That Trump is something like the apotheosis of the dysfunction of the American system does not mean that he is the end of the story. He may well be the beginning of something much worse. Our job is to make him a blip in the history of American democracy and not the opening act of its demise.
- Jamelle Bouie
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"At the end of the classic 1950 film “Sunset Boulevard,” the aging and mentally ill silent film star Norma Desmond imagines that she is acting in a movie directed by Cecil B. DeMille, when in fact she’s being arrested for murder. “I just want to tell you all how happy I am to be back in the studio, making a picture again,” she says to the police and reporters who are there to witness her demise. “You see, this is my life. It always will be. Nothing else. Just us. And the cameras. And those wonderful people out there in the dark. Alright Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my closeup.”
Donald Trump may spend his final years enacting his own version of Norma Desmond’s delusion. He’ll stand in front of smaller and smaller gatherings at Mar-a-Lago or one of his golf clubs and address the dwindling group of admirers as though he was at one of those blazing 2016 rallies. He’ll drone on for an hour or two about nothing and everything, lapping up the forced laughter of the group at another lame joke, imagining that the height of his power and glory is right now, not in a past receding rapidly as he gets closer and closer to death.
That’s still in the future. Yet every Trump rally that takes place today is like a sad echo of the ones that really made a difference a decade ago. There will be more, but they will never be what they were. And even Trump himself knows it."
- Public Notice piece on the dwindlng of Trump's rallies but how he'll keep on doing them.
Amazingly the writer doesn't seem aware - nor any of the many commenters - that Sunset Boulevard is Trump's favorite movie, something he rewatches obsessively, and that he is particularly fond of that final "I'm ready for my closeup" scene.
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Muskism and Main Character Energy
(Ezra Klein in conversation with Elon analyst Quinn Slobodian)
"One of the things we describe in the book is the way that being a minority privileged population, racially marked in South Africa, that drifted, through everyday life and one’s whole life course, in a way, past faceless colored masses of the African population helps to reinforce in very obvious ways a sense of the nonplayer characters and the playing characters.
- Slobodian on where Musk's worldview and sense of reality comes from
There’s something that he says a lot. I was there in 2016 at the ReCode conference — I was, actually, I think, one of the first people to write about this — when he was talking about how he believed it was very likely we lived in a computer simulation.
"This is a sort of idea that Nick Bostrom, that philosopher you mentioned, is very associated with. But he has kept saying it, actually in somewhat stronger terms. I want to play this clip. This is Elon Musk on Walter Isaacson’s show:
Archival clip of Musk: I once had a dinner at my house with a physicist and a computer scientist, and they’re both leaders in their field. I asked: What do you think the probabilities are that we’re in a simulation?
The physicist said zero percent, and the computer scientist said 100 percent simultaneously. So I guess maybe I should go 50 percent. I don’t know. There are odd things that happen in this simulation, especially if you’re me.
Think about it: If you’re me, should all these things really be happening? Should I really be making spaceships to go to the moon and Mars? That doesn’t seem real.
The simulation theory is that, if you just imagine an advanced society would create lots of simulations, the way we make lots of video games, you just shouldn’t assume that we are living in the base reality.
That’s sort of the argument in a nutshell. But he goes further, and I get, in a psychological way, why. I’ve heard him say this now repeatedly that what really seems unlikely is to be Elon Musk — to be building starships and influencing global politics and having 250 million X followers, or whatever it is, and being the first trillionaire.
The mixture of a life that is so unlikely and also not grounded in some other ontology — not some religion or some other way of imagining the world — plus an attraction to the simulation hypothesis and, of course, to be a lifelong gamer.
I just think that for a person with as much power as he has, to have that kind of psychology to suspect that this is a game where your role in it is making big moves — I don’t really know how to describe that situation. But it is a distinctive one that we all now have a lot of exposure to.
There are a couple of varieties of the simulation theory, too. One is we are all simply just artifacts of this future civilization’s computer video game.
But the other is that most people are shadow people and a small number of people are actually player characters. And it seems like that’s the one that orients him most.
....There’s this radical reneging on anything like social responsibility that is only possible if you embrace this incredibly nihilistic reaffirmation of your megalomania. And the question is how to remove the props and struts that hold him up in that delusion, because it is not true, and he needs to be somehow persuaded from the outside that it’s not true.
If he continues to be incentivized to indulge in those ways of thinking, then he will never be required to be divested of that.
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"The Abracadabra Economy"
Bret Stephens: ... I think there is a deeper class divide — and a more legitimate resentment — in America. It’s between the real economy and the abracadabra economy. The abracadabra economy is wealth extracted from ether: cryptocurrency, for instance, but also a lot of modern finance and tech.
There’s a big difference between this kind of wealth and the kind whose origin and value is easy to ascertain: Microsoft’s software, for instance, or SpaceX’s rockets. This is why, despite all my personal and political objections to him, I can at least understand Elon Musk as a guy who earned his riches.
Frank Bruni: Earned riches that immense? I disagree, in that there’s a way in which capital begets more capital begets more capital until the sums are utterly divorced from the substance. That’s its own abracadabra.
from "Is This The Final Unraveling?", New York Times
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Stragglers from recent months:
"Last Tuesday, President Trump demonstrated for the few who remain in doubt that his mind is trapped in a fictional world where he is the heroic savior of the nation, if not all mankind. That day, Trump honored the men and women who braved death or died on Sept. 11, 2001, but most of all he honored himself, portraying himself as willing to lose life or limb during the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center. Speaking at a Tunnel to Towers Foundation event honoring police officers, firefighters and other first responders, Trump recounted his memory of 9/11 and the days that followed. It has to be read in full to be truly reckoned with.
I want to just thank my people. I took a lot —— I was building a big building in New York, and I took the whole crew down there right after this happened. And they were — they had no hesitation. Everybody went down with me. We went down as a big group of people. Wasn’t too much we could do. I’ll be honest. It was, it was raw.
Nobody had seen anything like it ever. We had other buildings. The United States Steel Building was creaking, really creaking, and we thought it was going to fall down. The truth is, it creaked a lot. It creaked. It still creaks, but it never came down.
And I’ll never forget two firemen. We thought it was coming down on top of us, and two firemen, big strong guys. And I’m not the smallest guy in the world. They grabbed me under the arm, said, “Got to get out of here!” And they literally lifted me up. This is not easy to do. I’m big. They lifted me up and they started running with me. I said, “Fellas, I can run myself.” But they were amazing. But they thought it was coming down. It didn’t come down.
... He was miles away from the World Trade Center on 9/11 and was not whisked out of any building near ground zero that day....
In a Sept. 9 article, “60 Posts in 10 Hours: How Trump’s Social Media Reflects His Version of Reality,” my colleague in the newsroom Peter Baker provided crucial insight into Trump’s macho, almost fantastical, notion of himself.
Over Labor Day weekend, Baker wrote,
President Trump’s social media account roared to life. In what has increasingly become his weekend habit, he unleashed a daylong barrage of posts that put the bully in the modern bully pulpit.
There were images of Mr. Trump intimidating Canada’s prime minister with a hockey stick, personally bombing enemy targets and patrolling dark streets with killer robots. There were maps showing the United States taking over other countries, and maps renaming a state. There were attacks on the “Dumocratic Party” and tributes to himself as “the Greatest President of All Time!”
The 60 messages posted online over 10 hours and 41 minutes offered a window into Mr. Trump’s own unique reality, one anchored not in fact but in an expression of ego. For years, his social media feed was said to be a mirror of his id. But with A.I., it has become the manifestation of how he wants to be seen in a more visual, visceral way than ever before — as a warrior, as a conqueror, as a historical figure, as a younger and thinner and more muscular version of himself.
On Thursday, at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas, Trump pushed his narcissistic fable-making to the breaking point, telling the gathering:
Please raise your right hand. I pledge to the greatest president in the history of the United States. That loves us so much he can’t even breathe. That I will go out with my family, my friends, I’ll do it any way — I don’t care if I’m registered or not, I’m going to try to cheat like hell like they do. There’s never been bigger cheaters. They don’t care. I am going to go out and I’m going to get my friends, my family. And we are going to vote on Nov. 3.
Donald Moynihan, a professor of public policy at the University of Michigan, pointed out in an email that Trump’s distortions of reality have an impact on much more than beliefs in his claims about what he was doing on Sept. 11:
Trump’s loose relationship with reality extends to the issues that define our life, like inflation, public health, the war with Iran, our alliances or whether our elections are valid. For every seemingly harmless story where he inserts himself into the tableaux of history, there is a torrent of dark conspiracies that shape how we are governed.
Every time he insults another country or world leader, it feels less like a deliberate diplomatic strategy as his followers insist, and more like an indicator of the absence of such work, marking the indifference of a social media addict craving his next dopamine hit.
Thomas B. Edsall, "Trump Has Untethered Himself From Reality, Sept. 15, 2026
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The big show
The most riveting theatrical performances in New York aren’t on Broadway right now. They’re happening in Turtle Bay, in the General Assembly Hall of the United Nations, where hundreds of leaders of sovereign nations have gathered this week to debate (and maybe even address?) global issues.
It’s been super weird. Just seven months ago, Masoud Pezeshkian was running Iran from an underground bunker, trying to stay alive as American and Israeli missiles rained down. Now he’s moving around New York under the protection of the Secret Service. Yesterday, he accused the United States and Israel of “cowardly" attacks on his country, a day after President Trump mulled from the same lectern about whether to make a deal with Iran or “annihilate” the nation. It was the first time in the U.N.’s 81-year history that a leader whose country is at war with the United States had ever addressed the Assembly.
Here was President Javier Milei of Argentina whaling on the U.N. itself, a bunch of “fatally arrogant parasites masquerading as well-intentioned bureaucrats.” Nice to see you, sir. There was U Kyaw Moe Tun of Myanmar, the lonely representative of a government overthrown by a military putsch in 2021. The U.N. still recognizes his ambassadorship, but his own country doesn’t. He didn’t speak.
Dramatis personae
Let’s look at some of the main players in the show.
President Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran: Pezeshkian held up pictures of people killed by American and Israeli airstrikes and defiantly vowed that Iran could “not be made to surrender.” He said the country would never accept limits on a nuclear program meant only for peaceful purposes, though he allowed that Iran was “ready for dialogue.”
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine: He’s in a tough spot. His country is low on munitions that can intercept Russian drones and missiles, and so is the United States. He warned the General Assembly that without aid, his country might not survive — and that Russia’s “ridiculous and never-ending” war could spread beyond Ukraine. He predicted a harsh winter but pledged, “We will have no choice but to make it painful for Russia, too.”
Delcy Rodríguez, interim president of Venezuela: She’s in a tough spot, too. Eight months ago, U.S. Special Forces showed up in Caracas to snatch her predecessor, Nicolás Maduro, and lock him up in a Brooklyn jail. Then, the United States claimed a significant portion of Venezuela’s oil reserves. She spoke last night from the cultural capital of the nation that essentially appointed her, vowing to oversee elections and an “orderly legal transition” after years of authoritarian rule by her party.
Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada: Over the past year, Carney has emerged as the most prominent global leader to take on Trump. At a news conference at the U.N., he spoke about how nations can protect their mutual interests after a “rupture” in the world order caused by the United States and China. And in a discussion with The Times, he described in close detail how he is systematically reducing Canada’s reliance on the United States.
Offstage
A number of leaders are absent from the General Assembly. One is Xi Jinping of China, who arrived in Washington last night to see Trump. Their meeting today is expected to overshadow any speeches at the Assembly......
Sam Sifton, The New York Times
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