As President Donald Trump took the podium to announce he’d bombed Iran—“surgical strikes,” he assured us, as if he were talking about lipo—something even more revealing than the foreign policy shift unfolded behind him: the choreography of male ambition.
There stood VP JD Vance, bearded and beatific, in the classic heir-apparent spot: just to Trump’s right, chin slightly lifted, eyebrows set to “grave statesman.” But then you saw Pete Hegseth, the cable-tanned and restless Secretary of Defense, inching sideways like a man trying to catch a better breeze—or a better shot. His mission: slide into frame. His mistake: failing to clock Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
Here comes Little Marco, seasoned now, no longer the thirsty teen from 2016, who shimmies himself directly next to Trump with the ease of someone who’s learned how to duck and feint in the GOP’s royal court. (Though he’d clearly scrambled faster than the B2s because he’d forgotten to wear his American flag pin.) Hegseth, now blocked, drifts awkwardly to the end of the row, visibly stiff, as if he knows that in Trumpworld, proximity is power and he’s just been banished to the outer provinces.
And Trump? Oblivious. Or more precisely: supremely uninterested. He’s not watching them. They’re watching him. He knows the camera never blinks and never strays. He’s the sun; they’re just moonlighting.
This is how Republican politics works now: not with policy, not with principle or strategy, but with posture. In this White House cosplay, where war is declared like a press release and every man behind the man is auditioning for next season, even a bombing campaign becomes a photo op.
And the only question that seems to matter anymore: who gets closest to the chaos?
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