The news that Mr Trump’s ballroom plan has doubled in cost should surprise no one who has watched the trajectory of American ambition. It is a familiar tale: a leader determined to project power, indifferent to the ledger, and a nation that groans under the weight of its own grandiosity. The British trade negotiators, ever the unflappable observers, now watch the US debt spiral with a mixture of caution and weary recognition.
They have seen this drama before, in the gilded halls of Versailles and the crumbling forums of Rome. A nation that cannot balance its own books is a nation that will eventually be called to account by the markets, by history, and by the quiet patience of its creditors. The ballroom is a symbol, not of strength, but of the intellectual decadence that precedes a fall.
One wonders if the American elite, so enamoured with their own myth, will realise the reckoning before the music stops.
