Trump Paints Himself an Empire While the Real One - and He Himself - Fall Apart

The digital brush is the last refuge of someone who can no longer bend the world. Donald Trump dumped fifteen images and one video onto his own network in a single afternoon, and they show the oldest move of a failing man: He commands the image because reality no longer obeys him. Whether his digital aides build the nonsense or he does it himself does not matter, he puts it under his own name and signs every stroke that way. While his tariffs choke trade and corruption runs through the offices, he paints over the map and appoints himself to history. In the uniform of the Revolution, he rides alongside George Washington, and in a second image the Founding Father sits in his office and listens to him reverently. With one black line, Lake Ontario becomes “America,” and so does a crossed-out New Mexico. His latest project. A man only paints himself into the marble of the ancestors when he senses that posterity will not allow him there. Names are the memory of a people, and he erases them as though memory belonged to him too. Immortality cannot be elected, so he reaches for it with a marker.

Every dictator eventually discovers that images are easier to rule than countries. A port does not go on strike in a painting, a price does not rise under a marker. And in an image, a war does not demand dead bodies. So he moves power to the place where he can still win, the screen, and leaves reality to fend for itself. The art of painting over things is convenient, and it is deadly, because what has been painted over keeps living and keeps doing damage.

Under the paint lies the country that no longer follows him. His trade wars make what people buy every day more expensive and drive old allies away. Agreements that held for decades he scraps on a whim, and ordinary people pay the bill at the checkout. In office, he fills his own pockets and those of his people without shame, while the Iran war he helped start has frozen into an expensive stalemate. He denies climate change and burns through his grandchildren’s future for the present of the oil fields. No painted empire covers that bill, it keeps growing, even as he now declares the moon American property too. Governing would mean paying it. He would rather paint over it.

In between, he gives the employees at a McDonald’s window a wave, apron on, hand raised in greeting, and in the same breath has himself declared the greatest president of all time. For his Space Force, he designs a dress uniform straight out of a future war movie, all in black. He gives the people the games and keeps the bread. The daily laughter at the clown tests nothing, and the laughter turns into habit, where the outrageous becomes like the weather, something people talk about briefly in the morning and then go to work.

But under the carnival lies the threat, and it is serious. In front of the Capitol, in the last image, he walks through a city at night, flanked by armored machines with glowing eyes, with the line above them: “They will never sleep again.” The same hand that was just renaming lakes commands the military and the nuclear weapons. The question of whether he is fit for office gets sharper with every one of these images, and not asking it would be reckless toward everyone he can hurt.

In this one respect, he is more dangerous than Vladimir Putin or Kim Jong Un because he can see defeat coming. He is likely to lose the midterms, his power is hanging by a thread, and an emperor whose crown is wobbling reaches for anything that still makes him look big. Under him, right-wing populism and racism become part of everyday life, fascism loses its horror through sheer repetition. What he cannot possess, he wants to damage, from the climate to the reputation of his own country. A foreign tyrant thinks in years, this man thinks in months, and the short clock makes him reckless. He becomes most dangerous at the moment he believes he has nothing left to lose.

So here is a message to everyone who is still awake. A man like this belongs out of the highest office, and the Constitution has the tools for it. Impeachment and the 25th Amendment are among them. So are the courts and the ballot box. Violence is not needed for any of it, only resolve and the laws that are already there, and people with the courage to use them. The first step is refusing him the laughter he uses as camouflage. Because that laughter is the anesthesia under which the bill keeps running up undisturbed. A people that refuses to confuse itself with the image of its ruler shows him the boundary he can no longer see himself and pushes him back behind it.