How America can stage a 'remarkable comeback' after Trump’s 'bread and circuses'

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U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump depart after attending UFC Freedom 250 on the South Lawn of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., June 15, 2026. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Do Trump’s “humiliating loss to Iran” and his White House cage fight signal a nation in free fall? Or the moment America wakes up and fights back? Those are the questions The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol is asking.

“The coincidence yesterday of the announcement of an agreement on a deal and the cage match at the White House has led to much discussion of imperial decadence, and of our entering an age of bread and circuses,” writes Kristol in “Bread and Capitulation.” He says that the Roman Empire lasted 80 years after the advent of “bread and circuses,” but warns that “things seem to move faster these days. Our decline shows every likelihood of being far quicker and more thorough than Rome’s.”

Kristol points to The Atlantic‘s Tom Nichols, who analyzed the deal that is expected to end the Iran war.

“The United States has little to celebrate: Trump and his team, in record time, just lost a war to a militarily mediocre—but nonetheless extremely dangerous—adversary,” Nichols wrote. “It is clear that Trump has failed to achieve every one of the goals he put forward for this war of choice, and now he is determined to sign, seal, and deliver America’s capitulation as quickly as possible.”

Iran, says Kristol, “comes out a winner.” But that is less important than the “defeat” of America. He says that “Trump’s failure in Iran has confirmed and accelerated the broader retreat during his second term from our standing as the linchpin and guardian of an American-friendly international order.”

America was “the greatest world power” from 1941 to 2025. But now the nation is just one power “among many, even one bully among many, perhaps the preeminent one, but one without much credibility among either allies or enemies.”

Trump’s failed war, says Kristol, leaves the nation and the world “less feared and less respected,” and the world more dangerous.

But he asks, could “the humiliating loss to Iran — along with the embarrassment of our 250th anniversary celebration — be a kind of blessing?”

Could it provide the catalyst to stop and “reverse our decline in national power and also our slide into imperial decadence?”

He notes that the American people largely opposed Trump’s UFC cage fight at the White House. “Perhaps here, unlike in imperial Rome, it may not be too late to revive the spirit of republican virtue?”

Pointing to the Knicks’ “remarkable comeback,” Kristol asks: Who’s to say America can’t have one too?

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