Don’t polish a turd — gild it. That’s the philosophy governing America right now, and it’s working brilliantly. Donald Trump is splurging millions of public dollars doing up the Oval Office like a Vegas bordello: all gold drapes and 24 Karat bling, a kitsch, transactional stage set for a garish transactional presidency. But this isn’t just Kardashian realism. Intellectual Liberace. It’s a national metaphor; cheap, tacky and offensive. The aesthetic of anti-civilisation.

It’s not just ugly. It’s the performance of ugliness as a virtue, a middle finger to coherence, history, and taste. It’s the triumph of the “because I can” over the “why you should.” Even The Barbarians had more panache. They’d hate Trump’s transactional nihilism.

Let’s be clear. We’re watching the unmaking of a democracy, live on television, filtered through the psychopathology of a gold-plated trust-fund baby who learned the price of everything and the value of nothing. And pathological indifference to others.

Trump’s mentor, Roy Kohn, provided a type of Ayn Rand for the illiterate: The cartoonish, hyper-individualistic fantasy of objectivism, stripped of its pseudo-intellectual pretension and reduced to its most visceral, selfish id: “I got mine, screw you.”

Trump never learned that money can’t buy taste, competence or approval. This isn’t complex geopolitics. It’s Fred Trump’s son, the original nepo kid who turned a “small loan” of a million dollars into an education in how to fail upward while bankrupting his own casino. The clinical diagnosis, courtesy of his own niece, is textbook narcissism, forged in a cold, cruelly transactional household, where love always came with a price tag.

That golden toilet in Trump Tower isn’t a flex — it’s a psychiatric cry for help. A desperate, gleaming signal that Donald’s confused price with value, surface with substance, performance with governance. All that glisters isn’t gold. Sometimes it’s just cheap spray paint over a rotting foundation, near a leaking sewer.

Yet what a spectacularly pissweak foundation it is.

Forget the promised hundred days of legislative mastery. Look at any given week of this “presidency” and witness governance as bad performance art — specifically, the kind where the performer keeps forgetting their lines while the theatre burns down around them and Stephen Miller’s scalpel excises ‘we the people’ from America’s body politic. Trump promised healthcare reform; delivered systematic cruelty disguised as policy. He championed American infrastructure but has delivered a bad fake tan. He pledged to drain the swamp; then made it a gold-plated cesspit where ethics go to die, a type of Grifters’ HQ.

Trump Inc’s aesthetic poverty isn’t just confined to tacky interior decor. It leaks into everything: his political dalliances with conspiracy loonies like Laura Loomer — so toxic she’s been banned from platforms that welcome actual Nazis — his embrace of medical charlatanism, his transformation of the presidency into a cheap reality TV show where the tackiness is the whole point and the plot is a limbo dance of democratic norms and protocols. How low can he go?

This is what happens when you mistake the Oval Office for a penthouse pad. When you confuse the presidency with a personal branding opportunity or franchise. Yet when you think democracy is just another business venture, you can leverage for personal gain.

But here’s the thing about gilding — it’s designed to hide what’s underneath. And what’s underneath this particular turd is genuinely terrifying.

Watch how it works. The attacks on press freedom aren’t random tantrums; they’re systematic demolition. “Enemy of the people” isn’t rhetoric — it’s preparation. Trump’s not just threatening to “open up” libel laws; he’s studying the playbook of every strongman who ever silenced critics with lawfare. This is an assault on the foundational premise of democratic society: that truth can emerge through open debate and consensus rather than authoritarian decree.

His administration’s family separation policy wasn’t immigration enforcement — it was state-sanctioned psychological torture, designed not to solve problems but to satisfy the cruellest impulses of his base. Children as young as four months old were ripped from their parents’ arms as a “deterrent.” The bureaucratic euphemism doesn’t soften the moral reality: this was a crime against humanity, executed with the cold efficiency of a system that had lost its soul.

Trump’s pandemic response showed the full bankruptcy of leadership-by-ego. While scientists begged for coordinated federal action, he was promoting miracle cures and suggesting people inject bleach. Or bright interior lighting. While hospitals ran out of basic supplies, he was feuding with governors who had the temerity to criticise his performance. The death toll — preventable, staggering, shameful — stands as a monument to what happens when you let a malignant narcissist play doctor with a nation’s health.

This is what the gold leaf is for: to dazzle you into not seeing the decay beneath. To convince you that surface glamour equals substantive leadership. To make you forget that beneath all the gilt and bluster lies the simple, devastating truth — America elected a man who mistakes cruelty for strength, chaos for disruption, and performance for governance.

The emperor has no clothes, just an ill-fitting suit, a Freudian tie and a cheap re-spray. The world is watching this horror-show unfold, and they’re not impressed. They’re aghast. They’re planning for a post-American world where leadership comes from somewhere else, anywhere else, as long as it’s not here.

The question isn’t whether American democracy can survive this presidency. The question is whether it can survive what comes after — when the precedents have been set, the norms have been shattered, and half the country has been convinced that gilded turds are actually golden treasures worth fighting to preserve.