The emperor wears a diaper on his head. I do not mean this metaphorically, or I do not mean it only metaphorically, because the metaphor and the literal have collapsed into each other so completely under this presidency that I have stopped trying to keep them sorted. The diaper is on his head. It has been on his head for some time now. It is visible to anyone who chooses to look, which is to say anyone with functioning eyes, which is to say anyone not currently engaged in the strenuous and well-compensated labor of pretending the diaper is a crown. There are millions of people so engaged. They are organized. They have a network. They have hats.

Andersen had it almost right and not nearly hard enough. In the parable, you remember, a swindler convinces a vain ruler that he is dressed in finery only the worthy can see, and the worthy are too frightened of being called unworthy to admit they see nothing, and the whole court parades a naked man through the capital until a child laughs and the spell collapses and everyone goes home embarrassed and presumably wiser. It is a tidy little fable about vanity and conformity, and it has enjoyed a long, comfortable career as the go-to reference for any moment when public officials embarrass themselves in plain sight. But our version is harsher than Andersen’s, and the difference is the part that should keep you awake. In the original, there was nothing on the emperor at all, and the lie was that something was there. In ours, there is something on the emperor, and the lie is what to call it. He is not invisibly naked. He is visibly absurd. The diaper is on his head. The court calls it a crown.

Let me take you on a tour of the diaper, since the tour is the whole point.

He suggested, on national television, during a public health briefing in the middle of a pandemic, with the wide hopeful face of a child presenting a drawing, that perhaps the cure for the virus was to inject disinfectant into the human body, and turned to the doctor beside him for confirmation, which the doctor declined to provide.

He took a Sharpie and altered an official National Hurricane Center forecast so that the storm would conform to a thing he had already said in error, and he displayed the altered map in the Oval Office, with the visible Sharpie loop drawn over the actual meteorology, as if everyone in the room would simply agree that the path of the hurricane had been adjusted, on his orders, with a marker.

He stared directly at a total solar eclipse, from the South Lawn, in front of the world’s photographers, having been advised, in writing and out loud, by every available adult, not to do this.

He said the noise of wind turbines causes cancer. He asked, in earnest, whether magnets continue to work underwater. He proposed, more than once, the nuclear bombing of hurricanes. He has theories about water pressure in showers and the relative volume of toilet flushes that he will share with you, unprompted, at length, regardless of the subject the room was discussing two minutes earlier.

He launched a series of trading cards depicting himself as a cowboy, an astronaut, and a superhero with lasers shooting from his eyes, and he sold them to grown men for ninety-nine dollars apiece, and there are grown men who own them, in plastic sleeves, in display cases, in the rooms of homes they share with adult women, and they are not embarrassed.

He launched a Trump-branded Bible, the King James edition with the Constitution helpfully stapled into the back, retail price fifty-nine ninety-nine, and his supporters bought it in numbers sufficient to chart, and pastors held it aloft on Sundays as a holy object, and somewhere a copy editor at a Christian publishing house quietly resigned and never told anyone exactly why.

He licensed his name and his shoe size to a pair of gold high top sneakers, climbed onto the stage of Sneaker Con, the actual convention, in front of a crowd that booed him, and held the sneakers up over his head like a relic recovered from a holy site.

He sat down at a televised cabinet meeting and fell asleep, his chin slowly approaching his necktie, while his own Secretary of Health, the man he had appointed to oversee the medical destiny of three hundred million Americans, explained with visible feeling the alarming decline in the sperm counts of American teenagers.

He stood beside a college football coach he had been brought onstage to honor, looked directly at him, looked away from him, looked back at him, and could not, when asked, produce the man’s name.

He floated, casually, into a microphone, on an ordinary spring morning, the annexation of Venezuela as the fifty-first state. He had already had its leader seized. The annexation was the breakfast thought.

He called the White House a shithouse. The actual building. The one with the columns and the portico and the resolute desk. The one we lend our presidents for four years at a time on the modest understanding that they will not, while in residence, refer to it in those exact terms.

He sued himself, through his own Department of Justice, for ten billion dollars, settled with himself for one billion seven hundred and seventy six million dollars of the public Treasury, in a settlement signed by his own former personal lawyer now serving as Acting Attorney General, and then announced that the proceeds would be used to compensate the people who, on his behalf, had stormed his own Capitol on January 6.

He introduced his Secretary of Defense, in a recent cabinet meeting, by praising him as central casting, a man who, the President added warmly, with admiration, loves war, while the secretary smiled the practiced smile of a man who has been told the line is good for his career.

Each of these is documented. None of them is a slip, a single bad day, a tired-old-man moment that should be charitably overlooked. They are the texture. They are the steady operating condition. They are the diaper, sitting visibly on his head, every hour of every day, while the entire court declines to use the word.

And the court. Sweet God, the court. Watch them at the cabinet table. Each man, each woman, each smooth-faced senator, each unctuous cable host, each weeping pastor, each multimillionaire podcaster, each tradesman in a baseball cap who once welded his own truck and now welds his entire identity to a man who has never personally welded anything in his life, all of them, in turns, leaning forward to compliment the diaper. What majesty, they say. What strength of purpose. What strategic genius has been folded into this magnificent piece of regalia upon our leader’s brow. The Speaker calls it a crown. The press secretary calls it a crown. The Vice President, who once called him America’s Hitler in his own private text messages, now writes books about the crown, gives speeches about the crown, appears on the Sunday programs to praise the quality of the crown, the fit of the crown, the way the crown catches the light. They have not been threatened, the way Andersen’s courtiers were threatened. They volunteered. They lobbied for the diaper detail. They are paid handsomely in proximity and merchandise, and the children of some of them will be richer than the country was when their grandfathers were born, and the entire price of the contract was a single, simple, lifelong agreement to stand near the diaper and call it a crown without their faces moving.

And the country. This is where my voice goes flat, because the country is the part of the fable Andersen could not have anticipated. In the parable, the villagers see what they see and require only a child to give them permission to say it out loud. In ours, the children have been speaking for ten years. There has been a continuous high keening chorus of clear eyed witness, from journalists and historians and former cabinet officials and four star generals and the President’s own former lawyers and his own niece and his former chief of staff, a chorus of children pointing at the diaper from every angle on the avenue, and what the country did, twice now, with full information, on the record, in broad daylight, was vote for the diaper. Not in spite of the diaper. In tribute to the diaper. They wanted the diaper. They put hats on for the diaper. They turned their kitchens into shrines to the diaper, hung it above the mantel where the wedding photo used to be, estranged their grown children over the diaper, sold their savings on truck flags of the diaper, drove eight hours into a thunderstorm to stand in mud for the diaper, and informed the rest of us, with the cool authority of the well slept, that any failure to admire the diaper was the symptom of a mental disorder which, in the latest editions of their phrasebook, they have begun calling derangement.

The original parable depended on the assumption that, once the spell broke, everyone would see what had always been there, and the seeing would do the work. The terrible amendment our country has supplied to Andersen is that the spell does not break, because there was never a spell. There was only the choice. They chose the diaper. They keep choosing the diaper. They will, if no one stops them, choose the diaper again, and again, and after that, and after that, until the diaper is the only thing the country can imagine wearing, and the word crown has been quietly retired from common use because there is no longer any object left to compare a diaper to.

I have stopped pretending I do not see it. I have stopped softening the description for the benefit of relatives, neighbors, the man behind the counter at the hardware store, the cousin on Facebook, the colleague at the work lunch who thinks he is being even-handed when he says both sides. There is no both. There is a man with a diaper on his head, and a court that calls it a crown, and a country that has chosen the diaper twice on the merits, and the smallest unit of honesty available to me, in this long, undignified twilight of a republic that used to know how to be embarrassed, is to keep saying out loud, in the present tense, into the open air, what is so plainly there.

The emperor wears a diaper on his head.

Now you say it.

The Emperor Wears a Diaper on His Head