Because even superpowers can make mistakes that are so egregious and so damaging that they that cannot be undone by hubris, propaganda and personality cults. Sooner or later the consequences of those mistakes will make themselves clear, and even the most willing fantasists are forced to consider the horror they have unleashed, if only out of self-interest.

Millions of people are already paying the price for the colossal folly that is now unfolding, and not just in Iran and Lebanon. As countries across the world struggle to cope with the economic fallout of the war, and with rising food, fuel and energy costs, they will not look fondly on the countries that caused the conflict, and they will not want to honour America’s leaders with golden statues.

Some politicians will continue to grovel, like the ridiculous NATO General Secretary Mark Rutte, who went to Washington last week and claimed that Trump was at war with Iran ‘to make the whole world safer’ - self-delusion is not unique to Trump’s American followers.

But even politicians who once bragged about their closeness to Trump have fallen silent. And there is evidence - not yet conclusive - to suggest that proximity to Trump may not help his admirers and would-be emulators win elections. It also remains to be seen how America’s allies across the world react in future when the war comes to an end, and they seek to come to terms with the disastrous consequences of a conflict that was forced upon them.

Last week, it was reported that Trump was demanding $5 trillion from the Gulf States to continue the war, and $2.5 trillion to stop it. He also took time to boast that Muhammad bin Salman was now ‘kissing my ass.’

How will these states respond to this shakedown? Why would they look for security to a country that has made them insecure, and also harmed their financial and economic interests? Who would trust the country that pretended to negotiate and then attacked the country it was negotiating with? Can Europe really look to America’s ‘moral leadership’ after these multiple failures? It seems far more likely that the war will reduce America’s political influence, rather than strengthen it.

All this is a steep price to pay, just to be entertained. And many of Trump’s voters may now be paying it out of their own wallets - the only thing many of them seem to care about - instead of gloating over other people’s suffering on X or Instagram.

The hope - insofar as there is any right now - is that millions of Americans are not entertained, and that they will find a way to take this disgusting movement and its Mad Emperor down, and build a better country from the moral ruins of America’s fake empire.