Self-Abasement at the End of Empire
From TSA collapse to war brinkmanship to Trump branding the currency with his own signature, today’s roundup is a tour through a government run like a royal court during an electrical fire.
Good morning! Welcome once again to the world’s least reassuring episode of government by tantrum, where the airports are melting down, the military is being ideologically fumigated; the allies are recoiling; the markets are gagging, and the president apparently decided that what this moment really needed was his autograph on the money.
Let’s start with the Department of Homeland Security mess, because after weeks of chaos, unpaid TSA workers, and enough airport misery to make spring break look like a reenactment of the fall of Saigon, the Senate finally moved early Friday to fund most of DHS through the end of the fiscal year while excluding ICE and Border Patrol from the deal. In practical terms, that means lawmakers found a way to stop the bleeding at airports without giving Trump and his immigration hardliners everything they wanted. Of course, this makes Trump’s sudden declaration that he would heroically order TSA agents paid “immediately” look exactly like what it was: a panicked PR bandage slapped over a wound his own standoff helped deepen. Rather than gallop in to rescue the republic, he stood there holding the gas can until the smoke got bad enough for Congress to yank it away.
That fight is not over, of course. Republicans are already openly talking about coming back for the ICE money later through budget reconciliation, which is Washington’s special procedural trick of saying, “What if we just did the ugly part with fewer votes?” Democrats did not get the reforms they wanted on immigration enforcement tactics, masks, warrants, and all the rest, but they did manage to deny a blank check to the agencies at the center of the confrontation. What emerged is not a clean resolution so much as triage for the parts of DHS the public could actually see collapsing. Funny how performative cruelty suddenly finds its limits when it backs up the security line at LaGuardia.
In the Pentagon, Pete Hegseth is apparently trying to turn officer promotions into a live-action remake of a grievance-podcast. Reporting says he moved to block the promotion of four Army officers to one-star general, including two Black officers and two women, in a process that is supposed to be merit-based and insulated from exactly this sort of ideological meddling. Hegseth keeps calling this “restoring meritocracy,” which at this point is one of those phrases that should arrive in quotation marks, under escort, and possibly wearing a wire. The pattern is pretty clear: “merit” keeps meaning “more white men,” “anti-woke” keeps meaning “roll back anyone who does not fit the old mold,” and “apolitical” keeps somehow involving a defense secretary pawing through promotion lists like a man rage-shopping at an authoritarian e-commerce store.
As serious as it is, the danger is bigger than the individual officers. The military promotion system exists to prevent exactly this sort of politicized intervention, because once command advancement turns on ideological purity and cultural resentment, you are no longer maintaining a professional officer corps. That brings us, naturally, to the broader theme of the day: the administration is becoming more personalist, more theatrical, and more openly devoted to the proposition that loyalty to the sovereign’s ego is the real qualification for public office.
The currency story matters more than it may seem at first glance. Treasury says Trump’s signature will begin appearing on new U.S. paper currency later this year, making him the first sitting president ever to have his name on the greenback. Officially, this is all part of the 250th-anniversary celebration, because apparently semi-quincentennial patriotism now requires treating the dollar like a campaign flyer. Come on, no one with functioning pattern recognition can look at this and think, ah yes, a perfectly normal republic doing perfectly normal republic things. The administration lurches from shutdown to market panic to alliance rupture to military purge; the state is literally putting Trump’s personal branding on the cash. The cult of personality has reached the register.
The thing that makes all of this feel so rancid is the courtier behavior around him. Pam Bondi, Stephen Miller, Kash Patel, cabinet members, aides, the whole procession of willing adults who stand there in public lavishing him with praise in a ritual of self-abasement as a career path. This is ego management as statecraft. It is not merely that they defend him; they magnify him, soothe him, adore him, and compete to prove who can most thoroughly shed any trace of dignity or conscience in his presence. One almost wants to ask whether mirrors have been outlawed in official residences, because I do not know how some of these people look themselves in the face after these adulation spectacles. Maybe that is the point. In corrupt courts, self-abasement is not a byproduct of loyalty, but the proof of it.
It feeds into the larger question of how to interpret Trump’s behavior, especially on foreign policy, where the usual tools of analysis keep shattering in our hands. Everyone wants to believe there must be a hidden logic underneath the contradictions. Maybe he is playing three-dimensional poker with the markets. Perhaps he is bluffing Iran. Maybe, possibly, maybe he is manufacturing chaos to improve negotiating leverage. Could it be a plan so cunning it can be mistaken for the behavior of a raccoon trapped in a shopping mall? We are all in danger of overthinking irrationality. It is increasingly possible, I would suggest likely, that there is no coherent doctrine underneath any of this. Not a chess master, just a man lurching from impulse to impulse while institutions and commentators exhaust themselves trying to explain why the fire is art.
One of the smartest observations floating around right now is also the simplest: stop obsessing over every claim, because with Trump the rhetoric is vapor and the state action is real. He says the war is over but not over, won but not won, negotiations are happening but maybe not, he needs help but doesn’t need help, he’ll strike tomorrow but maybe not tomorrow, he’s pausing but escalating, he’s de-escalating but moving more assets. If you try to process every pronouncement as if it were a good-faith policy statement, you will go insane before lunch. What is real are the troop movements. Deployments and weapons are real. Market shocks are real. The institutional damage is real, and the bodies, sure as hell, are real.
Trump gave Tehran another ten days after Wall Street coughed up blood over his war brinkmanship, with stocks taking a beating, oil surging, and inflation fears roaring back. The timing made the pause look like a panicked response to the one constituency he actually listens to: rich people watching numbers turn red. Trump’s usual style of chest-thumping macho chaos ran into the hard reality that markets dislike war, especially wars run by a man who changes his story depending upon how much gas is trapped in his bowel. So the “deadline” moved again, because in Trumpworld even apocalypse apparently comes with an extension option if the S&P has a bad afternoon.
If the markets are pushing one way, the regional hawks are tugging the other. New reporting suggests Saudi Arabia is leaning much harder into escalation than it wants to admit in public. According to the latest accounts, Mohammed bin Salman is said to view the U.S.-Israeli war as a “historic opportunity” to remake the Middle East and has reportedly urged Washington not merely to continue but to intensify the assault. That is an important update to the line we’ve been tracing for weeks, because it shows the Gulf monarchies doing what they so often do best: wanting the fire hotter so long as someone else strikes the match and stands closest to the blast. And as we noted yesterday, Riyadh is not just watching this crisis unfold from a position of fear. It is also profiting from it. Higher oil prices are padding Saudi coffers even as the kingdom publicly cloaks itself in the language of caution and calibration. Behind the scenes, the logic may be even uglier than simple regional rivalry: if war is already driving up energy prices, weakening Iran, and enriching the kingdom, then the incentive to let the fire burn a little longer becomes all too obvious. The problem, of course, is that wounded lions bite, and Saudi oil infrastructure is not made of magic.
Then there is Europe, where Marco Rubio arrived at the G7 in France with the diplomatic equivalent of a mop and bucket, trying to sell Trump’s Iran war to allies Trump had just insulted for not joining it. France all but said the war is not theirs. Britain emphasized that supporting defensive action is not the same as backing Washington’s offensive campaign. European officials complained that they were not properly informed before the escalation began. Still, Rubio showed up with all the breezy entitlement of a man trying to invoice the neighborhood after setting someone else’s garage on fire. This is what Trump’s foreign policy keeps producing: first he acts unilaterally, then he berates allies for not cleaning up after him, then a subordinate flies overseas to explain why everyone should be grateful for the chaos. We’ve gone from “America First” to America alone, stomping around demanding coalition benefits without coalition behavior, consultation, or trust.
While all of that was unfolding, one of the ugliest reports of the war so far surfaced out of southern Iran, where images reviewed by experts appear to show U.S. scatterable anti-tank landmines dispersed near a residential area outside Shiraz. If confirmed, it would mark the first known American use of such mines in conflict in more than twenty years. The likely military rationale is obvious enough: make it harder for Iranian mobile launchers and vehicles to maneuver near missile facilities. Land mines do not care about doctrine papers or talking points, or Pentagon euphemisms. They turn villages into roulette tables. They turn “area denial” into a bureaucratic synonym for “let’s see who loses a leg.” Human rights groups have spent decades trying to drag these weapons into the moral ash heap for a reason. The United States seems to be rummaging back through it like a man looking for his Sharpie.
And if that were not enough creeping-authoritarianism for one morning, there was also a genuinely chilling court ruling in Anthropic’s favor. A federal judge temporarily blocked the Pentagon from branding the A.I. company a “supply chain risk” after it pushed back on how its technology might be used in warfare. That label is usually associated with foreign threats, not domestic firms raising objections about surveillance and autonomous weapons. The judge’s language was scathing, rejecting what she called the “Orwellian notion” that an American company can be treated like an adversary for expressing disagreement with the government.
Taken together, the shape of the day is not subtle. The Senate moves to clean up a shutdown crisis after Trump’s theatrics cannot hide the damage. The Pentagon seems to politicize promotions under the banner of “merit.” Treasury turns the currency into Trump memorabilia. Gulf autocrats egg on a deeper war while allies recoil from the madness. Rubio is dispatched abroad to sell a conflict that even NATO countries do not trust. Scatterable mines appear near civilian areas. A judge had to step in because the government tried to punish a company for dissenting from the war machine. Everywhere you look, the pattern is the same: spectacle over competence, vengeance over restraint, flattery over governance, branding over substance, force over law.
In answer to whether there is any rationale behind Trump’s little excursion, sometimes the simpler explanation is the truer one: a man driven by grievance, vanity, impulse, and fear is wielding the machinery of the state, while everyone around him either flatters him, launders the chaos into policy language, or prays the next contradiction buys them another news cycle, or people forget the Epstein files.
Tomorrow, while No Kings protesters take to the streets across the country in what organizers say will be more than 3,000 local actions, Trump is scheduled to spend Saturday at Mar-a-Lago, tucked inside another Palm Beach weekend as the country absorbs the wreckage of his governance. There is something almost too perfect about that contrast: the public showing up to say this country does not belong to one man, while the man himself retreats behind the walls of his private club, cocooned by the security, spectacle, and public expense that always seem to follow him wherever he goes. If you need an image for the moment, there it is: thousands of Americans in the streets rejecting kingly rule, and the self-anointed monarch sheltering in place at Mar-a-Lago while the bill keeps landing on everyone else.