Carpe Momentum: The Empire of Optics

Why Trump’s authoritarian theater is cracking, and why now is the moment to strike back

There’s something almost poetic about watching an authoritarian regime drown in its own propaganda. The Trump administration, emboldened by the blueprint of Project 2025, promised clarity, control, and strength. Instead, we see something closer to slapstick empire: a militarized theater where facts are optional, competence is suspect, and performance art has replaced the governing philosophy.

A case in point is Iran. What began as a serious strategic gamble has unraveled into a hall of mirrors. The Trump administration declared, with great fanfare, that it had obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. The truth, however, leaks out in fragments. Iran likely moved enriched uranium before the strikes. Some damage was done, centrifuges knocked out by shockwaves, tunnels collapsed, but only on Truth Social can it be called obliteration?

The Pentagon briefing this week revealed the chasm between power and reality. Secretary Pete Hegseth stormed the stage with red-faced indignation, attacking the press, praising Trump, and insisting this was the most complex military operation in U.S. history. D-Day veterans might disagree, and with good reason. Operation Overlord involved more than 150,000 Allied troops, 5,000 vessels, 11,000 aircraft, and months of joint planning among multiple nations under the constant threat of Nazi counterattack. It was the culmination of a multi-year effort to liberate Europe, executed with extraordinary logistical precision and at the cost of thousands of lives.

Over 10,000 Allied troops were killed, wounded, or missing in the first 24 hours alone. And once the beachheads were secured, the Allies faced the colossal challenge of evacuating wounded and rotating personnel back across the English Channel, a process that took several days and involved a vast network of landing craft, hospital ships, and field coordination under fire. In contrast, the Iran strike, while dangerous and tactically challenging, was a precision bombing run carried out by a small number of elite crews in controlled conditions. To compare the two is not just misleading. It’s an insult to history. More to the point, when asked a simple, concrete question, was the uranium moved?, Hegseth admitted he didn’t know. For a regime obsessed with strength, it was a moment of telling weakness: performative certainty masking strategic ignorance.

This is the essence of Project 2025’s vision: loyalty over competence, narrative over nuance, optics over statecraft. The American military remains competent, even heroic, but it is now fronting for a regime that treats them like background players in a reality TV reboot of the Cold War.

Authoritarian systems rot from the inside not just when they lose wars, but when they lose the ability to know what’s real. Soviet Russia buried itself in bureaucracy and lies. Mussolini’s Italy collapsed under the weight of its own myth-making. And perhaps the most instructive parallel: Nazi Germany, where Hitler’s obsession with optics, grand rallies, exaggerated military confidence, and the cult of personality, masked the regime’s deep operational dysfunction. Rivalries between SS and Wehrmacht, arbitrary command decisions, and the preference for loyalty over military expertise led to catastrophic strategic missteps. What mattered most was the illusion of strength, even as the Reich crumbled from within.

And now, the Trump regime, armed with bunker busters, ego, and a frenetic propaganda machine, finds itself reactive, disoriented, and easily manipulated. Israel and Iran are playing their own game. Trump, desperate for a legacy moment, has instead made himself the pawn. (He couldn’t even throw a successful parade.) It’s a fatal design flaw of authoritarianism itself.

History shows us that authoritarian regimes often burn brightly, but briefly. Nazi Germany lasted only 12 years. Mussolini’s fascist Italy endured for just 21, collapsing the moment it lost the illusion of invincibility. The Soviet Union, despite its scale and surveillance, disintegrated after 69 years when its internal contradictions finally overcame its fear machinery. Argentina’s military junta crumbled in just seven years after a failed war it provoked. Even modern-day examples like Myanmar’s recent military regime or Sudan’s autocratic swings reveal the same instability: regimes that rule through spectacle and suppression tend to shatter under pressure. And now, there are signs that Vladimir Putin’s autocracy is reaching its terminal phase as well: bogged down in Ukraine, plagued by economic strain, shaken by internal dissent, and hemorrhaging legitimacy at home and abroad.

As kakistocracies go, the Trump regime may be one of the least competent in history. It is not merely corrupt, but catastrophically unskilled. Its leaders mistake flattery for insight, loyalty for qualification, and optics for outcomes. That level of systemic self-deception is not just unsustainable, it’s combustible.

The true danger of Project 2025 isn’t brute force. It’s the hollowing out of every system that sustains fact-based governance: the press, the courts, the intelligence community, even the military chain of command. And in its place? A parade of hashtags, a chorus of sycophants, and a commander-in-chief more focused on posturing for a Nobel Peace Prize than protecting American credibility.

The world sees this. So do the American people. Our task now is to jam the gears of this stage-managed machine before the curtain falls.

Because make no mistake: the regime is on shaky ground. The Big Beautiful Bill, the crown jewel of Trump’s second-term economic agenda, is being gutted in real time. Between $250 and $400 billion in Medicaid cuts were ruled out of bounds by the Senate parliamentarian, leaving a gaping hole in the budget framework and sparking internal GOP chaos. The bill, already stitched together with policy gimmicks, is unraveling like bad theater curtains. The Trump camp is scrambling, some want to rewrite the rules, others want to fire the referee. And looming over all of it is a self-imposed, optics-driven July 4 deadline. No analysis, no final language, no score, just a mad dash to force a win. Compare that to the yearlong process behind the Affordable Care Act, hundreds of hearings, public debate, bipartisan outreach, and policy transparency, and you begin to see the rot.

Hegseth’s bluster, delivered with trembling bravado, is under global scrutiny. Trump, the self-proclaimed dealmaker, is now an international punchline, flanked by world leaders who actually understand policy and power.

This is our moment. The resistance is smarter, more agile, and increasingly fearless. If there was ever a time to seize the initiative, legally, strategically, nonviolently but relentlessly, it is now. Carpe momentum.