I never thought it would happen like this.
If you'd asked me years ago what the beginning of collapse might look like, I would have guessed something cold and efficient. A smooth-talking ideologue. A polished politician with a lawyer's brain and a preacher's cadence. Someone capable of selling cruelty with the voice of a trusted friend.
Not—this.
Not a cartoon character who can barely string a sentence together. Not a man whose entire presence feels like a toddler demanding candy at an airport gift shop. Not someone who looks perpetually lost, yet somehow convinced he’s leading the parade with a juice box in one hand and a lit match in the other.
And yet here we are.
It's one of the most surreal parts of all this. Collapse didn't come in riding a black horse. It stumbled through the door covered in fast food grease and resentment, shouting half-finished slogans like a kid throwing a tantrum because nap time was canceled.
And they didn't call it what it was.
That's the part that sticks.
The system bent anyway. The institutions crumbled anyway. The "serious people" fell in line anyway. It didn't matter that the figurehead was barely coherent. In fact, it almost seemed to make it easier. There was no grand argument to defeat, no clever ideology to dismantle. Just a blunt force of rage and spite and broken pride, too dumb to negotiate with and too loud to ignore.
You expect collapse to have some dignity. Some inevitability you can understand even as it horrifies you.
Instead, we got something stupid.
A stupid collapse for a stupid moment in history.
The absurdity of it almost makes it harder to resist. How do you rally people to fight against something so petty and clumsy and grotesque? How do you convince anyone that yes, even the fools can destroy a civilization, if you hand them enough matches and call it patriotism?
Maybe that's part of the trick.
Maybe we thought collapse would be too smart to sneak past us looking this ridiculous.
But it didn't have to be smart.
It just had to be shameless.
And now we live in the wreckage of that bet.
No grand speeches. No final clarifying moment. Just the long, embarrassing fall of a country that underestimated how easy it is to mistake noise for strength.
It is what it is.