Michael Jochum

It's great to see some new writers stepping up and speaking out. Musician Michael Jochum has been posting a lot lately. He's performed with Jackson Browne, Korn, Jonathan Davis and others. Rock on, Michael!

What passes for leadership in this moment would be funny if it weren’t so dangerously real. The world is on edge, American forces are entangled in a widening conflict with Iran, and the man with his thumb hovering over the nuclear codes decides it’s time for a little side trip to Graceland. Not to address the nation. Not to steady the ship. Not to offer even the illusion of command. No, he takes a detour into nostalgia, like a bored tourist killing time between rounds of golf, wandering into one of the most sacred spaces in American music history and treating it like a prop warehouse for his next ego boost.

Because that’s what it is with Trump, everything is a stage, everything is branding, everything is an angle. He doesn’t walk into Graceland with reverence; he walks in like a man mentally calculating square footage and resale value. Elvis Presley wasn’t just a star, he was a cultural earthquake, a once-in-a-generation force who changed music, style, and identity in America. Trump doesn’t see any of that. He sees gold trim. He sees spectacle. He sees something he can compare himself to, compete with, cheapen. So of course, in the middle of a global crisis, he’s asking if he could’ve beaten Elvis in a fight, and reminding anyone within earshot that, growing up, some people thought he looked like Elvis. That’s the level of self-awareness we’re dealing with. History reduced to a mirror, legacy reduced to a punchline.

And then comes the real tell, the moment that gives the whole game away. Not the music. Not the history. Not the human story behind the myth. No, what catches his eye is Elvis’s gold-plated Social Security card. That’s what sparks the imagination. That’s where the policy brain kicks in, if you can call it that. Suddenly we’re floating the idea of bringing back gold Social Security cards, because in Trump’s America even retirement becomes a branding opportunity, a tiered membership in a country that increasingly looks like a casino loyalty program. You can almost hear the pitch: upgrade your citizenship, go premium, get the gold card, skip the line, because equality was always such an inconvenience to begin with.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, airports are jammed, security lines are backed up across the country, and instead of trained personnel we’ve got ICE agents dropped into terminals like confused extras, hovering around like they’re deciding whether to grab McDonald’s or Burger King while pretending to be part of a system they were never trained to run. It’s theater. It’s all theater. A government reduced to optics and improvisation while the stakes climb higher by the hour.

And Graceland, of all places, gets shut down so he can wander through it, sign a replica guitar Elvis never even touched, poke around the Jungle Room, and muse about whether one day people might line up to tour Mar-a-Lago the same way they do this place. That’s the sickness right there. Not admiration, competition. Not respect, envy. He doesn’t stand in the presence of legacy and feel humbled; he stands there and thinks, how do I top this? As if greatness is something you can counterfeit with enough gold plating and self-promotion.

All of this unfolding while the machinery of war hums in the background, while decisions made in quiet rooms carry consequences measured in lives, not headlines. And the man at the center of it all is marveling at bread warmers and gold trinkets, drifting through history like it’s a gift shop he might buy on impulse.

This is not leadership. It’s not even distraction anymore. It’s detachment, total, unapologetic, and dangerous. A presidency that treats crisis like an inconvenience and legacy like a commodity, forever chasing the illusion that proximity to greatness is the same thing as earning it.

It isn’t. And no amount of gold plating will ever make it so.

—Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition