This Decline Looks Like

A billionaire’s wedding, a golden toilet presidency, and a Congress gutting aid for the poor, America’s moral collapse under spectacle and greed.

While Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez danced in foam at a $50 million wedding in Venice, Leonardo DiCaprio ducked under his hat, and Vogue accidentally exposed the discomfort of seamstresses pressed into service for a billionaire’s spectacle, America’s government moved to punish the poor so the rich could get richer.

Trump was in Florida, staging a grotesque spectacle of his own at his newest migrant detention center, which he proudly dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” He told the press he liked the nickname because “that’s not a place I want to go hiking anytime soon,” while smirking about how the swamp was “surrounded by miles of treacherous swampland, and the only way out is really deportation.” He joked that “a lot of these people are self-deporting back to where they came from,” and bragged about how the only way out for the people he would cage was “to get eaten by the alligators.”