The Rotting Strongman and His Armed Palace

Trump limps across the fairway, Vance shrugs for Putin, soldiers patrol D.C. with rifles, and cruelty reigns while the gilding flakes off the White House walls.

Good morning! Donald Trump spent the weekend exactly as you’d expect from a fading strongman: hobbling around his golf course on the taxpayer dime, dragging his right leg like a marionette with a snapped string, and rage-posting on Truth Social about his “record approval ratings” in the 70s. His hands are mottled with fresh bruises, his ankles ballooned, his gait reduced to a zig-zag shuffle that makes sobriety tests look like endurance sports. If this were Joe Biden, CNN would have a Chyron counting down the seconds until the 25th Amendment. Instead, the mainstream politely looks away while the man with the nuclear codes visibly decomposes.

Heather Cox Richardson put it plainly: the collapse isn’t just physical, it’s cognitive. The man who once bullied his way through interviews with brute-force bluster now drifts off mid-sentence, slurring fragments of half-remembered grievances as if volume alone can stand in for coherence. Weakness masquerading as strength is still weakness, but Trump’s weakness is now paired with the unchecked machinery of state power. That’s what makes it dangerous. The more his body betrays him, the harder he clings to spectacle, gilding his palace with a 90,000-square-foot State Ballroom expansion and enough gold trim to make Versailles blush. The Oval Office, once iconic in its restraint, is now smothered in gilded molding and theatrical flourishes that make it look less like the seat of a republic and more like a casino lobby in Macau. The American Institute of Architects has already weighed in with horror, warning that the changes erase historic continuity and turn the People’s House into a stage set for one man’s ego. The Oval Office has become a prop, a set piece for a despot who can’t stand upright, a mirror of the man himself, gaudy, unstable, and rotting from within.

While Trump’s body crumbles, his vice president doubles down on smarm. JD “Just Dance” Vance spent Sunday beclowning himself on NBC, lecturing the country that wars “always end with negotiation,” even World War II, apparently forgetting the part where Hitler shot himself in a bunker rather than sit down for cocktails with FDR. When pressed about Russia bombing an American-owned factory in Ukraine, Vance mustered all the outrage of a man finding the wrong milk in his latte: “I don’t like it.” That was it. He saves his real fury for Zelensky not saying “thank you” enough. Then came the Freudian slip: “We are in the early stages of an investigation into John Bolton.” We. Not DOJ, not FBI, we. In case it wasn’t obvious, investigations now run directly out of the Trump White House, where justice is just another MAGA prop.

But the real danger of the weekend wasn’t Vance’s clown act, it was Trump’s escalation in Washington, D.C. National Guard troops are now patrolling the capital armed, carrying M4 rifles and M17 pistols with official orders that “detentions may occur leading to arrests.” This is not normal, and it’s not legal in spirit if not in letter. Two weeks ago, the Pentagon swore the Guard would remain unarmed and avoid arrests. That promise has already collapsed. Soldiers with rifles were stationed at Union Station on Sunday, patrolling Metro stops, their weapons on display as a visible reminder of who holds power. The White House insists they are protecting “federal assets,” but crime in D.C. has actually dropped since Trump declared his “crime emergency.” The spectacle, not the statistics, is the point.

Trump likes what he sees in the capital and wants to export it. Baltimore is next on his list, where Governor Wes Moore invited him to walk the streets to discuss public safety. Trump sneered that the city was a “crime disaster” and threatened to withhold federal funds to rebuild the collapsed Francis Scott Key Bridge. Chicago is also in his sights, despite homicides dropping 35 percent and shootings falling 26 percent year over year. Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker was blunt: Trump’s goal is “to incite fear in our communities and destabilize existing public safety efforts, all to create a justification to further abuse his power.” We are looking at occupation as theater. International observers would call it the deployment of armed forces against a civilian population. If this were happening abroad, we’d call it authoritarianism. Here, it’s dressed up as “public safety.”

And while the streets are militarized, the political map is being redrawn under our feet. After forcing through an unprecedented mid-decade gerrymander in Texas, adding five new Republican seats overnight, Trump’s allies are pressing Missouri and other red states to follow suit. Democrats in California are retaliating with their own blue-state redraw. Instead of democracy it’s like trench warfare by cartographer, with voters treated as pawns to be packed, cracked, or erased altogether.

For proof of how petty and cruel this regime has become, look no further than Baltimore, where Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who just last week reunited with his family after being wrongfully deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order, was seized again by ICE during what should have been a routine check-in. His lawyers knew it was coming, because again cruelty is the point. Trump’s DHS has already floated deporting him to Uganda, a country he has no ties to, after dangling a grotesque plea deal: plead guilty to crimes you didn’t commit, serve your time, and we’ll let you “live free” in Costa Rica. Abrego refused, standing outside the ICE office with his family, thanking God and the community for his brief miracle of freedom before walking back into detention. It’s punishment-by-deportation, a warning shot to anyone who dares to fight back.

Some more schadenfreude courtesy of Elon Musk. Tesla’s much-hyped robo-taxi experiment in Austin failed so spectacularly the safety driver had to abandon the passenger seat, climb behind the wheel, and chauffeur the vehicle to safety like an embarrassed babysitter escorting a drunk toddler home from the fair. Meanwhile, Waymo just secured the first permit to operate fully driverless cars in New York City, the hardest proving ground in America, and has already logged more than 10 million autonomous rides across the country. Tesla, after all the bluster, has exactly zero.

But if you wandered over to Musk’s X feed, you wouldn’t know any of this. Not a whisper about robo-taxis, only endless boasts about Grok 4 being “the smartest AI in the universe” and, of course, his perennial promise to pack up and colonize Mars. The man can’t get a car to drive through Austin without a chaperone, but we’re supposed to believe he’ll conquer interplanetary logistics. He’s still insisting version 14 of Tesla’s system will be “better than humans” and version 15 will be “10x better.” The only thing multiplying is his stack of broken deadlines, replayed in court as future-fraud exhibits. For now, Tesla’s robo-taxi remains what it has always been: a mirage with cup holders, while the CEO dreams of moving off-world.

So here we are: a rotting strongman dragging his cankles across the fairways, a smarmy vice president shrugging off Russian attacks on American property, soldiers with rifles patrolling the nation’s capital, voters gerrymandered into oblivion, immigrants treated as props in a cruelty pageant, and a tech messiah who can’t get his robo-taxi out of the parking lot. Dangerous times, absurd times, and above all revealing times. The machinery of Trumpism is marching forward, armed, gilded, and grotesque, while its leader limps into history insisting he’s at his peak.

On a more personal note, this morning Marz and I finally sit down face to face with the surgeon who worked on his eye, back at last from vacation. To be fair, Marz is improving, little by little, which is no small relief. But to be truthful, I’m still miffed that a couple of sutures caused so much trouble and discomfort, not to mention the hundreds of extra dollars I had to spend to bring him relief. Still, Marz is healing, and that’s the part that matters most. He’s not quite photo-ready yet, but give it a few more days and he’ll be posing like a champ.