I find myself once again staring into the abyss of human triviality, and as usual, the abyss is wearing orange bronzer and a cheap suit. Donald Trump, a man whose physical coordination suggests a marionette being piloted by a caffeinated squirrel, has accused Nicolás Maduro—a man who has presided over the systematic dismantling of a Venezuelan economy once buoyed by oil—of intellectual property theft. The stolen goods? A dance. A movement. A rhythmic geriatric shuffle that signifies nothing and insults the very concept of motor skills. It is the kind of news story that makes me wish I had chosen a more dignified profession, like cleaning the bilge of a plague ship.

Let us analyze the sheer, unadulterated vanity required to believe that your specific brand of stiff-armed, double-fisted air-pumping is a proprietary aesthetic worth defending. Trump claims Maduro copied him. Maduro, presumably between sessions of suppressing dissent and watching inflation rates reach the stratosphere, apparently found the time to study the particular way the former U.S. President moves his hips like a rusted hinge in need of WD-40. This is what we have become as a species. This is the zenith of our geopolitical discourse: two aging, power-hungry narcissists bickering over who invented the 'accordion-squeeze' dance move. It is a pantomime of leadership performed for an audience of idiots.

On the one hand, you have the American Right, a demographic so desperate for a strongman that they will interpret a series of involuntary muscle spasms at a rally as a display of alpha-male vitality. They watch this man move with the grace of a falling refrigerator and see a folk hero. On the other hand, you have the Left, who will spend forty-eight hours producing frame-by-frame forensic analysis to 'debunk' the claim, as if the objective truth of who danced first matters more than the fact that both men are currently holding the collective sanity of their respective hemispheres hostage. If you find yourself caring about who did the 'YMCA' shuffle better, you are the reason the aliens won't talk to us.

Maduro’s imitation—if we can even call it that—is merely a symptom of the global contagion of performative populism. When your country is starving, you give them a show. When your country is polarized and drowning in debt, you give them a rally. The dance is the distraction. It is the jester’s bell rung by the king to keep the peasants from noticing the walls are caving in. Trump, ever the brand-obsessed huckster, cannot abide the idea that even his most pathetic mannerisms aren't unique. To him, everything is a trademark. To him, a socialist autocrat mimicking his platform-stage twitching is a form of flattery he somehow finds offensive, yet deeply validating. It is the narcissism of small differences taken to a grotesque, global scale.

I watched the side-by-side footage because my editors insist on 'research,' a word I use here to describe the slow erosion of my soul. What I saw was not a dance; it was a symptom. It was two men who have clearly never been told 'no' by a choreographer or a psychiatrist, vibrating with the unearned confidence of the truly powerful. They move with a total lack of self-awareness that would be charming in a toddler but is terrifying in men who have, at various points, controlled nuclear codes or national armies. The tragedy of modern history is that it is being written by people who belong in a community center’s beginner salsa class, not the halls of power.

Is there a deeper meaning? Perhaps. Perhaps this is the final evolution of the 'Great Man' theory of history—now reduced to the 'Dancing Man' theory. We are no longer led by ideologies or even coherent policies; we are led by memes. We are led by the ability to capture thirty seconds of social media oxygen through sheer, baffling absurdity. Maduro copies Trump because the formula works. The formula is: be loud, be ridiculous, and never, under any circumstances, allow the public a moment of silence in which they might actually think about their own misery. The dance is the static on the television, the white noise of a collapsing civilization.

I am tired of this planet. I am tired of the Left pretending that Maduro is a misunderstood revolutionary while he plays dress-up as a Caribbean Trump. I am tired of the Right pretending that Trump is a savior while he whines about a Venezuelan dictator stealing his choreography. We are trapped in a feedback loop of ego and idiocy, watching two mirrors reflect each other's ugliness into infinity. If this is the leadership we deserve—and given our collective appetite for this garbage, it clearly is—then I can only hope the music stops soon. But I know it won’t. There’s always another rally, another video, and another reason for me to pour a drink and contemplate the end of the world.