Tickets to the Decline

the President and I are the same age. only one of us threw a party

We are the same age, Trump and I. Eighty this year. He spent his birthday building a cage on the South Lawn of the White House and putting two men inside it to beat each other bloody for a crowd. I spent mine watching. I want that on the table before I say anything else, because the rest of this is an argument about how a country gets walked downhill, and I was on the path too, in a chair, with the fight on.

A country does not fall the way a tree falls. A tree falls because something rotted and gravity noticed. A country falls the way a stadium goes up. On purpose. On a budget. With a man at the gate selling tickets to the thing that is burying you. I have watched a few things get built in 80 years, software companies and computer stores and a racing school and the inside of more boardrooms than I would wish on a man I disliked, and I know the difference between a thing that collapsed and a thing somebody poured the footings for. A 4,500-seat arena is the second kind. Nobody trips and falls into one.

So before the rest of it, look at the cage on the lawn.

After the break: the man whose face stopped being his face, and the man at a negotiating table who watched his leader killed in the middle of a sentence, and the war that ended three days after the party while the cameras stayed on the blood that was easier to look at. And the number that measures how far we have come from one stubborn man in a Boston courtroom, which you can read straight off the seating chart. I turn the blade on myself before I am done. I watched too. Come find out what it cost.