1. United States
2. Mo.
3. Letter

“This week, the U.S. Senate will stage an argument so absurd it will be talked about for a thousand years…. Of course, the current U.S. president has been compared too many times to cite to Nero. But now, it seems, the Senate has subordinated itself to Trump’s desires, as Republicans fight mightily to make sure the president gets his palace. The U.S. Senate has been setting aside valuable time to bicker over the finer details of funding for Donald Trump’s ballroom. Not the ongoing war in Iran or a teetering economy, mind you, but the ballroom…. The Bureau of Labor Statistics [has] released a red-alert inflation report, showing the largest annual increase in three years…. Economists have warned of economic catastrophe if the war [on Iran] drags into June, with the worst inflation increases yet to come. …English historian Edward Gibbon, surveying centering of Roman decline, identified the moment of the collapse. He pegged it at the point when leaders shifted from focusing on urgent civic matters to debating pomp and spectacle. Yes, the Roman Senate still met, he wrote, but its senators had quietly accepted that the work of their great empire was now the curation of the emperor’s taste. The state still seemed to function (bread was still distributed and the aqueducts still flowed), but underneath the surface the institutions were corroding. …The ballroom is the president’s thing. It’s meant for him and his legacy. It’s also the donors’ thing, a way for big businesses and wealthy individuals to give money in search of special treatment from the Trump administration. And perhaps more than anything, it’s the sycophant’s thing. It’s the vanity project most cherished by the president and, accordingly, the one his staunchest defenders must take up as their own cause if they want to remain in his favor. In choosing to spend the third month of a war debating ballroom construction details, that’s how the U.S. Senate has told us what kind of body it’s become. …Rome didn’t fall because Nero designed a Golden House for himself while his city was literally burning. The truth of the matter is that Rome fell because the Roman Senate let him do it, helped him, and then forgot that there’d ever been anything else worth doing than pleasing the emperor.” ~ Miles Taylor on Substack