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.

America’s destruction of its own government and economy continues to shock the world outside of bribe-paying oligarchs. Not just Canada and Mexico but our allies across Europe and Asia look on with horror as Donald Trump’s ICE and Border Patrol thugs beat up and kidnap people on American streets and murder Venezuelan fishermen in the Caribbean. While a federal shutdown dragged on for almost two months, the MAGA-aligned Supreme Court gave a thumbs-up to Trump denying children SNAP benefits and Trump’s clown cabinet made the TV news rounds saying that inflation was a hoax and that prices were actually coming down.

Official government websites now function like backed-up sewers, filled with Trump Administration propaganda and lies about political enemies, the state of economy, and the safety of cities and communities. The Homeland Security site, in particular, engages in performative immaturity that would get you fired from any company in America. Its vulgar “messaging” mirrors whatever foreign-bot-generated AI content Trump shares on Truth Social. All of this contributes to the global impression that the word of the United States cannot be trusted.

For years I’ve taken a route that runs along Cayuga Lake when I visit relatives on another of New York’s Finger Lakes. On the drive there, I reach this stretch just north of Ithaca around noon, and on a sunny day it’s a beautiful 20-minute drive. On the return trip, though, I hit Route 89 early in the morning, when the hilly road glistens with dew and deer.

Most times you see them in adjacent fields, in groups of three and four, always in perfect Christmas card formation, a little mist for effect. Slowing down usually triggers their game of Red Light Green Light 1-2-3, where they scuffle slightly ahead and suddenly stop, bolt briefly and stop again, more of the scuffle-and-bolt until they finally clear the road. You wonder why you didn’t “Seek Alt Route,” like the yellow signs warn when men in lifts are chain-sawing tree limbs. Why did I think it so important to save 20 minutes by going this way and not another?

In America, a lot of the discord on the Israel-Hamas War and the complex and frustrating history of Palestinian statehood stems from the need for a villain.

It’s hard to get moral ambiguity on a piece of cardboard from Staples. Instead, you define your villain and make every attribute from the dropdown (colonialism, imperialism, apartheid) stick. With the widespread protests following the murder of George Floyd, the villain began, understandably, as the police. In the aftermath of the major demonstrations, however, it evolved into anyone who was not a self-avowed anti-racist.

After the October 7 Hamas attacks, American progressives who may not have previously embraced the Palestinian cause found in Israelis a villain as clearcut as the one from June 2020. They held up signs with many variations on the word “solution.” All that tedious history of wars and failed negotiations could be rolled up in “colonialism” and other crimes against humanity attributed to the villain.

The financial panic that began with the failure of Silicon Valley Bank introduced us to an odd phrase for such a sterile, suburban-backdrop event: being made whole.

Being made whole is an outcome people expect from lovers—naively as it turns out, at least according to songs. What really plucks the heartstrings is not that the people desired often fail to honor this expectation but the way in which those doing the desiring confront reality. This is what reroutes the Love Train into the self-help aisle.

But in regard to banks, whose idea was it to describe a failed bank’s large depositors holding on to every last cent as being “made whole”? Does the simple fact of having assets make you, as an entity, deserve to be whole? I might buy that concept if all depositors were people, but they’re not.

The Marjorie Taylor Greene in white fur meme had nearly played itself out by the time Michael Che added the coup-de-grâce of “Cocaine Bear.” The pitifully comic spectacle of Green’s incivility at President Biden’s State of the Union address and the gory comic spectacle of a coked-up CGI bear are neck and neck when it comes to insulting real live bears.

We seem to be having a Bear Moment—pure coincidence but nonetheless illuminating. In addition to Cocaine Bear, there’s a Winnie-the-Pooh horror movie, the Iranian film No Bears, and a streaming series The Bear. Since last year we’ve been in a Fed-induced Bear Market, and Russia’s war on Ukraine has brought the Sleeping Bear of old political cartoons back to life.