Cut His Mic (Again)

Trump’s Knesset fiasco, Hegseth’s Qatari backpedal, Oregon’s secession fever, and the language of empire, one long karaoke of decline.

Good morning! If you want a sense of how fractured the American psyche has become, take a drive east from the Oregon Coast. By the time you reach the high desert, you’ll find counties voting to secede from Oregon altogether, to join Idaho, no less, because they’re “tired of being governed by Portland elites.” It’s a familiar dirge in the age of delusion: the regions most subsidized by the system insisting they’re its captives.

The Greater Idaho movement swears this isn’t about politics, just “representation.” But the math doesn’t lie. Portland’s tax base keeps those rural schools open, those sheriffs paid, those bridges standing. Without it, eastern Oregon would discover what “freedom” actually costs, potholes, pink slips, and bankruptcy. Still, it’s easier to dream of new borders than to face how intertwined we really are. The fantasy of separation sells better than the reality of dependence.

Trump’s America continues its own borderless descent into absurdity. At the Knesset this week, the president delivered a speech that managed to make every foreign leader in the room look like they were calculating escape routes. Giorgia Meloni froze somewhere between disbelief and pity; Keir Starmer looked ready to fake a fainting spell. Trump bragged, “We have deals worth seventeen trillion dollars, more than any country has ever seen!” and praised Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister and Vladimir Putin’s favorite European ally, as “a fantastic man, the best, very strong.”

Seventeen trillion. Not to be repetitive but for perspective, that’s roughly the size of China’s entire economy, or about half of America’s national debt, which currently stands at $37 trillion. In other words, Trump was claiming he’d single-handedly produced contracts equal to the GDP of the planet’s second-largest economy, or conjured half of America’s debt in “deals” that exist only in his imagination. “People said it couldn’t be done,” he added, “but we did it, we made it happen.” It’s unclear who “we” are, but one suspects the math department has resigned en masse.

It was improv night at the nursing home. Italy’s Georgia Meloni blinked in Morse code; Britain’s Keir Starmer stared into the void; even Netanyahu smiled like a man questioning every decision that led him to this table.

While the U.S. press politely summarized it as “rambling,” the foreign press is doing what our domestic media won’t, investigating Trump’s corruption, tracing the crypto cash flows, and naming the oligarchs underwriting his empire. Australia’s Four Corners program is doing heavy forensic work. According to their reporting, Trump entered the presidency in 2017 claiming roughly $3 billion in assets; eight years and countless “deals” later, he’s now pegged at about $10 billion, a miraculous personal windfall achieved during an era of national decline. America’s democracy now relies on international correspondents to describe its own decay, while our homegrown pundits debate whether Trump’s mood swings count as “energy.”

Then came Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who decided that what America really needed right now, amid global chaos, domestic unrest, and Trump’s rolling cognitive implosion, was a foreign air base in Idaho. Standing beside Qatari officials, Hegseth proudly announced a new “letter of acceptance” to build a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility at Mountain Home Air Force Base, complete with training access for Qatari pilots and F-15s. It was, he gushed, proof of “deepening partnership” with the same Gulf monarchy that helped mediate the recent hostage release in Gaza.

MAGA influencers were howling about “foreign occupation,” Idaho conservatives were drafting secession papers for real this time, and Trump, fresh off his Knesset delusion, was reportedly furious that someone else had managed to say something even dumber that day. The idea that a foreign military might have a “facility” on American soil, under Trump’s watch, triggered what sources described as “an uncontrolled theological event” in the Oval Office.

Hegseth, bless him, tried to hold his ground. You can picture the veins popping as he insisted this was not a foreign base, but merely a “joint training facility.” In other words: same jets, same pilots, same location, just fewer syllables. “The U.S. military has a long-standing partnership with Qatar,” he tweeted desperately, “but to be clear, Qatar will not have their own base in the United States.” Which was curious, given that his own announcement had used the words “Qatari facility” about a dozen times in thirty seconds.

By nightfall, the whole thing had devolved into pure farce. The Pentagon was issuing “clarifications,” Qatari officials were politely pretending they’d misunderstood the term base, and right-wing media was frothing about “sharia airspace” over Boise. The Daily Beast called it a “half-denial, half-retraction,” diplomatic code for someone’s getting screamed at. Somewhere between the shouting, the spin, and the sound of glass shattering in the West Wing, Hegseth probably realized he’d just become the first Defense Secretary to accidentally trigger a cultural war between Idaho and the Arabian Peninsula.

By morning, the “Qatar base” had been reduced to a “training agreement,” the training agreement had been downgraded to a “proposal,” and the proposal had been redefined as a “miscommunication.” The only thing everyone agreed on was that the incident had achieved the impossible: it made the Pentagon look both imperial and incompetent at the same time.

Still, there’s a certain poetry to it. After all, this administration has spent the past ten months blurring the line between church and state, truth and fantasy, civilian and combatant, why not blur the line between Idaho and Doha while we’re at it?

Closer to home, Willamette Week uncovered something darker, and far more revealing, about the government’s domestic posture. On October 5, federal ICE agents in Portland blocked an ambulance from leaving their facility, surrounded it, and threatened to shoot the driver for trying to transport an injured protester to the hospital. Yes, shoot a paramedic. The medics’ incident reports read like dispatches from an occupied zone: riot gear, screaming agents, a driver trapped in her own vehicle. This is what “law and order” looks like when paranoia meets power. The agents eventually relented, but not before demonstrating that Trump’s federal apparatus now sees emergency responders as potential insurgents.

Even our words have frontiers. A thoughtful reader wrote to remind me that in a recent roundup, I uncritically echoed the U.S. press in referring to captured Israeli soldiers as “hostages.” That framing, as they pointed out, is both inaccurate and morally loaded. Soldiers captured in war are prisoners of war, and when civilians are detained indefinitely without charge, they are the hostages.

It’s a small but essential distinction, because language is how empire tells on itself. You can see it in the Washington Post headline this week, “Jubilation in Israel as hostages returned to families who fought for deal”, where the newly freed Israelis are given names, families, and tears, while the 67,000 Palestinians killed are presented as a statistical footnote, attributed to “local health authorities.” Their grief is filtered, their credibility questioned. One side’s pain is sacred; the other’s is bureaucratic.

That’s not journalism it is narrative control. And I’m not exempt from it. I slipped into the same linguistic groove, the one designed to make occupation sound like defense and make resistance sound like terror. It’s the same colonial grammar that once painted Indigenous Americans as “savages” and settlers as “defenders of civilization.” Words do the work of domination long before bullets or bulldozers arrive.

Owning that bias isn’t about semantics; it’s about honesty. Because if we can’t see the way our language enforces hierarchy abroad, we’ll miss how it does the same thing at home, in Oregon counties dreaming of secession, in ICE agents threatening to shoot medics, in presidents who turn war into theater and diplomacy into karaoke. The borders we draw in speech are every bit as real as the ones we draw on maps.

And speaking of karaoke, Trump’s schedule today includes a meeting with Argentina’s self-styled libertarian showman, Javier Milei. If they don’t end the day with a joint rendition of “We Didn’t Start the Fire,” it’ll only be because neither man knows all the words.

As for me, Marz and I are sticking to quieter harmonies, breaking in new walking shoes along the coastal trails, coffee in hand. When the world turns into performance art, the least we can do is remember who’s holding the microphone.