I find myself, once again, forced to gaze upon the digital entrails of our crumbling civilization, and the view is as predictably hideous as a pile of wet cardboard in a gutter. The BBC, in its infinite, tax-funded wisdom, has decided that the most pressing use of our collective cognitive energy is to watch a panel of 'experts' perform a forensic autopsy on the private messages between Donald Trump and various European leaders. It is a spectacle of such profound futility that it makes the act of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic look like a high-stakes masterclass in civil engineering. We are now living in an era where the pinnacle of geopolitical discourse is the equivalent of a 'u up?' text sent at three in the morning, and we have the audacity to call it 'statecraft.'

Let’s be clear about the players in this tragicomedy. On one side, we have Trump, a man whose approach to diplomacy is less Metternich and more a used car salesman trying to move a 2012 Altima with a blown transmission. His messages aren't communiqués; they are transactional demands wrapped in the aesthetic of a ransom note written by someone who views the English language as an optional suggestion. Then we have the European leaders, the Macrons and Scholzes of the world, who treat these digital brayings with the reverence of a newly discovered Dead Sea Scroll. They aren't victims here; they are the desperate, sweating sycophants of a dying order, trying to figure out if a 'thumbs up' emoji from the White House means a new trade deal or a sudden withdrawal from NATO. They are the high priests of a religion that no longer has any gods, groveling before a golden calf that only speaks in all-caps and grievances.

The real irony, however, lies in the 'experts.' These are the people who have spent decades learning the nuances of international relations, only to find themselves reduced to the status of celebrity gossip columnists. They tell us what to 'read into' these messages. They look for subtext in a man who is famously, aggressively devoid of subtext. Reading into a Trump message is like trying to find hidden meaning in a car crash; there is no 'why,' there is only the physics of the impact. Yet, these analysts insist on treating these exchanges as if they were the correspondence between Frederick the Great and Voltaire. They speak of 'power dynamics' and 'diplomatic leverage' when what they are actually observing is the total, irreversible degradation of the office of the presidency into a reality TV spin-off that nobody asked for and everyone is too stupid to turn off.

Historically, diplomacy was a game of shadows and elegant deception. We had the Treaty of Westphalia, the Congress of Vienna, and the Yalta Conference—events where men in suits decided the fate of millions with a certain level of intellectual rigor, however misguided. Now, we have 'private messages shared publicly.' This is the logical conclusion of a culture that has traded depth for engagement metrics. The 'experts' interviewed by the BBC are like haruspices in ancient Rome, poking at the steaming liver of a sacrificed sheep to predict the weather. They don't know what’s going to happen; they are just as lost as the rest of us, but they have better haircuts and more impressive titles to hide their existential dread. They pretend there is a strategy at play because the alternative—that the world is being run by a series of impulsive, narcissistic pings on a smartphone—is too terrifying to contemplate.

The Left will, of course, hold these messages up as proof of a lack of decorum, as if decorum ever fed a starving child or stopped a bomb from falling. They miss the point entirely. The Right will cheer these messages as a sign of 'strength,' mistaking the behavior of a playground bully for the resolve of a statesman. They are both wrong. What these messages actually represent is the final, sputtering gasps of the Enlightenment. We have reached a point where the most powerful people on Earth communicate with the sophistication of a YouTube comment section, and we—the bored, the cynical, the hopelessly distracted—are expected to find it fascinating. It isn't fascinating. It is a digital grease fire in the kitchen of democracy.

Ultimately, this analysis of private messages tells us nothing about Trump and everything about the state of our discourse. We are obsessed with the 'private' because we have given up on the public. We are fascinated by the gossip because the policy is too depressing to face. We are watching the leaders of the Free World behave like cast members of a low-budget soap opera, and the BBC is there to provide the commentary. It is a circle of stupidity that encompasses the sender, the receiver, the analyst, and the reader. I’d say we should all be ashamed, but shame requires a level of self-awareness that was deleted from the human hard drive somewhere around the time we invented the 'like' button.