"If you were looking for a portrait of an American empire in decline, it arrived on Monday evening when Donald J. Trump, in the thick of a bout with COVID-19, checked himself out of the hospital at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and was flown back to the White House on Marine One. Then he climbed the curved staircase, reached the balcony, and removed his mask in what appeared to be a gesture of defiance. Of what—The Media? The Deep State scientists? Reality itself?—it was not immediately clear. But that trademark pout was unmistakable. This was authoritarian chic. The president was looking at something very strongly, that's for sure, though it will not be an ounce of humility or growth as a human being after he was struck by the very disease he so long downplayed and ignored at the cost of so many American lives. Presumably, the president thinks he's gone too far down the road of pretending the virus simply does not exist—at least as a major problem for American society—to go back now. Soon enough, he'd posted a video doubling down on his don't let it dominate your life language. "Nobody that's a leader would not do what I did," he said. Then a man who's on at least three different treatments, and has spent time on oxygen assistance, and whose doctor refuses to comment on the state of his lungs in public, offered an extra dose of delusion: "Maybe I'm immune." Yeah, maybe his bout with the virus is over. Almost immediately, his return was made into a campaign ad, the war machine ferrying him back to the locus of power set against the roiling purple sky. He wants this story written, and yet it must be. He is, after all, the president. And his fans will love it. The faithful demand a figure of strength, the myth of the leader as a physical specimen as well as a loud and belligerent voice trumpeting the virtues of a past America that never existed, spray-painted onto an extant nation in very real decay. This country has gorged itself on the excesses of empire, allowed the muscles of democracy to atrophy until the republic itself grew infirm, occasionally lashing out at the world as its rich and its powerful ate up all the resources and gave the people circuses to compensate until one day, one of the exhibits escaped the tent. Many of us bear our own responsibility, large and small, for this. All of us are now facing the consequences of living in this reverse-Truman Show, a program produced by the child of P.T. Barnum and the Mad Hatter. A sprawling and ambitious country is now reduced to glinting off a television screen, greed and ignorance wearing away at our image of ourselves until, now, it is close to unrecognizable. The rest of the world, we know, now looks upon us with horror."