There is a certain exhausted majesty in watching the American political apparatus collapse under the weight of its own intellectual bankruptcy. This week, the lead performer in our national tragedy, Donald Trump, decided to play the role of the great geopolitical eraser. In a rambling diatribe that served as a perfect microcosm of our collective descent into idiocy, he declared that Somalia is 'not even a country.' It is a bold move, really—to simply un-exist a nation because it doesn't fit the aesthetic of a Florida golf resort or a functional DMV. But in the theater of the absurd that we call the American electoral cycle, facts are merely inconvenient obstacles to a good soundbite, and geography is whatever the loudest man in the room says it is.

Naturally, the reaction from the two dominant wings of our national asylum was as predictable as a sunrise in a polluted sky. On the Right, the MAGA faithful grunted in unified approval, their understanding of world geography roughly equivalent to that of a golden retriever staring at a static television screen. To them, Somalia isn't a place with history, culture, or a seat at the United Nations; it is a vaguely threatening concept used to frighten the suburbs. If the Great Leader says it doesn't exist, then the Horn of Africa is suddenly a vast, empty void on the map, perhaps populated by dragons or, more likely, more immigrants they’ve been told to fear. It is a blissful, aggressive ignorance that requires a complete lobotomy of the critical thinking faculties, which, to be fair, is a prerequisite for participating in modern American conservatism.

On the Left, the outrage machine whirred to life with its usual performative intensity. The professional fact-checkers, those sad little monks of the digital age, rushed to their keyboards to cite the Westphalian system, the 1960 independence of the Somali Republic, and its various diplomatic recognitions. They clutch their pearls and gasp at the 'unprecedented' nature of such comments, as if the last eight years haven't been a non-stop barrage of similar idiocies. They believe that by proving Somalia is, in fact, a country, they have somehow won the argument. They haven't. They are playing a game of logic in a room full of people who have decided that logic is a liberal conspiracy. The Left’s obsession with being 'correct' is their greatest weakness; they are trying to use a scalpel to stop a tidal wave of stupidity, and then they wonder why they’re soaking wet and miserable.

Let’s look at the actual substance—if we can call the gaseous emissions of a campaign rally 'substance.' Trump’s claim that 'they don't have anything that resembles a country' is a fascinating study in projection. Somalia has spent decades grappling with state collapse, civil war, and the interference of foreign powers who view the region as a convenient chessboard. It is, by all academic definitions, a 'failed state.' And yet, here is a man who presided over a country where the capital was stormed by people in buffalo horns, where the basic mechanics of an election are treated as a Choose Your Own Adventure novel, and where the national debt is a number so large it has become an abstract concept. For a representative of the American government—an institution currently held together by spite and geriatric stubbornness—to point a finger at another nation and call it a non-country is the kind of irony that would make a Greek tragedian weep into his wine.

What Trump is really saying, in his characteristic simian shorthand, is that if a place doesn't look like a sanitized Western strip mall, it doesn't deserve the dignity of sovereignty. It is the ultimate expression of the American worldview: if we can't buy it, bomb it, or build a hotel on it, it doesn't exist. This isn't just a critique of Somalia; it is a declaration of the end of the global order. We are moving into an era where 'truth' is determined by the person with the largest social media following. If a former president says a country isn't a country, for his millions of followers, that country ceases to be a human reality and becomes a mere rhetorical device. It is dehumanization disguised as a gaffe.

The tragedy is that the people of Somalia, who have survived more hardship in a single afternoon than the average American voter experiences in a lifetime, are reduced to a punchline for a man who thinks the 'silent majority' is anyone who doesn't mute their television. We are witnessing the final rot of the American mind. On one side, we have a faction that treats the world like a reality show where they can vote nations off the island; on the other, a faction that thinks a well-sourced Tweet will save democracy. Both are equally useless. The reality is that Somalia exists, the world is complex, and the United States is currently a sinking ship being argued over by two groups of people who can't agree on which direction the water is coming from. If this is the best we can do, perhaps we should all stop pretending we’re a 'country' and just admit we’re a collective fever dream waiting to break.