THE TOXIC FIDGET QUEEN VILLIFIES DR. FAUCI

Dr. Lillian Glass

 One of the latest additions to the MAGA Fauci pile-on is bestselling psychological spin doctor Lillian Glass. You might recall Glass as the “self-help” pundit who allegedly invented the term “toxic people”—the title of her first worldwide bestseller back in the nineties—and as the self-styled “Queen of Communications” whose claim to fame is supposedly being able to tell you everything there is to know about a person just by how they blink their eyes, cross their legs, smile, frown, sweat or scratch their…whatever.

MAGA has apparently enlisted Dr. Glass (yes, she does have a PhD, but not, as it turns out, in psychology) to do a very public hatchet job on Dr. Fauci. She is doing it in articles and also on podcasts—on Newsmax among other places.

Speaking of Newsmax, I saw an interview she did there. They came to her home. My first impression was that, for a supposed expert on body language, you would think she would be better at controlling her own.

During that apparently uncut interview, at one point a dog comes into the room and starts barking at the strangers. The camera remains on Glass but you hear the dog barking. Glass suddenly grows very tense, seems to lose track of what the interviewer is asking her, tightens her upper lip (wonder what that means?) and shouts “No!” at the dog out the side of her mouth.

The dog keeps yapping and Glass gets increasingly agitated and distracted. At one point she leans forward, upper lip still tight across her front teeth, and appears to pick an item up from an invisible table in front of her—we’re only seeing her from the chest up. Whatever it is—we can’t see her hand—her shoulder shows that she has side-armed at the dog.

Then suddenly, interrupting the interviewer, she shouts at someone else in the house to come get the dog. By then, I’d pretty much lost interest in the interview—the body language (her body language) portion had been fascinating—because from there on it was a litany of  alleged “tells” that she claimed Fauci had, and which she interpreted as proof positive that he was guilty as sin of whatever he was being accused of, and was being deceptive about it. Innocent until proven guilty…unless you fidget.

Perhaps before I engage in any further analysis of Dr. Glass’s “expertise” and motives, I should point out that she is really hard to take seriously, since, while throwing an honorable scientist like Dr. Fauci under the wheels of the MAGA deflection bus, she has described the body language of Donald Trump—arguably one of the most hostile, deceptive and insincere personalities in history—as “expressive, confident and affectionate,” noting that he has non-verbal style shifts from high-energy dominance to rare moments of strict control or vulnerability depending on the context.

Glass has opined that Trump is typically outspoken, open, and emotional in his body language during standard rallies, utilizing a wide range of vocal inflections. She sees this as positive high energy. Fact-checkers would say that it is hard to be “outspoken and open” when you are provably lying to the crowd with nearly every breath you take.

She has also claimed that Trump has “a controlled delivery” with an “evidence-driven demeanor”—perhaps it would seem so if all you are doing is looking at his tics and “tells”, and not listening to the  outrageous things he is saying that have no basis in fact. Dr. Glass has also extensively analyzed Trump’s handshakes, calling them intense signs of warmth, or as “hand hugs.” Other observers have described them as over the top, creepy, and a kind of arm wrestling to see who blinks first.

Where I can only agree with Glass is when she talks about his meetings with authoritarians like Xi Jinping. She interprets a sense of close proximity, back-pats, and smiles, and calls them “a mix of deliberate power moves and genuine mutual affection.” Bingo! Donald Trump does indeed love his autocrats and authoritarians. You won’t see him wasting any effusive love of this kind on democratic leaders.

Dr. Fauci during the Senate hearing

Compare these glowing views of the president’s body language traits with her scathing interpretation of Dr. Fauci’s discomfort before a Senate committee headed up by Rand Paul, a sworn enemy of his, and under hostile examination by other Republican conspiracy theorists. Her bias seemed to be showing when, in an interview, she talked about how open and sincere questioning by Senator Bernie Moreno (R-OH) had been, when, at one point, as you might recall, Moreno disrespectfully asked Dr. Fauci “who the fuck he thought he was.” She might call that being open and sincere. I call it rude and inappropriate.

For her part, Lillian Glass interpreted all of Dr. Fauci’s “tells” as abjectly negative. The main thrust of her interpretation is that Dr. Fauci’s body language suggests “deception.” Glass points to signs of anxiety, facial expressions that she alleges reveal concealed emotions, the frequency of his blinking, swallowing or tightening of facial muscles. She claims Fauci’s posture during questioning became “defensive” (ya think?). That his voice changed under pressure—I keep remembering Glass with the dog. That his eye movements indicated discomfort. (He was, after all, being given the third degree by one of the GOP’s chief conspiracy theorists, who had the authority of the Senate behind him, no matter how outrageous his claims). That his smiles were “forced.” That his gestures signaled “evasiveness.” That his reactions to questions demonstrated “fear of exposure.” And that his exchanges with Rand Paul revealed “guilt rather than confidence.”

Just by looking at Dr. Fauci, Glass decided that he had “something to hide” regarding gain-of-function research, his congressional testimony, NIH funding of research involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the true origins of COVID (which, so far, no one serious has been able to establish, but the spin doctor seems to have it all figured out). Graver still, in her media posts, she has explicitly described Dr. Fauci as a “megalomaniacal, narcissistic sociopath” and a “megalomaniac and a narcissist”—terms more often employed by mental health specialists to describe Glass’s preferred Psychopath-in-Chief. 

Speech coach for the rich and famous

Furthermore, she is ill-equipped and hasn’t the credentials to make this call, since she is a body-language and behavioral analyst, not a psychoanalyst, and has never examined Dr. Fauci as a patient—nor could she. Indeed, her original training is more in the field of speech therapy and facial and cranial irregularities, specialties in which she skyrocketed to fame by setting up a Beverly Hills practice where she became the “king’s speech” coach to the rich and famous. So her saying this about Dr. Fauci is pretty much the same as any random person on the street calling him names.

Here’s the problem: The central weakness in Lillian Glass's criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci is that it attempts to transform inherently subjective observations about facial expressions and posture into proof of dishonesty while simultaneously adopting many of the political narratives promoted by Fauci's congressional critics. Whatever one thinks of Fauci's COVID-era decisions, body-language analysis is not evidence of deception, nor can it establish scientific misconduct. It is only slightly more than a party trick that can be interpreted in numerous ways. Proof of that is the fact that polygraphs—which depend on the body’s reactions to questioning— are inadmissible in courts of law because they are only scientifically considered to be fifty-four percent accurate at best, and open to interpretation depending on who is administering the test. Those odds aren’t much better than a coin toss.

Add to that the fact that Dr. Glass has made repeated public statements criticizing the handling of the COVID crisis by the team headed up by Dr. Fauci during the pandemic—a team, by the way, that received Presidential Commendations from then-President Trump for their “exceptional efforts” in combating the disease—and it is difficult to take her as being an “unbiased” observer.

This doesn’t come as a surprise. While Glass has always insisted that she is apolitical and that her body language interpretations are void of political prejudice, observers point out that her public comments on social media frequently lean into right-wing populist talking points, particularly regarding pandemic restrictions, cultural institutions, and public health officials. Glass has sharply and openly criticized standard public health measures, lockdowns, and Anthony Fauci personally, aligning closely with MAGA critiques of COVID-19 mandates. She has publicly called out celebrities like Julia Roberts for their praise of Fauci, framing it as a failure to recognize “toxic” (her favorite buzzword) institutional behavior.

While she avoids declaring whom she is voting for, her public commentary has frequently praised Trump’s cultural impact, while criticizing efforts to erase his name from historical venues. All of this while, as mentioned before, favorably characterizing Trump’s body language and delivery styles. She has, furthermore, routinely framed pandemic-era school closures, vaccine mandates, and masking rules as severe government overreach that destroyed businesses and personal lives, giving no credence to the idea of seeking to save lives through any means necessary in a once-in-a-century plague that nevertheless killed millions worldwide and a million in the US alone. The COVID pandemic was the kind of exceptional occurrence that, throughout history, has merited seemingly cruel general quarantines and exceptional public safety measures.

Communications experts claim that Glass’s insistence that her critiques are “not a political post” or partisan exercises, but rather objective assessments of human decency, communication, and systemic toxicity, ring hollow, since her choice of targets is predominantly liberal public figures or mainstream public health architects. This reveals no objectivity at all, but a consistently subjective anti-liberal, far-right populist alignment in spirit and practice.

Psychological and behavioral science professionals have long criticized Dr. Lillian Glass and similar high-profile self-help media commentators for promoting unproven body language “tells”. They point out that there is no empirical grounding for the concept of “toxic people”, and indicate that there are standing professional ethics rules that prohibit engaging in unsupported remote psychological analysis.

Many psychological and non-verbal communications researchers have, through their intensive studies, come to classify lie-detection through posture, eye movements, or touching the face as scientific misinformation or “junk science”. In all fairness, there are likely others, like Dr. Glass, who defend their stand with equal certainty. But empirical studies exist that tend to show that there is no single reliable non-verbal indicator or checklist of behaviors (such as micro-expressions or fidgeting—what Glass likes to call the “itchy-scratchies”—that proves a person is lying. Experts conclude that behavior depends on more than the “tells” of the moment, and relies heavily on individual baselines, cultural background, and individual context rather than any sort of universal “dictionary” of physical movement.

Some clinical psychologists have also specifically criticized the “toxic people” concept. These critics point out that terms like “toxic” or “toxicity” have no formal diagnostic utility or foundation in psychological science. They are usually, these experts say, an oversimplification in that they pigeonhole or label people as inherently toxic, which promotes a black-and-white view of human behavior that avoids addressing complex interpersonal dynamics or accountability. It tends to be a “feel-good” self-help gimmick that permits one or both parties in a relationship to lay all blame for the failure of that relationship on the other person by writing him or her off as “toxic”. That said, Dr. Glass’s body language star, Donald Trump, is clearly, in most of the world’s perception, and certainly in mine, for all it’s worth, the most toxic personality to reach global mega-power status since the eve of World War II.

Where Dr. Glass clearly falls through the cracks in professional ethics, however, is in her remote and un-credentialed analysis of Dr. Fauci as a “megalomaniacal, narcissistic sociopath.”  Licensed mental health professionals are bound by ethical rules (such as the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater Rule) forbidding the public diagnosis or psychological evaluation of public figures they have not personally examined. Media personalities like Dr. Glass who offer allegedly definitive psychological assessments of public figures like Dr. Fauci are in clear violation of this standard of empirical and clinical accountability.

But then again, since Dr. Glass is merely a bestselling, high-profile, self-help pundit rather than a mental health professional, perhaps the gold standard ethics of the psychiatric community do not apply. Instead, she is merely plying her millions of far-right fans with populist red meat that only has the subjective significance that she and her following want to give it, with no empirical evidence to prove it. And no apparent personal need on her part to be incumbered by the facts.

 

 

THE SINISTER SIDE OF THE GENIUS ACT

While most folks were trying to forget the horrific news it seems we are being spoon-fed daily and enjoy their summer, Congress and the Executive were busy legislating, once again, in favor of oligarchic interests, and, in the long-run, against the better interests of the majority of common everyday citizens. The legislation in question is at the heart of one of the more obscure goals that Donald Trump set out for his administration from the start of his second term in office. In the early days after his election triumph, Trump made fleeting mention of his objective of launching the US into the crypto era. That’s what the law in question is about. 

Little has been made of this point. In fact, mention of it has been pretty much negligible compared with stunning daily news of heavy-handed immigration enforcement, or of the president’s personal war on anybody who ever said an unkind word about him, or of Trump’s connection to child sex-trafficking monster Jeffrey Epstein, or of his disemboweling of, almost literally, every government office that ever provided assistance to the least fortunate sectors of the population. But it is something that affects us all, whether we realize it yet or not.

If information about this new law has been scant, it is probably because it has been little analyzed by the mainstream media, which have plenty of sensational headlines and shocking new revelations with which to flesh out their daily news schedules. And for many common ordinary people, it seems all too technical and obscure to attract their interest. But this is major news and it has happened, fait accompli, right under our noses.

I am referring here to the so-called Genius Act, which, with little fanfare, passed in the Senate by 68 to 30 on June 17, and, after grueling marathon debate, passed in the House 308 to 122 a month later. Donald Trump, with unaccustomed low-key publicity, signed it into law on July 18, a day after it passed in the House. In both houses of Congress it had obvious support from lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, despite having the Trump GOP’s fingerprints all over it. But seen from a critical viewpoint, this cannot, by any stretch of the imagination, be considered a law with bi-party support based on its clear-cut benefit to everyone. In all honesty, this is a law that provides yet another leg up to tech giants and the wealthy, as if this administration were not already doing their bidding to an enormous degree. And I’m going to attempt to explain why it is so dangerous, in terms that everyone can understand.

Known as the Genius Act, the actual name of the law is The Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins Act. The original bill was introduced in the Senate by Bill Hagerty, a Republican from Tennessee. The ostensible aim of the law is to provide a regulatory framework for so-called “stablecoins”. Stablecoins are basically a cryptocurrency supposedly backed by “reliable assets”, such as commodities or strong currency.

Stablecoins are typically used as a vehicle for transfers between other types of cryptocurrency. The core idea of the Genius Act is to ensure that US stablecoins are backed by dollars on a one-to-one ratio, or by “other low-risk assets.” Prior to the Genius Act’s  passage into law, stablecoins weren’t subject to rules regarding one-to-one backing by “low-risk assets”.

That all sounds pretty straight-forward and positive. But one of the first red flags raised to its passage came from a major nonprofit consumer group, Consumer Reports. According to their study of the law, its provisions not only fail to provide sufficient consumer protection, but also hand a blank check to Big Tech to engage in activities that compete with commercial  banking, but which are not subject to the stringent standards or practices to which banks must adhere.

This would be alarming enough, but it is only the tip of the iceberg. While the alleged aims of the Genius Act include the fostering of innovation and decentralization, it will, in effect, promote shifting control over the monetary system from public to private hands, but often in collusion with the short-term political goals of individual administrations.

How so?

First, the Act clears the way for “further study” of digital dollar frameworks—basically meaning government-backed cryptocurrencies. The problem with that is that this opens the path to the complete replacement of traditional cash with digital coins that the Treasury or Federal Reserve would presumably issue. But here the role of Big Tech firms as government partners and contractors is as yet unclear.

Additionally, the law calls for “modernization of the monetary system,” making use of accounting technologies that would provide for real-time tracking, surveillance and management of all digital transactions. These are aspects that are completely absent from current cash transactions. And if cash is phased out, digital will be the only sort of transactions available.

Further complicating matters is that, while stringent government control over digital transactions is the apparent aim, the law nevertheless calls for public-private partnerships to develop crypto tools. What this means in practical terms is that Big Tech firms will have a key to national monetary policy and infrastructure.

At a grassroots level—how the law affects you, the individual—in  the absence of cash money, every single transaction you make will be subject to oversight, presumably not only by the government, but also by its crypto business partners. In short, everyone would end up being subject to a surveillance-based financial system in which any presumed right to privacy would go right out the window.

Another consequence would be the marginalization of unbanked and underbanked populations. No one would have the freedom to remove credit card type activity from their life, or to merely have a savings account and operate on a day to day basis with hard cash. You may think no one does this either intentionally or because of their particular social situation any longer. But in fact, government statistics show that the unbanked and underbanked population in the US totals nearly six million households.

These are mostly people who are, in some sense, already marginalized to a greater or lesser degree. These people are, for instance, the elderly, low-income wage-earners, rural residents, and undocumented immigrants working in a variety of American sectors—farming, hotels, packing, etc. Already vulnerable, these people would simply be written off by an all-digital system, since they rely on cash for their daily needs, and the Genius Act does little or nothing to protect them and their way of life.

The law also does little to mitigate the risk of government overreach. On the contrary, it opens a door to it. And in an autocratic climate like the current one, and in an era in which the Executive has ever greater power in detriment to the other branches of government, this feels like a major vulnerability. Suffice it to say that, in any “politically sensitive” context, government policy could very well program spending restrictions in accordance with political goals, a restriction that is impossible when cash is freely available and usable.

Nor does the Genius Act provide, within the context of eventual cash restrictions, for the preservation of tools such as ATMs, cash-handling services (PayPal etc.), or even cash-acceptance mandates for businesses. Clearly, this has the makings of a catalyst for banks and retailers to accelerate the removal of cash operations, permitting them to cite “modernization mandates” espoused by the Genius Act.

Also of no little concern are cybersecurity and stability issues. If all money is rendered “electronic,” the entire monetary system would become vulnerable to such threats as algorithmic errors, power outages and hackers of all sorts. Unlike cash, which is undeterred by war, natural disasters, blackouts, etc., solely digital systems are eminently vulnerable to any and all of these contingencies.

In short, a crypto-based financial and monetary system promises to further undermine civil liberties, exacerbate state control over people’s personal finances, and vastly increase inequality. And, bottom line, whoever manages to gain control over the monetary system will also have control over the distribution of wealth, in a world where some people are already clearly “more equal” than others.

 

CRIMEA: LET’S LOOK AT THE FACTS

When Donald Trump came to office last January, it was with the promise that he would have the war in Ukraine over with in twenty-four hours. Like much of what Donald Trump says and promises, this statement too was empty, hyperbolic and always undoable.

Since then, however, he and what I call his non-negotiators—principally Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Vice-President JD Vance and Special Envoy Steve Witkoff—have sought to quickly end the conflict by scandalously siding with Russia’s Vladimir Putin and vilifying Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky. This approach ignores completely the fact that the Ukraine War is a war of aggression perpetrated by Russia’s totalitarian leader against a sovereign nation. It also disregards the direct challenge Russia’s aggression poses to NATO, and to the sovereignty of the nations of both Eastern and Western Europe.

The Trump administration’s stance further ignores the fact that Russia is a natural enemy of the US and of the West as a whole, engaged ever since World War II in an ideological and geopolitical struggle for worldwide influence and power that is opposed to the West’s own world leadership goals. There has only been one brief period of rapprochement following the fall of the Berlin Wall. But since the start in 1999 of the reign of Vladimir Putin, alternating between the offices of prime minister and president, the focus of the Kremlin has been on reviving Russian imperialism and on the reestablishment of a bipolar world.

Incredibly, considering this environment, the officials handling Trump’s virtual capitulation to Putin’s whims are now quoting a Russian talking point as the basis for their “negotiations”. Namely, that the war is not Russia’s fault at all, but Ukraine’s for seeking a place as a Western ally within the framework of NATO. Here, my friends, is where we should be seeing a huge flashing sign reading: What’s wrong with this picture?

What I mean by that, in case you’ve let yourself get confused about who Putin is and who the US is supposed to be, is that Ukraine’s wanting a closer relationship with the West is now, and should always have been, a good thing, not a fault. Ukraine is a key piece in the geopolitical puzzle, the very terrain which stands between Russia and renewed domination of Eastern Europe. In case you’re getting lost on the map, if Ukraine’s wanting to be in NATO sparked Russia’s war of aggression, letting Russia have Ukraine is the same as opening a gaping hole in Western defense against a repeat of Russian post-war imperialism, and of the czarist imperialism that preceded it.

In the manner of Herod making a reluctant gift to Salome of John the Baptist’s head, Trump administration officials conducting these non-negotiations are starting from a position of abject weakness by kneeling before Putin with Crimea on a platter. Their sorely uneducated notion is that Crimea has always pretty much been Russian anyway, and besides, Putin grabbed it a decade ago, so, hey, finders keepers.

But is that really the case? The answer is, no.

The fact is that prior to Russia’s original imperialist advances, Crimea was inhabited by various ethnic groups, but principally the Crimean Tatars. They were a Turkic people who established the Crimean Khanate in the fifteenth century. Indeed, the name Crimea is derived from the Turkish root word Qirim. Crimea was a vassal khanate of the Ottoman Empire from 1478 to 1774. The Ukrainian region was, then, part of the Ottoman Empire’s broader sphere of influence, not that of the Russian Empire.

It was only through conquest, not by legal or consensual means, that the Russian Empire annexed Crimea in 1783, following the Russo-Turkish War (1768–1774).  At the end of that war, the Ottoman Empire had granted Crimea independence through the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca (1774). So the Russian annexation nine years later was the first instance of Russia’s simply grabbing sovereign Crimea for its own strategic purposes. It was that annexation that marked the start of a Russian presence on the peninsula, but contrary to Putin’s narrative, that presence wasn’t based on any inherent or historic Russian claim to Crimea.

Crimean Tatars

The Putin myth echoed by Trump officials that ethnic Russians have always formed the population of Crimea is also spurious.  While it is true that Cossacks traditionally formed part of the Crimean population, along with the native Turkic Crimean Tatars, and while it is also true that Cossacks took part in Russian military campaigns throughout history, the Cossacks cannot be counted as Russians. They were a diverse group of predominantly East Slavic people. A mix of peasants, escaped serfs, and some nobility, they emerged as a nomadic society in the fifteenth century, banding together for mutual protection. They were a quasi-military and semi-nomadic society that primarily inhabited the Ukrainian steppes, venturing as well into Southern Russia. While the Cossacks still exist, with various levels of organization and activity, their communities have been reconstituted and adapted to modern society. 

Highly independent and of autonomous spirit, while not strictly mercenaries, the armies of the Cossacks often fought for a variety of regional powers, including Russia, in exchange for self-governance and a free lifestyle. They played a significant role in the history of the region, including participation in conflicts with various states in resistance against foreign invaders. But they formed part of no other nation.

Cossacks - quasi-military, semi-nomadic people

Nor is the term "Cossack" Russian. It is derived from the Turkic word kazak, which, literally translated, means adventurer or free man. Furthermore, East Slavs, the ethnicity to which the Cossacks pertain, were once part of a federation of principalities known as Kyivan Rus', a medieval state that existed from the late ninth to the mid-thirteenth century. It emerged as a powerful confederation with the city-state of Kyiv (today the capital of Ukraine) as its capital, and its territory encompassed much of what are today Ukraine, Belarus, and parts of Russia. 

That said, the Cossacks weren’t indigenous to Crimea. Having taken  part in Russian military campaigns in the area, some of their number eventually settled on or near the Crimean Peninsula, but their presence does not give Russia a legitimate claim. Especially since some of the campaigns the Cossacks took part in where Russian efforts to subjugate and/or displace the native Crimean Tatars.

As for the Tatars, they were the dominant ethnic and political group in Crimea for centuries, and still formed the majority of the population until 1944, when Soviet strongman Joseph Stalin engineered their mass deportation. It was, then, through an act of what is today known as ethnic cleansing, rather than through any legitimate transfer of sovereignty, that the Crimean region’s demographic balance was tipped toward a predominantly ethnic Russian population.

Stalin's deportation of the Tatars

From a strictly legal standpoint, ten years after Stalin’s annexation of Crimea in 1944, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet (governing body of the USSR) transferred the peninsula back to Ukraine in 1954. Basically, the Supreme Soviet removed Crimea from the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR) and placed it once more under the original control of Ukraine (at the time, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic). Ukraine’s claim to Crimea was never questioned after that, until Putin’s decade-long challenge to Ukrainian sovereignty—not by the Russian Federation after the fall of the USSR in 1991, nor by any international body.  

What is more, International law recognizes Crimea as part of Ukraine. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Ukraine inherited Crimea as part of its internationally recognized borders. Russia itself recognized these borders in multiple treaties, including the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Russia agreed to respect Ukraine’s sovereignty in exchange for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal.

Bearing all of this in mind, Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its armed invasion of other parts of Ukraine’s sovereign territory, using devastating military force, are violations of international law, and have sparked the largest major ground war in Europe since World War II—one involving a world-class nuclear power. Russia’s war of aggression on a sovereign country has drawn widespread condemnation in the international community. The United Nations has passed a resolution (R68/262) reaffirming Ukraine’s territorial integrity and declaring invalid a referendum held by Russia in Crimea to try and justify its annexation.

Crimean Tatar children in traditional dress

In short, Russia’s claim to Crimea and all other areas of Ukraine that it has usurped by military force since 2014 is historically, ethnically, legally and morally illegitimate, and the Trump administration’s attempts to justify Russia’s actions based on some “might makes right” theory that forms part of Trump’s authoritarian view of the world, fly in the face of international law, of respect for the sovereignty of free nations, and of America’s traditional role as the erstwhile leader of the Western world.

Worst of all, Donald Trump admires authoritarians. It’s a schoolyard philosophy, a bully’s attitude of joining other bullies in ganging up on the weaker kids in order not to have to stand up to the other bullies himself.  It’s a stance that not only makes the US Russia’s vassal, but which is also tantamount to appeasing a dangerous, megalomaniacal imperialist.

It is easy enough to understand if we stop pretending this is business as usual and start realizing that Trump identifies with Putin because Trump has megalomaniacal expansionist delusions of his own when it comes to our neighbors. There is all too obviously no difference between Trump’s feverish, openly-stated ambition of taking over Canada and making it a state, and Putin’s realized dream of invading Russia’s sovereign neighbors and making them part of his empire.

Appeasing bullies has never worked. There is no better example to quote than that of another megalomaniacal expansionist who invaded his neighbors prior to World War II. The US and Europe alike appeased Germany’s Adolf Hitler when he took over Austria. They turned a blind eye as well when he went on to invade Czechoslovakia, apparently hoping if they let him violate the sovereignty of a couple of nations, he would somehow get it out of his system. It was a fatal mistake, one with the most catastrophic consequences the world has even known.

Western Europe needs to stop appeasing not only Vladimir Putin, but also Donald Trump, if the US itself continues to fail to rein in its rogue leader. European leaders must stop hoping against hope that Trump will have some sort of epiphany and suddenly begin exercising the kind of pro-Western leadership the US consistently produced before the Era of Trump. For as long as Trump is leading it, the US is no longer a reliable ally, and does not have the best interests of the free world in mind. If anyone is to save Europe from the new wave of Russian imperialism—which, make no mistake, will not end in Ukraine if Ukraine is abandoned to its fate—it will have to be Western Europe itself, and the time to step up, sideline Trump, and draw a line in Ukraine is now.  

THE CHAINSAW MASSACRES OF ARGENTINA AND THE US

Argentine President Javier Milei with signature chainsaw

 Many Argentines cringed in shame this past week as they watched their president make a clownish spectacle of himself by showing up in the US, to obsequiously and gratuitously pander to his personal heroes, Donald Trump and Elon Musk. This time, he made the pilgrimage to Washington—where he was also courting the IMF to see if he can land an eleven-billion-dollar credit to shore up his faltering economic program—to present Musk with the signature symbol of his own populist regime. Namely, a custom-designed chainsaw.

Musk, who is basically a filthy rich, unelected appointee, with no real political standing—a sort of high-end bureaucrat, if you will—magnanimously granted Javier “Baby Trump” Milei, a head of State, a forty-five-minute audience, in which the visibly excited Argentine president, giddy as a kid at Christmastime, presented Elonius Rex with the prize saw, a gleaming red and chrome machine with Milei’s favorite slogan emblazoned on the blade: ¡Viva la Libertad, carajo! (Which roughly translates as “Long live liberty, damn it!”).

Musk with his new saw, Milei with his bro-crush

It’s a motto with which the far-right libertarian ends even his most formal of speeches,  and which he utters in a guttural, if reedy growl. It is the Mileian equivalent of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again”. And, when it comes down to what both those phrases mean to those they are inflicted on, they are rendered Orwellian in terms of their consequences.

For those of you who have never had the pleasure of making George Orwell’s acquaintance, an example of what I mean is that, for instance, in his dystopian novel 1984—which is far more relevant today than it was when it was written—the author’s fictitious country boasts four main ministries: the Ministry of Truth is ostensibly in charge of media, entertainment, education, and the arts, but is actually the creator and purveyor of political lies, propaganda and spin. The Ministry of Peace’s apparent mission is to broker and keep the peace, but it is actually devoted to sparking and incrementing violence. The Ministry of Love is supposedly charged with justice and order, and creating a pleasant climate for all, but its true main mission is torture, punishment and “re-education”. And the Ministry of Plenty is officially at the center of the regime’s allegedly plentiful economy, but is actually the entity in charge of supply rationing and distribution.

Similarly, while both Trump and Milei’s favorite slogans might sound inspiring and rosy, the actions behind them are having contrary effects for just about everyone but the rich and powerful. The actions Donald Trump took during his first term from 2016 to 2020, bolstered the power of the presidency and initiated a sharp decline in the influence of the other two branches of government. His economic policies provided tax breaks to the already vastly undertaxed wealthy, and put additional economic pressures on the middle and lower classes—as reflected in the estimated seven trillion dollars that his administration added to the deficit. He showed contempt for democratic institutions and disdain for the rule of law, but was, in the end, held in final check by the other two branches when he sought to, basically, overthrow democracy and remain in office after losing an election. His legacy was division and chaos, and now, after a four-year hiatus, he is back to finish the job, this time with the indispensable help of the richest man in the world. Fitting, since he was and is the president of the wealthy, who, in Orwellian style, bills himself as “the president of the people.”

Milei has made no bones about being an avid admirer of Donald Trump’s. But he had the initial disadvantage over Trump of following, not a highly popular and highly democratic administration like Barack Obama’s, but rather, the weak, corrupt presidency of Alberto Fernández, which was consumed with party infighting and crippling economic woes.

Like Trump, Milei is fond of puerile displays of showy bravado. Hence, his choice of the chainsaw during his campaign and beyond, as the symbol of his promise to “destroy the government from within”—which, without saying it in so many words, is what Trump and Musk (or Musk and Trump, depending on your point of view) are bent on doing as well.

Milei at one of his Trump-like rallies

The Argentine president is every bit as disdaining of anyone who opposes his most extreme measures, and of those he perceives as his political enemies, referring consistently and publicly to anyone left of the center right as “zurdos de mierda” (fucking leftists). And when numerous governors from Argentina’s twenty-three provinces opposed cuts in federal aid at the beginning of his term, he angrily vowed that he was going to “piss on the governors”.

He also suddenly turns on those who dare criticize him, very much in the dismissive style of Trump, who has dissed his former political allies that have failed to accompany him to some of the extremes to which he has taken his policies and personal misdeeds: Generals John Kelly, James Mattis and H.R. McMaster, as well as former Trump attorney Michael Cohen and former Vice President Mike Pence spring to mind, but there are countless other examples. In Milei’s case, for example, early on he expressed praise and admiration for former Economy Minister Domingo Cavallo, the architect of the late President Carlos Menem’s convertibility and privatization policies, which marked a ten-year neo-conservative era in Argentina. When he was first elected, Milei touted Cavallo as “the best Economy Minister in Argentine history.” Until just a few months ago, he was still referring to Cavallo as “a hero” and saying he hoped to emulate him.

But in his personal blog, Cavallo recently issued a warning to Milei about the dangers of a falsely appreciating peso. The Harvard-educated economist said that since Milei took office, a little more than a year ago, his economic policies had caused the peso to appreciate by twenty percent in real terms. Cavallo said that this was a similar trend to the one witnessed in the last three years of convertibility, leading to the crash of 2001 (the Corralito Crisis).

The former economy minister pointed out that real appreciation had led to “a very costly deflation, because it transformed the recession that had begun in 1998 into a true economic depression.” Cavallo counseled Milei to lift exchange rate restrictions within the next three months before the effects of a (falsely) “strong peso” started affecting domestic industries and discouraging export investment.

Echoing the sort of capricious flipflops Americans have come to expect from Trump, Milei suddenly referred to Cavallo as “a disgrace”, and as “unpresentable”. And in another Trumpesque move, within hours of reacting to Cavallo’s blog, the Argentine president fired the economist’s daughter, Sonia Cavallo, who, until then, had been posted as Argentina’s delegate to the Organization of American States. He justified the vengeance move by saying “Her father is constantly sabotaging the economic program, and you can’t have your cake and eat it. You’re either on one side or the other.”

The grotesque posturing of Milei and Musk on the far-right CPAC stage with a shiny new chainsaw this past week was chillingly symbolic. Tens of thousands of federal workers turned out into the street in Argentina, and thousands so far given the axe by Musk in just one month of the new Trump regime speaks to just how chilling. Milei is fond of crowing to his far-right supporters that the US “is taking its cue from Argentina.” And his presentation of the fashion-designer saw to Musk is an apparent attempt to underscore that exaggeration. But Trump’s first term precedes Milei, so it’s pretty clear who is taking his cue from whom.

The parallel he strikes, however, is worthy of consideration. What I mean by that is, if Americans want a preview of what the Musk-Trump duo’s policies will likely lead to, they need only look to the almost caricaturesque example of Argentina. For one thing, while Milei boasts about his policies reining in hyperinflation, peso inflation in his first year in office has still soared at 117 percent in 2024. But worse still, the consequences of his crawling peg exchange rate policy have also caused prices to explode in dollar terms.

When Milei came to office, it was, in part, on a promise to “dollarize” the economy, since he described the peso as a “shit” currency. But since taking office in December of 2023, he has only “dollarized” in the sense that Argentina has become the most expensive country in dollars in all of Latin America, while he has at the same time “revalued” the peso by removing a lot of local currency from the market, artificially driving its value upward.

No example could be better than my own experience, living here in Argentina’s Patagonian region, to illustrate the consequences to middle and lower class residents of these and other policies imposed under the Milei government. For instance, until December of 2023, my wife and I were paying about two hundred fifty dollars a month for excellent private health care—uphill for two retirees in Argentina, where the standard of living is nowhere near as high as in the US—but doable. Furthermore, it kept us independent from the pensioners’ health care plan paid for, in large part, by the State, since the amount paid into the health plan by pensioners is minimal.

One of the first things Milei did on taking office was completely deregulate private health insurance—and just about every other commercial activity in the country. The result was that, within his first three months in office, our health insurance costs had gone from two hundred fifty dollars a month to six hundred fifty-eight. It became impossible for us to continue to pay, and we ended up on the State retirement health care rolls.

Milei’s own brand of “moving fast and breaking things” also removed all restrictions on price gouging—an even more common practice here in Argentina—especially in remote Patagonia—than in the US, while de-subsidizing all services. Between the artificially bolstered peso and the removal of all restrictions, then, our grocery bills here in Argentina have doubled in dollars, going from between seventy and ninety dollars a week when he took office, to about one hundred fifty to one hundred eighty dollars after his first year in office. And the prices of just about everything else have risen accordingly, especially in areas like clothing, new car sales and electronics, in which local industry is heavily protected.

A noonday luncheon special in downtown Buenos Aires now runs an average of eighteen dollars—more than a minimum wage worker makes in a day—while in other major Latin American capitals, research shows a comparative average of seven dollars. A cup of coffee averages thirty percent more there than in São Paulo (Brazil) or Santiago (Chile) and more than twice as much as in Bogotá (Colombia). Meanwhile, Argentina’s minimum wage is higher than on Brazil’s depressed job market, but considerably lower than minimum wage levels for either Chile or Mexico.  Moreover, forty-five percent of Argentina’s workforce works off the books, with no minimum wage guarantees or benefits of any kind.  

As with the Trump administration, Milei’s regime is doing nothing to address these inequalities. On the contrary, he is, like the Musk-Trump duo, slashing social services wherever he can get away with it, and seeking to break the country’s once powerful Peronist labor unions. He is also, like Trump in his first term, jockeying to try and get himself a more malleable Supreme Court.  

Nor have vital services been spared: fuel prices rose one hundred eighteen percent in Milei’s first year in office, while de-subsidized natural gas services rose by more than five hundred percent. Water was up more than three hundred percent for the year, and electric power services increased more than two hundred sixty percent.

Milei, like Trump, promotes himself as a political outsider, bent on dismantling the “political caste”, which, according to him, has led to the country’s economic decline. Also like Trump, however, he is seeking to replace that “political caste” (i.e., elected representatives of the people), with a corporate elite, seeking a country where a place at the international business table is sought using the average Argentina’s impoverishment as a stepping stone.

While Trump and Milei’s ideologies strongly overlap—Milei was a guest at Trump’s latest victory celebration and got a shout-out from the then president-elect as “a true MAGA guy”—the political and economic contexts in which they govern differ substantially. The US economy under Trump was the world’s largest and still relatively stable, despite challenges, mostly of Trump’s own making. In Argentina, however, Milei came to office already struggling with high inflation, widespread poverty, and significant public debt. This fundamental difference in starting conditions means that while Trump’s policies could often be masked or justified by a booming economy, Milei faces the much more immediate consequences of severe economic disarray.

Both Trump and Milei’s governments have been criticized for their exacerbation of social polarization. Trump’s rise has been  marked by deep divisions within American society, particularly on issues of race, immigration, and cultural identity. His inflammatory rhetoric and policies have often targeted minority groups, including immigrants and African Americans. His current campaign to forcibly eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion by decree in the US is only deepening the divide.

Milei’s rise to power in Argentina has similarly highlighted the nation’s profound political divide. While he has framed himself as a defender of individual liberty and economic freedom, his rhetoric, like Trump’s, often smacks of authoritarianism, with frequent attacks on the media, the judiciary, and his political opponents. His presidency has already seen increased protests from various sectors of society, particularly labor unions and public sector workers who fear the consequences of his austerity measures. Milei’s confrontational approach to governance, much like Trump’s, risks further fracturing of the social fabric of Argentina, deepening divisions between those who support his vision and those who see his policies as an existential threat to their livelihoods.

While Milei has managed to get fairly good international press from business media and multi-lateral organizations such as the IMF and World Bank, none of these are known for being concerned about the social devastation wreaked by the kind of cruelly radical  neo-conservative programs being implemented by Milei and his Economy Minister Luis Caputo to wipe out a decades-long deficit overnight. All these sectors care about is hammering developing nations into good credit customers who pay their debts in timely fashion—unlike major economies like the US which, despite admonishing the developing world to be good citizens and keep their debts in check  if they want aid, are the world’s biggest debtors (as of last year the US had eight trillion dollars in foreign debt, or a little more than a fifth of the country’s entire federal debt).

Multiple studies have shown over the decades that IMF and World Bank ultra-conservative economic prescriptions in regions like Latin America have bolstered the international profiles of neo-conservative governments at the expense of the common people’s well-being. This was true of the military dictatorship that ruled the country with an iron fist and at the point of a gun from the mid-seventies through the early eighties, and that is certainly the current case of Milei’s Argentina.

Despite being the darling of the MAGA crowd in Washington, however, Milei may find his forward momentum stalled on his quest “to move fast and break things.” Back from his meetings with the IMF and Trump in Washington, and his clown show with Musk at the CPAC extravaganza, the Argentine president begins work Monday in the face of a scandal sparked—also not unlike Trump—by a blunder on social media that cost local investors big-time. It’s being called “Cryptogate”, and it promises to haunt the president’s government.

A week ago in his social media feed, Milei, a self-styled “anarcho-capitalist”, touted a cryptocurrency meme coin known as $LIBRA. Sharing information about its launching on his feed, the president wrote, “This private project will be dedicated to encouraging the growth of Argentina’s economy.” The local currency market reaction to the post was immediate, with the coin’s value surging to five dollars almost immediately, only to plummet by ninety percent two hours later.

The practical result of the meme coin fiasco was that Argentine investors lost approximately two hundred fifty million dollars in the blink of an eye.  Milei immediately took his post down and claimed he really hadn’t had all the details of the deal. Worse still, he tried to foist blame off on the investors who had followed his cue, saying that they knew the risks, just as they would if they went to a casino to gamble.

Investors aren’t buying it. Both at home and abroad, he is facing accusations of crypto-fraud, and lawsuits are being filed against him in both Argentina and the US. Opposition members of Congress, meanwhile, are calling for his impeachment, and although they don’t yet have the votes necessary, the fact that Milei has consistently referred to Congress as “a rat’s nest” is unlikely to garner a lot of sympathy.

At best, Milei will have to try and convince people that he was duped by some of his acquaintances involved in the scheme, in which case he will look like a guileless fool. At worst, he will face multiple legal actions, and the possibility of more opponents climbing onto the impeachment train.

Time will tell.