Bing, Bing, Gone - And Nobody Even Raises a Hand Anymore

There are days when you look at a screen and no longer know whether you are seeing the world or its caricature. Today is one of those days. A man, 79 years old, president of the most powerful military force on the planet, sits somewhere inside a gilded room and posts a computer generated image showing an American destroyer vaporizing an Iranian drone with a red laser beam. Above it, in giant letters, three words no statesman should ever utter - “Lasers: Bing, Bing, GONE!!!”. Current status of the spectacle: 14,900 hearts. Shared 3,510 times. 571 comments. The world nods, scrolls, closes the window, bites into bread rolls.

At this point, there are two things one can do. One can laugh. Or one can ask what actually happened to the concept of fitness for office, that old fashioned phrase that once meant someone had to be capable of carrying the office they held with the dignity the office required. Neither seems to apply anymore. Maybe it never did. Maybe we only imagined it because men used to wear better ties.

And then there are the great American patriots. At least that is what they call themselves, and the president thanks them on Truth Social for a gilded statue erected in his honor at his own resort in Doral, fist raised upward, gold paint over resin, “The Real Deal - GOLD - At Doral in Miami.” Patriotism in the year 2026 is the word people use to describe themselves when they cannot find a better one. These are not people standing up for a country. These are people casting a country in gold because gold is easier to understand than a constitution. They betray daily the very thing they claim to defend and call that betrayal love. They place a man on a pedestal who tears down every pedestal the republic once stood upon and mistake that for an honor.

A president publishing himself as an action hero. A president writing war in comic book language, as if he were an eight year old boy sitting on the floor of a bedroom holding two plastic airplanes in his hands. “Bing, Bing. Gone!!!” - three syllables for something that means human lives, no matter which side those lives belong to.

And yet the disturbing thing is not the president. The disturbing thing is that nobody is disturbed anymore. The senators stay silent, the allies stay silent, the prestigious columnists write about something else. The event gets filed away, categorized as “classic Trump,” as if familiarity were an argument, as if repetition somehow erased scandal. It does not. It confirms it. Whoever repeats the unacceptable long enough does not make it acceptable. He merely turns acceptance into a habit. That is not the same thing.

In the year 2026, parliaments across the Western world are filled with people whose main talent is watching events unfold. They call it pragmatism. They call it realpolitik. They probably also call it responsibility, because every silence eventually invents a respectable sounding word for itself. In reality, it is simply settling into decay. People build themselves a little house beside the abyss and call it a scenic overlook.

Life is what we make of it, and most people make very little of it. Among today’s politicians, the principle appears to have been extended to history itself. They do nothing. They post, they comment, they sit inside committees where committees are formed only to later be dissolved inside other committees. Meanwhile, an algorithm draws drones exploding into flames, and a president presses “publish.”

The question of whether this man is fit for office is framed incorrectly. He is in office, therefore by definition he is fit, because fitness today is no longer defined by what someone can do, but by what nobody stops. Fit is whoever gets through. Fit is whoever is not removed. Fit is the man whose posts still collect 14,900 hearts.

The real question would be a different one. It would be about us. About the people watching. About the lawmakers sitting in their rows who never raise their hands. About the journalists embedding the image and writing “Trump posts again” underneath it, as if repetition were an explanation. About the citizens who scroll, who like, who share, who ask themselves in the evening why the world feels as if someone has locked a typewriter inside a boiler room.

Maybe that is the only honest answer left. In the year 2026, nobody is fit for office anymore, but that does not apply only to presidents. It applies to an entire system that has collectively agreed to stop calling the undignified undignified, because the word itself would already be worn out by now if anyone still used it. Nobody uses it anymore. Instead, they post an image. Lasers. Bing, Bing. Gone.

And the rest of the world leaves hearts. We will continue fighting it, because everything else would amount to the silent permission by which the world sinks a little deeper into itself every single morning.