The Democratic National Convention wrapped up Thursday night with Kamala Harris accepting the party’s nomination for president. It was a rousing end to a four-day party in Chicago’s United Center, one that was jam-packed with big-name speakers, bumping musical performances, and unbridled enthusiasm over Harris’ campaign, which is somehow only a month old with the election right around the corner.
The DNC has been lauded as a success, providing a powerful launchpad for Harris and her running mate Tim Walz to bring home their campaign for the White House — but the week still featured its share of WTF moments. The logistics around the arena were not ideal, the fossil-fuel industry was present, and the Democratic Party refused to allow a pro-Palestine voice to speak onstage.
Here are some of the most memorable moments from the convention, good and bad:
THE BEST
Harris and Walz blowing the roof off the arena
If Walz is the campaign’s coach, Harris is its quarterback, and the two are in lock-step.
On Wednesday, Walz delivered what he described as a “pep talk” for the nation from their coach. “Let me finish with this, team,” he said. “It’s the fourth quarter. We’re down a field goal. But we’re on offense and we’ve got the ball. We’re driving down the field. And boy, do we have the right team. Kamala Harris is tough. Kamala Harris is experienced. And Kamala Harris is ready.”
That message carried into Friday, when Harris delivered her own acceptance speech and made the case for herself as the best candidate to take on Trump. “In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man,” she said, but the consequences “of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious.”
The two speeches exemplified the balance between the candidates on the Democratic ticket, with Walz acting as the campaign’s motivator and hype man while giving Harris the space to lean into her career roots and prosecute the case against Trump.
The roll call
The most reliably boring part of every party nominating convention is the roll call vote, during which delegates from every state and territory cast their votes for the prospective candidates. It wasn’t boring at the 2024 DNC.
DJ Cassidy, whose resume includes Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s wedding as well as Obama White House parties, selected songs to represent every delegation — in many cases with help from the delegations. Highlights included Chappell Roan for Missouri, Kendrick Lamar for California, Tom Petty for Florida, Kansas for Kansas, and the Dropkick Murphys for Massachusetts.
But the unquestionable star of the roll call was Georgia, whose moment in the spotlight featured an in-person appearance by Lil Jon, who performed his hits “Shots” and “Turn Down for What.”
The return of Michelle Obama (and also her husband)
It’s been more than 10 years since former First Lady Michelle Obama gave a nationally televised address, and her return to the DNC blew the roof off of the United Center.
Obama called back to the election of her husband, former President Barack Obama, speaking about “the contagious power of hope” generated by the enthusiasm surrounding Harris’ campaign.
The former first lady has never been shy about calling balls and strikes, but Tuesday’s speech was a far cry from her infamous declaration that “when they go low, we go high,” and she had no qualms about publicly eviscerating Trump. “I want to know who’s going to tell him that the job he’s currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?” she said.
“If we see a mountain in front of us, we don’t expect there to be an escalator waiting to take us to the top. We put our heads down. We get to work in America, we do something,” she added to ground-shaking cheers from the audience.”
Michelle’s address may have stolen the show from her husband’s headlining speech, with the former president even quipping that he’s “the only person stupid enough to speak after Michelle Obama.”
That big Project 2025 book
Ideas can often be hard to translate into real-world action. Conservatives hoping for another Trump presidency decided to write all of their worst ones down in Project 2025, a 900-page plan to restrict the rights of Americans and give the president an unprecedented amount of power.
Multiple DNC speakers used a giant physical copy of Project 2025 as a prop to represent the Republican agenda.
Host Keenan Thompson stole the bit though, asking the audience if they’d ever seen “a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time? Here it is.”
Taking aim at Trump
Democrats have long been propping Trump up as a menacing force set to dismantle American democracy. Speakers at the DNC appeared to adopt a new tactic in taking on the former president: reframing Trump as a subject of mockery.
Democrats trolled the president Sunday night by projecting “Trump-Vance Weird as Hell” onto Trump Tower in Chicago. The next night, Golden State Warriors Head Coach Steve Kerr joked that in November “we can tell Donald Trump ‘night night,’” mimicking Steph Curry’s famous sleep celebration. The next night, the Obamas both made fun of Trump, with Michelle making a dig about how the presidency could be a “Black job” and Barack mocking his obsession with crowd sizes, making a gesture with his that many took to represent the small size of something else. Earlier that night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) called him a “two-bit union buster who thinks of himself as more of a patriot than a woman who fights to lift working people up every single day.” On Wednesday, Bill Clinton made fun of Trump’s obsessions with Hannibal Lecter while turning the focus to his self-obsession, imploring Ameircans to “count the I’s, not the lies” when he speaks. Walz called him “weird” again later that night. Former Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger said he was a “weak man pretending to be strong, a small man pretender to be big” on Thursday, before Harris labeled him as “unserious” during her acceptance speech. Harris cautioned, though, that the consequences should he win in November would be plenty serious.
The musical performances
Beyonce may not have performed as was rumored on Thursday night, but the DNC still featured a star-studded rolodex of musicians who helped turn the convention into a spectacle. Stevie Wonder, John Legend, The Chicks, Pink, and Maren Morris were all featured in the lineup. Lil Jon also made a surprise appearance during the delegation roll call, and the Chicago Bulls’ drumline made the convention feel like a party.
The emotions
For all the performances and inspirational speeches, the DNC was also a deeply emotional event, full of heart-wrenching testimony about the way policy has impacted the lives of Americans.
On Tuesday, several women shared their experiences attempting to secure life saving reproductive care in states with abortion bans. On Wednesday, the parents of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, an American hostage kidnapped by Hamas on Oct. 7, delivered an emotional plea for the return of their son, the other remaining hostages, and a ceasefire that “ends the suffering of the innocent civilians in Gaza.” On Thursday, gun violence survivors, their families, and classmates spoke of the trauma they lived through.
The gut wrenching segments echoes the very personal stories shared by some of the convention’s biggest names. President Joe Biden shared an emotional moment with his daughter, Ashley, who introduced him before his primetime speech on Monday night — which included plenty of gratitude from the crowd for the president. Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) teared up on Tuesday while sharing a story about Harris’s support for her when she first arrived to Congress, and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had to take a moment to collect herself after receiving a more than a minute long standing ovation on Thursday.
Walz’s speech on Wednesday was also highly emotional. His story about conceiving using fertility treatments and a profession of his love for his family in the audience led to tears from just about everyone. “Hope, Gus, and Gwen: you are my entire world and I love you,” Walz said.
THE WTF
Palestinian erasure
The DNC snubbed the Uncommitted Movement — which represents more than 700,000 voters who voted “uncommitted” during the primary to show their support of Palestine — refusing give a pro-Palestine voice time to speak in the United Center.
“I was working on it every day for the past week or more,” James Zogby, a former member of the DNC’s executive committee, told Rolling Stone. “The campaign made a mistake — an unforced error. This didn’t have to happen the way it did and now needs to be fixed.”
Democrats provided a forum that wasn’t televised for the movement, which held a sit-in outside of the arena when they learned they wouldn’t be allowed into the main event Wednesday night. “I was incredibly honored to be considered,” Ruwa Romman, a Palestinian-American and member of Georgia’s legislature who hoped to give a speech at the convention, told Rolling Stone on Thursday.
Fossil-fuel companies sponsoring events
Not only has the climate crisis not exactly been at the forefront of the Democratic Party’s messaging lately, an off-site event hosted by Punchbowl News was sponsored by ExxonMobil. Climate activists, including DNC member RL Miller, disrupted the event. “Exxon lies, people die!” they chanted.
“Companies like Exxon should have no place at the DNC,” the Sunrise Movement said in a statement. “Exxon has spent decades misleading the public about the climate crisis and buying off politicians. If the Democratic Party wants to be taken seriously by our generation on climate change, they need to walk the talk.”
Conservatives going “undercover”
Is that three raccoons in a Kamala Harris bomber? Or is it just right-wing extremist Matt Walsh wearing a wig?
Members and supporters of the opposite party are always present at nominating conventions, but, for some reason, several prominent Republican figures thought putting on the equivalent of chunky glasses and a mustache would make them unrecognizable to the most politically obsessed crowd in the nation.
Walsh was spotted wearing what looked like a dollar-store wig and an array of Harris pins. Pizzagate conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec attempted to infiltrate a pro-Palestinian protest outside of the DNC wearing sunglasses and a keffiyeh. Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe opted for a mask, glasses, and beanie to cover most of his face.
Probably the most embarrassing display came from MyPillow founder and election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell, who shaved his mustache and donned a jaunty fedora in an attempt to disguise his identity — only to be outed by 12-year-old political influencer Knowa.
Did Lindell try to debate a 12-year-old? Yes. Did he lose? Also yes.
Conservative freaking out because Democratic families love each other
Conservatives took to social media to call Doug Emhoff “weird” for having what appears to be a good relationship with his daughter Ella — whose tattoos and fashion sense have been a lightning rod for buttoned-up conservatives — and Biden “creepy” for hugging his daughter Ashley after she introduced him on Monday.
They later mocked Tim Walz’s son Gus, who has a non-verbal learning disorder, for crying as his father expressed his love for his family during his acceptance speech on Wednesday. “Talk about weird,” Ann Coulter wrote.
Bad fact-checks
Fact-checking politicians is a critical charge of the American press, but during the DNC some outlets have been inexplicably twisting themselves into pretzels to soften Trump’s position on key electoral issues.
The New York Times rated President Joe Biden’s claim that Trump “created the largest debt any president had in four years,” as “misleading,” because — even though Trump did “rack up more debt than any other in raw dollars” — the debt incurred under Obama during his eight-year term was larger. Four versus eight … math is hard, but not that hard.
When Biden said on Monday that Trump wanted to cut Medicare, PolitiFact rated the statement “mostly false” even though Trump repeatedly proposed cutting Medicare during his presidency and in March told reporters that “there is a lot you can do in terms of entitlements, in terms of cutting, and in terms of also the theft and the bad management of entitlements.” But because Trump has backpedaled from the position now that he’s running a tight race for the White House, voters should apparently take him at his word.
Perhaps the most egregious “fact-check” came from The Washington Post, which attempted to push back on Biden’s claim that “Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again.” The Post countered that “Trump just hasn’t said that he would accept. And he has previously said the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.”
Make it make sense.
Logistical chaos
The DNC was beset by organizational mishaps, with people waiting hours to get into the United Center on Monday. The programming suffered some setbacks, as well, with delays forcing the cancellation of a performance from James Taylor so Joe Biden could take the stage at a reasonable hour on Monday. He still wasn’t able to come on until after primetime, however, with his speech wrapping up after midnight on the East Coast. The DNC blamed the delays on the “raucous applause” causing speakers to take longer than anticipated.
The issues weren’t confined to Monday. The DNC reportedly told journalists on Thursday that they could not be guaranteed entry if they left the arena to go to the bathroom, and at a certain point stopped letting people onto the floor, even turning away Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.), who spoke at the convention earlier that night.
Trump’s counter-programming
Trump did all he could to wrest the spotlight away from the DNC … kind of. The former president held a series of events during the week, but he wasn’t able to muster much energy — or anything new to say outside of sprinkling fresh batch of sensationalism on his well-worn talking points. “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread or you get shot,” he claimed, absurdly, during an event to address crime in Michigan. “You get mugged, you get raped, you get … whatever it may be.”
He was also on the defensive. During an event intended to focus on the economy in Pennsylvania, Trump tried to convince factory workers that he’s normal, despite Democrats now regularly alleging that he and his running mate J.D. Vance are weird. “I think we’re extremely normal people,” he insisted.
Trump didn’t do much for his argument that he’s totally not weird by having a full-fledged, multi-platform meltdown during and after Harris’ acceptance speech on Thursday.
The Terrifying New Era of American Imperialism
In 2017, I published a book called, Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy. For the next year, I lived mostly in transit around the world — 50 cities, dozens of stages, endless conversations about how the tech empires had bent our culture out of shape, numbed public life, and hollowed out the foundations of democracy.
It was outside the United States, though, that the dissonance struck most deeply. I remember sitting on high-speed trains that glided so fast and silently they seemed to erase distance itself, watching wind farms cross the horizon like silent fleets. In country after country — places far smaller and, on paper, far poorer than ours — I kept asking the same question: how could they manage to build what we could not? Why did the richest nation on earth feel like it was living off the leftovers of its mid-twentieth century optimism?
Conversations in Europe added another layer. People spoke casually of health care as a right, not a privilege; of sending their children to university without dread or debt; of a shared obligation to slow the warming planet. It was not utopia — just an older, steadier faith in the public good. The idea that freedom and mutual responsibility might coexist had not yet been driven out of their political imagination.
Back home, the contrast was impossible to ignore. We stumble on crumbling bridges and argue about the price of insulin yet never question why nearly two-thirds of what Washington calls “discretionary spending” is locked inside the machinery of the National Security State. In the 2026 budget, 59.6 percent is marked for the Pentagon (even more if Trump succeeds in getting an additional $600 billion), another 6.4 percent for Homeland Security. No other democracy has made such choices — or lived so comfortably with their consequences.
President Eisenhower famously warned us in his farewell speech that the military and the defense contractors would be unwilling to give up the giant budgets they had gained since the end of World War II:
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.
For more than three decades, presidential campaigns — from Clinton through Obama to Trump — have promised a reckoning: an end to “stupid wars” and a redirection of national wealth toward rebuilding America itself. Yet once in office, each fell under the shadow of Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex. None dared to reduce defense spending, and so Eisenhower’s second fear — that this imbalance would “endanger our liberties or democratic processes”— has slowly come true. But now under Trump we are engaged, as The New York Times noted, “in a resurrection of the mission of empire — acquiring the territories and resources of sovereign peoples.”
Trump campaigned on the promise that the United States would stop policing the world, that the era of regime change and open‑ended intervention was over. Now we have invaded Venezuela, kidnapped their president, and Trump tells us we “are going to run the country for a long time,” as if Venezuela were a failed subsidiary being placed into receivership. Next up was Iran, with a New York Times banner headline proclaiming, “Trump Calls for Overthrow of Government.” The idea that the United States will “run” or administer another sovereign nation, even “temporarily,” ought to trigger every alarm that still works in Washington.
We are entering a new era of American imperialism. Trump Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller recently told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.” As Jonathan Last wrote in The Bulwark, in both Venezuela and in Minneapolis, “What we are seeing is a worldview for which the only value is the domination of enemies. There is a name for that. It is fascism.”
American fascism, to the extent that it exists as more than a slur, expresses itself less in blackshirts than in the quiet normalization of permanent imperial management. The classic fascist regimes insisted that a nation’s vitality depended on expansion — that without new territories to subdue and administer, the social order would atrophy and turn inward on itself. Contemporary American power dresses this same logic in the language of “stability operations,” “rules-based order,” and “responsibility to protect,” but the underlying premise is familiar: the United States must supervise, discipline, and, when necessary, occupy other societies in order to preserve its own sense of mission. What Hitler called “Lebensraum” and Mussolini cast as a “proletarian nation” bursting its confines reappears in the Washington vernacular as forward deployments, security partnerships, and transitional authorities that somehow never transition. The point is not that today’s policymakers are closet Nazis, but that a republic which comes to believe it cannot remain itself without governing other people’s territory has already internalized a key article of the fascist creed: that conquest is not an emergency measure or tragic exception but the normal condition of a serious country. As Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny, noted, “Fascism demands a major foreign war to kill one’s own people and thereby generate a reservoir of meaning that could be used to justify indefinite rule and further oppression, to make the world seem like an endless struggles and submission to hierarchy as the only kind of life.”
Trump is not wrong to demand that Europe shoulder more of its own defense. In March of 2016 he told the New York Times’ David Sanger, “at some point, we cannot be the policeman of the world.” The irony, of course, is that under his watch American defense spending has only swelled and America has assumed a belligerent stance towards both competitors and former allies. No American troops have been withdrawn from Europe. Trump’s new demand for a 50 percent jump in the Pentagon’s budget is not a policy so much as a symptom. It reads less like a response to any discernible strategic assessment than as a sequel to the Maduro raid, an attempt to convert one clean, televisable operation into a permanent line-item tribute to himself. In that sense the proposal is pure Trump: spontaneous, grandiose, and retroactively draped in the language of “long and difficult negotiations” that plainly never occurred in any conventional budget process. The point is not whether Congress ever enacts a $1.5 trillion authorization; the point is to establish a new psychic baseline in which anything less than a “Dream Military” feels like an insult to the man who ordered Maduro’s capture.
Seen from the vantage of America after empire, this is what late-imperial politics looks like when the imperial story has outlived the material conditions that once sustained it. The old language of sober responsibility and tragic necessity has given way to the logic of the algorithmic feed: each crisis, each boat bombing, each killing, each “decisive” show of force must be instantly topped by something louder, costlier, more spectacular. Trump is only the most garish embodiment of a broader political class that long ago internalized the idea that military power is the last reliable currency of national meaning; he simply strips away the last restraints and says the quiet part out loud, equating the health of the republic with the size of his own arsenal. The danger in such a politics is not just fiscal or geopolitical. It is that, in a country willing to spend $1.5 trillion to feel invincible abroad while treating the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti at home as collateral damage to be managed with fearmongering and lies about domestic terrorism, the distinction between security and domination disappears entirely.
Follow the Money
Adjusted for inflation, the United States will spend in 2027 almost a trillion dollars more on the military than it did at the height of the Cold War. The combined military budgets of China, Russia, Germany, India, United Kingdom, and France are only $786 Billion. Yet for all that money, the structure of the armed forces has been hollowed out: we have roughly half as many active-duty service members, half as many ships in the Navy, and half as many aircraft in the Air Force. More than half of the Pentagon’s budget now flows not to soldiers or sailors, but to private firms — the contractors, consultants, and corporate intermediaries who have become the real custodians of the American war machine. For more than three decades, the Pentagon has functioned as a kind of black hole in the federal ledger, failing audit after audit even as nearly a trillion dollars a year disappears into a fog of untraceable contracts, “improper payments,” and bureaucratic bloat that its own buried studies estimate in the hundreds of billions. The inability — or refusal — to produce a clean set of books is not a technical glitch but the operating system of American militarism, a permanent state of engineered opacity in which waste and fraud cease to be aberrations and become the business model of empire itself.
When Donald Trump proposed buying Greenland in 2019 — and later mused about “taking” it — the impulse seemed so outlandish that much of the world laughed it off as another episode in the long-running theater of American excess. Yet the Greenland moment, in retrospect, looks less like farce and more like a kind of tragic symbolism, the twilight gesture of a hegemon that had forgotten the difference between dominance and delusion. Trump’s threats to “conquer” or annex the island — a NATO-protected territory of Denmark — encapsulated a fantasy of American omnipotence that no longer existed, while accelerating the very unraveling it sought to deny. The fantasy that Washington can script another nation’s political future at the point of a gun survives only by ignoring the wreckage already left behind — from Saigon to Baghdad and beyond. It rests on a peculiar imperial arrogance: the conviction that history’s verdicts do not apply to us, that this time the occupation will be brief, the technocrats wise, and the locals grateful, until the cycle of disillusion and violence begins again.
The financial foundations of U.S. power have also begun to look less secure. A Deutsche Bank report that once would have been confined to economic circles recently became geopolitical fodder, noting that Europe is America’s largest creditor, holding roughly $8 trillion in U.S. assets. If Trump’s trade wars once seemed like symbolic politics, they have since revealed an unsettling asymmetry: the United States depends more on foreign financing than most Americans realize, and its leverage is waning. The same government that once underwrote the Marshall Plan and NATO’s defense architecture now talks like a debtor demanding tribute from its lenders. It is vintage Trump. Having driven his Atlantic City casinos into bankruptcy, he fixated not on his own recklessness but on the temerity of those who financed it. He even threatened to sue one of his lenders, as if the real offense lay in having believed him capable of repayment.
Meanwhile, the ghosts of the old Cold War have returned, but their allegiances have shifted. Critics accused Trump in 2016 of election collusion with Putin — an allegation Republicans dismissed as hysteria — but in dismantling NATO’s cohesion, Trump pursued what had long been the supreme objective of Putin’s worldview. For Moscow, NATO’s eastward reach has always been seen as aggression; for Washington, it was deterrence. But in the grand scheme of things Russia is a minor power, with a GDP considerably smaller than California.
For now, the center of modernity is in Shanghai. While we borrow money from China to fill the coffers of the military industrial complex and subsidize the fossil fuel industry, the Chinese are building the low carbon, high intelligence future. The United States, restless and unfocused, turns again to the vanities of empire — scheming over Venezuela, coveting Greenland, bombing Iran — while across the Pacific, China gathers its strength in silence, investing colossal sums in the instruments of the coming age: artificial intelligence, robotics, quantum code, the manipulation of life itself. By purchasing power, its economy already surpasses America’s by nearly a third; its factories and power grids hum at twice the scale; its navy, relentless in construction, will eclipse America’s within the decade. China now leads in the engines of the future — electric mobility, fourth-generation reactors — while the United States grows dependent on its former pupil for the most vital sinews of modern life, from antibiotics to rare earths. The balance of the century is shifting — not with banners or battleships, but with algorithms, reactors, and the quiet gravity of accumulated power.
So, what drives us to spend our blood and treasure on the military? Surely the answer lies in Eisenhower’s “unwarranted influence … of the military-industrial complex.” In 1993, Clinton’s Defense Secretary Les Aspin and his deputy William Perry effectively told the big prime defense contractors at the so‑called “Last Supper” that post–Cold War budgets would not sustain the existing industrial ecology, and that they were expected to merge or die; over the following decade the number of major prime contractors collapsed from dozens to roughly a handful, even as the top five’s share of federal defense contract dollars rose from around one‑fifth to nearly 50 percent. What was sold as rationalization and acquisition “reform” in an era of peace dividends instead entrenched a structurally dependent state, increasingly reliant on a few leviathans whose pricing power, political leverage, and freedom to offshore and financialize only grew as real competition disappeared. Although Clinton, Bush and Obama paid lip-service to the idea of competition they were all neo-liberals at heart who had adopted Reagan’s mantra of deregulation. And the monopoly defense contractors stopped investing in R & D and instead became vehicles to funnel their cash to shareholders and executives.
Now, a new group of monopolists, based in Silicon Valley are vying to create a digital military industrial complex. Their philosopher king, Peter Thiel, made it clear to the Wall Street Journal, “Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits are competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, build a monopoly.” Thiel and Marc Andreessen’s drone maker, Anduril, and Elon Musk’s Space X are determined to put that philosophy into practice. And because figures like Musk and Thiel are exceptional hype artists, they have a new trillion-dollar project for Trump to fund: the Golden Dome.
The Golden Dome is a $3.6 trillion bid to turn the old Reagan Star Wars fantasy into a homeland missile shield, using constellations of space-based sensors, AI-driven command systems, kinetic interceptors, and eventually directed-energy weapons to track and kill missiles in every phase of flight. In theory it promises an always-on, automated perimeter for the continental United States: satellites watching for launches in real time, software fusing the data, and interceptor swarms — some in orbit, some at sea and on land — firing fast enough to handle hypersonics, saturation attacks, and decoys. The Silicon Valley pitch is that breakthroughs in AI, sensor fusion, quantum computing, and commercial space launch finally make this dream technically attainable, and the roster of expected winners — Palantir, Anduril, SpaceX, and other “defense tech” firms — reads like a venture-backed sequel to the classic Beltway contractors.
The deeper logic, though, looks very much like the metaverse hype job: a totalizing, almost theological solution — this time to nuclear vulnerability — built out of still-maturing technologies and wrapped in seductive imagery of an impenetrable sphere around America. The physics of missile defense have not changed: “hitting a bullet with a bullet,” discriminating real warheads from decoys at scale, intercepting in time, and doing it reliably under stress remain brutally hard problems, and partial success is indistinguishable from failure if even a handful of warheads get through. That makes Golden Dome less a plausible end-state than a funding boondoggle — a way of organizing trillions of federal dollars around a shared fantasy of perfect protection, in which the tech sector sells the software of invincibility while strategic reality stays stubbornly analog and vulnerable.
Whether we want to put multiple trillions in Elon Musk’s pocket to build the Golden Dome remains a question that someone like Trump is not interested in answering. If the growth of the Military AI industry creates a new digital monopoly, resulting in millions of lost jobs, but spurring GDP growth, Trump is happy.
In the next few years, the billionaires who control the digital economy will also control the military economy. Their ability to influence Trump and Vance is evidenced by the behavior of Elon Musk during the 2024 election. By the time the filings closed, Musk had poured on the order of $300 million into the 2024 cycle, an amount large enough that it functioned less as “participation” in politics than as the purchase of a governing stake in the regime that followed. What shows up on FEC forms as roughly 290–291 million dollars in donations to Trump-aligned super PACs, outside groups, and party committees is better understood as a capital investment in state power, a way of turning one man’s private balance sheet into a dominant force in public decision-making. The scale is revealing when a single tech billionaire can outspend entire institutional coalitions, the election stops looking like a contest among citizens and starts to resemble a shareholder vote in which one owner quietly holds a blocking stake.
The time has come for Americans to decide, as Eisenhower once warned us to, whether we wish to be citizens or subjects — participants in a republic or passengers in an empire sustained by monopoly, militarism, and distraction. Perhaps only the Democratic Party has the independence from the oligarchs to return to its 1960s roots as the anti-war, anti-monopoly party of working people. During his 1968 presidential campaign in a speech at the University of Kansas, Robert Kennedy issued a broadside against an economy dominated by profit, militarism, and corporate corruption. If you read the speech, it is still relevant to our current dilemma. “It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country,” Kennedy said of America’s gross national product. “It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
A Vision for Change
The arc of our decline was never inevitable. It was the cumulative result of millions of quiet abdications: of civic duty to marketing, of public good to private gain, of truth to convenience. What the republic most needs now is not another savior or algorithm, but a revival of responsibility in the old, exacting sense — the willingness to take part in self-government, to see the commonwealth not as an inheritance but as a trust. As Eisenhower said, “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”
Polling shows that the public wants a change. Chicago Council’s 2024 report notes that, “Americans largely agree the government should spend more resources on domestic priorities than on defense.” Let’s imagine a $300 billion yearly savings from a reduced Defense budget. How would we reallocate that money? Here are some ideas. The Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that a national free-college program focused on public institutions would cost about $58.2 billion a year. The Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation analyzed a policy fully lowering Medicare eligibility to 60 starting in 2026 would cost about $25 to 30 billion a year in the initial years. And if we wanted to have high speed rail with new 220‑m.p.h. trains along the Eastern seaboard, it would cost on the order of $151 billion for a Boston to Charlotte route. The Boston to New York City trip time would be 45 minutes. This kind of non-polluting electric rail service would make it possible for people to live outside of the big city centers and have a low stress commute.
We have lived during a decade of Trump’s political dominance, as the philosopher Antonio Gramsci foresaw, in an interregnum, “The old is dying and the new cannot be born. In this interregnum many morbid symptoms appear.” The term Interregnum was first applied to the five-year reign of Oliver Cromwell in England from 1653 to 1658.
If Trump is our Cromwell, then this interregnum is less a beginning than an afterglow, the long, strange light that lingers after an empire’s sun has set. Like Cromwell’s England, which mistook zeal for providence and the seizure of a king for the birth of a new order, Trump’s America confuses disruption with renewal, as if rage alone could rearrange a constitutional cosmos that no longer quite believes in itself.
Cromwell shattered the old regime in the name of redemption and left behind not the godly commonwealth he imagined, but a restoration that quietly tamed the crown and elevated Parliament, codified at last in the Bill of Rights of 1689. What endured were not his sermons or his armies, but the tired compromise that followed him, the slow drafting of limits and liberties by a society that had burned through its appetite for revelation.
So it may be with us. The MAGA years may come to look less like the foundation of a new dispensation than like the Whigs’ last flare before disappearance, an episode of furious improvisation that clears the ground for some other alignment not yet fully visible. The movement that once seemed to swallow the Republican Party whole may, in time, recede into a cautionary memory, leaving behind a scattered cadre of reactionaries and exiles — today’s Never Trumpers and disenchanted loyalists — who try to piece together a different vocabulary of right and left from the debris.
Every empire, it seems, breeds its own Cromwell, a figure who believes he is inaugurating an age when he is really presiding over an ending. And every interregnum carries the same sorrowful wisdom: that nothing begins entirely anew, that the future is fashioned instead from the spent materials of the past, as a people learns again, slowly and without guarantee, how to live after power — how to be America after empire.
Jonathan Taplin is the Director Emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and the author of Move Fast and Break Things, The Magic Years, and The End of Reality.