Roberto

The President of the United States is asleep at his desk. Again. Behind him stand seven grown adults in expensive suits, and not one of them is doing anything about it. One is mid-sentence. Another is gazing sideways with the haunted look of a man whose pension depends on never acknowledging what he can see in his peripheral vision. The rest of the world is watching, and the rest of the world has noticed something. Americans are terrified of authority. That fear has settled over this administration like a fog, and it turns otherwise functional adults into warm furniture. Nobody moves. Nobody speaks. The paralysis is total. In any European parliament, in any boardroom from Oslo to Ljubljana, someone would have leaned over by now. Tapped a shoulder. Said, quietly but clearly, that perhaps this isn’t the moment. Somebody would have done something, because the alternative, pretending a sleeping man is running a meeting, would have been too absurd to sustain. Not here. Here, seven men have collectively decided that the correct professional response to the President losing consciousness in the Oval Office is to carry on as though he were a particularly demanding houseplant.