“Where were we two years ago? We weren’t respected. We were a joke. We’re not a joke anymore.”
Trump kicked off this country’s 250th “unforgettable birthday party” with one of his classic campaign-style rallies on the National Mall in DC. From behind the stage, while Lee Greenwood belted out his famous “And I’m proud to be an American” chorus, the pungent smell of algae wafted over from the bright green Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. On the adjacent White House lawn, the spot where a 600-ton, 5,000-seat UFC arena had recently stood was still discernible; Trump had celebrated his own birthday the week prior.
The cost of restoring the destroyed lawn alone came to $700,000—a small tab for taxpayers compared to the $16 million spent recoloring the pool. Never mind the $60 million spent on the “UFC Freedom 250” cage fight. The crypto-sponsored spectacle drew comparisons to the 2006 Mike Judge film Idiocracy on social media.
Not everyone was chuckling at this dystopian scene. By the week’s end, eight far-right men in their 20s and 30s were arrested and charged with plotting to assassinate the president and other top government officials during the prime-time show. The youngest was a 19 year old from rural Ohio who spent his graduation money on weapons for the attack.
The FBI affidavit says the conspirators were “ultra-religious” Christians motivated by grievances over AIPAC influence, government corruption, the Epstein files, and “data centers taking up all the water.” They called themselves “freedom fighters” in their Signal chat: “You will be sacrificing for your country, and carrying a brunt of the weight.” Investigators recovered an assault rifle painted in the colors of the American flag. All were detained before making it to DC. Overshadowed by the World Cup, the story made few headlines.
That events like these have started to feel commonplace is a reflection of the decay of American capitalism in 2026. Trump personifies the social, moral, and strategic decomposition of a ruling class that is on its way out. He is presiding over the self-evident decline of an empire, but seems too busy erecting monuments to himself to notice. As one senior White House official put it, “He’s clearly in his ‘I don’t give a fuck’ mood.” Last year, he posted an AI-generated image on X of himself (reproduced above) wearing a crown with the trolling caption “LONG LIVE THE KING!”
After the months he spent gilding the Oval Office to match the decor at the Palace of Versailles, it was fitting that he traveled to King Louis IX’s home itself to sign his surrender to Iran. Precisely one week after this, he proudly told his crowd at the 250 rally that he had “saved our country.”
Desperate to appear nonchalant and unburdened by the weight of US imperialism’s most humiliating defeat—and the economic pain it meant for the workers who voted for him—he told the press, “I love the inflation.”
While the ruling class is infatuated with the ever-inflating AI bubble, and Washington is in the grip of a man infatuated with himself, the working class is boiling over with a rage that it doesn’t know what to do with. That’s where the communists come in.
Modern US history, Lenin said, “opened with one of those great, really liberating, really revolutionary wars of which there have been so few compared to the vast number of wars of conquest which, like the present imperialist war, were caused by squabbles among kings, landowners, or capitalists over the division of usurped lands.” Another one of those revolutions is coming.