On the day Donald Trump descended his golden escalator in 2015 and announced to the world that he was running for president, the world knew that we were in for a good show. Left-liberals had a perfect embodiment of a villain, and right-leaning conservatives and nationalists finally had a great, loud, politically incorrect champion.
The idea that politics was mere entertainment was not new when the Trumpian age began, but there can be little doubt that the TV show aspect came to the fore. Indeed, the hallmark of the Trumpian age is that there was almost nothing outside of the sales pitch and the various narrative threads. The comparisons to Jerry Springer or professional wrestling were both legion and entirely accurate. There were storylines instead of strategy; heel-turns and enemies of the week rather than ideology. There was even the archetypal three-act structure of New Hope, backlash and defeat, followed by triumphant return.
Trump’s uncanny knack for creating new perceptions of reality through force of personality and bombast often seemed to contain reality itself, like sitting in the cinema and becoming so engrossed that you forget who you’re with, or where you’re sitting. The last ten years were a bewildering storm of imagery and iconic photos of Trump. The “fight, fight, fight” defiance post-assassination attempt, the mugshot, the sombre, gloomy walk toward a podium in an aircraft hangar, Trump barking at the boy mowing the lawn.
Yet, ever gnawing in the back of the mind, at least, was the question of where this would all end. Would Donald Trump simply shuffle off to play golf after the second term? Would he be impeached at some point? Would he enact the mass deportation schemes?
Fundamentally, we now see that the final act of the saga is ending more like a tragedy. The war with Iran has untethered Donald Trump’s nemesis, his greatest foe: hard material reality.
The Venezuela escapade that preceded the Iran war was typically Trumpian - no casualties, amazing visuals, cartoonish bad guy snatched, back in time for cornflakes. This Tom Clancy-style derring-do likely increased the administration’s confidence to take the next step, to go for the Big One.
Unfortunately, the nature of the bear trap that Trump has ensnared himself in is entirely his belief that he could talk, shout, and post on social media his way out of any situation. Some of the old magic still lingers, such as manipulating markets through statements to quell their panic, but that’s dwindling.
The idea that you can announce negotiations that aren’t actually happening, to sway public opinion, now seems farcical and insulting. Demanding “unconditional surrender” because of its connotations with World War II and Eisenhower also falls flat.
The military bases remain wrecked, the military personnel remain dead, critical supply chains remain blocked, and Iran’s hypersonic missiles remain active. The Epstein Files could be ignored or tampered with or downplayed, but a farmer’s inability to spray fertiliser on his crops cannot, nor can empty petrol nozzles.
The Trumpian Age, as a grand saga, is becoming a tragedy and a cautionary morality play. It is the story of a supreme narcissist who came to believe that he could flout the laws of nature and physical constraints through sheer force of personality, like a wizard or an illusionist, conjuring memetic spells to hypnotise his legions of followers. Yet the nature of the bear trap negates any such rhetoric or bluster because it is tethering MAGA to a different form - a different, harder existence.
A fork in the road stands before the American Government. One road leads to a full retreat, defeat and flight from the chaos it created, leaving Israel to fend for itself and facing a route from the Middle East and severe loss of prestige on the world stage. The almighty petrodollar would be brought into question, and therefore also America’s ability to accrue endless debt.
Alternatively, it is the road toward escalation, a full-blown invasion, and stacks of body bags in what would undoubtedly become a bloodbath that could fail anyway.
No anecdotes can change this, no funny little dances, no lambasting allies as cowards and no sad utterances that America can simply leave, nothing can change the paucity of options.
During and after Trump’s last presidential run, his loyalists took to telling naysayers to “get in the crystal”. Yet it is now quite clear that it is Trump and his loyalists who inhabit a separate astral plain.
The options available to Trump within the confines of his own mind seem infinitely more rosy, less existential, and less real. In this fantasy realm, Iran acquired Tomahawk missiles and fired them at their own girls’ school. Iran is on its last legs, and the rebels will storm the offices of the state at any moment. It’s just a matter of time before the fleets of other countries arrive in the Strait of Hormuz to form a grand coalition - under Trump’s sovereignty, of course.
Trump’s version of vainly ordering long-lost Panzer divisions into battle is to regurgitate patter and old one-liners, to do the funny little dance from the rallies one more time.
This, all the while, Trump himself becomes a meme via Iranian AI propaganda.
The man who once held perceptual reality in his hand now finds himself crushed in the grip of physics.
But then again, the same could be said for the West writ large. The postmodern reality television era was only possible in times of plenty, when the circus encompassed everything because we never had to think about the bread. But as fertiliser stocks deplete, inflation soars, and policies emerge to ration fuel, the desert of the real will return.
The intricate lattice of supply chains, critical infrastructure, energy demand and supply, and just-in-time economic models has, like Trump, been revealed as a fragile sham.
Trump was, unfortunately, one of the West's last chances to survive. And he blew it. He blew for a worthless and entirely self-serving 'allied' country (which has always been a one-sided marriage anyway). And the tangible result will be, most likely, the West being engulfed in Wagnerian chaos.
How much agency does Trump actually have? I´m inclined to think that he made a bargain, his end of which he now has to hold up and that any agency he may have had before is now essentially gone.