The inevitable has occurred, and it is far more terrifying than a coup or a populist uprising: the lead actor in the American psychodrama has finally run out of batteries. Donald Trump, the man who spent a decade vibrating at a frequency designed to shatter the glass of liberal sensibilities and conservative logic alike, has finally achieved the one thing no one thought possible: he has become boring. During his recent one-year-anniversary ‘takeover’ of the White House briefing room, we weren't treated to a fire-and-brimstone sermon or a masterful display of demagoguery. Instead, we witnessed the political equivalent of a lukewarm bowl of porridge reciting its grievances to a room full of people who are too addicted to the drama to realize the show was canceled three seasons ago.

The liberal commentariat, led by the perpetually bewildered Holly Baxter, is currently undergoing a collective nervous breakdown. They aren't panicked because Trump is dangerous; they are panicked because he is dull. For years, the media has functioned as a symbiotic parasite, feeding off the high-calorie outrage generated by every ‘covfefe’ and caps-lock tirade. Now, they are staring into a void of ‘low-energy’ recaps and bizarrely muted performances that leave them questioning their own existence. If the monster under the bed doesn't roar, what is the point of the professional monster-hunters? Baxter’s admission that this was ‘some weird s**t’—invoking the ghost of George W. Bush’s accidental lucidity—is a confession of intellectual bankruptcy. They need him to be the existential threat; without the threat, they are just people in expensive glasses shouting at a cloud.

On the other side of the aisle, the Right continues its pathetic performance of pretending this is all part of a grand strategy. They watch a man mumble through a list of perceived slights with the enthusiasm of a DMV clerk and call it ‘strategic restraint.’ It isn't restraint; it’s exhaustion. The MAGA movement has always been a cult of vitality, a desperate grasp for a ‘strongman’ to fix a broken system. But what happens when the strongman is just a tired septuagenarian who seems more interested in the acoustics of the room than the destruction of the Deep State? The cognitive dissonance required to maintain the image of Trump as a vigorous conqueror while he delivers a briefing room monologue that feels like a rehearsal for a local community theater production of ‘The Grumpy Old Man’ is staggering. They are worshipping a fading signal, a VHS tape that has been played too many times and is now mostly tracking lines and static.

This is the true end-state of American politics: not a bang, but a drone. We have reached the point where the spectacle has consumed itself. Trump’s briefing room appearance was a masterclass in the banality of narcissism. It wasn't ‘weird’ in a way that suggests a new direction; it was weird in the way a broken refrigerator is weird—it makes a constant, annoying hum that you eventually stop hearing until the silence finally arrives and you realize how much brain power you wasted trying to ignore it. The tragedy of the American voter is that they are still looking for meaning in this noise. The Left wants a villain to justify their performative virtue; the Right wants a hero to justify their resentment. What they both have is a man who is clearly bored with his own act, yet trapped in a cycle of repetition by an audience that refuses to let him leave the stage.

Historically, when empires crumble, the leaders usually have the decency to be interesting. Nero fiddled; Caligula made his horse a consul. We, however, are cursed with a decline that sounds like a rambling Yelp review for a restaurant that closed in 2016. We are witnessing the heat death of the American personality. The ‘weird s**t’ isn't the performance itself; it’s the fact that we are still talking about it. We are dissecting the energy levels of a man who has spent forty years saying the exact same seven things in different orders, as if there is some hidden code to be found in the repetition. There is no code. There is only the realization that we have spent a decade elevating a person whose primary talent is occupying space, and now that the space is being occupied with less vigor, we don't know what to do with our collective boredom.

So, is Trump boring now? Yes. But the more pressing question is: why are you still watching? The spectacle is over, the actors are tired, and the script was lost years ago. We are all just sitting in a dark theater, staring at a blank screen, waiting for someone to tell us it’s okay to go home. But we won't, because the only thing more frightening to the modern American than a terrifying leader is a boring one. In the silence of the boring, we might actually have to look at ourselves, and that is a horror no one is ready to face.