The Moment Competitive Reality Became Real: President Trump’s Speech to Congress Decoded

There’s a particular feeling in the air right now—a kind of global bewilderment. Switch on the news, open a browser, swipe down on your phone – and the screens are going wobbly. As if we’re all walking through a political hall of mirrors.

It’s not just the news itself—it’s the way the world seems to have drifted into something stranger.

The sense of dislocation is heightened by the emergence of AI – what is going to happen next? Our very existence seems threatened. It’s a moment that reminds me of the famous Nobel Prize acceptance speech by William Faulkner in 1950: ?

“There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself, which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.”

?Something surreal is going on; and it brings to mind Magritte’s great line:

“Everything that is visible hides something that is invisible.”

That seems like the perfect gloss on today. What are we really looking at? What’s being hidden in plain sight? Especially when it comes to the strange theatre of Trumpian politics.

And that brings us to President Trump’s big speech to Congress this week.

On the surface, it’s chaos. It is tempting to compare it to a classic Fidel Castro marathon—except instead of six hours of “El Caballo” on revolutionary struggle, we get two hours on tariffs and Greenland and Trudeau.

But it’s worth digging deeper: decoding what’s really going on in this speech.

I believe hidden inside this speech, is something genuinely historic—a preview of a new political force that’s only just getting started. A force that’s less interested in governing the world as it is, and much more focused on rebranding reality itself.

Because if we look closely, this speech reveals the blueprint of something deeper: A new era of competitive reality. A shift toward narrative dominance. A strategy powered by a method we might call “Only Disrupt”.

I have tried to unpack this moment; trace the method in the madness. To ask what happens when reality itself becomes the battleground—and the person still talking wins.

II. The Strange Power of Renaming Reality

There is a key section to review:

“I signed an order making English the official language of the United States of America. I renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And likewise I renamed Mount Denali back to Mount McKinley.”

Gulf of America? C’mon.

But this isn't just rhetoric. It's a method. What you're witnessing in that moment is narrative-based colonization. Not troops. Not treaties. Just language. Just the casual rebranding of reality itself—spoken into being on a global stage.

These declarations don’t have to be factually true. They just have to exist. They just have to circulate. They just have to be testable in the feedback loops: “Let’s see how this plays online.” Let’s make the world blink and say, wait... did he just say that?

Because if reality is now competitive — then this is the next frontier of geopolitical influence will look like. Forget occupation and alliances. Now it’s:

Control the memes, control the dreams, control the map.

This is competitive reality in the making, literally:

“I signed an order making English the official language of the United States of America. I renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And likewise I renamed Mount Denali back to Mount McKinley.”

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III. Only Disrupt: The Method Behind the Madness

In traditional politics, disruption was a tool. But that’s not what’s happening here.

Now, disruption isn't the means to an end. Disruption is the end.

Consider the moments we’ve all watched, blinking in disbelief:

• J.D. Vance’s speech in Munich—of all places—using an international security conference to undermine U.S. support for Ukraine.
• Trump and Vance together in the Oval Office, openly berating Zelensky, turning what should have been a moment of solidarity into something awkward, off-script, and vaguely menacing.

( I would love to have been on Starmer’s easyJet flight back to the UK as he twisted the the top off another miniature and whispered to himself “That could so easily have been me…. Thank God for that Invitation…)

These moments aren’t accidents. They’re designed dissonance. The goal isn’t to propose a better system. The purpose is to make people stop and say:

"Wait, what?" "Is this really happening?" "They can’t be serious… can they?"

And in that moment of disbelief, comes a power vacuum.

Because disbelief weakens reality. Disbelief makes traditional structures—diplomacy, consensus, facts—seem fragile.

And while you're still trying to figure out whether it's real, something else happens. The new reality slides in to fill the gap.

This is Only Disrupt at work: A deliberate, relentless attack on shared reality itself, clearing the stage so that a new narrative—a competitive reality—can be installed.

It’s no longer about persuasion. It’s not even about belief. It’s about placing a competitive reality in view. About making the old reality unstable..

IV. Competitive Reality: The New Battleground

This is where we are now. Welcome to the era of competitive reality.

In this model, reality is no longer a neutral landscape. It’s not a shared set of facts we all more or less agree on. Fake news put an end to that.

Now, reality itself is up for grabs. It’s being actively contested, branded, and market-tested in real time.

Narratives aren’t just how we explain the world anymore. They’ve become the world.

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V. Why AI Changes Everything

And remember this is all happening against the backdrop of AI …. And who else is on the White House? Elon Musk and his tech’ bro’ JD.

In old media – as Alistair Campbell, media spokesperson for UK PM Tony Blair observed all ?those years ago: You need to feed the machine. You needed headlines, talking heads, press conferences. 24/7.

Now? The machine feeds itself.

AI generates infinite variations of a narrative on demand, ably abetted by social media. Bots swarm social media, making fringe ideas feel mainstream overnight..

What begins as a comment in a long, rambling speech—say, renaming the Gulf of Mexico—can suddenly become a content ecosystem. Memes, videos, fake maps, merch. Trending hashtags. A shared in-joke that becomes a shared assumption. And before long, a real conversation about whether, actually, the Gulf of America might make sense.

In an AI-powered environment, reality isn’t just fragile—it’s endlessly remixable. ?Like a session from FatBoy Slim, we’re dancing in a circle outside the movie theatre to the hypnotic sounds of:

“I Need To Praise You Like I Should”.

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VI. Has This Has Happened Before? (Ans: Only Sort of)

1. Napoleon and the Self-Coronation

In 1804, Napoleon did something almost unthinkable. At his own coronation, rather than kneel before the Pope and receive the crown like every ruler before him, he snatched it and placed it on his own head.

It wasn’t just a power move. It was theatrical narrative dominance. A visual disruption designed to rebrand reality in front of a watching world: “I’m not crowned by God. I’m crowned by me.”

2. China’s Territorial Maps

For years, China has produced maps that redraw its borders to include contested regions, broadcasting those images internally and externally as though they were settled fact.

The logic is simple: If you show people the map enough times, the disputed territory begins to feel like part of the nation. Claim it symbolically. Repeat it endlessly. Let the world get used to the idea: competitive reality at the cartographic level.

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VII. The Risks of Competitive Reality

Does this matter……?

I think Trump and his team have realised that we are on the verge of a new age – an age of competing realities.

Power comes from creating a reality.

Once competitive reality becomes the game, the old ideals—truth, accuracy, context—no longer apply. They belong to the era of Only Connect, the time when we believed in stitching the world together through mutual understanding.

But Only Disrupt doesn’t care about understanding. It doesn’t care about coherence. It cares about attention. It cares about dominance.

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Conclusion

Trump’s speech wasn’t just long. It wasn’t just rambling. It was a demonstration. A live test of what happens when you stop trying to manage reality and start trying to own it.

Control the memes, control the dreams, control the map.

That’s the game now. And competitive reality isn’t coming. It’s already here. This is what it sounds like:

“I signed an order making English the official language of the United States of America. I renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. And likewise I renamed Mount Denali back to Mount McKinley.”

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