Behold the empire that mistook its reflection for a sunrise. The United States of America—bloated, restless, and convinced of its own divine permanence—stares into the mirror and calls its own reflection destiny. The stars still shimmer on the flag, but faintly, like the pulse of a dying giant that hasn’t yet realized its heart has stopped. We were told this nation was eternal, guided by providence and liberty, but the smell of the rot is impossible to ignore. The walls are sweating hubris. The air hums with denial. And at the center of it all stands a man who didn’t invent the decay but merely learned how to monetize it: a showman, a salesman, a false prophet selling the end of democracy one slogan at a time.
He is not the disease. He is the symptom that learned to talk—a mirror with a mouth. He waddles through the ruins of the Republic like a bloated idol carved from resentment, grievance, and fast food wrappers, dripping self-pity and counterfeit patriotism. His words are less speech than sound, guttural notes of performance art for the disillusioned. He is the embodiment of America’s worst instincts, inflated to cartoonish proportions and baptized in cruelty. Every rally is a séance for the living dead of democracy, a bargaining session between a dying conscience and its own desire to keep consuming.
For years this country has called its sickness “strength.” It has dressed brutality as courage and labeled empathy as weakness. It has mistaken wealth for virtue, arrogance for confidence, and ignorance for authenticity. As a culture, as an economy, as a political organism, we did this — not each citizen, not every voter, but the collective “we” of a nation that traded accountability for convenience. We sold the truth for parts, melted the moral code into trinkets, and handed them out at campaign stops like souvenirs from a collapsing theme park. He did not create this moral drought — he merely branded it. He turned corruption into a franchise and grievance into currency, selling stock in apocalypse and watching the faithful buy every share.
The corruption we face isn’t foreign. It is distinctly American—homegrown and deeply rooted. It’s the byproduct of decades spent worshiping capitalism as gospel and cruelty as proof of toughness. We fertilized it with talk-radio hysteria, Facebook conspiracies, and the endless sermonizing of politicians who confused volume for vision. The American dream was repackaged as a clearance sale, marked half off, morality not included, and we applauded ourselves for getting such a good deal. This isn’t invasion. It’s infection by choice.
He rose because the system made room for him. Because America collectively allowed the shallow to pass for strong and the shameless to pass for bold. We mistook spectacle for substance, mistook wrestling for politics, mistook the swagger of a con man for leadership. Faith itself became weaponized—a cudgel to punish difference and reward delusion. The flag, once a symbol of collective purpose, now flies as a personal logo for the permanently aggrieved. His rallies feel like tent revivals for the end of empathy—loud, trembling, and drenched in the sweat of those who confuse belonging with rage. Cameras feast on the chaos, pundits call it populism, and the rest of the country stares into the abyss of its own reflection.
He does not lead his followers; he reflects them. Every jeer, every chant, every violent outburst is the sound of America talking to itself through a mouthful of glass. They don’t worship him—they worship the permission he grants to stop pretending they care. He offers absolution for hatred, indulgence for cruelty, and calls it patriotism. He is the unholy child of greed and grievance, the mascot of a generation allergic to shame, the influencer of an empire addicted to attention. He takes their hate, repackages it with a logo, and sells it back to them at a profit. And while the cameras roll, democracy gasps for air, dying not with a bang but with a brand deal.
The real tragedy isn’t that he exists—it’s that he fits so perfectly. He slides neatly into the hollow space we carved where decency should have been. He is the natural evolution of decades of moral outsourcing, the result of every church that swapped grace for grievance and every politician who swapped principle for performance. He is the logical endpoint of a country that would rather be entertained than educated. The rot wears a suit now. It smiles for the camera. It has a golf resort.
But the joke ends when America stops laughing. There is nothing inevitable about decay, nothing sacred about surrender. He thrives on permission—on exhaustion, on the silent acceptance of those who think “this is just how it is now.” That’s what he will not get. Not anymore. Every teacher who still dares to tell the truth, every journalist who still risks their career for honesty, every nurse who refuses to abandon compassion—all of them are cracks in his monument to cruelty. Every whistleblower, every protestor, every unbowed voter with ink-stained fingers is a hammer in the hands of history.
We — the collective we, the country, the culture, the architects and inheritors of this grand and broken experiment — will not “let him.” We will end him—not through violence or vengeance, but through relentless exposure, through accountability, through the slow, excruciating labor of truth-telling in an age that despises it. We will end him by remembering that democracy is not a spectator sport. It demands sweat. It demands courage. It demands that ordinary people refuse to be ruled by extraordinary lies.
And when the lights dim, when the networks move on to their next scandal and the idol of rot stands alone, stripped of applause and relevance, we won’t be sweeping up after his circus. We’ll be building something new on the ashes—something imperfect but honest. A country that no longer mistakes cruelty for power. A people that have finally outgrown the need for a con man’s permission to be human.
Because this time, the rot doesn’t get the final word.
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This post has been syndicated from Closer to the Edge, where it was published under this address.