We’ve met the Horsemen. We’ve named the disease. Now comes the question that has been keeping me up at night, the one that started as a seed and grew into something I can’t pull out of my pea brain no matter how hard I try.
Is any of this accidental?
Bear with me. I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’m an eighty year old man who has been watching American politics since 1964, who has seen administrations come and go, who has lived through assassinations and Watergate and Vietnam and Iran-Contra and all the other moments when the republic looked into the abyss and stepped back from the edge.
This feels different.
Let me give you two possibilities and you can decide which one keeps you up at night more.
Possibility One: Don Quixote has lost his Sancho.
The man on the white horse is genuinely, measurably, visibly in cognitive decline. The rambling. The confusions. The speeches that start in one place and arrive nowhere. The July 4th celebration where people walked out mid-speech and he noticed, which was ironically the most coherent observation he’s made in months.
If this is true, then what we are watching is a man whose handlers are managing a deteriorating situation in real time, feeding him day old nuclear codes and hoping nothing lands on the wrong desk while Project 2025 runs the actual government from whatever think tank conference room they’ve claimed as their own.
The puppet show is running without a puppeteer. The chaos is not a strategy. It’s just chaos, and the most dangerous kind, chaos with a red button attached.
That should terrify you.
Possibility Two: The shell game is working exactly as designed.
Watch the shells. The pea isn’t under any of them until he wants it to be. The confusion is strategic. The rambling is cover. The apparent disorder is actually a remarkably effective method of keeping opponents off balance, exhausted, and unable to focus long enough on any single outrage before the next one lands.
Every morning a new fire. Every afternoon a new crisis. Every evening a new enemy. Nobody can keep up. Nobody can organize around a target that keeps moving. The media chases the noise. The opposition chases the media. And while everyone is looking at the shells, the quiet work of dismantling institutions, consolidating power, and lining pockets continues uninterrupted.
If this is true then we are not dealing with a declining old man. We are dealing with something considerably more calculated and considerably more dangerous.
That should also terrify you.
Here is what makes this particularly uncomfortable, both possibilities can be simultaneously true.
A man can be in genuine cognitive decline AND be surrounded by people using that decline as useful cover for their own agenda. Project 2025 didn’t need a genius. They needed a vessel. Something loud enough to keep the cameras pointed at it while the real work happened offstage.
Don Quixote tilting at windmills while Sancho quietly empties the treasury.
The bone spurs hero on the white horse waving to the crowd while the Horsemen do their actual work behind him.
So where does that leave the rest of us?
Tired. Angry. Occasionally writing things at midnight that surprise us in the morning. Planting seeds and hoping they find soil somewhere useful. Asking friends in driveways whether they have the right to complain about things they won’t lift a finger to change. Wrapping fish guts in whatever we can find because the newspaper is gone and the commons it created went with it.
It leaves us here, at the kitchen table, coffee going cold, dogs asleep on the floor, trying to figure out how a republic survives four horsemen, one on a white horse, rider with a red button and a grudge.
I don’t have the complete answer. I’m not sure anyone does right now.
What I do know is this. The republic has survived worse, barely, sometimes, and not without cost. What it has never survived is a citizenry that decided the situation was too overwhelming to engage with. The bunker is tempting. The dance floor on top of it is genuinely appealing some days.
But the door stays open. The Substack keeps publishing. The memes keep landing. Someone who smiles when they hear something true they weren’t expecting.
And somewhere out there, someone is reading this who wasn’t reading it last week. Someone who picked it up the way you used to pick up a newspaper left on a lunch counter, not because they were looking for it, but because it was just sitting there.
Comments are Disabled