Long live the king!

Down with the king!

President Donald Trump sees the appeal of both.

Trump jokingly declared himself a sovereign last month, while his advisers distributed AI-generated photos of him wearing a crown and an ermine robe to celebrate his order to end congestion pricing in New York City. “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” he’d decreed a few days earlier, using a phrase sometimes attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor of the French.

But the president has also asked advisers in recent days about moving the Declaration of Independence into the Oval Office, according to people familiar with the conversations who requested anonymity to describe the planning.

Trump’s request alarmed some of his aides, who immediately recognized both the implausibility and the expense of moving the original document. Displayed in the rotunda at the National Archives Building, in Washington, D.C., it is perhaps the most treasured historical document in the U.S. government’s possession. The original is behind heavy glass in an oxygen-free, argon-filled case that can retract into the wall at night for security. Because of light damage to the faded animal-skin parchment, the room is kept dimly lit; restrictions have been placed on how often the doors can even be opened.

But to the relief of aides, subsequent discussions appear to have focused on the possibility of moving one of the historical copies of the document, not the original. “President Trump strongly believes that significant and historic documents that celebrate American history should be shared and put on display,” the White House spokesperson Steven Cheung told us in an email.

Displaying a copy would still enshrine history’s most famous written rejection of monarchy in the seat of American power. The document is reprinted in textbooks nationwide and is recognized the world over as a defiant stand against the corrupting dangers of absolute power. It declares equality among men to be a self-evident truth, asserts that governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed, and offers a litany of grievances against a despotic ruler.

“A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people,” reads the 1776 repudiation of British King George III’s dominion over the American colonies. (Spokespeople for the National Archives declined to comment on Trump’s request and whether a Declaration display in the Oval Office is imminent. White House aides also declined to share the timing of when the document might arrive in its new West Wing home, if it is coming at all.)

Since returning to power, Trump has moved quickly to redesign his working space. He has announced plans to pave over the Rose Garden to make it more like the patio at his private Mar-a-Lago club, as well as easier to host events with women wearing heels. He has also revived planning for a new ballroom on the White House grounds. “It keeps my real-estate juices flowing,” Trump explained in a recent interview with The Spectator.

Golden trophies now line the Oval Office’s mantlepiece. Military flags adorned with campaign streamers have returned. And portraits of presidents past now climb the walls—George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Martin Van Buren, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan, among others. Gilded mirrors hang upon the recessed doors. A framed copy of his Georgia mug shot appears in the outside hallway. And the bright-red valet button, encased in a wooden box, is back on the desk.

In addition to the National Archives’ original Declaration, the government has in its possession other versions of the document. The collection includes drafts by Jefferson and copies of contemporaneous reprintings, known as broadsides, that were distributed among the colonies.

Alarmed by the deterioration of the original Declaration in the 1820s, Secretary of State John Quincy Adams commissioned William J. Stone to create an engraving of it with the signatures appended. That version forms the basis of the document since reproduced in school history books—the one with which most Americans are familiar. Adams tasked Stone with engraving 200 copies—but in what passes for a mini 19th-century scandal, Stone made an extra facsimile to keep for himself, the documents dealer and expert Seth Kaller told us.

Many of those Stone copies of the document have now been lost; roughly 50 are known to survive, Kaller said. The White House already has in its archives at least one of the Stone printings. Kaller told us that one of his clients who had recently purchased a Stone facsimile was visiting the White House when President Barack Obama asked him whether he could help procure a Stone printing for the White House.

“The client called me, and I said, ‘I can’t—because, one, there aren’t any others on the market right now, and two, the White House already has one,’” Kaller told us. In 2014, Kaller visited the White House to view the Stone Declaration, which the curator displayed for him in one of the West Wing’s rooms. (The White House curator’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment, including on whether the Stone copy still resides under its purview.)

It is unclear where Trump first got the idea to add a Declaration to the Oval Office’s decor. Since returning, Trump has shown interest in the planning for celebrations next year of the 250th anniversary of the document’s signing. Days after taking office, he issued an executive order to create “Task Force 250,” a White House commission that will work with another congressionally formed commission to plan the festivities.

Trump and the billionaire philanthropist David Rubenstein, who owns four Stone engravings and is a historical-documents aficionado, also met privately at the White House last month, according to two people familiar with the meeting. Trump had decided weeks earlier to replace much of the board of the Kennedy Center for the Arts so that he could install himself as chair, replacing Rubenstein.

Previously, Rubenstein had worked with the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies to have a modern copy of the Stone Declaration, placed in a replica of a historic frame, displayed at U.S. embassies around the globe.

“Because the Declaration of Independence has—like the Stars and Stripes—become a symbol of the United States, and because the Stone copy of the Declaration is the most recognizable version of that historic document, I thought it would be appropriate to have a new copy of a Stone Declaration placed in each of the American embassies around the World,” Rubenstein wrote at the time in a booklet describing the history and importance of the Stone facsimiles. “My hope was that everyone who visited an American embassy would see not just our flags, but also this unique symbol of our country.” (Rubenstein did not respond to requests for comment.)

Kaller told us that he thinks moving the original document in its special enclosure to the Oval Office would likely cost millions of dollars. But a Stone printing would be far simpler to exhibit, requiring only getting “the lighting right in a display case,” he said. The reason Quincy Adams commissioned the Stone version, Kaller added, was in part for this very purpose.

And if Trump decides he wants it, he will likely get it—even without the powers of a king.

A few weeks before he started selling swastika T-shirts on the internet, I considered letting Ye back into my life.

It was inauguration weekend, and I’d been sitting in a restaurant where the bartender was blasting a playlist of songs by the rapper once known as Kanye West. The music sounded, frankly, awesome. Most of the songs were from when I considered myself a fan of his, long before he rebranded as the world’s most famous Hitler admirer. I hadn’t heard this much Ye music played in public in years; privately, I’d mostly avoided it. But as I nodded along, I thought it might be time to redownload Yeezus.

The bartender probably wasn’t making a political statement, but the soundtrack felt all too apt for the dawn of the great uncancelling—the sweeping return of various disgraced figures and discouraged behaviors to the public realm. Donald Trump, a convicted felon, was back in the White House and naming accused abusers, quacks, and even Mel Gibson to positions of honor. Trend forecasters were proclaiming that Trump’s reelection represented a cultural shake-up in addition to a governmental one, replacing the stiff moralism of wokeness with cowboy rowdiness and chic nihilism. Phrases such as “the boom boom aesthetic” and “dark mode” were being coined to describe the phenomenon of young people suddenly dressing like Patrick Bateman and availing themselves of the term retard.

Given this climate, I thought maybe I could loosen up and try that whole “separating the art from the artist” thing again. I’d not been boycotting Ye’s music per se, but for the past few years, the disgust caused by his conduct had ruined the pleasure of stomping around to “Can’t Tell Me Nothing.” Now I could sense something shifting. The second Trump administration’s flurry of disorienting news was already becoming soul-deadening. The bad actors who were reemerging seemed only energized by outrage. Exhaustion was supplanting my sense of ick.

A few weeks later, on Super Bowl Sunday, the ick came roaring back. That day, a commercial aired directing viewers to Ye’s online store, which he then updated to sell only one item: a white shirt with the black, swirling symbol of the Third Reich. When I pulled up the website to see for myself, I felt a few kinds of bad feelings. There was horror at the Nazism. There was embarrassment at the fact that I’d recently wanted to listen to this guy’s voice again. And there was the sinking, instinctual understanding of what Ye was doing: testing how numb America has gotten.

The shirt stunt was part of a sudden flurry of activity suggesting a Ye comeback campaign. He crashed the Grammys; he’s prepping an album; he’s hyping a cryptocurrency. All the while, he’s doubled down on Hitler talk—and asserted his kinship with the second Trump wave. “Elon stole my Nazi swag,” he joked in one X post, referring to the tech mogul’s alleged Sieg heil; “whit[e] guys have all the fun,” he wrote when Steve Bannon seemed to make a similar gesture. He’s been filming podcast videos with an influencer, Justin LaBoy, whom he calls “the culture’s Joe Rogan.” He has described his habit of parading around his wife, Bianca Censori, nearly nude as if she were a pet, in redpilled terms. “I have dominion over my wife,” he posted. “This ain’t no woke as[s] feminist shit.”

Maybe Ye is saying what he truly believes. Maybe mental health is at play (he used to describe himself as bipolar; recently, he’s said the more accurate diagnosis is autism). Definitely, he’s trolling for publicity. In any case, he clearly believes this moment is ripe for him to capitalize on. And perhaps he’s right.

Conservatives who are proclaiming a golden age for America like to talk about the fall of “the regime,” a handy term to refer to any power center steered by liberals, including in the entertainment world. The idea is that we’d been living in a centrally planned culture of racially inclusive sitcoms and feminist pop stars, whose Millennial-pink kumbaya vibe was backed up by vicious online campaigns to shun the insufficiently woke. Now the entertainment regime is under assault through such means as Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center and the Federal Communications Commission’s saber-rattling against broadcast networks. In the MAGA view, these efforts aren’t dictatorial—they’re liberatory.

This logic is credulous logic, conspiracy logic, that tends to downplay a crucial driver of culture: audiences’ desires. Certainly, the idea that 2010s entertainment was smothered by progressive politeness is overstated at best. The decade’s defining TV show was the brutal, T&A-filled Game of Thrones. Hip-hop was driven by young rappers whose music and personal lives defined the word problematic (Tekashi 6ix 9ine, XXXtentacion, Lil Uzi Vert). And, of course, Trump’s 2016 election delighted a whole new cultural scene: edgelords posting frog memes. The internet was undercutting old gatekeepers, turning culture—more than ever—into an unruly, competitive arena. If there was a regime, it was already weakening, not strengthening.

[Read: Kanye West finally says what he means]

Ye has long understood the crowd-pleasing potential of chaos over conformity. Though he once scanned as a liberal protest rapper—remember when he called out George W. Bush on live TV after Hurricane Katrina?—his misogynistic streak hardly made him a consensus figure. In 2016, he got into a spat with Taylor Swift by calling her a “bitch” in a song; the resulting brouhaha damaged her reputation more than it did his. Even after he started praising Trump in 2018 and called slavery a “choice,” he still drew major collaborators and successfully orchestrated hype for new albums.

It was only in 2022 that he pushed far enough to experience something like full-on cancellation, by going full-on anti-Semite. He posted that he wanted to go “death con 3” on Jews. He told Alex Jones, “I like Hitler.” He posted a swastika on X. Consequences piled up: Adidas exited their billion-dollar partnership with Ye; Def Jam, his label, severed ties; Elon Musk, of all people, banned him from X. Yet even then, his career continued: He released an unconvincing apology to the Jews, put out an album full of big-name rap collaborations, and landed a Billboard Hot 100 No. 1. In that song, “Carnival,” he compared himself to vilified men such as R. Kelly and Diddy. “This number #1 is for … the people who won’t be manipulated by the system,” Ye wrote on Instagram at the time.

“The system”—that term is pretty close to what people mean by “the regime.” Ye wasn’t wrong to suggest that important organizations had tried to marginalize him. But if someone booted out of the system can still hit No. 1, what does the system really count for? Maybe this: Even in a culture as fractured as ours has become, people intrinsically sense the existence of a “mainstream,” shaped by widely shared beliefs, norms, and urges. Powerful institutions stay powerful by catering to that consensus. After years of Americans becoming more socially progressive—after a decade in which gay marriage was legalized and Black Lives Matter gained broad-based popularity—it made some sense that, say, diversely cast Marvel movies would be the mainstream and the erratic Hitler-loving rapper would be subcultural.

Perhaps that’s not going to be true for much longer. “You are the media,” Elon Musk told his followers on X after Trump’s reelection, speaking to a platform that, under his watch, has become overrun by white supremacists. Seemingly every other day, a pundit proclaims that Trump is spurring a “cultural revolution.” The president may have been returned to office thanks in part to widespread dissatisfaction with grocery prices, but he was also helped by young people, typically our great trend-drivers, becoming more hostile to social-justice causes. And now here comes Ye, doing that thing you do when you think the masses will buy what you have to sell: film a Super Bowl commercial.

Vestiges of “the system” have, thus far, rebuked Ye’s swastika shirt. Two days after the Super Bowl ad aired, the e-commerce platform Shopify pulled the plug on Ye’s online store, citing a violation of its terms of service in a terse statement. Ye’s talent agency dropped him, and according to his own post on X, a few employees on his Yeezy design team quit. “Maybe one day they will understand why I had to do what I did, and one day they will forgive my method,” Ye wrote on X.

As for that why: In his X posts after the shop was taken down, Ye said he started thinking about selling the T-shirts after seeing the swastika—an ancient symbol used peacefully in Buddhism, Hinduism, and other religions—on clothing in Japan. In his telling, the point is to shock people and show them how free they are to embrace things that society has coded as taboo. That’s also the rationale spread by his defenders. Myron Gaines of the Fresh and Fit podcast, a prominent manosphere outlet, posted that Ye’s “genius” Super Bowl stunt probably got “millions” of fans to buy the shirt—“not because we’re Nazis,” but because Ye was flouting “years of censorship.”

To reiterate: The rapper openly admires Hitler and demonizes Jews. He posted that he made the swastika shirts to show “that I am not under Jewish control anymore.” Gaines wrote that Ye has “revenge to seek for 2 years ago when the jews launched a campaign to cancel him.” So these non-Nazis … just happen to use Nazi imagery while spreading the idea that the Jews are a shadowy cabal that needs to be brought to heel. In late February, Ye posted that he’s no longer a Nazi; a few days ago, he wrote, “Antisemitism is the only path to freedom.”

The absurdity of these antics is so obvious that to expend effort condemning them can feel pointless. I sympathize with the rapper Open Mike Eagle, who posted a video calling Ye’s latest phase a “predictable meltdown nobody has time for.” He noted that Ye’s shock tactics were largely getting drowned out by the drama caused by the Trump administration, and by broader shifts in the attention economy. “Things have changed,” Open Mike Eagle said, addressing Ye. “All the counterculture jive that you used to say, that shit is all mainstream now. There’s just Nazis all over Twitter.”

Ye may well see an opportunity in the fact that what once seemed insane now can seem inane. The institutions that helped us make sense of what’s normal and what’s fringe, what’s upstanding and what’s contemptible, what’s true and what’s false, are weaker than ever. But cultural change never really did happen through the dictates of regimes—it happens through ideas and attitudes moving contagiously, person to person. We absorb how others behave, what they react to and what they don’t react to. Certain people will buy into Ye’s posture of rebelliousness, and maybe even buy his shirt, and maybe even wear it on the street. The rest of us should try clinging to our disgust.

Among the official White House records housed in the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum, in Atlanta, is a photograph of the late president shaking hands with an 80-year-old Black schoolteacher, Septima Poinsette Clark. The photo was taken in February 1979 at a White House ceremony honoring Clark with a “Living Legacy” award, in recognition of her work as a voting-rights educator and civil-rights activist.

I intended to use this photo to illustrate my talk next week at the Carter Library discussing my new book, Spell Freedom, which tells the story of Clark and her work training Black citizens to assert their constitutional rights. The venue seemed to be a perfect match for the theme. But late last month, I found out that I wouldn't be speaking at the Carter Library after all. My publisher informed me that my book event had been canceled, and I subsequently learned from other sources that all programming at the library, which is operated by the National Archives and Records Administration, now needs to be approved by the new administration in Washington.

I was confused. My presentation had been arranged back in the fall and had already gone through NARA’s routine vetting process, usually a pro forma confirmation that affiliated programs are of high quality and based on research using the National Archives’ rich resources. Spell Freedom is my third book of narrative history, and I’ve given numerous presentations at NARA locations before. The event was already up on the Carter Library website. Clearly, the criteria for “approval” had changed.

My little cancellation drama was not unfolding in a vacuum. Just a few weeks into Donald Trump’s second administration, the president fired the archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, who was the first woman to lead NARA, and pushed out most of the senior staff. Trump made no secret of his special animosity toward the National Archives, which protects presidential records and had played a role in exposing his improper handling of files from his first presidency.

Trump has also purged the governing board of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in Washington, and installed himself as board chairman. Speaking of his new side gig, the president promised “no more woke” and “no more anti-American propaganda” on Kennedy Center stages. He also signed executive orders ending all diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities revised their funding guidelines to align more closely with the administration’s ideology.

[Read: America now has a minister of culture]

Sitting at my desk, I tried to channel my suspicion and anger into action. I’m a journalist, so I went to the press. Reporters at The New York Times and The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found that other events had been canceled at the Carter library: Joining Spell Freedom on the chopping block were Mike Tidwell’s The Lost Trees of Willow Avenue: A Story of Climate and Hope on One American Street and Brian Goldstone’s There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America. Other events went on as scheduled; it seemed obvious that books on race, poverty, and the climate had failed the new administration’s ideological test—though we can’t know for certain, because government officials declined to answer reporters’ questions.

Stifling inconvenient discussions is dangerous business, and it goes far beyond book talks. The Trump administration has flaunted its contempt for many of the country’s cultural, scholarly, scientific, medical, and educational institutions while announcing its intention to defund and destroy them. Investigation and expression on vital topics disfavored by the White House is being squelched. As many writers have already warned, these moves represent a frightening step toward autocratic rule and an erosion of democratic values. The core value that defines NARA, as well as the many libraries under its management, is the notion that the United States is ruled by laws—and that the office of the president matters more than whichever party or person happens to occupy it.

NARA has always been a proudly nonpartisan institution; it holds and protects sacred historical documents, and it is our nation’s collective memory bank. From the Declaration of Independence to the files of the tiniest bureau of the federal government, it’s all there, neatly filed. The presidential libraries chronicle the policies and proclamations of Republican and Democratic presidents alike, providing the essential primary-source material for analyzing their impact on the country and the world.

In recent decades, the archives have been open to all researchers, and therefore to all stripes of historical interpretation. Public programs, including book talks, bring the documents to life, expanding our understanding of the national story and fortifying our collective ownership of our nation’s past—its triumphs and its mistakes. They serve an educational function, which is why it makes sense that they are under attack. Another of the president’s executive orders promotes “patriotic education” in the country’s K–12 schools, threatening to withhold federal funding from those that teach that the United States is “fundamentally racist, sexist or otherwise discriminatory.” That cuts out a lot of history.

Under the new administration, the National Endowment for the Arts has declared that its most urgent priority is funding projects that honor the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Our foundational document, held and displayed in the National Archives building on the National Mall, insists that all men are created equal and rails against the tyranny of despots and kings. It is certainly patriotic; it is also revolutionary in every sense of the word. The president is right to recognize its monumental importance, and he should also honor the principles written into it.

[Read: Control. Alt. Delete.]

Septima Clark was dedicated to making her country live up to its democratic ideals, to honor in practice—not just in words or flag pins—the historical principles outlined in the Declaration and the Constitution. A widowed grandmother who stood up to local tyrants, she lost her job and 40 years of pension benefits in 1956 when she refused to renounce her membership in the NAACP, which the southern states had outlawed as “subversive” and “Communist.” She took her teaching talents to the emerging civil-rights movement, developing hundreds of “citizenship schools” across the South that trained tens of thousands of Black citizens to read, write, and reclaim their voting rights. She stared down the Klan, knelt in prayer before a southern sheriff’s tanks, guided the hands of the poor and unlettered so they could hold a pencil and sign their name at the voter-registration office.

In this new culture of cancellations, it seems—though no official will admit it—that this story does not fit into the administration’s definition of “patriotic” narratives of American history. I would argue that the story is absolutely one of fierce patriots—Black citizens who so loved and believed in the promise of the United States, in the constitutional right to vote, in the Declaration’s claim of equality, that they faced down suppression, violent reprisals, economic ruin, imprisonment, and death to participate in their own government and assert their rights as Americans.

I think Clark would have some sharp words for the current administration, with its callous attempts to bend language, art, science, and history to its liking. “I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth,” Clark proclaimed. “We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm.” This may not fit the current government’s definition of patriotism, but to me, it’s the right spirit in which to honor the history and guard the future of the United States. It’s the kind of patriotism we need right now.

The takeover of the Kennedy Center may seem like an afterthought in the furious drama of President Donald Trump’s first month in office. The abandonment of the transatlantic alliance, proposals to annex territory on multiple continents, the evisceration of national institutions, and overt claims to kingship are such eye-popping departures from precedent that the leadership of a somewhat stuffy, self-consciously elite performing-arts venue seems negligible by comparison. But Trump’s peculiar preoccupation with the Kennedy Center is symptomatic of a profound change in the nature of American power since his inauguration: America is undergoing a cultural revolution. “This is going to be great television,” Trump said at the end of Friday’s stormy session with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. It may as well be the motto of his administration.

It is a new kind of cultural revolution. Unlike the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, which imposed ideology on their populaces by means of culture and entertainment, America’s current reality is the overturning of the political order by the country’s entertainers. The American culture industry has overwhelmed politics: Washington today can be understood only as a product of show business, not of law or policy.

The Trump administration has been consistent in its veneration of show business, if in nothing else. The president has put a WWE executive in charge of education, made a Fox News talking head his secretary of defense, installed a celebrity conspiracy theorist to lead the National Institutes of Health, handed control of Medicare to a TV doctor, and appointed a right-wing podcaster as deputy director of the FBI. Elon Musk is running government reform because he can live-post it. Dr. Phil accompanies ICE on raids. Trump’s Cabinet picks resemble the cast of a reality-television show by design: Trump understands, by instinct and through experience, that the line between entertainment and power in American life has effectively dissolved.

In his farewell address, President Joe Biden described the incoming administration as an oligarchy. He was mistaken. It is rule by performers: a “histriocracy.” Anyone who wants to understand what is happening in American politics needs to understand it on those terms.

In 2016, a reality-TV star’s rise to the presidency was novel, and seeing that surprise triumph as an anomaly was still possible. No longer. The 2024 election was not just evidence of a rightward shift among traditionally Democratic voters, or of rising anti-government patriotism, but a clarification of how fundamentally American politics has shifted the ground from which its meaning derives.

Politics has become an offshoot of spectacle. Trump has left intellectuals grasping for historical analogies: Is he a fascist or a populist? Is he a latter-day Know Nothing or a modern demagogue? The analogies are unsatisfying because they fail to account for popular culture as a political force, the way it has scrambled traditional dividing lines. Trump has Orthodox Jewish grandchildren and is a hero to the white-power movement. He won a record percentage of Arab American votes, then appointed an ambassador to Israel who claims that “there is no such thing as Palestinians.” He enjoys fervent support among evangelicals despite the fact that his character is a living contradiction of every value they revere. These paradoxes would not be possible in a politics that selects the country’s leadership on the basis of ideas and character. They make sense if brute exposure determines who wins.

[Stephen Marche: Welcome to the burning ’20s]

As the grand soap opera of this American presidency unfolds, displays of rage and wonder fill every moment: get-rich-quick schemes, rigged games, vengeful punishments. The audience is hurried from one hustle to another. The distinction between a con and a joke has blurred. The great circus showman P. T. Barnum prophesied the rise of Trump when he declared: “Let me furnish the amusements of a nation and there will be need of very few laws.” The connection between Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and John F. Kennedy is more than genetic. Norman Mailer, in his famous essay on the 1960 Democratic Convention, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket,” noticed a mysterious sadness that gripped the spectators, which made sense only when he saw the future President Kennedy in the flesh: “The Democrats were going to nominate a man who, no matter how serious his political dedication might be, was indisputably and willy-nilly going to be seen as a great box-office actor, and the consequences of that were staggering and not at all easy to calculate.” Trump’s Cabinet is the staggering consequence that Mailer could not calculate.

Ronald Reagan in the 1980s made the connection between celebrity and power even more explicit; he rose after a career in which perhaps his most famous role was starring opposite a chimpanzee. The “Great Communicator” told corny jokes and knew that television was everything. The Republican Party “won one for the Gipper,” as Reagan’s campaign slogan had it. When his administration abolished the Fairness Doctrine in 1987, releasing news media from any obligation of impartiality, it prepared the way for histriocracy without government interference.

Rule by performers is distinct from autocracy. The ruling performers serve the narrative needs of their fans first and foremost. Policy will always be an addendum to the show. The overturning of Roe v. Wade had compelling emotional heft for Trump’s base, a soul-stirring final scene to the movie that had been playing in their minds for generations: “We beat the cosmopolitan elite to save babies.” The happy ending was that abortion became illegal in much of the United States.

But winning for show is very different from having a desired effect on the world. Since 2018, the rate of abortions has, by most accounts, kept rising—not that anybody seems to care, because the narrative impulse is the primary political driver. In fact, the restrictionist policy’s failure provides an opportunity for endless sequels. Trump has served the pro-life movement’s storyline needs by creating the conditions for an increase in abortion numbers: so many more bad people to punish, so many more babies who need saving. In a politics determined by performance, outcomes are epilogues that nobody reads.

[Read: Trump’s conquest of the Kennedy Center is accelerating]

The reality of rule by performers is profoundly disconcerting to American intellectuals’ self-conception of their government’s dignity. This is the message of the Kennedy Center’s takeover that the D.C. political elite has been so slow to register. If you think it’s a joke to have RFK Jr. in office, that’s the point. Jokes gather attention. Attention creates exposure. Exposure drives power. The greatest asset for any politician today is a bottomless narcissism that requires unremitting attention to satisfy.

Rule by performers doesn’t need to impose an autocrat’s lies on the people; people do it to themselves through their entertainments. In 1984, George Orwell described doublethink as the kind of intellectual gymnastics demanded by a totalitarian society: “To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies.” Reality television and the WWE demand similar distortion-effect gymnastics; their audiences willingly suspend their disbelief and gladly accept events they know are artificial as real. The audiences come to political debate already prepared for the blurring of illusion and reality. “The public appears disposed to be amused even when they are conscious of being deceived,” Barnum understood, which is why they called him the “Prince of Humbugs.” In Trump, they have a king.

As forewarned, America has amused itself to death. Histriocracy is much less stable than traditional autocracy—wilder, more unpredictable. Turbulence is to be expected, as creating drama is the point of the government and the source of power. No doubt, the Kennedy Center will be consumed by a whirlwind of thrills and chills over the next four years. But when a circus departs, it leaves behind dirty streets, empty pockets, and lingering regrets. Under rule by performers, only one law is inviolable: The show must go on, until the curtain falls.