The Emperor’s Nuclear Circus

Photo by Spenser H on Unsplash

The emperor has no clothes, but he does have nuclear codes.

This is the terrifying paradox of our moment. On one hand, we’re watching a circus performed by clowns, except the clowns control nuclear weapons, the world’s largest economy, and the most powerful surveillance apparatus in human history. The spectacle is transparently absurd—manufacturing controversies about Sydney Sweeney while covering up Epstein crimes, threatening governors over invasive fish while using ICE as secret police, building $200 million ballrooms while people drink from toilets in detention centers.

The absurdity of it all doesn’t diminish the power so much as it amplifies the danger.

What we’re witnessing isn’t sophisticated governance or even competent authoritarianism. It’s pure spectacle, manufactured controversy, performative cruelty. Trump threatens economic catastrophe over tariffs he doesn’t understand. His Defense Secretary wants to restore “shark attack” training because it sounds tough. The FBI hunts down state legislators for using constitutional parliamentary procedure. Every day requires new controversy to keep the audience engaged, new outrages to fragment democratic attention, new enemies to punish for the entertainment of the base.

We’re not living through the careful institutional capture of a competent autocracy. We’re living through a coup directed by reality TV logic, where generating attention matters more than achieving outcomes, where owning the libs substitutes for actual policy, where the appearance of strength masks the absence of strategy.

The incompetence of it all is—at some level—politically useful for those of us in the business of trying to fight for the survival of our democratic republic.

But incompetence doesn’t make it less dangerous—it makes it more dangerous. A circus performed with real weapons is more destructive than calculated tyranny. When people who think in tweets and cable news segments control federal law enforcement and nuclear arsenals, the spectacle becomes lethal. The performance might be theater, but the detention centers are real. The constitutional violations are real. The human suffering is real.

When the missiles launch, there really is no director to yell “cut!”

The fact is, these revolutionary bourgeois aren’t master architects of society. They’re just rich clowns who found the keys to the ringmaster’s vault. Wealthy mediocrities who discovered that shamelessness is a superpower in an attention economy. They don’t need sophisticated plans. They just keep juggling scandal after scandal, using real government power to crush anyone who points out that the emperor is naked. Each fresh controversy buries yesterday’s outrage. Each escalation makes the previous violation seem quaint. The circus tent gets smaller. The music gets louder. Nobody can leave.

The emperor dances with the nuclear briefcase, turning human suffering into matinee entertainment and using the Department of Justice like a private bouncer. Everyone can see it’s a circus. The lies are obvious. The corruption, brazen. The incompetence, staggering.

But when the circus has real weapons and no one can leave the tent, the absurdity becomes the atrocity—children screaming for water in desert detention centers while the president gilds another room in gold.

This is why calling it fascism isn’t hyperbole; it’s precision. We’re not watching the emergence of an efficient totalitarian machine—although JD Vance and his tech fascist friends who whisper in his ear hope to design one with the help of AI. This is rather, a display of spectacular incompetence armed with unlimited power. The danger isn’t hidden genius. It’s mediocrity with the keys to the arsenal.

The wire isn’t trembling; it’s being cut by people too foolish to see they’re standing on it. They will cut it. Then we fall.

This is what makes now uniquely dangerous: not calculated evil but weaponized incompetence; not strategy but spectacular vandalism. In the attention economy, shamelessness beats competence. Every time. The clowns know it. It’s all they know.

We sit in the stands, trapped, watching them juggle live grenades. They believe the act. They think they’re heroes. They can’t tell entertainment from governance.

The circus is obvious. That doesn’t make catastrophe less likely.

It makes it more likely.