No. of Recommendations: 10
Something corrosive is happening in American political discourse right now, and it’s dressed up as victory. Republican senators are beginning to hold their noses around Trump. Cable news chyrons breathlessly catalog his latest administrative disasters. Social media erupts in schadenfreude with each fumbled appointment, each incoherent press conference, each new revelation of staggering incompetence. The consensus is forming.
Political cartoon showing a figure in stars-and-stripes attire collapsed face-down on the ground amid debris, while a crowd of laughing people point and celebrate in the background—illustrating the dangerous satisfaction of mocking failure without addressing systemic collapse
“The tide is turning. The fever is breaking. America is finally, mercifully coming to its senses.”
This is not wisdom. This is the final stage of our collective delusion, the moment we mistake recognizing the obvious for having done something about it. We’re celebrating the diagnosis while the patient hemorrhages on the table.
Trump’s incompetence has become a sedative. It allows people to feel smart without being responsible, correct without being effective. Recognizing the obvious has been mistaken for action.
To fully illustrate this, I need to talk about mascots, and what happens when a country forgets the difference between entertainment and governance.
When I was ten years old, my parents had season tickets to the Denver Nuggets. Not good seats. Not “kind of close.” These were end-of-the-bench seats, the kind people dream about and save for and tell stories about later. I didn’t know any of that. To me, it was just Tuesday night basketball, my knees brushing warmups, my shoulder doubling as an armrest for grown men making NBA money. Marcus Liberty. Jerome Lane. Joe Wolf, and if fate smiled, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, moving with the quiet gravity of someone who already knew how lonely brilliance could be.
The Nuggets were catastrophically, almost biblically awful. Twenty wins. Sixty-two losses. A team so relentlessly, systematically abysmal that hope itself stopped showing up to the arena, like a creditor who’d finally learned the checks would bounce. There was no illusion. No rebuild narrative stitched together from draft picks and prayer. No “next year” mantra whispered like an incantation against the obvious. Just loss, piled on putrefying loss, echoing around McNichols Arena like a stench no amount of buttered popcorn could smother.
The best part of 1990 Denver Nuggets basketball wasn’t the basketball. It was Rocky.
Rocky the mountain lion mascot. High-flying. Half-court shot-making. A blur of choreographed fur and calculated bravado who treated gravity as a polite suggestion and physics as a personal insult requiring revenge. Rocky stole my hat so many times that season I started clutching it like a newborn, like something precious that needed protection from the chaos. He dunked off ladders with the reckless precision of a stuntman who’d made peace with mortality. He hit shots backward, upside-down, blindfolded, each impossible feat met with roaring approval from crowds who’d long since stopped expecting the actual players to make anything at all. He worked the crowd like a vaudeville assassin with a mortgage to pay and student loans to service. Today he makes something like $625,000 a year. The average NBA mascot makes around $60K.
The Nuggets understood the product they were selling, and it wasn’t basketball.
That is the part that should haunt us as Americans, that is the thing that should keep us awake at night sweating into our expensive sheets. No one ever confused Rocky’s greatness for the team’s greatness. Not once. Not even the most inebriated guy in the upper deck wearing a foam finger and pharmaceutical-grade delusions. Rocky was entertainment. A pressure valve. A licensed idiot, granted freedom to be magnificent in his ridiculousness so the rest of us didn’t have to pretend the product on the court was anything other than comprehensively, irredeemably broken.
That’s the job of a mascot. A symbolic village idiot. Talented, sure. Athletic, even. Extraordinarily good at what he does, but fundamentally unserious. Categorically separate from the actual contest. The joke is the point. The performance exists precisely because the substance has failed. The spectacle fills the vacuum left by competence.
Somewhere along the way, sometime between the last time institutions mattered and the first time a reality television host seemed like a reasonable choice for supreme executive power, America forgot that distinction.
We stopped being able to tell the difference between the show and the game, between the performance and the republic. Between Rocky and the Nuggets.
Now we’re celebrating because we’ve finally noticed the mascot is just a mascot, even as the country loses everything that matters.
The Spectacle Economy of Governance
Because right now, a staggering, almost incomprehensible number of people are confusing the mascot for the country itself, and that confusion isn’t harmless. It isn’t a minor category error. It’s civilizationally lethal.
There is zero doubt that Donald Trump is an incompetent buffoon. You don’t need to hear him speak to know it, though if you do, the case becomes airtight within seconds, delivered in his signature word salad of malice and malapropism. He is incapable, bumbling, incoherent. A man who fails upward like it’s a spiritual calling, like gravity itself has exempted him from consequence. A walking embodiment of noise over substance, grievance over governance, spectacle over skill, chaos over competence.
He didn’t become a leader. He became a mascot.
A mascot of hate. Of violence. Of the systematic corrosion of civic virtue and institutional legitimacy. He flailed, he bragged, he broke things with the gleeful abandon of a toddler in a china shop, and millions, tens of millions, mistook the performance for strength. Mistook the volume for vision. Mistook the cruelty for courage.
His second administration isn’t some deviation from that truth. It’s its purest, most distilled expression. Corrupt because he is corrupt. Incompetent because he is incompetent. Incapable because incapacity is the core feature, not a bug. This is what the country voted for. This is what the system delivered. This is what we collectively chose, or failed to prevent, which amounts to the same thing.
Now that the bills are coming due, now that the circus is eating itself, I’m watching people celebrate his failures like they’ve just discovered fire. Like this is new information. Like the punchline hasn’t been obvious, screaming, undeniable the entire time.
The Dangerous Comfort of Recognition
What I can’t understand, what genuinely baffles me, is how so many intelligent, well-meaning people are missing the forest for the trees, the fire for the smoke, the collapse for the spectacle of collapse.
If the idiot mascot was able to seize control of the country, if Rocky could simply walk onto the court, declare himself coach, and point guard and have millions cheer while the actual players wandered off confused. There is no room for celebration in his subsequent collapse. His failures are not a relief. They are not vindication. They are an indictment.
They are our failures. We did this. Collectively. Systemically. Repeatedly. Through decades of civic neglect, institutional erosion, epistemic collapse, and the willing abandonment of any shared framework for assessing reality itself.
The Republican Party beginning to “smell Trump’s stench” to finally, belatedly recognize what has been obvious since 2015, is not a victory. It’s an admission that the entire architecture of American conservatism has been so thoroughly corrupted, so completely hollowed out, that it took this long to reach this point. That senators and congressmen who swore oaths to the Constitution spent years enabling, defending, and empowering a man whose contempt for those very institutions was never subtle, never hidden, never unclear.
This isn’t the cavalry arriving. This is accomplices getting nervous about their own legal exposure.
Cheering the mascot’s incompetence after handing him the keys to the republic is like applauding Rocky while the arena burns down around you. It’s distraction dressed up as wisdom. It’s mistaking spectacle for progress. It’s confusing the entertainment value of watching something collapse with the actual work of rebuilding what has been destroyed.
You don’t get credit for noticing the clown is a clown after the circus has metastasized throughout governmental policy.
The Ratchet Only Turns One Way
Here’s what those celebrating fundamentally misunderstand. Authoritarian damage operates on a ratchet mechanism. It only turns one direction. Every norm destroyed stays destroyed. Every institution delegitimized remains delegitimized. Every precedent for lawlessness becomes the new floor, not the ceiling.
Trump has three years left in this presidency. Three years to continue appointing judges who will shape American jurisprudence for a generation. Three years to further corrupt the administrative state, to weaponize federal agencies, to embed loyalists in positions where they can inflict damage long after he’s gone. Three years during which every geopolitical adversary, from Beijing to Moscow, watches America’s continuing institutional disintegration and adjusts their strategic timelines accordingly.
The man can fail at everything he attempts and still succeed in his fundamental project: The destruction of functional governance itself. Because chaos is the governance model, and performative incompetence is the point. The cruelty, the corruption, the constitutional violations, these aren’t unfortunate side effects. They’re the product.
