In 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. dreamt that his four young children would “not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” King was appealing to people’s understanding of character as both virtuous and “built” by hard work, discipline, and commitment to the greater good. King’s contemporaries knew that definition of character as well as they did the other definition: representations of people in fiction and on stage and screen.

The two meanings of character have coexisted for a long time. But in an increasingly performative world, the noble task of building character feels shunted aside by the relentless pressure to raise one’s profile within the dramatis personae on social platforms. I’ve been thinking for a while about two widely used expressions that underscore this shift.

The America 250 Party Summer that wasn’t. Who couldn’t see that one coming?

Donald Trump’s HeeHaw Follies—the UFC lawn fight, the “Great American State Fair,” the whites-only Patriot Games, the “IndyCar Freedom 250 Grand Prix”—were a sneering sucker punch not just to his bicoastal enemies but to all of us. He hijacked America’s birthday celebration with corporate jumbotron attractions that were absolutely meaningless, though they worked hard to glorify the tastes of white MAGA nationalism. As Trump’s 4H-style propaganda fair failed to draw crowds, his cabinet hit Fox News to hype some truly bizarre aspects of American life: “People are enjoying the United States of America because it’s an awesome place. We have extraordinary things like Buc-ee’s and Chick-Fil-A, very convenient to eat in your car while you’re having a phone call.”

Hear that, all you strip-mall hot tub salesmen? Your lifestyle is the envy of the world!

Among the leaked White House stories reported in Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump is one that most of us could have guessed. One morning, Trump’s press secretary Karoline Leavitt entered the Oval Office to find the president with a tube of super glue in his hand, trying to stick more gold decorations on the mantel of the marble fireplace.

“Bad taste leads to crime,” the Baron de Mareste, a French civil servant and friend of Stendahl’s, is said to have said in the nineteenth century. True and true for Donald Trump. The super glue detail nudges this excruciating anecdote into an eerie kind of pathos. The man is a rapist and a war criminal, but the image of his hunched, bloated figure putzing with DIY décor suggests a lantern-holding servant scuffling through a medieval castle. Next up, I imagine: staple-gunning hundred-dollar bills (you know, the new ones bearing his signature) directly onto the wallpaper.

I generally don’t pick sides in the FIFA World Cup until the very end, but this year I rooted for Mexico, even over the United States. Mexico deserves world-class recognition not just for surviving Donald Trump’s “Mexico’s gonna pay for it” border wall saga and his calling Mexican immigrants “rapists.” The country deserves our admiration for electing a rational, level-headed president in Claudia Sheinbaum. It’s impressive how Mexico has navigated a reckless and abusive neighbor when it is their immigrants and seasonal workers who keep the neighbor economically aloft. Mexico put together a united national team with an amazing fan base and I wanted them to win.

I watched the July 5 match against England curious to see the famed Azteca Stadium, approximately 7,220 feet above sea level. The packed-to-the-gills venue did not disappoint: It had rained heavily in Mexico City during the day and lightning had been spotted above the stadium. The mist that descended was hypnotic, a fugue before the undulating sea of green clothing. I learned from the Fox Sports announcers that the Brits had been anxious about the thin air (England’s highest elevation is 3,209 feet) and facing a massive stadium of amped-up fans. I also learned that Azteca recalled the bad juju of June 1986, when Argentina defeated England there in the quarterfinals.

The April visit of the British king and queen provided plenty of foursome photo-ops across the White House, but also plenty with just the suits: on one side, the gracious, affable figurehead; on the other, the democratically elected felon seeking to extort himself into kingly status. This unlikely pair of kings would seem to play right into Donald Trump’s favorite metaphor of statecraft: having or not having the cards.

With at least one card of conscience up his sleeve, King Charles attempted some stealth diplomacy while addressing a joint session of Congress. He reminded the legislators why their constitution has been a 250-year-long beacon for democracy, only to draw blank stares from half of them. While most of us can (or maybe can’t) imagine what Charles made of Trump and the MAGA spectacle, the king travels with his own spectacle of phantom grandeur—access that can still be counted out in bullion but weighs almost nothing. (Plus, there’s Andrew.) In the end, everything about this pair of old kings—the powerless aristocrat and the power-mad buffoon—rings hollow. And that, for better or worse, leads us to Shakespeare.

Anglo-American society never quite embraced Samuel Johnson’s idea that “nothing odd will do long.” His reference point was Tristram Shandy (1766), Laurence Sterne’s odd autobiographical novel filled with so many asides and digressions that it eventually cops to its own pointlessness. Though right about the trend-setting potential of Tristram Shandy, Dr. Johnson was completely wrong about oddity within culture.

Amid the conformity of British capitalism and especially that of the American version, oddity endures but is constantly displaced by new oddities vying for consumer attention. We are often too busy or too incurious about the previously odd to track its subsequent fate. History being full of curios and oddities is what makes it seem clunky, non-seamless, and non-optimized to devotees of presentism. The internet dutifully organizes the previously avant-garde within a mainstream buffet, enabling consumers to pick and choose the “alt” to suit current tastes and esthetics (tattoos, piercings, Doc Martens) without the bother of historical context.

Donald Trump’s signature extortion line of 2025 was delivered right out of the gate last January. Ironically, he said it to the last person in the world he would dare extort: Vladimir Putin. “We can do it the easy way or the hard way,” he told the Russian President in regard to the war with Ukraine. Although Trump’s FCC lackey Brendan Carr used the phrase months later in attempting to pressure the FCC to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air, Trump owns the letter and the spirit of this gangland “proposition.” He said it again on January 9, this time in regard to annexing Greenland, as he regaled the oil executives he called to the White House with scenarios of Venezuelan plunder.

In the mob world, “We can do this easy way or the hard way” is usually delivered to someone in a very bad place. In extreme situations, victims are aware that if they don’t submit they will be tortured to death (the hard way) whereas if they do they will merely be fatally shot (the easy way). With the White House rackets, many have paid to take the easy way: Columbia, Harvard, Cornell, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Virginia; YouTube, Disney, Meta, ABC, and most notably CBS. Pepper that with a bunch of white-shoe law firms and voilà! . . . a one-pan dictatorship for a crowd. During the Year of Submission, it seemed that this is what you did when your number was called: capitulate to the criminal threatening to remove your organization’s congressionally approved federal funding and/or tax exempt status.