The Empire Keeps Office Hours

By Monday, the protests were background noise, the war machine was humming again, and Trump was already fantasizing about seizing Iran’s oil.

Good morning! Trump and the political press have already done what they always do after a weekend of mass protest: moved on. The streets filled, the cameras glanced over, and then it was right back to the usual imperial programming: war chatter, oil fantasies, border demagoguery, and whatever fresh chandelier of self-worship Trump wanted hung in the palace this week. That was the point of the “No Kings” protests, and also their limit. More than 3,100 events took place across all 50 states and beyond, with organizers claiming turnout in the millions, yet by Sunday evening’s press gaggle the machine was already back at its desk, coffee in hand, feeding itself as if nothing had happened.

That is the flaw in confining resistance to weekends. Authoritarians can tolerate a Saturday. They can weather a march, wait out a chant, let the drone footage circulate, and then return Monday to the business of wrecking the country and setting whole regions on fire. What they fear is a weekday that does not function, a workday that jams the gears, a refusal that costs them something measurable. This moment calls for the kind of disruption power cannot shrug off by Monday morning: a general strike, the clearest expression of democratic refusal available when institutions have gone rotten and the people steering the machinery no longer feel bound by law, morality, or reality.

Organizing a true general strike is no small feat. It takes infrastructure, solidarity, trust, and time. But waiting around for perfect conditions is also how a country sleepwalks into catastrophe or kakistrophe. In lieu of a fully organized general strike, the public could start building toward one now. If every one of the roughly 78 million Americans who voted for someone other than Trump in 2024 took one day a month to step out of the machinery, stay home if they can, skip nonessential spending, refuse the little rituals of compliance that keep the system humming, it would measurably gum up the works. It would turn opposition from an opinion into friction.

t is not a substitute for a general strike, but it is how one begins to feel possible. It builds the habit of interruption and reminds people that they are not alone. It transforms scattered disgust into a recurring act of public refusal. Don’t feed the machine more than survival requires. Make your dissent visible. Repeat it monthly, weekly if you can. Let the people wrecking the country understand that the public is no longer content to register moral disapproval on weekends while the empire keeps office hours all week.

The truth underneath all of this is that Trump is openly fantasizing about seizing Iran’s oil, bragging about regime decapitation, shuffling more troops into the region, and decorating the White House like a warlord with a Vegas interior designer. The war machine is moving, the palace is preening, and the legacy press is normalizing. American troops are going to die unless business as usual becomes genuinely inconvenient.

While the White House and its stenographers were busy pretending the protests were background scenery, Pope Leo used Palm Sunday to deliver the sort of moral clarity Washington now treats as an exotic foreign substance. He said no one can use God to justify war, described Jesus as the “King of Peace,” and declared that God does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, quoting Isaiah’s warning about hands “full of blood.” There it was: more ethical seriousness in one homily than this blood-soaked administration and its obedient court press have produced in months.

The war is no longer being sold with even the pretense of adult statecraft. It is being narrated like a casino-floor brag by a man who hears “regional conflict” and immediately starts browsing the assets. In reporting from the Financial Times that has now echoed across other outlets, Trump talked about wanting the United States to “take the oil in Iran,” including Kharg Island, Iran’s main export hub, as if sovereign territory were just another distressed property he could slap his name on and refinance with blood. Oil prices jumped above $115 a barrel as markets reacted to the possibility that the President of the United States is now openly musing about piracy with nuclear paperwork.

Because this administration never settles for one obscenity when it can stack three, Trump paired the oil-grab talk with more claims that negotiations are going “very well,” that Iran has effectively already undergone “regime change,” and that somehow this all proves his genius rather than his instability. AP reports there are tentative diplomatic efforts involving Pakistan, even as Iran disputes the nature of those talks and the war continues to widen. So the public is being asked to accept the usual gangster fairytale: yes, we are threatening to seize your national lifeblood; yes, we are moving more forces into the region; yes, we are talking about more strikes, but also please clap, because this is apparently what peace looks like now.

The military buildup is not hypothetical. About 50,000 U.S. troops were already in the Middle East before the latest reinforcement moves, according to AP. On top of that, Marine units aboard the Tripoli group and a second amphibious force are adding roughly 5,000 Marines, while at least 1,000 troops from the 82nd Airborne are preparing to deploy, with other reporting putting that number closer to 2,000. While people are given a weekend to be horrified, the empire keeps office hours.

Who exactly is directing all this? A kakistocracy of zealots, grifters, and chest-thumping mediocrities, with Trump at the top and Dumb McNamara somewhere nearby, moving pieces around the board as if war were a management simulation instead of a human catastrophe. These are people who talk about regime change the way drunken developers talk about zoning variances. In a press gaggle Sunday, Trump bragged that Iran was now on its “third group” of leaders because the earlier ones were mostly dead, floated bizarre claims about tribute-like “boatloads of oil,” and casually toggled between “regime change isn’t imperative” and “it truly is regime change.” He also found time, in the middle of all this, to pivot from bombing Iran to showing off renderings for a lavish White House ballroom, because Nero has decided the fiddling should be donor-funded and bulletproof.

That performance made clear just how fully Trump now treats war, vanity, and domestic authoritarianism as one seamless business model. In a few minutes he lurched from boasting about annihilating military targets and remaking Iran’s leadership by force, to fantasizing about his ballroom with hand-carved Corinthian columns and “drone-proof” roofs, to ranting about ending the filibuster, glorifying ICE, and calling Democrats sick and terrorist-adjacent for opposing his agenda. It was a dream staged by a man who believes imperial violence abroad, palace upgrades at home, and democratic erosion in Congress are all just line items in the same executive budget.

The human cost keeps getting harder to bury. Iran is still pushing the Minab school massacre to the front of the story, where it belongs. Tehran publicly named U.S. naval officers it says were responsible for the February 28 Tomahawk strike on the girls’ school in Minab, where nearly 170 civilians, mostly children, were killed. Iran’s foreign minister has called it a war crime and a crime against humanity, while Volker Türk, the U.N. human rights chief, said the bombing evoked “visceral horror.” Washington, naturally, is still hiding in the usual language of regret, investigation, and not intentionally targeting civilian infrastructure, which is the bureaucratic version of wiping the blood off your shoe and insisting you tripped.

Now the story has widened. The New York Times reported that on that same opening day of war, a newly developed U.S. Precision Strike Missile appears to have made its combat debut by exploding above a sports hall, an adjacent elementary school, and a residential area in Lamerd near an IRGC compound. The Times’ visual analysis and weapons experts said the damage pattern matched the PrSM’s airburst warhead, which sprays tungsten pellets over a wide area. At least 21 people were reported killed. So if Minab looked like a massacre, Lamerd makes it look like a pattern: America’s newest missile got its big entrance not over some immaculate battlefield abstraction, but over children.

Morally, strategically, and politically, this matters. Morally, because the war keeps producing the same ugly photograph: shattered schools, dead kids, shattered neighborhoods, official denials. Strategically, because Europe is watching this and concluding that Trump’s America is no longer a difficult ally but an extortionate one. As Steven N. Højlund argued, Trump’s threat to squeeze Europe over energy while demanding obedience on tariffs and war has landed not as hard-nosed diplomacy but as blackmail. That disgust is the smell of allied trust rotting in real time. More and more of the civilized world is looking at Trump’s alliance model and seeing a protection racket with briefing books.

The silence surrounding the protests matters. Trump did not really acknowledge them, and the press did not meaningfully force the issue. The White House that can spare ten minutes for a fantasy ballroom and a fresh lie about tribute tankers could not spare one honest reckoning with the millions of people disgusted enough to march against this regime.

The next phase has to be something harder to metabolize. Not just another weekend of righteous spectacle, though God knows there is plenty to be righteous about. Something repeated, visible, and costly. A monthly weekday of dissent. Take the day off if you can. Refuse nonessential spending. Disrupt business as usual in whatever way your life allows. Make refusal visible. Build the muscle memory of interruption. If Trump is openly fantasizing about seizing Iran’s oil, bragging about regime decapitation, shuffling more troops into the region, and decorating the White House like a warlord with a Vegas interior designer, then we have to show the opposition is going to make it inconvenient.