Perfidy

It’s almost poetic, in that dark, American way: a president unveiling his new marble-and-gold bathroom while millions of his citizens brace for their food stamps to run out.

Meanwhile, the rest of Washington was silent — because it was closed. Federal workers were furloughed. Congress couldn’t pass a budget. And the USDA quietly announced that SNAP, the program that feeds one in eight Americans, was running out of money. Literally running out.

“So while Trump was polishing the optics of a bathroom built for a nineteenth-century president, millions of twenty-first-century Americans were refreshing their EBT cards to see if they could still buy groceries.”

Food banks sounded alarms, warning they couldn’t handle the surge if SNAP funds stopped. Families were skipping meals, stretching cans, doing the math that doesn’t work when the safety net starts to fray.

But sure — let’s talk about marble.

You can’t make it up. A gold-trimmed bathroom tour while the country’s basic nutrition program circles the drain. It’s as if Versailles threw a press conference during a bread shortage.

The Lincoln Bathroom, we’re told, was meant to “restore historical authenticity.” But it really restored something else: the eternal American art of performing wealth while ignoring want. The president didn’t unveil a bathroom; he unveiled a metaphor — a glittering monument to how far removed power has become from hunger, debt, and the everyday grind.

“SNAP doesn’t trend. Food insecurity doesn’t go viral. Hunger doesn’t sparkle.”

And it worked. The photos went viral. Reporters debated décor choices. The internet argued over whether the gold accents were too gaudy. Meanwhile, the USDA’s emergency funds ticked down toward zero.

Because hunger doesn’t photograph as well as polished stone. It doesn’t get lighting design or an Instagram filter. And in this country, if it doesn’t sparkle, it barely exists.

That’s the real story hiding behind those marble walls: a nation where image is everything, empathy is optional, and even the bathroom is political theater.

Maybe the irony is that this particular bathroom was dedicated to Abraham Lincoln — a president who, for all his flaws, understood the value of feeding a fractured country instead of gilding its reflection.

The marble isn’t the scandal. The timing is. The gold isn’t obscene. The indifference is.

“When one in eight Americans depends on food aid, and the man in the White House is showing off his fixtures during a shutdown, it’s not just bad optics — it’s a confession.”

And the walls are echoing.

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Related Reading:
Who receives SNAP? Food aid for 1 in 8 Americans is threatened in November – Washington Post
SNAP has provided grocery help for 60-plus years; here’s how it works – AP News
Trump law will cut food stamps for 2.4 million people as work rules widen – The Guardian

It’s always easier to talk about “tightening belts” when yours is made of imported leather. During the shutdown, food assistance froze — but the catered luncheons went on. Some people worry about groceries; others worry about their next donor dinner’s wine pairing.

The New Aristocracy in Business Suits

Marie Antoinette never filed an expense report, but her spirit lives on in modern halls of power. Our elected elite dine on “fiscal responsibility” while the shelves at food pantries grow bare. They debate hunger from the comfort of full plates, assuring the nation that shared sacrifice tastes best when everyone else is fasting.

Government à la Mode

Shutdowns are the political version of a crash diet — imposed by those who never miss a meal. It’s ideology wrapped in pastry: looks principled, feels rich, and leaves everyone else hungry. There’s always funding for perks, offices, and optics, but never for the programs that actually keep families from skipping dinner.

Cake for the Few, Crumbs for the Many

In this modern Versailles, compassion is out of budget. While workers wait for back pay and children for school meals, speeches about “fiscal prudence” echo like the clinking of silver cutlery. Somewhere, an aide whispers, “Let them eat shutdown cake,” and the cameras roll.

History has a sweet tooth for irony — and this batch is baking nicely.

The Sovereign Above the People: A Study in Contempt for the Citizenry

When the Trump White House disseminated an AI-generated video depicting a crowned “King Trump” in a private jet dumping excrement onto “No Kings” protesters, the image crossed a line that separates satire from state-endorsed contempt. It was not simply bad taste; it was a symbolic act of degradation—an official embrace of mockery toward the citizenry itself.

From Satire to State Messaging

Political satire, when wielded by artists or critics, serves to puncture power. But when the powerful themselves turn to grotesque caricature, the act reverses direction: it becomes ridicule from above. In the “King Trump” video, the government’s communicative apparatus—formerly a conduit for public trust—became an amplifier of derision. The excrement streaming from the royal jet was not a metaphor for critique; it was a metaphor for disdain.

That this imagery originated in the seat of executive power underscores a fundamental shift in democratic rhetoric. It suggests a regime no longer preoccupied with persuasion, consensus, or even dignity, but with dominance, humiliation, and spectacle. The citizen, in this frame, is not a partner in governance but a prop in a theater of scorn.

The Symbolism of Height and Waste

The meme’s central composition—one man above, many below—speaks to a political cosmology older than democracy itself. The jet, gleaming and distant, is a throne in motion, hovering beyond accountability. Its waste falls upon the crowd, erasing individuality, staining the collective. This is power that communicates through contemptuous gesture rather than law or reason.

Scatological imagery has long been used by critics to expose moral corruption at the top: the bloated kings and soiled ministers of James Gillray’s engravings, the inverted monarchs of medieval grotesques. But here, the inversion is perverse—the sovereign adopts the language of the jester to insult his own subjects. What once mocked kingship now celebrates it.

Erosion of Civic Respect

Democracy depends on mutual recognition: the governed must see themselves reflected, however imperfectly, in those who govern. To mock the citizen as unworthy of dignity is to corrode that mirror. The meme’s viral life is thus not just digital provocation; it signals a corrosion of civic respect—a leadership that no longer bothers to disguise its contempt.

In such imagery, one sees a moral inversion: the ruler enthroned in the sky, untouchable and unashamed, while the people below are literalized as refuse. It is a worldview that denies the very principle on which republics stand—that all authority derives from the consent, and the dignity, of the governed.

The Decline of Political Decorum

Modern political communication has grown theatrical, but it once maintained a boundary of decorum—a tacit understanding that governance is a public trust, not a personal performance. When that boundary collapses, governance becomes entertainment, and citizens become the audience, or worse, the target of the joke.

The “King Trump” jet meme reveals this descent. It is not simply vulgar; it is symptomatic of a deeper cultural illness—a politics that measures its strength not by persuasion but by humiliation, not by civic pride but by ridicule of dissent.

Conclusion: A Warning from Above

Every democracy is built on respect for the citizen. To degrade that respect is to degrade the foundation itself. The meme of a ruler literally defecating upon the people may seem absurd, but its message is deadly serious: it portrays contempt as confidence, cruelty as humor, and dominance as destiny.

In a republic, the sky should belong to all. When it becomes the ruler’s toilet, the nation beneath is already diminished.

Content references:
Axios report,
The Guardian,
The Daily Beast

Perfidy means deceitfulness, treachery, or betrayal of trust.
It derives from the Latin perfidia — “faithlessness,” from perfidus (“false to one’s trust”).

Examples:

• The treaty was violated through an act of perfidy.
• She could not forgive his perfidy after so many years of loyalty.

Synonyms: treachery, betrayal, duplicity, deceit, disloyalty, treason.
Antonyms: faithfulness, loyalty, devotion, integrity.