“Golden Feedback Loop” to Donald Trump by Stefano Donno

You enter the room as if it were a headline,

bold font, all caps,

a ticker tape of your own making gliding

behind your eyes.

Once, the republic spoke in columns and iambs,

measured clauses, slow debate;

now the sentence refreshes every second,

a feed, a scroll, a shout.

You mastered that music first:

the cut of the slogan,

the hook of the insult,

the rhythm that fits in the palm

of a stranger’s hand.

They call it populism, branding,

spectacle, reality,

but it feels more like a mirror factory—

each surface tilted

to catch your name

and send it back brighter,

louder,

again.

There is a crowd inside every camera.

Red hats bloom like small alarms.

History, half-remembered,

watches from the balcony

and takes notes in the dark.

You speak of greatness

the way architects speak of height,

as if altitude were innocence,

as if a tower could be a verdict

or a wall could cure a wound.

Still, the country moves through your shadow

like a long, divided caravan:

some with fists raised,

some with flags raised,

some with phones raised

to catch the proof

that they were here

when the story bent

toward you

again.

In another era,

poets might have praised or cursed a king;

now we annotate the algorithm

that chose which speech to show,

which silence to ignore,

and how your face appears

between a makeup tutorial

and a clip of someone dancing

in their kitchen at midnight.

What will remain is not only the marble

or the motorcade,

but the echo pattern you taught the language—

how a line can break like a nation,

how a nation can chant like a line,

how power learns to rhyme

with itself.