The unveiling was staged like a civilization announcing its immortality.
A massive missile shield.
A “Golden Dome.”
Trillion-dollar projections.
Sweeping promises of national invulnerability.
Graphics designed to evoke technological supremacy and historic destiny.
At nearly the same moment, inflation accelerated again, increasingly driven by energy shocks linked to the expanding Iran conflict.
🎧 Listen to the narrated version of The Price of the Performance State (8 minutes, 33 seconds).
Meanwhile, the Pentagon's initial estimate of the cost of the war in Iran totaled $29 billion, and administration officials are now requesting an additional $88 billion to offset rising costs.
And hovering over all of it was perhaps the most revealing statement: Donald Trump, when asked about Americans struggling financially amid the conflict, responded that he was not thinking about their finances. “Not even a little bit,” Trump said.
Taken separately, each of these stories appears manageable enough.
A defense proposal.
An inflation report.
A war appropriation debate.
An insensitive presidential remark.
Together, they reveal something much larger: The continued transformation of the American state into a machine of political spectacle, where public money increasingly functions less as civic investment than as theatrical capital.
That distinction matters.
Because traditional American conservatism once claimed — at least rhetorically — to fear precisely this kind of governance.
For decades, Republican politics wrapped itself in the language of fiscal restraint: balanced budgets, limited government, taxpayer stewardship, warnings about debt,
and constant lectures about future generations inheriting unsustainable obligations.
Whether that rhetoric was always sincere is beside the point now.
What matters is that Trumpism has effectively abandoned that language altogether.
Trump did not shrink the state. He did not reduce the federal government’s appetite for spending. He did not restore a culture of austerity.
Instead, Trumpism transformed government expenditure into identity performance.
Money is no longer merely spent; it is staged. In the Performance State, public expenditure is judged less by what it accomplishes than by what it communicates.
The purpose is not simply policy implementation. The purpose is emotional demonstration: strength, dominance, revenge, national prestige, executive grandeur, and civilizational mythology.
That is why so many of the defining projects of Trump-era politics feel simultaneously enormous and strangely cinematic.
The border wall was not primarily an infrastructure project; it was a televised symbol of sovereignty.
The tariff wars were not simply trade policy. They were performance economics designed to dramatize global confrontation.
Mass deportation proposals operate similarly, less as administratively coherent programs than as spectacles of state power.
And now comes the “Golden Dome,” perhaps the purest expression yet of performance-state politics, a trillion-dollar monument to projected invulnerability unveiled at the precise moment Americans are being told, implicitly and explicitly, to absorb rising costs at home.
This is the deeper shift many political observers still struggle to fully describe.
The old conservative mantra at least claimed that public money belonged to taxpayers and therefore had to be justified carefully.
The new Trump-era mantra increasingly suggests something else: public expenditure is acceptable — even limitless — so long as it reinforces national mythology and executive image.
That is not fiscal conservatism. It is prestige politics.
And prestige politics almost always carries hidden economic consequences.
Eventually, spectacle collides with lived reality.
Citizens may not follow Treasury issuance tables or Pentagon appropriations hearings.
They may not understand the mechanics of deficit financing or debt-service projections.
But they understand:
· Gasoline prices
· Food bills
· Insurance premiums
· Credit-card balances
· Mortgage rates
· Shrinking household budgets
Inflation matters politically because it converts abstraction into experience.
The Iran conflict clearly illustrates the danger.
Military escalation produces rising energy costs. Rising energy costs ripple outward into transportation, manufacturing, and consumer pricing.
War expenditures compound existing deficit pressures.
Interest payments continue climbing.
And ordinary citizens absorb the cumulative burden incrementally, quietly, and often invisibly.
That is why Trump’s statement about not thinking about Americans’ finances matters so much more than a typical presidential gaffe.
The problem is not merely insensitivity.
The problem is the governing assumption embedded in the statement: that the public’s material strain exists beneath the priority of geopolitical and political performance.
In other words: the spectacle comes first.
The audience absorbs the cost afterward.
A republic can ask citizens to sacrifice. Democracies sometimes require it.
But democratic stability weakens when sacrifice increasingly appears detached from civic necessity and attached instead to the emotional needs of political theater.
That is the danger emerging under Trump’s second presidency.
And the danger extends beyond deficits themselves.
The United States has survived large debts, wars, and inflationary periods before. It has even survived reckless presidencies before.
What makes this moment more destabilizing is Trump’s conversion of public expenditure into symbolic architecture — government not as stewardship, but as performance.
Historically, societies entering periods of institutional exhaustion often become visually grand at the precise moment they become structurally brittle.
Empires build monuments.
Leaders announce historic projects.
Governments cultivate images of permanence and strength.
The symbolism grows larger as public confidence quietly weakens underneath it.
That does not mean the United States is collapsing. History is rarely that simple or theatrical.
But it does suggest that Trumpism has altered the psychological relationship between the public and the state in ways that neither party fully understands yet.
Citizens are increasingly treated less as stakeholders in democratic governance than as the audience for a permanent national performance, subject to perpetual announcements, recurring spectacles, permanent emergencies, historic declarations, and ritual demonstrations of strength.
And, like all performances, the production must continually escalate to maintain its emotional effect.
That escalation carries costs: financial, institutional, and democratic.
Eventually, fiscal reality reenters the story whether governments welcome it or not.
The danger is not merely that public expenditures under Trump are increasingly large.
The United States has managed large expenditures before.
The danger is that public expenditures under Trump are increasingly treated less as civic responsibility than as stagecraft—a mechanism for projecting strength, grievance, permanence, and national mythology.
And when governments begin to treat citizens primarily as audiences rather than stakeholders, the bill eventually comes due.
— Dunneagin
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