John Martin: Fall of the Walls of Jericho,
from Illustrations of the Bible (1834)

"It would never raise a credible head again. It's done."

The apotheosis appears as a trajectory more than a peak. At that point, nothing's obvious yet, though subtle and, in retrospect, not so subtle signs point to an inescapable conclusion. That arc peaked. It will never regain that height again. It's downhill from there, though not necessarily a power dive. There might be a series of plateaus and even a few apparent recoveries on the inevitable way down, but the momentum is lost along with the surprise that the initiative initially depended upon. Opponents easily anticipate what were once utterly baffling motives and moves. What seemed like magic was rendered barely tragic. Only theater remains. The outcome will never again find itself in serious question. So begins the slow shuffle toward the exits. What began as a mammoth traffic jam as everyone tried to arrive before the start winds down with people who paid through the nose for tickets leaving well before the end to avoid traffic or something.

Our incumbent still believes he successfully outsmarted everybody. How could he have lost? He only hired the finest people, though his judgment about people had always been suspect. His hired geniuses one by one betrayed him, or they ran into immovable objects easily avoided if they'd had a clue about what they were doing. Their ignorance finally did them in; that, and their malfeasance. They seemed to believe that his incumbency came with a license to do whatever he pleased, and that they also enjoyed the same imaginary immunity. This belief made them careless on top of their native cluelessness. Let's agree to say that they repeatedly "outsmarted" themselves.

They began their campaign with a poisonous presumption. This set the context for their eventual comeuppance. They presumed that our country was the absolute center of the universe, and that this position rendered us absolutely invulnerable. Our economy was, indeed, larger and apparently stronger than any other. Ditto our military. They presumed we were an island everyone wanted to emulate. We'd long suffered from a troublingly parochial perspective that seems to accompany our presumption of being better. Our most conservative voices insisted that we needn't abide by scientific consensus, for instance, or enlightened trading practices. They'd insisted that we were free to be anybody we wanted to be and that nobody could force us to be different. We had at times seemed awfully arrogant to our neighbors. They would remember every time we refused to work together. They would never forget any betrayal.

Our trading partners had always held a BATNA (Better Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement). Together, they might prove every bit as powerful as their traditional big brother if he ever proved unruly. Our incumbent let his election go to his already oversized head and immediately began making unreasonable demands. His tariff plans seemed insane because they were, and his insistence that he could redefine ‘reasonable’ to his own parochial benefit offended them. Many refused to play along. Whole industries, recognizing encroaching unreasonableness, fled to make agreements among themselves. Other countries found that they could more than make up for any slack when indispensable institutions turned lax. They had standards they were unprepared to lower so the incumbent could take unfair advantage of them.

Old Indispensable turned itself into a Newly Disposable. Our economy suffered from strategies intended to punish others for their imaginary infractions. The frustrations only expanded from there, until the incumbent, in lieu of answering questions at press conferences, took to criticizing the questioners. "Only a very evil person would ever ask such a question. Of course, I don't know who you are, but you must be a truly evil person to ask such a question." Our emperor preened in his spiffy new uniform, more naked than the day he was born. Not even the courts could prop him up for long. The Christian Nationalists were ultimately less than useless since they had never bothered to study or even understand the system they had sworn to topple. Not even the harshest realities seemed likely to pop their delusional bubble.

When Ford announced that it would no longer assemble cars in the US due to tariff-related supply chain problems, the proverbial shit hit the fan. When the EU and all their trading partners disqualified American corn because it wasn't clean or green enough for them to consume, the manure joined the shit hitting the fan. When American pork showed traces of banned chemicals, more manure joined the throng. When ICE was enjoined from assaulting innocent citizens on the street, it seemed unlikely that the mass deportation threats, which had already become less popular than illegal immigration, would escape their fate. There will be more noise in the channel, and yes, more innocents will be damaged, but the transformation to what sane people feared had failed. It would never raise a credible head again. It's done.

©2025 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #FollowingChapters, #PureSchmaltz