Here is a headline that will set the chattering classes alight: a Trump-backed candidate in Iowa has been ousted. The former president’s Midas touch has finally tarnished. Or has it?
Let us resist the impulse to prognosticate on 2024 and instead consider what this truly signifies: the comforting illusion of political infallibility. The American electorate, ever fickle, has delivered a minor rebuke. Yet in the grand theatre of history, this is a footnote, a stubbed toe on the march to the next crisis.
We are in the autumn of the American empire, dear reader, and these squabbles over local candidates are but the rustling of leaves before the winter gale. The Victorians understood that power is a cloak, not a skin. Trump’s cloak has a hole.
So what? The structural rot remains. The intellectual decadence of our age is such that we obsess over the sartorial choices of clowns while the building burns.
This is not a moment. It is a pattern. The fall of Rome was not marked by a single lost election in a rural province.
It was a thousand cuts. This Iowa result is one such cut. Bleed on.
