HAS JD VANCE SEEN THE WRITING ON THE WALL?

 

Many opponents to the Trump regime have argued that even if, whether through impeachment or enactment of the twenty-fifth amendment, Donald Trump should be removed from office, Vice-President JD Vance would be just as bad or worse. In terms of the damage he could do, I don’t completely agree. Not because I think Vance is any more democratic than Trump, but rather because JD Vance is not Donald Trump.

He’s not a particularly popular person even in Republican circles—indeed polls tend to show he’s the most unpopular VP in history. As such, he would never get away with bullying Congress and the Supreme Court the way Trump does, and could never break the Constitution and federal laws daily like Trump does either, without being consistently called on it. My guess is the Trump dictatorship will end with Trump, whether by impeachment, removal for incompetence, completion of term, or act of God.

So it is not that Vance is any more presidential than Trump is. Indeed, Democratic Georgia Senator Raphael Warnock recently described Vance as “one of the most craven politicians on the American political scene.” The only reason, then, that a Vance presidency would be different from Trump’s is that JD Vance is a flagrant opportunist who, lacking Trump’s cultist backing, would have no choice but to more closely read political climates and appetites than his current boss does, and to act accordingly. And it appears he is currently doing just that, fearing that his own political ambitions for the future will, otherwise, die with the Trump regime, which, by all appearances, is sinking into a period of decline and agonization. 

But Vance’s pusillanimous nature, contrasting with his rank opportunism, have served him incredibly well. In 2011, Vance was a law student and political nobody. But while studying for his law degree at Yale, he attended a talk by billionaire German-American venture-capitalist Peter Thiel—who, since very recently, is holed-up with his family in Argentina, as a means of fleeing proposed taxes on billionaires in his former home of California, because he feels aligned with the radically libertarian ideology of Argentina’s current president, Javier Milei, and because he sees the Southern Cone as  a remote future safe haven in which to hedge against

Vance pictured with mentor Thiel

global instability, the possibility of nuclear war, and artificial intelligence meltdowns in the Northern Hemisphere.

As an aside, having lived in Argentina for half a century myself, I think Thiel might be in for a major surprise when it comes to the instability question. Argentina has proven over recent decades to be one of the most politically and economically unstable countries anywhere. But then maybe impunity rather than stability was the word he was looking for.

Anyway, following that talk, Vance, against all odds,  managed to buttonhole Thiel, and to hit it off with the magnate. Vance seems to have impressed Thiel—perhaps with an ambition and lack of empathy to match the billionaire’s own—and in short order, Thiel took Vance under his wing and made him his mentee. It’s not like this was a something-for-nothing mentor-mentee relationship. Clearly, Thiel planned to turn Vance into his political Pygmalion, the kind of young and ambitious politician who would be willing to do anything necessary to get ahead that a libertarian tycoon could love. And that’s just what Thiel did.

Not-so-long story shorter, Thiel was the key financial architect behind Vance's rapid political ascent. He not only set Vance up in venture capital management from early on, but also later contributed an estimated fifteen million dollars to his protégé’s  2022 US Senate campaign in Vance’s native Ohio.

Thiel pictured with Trump sycophant and 
libertarian Argentine president Javier Milei

It has been widely reported that it was Thiel who encouraged Vance to write what became his massive bestseller, Hillbilly Elegy, published in 2016, at the start of the Trump Era. It was with that book that JD Vance went from being a nobody to being a household name in his Ohio, and indeed in other parts of the US as well.

Thanks to that book, which provided Vance with a public persona (an albeit fake one, since Vance was not the Appalachian hillbilly he portrayed himself as but a middle-class Ohioan), and to Thiel’s deep pockets, that a best-selling author emerged from the political woodwork to burst onto the scene as an Ohio senatorial candidate. This was in the run-up to his 2022 win (by a six percent margin) over Democrat Tim Ryan, in the race for a seat left vacant by Ohio Republican incumbent Ron Portman, who was retiring.

Thiel’s tutelage largely molded Vance’s worldview. Thiel is a techno-libertarian with far-right populist ideas. Both he and Vance share a conviction that American elites have failed, and they have both pushed back actively against institutions like the mainstream media and universities. That and Thiel’s vouching for him made Vance the perfect choice for Donald Trump’s vice-presidential candidate. So, with a scant two-year political career, JD Vance was suddenly the VP after Trump’s Grover-Cleveland-style election win, and the definitive breakup with his first VP, Mike Pence, whom he incited MAGA rioters to almost lynch during the J-6 Insurrection in 2021.

That said, the truth is that although JD Vance would probably do no more than Trump to protect democracy, his actions might be mitigated somewhat by virtue of the fact that, as I said before, he is JD Vance, not Donald Trump. But indeed, according to advances on the new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, about to be released by New York Times investigative reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathon Swan, it was Vance, during the ICE occupation of Minnesota, who took the nefarious Assistant Chief of Staff (and Trump Rasputin) Stephen Miller’s cue in passionately backing the idea of invoking the Insurrection Act and sending troops to that state to put down mass peaceful protests against the federal government invasion.  Note that, to date, Haberman and Swan have been so accurate in their reporting that the White House is now claiming that they could not have been so spot on about what went on in the Sit
uation Room unless they had managed to record the sessions involved.

Three faces of US neo-fascism

Again, however, it is less often ideology that triggers Vance’s actions than it is opportunism. His plea for martial law could well have been no more than a ploy to win points with the nefarious Stephen Miller, who is the chief architect for Trump’s most neo-fascist policies.

Compare this to Vance’s public viewpoint in the two years that he was a senator, when he positioned himself as a never-Trumper, and went as far as to describe Trump as “America’s Hitler”. He would, of course, later seem to forget all about his aversion to Trump’s politics when his handler, Thiel, got him a shot at the VP slot.

Now, it would appear, he is repositioning himself once more, this time to be one of the first rats in line to abandon ship, as the Trump regime sails into ever stormier weather. His recent public behavior suggests a politician engaged in a familiar vice-presidential calculation. He is remaining outwardly loyal while gradually differentiating himself from a damaged president whose controversies, legal vulnerabilities, policy failures, and declining popularity will likely threaten the future ambitions of everyone closely associated with him. Perhaps the most significant differentiation to date is reporting that suggests his strong opposition to the war in Iran. So much so that one wonders if leaks to investigative reporters might have come from his camp.    

Whatever the case might be, some of his recent statements and actions have tended to demonstrate that Vance isn’t going as far as  seeking a public confrontation with Trump, but he is quietly but definitively seeking to put distance between himself and his boss—and, clearly, between himself and hardcore MAGA politicians as well.

Once again, advanced releases of excerpts from Haberman and Swan’s new book suggest that JD Vance has been adamant about a full release of the Epstein Files and transparency regarding the entire Epstein scandal. There were reportedly bitter arguments between Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles.

Wiles is reported to have argued that the release of many of the files would be devastating for the president and needed to be covered up. Vance reportedly posited that everyone was already aware that Trump had been found civilly liable for sexual assault, that he had revealed that he grabbed women by the vagina and kissed them without their permission and got away with it because he was a star, and that he walked in on naked beauty queen contestants whenever he felt like it because he owned the pageant. According to Haberman and Swan, Vance pointed out that Trump had done all of this with political impunity. So how would the Epstein files make any difference? It would be worse, he argued, to be caught covering it up—something about which, so far, he has been right. But Trump reportedly agreed with Wiles and ordered the cover-up to continue.

Vance tells KC workers, "Vote against crazy."

Perhaps the most telling case of separating himself from Trump lately was a baffling statement he made to a crowd of workers and supporters at Milbank Manufacturing in Kansas City, Missouri. At one point in his stump speech, Vance said, “What I will ask you is, if you wanna make America great... if you want to rebuild the American dream for the next generation, vote against the crazy leadership in Washington, D.C.

If it hadn’t been an audience of cheering sycophants that he was addressing, the obvious question to ask would have been, “Wait a second, JD, aren’t you part of the ‘crazy leadership’ in Washington, DC?”  But maybe he figured since he was in KC and not, say, Washington, or New York, or even among his senatorial constituents in Cleveland, he could get away with it. And except for the independent liberal media that jumped on it with both feet, he may have been right, if that’s what he thought, because it seems to have been largely ignored by the corporate news outlets and even by Trump himself.

Perhaps it was just so off the wall that a lot of people jumped to the conclusion that he had simply misspoken. But if that was the case, it was one humongous Freudian slip.

But except for this particular incident, there seems to be no evidence of open rebellion on Vance’s part. Rather, he seems to be engaging in strategic hedging. It’s a strategy that doesn’t muster a great deal of scrutiny, since it is taking place in a regime in which contradictions are the norm. Trump contradicts himself from one year to the next, one month to the next, one day to the next, and, increasingly, from one hour to the next. Indeed, he will sometimes contradict himself from what he says at the start of a single sentence in a social media post before he reaches the end of that same sentence. Especially when he’s tossing out dozens of them, one after another, in the middle of the night.

As mentioned earlier, one area in which Vance is growing especially cautious is in foreign policy—particularly as regards US military intervention abroad. From the outset in his campaign for the vice-presidency, Vance bought into Trump’s prince-of-peace lie. Again and again Trump sought to portray the Democrats as hawks—ignoring the fact that the most prolonged war in US history began on a false premise entertained by a Republican administration. But Trump’s promise to voters was that he would not only not start any wars, but would also end ones that were already ongoing. He even went as far as to say he would halt Russia’s war against Ukraine “on day one.”.

Yet, early in the 2.0 phase of his regime, Trump, disappointed at not getting a Nobel Peace Prize—ignoring the fact that the solution of eight wars that he has repeatedly claimed to have been responsible for, appears to exist only in his head—carried out a rocket attack, apropos of nothing, on Venezuela and sent in commandos to kidnap the Venezuelan president and his wife and spirit them away to jail in New York. He then began threatening to invade Cuba and, finally, ordered attacks on Iran that have gone exceedingly badly for the United States and ended in a clearcut US retreat.

Historically, Vance built much of his national profile around skepticism toward this sort of foreign intervention. Yet Trump’s second administration has become increasingly entangled in military escalation.

In an interview back in February, Vance emphasized:

“I think we all prefer the diplomatic option.” He added, “There is no chance the United States will be involved in a drawn-out war.”

You could say, in twenty-twenty hindsight that this was wishful thinking. Unofficially, reports from within the White House suggest that Vance was vociferously against Trump’s war in Iran from the outset, agreeing with some of the top military officials that it was a disastrous idea. If the president thought a few bombing runs would bring Iran to its knees, he was mistaken. And if that wasn’t the plan, then the US would be in for another forever-war in the Middle East. In the end, however, Vance was in the minority in Trump’s yes-man (and woman) cabinet, and the US has since suffered a humiliating defeat and weakened its position on the world stage, with the senseless Wild West “diplomacy” of Trump and the self-styled “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth taking the lead.

Vance’s language in public statements is, nevertheless,  politically revealing. Rather than fully embracing Trump’s aggressive posture, Vance has repeatedly framed himself as the administration figure emphasizing restraint — preserving his long-standing anti-interventionist credentials with populist conservatives. But then, as the Washington Post would point out, the VP didn’t have a lot of choice. Trump had put him, as the Post said, “in a bind, supporting a war that could cost him politically.” This couched public language was, then, the classic political language of insulation.

JD Vance is also separating himself from Donald Trump by engaging in appearances designed to broaden his image beyond simply being Trump’s lapdog. Perhaps the best example was, once again, that Missouri appearance before workers and supporters at Milbank Manufacturing, where he almost said the quiet part out loud: Dump Trump!

But a much more high-profile move was his decision to appear on a premier anti-Trump TV talk show, ABC’s The View. Earlier this week, Vance sat down with the co-hosts of The View, Joyce Behar, Whoopie Goldberg, Sunny Hostin, Sara Haines, Alyssa Fara Griffin and Ana Navarro, ostensibly to promote his new book, Communion touted as a return-to-faith work. The show is designed to be confrontational, and this, in that sense, was a typical interview. But unlike Trump’s appearances on even mildly opposition shows, in which he always ends up insulting the interviewer, calls their media fake news, stomps on mics and storms off the set, this one was completely civil. It was like a civilized debate in which the two sides agree to disagree but continue to discuss the issues anyway in a calm and collected fashion.

He did particularly well in separating his stance on the Epstein files from that of the Bondi and Blanche DOJ, which has done everything it could to cover the Epstein affair up. Vance’s response to this was to say more or less, “don’t believe everything you read in the paper,” but at the same time confirming that he wanted the files out there in full and in compliance with the law. He managed to elevate his figure above the fray, while still protecting his boss by pointing out that the Epstein transparency legislation was signed into law by Trump and that “Trump threw Epstein out” of Mar-a-Lago, and “reported him to the police,” for “being a creep.”

Navarro calls out Vance on Epstein

Ana Navarro pushed back saying the breakup between Trump and Epstein was over real estate, not pedophilia, but Vance insisted that the media always forgot that Trump reported Epstein to the police. When another host tried to interject something, he calmly said, “Wait, Ana made an important point and I’d like to answer it,”  thus defusing what could have turned into a he-said-she-said confrontation.

The tensest moment was when Whoopie Goldberg and Sunny Hostin double-teamed Vance, asking him to explain where black people fit into his administration’s vision for America. They grilled him over Trump’s systematic erasure of black history and black heroes, and Whoopie sought to get under his skin by reminding him that he should have a better understanding of what people of color go through in the US since he had “people of color in your family,” clearly referring to the VP’s East Indian wife, Usha, and their children. Vance danced around these questions, pretending he wasn’t sure what they were referring to, which obviously didn’t fly, but managing to make it through that segment without demonstrating anger or an open unwillingness to respond.

"You have people of color in your family."

It was clearly his weakest moment, but he kept it civil. At no point was he rude or short-tempered. Throughout, he fielded questions with relative calm, if not always believable responses. He also eschewed Trump’s mindless triumphalism and made it clear that there were a lot of campaign promises that the Trump camp had made and had so far failed to produce, but “we’re working on it.” The overall good interview in clearly hostile territory was sure to contrast Vance as a “rational, tolerant figure,” perhaps even “the adult in the room,” compared with Trump’s consistently irate, prevaricating and scandalous public appearances.

In short, The View provided Vance with a golden opportunity to present himself as independently electable, as seeking to normalize his image with moderates, and as atypically willing and able to engage with Americans beyond the MAGA media ecosystem.

Vance and family in India

This appearance was, in short, a major move in Vance’s personal brand construction. At the same time, he has subtly opened the door to a possible run for the presidency once the midterm elections are over.  Indeed, according to Forbes Magazine reporting, Vance has explicitly said, “I’ve thought about what that moment might look like after the midterm elections.”

Why does this matter? It matters because, once a vice-president begins planning a presidential campaign, his or her political incentives change. It means that JD Vance’s political interests no longer mesh perfectly with those of Donald Trump.

And as if a studied opportunist like Vance needed it, he has the example of Kamala Harris to refer to. Harris came very close to matching Trump in the popular vote in the 2024 presidential race, but not close enough to win. Among other reasons—and racist and misogynist considerations aside—as an incumbent VP, Harris remained loyal to her boss and friend, President Joe Biden, to the bitter end. It was an ethically laudable stance, but it was political suicide, since her campaign failed to make it clear that she was Kamala Harris, not Joe Biden, and that she had a separate set of ideas and ambitions that had nothing to do with the administration she currently represented. This led much of the all-important independent vote to see her as “just more-of-the-same,” and thus to vote for Trump.

Now the situation is the same for Vance. Trump has become toxic and is highly unpopular, particularly among independents that gravitated away from Harris and toward him in 2024. Even many Republicans who have stood by Trump up to now are having their doubts because they realize how badly Trump’s regime is hurting people like them.

An indication of the climate Vance is living in was provided earlier this week by the ultra-conservative National Review, the famous publication founded in 1955 by the late conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr.  Conservative anger was encapsulated in an editorial headline in the Review that read, The Trump Administration Thinks We’re Imbeciles.  Carrying Andrew McCarthy’s byline, the piece was a scathing attack on Trump’s so-called Memorandum of Understanding with Iran to end a war Trump himself started and to open the Strait of Hormuz which was never closed before Trump began bombing Iran.

This is a major issue that Vance must be considering in his effort to de-align himself from Trump, since he must ask himself: Which Trump controversies could damage me? Which policies are or might become unpopular? And, more complex and more important still, how do I inherit the movement without inheriting all the Trump baggage?

Trump too is apparently seeing the writing on the wall in his relationship with Vance. As early as February of 2025, Trump publicly stated he did not necessarily view Vance as his successor. This was politically significant, since it made it clear to Vance from the outset that even if he swore loyalty and had Trump’s back, the president didn’t have his. Indeed, the president’s pick to succeed him could very well be someone like Don Jr., or some other more sycophantic choice who might allow Trump to still have a hand in setting policies of personal convenience.

Once Vance understood that Trump was unwilling to guarantee him succession, the rationale behind the VP’s political strategy (as an attentive student of Peter Thiel’s tactics) was sure to change. Why should Vance remain completely tied to Trump if Trump could well abandon him?

The Washington Post as early as April of this year said that Vance was, “Praising Trump while subtly differentiating himself.” And Bloomberg Government posited in a headline that, “Vance searches for fine line between (his) current role and (his) ambitions.”

The idea of a “fine line” reflects the balancing act Vance is currently performing in remaining loyal enough to retain MAGA support, but separating himself enough to politically survive a post-Trump future.

Donald Trump is eighty, and—at least according to the Constitution—cannot have another run, even if he were in condition to accept one, which he isn’t, since this is his second term.

But JD Vance is only half his boss’s age, and, at least in his mind, his political career is just beginning. Vance, then, apparently understands what many other vice-presidents with political ambitions before him have understood. Namely, that when a presidency begins to display a high level of toxicity, the only way to survive politically is to distance yourself from it. 

The evidence strongly suggests that Vance has foreseen the future, and knows that Trump is becoming more of a liability than an asset. The trick for Vance, then, is the one Kamala Harris’s ethical stricture forced her to ignore. That’s not a problem for an opportunist like Vance and he is already engaging in the long and incrementally gradual process of ensuring that when history judges the Era of Trump, it won’t judge the VP as inseparable from Trump’s enormous failures.

 

TRUMP FINALLY HANDED IN HIS HOMEWORK…HE FLUNKED

The ill-advised military action against Iran, which turned into a hundred-day shooting war, was both started and ended by Donald Trump. He didn’t care how it started, and he obviously didn’t care how it ended.

It was a war that never should have happened. It did not have congressional approval. In fact, Congress was never consulted. Trump simply went to war, like he has done everything else in this Trump 2.0 version of his regime, because he felt like it. And in doing so, he dragged both the United States and the world into its consequences un-consulted.

Trump’s war began with war crimes and ended in surrender. Not the surrender of Iran, but the surrender of Donald Trump. However laden with Trump’s fingerprints this disaster might be, however, he, unfortunately, represents the United States as the country’s head of State. And so, Donald Trump has handed his defeat and capitulation to us, the American people and our representatives. And thanks to his hijacked GOP’s acquiescence and complicity, the defeat is ours to bear. And the shame of it in the world rests on our reluctant shoulders.   

In 2016, on taking office the first time, Trump vowed that he would tear up the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the Iran nuclear deal that the Obama administration before him had so painstakingly negotiated along with five other nations including three allies and two rivals: Germany, France, the United Kingdom, China and Russia, as well as the European Union. It was, then, a deal that had the signed consensus of the most powerful nations on earth.

Just as he had promised and eventually achieved the destruction of the Affordable Care Act, better known as Obama Care, that had brought health insurance to millions of Americans who had never had it before, Trump did, in 2018, effectively tear up the JCPOA. Trump and his sycophantic MAGA-led GOP didn’t do either of these things because they were bad deals—although that was the excuse. They did it, to the cheers of their white-supremacist supporters simply because these were major achievements of the administration of the first non-white president in the history of the United States.

In both cases, Trump promised that he would replace the ACA and the JCPOA with something much better and stronger. In neither case has this promise—like so many other Trump promises—come true. Like the wanton—and also un-consulted—destruction of the historic East Wing of the White House, which Trump also ordered, all that remained where something good had stood before, was rubble. It was, in short, a unilateral pissing contest in which Obama refused to participate. Instead, the former president has sat back and watched as Trump keeps urinating on democracy and diplomacy while digging himself into a deeper and deeper hole.

The 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) stands as one of the most significant diplomatic achievements of the twenty-first century because it accomplished something exceedingly rare in modern geopolitics: It peacefully neutralized a major nuclear proliferation crisis through multilateral diplomacy, verifiable enforcement mechanisms, and international consensus, without firing a shot. By contrast, the newly revealed 2026 Iran Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) negotiated under the administration of Donald Trump amounts to an extraordinary strategic retreat that delivers Iran major concessions while extracting virtually nothing that was not already achieved more effectively more than a decade earlier. In effect, it is not a diplomatic victory for the United States, but capitulation dressed as negotiation through military might.

In this sense, the JCPOA and MOU could not be more contrary in their effects and substance. While it should be pointed out that the MOU is basically a negotiation to negotiate, it will be impossible for the US under the Trump regime to achieve a better deal than the JCPOA—unless  Trump manages to get Iran to sign a carbon copy of the deal he tore up nearly a decade ago. It is, indeed, thanks to that willful and malicious action on Trump’s part that we are where we are today, since the JCPOA was working, and working well. All Trump had to do was leave it alone, or, appeal to proper diplomacy—with regional experts, attorneys, career diplomats and the secretary of state doing the negotiating, rather than Trump’s son-in-law and some real estate guy—to seek even better terms. Instead, as is his “solution” for everything, he bulldozed it.

The JCPOA succeeded because it imposed the most intrusive nuclear verification regime ever negotiated with a non-nuclear state. Iran agreed to reduce its stockpile of enriched uranium by 97percent—and only started enriching beyond the limits of the Obama agreement again after Trump pulled the US out of the pact—to slash operating centrifuges by roughly two-thirds, to cap enrichment levels at 3.67 percent, to redesign the Arak reactor to prevent plutonium production, and to submit to continuous monitoring by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The agreement extended Iran’s estimated “breakout time”—the time needed to produce enough fissile material for a nuclear weapon—from only a few months to roughly one year. Independent fact-checking organizations note that these provisions were functioning and compliance was repeatedly verified before US withdrawal.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry

This was diplomacy operating at its highest level. The agreement was not a bilateral improvisation like the MOU. It required coordination between the United States, Iran, Britain, France, Germany, Russia, China, and the European Union. At a moment of escalating regional hostility, the Obama administration, with Secretary of State John Kerry at the head of the negotiating team, demonstrated that adversaries with fundamentally opposing ideological systems could still reach enforceable agreements serving mutual security interests. Few, if any, diplomatic achievements this century can claim a similar level of complexity or effectiveness.

Then came Trump’s unilateral withdrawal in 2018. The stated rationale was that the JCPOA was “the worst deal ever negotiated.” Critics argued it failed to address Iran’s ballistic missile program, regional proxy activity, and contained sunset clauses. But history has rendered a harsh verdict on that decision: Abandoning the deal produced none of the promised strategic gains. Instead, Iran gradually ceased compliance, expanded uranium enrichment dramatically, deployed advanced centrifuges, restricted inspections, and moved materially closer to nuclear threshold status. Even critics of the original agreement now acknowledge that, however imperfect, the JCPOA “bought time” and successfully constrained Iran’s nuclear capabilities. Backing out of the deal gave Iran an inducement to expand its nuclear program because of the hostility emanating from Washington under the Trump regime.

The irony is profound: After spending years denouncing the JCPOA as weakness, Trump has now negotiated a memorandum that is dramatically weaker than the one he destroyed. The newly proposed  MOU commits the United States to lifting sanctions, unfreezing Iranian assets (a hundred times more assets than those freed up by the Obama administration, which, at the time, drew shouts of indignation from the GOP), easing restrictions on oil exports, reducing military pressure in the Persian Gulf, and—the cruelest cut of all for Americans—providing the bloody dictatorial regime in Iran with reconstruction funding estimated at nearly three hundred billion dollars. One conservative pundit described this last as akin to “giving the Marshall Plan to Germany while the Nazis were still in power,” which is spot-on accurate more than hyperbole.   

In exchange, Iran merely reiterates, as it had already agreed in the JCPOA, that it will not pursue the creation or acquisition of nuclear weapons, and that it agrees to enter into a vague sixty-day negotiation framework for future talks. Critically, the agreement contains no durable new enforcement architecture—Trump says it isn’t necessary—leaves missile programs untouched, leaves proxy militias active, and fails to substantially dismantle Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. In other words, core strategic issues remain entirely unresolved.

The central contradiction is that Donald Trump, on a personal whim, withdrew from a functioning agreement that imposed concrete, measurable, internationally verified restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program, only to re-enter negotiations eight years later offering broader concessions for weaker commitments. In strategic terms, Trump destroyed the leverage the United States once possessed, and he now appears willing to pay enormous economic and diplomatic costs simply to restore a lesser version of the status quo.

Worse still, this substantially strengthens Iran’s radical, repressive, Islamist regime itself. Think tank analysts this week warned that the draft MOU leaves Tehran in a “stronger strategic position.” To say nothing of the fact that it flies in the face of Trump’s broken promise to liberate the Iranian people through democratic regime change. Economic relief—the lifting of sanctions, the enormous injection of formerly frozen assets, and a three hundred billion-dollar reconstruction bailout—will enable the hostile Iranian regime to stabilize its domestic economy, replenish State revenues, and potentially redirect resources toward the very regional networks Washington has long opposed, including Hezbollah and broader “Axis of Resistance” alliances. Rather than weakening Iran’s regional influence, the agreement risks financing its resurgence, in detriment to US regional allies.

From a Middle East power-balance perspective, this weakens US credibility dramatically throughout the region. America’s Gulf partners are confronted with an uncomfortable reality: Washington abandoned a strong agreement for ideological reasons, pursued years of coercive pressure that failed, and, after basically losing Trump’s war, ultimately returned to negotiations from a far weaker bargaining position while granting greater concessions.

The broader lesson of all this is unmistakable. The JCPOA demonstrated disciplined statecraft: multilateral cooperation, rigorous verification, and peaceful conflict management producing measurable security gains. Trump’s MOU demonstrates the opposite, destroying a working framework, squandering leverage through maximalist rhetoric, and then settling for substantially worse terms while irrationally proclaiming “victory”.

In the end, history will not only judge the JCPOA as a highly successful nuclear agreement, but also as a case study for how diplomacy can solve problems that war cannot. Meanwhile, it will judge Trump’s MOU as proof that ideological grandstanding, delusional thinking and a might-makes-right foreign policy can destroy strategic advantage. It also shows that the neighborhood bully’s loud-mouthed promises of “strength” by brute force nearly always end in whimpering surrender.

 

D-DAY – THE HEROIC ANTIFA HISTORY LESSON TOO MUCH OF AMERICA HAS FORGOTTEN

 

June is the month in which many of us from the US and across the world take time to think about, remember and commemorate the supreme sacrifice of the now nearly extinct generation that went to war in the worst conflagration in history in order to rid the world of the scourge of fascism. This year marks the eighty-second anniversary of the June 6^th D-Day Normandy invasion.

For the people of my own generation, D-Day commemorations are more than the mere marking of an historical milestone. They are real and personal and literally hit home, since it was our parents’ generation that made those supreme sacrifices to free Europe and the world from the nefarious, encroaching despotism of fascist ideology. Many of us went to grade school already knowing the gist of World War II history. We knew the names of American military leaders, of some of the key battles, of a lot of the weaponry used. We knew basically what the war had been about.

Hero dads - Sergeant Whitie,
antifa freedom-fighter

Above all, we knew who the good guys and who the bad guys were. Our dads were the good guys, the ones who had gone to war to fight for freedom and democracy. Our mothers were the ones who took up the posts in manufacturing factories and defense plants left vacant by our fathers who were off at war. No matter what sort of relationships we might have with them as we grew up, in that, in having been true freedom-fighters, they were our heroes. The bad guys were the fascists, the Nazis, the militarized far-right imperialists. And we knew the names of their leaders as well, and that the most diabolical one of all was Hitler. His insane, despotic, callously cruel figure was the manifest avatar for fascism and everything that rendered it deplorable enough to warrant the most destructive war in history.

It is worthwhile recalling what D-Day signified in the prosecution of World War II. It was, quite literally, the turning point at which the Allies began winning a definitive victory over the fascist forces of the Axis powers led by Nazi Germany.

On June 6^th, 1944, US, British, Canadian, and other Allied troops landed on the beaches of Normandy in the largest amphibious military operation in history. D-Day was not merely a military maneuver. It was the opening of the Western Front against Nazi Germany and a direct assault on history's most destructive fascist regimes.

More than 156,000 Allied troops crossed the English Channel to France in staging the invasion.  In the first twenty-four hours of the invasion alone, Allied troops suffered ten thousand casualties, 4,414 of them fatal. The US lost 2,501 troops that day, in the bloody fighting to rout the well-entrenched Axis forces. Fatal British casualties numbered 1,449, Canadians 391, and other Allies 73.

Most of the Axis troops defending the positions firing on the Allies at Normandy were German. But the Nazis were also joined by what were known as the Osttruppen, or Eastern Troops. These were volunteers from other countries, or draftees and prisoners of war from Nazi-occupied nations. The Osttruppen, then, were comprised of volunteers from occupied territories in the Soviet Union (such as Ukraine and Georgia), as well as forcibly conscripted men from countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia. In the months leading up to the invasion, the German Army integrated tens of thousands of these non-Germans into their coastal divisions. As many as nine thousand Axis troops were killed, wounded or went missing on that day.

German soldiers entrenched at Normandy

The American forces suffered their devastating casualties at Omaha Beach. Canadian forces stormed Juno Beach under heavy fire. British troops landed at Gold and Sword Beaches. Behind them stood entire societies mobilized against fascism, against white supremacists, against authoritarianism, militarism, and aggressive, imperialist nationalism.

The significance of D-Day cannot be separated from what the Western Allies were fighting against and the freedom-loving attitude of an entire generation in the West. I have underscored Western Allies, since Soviet Russia was an anti-fascist ally during World War II as well. But it was an ally of convenience rather than ideology. Indeed, the Russians paid the highest price of the war, with at least twenty-four million fatalities between civilian and military personnel. But the Soviets’ war with the Nazis was a war between two authoritarianisms—Communist totalitarianism and Nazi fascism—not a war between fascist authoritarianism and democratic freedom.

Nazi Germany was not just another authoritarian government. It was a fascist state built on an historic cult of personality surrounding a cunning if demented leader. The cult was built on contempt for democratic institutions and for the rule of law. It encouraged attacks on the independent press, political violence in support of fascist aims, racial hierarchy, the scapegoating of minorities, and the belief that national greatness justified the destruction of constitutional constraints and of entire ethnicities.

That generation, my parents’ generation,  which fought, and sacrificed,  and died on D-Day, understood that democracy is fragile. They comprehended and believed that democratic institutions can only survive when citizens reject and actively oppose authoritarian designs before these turn into politically backed movements and manage to consolidate power.

British troops deploying at Sword Beach

For decades after World War II, Americans commemorated D-Day as historical proof that the United States was the world's foremost opponent of fascism. The nation portrayed itself as a defender of constitutional government, of free elections, of independent courts, of a free press, of political pluralism and of the rule of law. It was, in short, a society of laws, not of rule by force and by decree.

This historical identity began to erode in small if significant ways as far back as Ronald Reagan. Restrictions on rights and freedoms increased notably in the post-Nine-Eleven Bush Era, as US presidents, Republican and Democrat alike, gained an ever more powerful role, to the detriment of the other two supposedly co-equal branches of government.

But the deterioration of American institutions, democratic government and the rule of law has burgeoned out of control as of 2016, with the appearance on the political scene of Donald Trump, and the start of the Era of Trump. Since then, even in the four years that Trump left office between one term and the next, his nefarious figure has loomed large, not only in American politics, but also in the pernicious “culture wars” that have accompanied his rise to power and bitterly divided Americans.

In view of the fact that the hijacked GOP, which seems oblivious to—or indeed, complicit with—the destruction of America’s democratic institutions, it is almost impossible not to view the Trump administration, based on the most obvious of evidence, as being, not an administration at all in the traditional sense of the word, but a fascist regime. Note that I am not using the word fascist ill-advisedly or as a mere political slur, but rather, in the truest sense of the word.

Let me just clarify what I said above. Historians who specialize in the study of fascism and authoritarianism define some of the hallmarks of these phenomena as follows:

Fascism/authoritarianism is usually a cultist movement that elevates personal loyalty to a leader (cult of personality) or autocratic movement over and above the nation’s institutions. Fascism/authoritarianism is always marked by constant attacks on the independent media as “enemies of the people,” and by enormous efforts to convince the public that the only truth is disseminated by the State, and the propaganda media that support it. In its latest iteration, it also appeals to rich supporters of the movement to buy recalcitrant media and break them into a shadow of their former self—a model favored by former Hungarian dictator Viktor Orbán, who was greatly admired by the current US president.

Modern-day fascist and
Trump hero Viktor Orbán

Fascist/authoritarian regimes seek to garner the impression of legitimacy by de-legitimizing constitutional elections and election outcomes through false claims of election fraud. They also demonize political opponents as “traitors against the nation” rather than viewing them simply as rivals. As these claims get a foothold, fascist and other authoritarian regimes also often trump up charges against their rivals and seek to use the courts to jail them, and thus take them out of circulation. Alternatively, they seek to trash the reputations of their opponents, and to convince their followers that these individuals are dishonest or perverted.

These regimes always celebrate “strongman” leadership as the solution to the nation’s problems, plugging into the narrative that representative democracy is weak, inefficient and ineffective. They employ stark nationalist rhetoric that centers on the grievances and victimhood of their constituencies, casting themselves as having come to power to put right those “discriminations” perpetrated against their supporters and to punish those who “slighted them.”  Along these lines, they eschew legal processes and use the power of State to go after their perceived enemies.

Normalizing violence - J-6 Insurrection - blanket pardon

Fascist/authoritarian regimes seek to reward uniformity and to punish diversity. They are usually misogynist, racist, tribal and rooted in a single religious dogma.

And finally, these regimes seek to normalize violence and threats of violence against “enemies of the State” and of its leader. They encourage violent acts to weed out or overthrow what they tout as “rigged systems” so that the authoritarian leader can put things to rights and “restore the rights of the people.”

If we were to place a checkmark by the items above that apply to the current Trump regime, objectively speaking, they would all be checked. And to the chagrin of those who get a throbbing vein in their forehead every time they hear me use the word fascist to describe MAGA ideology, sorry, but if it walks like a fascist and talks like a fascist, and acts like a fascist…

But don’t take my word for it. Numerous noted scholars specializing in fascism and authoritarianism—including, but not limited to, Timothy Snyder, Ruth Ben-Ghiát, Jason Stanley, and Madeleine Albright—have argued that these patterns in the Trump regime and MAGA closely resemble warning signs historically associated with fascist and authoritarian movements. And this argument has become significantly stronger since Trump returned to office last year. Trump 2.0 is looking more and more like fascism on steroids—the forming of a State paramilitary commanded by the president to violently repress dissent in entire communities, almost daily violations of the Constitution and its Bill of Rights, encroachment on congressional powers, the reshaping of the military that answers to one man rather than to the tenets of the Constitution, and so on.

During Trump’s first presidency (2016-2020), opponents often argued that, despite his attempt to usurp exclusive power, the  institutional checks and balances remained intact. While this is somewhat debatable, let’s agree that, for the sake of argument, it’s true. Indeed, courts blocked executive actions. Career civil servants resisted political pressure. Senior military officers publicly emphasized constitutional obligations. Elections remained competitive, and power was ultimately transferred after the 2020 election—even despite Trump’s historic first as the only president not to accept the peaceful transfer of power, and despite his mounting a bloody insurrection at the Capitol to try and overturn the election results by force in 2020.

But the second Trump presidency has been, to date, stunningly different, because many of those institutional restraints have been purposely weakened and attacked by the regime. Efforts to centralize executive authority, to purge perceived opponents from the career State bureaucracy, to weaken or remove completely independent oversight, to politicize federal statistics, and to redefine loyalty to the state as loyalty to a central political leader represent a grimly advancing stage of democratic erosion.

Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower with
 Screaming Eagle 101st Airborne troops in Normandy

The contrast between this state of affairs and the antifa ideals that inspired D-Day are increasingly stark. The soldiers who landed in Normandy fought a war against a system that concentrated power in a single leader and that demanded ideological conformity, and cultural and ethnic uniformity. Those who fought and spilled their blood on the beaches of Normandy and turned the sea red were, in the truest sense of the word, antifa freedom-fighters, and the US was the exemplary champion of antifa ideals.

Today, as a result of a GOP leadership that is either all-in for fascist-style, one-party rule, or too politically weak or cowardly to resist, contemporary American politics increasingly rewards precisely the fascist tendencies enumerated above. The more than two thousand American heroes of Omaha Beach—or, indeed, the more than four hundred thousand Americans killed in the course of the entire war—didn’t die to establish a political climate in the US in which loyalty to one individual outweighs loyalty to constitutional principles. Indeed, they fought and died to cut the cancer of that fascist model out of the world order.

Canada provides a particularly revealing comparison to what is happening under the Trump regime in the US today. Canadians fought fascism alongside Americans at Normandy in June 1944. Canadian forces suffered more than a thousand casualties on D-Day alone.

Canadian troops disembarking at Juno Beach in
  Normandy, 1,000 casualties, 391 dead in a day.

As a result, for generations, the two countries, which were somewhat wary of each other until that time, have maintained one of the closest alliances in modern history, sharing defense commitments, intelligence partnerships, economic integration, and democratic values. But in recent years, Canadian leaders, policymakers, commentators, and much of the Canadian public at large have expressed growing concern about political developments in the United States. Concerns have included attacks on democratic institutions, threats against electoral legitimacy, political polarization, hostility toward allies, trade disputes, and increasingly hardcore nationalistic rhetoric.

These concerns have morphed into full-blown opposition since Trump began his second term and, unable to corrupt Canada’s democratic ethics and ideas, started attacking Canada outright, levying outrageous trade tariffs on it, and going as far as to suggest he planned to turn Canada into the fifty-first US state. This has obviously infuriated Canadians as a whole, and soured the alliance between the neighboring nations to the point of near dissolution.

Beyond the diplomatic meltdown with Trump, however, Canadians are entertaining more deep-reaching concerns regarding their mammoth neighbor. Indeed, many—perhaps most—Canadians view these developments, not as ordinary policy disagreements, but as evidence that the United States is moving away from the liberal democratic consensus that united North America as well as Western Europe following World War II.

As a result, Canada is  increasingly exploring ways to reduce strategic dependence on American political stability and to strengthen its relationships with other democratic partners. There has even been some talk of Canada’s becoming a member of the European Union, even as it is already reaching out to like-minded Nordic nations in Scandinavia.

It speaks loud and clear of the democratic crisis in the United States that this stunning development in bilateral relations between Canada and the US is historically remarkable. The country that once stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the US on the beaches of Normandy is now, in truly significant respects, attempting to insulate itself from the aggressive instability emanating from Washington.

It is noteworthy that, historically, fascism/authoritarianism succeeds, not because democratic societies consciously choose dictatorship, but because democratic norms are gradually eroded by bad actors. And as this takes place, citizens become accustomed to attacks on institutions, with many people coming to believe the narrative that “the system is rigged,” or that “the system is broken.” And, in the minds of these members of society—usually not a majority, but a critical-mass minority—it stands to reason that the leader and the regime denouncing that supposedly rigged system are “the only ones who can fix it.”

In my own experience, this was true of the military regime that took power in 1976, in Argentina, where I was working for an opposition newspaper that consistently defended the rule of law, and civil and human rights. There was a widespread belief at the time of the coup that the democratic system, rather than the weak and corrupt elected administration, was broken. And a far too extensive proportion of the population was willing to stand behind the dictatorial regime and let it act, “to make the country safe for a clean-slate constitutional democracy.”  Indeed, that was the initial promise of the regime. Instead, that regime ended up staying in power for nearly eight years by means of a bloody reign of terror.

Argentina 1976 - Arrests without charges,
disappearances and summary executions

In such systems, political opponents become enemies. And if the regime becomes powerful enough, it is no longer necessary for it to ostensibly bring charges, false though they may be, to get rid of its rivals and opponents. They are simply and summarily eliminated. In the case of Argentina, from the mid-seventies through the early eighties, thirty thousand were eliminated.

As authoritarianism gradually advances, loyalty to a movement and its leader replaces loyalty to constitutional principles. Exceptional measures become normal. What once seemed unthinkable becomes routine. And people all too often become numb to it until they themselves or their loved ones are caught in the gnashing teeth of the repressive monster.

The lesson of D-Day is that democracy is not self-executing. It survives only when citizens do everything in their power to defend it, no matter how disillusioned they might become with occasional outcomes in a functioning democratic system.

The soldiers who landed in Normandy confronted fascism in its most visible, highly developed and violent form. The challenge facing modern democracies is to recognize authoritarian tendencies before they become irreversible, and to stop them in their tracks.

It is a profoundly cruel reality that the generation that crossed the English Channel on D-Day fought and, in huge numbers, gave their lives to defeat fascism abroad, while many people among today’s generations in the US have embraced fascism. Meanwhile, the rest of Americans may eventually be forced to decide just how far we are willing to go and what we are willing to do to resist and hopefully defeat authoritarianism at home.

That is why today, D-Day and what it signifies is more relevant than ever. It is not merely a commemoration of a massive military victory. It is, additionally, a reminder that democracy can be lost, that fascism can emerge in unexpected places, and that the preservation of free societies requires constant vigilance and participation.

The central debate facing many in the United States today is whether current political developments represent ordinary democratic conflict or the early stages of the very authoritarian traditions that Americans once crossed an ocean to defeat. In my own mind, this debate is moot. Fascism is already upon us. It is here, and steps must be taken to put an immediate halt to its pernicious advancement. Either that, or we must resign ourselves to the death of American democracy.

How we respond to this issue—whether embracing the “new order”, being submersed in apathy about it, or fighting it tooth and nail—will shape not only the future of American democracy but also the future of what generations have, until now, called the Free World.