Birthday Cakes and Battle Tanks: The Empire Throws Itself a Party

As Trump hijacks the Army’s 250th anniversary for his own glorification, retailers falter, FEMA vanishes, and Elon Musk melts down on camera, welcome to another week in the American decline parade.

Good morning! It’s quiet on the surface, no explosions, no firings, no middle-of-the-night executive orders, but the ground is moving beneath our feet. The kind of slow-motion collapse that doesn’t make headlines until it’s too late. Like the crack of a glacier just before it calves into the sea. Economists Jeffrey Sachs and Richard Wolff have both been issuing not-so-subtle and increasingly urgent warnings: the United States, under Trump, is shedding the last illusions of postwar dominance and trading in its soft power for loud threats and fiscal pyrotechnics.

Sachs likens Trump’s economic policy to a poker game played by a man with no cards and a mouth full of bluster. He’s betting the world will fold because “the U.S. market is big,” despite the reality that it now makes up a shrinking slice of global imports. Most countries have already diversified. China, in particular, is laying the groundwork for a Bretton Woods 2.0, with digital currency, infrastructure financing, and bloc-to-bloc trade replacing the almighty dollar as the world’s anchor. The U.S., Sachs says, is a declining power, doubling down on 20th-century leverage it no longer has.

Meanwhile, Richard Wolff has been reminding us that when a system in terminal decline feels its own irrelevance creeping in, it lashes out at workers, at the poor, at its own future. What looks like incompetence is often a deliberate transfer of pain from the top to the bottom. Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is no different: $3.8 trillion in tax cuts, almost all for the wealthy, funded by gutting Medicaid, food assistance, and green energy. Last night, Republicans forced Democrats to stay up into the early morning hours trying to push it through. A fitting metaphor, really, bleeding the country dry while everyone’s too tired to stop it.

Retailers are starting to break ranks, too. On Target’s Q1 earnings call, CEO Brian Cornell didn’t mince words: Trump’s tariffs are hammering consumer confidence and choking supply chains. Net sales dropped nearly 3%, in-store traffic plummeted over 5%, and the stock is down more than 30% year to date. The company has slashed its reliance on Chinese imports from 60% in 2017 to just 30% today, trying to outrun the policy chaos, but the fallout is already here. Target, once a bellwether of U.S. middle-class retail, is now warning of continued declines and scrambling to adjust product lines, vendors, and pricing to soften the blow. Trade war politics, it turns out, make terrible inventory managers.

And if the fiscal sabotage wasn’t enough, the bill nearly included a provision that would have allowed the Treasury Secretary to strip nonprofit organizations of their tax-exempt status for vaguely defined “support of terrorism”, a phrase so malleable it could apply to voter registration drives or environmental protests. Civil liberties groups called it what it was: a cudgel to silence dissent. The clause was removed late in the game, but Thom Hartmann is right to sound the alarm. Authoritarians don’t throw bad ideas away, they put them back in the drawer until the timing is right.

Across town, FEMA is still nowhere to be found. Three days after an EF3 tornado tore through St. Louis, leaving over $1 billion in damage and claiming at least seven lives, Mayor Cara Spencer is sounding the alarm. State and local officials have mobilized, but the federal government, she says, has offered nothing but silence. FEMA, once the gold standard of disaster response, has been hollowed out by Trump’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), gutted in the name of “streamlining” and left incapable of responding to the crises it was built to handle.

The Trump administration’s new gospel of state-led disaster relief looks good in a Heritage Foundation white paper, but in North St. Louis, where infrastructure was crumbling long before the tornado hit, that libertarian dream means no help is coming. Trump’s public skepticism of FEMA’s existence has become policy. The federal safety net isn’t frayed. It’s vanished. And cities like St. Louis are left to dig themselves out, one church bake sale at a time.

Meanwhile, the press corps lost another spine. CBS News President Wendy McMahon resigned yesterday under pressure, citing “irreconcilable differences” with the direction of the network. Left unsaid: Trump’s lawsuit against 60 Minutes and CBS News, part of his increasingly aggressive campaign to litigate the free press into silence. One by one, the pillars of journalism are collapsing, or being bought off, chased off, or sued into submission. The fourth estate is looking more like a half-burned gazebo at this point. But as the legacy outlets crumble, the fifth estate is stepping up. Independent journalists, Substackers, scrappy local bloggers, and whistleblower-driven platforms are keeping the lights on, sometimes literally, when the networks blink out. Truth, it turns out, doesn’t need a billion-dollar studio. Just a signal and a spine.

And then there’s Elon Musk, who made a rare departure from the fawning embrace of Fox News this week to sit down for an actual interview with actual questions. The result? A meltdown dressed in tech-bro deflection. Confronted about plummeting Tesla sales in Europe, Musk dodged, bluffed, and cited his own stock price as proof that all is well, a response that would make even WeWork blush. Pressed on conflicts of interest between SpaceX, DOGE, and his cozy ties to Trump, he denied there were any, because, brace yourself, if there had been, surely someone would have written about it. (They have.) When asked if he planned to keep funding elections, Musk, sounding like a sulking warlord denied more palace space, muttered, “I think I’ve done enough.” But the real tell came when he tried to spin violent threats against himself as proof of persecution, while completely ignoring the fact that most people are just peacefully boycotting his companies. In this one appearance, Musk cycled through victim, rescuer, and persecutor like a sociopathic carousel, proof that the billionaire-engineered drama triangle remains the hottest show on X.

The judiciary, however, showed a flash of resistance. U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell blocked Trump’s attempted takeover of the U.S. Institute of Peace, ruling the firings of the board and asset seizures illegal. Howell, never one to mince words, called the DOGE-directed operation a blatant violation of federal law. There are still judges willing to enforce the rule of law. The question is how long they’ll be allowed to keep doing so before Trump’s loyalty tribunal finds their files.

And finally, in the most Trumpian flourish of the week, the White House is plowing ahead with a grand military parade set for June 14, officially to mark the 250th anniversary of the U.S. Army, but unofficially to celebrate the 79th birthday of its commander-in-chief-in-his-own-mind. The event will feature over 6,600 troops, 150 military vehicles, 25 M1 Abrams tanks, and 50 aircraft, all culminating in a red-white-and-blaring fireworks display on the National Mall. Estimated costs run between $25 million and $45 million, though that doesn’t include the street repairs Washington, D.C. will be stuck paying for once the tanks finish cracking the pavement. Troops attending the spectacle will reportedly sleep on cots in unused federal buildings and must bring their own sleeping bags because apparently there’s plenty of money for parades, just not for pillows. Trump is expected to lead parts of the procession and officiate enlistment ceremonies, turning what should be a solemn milestone into a personal tribute to his own delusions of grandeur. It’s being sold as patriotism, but the choreography reads like pageantry ripped straight from the dictator starter kit. Authoritarianism doesn’t always show up in jackboots, sometimes it arrives with fireworks, tanks, and a very expensive birthday cake.