Opera vs. Policy

How Europe sees Trump clearly and why America is still standing too close

Good morning! It feels like we’ve finally found the organizing principle for the whole Trump-era clown show: Europe is staging Trumpism as opera, while America is living it as policy.

In Hamburg, the world premiere of Monster’s Paradise opened with a President-King so gluttonous, ravenous, and absurdly swollen with ego that he enters a gilded Oval Office with a Coca-Cola fridge, a crown on the desk, and a literal eject button for unwanted visitors. Chorus members dressed as zombies roam the opera house. Disney princesses drift through the foyer. Vampires frame the action like Wagnerian narrators. Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg appear as countertenor tech-adjutants singing syrupy lines about “high numbers.” Trump, rendered as a diapered titan with a golden necktie, grows to monstrous proportions and plants a golf club like a flag on conquered territory.

It’s grotesque and hilarious. It’s satire so blunt it risks becoming documentary before intermission. The director even admitted, in disbelief, that reality keeps sprinting toward parody so fast the production might be outdated in eight hours. That’s where we are now: the metaphor can’t keep up with the man.

Europe laughs because it can see the monster whole. America scrolls because it’s standing too close to notice it’s being eaten.

Donald Trump has weighed in on Bad Bunny’s historic Super Bowl halftime show, calling it “absolutely terrible,” “an affront to the Greatness of America,” and, because of course, complaining that “nobody understands a word this guy is saying.” Imagine watching a celebration of Puerto Rican culture, a parade of flags from across the Americas, a 14-minute dance party built around joy, unity, and the radical proposition that people can move together even if they don’t speak the same language… and emerging from it with the takeaway that the real crisis is Spanish.

Bad Bunny’s message was inclusivity: love is stronger than hate, nobody dances alone. Trump’s message, as always, is isolation: if it isn’t centered on him, it’s a slap in the face. One worldview builds a dance floor. The other builds a wall and then complains the music is too loud on the other side.

The viewing numbers make the contrast almost too clean. Bad Bunny’s halftime show pulled a record 135 million viewers, a genuinely global audience tuning in for a Spanish-language celebration of culture, joy, and shared space. Turning Point USA’s counter-programming, breathlessly marketed as the “real” America, peaked at about 6 million concurrent viewers, reaching roughly 18 million by the next morning. Not nothing, but not remotely comparable. These numbers illuminate exactly what we’ve been seeing all week: a mass cultural event embraced across linguistic and national lines versus a smaller, politically curated alternative that functions as a niche but very loud counter-current. One is a global celebration; the other is a domestic echo chamber shouting into its own feedback loop. And the split mirrors the larger opera-vs-policy dynamic perfectly, the world watching the grotesque from a distance and laughing, while a shrinking but intense audience at home insists the satire is actually the main show.

While Trump tantrums about lyrics, the Guardian reports that Americans across the country are organizing into ICE observer groups, ordinary people training, by the tens of thousands, to document federal immigration agents in public. Nearly 80,000 joined a call on how to “observe ICE,” a constitutionally protected practice that has become necessary because agents have now killed residents like Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Witness footage contradicted the White House’s claims of “self-defense.” Observers say their presence has deterred detentions, multiple abductions prevented simply because people showed up with eyes, phones, and solidarity.

That’s the real America under the spectacle: communities building accountability infrastructure because the state has abandoned it, and because the government has begun doing what authoritarian systems always do, criminalizing the witness. Federal officials are casting observers as “terrorists,” as if filming public agents is violence, while actual violence is carried out with badges and impunity.

The legal machinery is grinding, slowly, against the people who assumed they’d never be forced to answer for anything. A federal judge has ordered Elon Musk to sit for a deposition over DOGE’s role in dismantling USAID. Musk tried to cloak himself in the “high-ranking government official” aura, the apex doctrine, the idea that you can’t depose the powerful unless you’ve exhausted every underling first. The judge’s response was basically: are you even a government official? What exactly were you appointed to? And even if we pretend you are, you’ve provided no one else who can answer for decisions apparently given orally, with no documentary record, like mafia orders whispered in hallways.

So Musk goes under oath. The oligarch who spent months ransacking institutions with a teenager’s sense of consequence is about to discover that depositions are where bravado goes to die.

In the Epstein-adjacent theater of the damned, Ghislaine Maxwell is scheduled for a deposition before the House Oversight Committee, and she intends to plead the Fifth and refuse to answer substantive questions. Which is, in its own way, a perfect emblem of the era: she will show up as a body and contribute nothing as a witness. Representative Ro Khanna points out the obvious inconsistency, Maxwell apparently did not invoke the Fifth when she met privately with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to discuss similar subject matter. Will she speak to Trump’s DOJ but not to Congress? Why does one room feel safer than the other? The questions hang there, unanswered, like smoke.

Then there is the foreign money, the crypto pipeline, the corruption that would have ended any other presidency but now barely registers above the daily noise. The Guardian lays out the staggering revelation that an investment firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed, the UAE president’s brother and national security adviser, signed a deal to buy nearly half of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, for $500 million, quietly, in the shadow of the inauguration. Half a billion dollars from a foreign security state into the sitting president’s family business, and Washington yawns. Crypto has become the perfect influence machine: opaque, deregulated, frictionless. A new offshore account disguised as innovation.

As if the opera needed another act, Tulsi Gabbard’s ODNI saga continues to smell increasingly Nixonian, and the whistleblower timeline explains why. Under federal law, when an intelligence-community whistleblower files a complaint seeking congressional review, the agency has 21 days to transmit it to Congress. In this case, the complaint was filed in May. Congress did not receive it until February, a delay of several months, far outside the statutory window. During that time, Gabbard was engaged in activities that raised alarm bells on their own: inserting herself into a domestic criminal investigation in Atlanta, getting the president on the phone with frontline FBI investigators, and dispatching her team to look into Puerto Rican voting machines despite acknowledging there was no foreign interference, the very condition required for ODNI involvement. When questioned, the explanations shifted by the day. First Trump said he ordered her there. Then he said he didn’t know why she was there. Then the White House claimed Pam Bondi begged her to intervene. None of it rings true. Gabbard has since suggested she didn’t know the whistleblower rules, a claim that flatly contradicts her sworn testimony during her Senate confirmation, when she pledged to honor whistleblower protections and follow the law. The implication is unavoidable: either the Director of National Intelligence is catastrophically incompetent, or the complaint was deliberately buried while the administration tested how far it could push the post-Watergate guardrails. Either way, those guardrails are now being treated less like law and more like optional suggestions.

Again: opera versus policy. In Hamburg, a monster of his own making devours the President-King. In Washington, the monster doesn’t need stage blood or special effects. It signs executive orders, rage posts through the night, and unravels democracy one memo at a time, with the dead-eyed efficiency of a paper shredder.

Bad Bunny ended his show beneath the words: the only thing more powerful than hate is love. Across the country, people are taking that seriously, and not just as a lyric. They are showing up, filming, and refusing to let neighbors disappear quietly.

A quick personal note before we move on: if it feels like my attention has occasionally been pulled in a few new directions lately, that’s because it has, in the best possible way. I’ve been helping build a new community radio project here at home, something local, collaborative, and very intentionally human. Over the next couple of months, we’ll be fully online as a station dedicated to local musicians, community stories, conversations you don’t hear on corporate airwaves, and the kind of cultural connective tissue that doesn’t show up in algorithms. This will actually be the fourth community radio station I’ve obtained FCC licensing for here in Coos County, which feels less like a personal milestone than a reminder of how much appetite there still is for truly local voices. Think less “broadcast from on high,” more “neighbors talking to neighbors, with a really good soundtrack.” I’m incredibly excited about what this will become, and I can’t wait to share more as it comes into focus.

For now, Marz and I are off for a quick romp while the rain has paused and before I get pulled back under the big top of the Trump carnival again. Congrats! Seahawks!