Rubio gets nostalgic in imperial cosplay

You gotta admire the Trump regime's talent for cosplay. Going by Marco Rubio's Valentine's Day speech at the Munich Security Conference, the secretary of state's good cop routine dripped of a Mar-a-Lago School for Boys sketch complete with togas and imperial horseplay. With all the solemnity of a man-boy clutching the prequel to Ed Gibbons' The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, he lectured about civilisational values shared by the White people of Europe and the US, along with warnings against 'evil empires', and the 'climate cult'.

The reich minister insisted the West must 'reindustrialise' and 'control borders', sounding like a mash-up of Reagan and Sir Lancelot. There was, however, no mention of bringing back powdered wigs or slave trade. Rubio warned of 'mass migration' as if millions of Europeans had moved to the US, and later Israel, because they wanted a change of scenery in the '30s-40s. This was foreign policy as Lone Ranger, Europe as trusted Tonto and everyone else a scalp-collecting Comanche. You don't have to be a 19th-20th c. Austrian psychoanalyst to figure out that Trump wants to recreate a world in the image of American TV shows and movies he watched as a boy in the 1950s.

The Munich audience applauded politely, perhaps out of relief that the rhetoric was at least familiar and confirmed the Trump regime's deep nostalgia for an era when anti-colonial movements could be seen as communist-fuelled eddies against the historical tide of western supremacy. While this may have tickled many attendees in the Bavarian capital, one suspects they left wondering whether Washington had mistaken the conference for a production pitch for a sequel of a film a teenage Marco must have enjoyed: Back to the Future.