a window on the world

Jermaine Fowler 

 May 29, 2026 (Friday)

The cranes came on a Tuesday. By Thursday two star-spangled steel arches hung over the South Lawn, over the ground where the East Wing stood until he had it knocked down last fall, and under the arches men in hard hats were bolting a cage to the grass for a UFC fight on June 14, his eightieth birthday, the loud center of the year-long thing called America 250.

Five thousand seats face his windows. The fighters weigh in on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, and everyone else gets jumbotron patriotism, fenced into the Ellipse across the street to watch on a screen they could have watched from a couch.

He paved the Rose Garden too. Jackie Kennedy’s roses, the lawn Bunny Mellon laid out in 1962, ripped up and floored in white stone because, he explained, the wet grass kept catching women’s high heels. Flowers to stone. Stone to blood, in two weeks, when the cage opens.

The show keeps shrinking, though. One act at a time, the concert lineup walks off the bill: Young MC, gone, and Bret Michaels, gone, and even Milli Vanilli (can we blame them for chasing a check, since who on earth is filling a stadium for Milli Vanilli) declining now to not-sing for him.

Apparently, the check wasn’t enough.

The Blue Origin rocket came apart on the launchpad yesterday in a ball of fire, the billionaires lifting out for orbit because they have colonized everything down here and can smell what is coming. And he wants his face on a $250 bill, in the slot a country keeps for its dead.

Past the fence, a family runs the numbers again, the premium doubled and the repo notice in the mail and the paycheck spent before the month was, while up at the house the gold goes higher: the rich digging bunkers and pouring monuments to themselves on the same grass, in the same week, that everyone else is sinking under.

The party goes up out front. What rots, rots underneath.

An octagon fools you. It gives the look of room, so a fighter circles and gives ground and trusts the space at his back, and the space betrays him, because eight short walls keep cutting the angle until the man across from him has nowhere left to be chased to. There is a cage going up on the South Lawn. Here is the part worth knowing. It is not new, and it is not foreign. We built it. Trump hung the portrait of the man who built it first behind his own desk, because Andrew Jackson is his favorite president.

In 1835, dairy farmers in Oswego County, New York, pressed a wheel of cheddar that weighed fourteen hundred pounds and sent it to Jackson on a cart pulled by twenty-four horses. It toured New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore. Then it sat in the White House vestibule and rotted for two years.

On Washington’s birthday, 1837, Jackson threw the doors open and let the public come eat it. A journalist named Benjamin Perley Poore was there. “For hours did a crowd of men, women and boys hack at the cheese,” he wrote, “many taking large hunks of it away with them.” The carpet was slippery with cheese. Nothing else was talked about at Washington that day. The whole thing was gone in two hours.

Only a small piece was saved for the President’s use.

The smell stuck. It hung over the house for months, you could catch it for blocks, and the next president banned food from White House receptions to be rid of it. Doors flung wide, floors fouled, the crowd hauling off hunks of a thing that had rotted in the hall since before they were invited. That was the party. Underneath it ran something else.

Washington had no sewer system until 1871. Raw waste pooled into a marsh beside the house, and the water the family inside drank ran seven blocks downhill from a field where the city’s filth was dumped, hauled there each day at government expense. The water bred disease and fouled the well and killed, in all likelihood, three of the four presidents who lived in the house between 1840 and 1850. Harrison, dead a month into the job. Taylor, dead after the cherries and iced milk. Polk, dead three months after he left.

Jackson did one more thing that rhymes with now. There was a national bank then, the one place that set the value of money out of the president’s reach. Jackson wanted it in reach. A president who controls the money can flood the country with it right before an election, hand everyone a good year, and call the boom his own. The bank was built to stop him. So he broke it.

He pulled the government’s cash out, scattered it to banks that owed him. For this, Jackson was the first president ever censured by the Senate. Two years on, the economy he had been propping collapsed into the Panic of 1837. It landed the month the next man took office.

That war is on the calendar again. Trump threatens the Fed and anyone who does not comply; his Justice Department, hunting for a charge, goes rooting for anything it could take to court.

The doors stayed open while Jackson cleared a country out. Picture a Cherokee grandmother on the Georgia road in the snow of 1838, walking because a paper Jackson signed told her to walk, one of four thousand who never reach the barren territory that was to be their new home.

Now pull up the video of a father in a Chicago kitchen, opening his door before light to men in masks who fold him into a van and drive him to a county where he knows no one, because a paper this president signed told them to. Two centuries lie between the grandmother and the father, and the paper is the same paper.

Standing at the fence are the American citizens he is throwing this party for. In April the average American bank savings dropped to the lowest since 2022, low enough that an economist told a reporter he first read the figure as a typo.

Fifty-nine of every hundred adults could not put their hands on a thousand dollars if the car died tomorrow. Forty-two million sit one stalled vote in Congress away from an empty refrigerator. That is the slab the cage is bolted into.

Whatever he spends to fill it, the room will not fill. The acts keep quitting, the rocket would not climb, and at this month’s graduations the seniors booed the famous men who stood up to praise the machines coming for their jobs — one of them called the noise a single flat groan of “this sucks.” He cannot keep talent on the stage or the young quiet in the bleachers, because they have run the same numbers the family at the fence ran, and the gold climbing out front is billed to the going-under out back, and the invoice has come due.

The same trick Jackson pulled with a gargantuan block of cheese, the UFC cage pulls. The chandeliers and the arch and the ballroom bunker are there so your eye climbs, and while it climbs you get distracted from the democracy crumbling, or the maxed card, or get distracted from the fact that the fecal field is still sitting uphill from the well. Poore watched the crowd in 1837 hack the wheel down to rind and carry it home, and on the fourteenth the crowd will fill five thousand seats around a cage on the same lawn.

How’s this for a political scouting report? White man in his early 60s from deep-red South Carolina. Progressive views on civil rights and a deeply held Catholic faith. Happily married to one woman for more than 30 years. Three kids. Used to teach Sunday school. Has a loyal dog that sits at his feet when he’s working in his office. Can carry a tune. Speaks from the heart about loss and grief, having lost a parent and two siblings when he was a child. Adept at cracking jokes.

I’m not suggesting that Stephen Colbert run for president. I’m merely pointing out that he embodies the phrase “paragon of decency.”

Decency: it used to be a virtue in the public square. The words that finally squelched Senator Joe McCarthy’s Commie-hunting reign of terror came from a lawyer for the U.S. Army, Joseph Welch, who, unable to bear another moment of the senator’s evidence-free bullying, said, “Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you no sense of decency?” Thereafter, McCarthy became a pariah, censured in the Senate by a vote of 67 to 22 and getting the silent treatment even from his fellow Republicans.

Now it is Colbert, the paragon of decency, who is getting kicked to the curb. Nominally, it’s because his parent network, CBS, decided that his show, the top-rated in late-night TV, was too expensive to sustain. Realistically, it’s because the network’s parent company, Paramount, sacrificed Colbert to appease Donald Trump when it was seeking federal approval for its merger with Larry Ellison’s Skydance. Spiritually, it’s because we live in a time of inverted norms, where the president can casually post something like “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” yet Stephen Colbert is the one castigated for being divisive.

Of late, there have been signs that inverted-norm fatigue may finally be taking hold. No one really bought the jive of the New York Post when it tried to gin up a new wave of outrage over Jimmy Kimmel, going to elaborate rhetorical lengths to reverse-engineer a joke he’d made about Melania Trump two days before the thwarted assassination attempt at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner—“Mrs. Trump, you have a glow like an expectant widow”—into a veiled threat on the president.

The First Lady and the president pretended to be gravely offended, and their lackey at the F.C.C., Brendan Carr, duly ordered an early review of the broadcast licenses held by Disney, the parent company of Kimmel’s network, ABC. But unlike the F.C.C.’s last go-round with Kimmel, when their intimidation succeeded in getting the network to suspend the comedian over a crack he’d made about Charlie Kirk’s killer, Disney did not buckle. Notwithstanding his beer-bloated early years as a co-host of Comedy Central’s “The Man Show,” the latter-day Kimmel is also a conspicuously decent family man, too menschy to be sold as a dangerous inflammateur.

The F.C.C. has no regulatory oversight of social media, but if it did, Truth Social, owned by Carr’s boss, would be a far more deserving target of high dudgeon and taste-policing. The same December week that Kimmel fought back tears while discussing the recent death of his best friend and bandleader, Cleto Escobedo, the president attributed Rob Reiner’s tragic death to “the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction” with “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” Three months later, Trump observed the passing of Robert Mueller by posting, “I’m glad he’s dead.”

Still, any potential turning of the tide comes too late for Colbert. He is losing his show, as Kimmel nearly lost his, precisely because he poses a threat to indecency. It’s akin to how the authors of the Project 2025 playbook proposed to defund the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (and succeeded) in part because of its involvement in “Sesame Street,” which they described as “biased to the Left.” I wrote a book about “Sesame Street.” I can tell you that, ethos-wise, it hasn’t changed much since it premiered in 1969 with the enthusiastic support of the Nixon administration. What’s changed is that the decency it represents is an affront to the indecent people now in power.

Last month I attended a taping of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” at the Ed Sullivan Theater. Since the start of this year, the episodes have had an elegiac feel, ever more so as the final broadcast approaches. The day I was there, Maggie Rogers, in a nod to Bette Midler’s serenade of Johnny Carson in his penultimate “Tonight Show” episode, sang a lovely rendition of “One More for My Baby (And One for the Road).”

It was a sweet moment, if of an entirely different energy than the 1992 broadcast. Midler’s choice of a Sinatra-associated saloon song came freighted with Carson’s own dark history: the cigarettes, the bad moods, the divorces, and the D.U.I.’s, all of which were as much a part of his persona as his wit and elegance. (Indeed, Dana Carvey, whose short-lived 1996 sketch show gave Colbert his first screen time, does an inspired bit in which he freestyles impersonations of Carson getting pulled over by a state trooper: “Sorry, officer, I didn’t know I was swerving. I had two Slippery Monkeys at the Hook ’n’ Crook.”)

Whereas Carson was consumed by demons and David Letterman by self-loathing, Colbert is an anomalously wholesome and ministerial figure for late night—more Fred Rogers than Don Draper. When I interviewed him for a magazine feature four years ago, Colbert told me, with the caveat that he knew it sounded pretentious, that his program was a “show about love.” He then quoted E. E. Cummings: “Love is the every only God / who spoke this earth so glad and big.”

Being present for his guests as a good listener, he explained, was an act of love. His house band’s music was an expression of love. So, too, were his monologues, the very material that placed him in his own network’s crosshairs. “What I found after a couple of years of doing the show,” he observed, “is that we often realize we love something as we’re losing it. Many things were lost in the last five years: standards, morals, a shared reality, a shared civic engagement, a lot of friends. So by addressing loss, that’s how the show talks about love.”

Now we must prepare for the loss of “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.” Already, the format it represents—the comforting, lavishly produced late-night talk show with a host, a band, a desk, and a couch—faces potential extinction, what with podcasts, YouTubers, and a weaselly new class of network overlords. The difference is that Colbert’s show was put down pre-emptively, like a dog in the care of Kristi Noem. That being the harsh reality, let us share, in its final days, our love for the show about love.—David Kamp for Air Mail

(The final episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert will air on May 21.)

Photograph by Scott Kowalchyk/CBS via Getty Images.

“Don’t try this at home.” As a child, that sounded straightforward. Do not attempt a piledriver in the backyard. Do not whack your cousin with a folding chair unless you are prepared for your mother to enter the room like an avenging regulatory agency. The warning was about bodies. Bones. Gravity. The ordinary physics of why human beings should not model their domestic lives on WrestleMania.

Perhaps we misunderstood the warning. Maybe the most dangerous thing professional wrestling ever taught anyone was not how to jump from the top rope, but how to live inside a storyline.

For newer readers: kayfabe is the wrestling term for the shared fiction that makes the whole enterprise work. It is not simply “fake.” Wrestling fans are not necessarily dupes. They are participants. They agree to suspend disbelief because the performance gives them something real: release, belonging, rage, enemies, heroes, catharsis. The match may be scripted, but the emotion is not. That distinction turns out to matter enormously outside the arena.

Donald Trump did not import wrestling’s aesthetics into politics. He imported its operating system. The nicknames. “Crooked Hillary.” “Sleepy Joe.” “Too Late Powell.” “Lyin’ Ted.” “Little Marco.” “Crazy Nancy.” “Radical Left Lunatics.” The chants. The foreign villains. The stable of loyalists. The ritual humiliation. The strongman who is always betrayed, always winning, always persecuted, always moments away from the greatest comeback in history. Trump did not merely learn that politics could be entertaining. He learned that entertainment could replace politics.

In kayfabe, contradiction is not a liability. When the performer says something outrageous and it happens, he is a prophet. When it fails, you were an idiot for taking him literally. He can threaten, retreat, escalate, deny, and declare victory in the same breath because coherence is not the point. The point is dominance. The point is keeping the crowd inside the story. In wrestling, kayfabe makes a great story. In politics, it becomes Kevlar.

Which brings us to this week, and the Strait of Hormuz, and a ceasefire described by the President of the United States as being on “life support.” Asked whether the ceasefire remained in effect, Trump dismissed Tehran’s latest proposal as “a piece of garbage” and noted he had not even finished reading it. There it is: the promo voice, the insult, the dominance posture, the refusal to treat diplomacy as anything other than a humiliation contest. A nuclear crisis becomes crowd work. A ceasefire becomes a catchphrase.

The Strait of Hormuz, however, is not a folding chair. You cannot smash it over an opponent’s head and reset after the commercial break. The strait remains effectively closed. A vital passage for global oil and gas shipments sits under Iranian control. Fuel prices have surged past $4.50 a gallon. And Trump’s response is to float a suspension of the federal gas tax, a measure requiring congressional approval, draining more than $23 billion annually, offering a momentary illusion of relief while preserving the spectacle that caused the pain.

In wrestling, a cheap pop is when a performer gets easy applause by shouting the name of the city. Hello, Cleveland! The crowd cheered even though nothing had happened.

Suspending the gas tax while the Strait of Hormuz remains closed is the policy equivalent of shouting Hello, Cleveland while the building is on fire.

Kayfabe politics is proving dangerous. It trains people to experience catastrophe as spectacle. The ceasefire is not a ceasefire; it’s a ratings beat. Diplomacy is not diplomacy; it’s a toughness test. A blockade, a closed strait, a regional war, rising fuel prices, and nuclear brinkmanship become props in a dominance narrative. The performer does not have to solve the crisis. He only has to narrate it like the main event.

The audience knows its role. Calling Trump’s supporters willing victims is too gentle. It lets them settle into the moral recliner of passivity, as if all of this simply happened to them. But kayfabe does not happen to an audience. It happens with one.

The wrestling crowd is not decorative, or mere background noise. It is literally one of the instruments. The boos, the chants, the signs, the ritual hatred, these are not incidental to the show, they are its power source. Trump understood that, perhaps from standing inside a WrestleMania roar and feeling what a crowd that size could do to reality. In that space, humiliation became entertainment, cruelty became comedy. The wrong thing, performed with enough confidence, became the right thing.

Enabler is the more honest word. Every chant, every rally ovation, every gleeful share of a dehumanizing clip helps sustain the fiction. The crowd does not write the script, but it keeps the script alive. A script kept alive long enough becomes policy. Becomes a closed strait and a gas tax stunt and a ceasefire described in the language of a pay-per-view promo.

The audience did not close the Strait of Hormuz. But it helped build the political universe in which a president can treat that closing as a prop. That is a share of authorship.

Authorship is what people want to avoid. It is easier to say they were fooled. Victims can be pitied without being held responsible. But the kayfabe frame denies that comfort. The crowd is part of the act. The chants, the permission, the thrill matters.

In wrestling, everyone eventually goes home.

In politics, people have to live inside the aftermath.

The warning was always there. Don’t try this at home. Do not confuse smack talk with strategy; treat humiliation as justice, or turn nuclear diplomacy into a pay-per-view feud.

In wrestling, kayfabe ends when the lights come up. In politics, the lights do not come up on their own. Someone has to break character.