This article is taken from the June 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Find our subscription offers here.
The curved black legs poked above the treeline of the South Lawn of the White House as though a mechanical spider had been flipped on its back. The sounds of hammers and drills, as much a part of spring in America as the chirp of the Northern Cardinal and the croak of toads, floated over the fence as the hardhats assembled the bleachers. Normally, you can walk up to the fence and contemplate the opaque windows of “The People’s House” in a keyed-up crowd of tourists, cops and beggars, but this time there was a checkpoint on Constitution Avenue and I couldn’t get past the soldiers.
The night before, 21-year-old Nasire Best had opened fire on the Secret Service security booth near the corner Pennsylvania Avenue and 17th Street NW. He shot a soldier in the stomach before the agents killed him. D.C. felt more on edge than usual, but it always feels on edge. The crazies and tent camps have thinned out since last August, when Donald Trump called out the National Guard because nothing else could fix D.C.’s perpetual “crime emergency”. But the proximity of power is like a Van de Graaff generator. Your hair stands on end.
Nasire Best’s shoot-out was the third in a month. In late April, 31-year-old Cole Tomas came all the way from California to shoot up the White House Correspondents’ dinner at the Hilton because he thought Donald Trump was Hitler. In early May, 45-year-old Michael Marx, a Texan with a Florida conviction for drug dealing, started shooting near the Washington Memorial and shouting, “Kill me, kill me, kill me.” The Secret Service shot him dead. It’s rare that an American gets prompt service from the federal government.
We call them “lone gunmen”. Guns are everywhere. So is loneliness, the death mask behind America’s mandatory smile. A shrink once told me that America is no longer making neurotics like it used to do. Everyone is now a narcissist. They lacked the conscientiousness that motivates a neurotic to do better.
There is a syndrome and a pill for everything in the American mind, but the rich and thick annals of American pathology have no name for the kind of attacks on America’s leaders and symbols. The closest, “suicide by cop”, was coined in 1983 by Karl Harris, an ex-cop turned psychologist in Los Angeles. But it’s also a clustered form of political violence, or even domestic terrorism. The “propaganda of the deed”, as the European anarchists called it, driven not by cells and ideology but by disorientation and networked psychosis.
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I retreated up the street to the Cheesecake Factory. It was dark and damp inside. The booths, the tables and the menus were sticky. The people were fat and from out of town.
I felt at home. Nothing is forever in America, apart from your preferred chains. Wherever you go, they wait for you, smiling assassins ready to clog your arteries. It’s like the Arabic parable of “Appointment in Samarra”, the story that Somerset Maugham brought west before John O’Hara domesticated it in 1934 by turning its protagonist from a Baghdadi merchant to a Pennsylvanian car dealer.
My server got me a 16-oz. Coke (190 calories). I eased in with a Small Plate from the Old World (fried zucchini, 1,000 calories). I did an Appetizer of Ahi Tuna Poke Nachos (1,020 calories), a gustatory tribute from the dependencies of Hawaii and Mexico. I cleansed my palate with a complimentary refill of the Coke, because the soy and salt were making my temples throb and it was free. I put away a French Dip Cheeseburger (1,620 calories). I turned down a slice of cheesecake (around 1,250 calories), because gluttony is otiose.
Robert F. Kennedy recommends that a man of my vintage eats between 2,000 and 2,600 calories a day, but Robert F. Kennedy was at a desk in the Department of Health and Human Services on Independence Ave, not a corner booth in the Cheesecake Factory on H Street.
I had put away 4,020 calories for lunch, following my light complimentary breakfast at the hotel (Parisian Omelet, Yoghurt Parfait, Pastry Basket), and preceding my date with density that night, a pressing editorial consultation with Victorino Matus of the Washington Free Beacon at Joe’s Seafood, Prime Steak & Stone Crab (“What’s Crackin”?”). Lunch came to $53.75, plus 6 per cent DC sales tax and 20 per cent service makes $68.38. About 50 quid. Everything is so expensive in America these days.
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The big black spider legs conjoined into an arch.
I was reminded of the Gateway Arch that opens to the west in St. Louis, Missouri and may be the world’s tallest arch, and then, because America collapsed the East into the West after 9/11, of the crossed swords of Saddam Hussein’s Victory Arch in Baghdad.
A 4,000-seat arena and a 92-foot-tall, 600-ton, octagon-shaped wrestling cage topped by the spider-leg sound and lighting rig called the “The Claw” were built on the South Lawn for “UFC Freedom 250”, Donald Trump’s 80th birthday party on June 14th. The Claw’s Stars and Stripes-bedecked roof was taller than that of the White House. The mixed martial promoter Ultimate Fighting Championship was supplying this $60 million entertainment for free. Our President thinks he is nobody’s fool.
It is an American tradition that all American traditions get larger. The accumulated amenities of the White House can now host a decathlon. Warren Harding invited tennis champs to the White House for a knock. Teddy Roosevelt sparred in the White House gym with Mike Donovan, an ex-middleweight champion, then switched to jujitsu. An artillery captain cross-countered him and permanently damaged his left eye.
FDR installed the pool for polio therapy and got the public to pay for it by subscription with the help of the New York Daily News, for he too was nobody’s fool. Eisenhower added a putting green on the South Lawn. Richard Nixon bowled alone in a single-lane alley installed beneath the North Portico Driveway. George W. Bush added a horseshoe pit, wherein he demonstrated his shoe-flinging skills to Queen Elizabeth II. Barack Obama expanded the tennis courts for full-court basketball.
Trump’s only peer for originality is Herbert Hoover. In 1928, Hoover’s physician, Admiral Joel T. Boone, invented “Hoover-Ball”, a mixture of tennis and volleyball in which Hoover’s flunkies competed for favour by lobbing a 6-lb medicine ball over an 8-foot net on the tennis court. Trump’s cage fights are in this tradition, but they place the downward mobility of taste and the theatre of violence in the most upward place of all. This is just an obvious symbol of a wider institutional degradation that is reaching critical density. Americans must wrestle with the consequences.
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I rolled out of the Cheesecake Factory like I’d swallowed a Hoover-Ball. America is the greatest show on Earth, but the run-up to its 250th birthday felt muted. Showbiz hates Trump so much that the “Freedom 250” concert planned for the Fourth of July on the National Mall in DC was cancelled because no big names wanted to share his stage.
The fallback for the Fourth is a military parade. Trump’s enemies will decry this as sinister in a late-Soviet way, but the Soviets didn’t alternate marching bands with Vanilla Ice and a guy who used to be in Milli Vanilli. The national anthem will be sung, and then Trump will do his little dance to the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A”.
The greatness of America does not lie in its leaders or its public architecture and formal rituals. It is in the American people. In Tsarist Russia, the People’s Will was a nihilist terrorist group. There are nihilists and terrorists in America, and pseudo-czars in its coagulated bureaucracy, but the people’s will still trusts in God, guns, the Constitution and the credit card. Yet it is impossible to see stunt bikes flying through the air over the South Lawn, and Ilai Topuria and Justin Gaethje fighting a 155-lb unification bout in the Cage, without fearing that Mike Judge’s 2006 satire Idiocracy is now the best guide to America’s public culture, and that the American people will get the tab.
Still, America’s mad circus of democracy and plutocracy, regulation and fantasy may be its salvation as much as its ruin. To be the greatest and the biggest is to be the hardest and the fastest, as well as the loudest and most lurid, and the dumbest and the smartest. America is excess all areas and always was. Its story is not over yet. Like the meme says, “The European mind cannot comprehend this.”
