Silver filigree crown pin (ca. 1900s) | Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum / Public Domain
We have become accustomed to the Oval Office ritual by which Trump stages his pugnacious primacy. The protocol of the traditional press conference, in which the president stands and the press remains seated until recognized, is inverted. Trump sits as if enthroned on one of his gilded chairs, though not in the reclining posture of a monarch. He rather leans forward, as if ready to spring, although it is difficult to imagine such a hulking mass rising from its seat at all, let alone leaping. His manspreading posture establishes his sole possession of the central point in the room, the cynosure of all eyes, even if that focal point is slightly displaced from the physical center in order to accommodate, by special dispensation of the sovereign, a temporarily honored guest, whether to flatter (as in the case of Mohammed bin Salman yesterday) or to berate (as when Volodymyr Zelensky was subjected to the combined scorn of the American president and vice-president).
If the president is well-disposed toward his visitor, he will bestow signs of his momentary affection: a hearty clap on the German chancellor’s shoulder, a picking of the lint from the French president’s lapel, a friendly tap on the knee for the Saudi prince (which back in Saudi Arabia would no doubt constitute a crime of lèse majesté punishable by a horrible death, but we are in America, where manners are simpler and expressions of “friendship” more tactile and direct, not to say transactional).
On either side of the twinned sovereigns, directly facing one another in a reminder that friendships are also confrontations, thou art not I, are arrayed the subordinates, distinguished from the commoners by being seated but also from the sovereigns by being made peripheral to the gaze of the principal cameras. The home team is seated in the righthand dugout, as in a baseball game, and the lineup is always the same: The ever-eager vice-president is at the president’s elbow, while the exquisitely embarrassed secretary of state sits to his left. His constipated expression suggests that he is aware, as his neighbor to the right is not, that the protocolar staging is intended as much to humiliate him, to put him in his subordinate and dispensable place, as to exalt him by demonstrating his role as one of the boss’s principal henchmen, even if in practice he often feels that he counts for far less than, say, the homeland security advisor, who stands to the rear because his place, while lower down in the protocol chart, puts him in closer proximity to the boss’s ear for more hours of the day—and this is an administration that operates by winks and nods and verbal orders that leave no trace rather than by briefing books that go unread and policy processes that leave the Decider bored beyond words.
And then there are the journalists, who—truth be told—are the raison d’être of the whole exercise and who are of course fully aware that they are but players on a stage, and bit players at that, but who are at the same time cognizant that the power of the state is and always has been by its nature performative. Their role is therefore, in the fullest sense of the word, historic: By asking their questions, they not only elicit the meaning of the performance but record if for posterity, writing, as the cliché would have it, history’s first draft. So yesterday a bold journalist, Mary Bruce, stepped forward to play her ordained part: She addressed the prince as Your Royal Highness and the president as Sir but reminded the former that the intelligence services of the latter had designated him a murderer only a few short years ago and demanding on behalf of the People to know why his royal presence should be tolerated in the Oval Office. (Except that instead of “the People,” she said “the 9/11 families,” in deference to the conventions of the network news, which eschews the abstractions of political theory in favor of facile personifications, which allow the march of history to be portrayed in terms of cheering crowds, raging mobs, grieving loved ones, and other camera-ready images.)
The president could not restrain his displeasure: “Who are you with?” he demanded to know—as if he, the inveterate consumer of TV news, did not recognize ABC News’s chief White House correspondent—reminding the impudent Ms. Bruce that if she thought she could score career points at his expense, he would be having a word with her bosses. “ABC. Fake news. We should look into that. They should have their license taken away. That’s no way to talk to our honored guest.”
His usual bluster, except that with this government, in our current state, power is even more performative than usual, and the illocutionary meaning of every presidential utterance is as fraught with danger as a nod from MBS to the royal physician who dismembered the murdered journalist’s body. “A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman you’re talking about. Things happen,” the president said—which may have been the single most callous and damning expression of contempt for the very idea of legal constraints on sovereign power ever to emerge from the mouth of an American president. And not a single gasp was heard in the room, not a single eyebrow was raised, although one suspects that Rubio’s expression may for a moment have become even more constipated than before, as one more instance of obsequious acquiescence was added to his already lengthy record.
Let’s not pretend. Trump is not the only president to have engaged or acquiesced in extrajudicial murder. Biden fist-bumped MBS. Obama’s drones obliterated wedding parties before Trump’s drones blew up speedboats in the Caribbean. “No king, be his cause never so spotless … can try it out with all unspotted soldiers.” But hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue, and the stubborn refusal to draw even a flimsy veil over the sins of state reflects an unconscionable expansion of evil’s empire.
This essay was first published in the author’s newsletter, The Sense of an Ending, on November 19, 2025.
