This piece is written in homage to the late, great Martin Amis. It borrows, in spirit and sharpness, from his satiric wit and his razor‑sharp edge; a style that skewered the powerful, the pretentious, and the self‑deluded with equal relish and unblinking clarity.
Not an image but a symptom
The other day, Donald Trump did not just post a picture. He posted a symptom.
The image appeared on the screen like a mirage: the President, AI‑rendered, haloed in a soft, sickly light, hands hovering over a recumbent patient, the whole thing layered with eagles, flags, and the kind of beatific glow that usually belongs to the Sistine Chapel, not to the Truth‑Social feed of a man who cheats at golf and lies a hundred times before breakfast.
Within hours it became obvious: this was not kitsch. It was theatre. The Trumpian cult‑of‑self had annexed the cult of Christ. The Emperor had become both head of state and head of the church, the commander‑in‑chief and the chief executor of divine favour. The only thing missing was the confession box and the offering plate.
The backlash came, of course. The Pope frowned. The pious shifted. The always‑frowning commentariat raised an eyebrow high enough to graze the stratosphere, deflecting Artemis’ fiery return to earth.
Trump’s response was the punchline. “No, no,” he said. “It’s me as a doctor. Just a doctor. Making people better.”
The joke, as Martin Amis would hear it, is that he meant it. He really believed he was a doctor. A healer. A saviour. The man who “makes America well.” The joke, however, is also on the rest of us, the audience who watched him fumble the joke, then double‑down on the delusion. The image is removed from all social media.
The Court of the Very Important Petulant Child
Picture the cabinet room as a stage for the power‑mad, the fearful, and the fawning.
The long mahogany table, the heavy chairs, the aides hovering like staff‑sergeants in purgatory, the generals with medals that look like fishing lures. The President sits at the head, half‑asleep, half‑furious, the body sagging under the weight of age and habit, the mind still racing down the same track it has always run: insult, insult, response, violation, escalation.
Around him, the courtiers perform the ritual. They don’t call it a ritual – they call it “protocol” – but the function is the same. Each one must out‑venerate the last.
“Sir, your great leadership, in this moment…”
“Mr President, the huge courage you’re showing in confronting Iran…”
“Sir, nobody understands the deep state like you…”
The sentences are like offerings at a shrine, the speakers like priests without the doctrine and the shame. They are not debating policy. They are auditioning for the right to be in the room, the right to breathe the same air, the right to survive the next outburst.
The Emperor’s petulance grows visible as the meeting wears on. He slumps, he yawns, he snaps, he threatens. One wrong word, one misjudged nuance, and the sentence is issued: sanctions, war, “obliteration,” the erasure of memory.
Because this is how it has always been: Trump does not threaten like a statesman; he erects the prospect of annihilation like a tantrum. He does not just want compliance. He wants cowed deference, the kind of fear that makes grown men genuflect before an AI‑generated halo.
The Ballroom‑Temple: A Dance to the Music of Time (revised)
The ballroom does not just resemble a temple. It is a temple. The ballroom‑temple. The ballroom, that great glassed‑in box on the East Side of the building; the side where the offices once helped America minister to its poor and needy, the side where social‑service workers tended to the suppurating wounds of inequality, injustice and deprivation, has been ripped out, stripped, gutted, turned into a sanctum for the devout donors.
Now, as we watch the tiny hands and the tiny feet of Donald Trump and his courtiers, shuffling, swaying, posturing under the crystal chandeliers, it is hard not to think of Powell’s Dance to the Magic of Time – only this time Macho Man is not so subtle, the steps are not graceful, and the dancers are not even aware that they are in a painting, let alone one that will outlive them.
They are performing the old ritual of power, the same choreography that has been danced in Versailles, in St Petersburg, in the Soviet Congress halls, in the Roman atriums: the courtiers circling the throne, the ruler pretending to generosity, the supplicants pretending to piety, the donors pretending to philanthropy, the generals pretending to patriotism, the tech bros in the designer stubble of everyman; a true humility hack. The steps are familiar, the costumes merely updated. The music is the same.
And beneath the ballroom‑temple, of course, is the cellar. The bomb shelter. The shelter for the rulers, the protectors, the messiahs, the saviours. The builders of today, we know, always have the best designs and the best materials for bomb‑proofing the rulers of tomorrow, while the rest of the population make do with cheaper concrete, cheaper walls, cheaper promises. The ballroom above them is gilded and sealed, the ballroom where the dance goes on, even as the world outside stumbles toward war.
At the door, however, there is one last stage direction. Beside the guest‑book lies the collection box, a Trump speciality. The choice is as elegant as the décor. You may drop a cheque into the slot labelled Pre‑Loved Children’s Charity, where the optics say “philanthropy” and the optics are all that matter. Or, for the true believer, the direct line: the Trump‑Coin donation tap, the family‑funded, family‑operated, family‑promoted digital‑currency funnel that looks like a cryptocurrency and smells like a Ponzi scheme with the Trump seal of approval.
One path leads to the illusion of charity, the other to the illusion of investment. Both lead, inevitably, back to the same vault: the Trumpian court of perpetual tribute, where even the collection box is part of the sacrament.
The Merchandising of Divinity
The Trump Store is a shrine‑shopping mall devoted to the cult of the self, the omphalos of the Narcissist Kingdom of the USA.
The hats, the shirts, the mugs, the Bibles, the digital trading cards, the wines, the “vintage” political‑issue clothing, the limited‑edition “Trump‑as‑Doctor‑Messiah” NFT‑drops; all of it arranged like relics of the faith. The AI‑Jesus‑Trump becomes a premium‑edition collectible, a digital icon for the digitally‑faithful.
The old imperial cults sold statues and coins; this one sells merch and memes. The currency is faith, the product line is personality, the dividend is influence. The cult‑of‑personality‑state becomes a brand‑extension operation in the Oval Office, the ballroom, and the boardroom.
J.G.A. Pocock’s “Machiavellian moment,” the moment of republican virtue guarding a fragile republic from the corrupt court, has been turned into a punchline. The armed citizens protecting the republic are now conscripted into the cult‑court‑brand‑state. The court has become a corporate‑theocratic‑shopping‑club, where the stock ticker is a kind of liturgical chant, and the bottom‑line is the new morality.
Roy Cohn, Epstein, and the Emperor’s Fear of the Reaper
Behind the stage lighting and the merch tables, two figures haunt the court like cruel providence: Roy Cohn and Jeffrey Epstein.
Cohn is the ghost that Trump has proudly invited to dinner. He is the patron of the Trumpian ethos: deny everything, attack your enemies, never admit a mistake, and then accuse them of the very thing you are guilty of. The Emperor venerates Cohn as if he were a saint of the new order, the model of the man who lies, steals and wins, and never pays his bills, the moral zero‑point from which every new outrage is calibrated.
Epstein is a different kind of ghost. He is the stain that refuses to wash out. The memory of the man whose name is whispered but never quite uttered, the courtier who knew too much, the broker who trafficked not in ideas, but in bodies, secrets, and leverage. Epstein’s shadow reminds us that the Trumpian court is not just a cult of personality; it is a corporate‑theocratic brothel, where the sacred and the sordid trade hands in the twilight.
The Emperor, for all his swagger, begins to look fragile. The eyelids droop during meetings, the naps grow longer, the tantrums more frantic, the threats grander, the accusations wilder. His incontinence more troubling. He lashes out at the world, the press, his rivals, the Pope, the Deep State, the Iranians, the Democrats, the Chinese, the “global elites,” as if by shouting loud enough he can drown out the echo of the ticking clock. He dreams of firing a Tomahawk at MTG who has also turned against him recently.
He knows, somewhere in the sparse, unholy, clutter of the attic of his mind, that the reckoning is coming. The maker, the judge, the ultimate auditor, the reader of the final ledger, all are waiting. The Messiah‑Emperor is terrified that when he finally arrives at the Gate, the reception committee will not be impressed.
“Sorry, Donald. You got it from Venezuela? We’re not sure this counts.”
The joke, as Amis would say, is that he is right to worry.
The Petulant Messiah With a Habit of Threatening Civilisations
Trump’s default mode of power is not statesmanlike negotiation; it is petulant escalation.
He does not threaten like a politician. He threatens like a child denied an ice cream, only with the power to erase civilisations. One moment he is complaining about a poll, the next he is threatening to “obliterate” Iran, wipe out Iraq, flatten Gaza, “deal with” the whole Gulf. The scale of the threat grows with the petulance, the fury, the fear.
The world treats him like a joke, but he is not a joke. He is a petulant sovereign with the keys to the pyres of civilisation. The cult of the personality, the branding of the cult, the merchandising of the Messiah, the ballroom‑temple, the tech‑bro‑priesthood, the ghost of Cohn, the stain of Epstein, the escalating war‑cries against Iran; all of it coalesce into a grotesque spectacle.
Martin Amis, in his prime, would have treated this as a satirical horror‑show of the contemporary age, the grotesque apotheosis of the narcissist ruler, the cult of the self, the cult of the brand, the cult of the war. The crass vulgarity of everything Trump. He would have written it like a black‑comedy epic, the tale of the naughty boy who became emperor, then saviour, then Messiah, then war‑lord, all while the rest of the world laughed, watched, and failed to notice that the joke was on them.
The joke is on all of us
And in the end, how can we be sure the joke is not on us, all of us, dancing as ever, to the music of time – American style – while the Messiah‑Emperor fumbles the halo, the cabinet room quivers with fear, the ballroom‑temple hums with donor‑hush, and the missile‑clocks tick down quietly somewhere else?
The joke, Martin Amis would say, is not funny.
This article was originally published on URBAN WRONSKI WRITES
Keep Independent Journalism Alive – Support The AIMN
Dear Reader,
Since 2013, The Australian Independent Media Network has been a fearless voice for truth, giving public interest journalists a platform to hold power to account. From expert analysis on national and global events to uncovering issues that matter to you, we’re here because of your support.
Running an independent site isn’t cheap, and rising costs mean we need you now more than ever. Your donation – big or small – keeps our servers humming, our writers digging, and our stories free for all.
Join our community of truth-seekers. Please consider donating now via:
PayPal or credit card – just click on the Donate button below
Direct bank transfer: BSB: 062500; A/c no: 10495969
We’ve also set up a GoFundMe as a dedicated reserve fund to help secure the future of our site.
Your support will go directly toward covering essential costs like web hosting renewals and helping us bring new features to life. Every contribution, no matter the size, helps us keep improving and growing.
Thank you for standing with us – we truly couldn’t do this without you.
With gratitude, The AIMN Team
David, I enjoyed your post and he’s at it again with the image on the left. Saw that and my mind went off (and I don’t care if it offends anyone) in a different direction: I saw JC giving Donnie a handjob.
https://img-s-msn-com.akamaized.net/tenant/amp/entityid/AA20XFvQ.img?w=1600&h=900&m=4&q=74
Simply BRILLIANT!!!!! Martin Amis would be very appreciative of this stylistic offering.
A few examples of appreciated language:
1) The Cabinet room – ”Each one must out-venerate the last” ….. ”He does not want compliance. He wants cowed deference …..” as recorded in every published television press release.
2) The Ballroom Temple: ”[T]he side where social-service workers tended to the suppurating wounds of inequality, injustice and deprivation …..”
3) The Collection Box: ”A Trump speciality. ….. a Ponzi Scheme with the Trump seal of approval”.
4) Merchandising Divinity: ”The Court has become a corporate theocratic shopping club”.
5) The Trumpian Court: ”Epstein ….. it is a corporate theocratic brothel”.
6) The Joke: ”He is right to worry”.
Sadly, these observations are too close to reality for comfort.
”Martin Amis, in his prime, would have treated this as a satirical horrorshow of the contemporary age, the grotesque apotheosis of the narcissist ruler, the cult of the self, the cult of the brand, the cult of the war.”
And Martin Amis would have been correct.
Because what we are witnessing is not a Trumpian aberration. It’s not a distortion of all that is good and decent in the Western Civilisation of which we are so proud.
What we are witnessing is the inevitable flowering, the maturing, of a civilisation that was diverted and manipulated by a wealthy elite class who have worked tirelessly to create what they proudly call the liberal order, but which is in reality an elaborate, wholly materialistic social system based on slavery.
What’s that, I hear you say?
Slavery??
What’s slavery got to do with the liberal order?
Well, just about everything.
Which historical figure is known as the Father of Liberalism?
John Locke, a slaver.
Western civilisation is so sick that this slaver is revered as a “philosopher”.
Then there’s the US Constitution that is the source of so much suffering today. It was designed to protect property rights, “property rights” being code for the right to own slaves.
And the result?
Twelve of the first sixteen Presidents of the newly formed USA were slave-owning Southerners.
And while the ownership of Africans was not accepted to the same degree in England at that time, the Brits had their own form of slavery.
The rural poor who had been forced by enclosures to move to the cities, were treated as vagabonds, wastrels and sub-humans.
Those lucky enough to get work in the cities, although technically free, were treated as slaves.
The hypocrisy was breathtaking.
Adam Smith, who frowned upon US slavery, had no inhibitions when it came to the treatment of servants. From Domenico Losurdo — Over the domestic or apprentice, the master exercised a right of ‘corporal punishment’ that must not result in death or mutilation. But what happened if this limit was exceeded? We can infer Smith’s answer: ‘The master has a right to correct his servant moderately, and if he should die under his correction it is not murther, unless it was done with an offensive weapon or with forethought and without provocation.’
Then there’s that great liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham, a theorist of that particularly British form of slavery, the workhouse.
And to the delight of liberals, the workhouse gave rise to the potential for experimentation using the poor as guinea pigs. Losurdo again — The best material for experiments are the children of popular extraction, Bentham wrote: “An inspection-house, to which a set of children had been consigned from their birth, might afford experiments enough.” One experiment is worth remembering. Locking up the children of delinquents and “suspects” in the workhouses, one could, observed Bentham, produce an “indigenous class” that would be distinguished for its industriousness and sense of discipline. If early marriage was promoted within this class, treating the offspring as apprentices until they attained their majority, the outcome would be a race of workers as docile as possible. So eugenics began with the liberals. Wonderful.
But the French liberals were up to their ears in slavery as well.
In France, Abbé Sieyès indulged in a eugenicist utopia (or dystopia) that is even more radical than Bentham’s. The French liberal imagined a “cross” [croisement] between monkeys and “Blacks” in order to create domesticated beings adapted to servile work: “the new race of anthropomorphic monkeys.” Inspiring stuff.
Even Tocqueville speaks with enthusiasm of “the enslavement of four-fifths of the world by the other fifth.”
Here liberalism explicitly assumes the form of a theory that denies liberty to the overwhelming majority of humanity.
And while a class or race of docile workers is very useful, the underclass can be harmful or totally intolerable for society. In 1764, the lovable Benjamin Franklin wrote to a doctor: “Half the Lives you save are not worth saving, as being useless; and almost the other Half ought not to be sav’d, as being mischievous. Does your Conscience never hint to you the Impiety of being in constant Warfare against the Plans of Providence?” A century later, Tocqueville dreamed of a massive fire that hopefully will burn the “prison rabble” like “rats.”
Every step of workers’ struggle for recognition met the opposition of the liberal elites. For instance, Tocqueville condemned the constitution of trade unions and the regulation and reduction of working hours as violations of liberty.
And so we see that Trump’s vain ambition to control global trade springs from a glorious tradition centuries in the making — the liberal project to enslave humanity.
@ Steve: An eye-opening post clearly identifying how the current ”mortgage-slaves”, ”bankcard slaves” and company are chained to producing wealth for the (undefined) elite class at the expense of the slaves.
Indeed, the Australian first Governor Arthur Phillip, specifically refused slavery in Australia, so creating the convict system whereby ”free settlers” could get a human workforce for ”board & keep” until their sentences were completed and the convicts were elevated to ”free settler” status complete with land grant.
I must dig out my copies of those works and read it for myself.
Cocky, Domenico Losurdo’s “Liberalism — A Counter-history” is excellent, highly readable, and available free as a pdf.
From Michael Hudson in a recent interview — So all of this, this fight is an attempt to use oil and control of its exports in the same way that Donald Trump has used his tariff policy of saying, “We will create chaos in your economies if you don’t agree to follow what U.S. diplomats ask you to do” in the form of what Trump called give backs for his access to the U.S. economy by reducing tariffs to a less extreme level.
Well, he’s saying the same thing basically now. He wants to grab Iran’s oil, and with that, he will complete the long attempt by the United States stretching for OPEC since, I guess 2003, to take control all of the OPEC, the Arab monarchy’s oil. And Iran was the last country of all of these: Iraq, Syria, Libya, the whole range of oil exporters.
So the plan to control all oil flowing from West Asia is, simply put, a plan for enslavement. Modern economies depend on oil. You comply with US demands, no matter what the policy area is, or the US withholds supply. That’s slavery.
That’s liberalism.
David Tyler’s ‘corporate-theocratic brothel’ is an apt family-historical bookend; before his marriage to Donald Trump’s grandmother (Elizabeth Christ) once back home in Bavaria, Trump’s draft-dodging grandfather, Friedrich Trumpf, made a fortune in the Klondike running a restaurant and brothel for gold miners.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Christ_Trump
But it was Donald’s father who clinched the full package of rapacious, sadistic autocrat.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Trump
And now it seems that being President is not enough for Donald; as the son of the father and having promoted himself from son of Christ to Jesus Christ (whilst recasting and demoting Pope Leo as a “weak”, failed politician in a cowardly sleight of projective identification), his political apotheosis in attaining power well beyond his sphere of influence is made possible only by popping off the big papas – a pope, an ayatollah or two, presidents, generals, political rivals – in a military killing orgy of gleeful decapitations.
Suddenly we are witness to the vengeful nuking of the patriarchs by the enraged child of a lying, child abusing, corrupt, racist, tax-evading Almighty Father, Frederick Christ Trump.
Meanwhile Trump’s full-blown Oedipal regression to epic patricidal fury is being concealed and obscured by the greatest Machiavellian distraction of all: an Epic Fury War Game prosecuted by the only players he can tolerate: compliant, corrupted child-men with guns big enough to conceal their diminished and misshapen manhood.
The matriarch, however, remains embedded in Trump’s hollow psyche; psychopath notwithstanding, he cannot quite kill off his pretty Scottish-born, white-washing do-gooder socialite mother Mary (nee MacLeod), whose incarnations – when not being pedestaled or shot off into space to offset his casual abuse, misogyny, and sexploitation of women – are indispensable, loyal avatars in the laundering and gilding of illegal wars and the systematic transmogrification of democracy into the holy grail of authoritarianism.
Only a sociopath could wave away the killing of innocents as mere collateral damage while launching a moon rocket named after a kourotropic (child nurturing) goddess. Only a deluded scion of anti-Christs could substitute himself for the true Christ (for so many sincere believers) via manifestly Oedipal blasphemies that crassly signal his psychotic levels of hubris and dangerous coup fantasies.
Will a nuclear missile be Donald Christ Trump’s weapon of choice in a decisive attack on the few remaining patriarchs of a world now turning on him?
Is there any geopolitical wisdom remaining with sufficient collective power, integrity, and cojones to depose a despot more vengeful and father-obsessed than Hitler himself?
Perhaps the eschatologists have been right all along and the end-times are now truly upon us.
Last Supper indeed.