Genuine power doesn’t need to be advertised this loudly. The frantic, escalating, almost pornographic self-celebration is the tell. It’s a confession in plain sight. The man building his mausoleum while he’s still alive is the man who knows he’s running out of road.

So here we are. A 79-year-old failure, swollen extremities and bruised hand, looking like the victim of a zombie bite — he turns, shuffling between Walter Reed and a half-built ballroom nobody asked for, with an approval rating in free fall, a base finally asking quiet questions about grocery prices, a press corps too cowed to say out loud what they all know, and a clock, biological, cultural, and political, that he cannot stop.

He is not coming back from this. There is no third act. There is only the long, undignified, makeup-smeared decline of a failure and a movement whose moment has passed, shouting to itself ever more loudly into an ever emptier hall, a frowzy barfly of a man, replaying past glories that never happened and

hoping you won’t notice his bad wig.