The Moon Is Ours

By Nick Catoggio

Tuesday, September 08, 2026

 

I’m an overthinker, and I’m mindful of my tendency to overthink. Which sometimes leads me to overthink whether I’m overthinking.

 

Case in point: How much thought should I devote to Facebook slop reposted by an 80-year-old man idly scrolling on his phone, possibly while sitting on the toilet?

 

I worry that I’m overthinking things in pondering the meaning of not one, not two, but three separate images published by the president Sunday of himself flanked by killer robots over captions like “GIVE THEM NIGHTMARES” and “THEY WILL NEVER SLEEP AGAIN.”

 

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar; sometimes a fantasy about leading an army of Terminators to crush your enemies is just a fantasy about leading an army of Terminators to crush your enemies. I’m probably overthinking it.

 

But I might be overthinking whether I’m overthinking it. If the most powerful man in the world’s ability to remember the words “person, woman, man, camera, TV” tells us something important about his mental state, so should his eagerness to imagine himself as the villain in a dystopian sci-fi film, no?

 

Why, next thing you know, he’ll want to dress up the U.S. military to look like the imperial officers in Star Wars—with the Nazi aesthetic dialed up a notch or two.

 

There’s no way to grasp the breadth of Donald Trump’s manic posting binge this weekend without scrolling through it yourself, although this (incomplete) list with timestamps will give you a taste. Amid the usual indecorous trolling of Democratic predecessors, there were numerous fantasies—a visit to the Oval Office from George Washington, an image of Trump in hockey gear looming over Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney after knocking him down, and robots, robots, robots. The official White House account got in on the act too, posting an elaborate video that cast the president as the Green Lantern.

 

The recurring theme, though, was territorial conquest. One image uploaded by the president declared the Strait of Hormuz to be a U.S. possession; another redrew the map of Iran to resemble his facial profile. Then he pivoted to the Western Hemisphere, posting several times about changing the name of New Mexico to (what else?) “New America” before zooming out and publishing a map in which all of North America, from Greenland to Mexico and Canada to the Caribbean, had become part of the United States.

 

Not content with that acquisition, he eventually zoomed out and off Earth entirely with a photo of the lunar surface alongside an American flag captioned “The Moon Is Ours.” That one was my favorite: Rarely have the three hallmarks of Trumpian nationalism—greed, grandiosity, and nostalgia—been synthesized so efficiently.

 

Many of the president’s critics are howling today about invoking the 25^th Amendment, as if his Truth Social diarrhea reflects a deficit of sanity, not dignity. I’m uninterested in that, and not just because (as those critics often forget) the procedural hurdles for removing the president under that amendment are actually higher than they are for impeachment.

 

What interests me about his posting binge is the same thing that interested the authors of today’s new Dispatch editorial—namely, that the post-Trump era is approaching. It’s a clue as to whether the president will spend the last two years of his term on populism or on slopulism.

 

‘Postliberal UBI.’

 

Eric Hoffer wrote that “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

 

For conservatism, that progression roughly tracks with the Reagan revolution, then the emergence of conservative talk radio, and ultimately the ascension of Fox News and online media as loyal partisan megaphones for whatever message the Republican Party needed amplified on a given day.

 

Trumpism is unusual in that I’m not sure that it ever had a “business” stage. It began as a movement against right-wing interventionism and corporatist support for soft borders. But because it’s led by a born racketeer who craves blind loyalty, it decayed straightaway into a racket in which its leader’s momentary preferences define its orthodoxy, its media heroes defame others wantonly to serve him, and its henchmen steal everything that isn’t nailed down.

 

It’s the dry ice of political causes. There was no intermediate phase between its original solid state and its dissolution into a gassy amoral racket.

 

Once Trump is gone, nationalist ideologues will need to somehow reverse-engineer that gas into something politically solid. Which explains last week’s introduction of what economic historian Phil Magness derisively calls “postliberal UBI.”

 

“UBI” stands for “universal basic income,” a welfare-for-all concept in which the federal government pays every American household a fixed amount each month. (For what I hope are obvious reasons, it’s an idea associated with the far left.) “Postliberal UBI,” as Magness calls it, wouldn’t go nearly that far—but it would go quite far, redirecting funds from a Health and Human Services Department program designed to subsidize childcare for working parents toward families where one parent has chosen to care for the children full time in lieu of working.

 

Under the scheme, in other words, the government would be “paying parents to stay home,” as the New York Times put it in a piece published on Friday about a new draft rule to change the policy. Viewed charitably, it’s an Orbánist attempt to goose falling birth rates by incentivizing women to have more children. Viewed less charitably, it’s a bribe to career-minded women to quit working, get married, and be the sort of “trad wives” that postliberals are sure they long to be. Hence, “postliberal UBI.”

 

Needless to say, with the national debt at $40 trillion and interest rates rising, it’s glassy-eyed bonkers for Republicans to want to further normalize the entitlement state by extending its benefits from the lower class to the middle class. And it’s—probably—a sucker’s game for the right in the long run: As a young conservative, I was always told that Republicans could never successfully “outbid” Democrats, an overtly statist party, in bribing voters with taxpayer money. Better to challenge the propriety of such things than concede the left’s premise that the state exists to redistribute wealth.

 

But I haven’t been a young conservative for a long time. The right-wing zeitgeist under nationalism today, as former Mitt Romney aide Kevin Madden put it, has moved “away from criticism of an expanding state and towards the question/contest of who should benefit from its largesse.” That’s postliberalism in a nutshell: Government is a repository of immense power and that power should be wielded aggressively to shape society, chiefly by benefiting friends and harming enemies. In a movement that takes that view, maybe the right can outbid the left.

 

There are obvious questions to be asked about the new policy—for instance, won’t lower-class working women have fewer children once their childcare subsidies disappear? But, to paraphrase Walter Sobchak: Say what you want about the tenets of right-wing socialism, at least it’s an ethos. Given its potential electoral benefits, “postliberal UBI” is precisely the sort of gas-into-solid nationalist policy that J.D. Vance and his Orbánist allies should logically be championing as the Trump era winds down. Without the president’s charisma to run on in 2028, they have little choice but to start getting serious (or “serious”) about populist policies.

 

The problem is that, to all appearances, Trump himself seems to have near-zero interest in those policies.

 

Slopulism triumphant.

 

That’s the real significance of his killer-robots posting spree, I think.

 

With a transformative new welfare program all teed up to dazzle middle-class women before the midterms, the president instead used his megaphone this weekend pushing moronic fantasies about annexing Canada and Mexico. (Which reminds me: Does he realize which way most Canadian and Mexican voters lean politically?) I’ve written before about the degree to which he’s betrayed his populist agenda, but watching him bury the news about “postliberal UBI” makes me wonder if he intends to put any muscle behind helping Vance build a populist platform over the final two years of his term.

 

I don’t think he does. He’s scoffed at making housing reform a priority, launched an expensive new trade war on Canada for reasons no one understands, and has resumed browbeating the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates when it’s trying to manage inflation. (Actual quote: “When our country is strong, interest rates should go down. When our country is weak, frankly they should go up.”) More than once over the last year, he’s babbled about “affordability” being a “fake word” made up by Democrats as part of a political “hoax.”

 

Last week he took the most unifying populist issue in America and somehow placed himself on the wrong side of it. “The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” he warned on Truth Social. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”

 

A checked-out Trump isn’t going to spend the rest of his term rebooting right-wing economic populism, particularly if he ends up with a Democratic Congress keen to infuse any legislation with its own economic priorities. In all probability, he’s going to spend those years on “slopulism”—circulating, and occasionally acting on, trollish dominance fantasies about humiliating his enemies and creating a personal legacy that can’t be expunged once he’s gone.

 

And the clearer it becomes that most Americans want to expunge that legacy, I suspect, the more energy he’ll devote to trying to make doing so impossible before he goes.

 

That’s also my theory for his obsession with building monuments and restoring landmarks. “Perhaps the president’s recent binge of architectural grandeur betrays his awareness that he, and America, are in decline,” I wrote in February, after his approval had sunk below 42 percent. Trump all but confirmed it in a recent interview with New York magazine when he was told that Sen. Jon Ossoff believes he’s building tributes to himself because no one will honor him once he’s gone. “That’s true,” he replied. “Nobody will do it once I’m gone. When I leave here, nobody will.”

 

Seven months and one damaging war since my February piece was published, his approval is now approaching 37 percent. If delusions of grandeur are the president’s response to declining popularity and a poisoned legacy, it makes sense that his response would escalate from things like ballrooms and arches to grander changes as his popular support crumbled—turning Lake Ontario into “Lake America,” imagining New Mexico as “New America,” and, much more ambitiously, hoping to swallow the entirety of North America into the United States.

 

“The moon is ours” is just how you’d expect a grandiose nationalist can't even restore access to a small waterway off the Iranian coast

 

Trump’s final two years in office will be suspenseful, I’m sure, but not with respect to whether he’ll choose populism over slopulism. He won’t. The vice president will need to spearhead a populist policy agenda himself. The suspense will have to do with whether Facebook memes will scratch the president’s itch for grandeur or whether he’ll end up doing something drastic to make his mark. We (probably) don’t need to worry about him leading an army of killer robots, but a surprise invasion of Greenland?

 

If the moon is ours, why shouldn’t Greenland be?

 

Low stakes.

 

The point of our new Dispatch editorial is that the stakes of the post-Trump era are high. For Americans, it’s a time for choosing (to borrow a phrase): “The power to decide what comes next is in the hands of the only people on this Earth who have ever raised their flag on the moon. In that, at least, we find reason for hope—sober hope—at the end of a long, vicious, squandered decade.”

 

We might call that outlook “cautiously pessimistic.” I, a more incautious pessimist, would counter that the stakes are actually low.

 

They’re low because it seems inevitable that “what comes next” will be a choice between two factions that have given up trying to solve America’s problems. “Postliberal UBI” is not a rational response to the country’s impending fiscal disaster—unless you’ve abandoned all pretense of averting that disaster, in which case playing Santa with entitlements until the bottom falls out is, sort of, rational.

 

Does it matter terribly whether, in 2029, America ends up with left-wing policies that it can’t sustain or right-wing policies that it can’t sustain? Or whether it’s President Vance or President Ocasio-Cortez demagoguing oil companies for “making too much money”?

 

For cripes’ sake, the presumptive Republican nominee doesn’t want the dollar to remain the world’s reserve currency. That’s what I mean by “low stakes.”

 

“If we have a crisis of political leadership—and we do—we also have a terrifying crisis of American citizenship,” the editorial declares at one point, correctly. One small data point will drive that crisis home to you, in case the previous thousand editions of this newsletter didn’t. Last month, when CBS News asked Americans if they’d support government price controls to reduce the cost of living, majorities in all three partisan groups said yes. Even Republicans, whose traditional suspicion of central economic planning would have steered them away, one might think.

 

Guess what happens to businesses that can legally no longer charge enough for their product to cover their expenses. The fact that most Americans apparently do need to guess is what makes our citizenship crisis “terrifying.”

 

Trump’s slopulism binge this weekend is another symptom of that crisis. If Republican voters cared about populism on the merits, they’d resent their leader’s embarrassingly childish diversions more bitterly than his left-wing critics do. It’s their movement that he’s discrediting, after all, and it’s their party that will stand to suffer for it in November.

 

But Republican voters no longer take government seriously, and why would they? Unfathomable debt, creeping military obsolescence, and an artificial intelligence industry whose acceleration has turned the future of humanity itself into a black box: America’s leadership class seems to have no idea what to do. And it’s hard to believe that a better leadership class is coming when the citizens who choose that class will be increasingly postliterate, dependent on machines to think for them, reliant on handouts like “postliberal UBI” to pay bills, and sustained in their stupidest political prejudices by bespoke online slop.

 

There will be no revival in a country that chose unseriousness and that will grow progressively less capable intellectually of choosing anything else. It’s a good thing the moon is ours; it’ll have to be enough.