Dwain Northey (Gen X)

It must be comforting—deeply, almost spiritually comforting—to live in a world where failure is just success wearing a red hat and shouting louder.

Because if you listen to Donald Trump and his ever-devoted chorus, the last year-plus has been nothing short of a golden age. A renaissance. A masterclass in leadership so advanced that the rest of us, clearly, just lack the intellectual horsepower to recognize it.

Take Iran, for example. Or rather, the situation formerly known as “not actively spiraling.” What some might call a reckless escalation, a destabilizing series of moves, or a strategic blunder that handed leverage away like party favors—well, that’s only if you’re stuck using outdated definitions of “competence.” In the new framework, chaos is strength, unpredictability is genius, and outcomes are irrelevant so long as the branding remains confident.

“I alone can fix it,” was the promise. And in a way, that promise has been fulfilled—if by “fix” we mean taking a complex, fragile system and shaking it like a vending machine until something else breaks loose.

But Iran is just the headliner. The undercard is stacked. Economic “wins” that somehow feel like losses if you check your bank account. International relationships that resemble group chats where everyone has muted you. Domestic policies that arrive with fanfare and leave quietly through the back door once reality asks a few inconvenient questions.

And yet, the messaging remains immaculate. This is the real achievement—not governance, not diplomacy, not measurable outcomes—but narrative control so relentless it borders on performance art. It’s not that things are going poorly; it’s that you’re being told they’re going extraordinarily well while watching them go poorly, and expected to resolve that contradiction by doubting your own perception.

It’s almost admirable, in a way. Reality itself has been rebranded as fake news. Failure is just success that hasn’t been appreciated properly. And every misstep isn’t a misstep at all—it’s a bold, misunderstood move in a chess game so complex that it looks exactly like checkers played badly.

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left squinting at the scoreboard, wondering if we’ve missed something. Maybe the losses are wins. Maybe instability is strategy. Maybe setting things on fire is just a prelude to calling yourself a firefighter.

Or maybe—just maybe—the simpler explanation is the correct one.

But that would require acknowledging that the emperor isn’t just underdressed—he’s been loudly insisting he invented clothes while everyone else is handed a blindfold and told to applaud.