Against the system that once dared to hold him accountable. Against the citizens who still protest his rise. Against the very idea of restraint.
He is now suing the U.S. government ….demanding $230 million from his own Department of Justice. Not for wrongful conviction. Not for proven harm. But for investigating him. For doing its job.
“We’re sort of suing ourselves,” he admitted.
No correction. No crisis. No constitutional guardrail.
Meanwhile, the White House East Wing …. home to national security operations and the First Lady’s office ….. is being demolished to make way for a 90,000-square-foot luxury ballroom.
In a time of economic fragility, climate whiplash, and institutional decay, the priority is crystal chandeliers. Not hospitals. Not housing. Not healing. But mirrors, columns, and a space to host elite gatherings in the ruins of governance.
And still, somehow, it gets worse.
As tens of thousands took to the streets in the NO KINGS protest movement, Trump posted a deepfake video of himself flying a jet labeled KING TRUMP, dropping feces on demonstrators. The clip was set to Danger Zone by Kenny Loggins … used without permission. A presidential meme ….. designed to degrade dissenters, to mock resistance, to turn protest into punchline.
This wasn’t satire. This was message warfare.
The deepfake wasn’t real. But the intention was. Mock the masses. Flood the discourse with sludge. Make the obscene feel absurd. Make the absurd feel normal.
That is the playbook.
Confuse. Distract. Shock. Then profit from the silence that follows.
This is not new for Trump. But the scale has mutated. He no longer breaks norms. He bulldozes them. Then he builds monuments on top of the rubble. He defunds trust, bankrupts memory, and sells the void back to us as content.
The lawsuits are not legal strategy. They are dominance rituals. Declarations of untouchability. Signals that power now operates beyond consequence.
The ballroom is not architecture. It’s mythology. A shrine to self-interest. A symbol of what happens when spectacle eats the state.
The meme is not a joke. It’s a test. A signal to followers, a humiliation for protestors, a reminder that he can fly above the law …. and drop what he wants.
Because this is not democracy anymore. This is governance by grudge. Leadership by mockery. A republic held hostage by a man who turns every institution into either a weapon or a stage.
And if we don’t call it what it is … a shock strategy fueled by spectacle and vengeance … then we become part of the silence that lets it spread.
Trump isn’t making policy. He’s making content. And in a distracted empire, content always wins.
He didn’t need a coup. He didn’t need a war. He needed a meme. And a ballroom to dance in while the republic burns.
The new Chief Marketing Officer of America’s biggest brands doesn’t sit in Madison Avenue boardrooms. It sits in Washington. And it doesn’t care about brand love, market share, or cultural relevance. It cares about tariffs.
Marketers aren’t pretending otherwise. Nearly half say they’re cutting budgets outright. Others are shortening campaigns, pausing buys, or fleeing to performance-driven channels where every click can be measured.
The casualties over at the USA are obvious:
Linear TV spend: -14.4%.
Print, radio, OOH: -12.7%.
Meanwhile, social (+14.3%) and CTV (+11.4%) are the lifeboats.
It’s a forced pivot from storytelling to transaction. As one media buyer put it bluntly: “Forget brand equity. Just sell before the next tariff drops.”
Tariffs Don’t Just Tax Goods …They Tax Culture
For decades, marketers told us they were culture’s architects. They built myths, symbols, slogans. But if trade policy can erase billions in ad spend overnight, then culture isn’t designed in creative studios anymore. It’s dictated in tariff negotiations.
That Nike campaign about human potential? It now competes with headlines about price hikes. Apple’s latest innovation launch? Drowned out by quarterly earnings wrecked by tariffs.
Marketers don’t control the message when they’re busy firefighting margin losses. Politicians do.
The Quiet Extinction of Branding
This isn’t just a budget story. It’s the slow death of brand advertising itself.
With customer acquisition and repeat sales now the only goals that matter, campaigns have collapsed into endless “buy now” loops. The promise of brand-building has been traded for measurable clicks.
It’s not strategy. It’s survival. And survival stories don’t go viral. They go silent.
Who Really Runs Advertising Now?
The ad industry is bracing for more shocks in 2026. Social, CTV, and retail media will grow. Traditional media will shrink further. Marketers will keep demanding proof of ROI at every step.
But the bigger story is this: advertising has lost sovereignty. It no longer writes culture on its own terms. It rents its megaphone from politics.
In 2025, the Chief Marketing Officer of American brands isn’t a strategist, a creative, or even an algorithm.
Legal residents of the United States sent to foreign prisons without due process. Students detained after voicing their opinions. Federal judges threatened with impeachment for ruling against the administration’s priorities. In this Opinion video, Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder and Jason Stanley, all professors at Yale and experts in authoritarianism, explain why America is especially vulnerable to a democratic backsliding — and why they are leaving the United States to take up positions at the University of Toronto. Professor Stanley is leaving the United States as an act of protest against the Trump administration’s attacks on civil liberties. “I want Americans to realize that this is a democratic emergency,” he said. Professor Shore, who has spent two decades writing about the history of authoritarianism in Central and Eastern Europe, is leaving because of what she sees as the sharp regression of American democracy. “We’re like people on the Titanic saying our ship can’t sink,” she said. “And what you know as a historian is that there is no such thing as a ship that can’t sink.” She borrows from political and apolitical Slavic motifs and expressions, arguing that the English language does not fully capture the democratic regression in this American moment. Professor Snyder’s reasons are more complicated. Primarily, he’s leaving to support his wife, Professor Shore, and their children, and to teach at a large public university in Toronto, a place he says can host conversations about freedom. At the same time, he shares the concerns expressed by his colleagues and worries that those kinds of conversations will become ever harder to have in the United States. “I did not leave Yale because of Donald Trump or because of Columbia or because of threats to Yale — but that would be a reasonable thing to do, and that is a decision that people will make,” he wrote in a Yale Daily News article explaining his decision to leave. Their motives differ but their analysis is the same: ignoring or downplaying attacks on the rule of law, the courts and universities spells trouble for our democracy.
India, the “world’s biggest democracy,” doesn’t hesitate to flirt with Beijing. Because democracy no longer sells. It is messy. It is slow. It is hypocritical.
Autocracy is the upgrade. It is packaged as efficiency and growth. Sleek. Dangerous. Seductive.
Democracy was Coca-Cola. Sweet, global, everywhere. Now it is flat. Autocracy is Red Bull. Ugly. Addictive. Global. It promises wings, even if it wrecks you.
Look at the parade in Beijing. Missiles rolling like limited-edition sneakers. Xi, Putin, and Kim posing like brand influencers at a launch event. This wasn’t a military march. It was an ad campaign.
Naomi Klein warned us how brands hollow out meaning. That’s what autocracy is doing now. Strip out human rights. Strip out transparency. What’s left? A clean pitch: speed, growth, security. The Apple Store of geopolitics.
Meanwhile democracy runs on nostalgia. Freedom. Rights. Integrity. Beautiful words. But when the infrastructure breaks, when governments gridlock, when politicians keep stealing money, when scandals are daily, when people feel betrayed—those slogans sound like jingles from a dead brand.
The West thinks the world still buys its values. The Global South is shopping for results. Ports. Railways. 5G. Debt relief. They don’t want democracy’s story. They want autocracy’s product.
Missiles are the new billboards. Parades are product launches. Power has become a spectacle, and the audience is global.
The Coca-Cola of politics is sliding to the back shelf. The Red Bull of politics is now at eye level. And the world is reaching for the can with wings.
Every empire ends the same way. Not with a bang. With bad branding.
We are told that “peace” is being negotiated. Cameras flash, leaders shake hands, headlines sigh in relief. But listen more closely: the word “peace” here has been hollowed out. What is being offered is not an end to war but a linguistic trick—territory traded under the table, sovereignty redefined as bargaining chips. It is settlement for some, surrender for others, dressed up as salvation for all.
This isn’t new. Europe has heard this music before. In 1938, the word was “appeasement.” Leaders congratulated themselves for buying peace by abandoning those caught in the path of aggression. What followed was not peace but the validation of violence, the confirmation that might could dictate borders. Every time we accept aggression as fait accompli, we do not prevent the next war—we finance it.
What’s unfolding now is not a “peace process” but the laundering of defeat. The aggressor demands recognition for his spoils. The mediator smiles, relieved to notch a diplomatic “win.” And the victim is told, once again, to swallow the loss for the greater good.
If sovereignty can be traded away without the consent of the sovereign, then the word itself becomes meaningless. If peace means rewarding the invader and isolating the invaded, then peace becomes indistinguishable from surrender. And if Europe accepts this language, it will be complicit in rewriting the postwar order into something unrecognizable: a world where borders are drawn not by law or consent, but by force and fatigue.
We stand at a rhetorical crossroads. One path leads to an honest settlement—messy, difficult, but grounded in consent and legitimacy. The other path leads to surrender disguised as peace, a mask that fools no one but comforts the powerful.
The question is simple. When the mask slips—and it always does—will we admit that we knew all along what we were watching? Or will we pretend we were deceived, when the truth was staring at us from the first handshake
