He has done things, in plain daylight, on camera, with a microphone in his hand, that would have ended any other human career inside a single news cycle, and the consequences have not arrived. The consequences are not coming. The consequences appear to have been canceled at the source, recalled from the warehouse, sent back to whatever metaphysical depot dispatches the consequences, because the man has discovered, through some combination of luck and instinct and the long erosion of every institution that was supposed to stop him, the precise frequency at which accountability cannot reach. He stands inside that frequency now. He broadcasts from it. The signal goes out and nothing comes back.
The mechanism, when you look at it closely, is not complicated. It is the oldest mechanism in the catalog of bad men: fear. He has built a perimeter of fear around himself so dense, so well-tended, so finely calibrated to the individual weaknesses of the people inside it, that the perimeter has become its own atmosphere, and the people who breathe it have forgotten that other atmospheres exist. He threatens. He blackmails. He hints. He does not need to hint very hard, because the hint is doing the work that explicit instruction would do in a less developed operation. Step out of line and your primary opponent is funded by Tuesday. Step out of line and the tweet goes out and your inbox fills with death threats from strangers who have memorized your home address. Step out of line and the dossier, real or invented, the dossier he assures you he has, gets shared with the wrong reporter. The dossier may not exist. The threat of the dossier exists, which is functionally the same thing, which is better than the same thing, because an actual dossier could be fact-checked and a phantom one cannot.
And so the people around him praise him. They praise him for things he did not do. They praise him for things he is actively in the process of failing to do. They praise him for accomplishments that belong to his predecessors, for economic numbers that were already trending before he took office, for peace deals that were negotiated by other people and signed in his presence as if he were the host of the ceremony rather than a participant in it. The praise is not connected to reality. The praise has, at this point, severed its last cable to reality and floated free, and it now drifts above the country like an aurora, beautiful in its way, glowing with a color that does not exist in nature, and the praise is the job, the only job, the entire job description for everyone in his orbit.
The cult metabolizes this praise the way a furnace metabolizes coal. The worse he gets, the more praise the furnace requires, and the more praise it requires, the more dutifully the cult shovels, and the cult is enormous now, the cult stretches from the trailer parks of the rural south to the marble corridors of the Capitol building, the cult is the cashier at the gas station and the senior senator from Texas and the cabinet secretary who once had a reputation and the staffer who used to write op-eds about the importance of norms, and they are all shoveling, all of them, in shifts, around the clock, and the man at the center of it stands warming his hands at the fire and tells himself he built it.
It is a Jim Jones operation, in the structural sense, in the sense that matters. The Kool-Aid is metaphorical now but the obedience is the same obedience, the surrender of independent judgment is the same surrender, the readiness to defend the indefensible at a moment’s notice is the same readiness, and the leader, the leader is the same leader, a charismatic mediocrity with a working understanding of how to weaponize the loneliness of the people who follow him. They will say what he tells them to say. They will believe what he tells them to believe. They will deny, on camera, things they were filmed saying twenty minutes earlier, and they will not flinch, because flinching is not in the contract, and the contract was signed in something thicker than ink.
And he believes, now, with the unblinking certainty of a man who has been told by a thousand voices a thousand times a day that he is the chosen one, that he is in fact the chosen one. He refers to himself as the most powerful person on the planet. He says it out loud, into microphones, with the calm conviction of someone reading the weather. He does not mean it as boast. He means it as description. He has begun to believe his own pageantry, which is the thing the handlers of every previous strongman have warned the next set of handlers about, and the handlers never listen, and history has filled entire libraries with what happens next.
What happens next, in our particular case, is that he is threatening to bomb Iran. Again. He is threatening to do it casually, on the way to a rally, in the same tone of voice he uses to order a steak. The military he intends to use for this is not the military he inherited. The arsenal has been drawn down, the stockpiles are at levels that pentagon officials are describing in private conversations as historically unprecedented, the soldiers are tired in a way that is no longer measurable on the ordinary scales of soldier-tiredness, the equipment is overdue for maintenance, the supply chain has been gutted by his own tariff regime, and none of this matters to him, because the war is not a war to him, the war is a gesture, the war is a way of standing in front of a camera and looking like the man he believes he is. The casualties are abstractions. The geopolitics is an abstraction. The illegality of the strike is an abstraction. The exhausted nineteen-year-old in the cockpit, on her fourth deployment, flying a plane that her own crew chief signed off on with reservations, is an abstraction. He is the only thing that is not an abstraction. He is the only solid object in his own moral universe, and everything else is weather.
And the cult will praise the bombing. The cult will praise it before it happens, during it, and after it. The cult will praise it if it succeeds and praise it if it fails and praise it if it kills civilians and praise it if it kills our own people, and the praise will have the same temperature and the same texture in every case, because the praise is not a response to events. The praise is a condition. The praise is what the cult does, the way lungs breathe, the way hearts beat, and somewhere a senator who once took an oath to a constitution will go on television and explain, with a straight face, that the bombing of a country we are not at war with, executed without congressional authorization, in violation of every treaty and every statute and every shred of the international order we used to claim to lead, was actually a masterstroke, a brilliant piece of statecraft, the deal of the century, and nobody on the panel will laugh, because laughing is no longer permitted, and the cameras will cut to commercial, and the country will go to bed, and in the morning the praise will start again.
He is literally a black hole and we are all caught in his event horizon.