The thing about the Olympic closing ceremonies is that they’re supposed to feel like a global exhale — a collective unclenching after two weeks of tension and triumph. But Milan 2026 didn’t feel like an exhale. It felt like a warning siren muffled under glitter and fireworks, a last‑ditch attempt to convince the world that everything is fine while the floorboards are actively on fire. The stadium glowed, the music swelled, the athletes marched with that exhausted joy that only comes from surviving something monumental, and yet the whole thing radiated the same energy as a family photo taken ten minutes after a screaming match. Beautiful on the surface, radioactive underneath.
And of course, back home, the regime was already trying to turn it into propaganda mulch. You could practically hear the spin machine revving up before the torch even went out. Every moment of unity, every handshake, every smile was immediately reframed as proof that America is “respected again,” as if the rest of the world wasn’t watching us with the same expression you give a neighbor who insists their collapsing porch is “part of the charm.” The Games were never going to save us — but watching the administration try to wring political capital out of a global celebration was like watching raccoons try to steal a chandelier. Loud, embarrassing, doomed.
The athletes deserved better. They deserved a country that could look at them and feel uncomplicated pride. But instead, they got the regime’s fingerprints all over the moment, smudging everything they touched. You could see it in the way officials back home tried to insert themselves into the narrative, as if they’d personally coached every medalist. You could see it in the way Kash Patel slithered into interviews he had no business being in, grinning like a man who thinks proximity to greatness is the same as earning it. You could see it in the way the president’s social media accounts blasted out deranged victory laps that somehow managed to insult half the athletes while congratulating the other half for “proper patriotism.” It was the Miracle on Ice rewritten by a committee of hall monitors.
Meanwhile, Milan was doing what host cities do: putting on a show. The lights, the choreography, the symbolism — all of it designed to remind the world that humanity can still come together for something joyful. And for a moment, if you squinted, you could almost feel it. Almost. But then the camera cut back to the American delegation, and the weight of 2026 came crashing back in. Because unlike 1980, when the darkness outside the arena made the light inside feel brighter, today the darkness is coming from inside the house. The threat isn’t a foreign superpower; it’s the people running the country like a demolition derby. The fear isn’t nuclear winter; it’s democratic erosion. The enemy isn’t “them.” It’s the rot that’s been festering under our own flag.
So the closing ceremonies became a kind of cosmic joke — a celebration of unity in a year when unity is a myth, a performance of hope in a country where hope has been repossessed. The athletes marched. The crowd roared. The torch went out. And instead of feeling uplifted, Americans felt the same thing they’ve felt for years now: dread. Not because of the Games, but because of what waits on the other side of them. The Olympics end. The world goes home. And we’re left with a regime that treats national pride like a hostage situation and international goodwill like a personal insult.
In another era, the closing ceremonies would have been a balm. In 1980, they were a victory lap for a country that had just remembered its own resilience. In 2026, they’re a mirror — and the reflection is brutal. A nation fractured, exhausted, and led by people who couldn’t inspire unity if you spotted them a script and a teleprompter. A nation that can still produce extraordinary athletes but can’t produce a single moment of shared joy without someone in power trying to monetize it, weaponize it, or ruin it.
The flame went out in Milan. The darkness that followed wasn’t symbolic. It was familiar.
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