Empire at Pay-Per-View

From Hormuz panic to Pentagon piety to a Saturday night UFC fight, Trump keeps turning war, faith, and governance into one long episode of televised male insecurity.

Good morning! This evening, as diplomats struggle to keep Trump’s latest regional dumpster fire from roaring back to life, the president will, of course, be attending a UFC fight. While negotiators in Islamabad try to hold together a cease-fire made of wet cardboard and America’s allies choke on the energy shock, Trump will be toddling off toward a cage match like a man who thinks foreign policy is just another pay-per-view of televised male insecurity. The prospect of a cease-fire seems only to have whetted Trump’s appetite for more blood sport.

In its own vulgar way, that is the perfect entry point into today’s mess. The United States and Iran are now in talks in Pakistan, with Pakistan shuttling between the two sides in what everyone is calling a make-or-break moment. The cease-fire exists, technically, in the way a cracked windshield still technically counts as glass. It is there, but you would be a fool to lean on it. Iran is still using the Strait of Hormuz as leverage, Israeli strikes in Lebanon have continued to threaten the whole arrangement, and nobody seems fully sure what this supposed cease-fire even covers. The White House, true to form, has been cagey about basic details, leaving the world to infer strategy from vibes, motorcades, and the facial expressions of people getting off planes in Islamabad.

Trump, meanwhile, continues to demonstrate that his grasp of global economics is roughly equivalent to a man yelling at a gas pump. He is still insisting that the United States does not really “use” the Strait of Hormuz, “we don’t use the strait,” he declared, as though that means the American economy floats above the consequences like some blessed and exempt reality show set. It does not. The issue is not whether every barrel entering the United States physically sails through Hormuz. The issue is that when one of the world’s most critical energy chokepoints is threatened, global prices jump, shipping risk rises, insurance costs climb, markets twitch, and Americans pay more too. Holding up traffic there makes Americans feel it through higher prices and inflation, just like everyone else. Trump’s fantasy is always the same. He imagines America as a self-contained action movie set where consequences stop at the border.

Reality stubbornly refuses the role, and America’s allies are getting tired of pretending otherwise. Keir Starmer said he was “fed up” with British families and businesses watching their energy bills “go up and down … because of the actions of Putin or Trump across the world,” which is quite a sentence when you stop and admire the diplomatic corpse on the floor. More than routine allied grumbling, that is the British prime minister effectively slotting the President of the United States into the same category as the saboteur who helped send Europe’s energy costs into orbit. Starmer was just as clear about Israel’s continued attacks on Lebanon, brushing aside technical parsing and saying, “That should stop” because “they’re wrong.” Britain, in other words, is looking at Trump’s so-called peace and noticing that if the bombs keep falling and the bills keep rising, this is not peace, it is false advertising.

Then there is the foreign commentary on Trump’s favorite line, that the Iranians “have no cards.” It was a sharp catch when an LBC host noted that Trump used the same line on Zelenskyy. There it is again, the whole worldview in four rotten little words. He thinks leverage only counts if it belongs to him and that shouting “you have no cards” is the same thing as actually winning. But if Iran had no leverage, Washington would not be in Islamabad right now trying to bargain over Hormuz, enrichment, sanctions, Lebanon, and the rest of the regional mess. If Ukraine had no leverage, Trump would never have needed to berate Zelenskyy in the first place. The problem with a man who thinks everything is a mobbed-up poker game is that he keeps forgetting the other players are still at the table.

The view from Europe is becoming harsher by the day, and not just because Trump is rude, crude, unstable, and apparently unable to stop behaving like a man who learned statesmanship from wrestling promos and casino carpeting. The deeper question now rattling around Britain and the continent is whether the United States itself can still be treated as a reliable ally, not just under Trump, but after him too. That anxiety surfaced almost immediately during a recent discussion with the host’s blunt summary that “the US has become this unreliable partner,” and the answer that followed was even more revealing: you have to do “what is in the best interest of the United Kingdom,” because “the US position within NATO … is less secure … with this president.”

What really stands out is the insistence that Europe and Britain cannot keep organizing their security around the hope that this all goes away when Trump does. One commentator tried the familiar reassurance that “there’ll be a new president in the United States” in two and a half years, that the deeper relationship will survive, that America is still America. But the sharper response in the transcript cuts right through that fantasy: “you cannot build a defense and security arrangement … on the basis of, well, Trump again.” He happened once, then twice. One speaker pointedly added, “the American Republican party are perfectly capable of finding somebody as antithetical to European interests” again. That is the key shift. From abroad, Trump no longer looks like an unfortunate interruption in an otherwise stable democratic story, he looks like proof of concept.

Pro-European voices are not making a sentimental case about harmony, shared values, and clasped hands under a blue flag. They are making a hard strategic case: Britain needs closer ties with France, Spain, the Nordics, the Baltics, and other European partners because geography still exists, Putin is still a threat, and America has “abandoned Ukraine.” The line that lands hardest is the simplest one: “America isn’t reliable. Therefore, you have to find allies. Who else is there?” A continent moving from irritation to adaptation.

The defensive case for sticking with Washington is hardly reassuring. It basically amounts to this: Trump “won’t last forever,” Europe is not ready yet, and America still has more military weight than any one European power. Rather than confidence, it belies dependence muttering to itself in the dark. Even the defenders of the old Atlantic order sound less like believers than like people clutching a frayed life raft and insisting it still counts as a ship.

It is not simply that Europe is annoyed with Trump. It is that Trump has forced Europe to ask whether America’s instability is temporary or structural. We have argued in earlier essays that a system capable of letting Trump rise, consolidate power, and return is already revealing profound internal failure. From Europe’s vantage point, that conclusion now looks less like partisan critique than obvious diagnosis. Trump was not a fluke. He emerged from a broken political structure, captured a major party, exposed norms that were far weaker than Americans liked to imagine, and then came back for another round. From abroad, that does not look like a bad season in an otherwise healthy democracy. It looks like a warning label. Europe is no longer merely irritated with one president. It is beginning to calculate around the possibility of a permanently unreliable America.

Which brings us home, because the domestic conversation is catching up to the international one. Jamie Raskin’s latest intervention is not, despite the headlines, a live removal effort. It is something more foundational and in some ways more unsettling: a formal attempt to explain what constitutional mechanisms even exist when a president behaves like this. In a TIME interview, Raskin makes clear that he is not charging into a 25th Amendment push with a secret master plan. He is trying to brief Democrats on the constitutional architecture around impeachment and incapacity while openly acknowledging the brutal political reality that there is not a single Republican presently interested in impeachment. That does not mean impeachment talk is imaginary. Formal articles have now been introduced elsewhere in the House, including a 13-count filing from Rep. John Larson, even as Raskin himself argues Trump has committed “a dozen or more impeachable offenses.” What he is really doing is setting the constitutional table for a public that has realized the system was never designed to contain a shameless, corrupt, norm-devouring narcissist backed by a party willing to function as his emotional support animal.

A reader from the Southern Hemisphere shared some reporting by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about Pete Hegseth and his church that is deeply chilling. It points to the growth of a militant Christian nationalist worldview that does not merely coexist with state power but seeks to sanctify it. The piece quotes Doug Wilson, founder of the church network Hegseth attends, saying flatly, “I don’t believe in liberal democracy,” while also arguing that women’s priority is “the home” and that they should submit to husbands and fathers. Hegseth has echoed that world himself, boosting the slogan “All of Christ for All of Life” and embracing a version of public Christianity that is less about personal faith than political dominion. It is a political theology that challenges pluralism, elevates hierarchy, and imagines public life as something to be reordered under explicitly religious authority.

The reporting becomes even more unsettling when it reaches the Pentagon. ABC notes that Hegseth has characterized combat in overtly Christian terms and has helped normalize monthly worship services at the Pentagon itself. That is a point where a comparison to the ayatollahs starts to feel less provocative than clarifying. The creed is different, but the political structure feels eerily familiar: divine legitimacy fused to state violence, sacred language draped over military power, and the nation recast as an instrument of providential destiny. As one scholar quoted in the piece put it, “The US Army should not be fighting on behalf of Christianity.” Once military force is narrated as the vehicle of a religious mission rather than the instrument of a constitutional republic, dissent stops being mere disagreement and starts being framed as rebellion against God’s plan. One side says Christian, the other Islamic, but the authoritarian impulse rhymes.

Pope Leo’s stance, by contrast, becomes more powerful. There is no blurring of principle with power or governance, no attempt to turn faith into a marketing strategy for missiles, and certainly no treating civilian death as a regrettable but sellable side effect of strongman rule. Innocent life matters. Peace matters. No cause can justify the shedding of innocent blood. That moral clarity lands with unusual force precisely because so many of Trump’s religious defenders sound less like pastors than like court flatterers in expensive shoes. When Leo speaks, religion functions as a restraint on power. When Pastor Mark Burns speaks, religion sounds like a permission slip for power. Burns’ defense of Trump’s Iran attack was so flimsy it practically fluttered out of his mouth. Asked about Trump’s threats, he shrugged that the president “says a lot of things that capture people’s attention” because he is “a mass marketer,” then retreated to the claim that “the president is not the moral authority of the nation.” So there you have it: Christian ethics for everyone else, branding immunity for the strongman. Burns then finished the job by insisting Trump is “saved by the grace of Jesus Christ” and that “God’s grace covers him,” as though grace were now a kind of celestial diplomatic pouch for war rhetoric, corruption, and empire. Instead of theology, it was laundering.

So here we are. The administration has lost control of its war of choice. America’s allies are looking on with a mix of disgust, fear, and dawning strategic realism. Democrats are reduced to explaining constitutional emergency measures because the normal assumptions of the republic have collapsed under the weight of a malignant clown show. Inside the state, a Christian nationalist tendency is creeping closer to power, and before the day is over, Donald Trump will make his way to a UFC fight.