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The first thing you learn covering war, pestilence and President Donald Trump is that reality, once filtered through the machinery of modern politics, comes out the other side like a three-day-old cardboard bucket of chicken fingers. It’s recognizable in form, toxic in substance, and somehow still being served to the public with a straight face.
Last week’s special was a double entrée—White House celebrity chef Trump threatening to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages,” paired with French President Emmanuel Macron stepping up like a weary maître d’, waving his arms and insisting the cook has lost his mind.
Trump, in his usual apocalyptic baritone, promised a war that would stretch on “several more weeks,” as if he were announcing a seasonal clearance sale at a failing strip mall.
The casualness of it all—this talk of flattening civilizations—felt less like a declaration of military posture and more like a man describing a landscaping project he might get around to after finishing his side of coleslaw.
Listen to the shrug in his voice. War, to him, has the texture of cable news filler: loud, fleeting, and ultimately forgettable.
“Americans have no capacity for abstract thought and make bad coffee,” was French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau’s verdict as he watched the world blunder into World War I.
But nowadays, Starbucks in hand, the crowd leans in. This is the age of social currency, where the value of a moment isn’t measured in truth or consequence but in its ability to be shared, reacted to, and metabolized into personal branding.
To have an opinion about Trump’s latest outburst is not merely a civic calisthenic. It’s a form of participation in a now global ritual, a digital bonfire where everyone tosses in their takes to stay warm and visible.
Macron, meanwhile, looked like a man trying to explain gravity to a room full of people who prefer levitation. His reported rebuke was blunt, almost surgical.
“When we’re serious, we don’t say every day the opposite of what we said the day before.” A clean cut, delivered without theatrics. Then he twisted the knife a bit—"Maybe one shouldn’t speak every day." You could feel the Atlantic Ocean ripple with diplomatic discomfort.
I phoned the Élysée Palace for a soupcon of off-the-record French Enlightenment.
“It was less a critique than a diagnosis,” was the explanation. “Macron wasn’t arguing policy. He was questioning the basic mechanics of coherence.”
English translation: In a world where alliances depend on Superglue, Trump’s stand-up slapstick routines land like haphazard gunfire in an overcrowded theater.
“If you create doubt every day about your commitment, you hollow it out,” Macron admonished, speaking not just of NATO, but of the fragile bond that holds together the idea of Western unity.
But coherence is not a currency in Trump’s economy.
Confusion is.
Ambiguity is.
Jesus, too.
The spectacle thrives on contradiction because contradiction generates engagement, and engagement feeds the machine. The more erratic the message, the more people feel compelled to respond, to interpret, to decode. It’s a hall of mirrors where every reflection demands commentary, and every commentary becomes part of the show.
Aside from the obvious screaming metal, the broken cities, and the ancient ghosts clawing their way out of Middle Eastern sand, the trouble with modern war is that the conflict belongs to the audience, the great slobbering crowd, the watchers, the likers, the re-tweeters of doom.
War is no longer fought. It’s consumed.
This is where the social currency phenomenon reveals its teeth and starts to chew.
People don’t just react to Trump—they perform their reactions. Outrage becomes a badge, sarcasm a shield, analysis a commodity. To not engage is to risk invisibility, and invisibility, in this system, is a kind of death. So we dive in, again and again, parsing the latest statement as if it contains some hidden logic, some buried strategy that might justify the chaos.
But asking Trump for clarity is like asking melted ice for structure. The form is gone. All that remains is a puddle reflecting whatever happens to be above it.
Once upon a time, there was a strange virtuosity in the madness, a flair that even America’s critics once admired. “The genius of you Americans,” former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser correctly reckoned, “is that you never make clear-cut stupid moves, only complicated stupid moves which make us wonder at the possibility that there may be something to them which we are missing.”
Sorry, Gamal, those days are as long gone as King Farouk.
Somewhere in the haze of all this, the ghost of Clemenceau drifts through, muttering his famous observation: “America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
It lands with an uncomfortable thud in the present moment, less a historical jab than the most accurate of all possible current events summaries on the relationship between Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
You can almost imagine Clemenceau lighting a cigarette, watching the headlines scroll by, shaking his head with grim satisfaction at Don and Bibi Show.
“What can a mere French minister do when associated with Woodrow Wilson, who thinks he’s Jesus Christ,” the physician-turned-statesman said of the American president after the Guns of August went on their first hiatus in 1918.
Set as preferred source
Set as preferred source
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