Global Spectators Place Bets as America Plays High-Stakes Tag With Itself
The World Watches America Play Tag With Itself
By Diego Morales, Foreign Correspondent-at-Large
NEW YORK—Across the marble lobbies of five-star hotels from Dubai to Davos, television screens flickered this week with the same surreal tableau: grown adults in suits sprinting across manicured lawns, frantically tagging one another while bellowing the words “You’re it, communist!” and “No, you’re the puppet!” Viewers from six continents leaned closer to their glasses of overpriced chardonnay and realized, with the mild horror of an epidemiologist spotting a new variant, that the United States has begun playing what can only be described as “America Game”—a sprawling, rule-free version of playground tag in which the nation simultaneously chases and flees from itself.
The rules, if one insists on calling them that, mutate faster than a hedge fund’s tax residence. One faction tags the other with accusations of “deep-state collusion”; the tagged faction responds by yelling “fake news” and sprinting in the opposite direction, ideally toward a cable-news camera. Observers in Seoul, long accustomed to neighborly saber-rattling, watched with professional curiosity as Washington screamed across the National Mall like toddlers hopped up on birthday cake and constitutional originalism. “At least when we do this on the DMZ,” a South Korean colonel mused, “someone remembers to bring live ammunition.”
International bookmakers wasted no time. London’s Ladbrokes now offers odds on which U.S. institution will be declared “it” next: the Supreme Court at 3-1, the Federal Reserve at 5-1, and “some poor intern who once liked a TikTok” at an enticing 12-1. Meanwhile, El Salvador’s president—never one to miss a branding opportunity—has floated a plan to air-condition the entire country and sell tickets as “the only place you can watch America lose its mind in climate-controlled comfort.” Early buyers include German venture capitalists who believe chaos is the final growth sector.
The economic fallout, like everything else these days, arrives gift-wrapped in jargon. Analysts at HSBC coined the term “Tagflation”: the phenomenon whereby policy uncertainty increases in direct proportion to the number of microphones within a ten-meter radius of any elected official. Supply-chain managers from Rotterdam to Rotterdam-on-Sea (yes, that’s New Zealand) now schedule contingency naps whenever a congressional hearing is announced, calculating that cargo ships move faster than American consensus.
Diplomatically, allies have adopted the weary patience of parents watching a teenager discover nihilism. Canada quietly renewed its subscription to bilateral NAFTA trauma counseling. France offered to send over a team of existential philosophers, then remembered America already has Florida and withdrew the offer. Japan, ever practical, simply updated its disaster-preparedness app to include “U.S. constitutional crisis: seek higher ground, preferably on another continent.”
Perhaps the darkest joke is that everyone else has played this game before—just never with so many nuclear warheads on the bench. Chileans remember the 1973 version, complete with real tanks; Italians recall the 1970s when governments rotated faster than espresso cups. Even the Brits, inventors of orderly queuing, produced the Brexit edition whose rulebook is still being written in crayon. What makes America’s iteration mesmerizing is the sheer production budget: HD cameras, corporate sponsorships, and a theme song that auto-plays whenever democracy’s loading screen hits 99 percent.
Human nature being what it is—equal parts rubbernecking and Schadenfreude—global audiences cannot look away. The America Game has become the planet’s most binge-worthy reality show, complete with cliff-hangers, spin-offs, and an ever-expanding cast of characters who vanish after one season. Ratings spike whenever someone yells “constitutional crisis!” Nielsen, ever the optimist, is reportedly developing a wearable panic monitor so advertisers can target antacid spots to viewers with elevated cortisol.
As dusk fell on Washington, the players showed no sign of tiring. A senator from somewhere rectangular tried to tag the concept of arithmetic itself, insisting two plus two equals “whatever keeps me in office.” The Statue of Liberty face-palmed so hard that tourists in New Jersey felt the breeze. And somewhere in a Geneva think tank, an intern updated the Doomsday Clock by thirty fashionable milliseconds, then added a footnote: “Subject to American recess rules.”
Eventually, like all childhood games, this one will end—either with someone crying, someone cheating, or the bell ringing for supper. The rest of the world, having watched empires play tag since the Bronze Age, knows the bell always rings. Until then, we keep score from the sidelines, popcorn in one hand, emergency passport in the other, secretly grateful that for once the chaos is livestreamed in a language we more or less understand.
Game on, America. Try not to tag the planet while you’re at it.
