Podcast | Arch Trolling: Installing the Monarch Archetype, Part One

One morning in April 2026 a US fighter pilot was supposedly pulled out from behind enemy lines in Iran. At night. That is the story we were told. We do not really know what happened. The likelier reading is that the United States military made an astonishingly unsuccessful attempt to steal nuclear material from Iran, then concocted a story about a fallen aircraft, the loss of many jets, and a heroic escape for an pilot nobody has yet seen. Some of us remember the cacophony of that week, which was then succeeded by all sorts of other stuff. On that very day Donald was circling the ceremonial axis of the Republic outside Arlington National Cemetery. He had his motorcade drive slowly round a traffic circle. He was focusing on a patch of grass in the middle of a roundabout, while the supposed airman, who may or may never have existed, struggled under unspecified injuries, rescued, it was reported, by hundreds of other heroic US military.

Part 2 of this two-parter is available here (though this is stand-alone and one of my best podcasts.

He wants to put an arch on that grass. A triumphal arch, like the one in Paris, 250 feet high, concrete wrapped in granite, with a 60-foot gold Liberty on top, wings on her back and golden eagles either side. Six months before, in the Oval Office, a reporter had pointed at the model and asked him who it was for. The Russian mafia Don answered: me.

Continued:

This week’s podcast is about an arch act of trolling: installing the monarch archetype at the ceremonial axis of the Republic, perhaps the greatest republic humanity has ever experienced, and probably now in its closing stages.

A duty to retain the Republic

All of us have a duty, and especially the Americans amongst us, to fight to retain the Republic in the jurisdiction of the United States. France has had five or six republics. There is no reason why there cannot be a second American republic, one that takes account of all the errors the Don and his enablers, the eparchy, have brought to the fore of so many minds.

It must be said what it is like, at this point, to read the august commentators upon whom I and many others used to rely, in the Washington Post, the New York Times and the other great institutions of the Republic. They take the ballroom at face value. They write serious pieces about the arch. They write sniffy, snobby pieces about gold in the White House. They share the memes the White House releases, to express their disapproval, and in sharing them they keep