We begin, not with the bombast of headlines or the shallow splash of think-piece righteousness, but with the subterranean sound—the root vibration of a republic increasingly in disrepair. It is not Trump per se, but the nonself he echoes: a frequency of dislocation, of rage simmered into style, of grievance aestheticized into governance. His tariffs, his threats of autocracy, his strange obsessions with toilets and light bulbs—these are not policy. They are sounds of something more fundamental: a body politic that no longer hears itself, and so elects a megaphone to replace a mirror. There is no coherent economic theory in Trump’s trade war redux; there is only the sonic boom of a man who never learned the difference between leverage and chaos, echoing back the nation’s unprocessed pain like a busted subwoofer in an empty church.

The trunk—where resonance consolidates and selfhood attempts to hold its shape—finds itself hollowed out in this second term. What should have been a place for ideological rooting or strategic balance becomes instead a resonant chamber of the Self, and only the Self. Trump is not the tree but the echo trapped within it, vibrating against the wood, hollow and persistent. His tariff threats against China, Europe, even Canada—yes, Canada, our polite neighbor to the north—are not coherent economic maneuvers. They are sonic events. They don’t do anything; they say something. They say: I alone can fix it, but also, I have no idea what “it” is. In this sense, his tariffs are less about economics than about epistemics—about whose voice can claim truth in a market of lies.

Enter the branching—that moment where consonance diverges from dissonance, and distinctions begin to show their teeth. Defenders of this chaos, many of whom once held crisp, Reaganite positions on trade, now find themselves tangled in a philosophy of exception: Trump is wrong, but rightly so; foolish, but productively foolish; chaotic, but in a way that disorients our enemies. This is pretzel logic, not because it loops, but because it warps. There is no straight line of defense anymore, only contortion. The free marketeers who once preached NAFTA like scripture now bend themselves into gymnastic apologetics: “Strategic decoupling,” “Tariff-as-bluff,” “Post-global realignment.” These are not analyses; they are acupuncture needles for the conscience, tiny stabs to keep the bloodstream of belief from clotting.

But the fractal-branching begins where suspense emerges—not just in political narrative, but in ontological stakes. This isn’t just about defending Trump; it’s about defending oneself from the implications of enabling him. His defenders now face an unbearable paradox: to maintain their sense of self, they must continuously renegotiate what they believe truth even is. That’s not politics anymore—that’s existential improvisation. It’s epistemic jazz, where the melody of principle is always getting overwritten by the urgency of now. We are witnessing not a coalition but a coping mechanism, a fugue state masquerading as strategy. Suspense builds not from what Trump might do, but from the increasingly obvious fact that no one—not even his allies—knows whether there is anything under the mask. The drama is no longer Shakespearean; it’s Beckettian: everyone waiting for a meaning that may never arrive.

Finally, we reach the canopy—the illusion, the shadow play. Here is where politics, media, and identity no longer serve truth, but each other, in a carousel of mutual hallucination. Trump’s America, in its second-term iteration, is not even trying to convince anyone anymore. It is performance art at the edge of empire, a Las Vegas residency for the soul. The tariffs? They are not meant to succeed. They are meant to signify. Like stage fog or a magician’s silk scarf, they are tools to redirect attention, to mystify the hand that feeds and slaps at the same time. The illusion is complete when the audience—half in horror, half in awe—can no longer tell whether the trick failed or succeeded, only that they are still watching, transfixed.

And that is the true danger of the canopy: it creates the feeling of cover, of structure, even as the branches rot beneath it. Illusion is not just Trump’s tool—it is his home. It is where he thrives, where he is. And those who defend him? They, too, have migrated into the canopy. They are no longer standing on principle, or even on policy. They are swinging from branch to branch in a jungle of self-preservation, clinging not to what is right, but to what can still be believed for now.

So yes—tariffs, defenders, the whole grotesque carnival—it’s all twisted, but not randomly. It spirals, like a pretzel, yes. But also like DNA. Like ideology mutating. Like a species evolving sideways because the sun disappeared, and only the shadows remain.