London, that ancient city of damp cobblestones and weary imperial ghosts, has found something new to mock. The news that Donald Trump’s face might adorn American passports has sent a ripple of hilarity through the corridors of Whitehall. No 10, with the kind of tight-lipped condescension perfected over centuries, has dismissed it as “colonial nostalgia”. But let us not be fooled by this veneer of amusement. What we are witnessing is not merely a diplomatic gaffe but a symptom of a deeper decadence, a rot that has set into the very marrow of the American experiment.
Consider the passport. It is the ultimate symbol of civic identity, a document that proclaims not just your person but your nation’s covenant with the world. To place a politician’s face on it, especially one as divisive and litigious as Trump, is to etch a partisan slogan onto the very fabric of citizenship. It is the logical endpoint of a culture that has abandoned the idea of a shared national story in favour of a perpetual culture war. The Romans, in their decline, minted coins with the Emperor’s image on every denomination. They did so because the Emperor was the state. But America, until now, prided itself on being something more: a republic of laws, not men.
The British reaction, for all its smugness, is instructive. Britain knows a thing or two about imperial delusion. Yet here we see a nation that once ruled a quarter of the globe now reduced to snickering at a former colony’s infantilism. This is not colonial nostalgia; it is the patronising laughter of a fallen empire watching another nation repeat its mistakes. For if Britain’s decline was measured in the slow retreat from Suez and the agony of the Troubles, America’s decline is measured in the trivialisation of its national symbols. A passport with Trump’s face is not a policy; it is a symptom of a polity that no longer takes itself seriously.
And what of the man himself? Trump, the avatar of a new kind of celebrity politics, has turned governance into a farce of reality television. But this is where the intellectual decadence sets in. We have reached a point where the substance of policy is secondary to the aesthetics of grievance. Passports, flags, anthems: these are the baubles of identity politics. Yet a nation that reduces its sovereignty to a face on a travel document has abandoned the harder work of statecraft. It is the equivalent of a bankrupt aristocrat polishing his silverware while the bailiffs hammer at the door.
Let us not pretend this is an isolated incident. From the Capitol insurrection to the steady erosion of institutional trust, America has descended into a kind of national solipsism. The passport debacle is merely the latest chapter in a saga where the symbol has replaced the substance. And London, for all its own troubles, can at least take comfort in the fact that its decline was more stately, more tragicomic. America’s decline is garish, loud, and utterly without irony.
So let No 10 laugh. But let us recognise that when a great power begins to worship its own trivia, it is not long before the barbarians, whether internal or external, come to claim what remains.
