Nightmare on Pennsylvania Ave - and Prince Harry’s new Gambit
American life has turned into a dream sequence from a bad horror movie, that scene where the haunted hero suddenly sits bolt upright in bed, after a torrent of fearful images invades his or her sleep, accompanied by a sinister laugh track.
It can’t be real: A power-engorged president Beta testing martial law by sending troops into made-up emergencies in American cities, a certifiably insane head of Health and Human Services with zero medical background unleashing disease on America, a boatload of Venezuelans whose identities and intent we still don't know after eight days, blown up by the U.S. military on the unproven premise they were fentanyl-smuggling fiends; ICE agents, like Brownshirts, breaking car windows to extract petrified immigrant. Swimming behind each increasingly fascistic executive order by an intellectually lazy president is the pallid, malevolent face of cartoon villain Stephen Miller, working late in his office on his deportation quotas.
And as morning dawns, we are freshly assailed by the coarsening of American public life, circling the drain. We no longer even blink when the sitting vice president tweets at a citizen who called the Venezuela strike a war crime, “I don't give a shit what you call it,” or the White House press secretary sneering about a network news anchor, “She’s stupid. You can put that on the record” or the Treasury secretary, who is supposed to be Wall Street’s grown-up in the room, threatening to punch a top housing finance official “in the fucking face.”
So why is anyone surprised by the crudeness of the messages in the Epstein birthday book — vile misogyny like Mar-a-Lago crony Joel Pashcow’s contribution of a posterboard-sized check mocked up to look like payment from Trump to Epstein for a “fully depreciated” woman for $22,500. Or venture capitalist William Elkus's remembrance of a trip to the Midwest with Epstein where it was difficult to “tell the difference between the girls and the hogs.” (It was just meant to be a joke, Elkus explained to the New York Times.) This has always been Trump’s world: profane, leering, bullying, exploitative gorilla men who love to haw-haw-haw at women’s body parts.
And to counterbalance them, we have the morally blank co-hort of centibillionaire tech bros and their ilk summoned to a White House dinner celebrating America’s AI dominance. It swiftly turned into an on-camera ring-kissing of their fat-fingered host, who prodded them to declare titanic investments in AI in the U.S., all thanks to DJT. How gratifying that Meta’s slippery salamander Mark Zuckerberg was caught on a hot mic, apologizing to Trump for his hesitant reply pledging $600 billion through 2028. “I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with.” What a worm.
Meanwhile, as Trump amps his warrior bona fides by rebranding the Defense Department as the Department of War, its Secretary Pete Hegseth, in his American flag-lined jacket, now stands with his legs so far apart, he's almost doing the splits. Yet the two real wars in Gaza and Ukraine Trump promised to end are running hotter than ever. Israel has just told a million Palestinians to evacuate Gaza City ahead of an invasion that Bibi Netanyahu warns “is only the beginning” and Trump’s covert Svengali Vladimir Putin’s response to Trump’s Alaska peace overture was a glide bomb attack in the eastern Donbas region on Tuesday, killing 20 Ukrainian civilians lining up for their pensions. As Trump alienates America’s traditional allies with blistering tariffs, we see what the alternative world order looks like, with the chilling fraternity of evil assembled by Chinese President Xi Jinping last week - the squat crime boss of North Korea Kim Jong Un and the rodent-like Putin, happily brought in from the cold by Trump, joining Xi at the Beijing equivalent of the Nuremberg rally to celebrate the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II.
The contentment on Xi’s plump, pursed face was palpable as he savored not just the show of military might, but the rise in excellence of Chinese academia even as Trump destroys ours. China now dominates the electric vehicles market as the White House pulls back, in favor of the fossil fuel planet-burners of yesteryear. It was Trump’s immediate pulling out of the Paris Agreement in 2017, after years of American diplomatic efforts to persuade China to join, that finally convinced Xi, to quote Succession, that Americans “are not serious people.” No wonder Chinese social media likes to refer to the 47th U.S. president as Trump Chuan Jianguo—“Trump the Nation Builder” - the nation of China, that is.
Wake me up when it’s over.
Prince Harry does Prince Charming
At last, Prince Harry has got it right, which is bad news for the Prince of Wales. After five years of exuding choler and wrath and spouting therapeutic gibberish, the ginger whinger finally realized that all the royals have to do to win public enthusiasm is zip around the UK and smile. Watching Harry’s high-gusto balloon sword fight with a sweetly gratified, disabled nine-year-old girl at the WellChild Awards in London and the dance moves he busted at the Children in Need Community Recording Studio in Nottingham, brought a shaft of royal optimism to a country whose national motto should be “It will be ready in six weeks.”
As Harry’s buoyant photo ops dueled with Prince William and Kate’s engagements for press coverage this week, you had to ask: Who would you rather hang with? The Tigger-like Duke of Sussex or sober, appropriate William and infinitely perfect Kate, taking tea and cake with a cooing chapter of one of Queen Elizabeth’s most beloved but groaningly square charities, The Women’s Institute. Probably more fun was to be had at the king’s diverting house party at Balmoral, where His Majesty and Camilla entertained such national treasures as glamorous Ab Fab fossil Joanna Lumley and rollicking human rights barrister Baroness Helena Kennedy, who kicked over the traces by not conforming to the tartan dress code. (As well she should. One suspects the tartan tradition was entirely made up to let King James I wear a skirt.)
Money Talks
Harry’s own reset, a positivity campaign he hopes will endear him to his still estranged father and a negative British public (those cheers in Nottingham were a good start), came with a new unexpected gambit—a contribution from his own bank account of £1.1 million to the Children in Need project. It cannily unleashed for William the uneasy question of what exactly the 43-year-old Prince of Wales is doing with the £23 million a year he gets from the Duchy of Cornwall. Back when Charles was Prince of Wales, he was a powerhouse of philanthropy, starting at age 27, when he used his £7,400 severance pay from the Royal Navy to seed The Prince’s Trust, which has gone on to raise more than £100 million a year. Without wishing to be churlish, I can’t help pointing out that William’s annual Earthshot Prize of £1 million (covered by sponsors) to five promising innovators in the climate change space is a little underwhelming. But perhaps I am now too American, used to such big dick largesse as John Doerr’s $1.1 billion gift to Stanford’s School of Sustainability.
While the British press obsesses over the question of a Harry/Charles reunion (getting warmer) or a Harry/William rapprochement (not gonna happen), the king is, I am told, currently less irritated with the prodigal Harry than he is with his elder son and heir. Somehow, William’s parenting dedication always seems couched as a tacit criticism of the king’s own paternal deficiencies. And after five confirmed family vacations in the past seven months, William’s first-week-back diary pulsated with two outings: a father-daughter excursion to a Women's Rugby World Cup pool match and a stroll through the Natural History Museum’s new gardens. Charles, despite his battle with cancer, has carried out official engagements on 175 days during the past 12 months. (Fyi, when the deft Mark Bolland was Charles’s spin doctor in the ’90s, Bolland divided up the country into local TV news markets, and ensured that Charles hit each one with visible visits.)
The Past as Prelude
After stewing for five years as prince without portfolio in Montecito, it feels as if Harry has got over Meghan’s vision of royalty as a version of global celebrity—and renewed his vows to the old royal MO of being a messenger of validation. This is what Queen Elizabeth was trying to show the newly wed Duchess of Sussex when she invited Meghan to accompany her on her first outing as granddaughter-in-law, not to shine on a glamorous royal red carpet, but to open a six-lane toll bridge in the town of Chester, near Liverpool. The queen wore a festive lime-green Cat in the Hat trilby, a matching coat, and white gloves, and had rarely been seen having such a good time at a public engagement that wasn’t about horses. (As her grandmother Queen Mary once said to a relative, “You are a member of the British royal family. We are never tired and we all love hospitals.”) Now, Harry is showing his father that he understands the fulfilling dullness of duty once more —and is ready to do the hard work of redemption.
Tina, I sometimes think you’re on the Sussex payroll. Harry is far too old, and far too much has happened between him and the RF, for him to be waltzing back into the UK trying to revive his 2011 “cheeky Harry” persona. His schtick came off as silly and performative. Men with real gravitas don’t behave that way. And yesterday in Nottingham the streets were empty—no one showed up to greet him. And as for the 1M donation? There’s a world of difference between “pledged” and “donated”; as with everything where the Meghan & Harry are concerned, a turn of a word makes a world of difference.
What a pleasure to read your lively story while drinking coffee this morning. You seemed to cover everything newsworthy from the past couple of days, and your writing sparkles. Thanks.