THE VIEW FROM TRUMPWORLD

 

For many educated Americans with even a passing knowledge of US foreign relations, President Donald Trump’s latest machinations on the world  stage are very likely baffling.  If we are baffled, however, it is because we are failing to understand that Trump doesn’t see the world from the point of view of a world-class leader, but rather, from that of a mobster.

A lot of us were shocked and infuriated during his first term when he dissed our Western allies, while embracing every murderous dictator he had ever longed to meet. It was clear that these were “his people”, and that it mattered little to him what the people of the United States had sacrificed in the past to help democracy and freedom ring throughout every Western nation, following the worst war in the history of the world.

We watched him disrespect the memories of men and women sacrificed from our fathers’ and grandfathers’ generations, and belittle the pain, hardship and suffering endured by those like my father (and yours), who put their lives on hold to fight fascism and the expansive imperialism of a madman in Europe, and survived. He belittled that cause and our elders, calling them “losers and suckers” and asking rhetorically “what was in it for them.” Those brave people, the ones who understood the value of defending the free world, and who continued to support that cause, when the Soviet Union crushed the freedom of Eastern Europeans following World War II, back when US presidents understood that Russian tyrants were our enemies.

We witnessed too, his denigration of the noble institution of NATO, which he dismissed as being over and of no importance to the US—that great alliance which has been the mortar holding together Western peace and democracy for the past seventy-five years. An all-for-one-and-one-for-all pact in which the US earned its leading role with the blood we spilled on European soil in two world wars. A role which has been almost totally responsible for launching the US to world leadership status on the global stage.

Trump shocked patriotic and democratic Americans in those first four years by speaking in disparaging and arrogant terms to those previously highly respected Western allies, while at the same time referring in the most glowing of terms to murdering despots like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un (with whom he said he had “fallen in love”), and like China’s Chairman Xi (whom he admired for becoming leader for life and suggested perhaps the US should follow suit with him). He preferred Russian talking points to US intelligence, revealed things to Putin that the Kremlin never should have known, and mishandled a treasure trove of classified documents putting American lives in danger.

And then he threw the country into chaos by, for the first time in history, refusing to participate in the peaceful transfer of power, after losing an election, and created further chaos by inciting an insurrection designed to halt certification of the election he had lost, apparently bent on remaining in office as an ad hoc authoritarian ruler.

The majority of Americans breathed a sigh of relief when he was finally gone, and talked about how our democracy had dodged a bullet. It had been a close call but democracy was intact and we could all sleep easy.

But then, something utterly insane happened. Slightly more than half of voters who actually voted in the 2024 election put this despot back into office, not caring that he was a convicted felon, a court certified rapist, a man indicted on charges of election tampering, inciting an insurrection, and gross mishandling of America’s secrets. None of that mattered because people were worried about eggs being more expensive than when he was in office, and about whether they would be able to keep affording fuel for their gas-guzzling SUVs and giant pick-up trucks.

Trump ran on that. But anyone who was even half-awake during his first term was at least vaguely cognizant of the fact that, if Trump’s lips are moving, he’s lying. That is, except when he talks about using the power of State to destroy his personal enemies, or when he talks of dismantling any part of American democracy that keeps him from doing exactly what he pleases with no consequences. Those are promises—vendettas—that he is serious about keeping.

How all of that is affecting democracy at home is becoming more shockingly evident by the day. Adding insult to injury for every small-d democrat in the nation,  Trump is already, after only a month in office, describing himself in monarchic terms on Truth Social, where, referring to himself,  he wrote LONG LIVE THE KING!  That message was repeated under the White House’s official X handle captioning a Time-style fake cover with an illustration of Trump wearing a crown. In the same flurry of narcissistic, self-congratulatory messages, Trump also quoted—without saying he was quoting him—Napoleon Bonaparte saying,   “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” Napoleon was, of course, also a narcissist, an emperor and a despot.

The consequences of Trump’s dictatorial actions on the home front will even shortly begin to become evident to his most fanatical followers when they start to understand that what he does will negatively affect them as well where the rubber meets the road. Especially when the high prices they were so worried about and that were a decisive factor in his re-election, are not going down. On the contrary, thanks to the president’s reduction in taxes on the rich and soaring tariffs on international trade, prices can only be expected to rise.

But they’ll also start to feel the pain of their decision to return him to office when their Social Security and health care benefits are affected, when the cost of their medication rises, when their farming subsidies are cut, when their flights are canceled because of a hamstrung Federal Aviation Agency, and when every government office they must deal with is rendered totally ineffective because it has been stripped to its bare bones.

Returning to the foreign relations front, just because common everyday people have no idea of the importance of America’s status on the global stage doesn’t mean that it is unimportant, since our leadership in that arena is what defines US power and its ability to continue to shape democracies abroad and to influence the world through its allies. Trump clearly doesn’t care about that. He thinks of the US as a big business to be run as ruthlessly as he and Elon Musk have always run their own. His attempt to turn US relations with Ukraine into a protection racket in which he conditions aid—already earmarked by Congress—on President Zelensky’s signing over half of the country’s wealth of natural resources to him, should make every American feel ashamed. Every American but him, of course, because if there’s something we can be assured of, it’s that Donald Trump has no shame. And it’s not a first by any means because he already sought to blackmail Zelensky during the earlier Trump administration, by withholding vital defense aid unless the Ukrainian president dug up dirt on the son of his political rival, Joe Biden.

Worse still, he is now blaming the victim for causing the crime. (If you’ve been paying attention to his take on sexual assaults and molestations he and his cronies are accused of, you’ll understand that this stance is nothing new for him). Let’s be clear: The reality, the unvarnished facts, are that Russia, an imperialist power, run by a dictator, and a natural enemy of the United States, invaded Ukraine, a sovereign, democratic nation, unprovoked, and based on the sole self-justification that Ukraine was seeking closer ties to the West, and that it had cast off a puppet government put in place by the Kremlin. Any other interpretation is political spin and an out-and-out lie.

Yet, Trump now insists that Ukraine “never should have started” the war of Russian aggression against it. And that, instead of fighting tooth and nail against that invasion, it should have rolled over and “made the deal” that Putin offered. Which for any sovereign nation, was no deal at all, but rather capitulation to Russian dominance.

Ukraine is not, of course, the only place where the US stands to lose ground in the world due to the ham-handed fashion in which the new US thugocracy is mishandling international relations. Eastern European leaders are already on alert, since, with the US (actually Donald Trump, not the US as such) taking the side of Vladimir Putin and accepting Russian propaganda talking points as truth, if Ukraine falls, there is no way an emboldened Putin will stop there, or until all of Eastern Europe is once again under Russian dominance.

Meanwhile, Western European leaders have been left scrambling and are holding emergency meetings to decide how to approach this new reality. After reestablishing firm US-European and NATO ties during the four years that Joe Biden sought to pick up the pieces of American diplomacy shattered under Trump’s earlier four years, they find themselves back at square one after the unthinkable happened and Americans brought a convicted felon back to office again. Clearly, they have to be thinking that, no matter what happens next, the US is no longer a reliable ally. As such, they are now discussing ways in which Europe can disengage from US dominance and start fending for itself in the face of new threats of Russian expansionism.

But I am concentrating on the Ukraine situation because it is a case in point for how Donald Trump views the world. And as I said at the beginning of this essay, his viewpoint is not that of a world leader, but of a mobster.

Let me explain: Trump sees the world not as the sophisticated strategic game that it is, in which strong alliances are vital to the mutual defense of democratic nations. First of all, Trump is not a believer in democracy—not that he is above using the democratic process to gain access to power. It’s just that once in power, he no longer plays by democratic rules. So for Trump, organizations like NATO, the UN, the Organization of American States, and any agency within the government he heads designed to halt corruption or to place checks and balances on the powers that be, are meaningless.

On the contrary, Trump is incapable of complex thinking. Things for him are quite simple. As simple as they are for any mob boss—it’s no coincidence that Trump has more than once expressed his admiration for 20^th-century bootleg mob boss Al Capone (clearly and conveniently ignoring the fact that “Scarface” died in prison on a federal rap). Capone embodied everything Trump admires: raw power backed by violence, accumulation of a vast fortune through any means necessary, lawlessness, and accountability to no one but himself.

Trump, then, doesn’t identify with his predecessors. He doesn’t see himself as the elected leader of a free and democratic nation, guided by an ironclad Constitution and controlled in his actions by the checks and balances of a carefully created three-branch system. He sees himself simply as the head of the greatest military power on earth, and as such, as the Boss, the capo dei capi, the Boss of all bosses.

It follows, then, that he has little or no respect for any of the “minor bosses”—the European leaders, for instance, who, throughout post-war history, have been our friends and allies. If he is the Boss, then they are beholden to him, and, in his simple mind, are worthy only of his contempt and his vengeance if they fail to toe his line.

That means that he sees the world as being divided, much like the mob, into “families”, each with its own turf and its capo dei capi, and it is only for the other Bosses that he reserves his respect. For Trump, there are three “families”. America, Russia and China. Their bosses, Putin and Xi, are, if not his friends, then at least his colleagues, his equals, and he respects their “businesses”, like they respect his, even if, as in the case of China, he exacts certain payments for allowing their businesses to overlap. Business, after all, is business. But they keep their territories clearly marked and try their best to keep out of each other’s way, at the expense of the minor bosses, whom they see as their underlings. Because a turf war between the three families would be “bad for business”.

This is why I’m using Ukraine as my example. Because in Trumpworld, Ukraine doesn’t count. And the only sovereignty it has is because the Boss on its turf allows it to have it. And it can only have it if the Boss is happy with its performance. For Trump, Ukraine, and, very likely, all of Eastern Europe, belongs to the Russia Boss. Asia belongs to the China Boss. And the West belongs to the US Boss. The Middle East is something of a no-man’s-land, but the three are careful not to step on each other’s toes there either—hence Trump’s abandoning of Syria to its Russian regime oppressors during his first term. The fact that it all backfired under Biden is Putin’s problem, but it wasn’t the America Boss standing in the Russia Boss’s way, and the people of Syria be damned. Same goes for the Ukrainians in the simple black and white rules of mobster ethics.

You might say, then, that Trump, a mobster dolt looking to set up a thugocracy, with nobody really doing much to stop him, thinks he’s playing checkers on the world game board. Xi and Putin, meanwhile are playing chess, and Putin has just put Trump in a check move that leaves America’s king in danger of capture.

 

FOOD FOR THOUGHT

 

The first major government agency Elon Musk attacked in his unvetted ad hoc auditor's post was USAID, one of America's most consequential foreign policy tools, and a major factor in giving the US an edge over China and Russia around the world. That agency has basically been gutted and Musk has been dancing on its shallow grave.

Meanwhile, only months prior to Musk's talking President Trump into turning him loose with a machete to hack the US state to pieces, the Inspector General at USAID--the post in charge of keeping the agency honest--had apparently launched an investigation into USAID's contractual ties with Starlink.

Starlink, as you might be aware, is billionaire Elon Musk's satellite communications firm.

I'll let you do the math.

CONSERVATISM DEFINED

 Definition of a conservative: Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy and ideology that seeks to promote and preserve traditional institutions, customs, and values.

NOTE TO MAGA: Stop calling yourselves "conservatives". Your leader is a far-right populist autocrat who is systematically trampling every tradition, institution, custom and value that the US stands for.

Thanks in advance.

 

WHAT IS A PSYCHOPATH?

Recent events—in the past few months since November—have led me to engage in a layman’s study of what is known as ASPD (antisocial personality disorder). It seems that ASPD is a somewhat broad classification of specific mental illnesses that may include sociopathy, borderline personality disorder and psychopathy. It is supposed to be more politically correct today, from our American POV, to use scientific-sounding initials to describe garden-variety behavioral aberrations, hence, ASPD, AvPD (avoidant personality disorder), BPD (borderline personality disorder), DPD (dependent personality disorder), HPD (histrionic personality disorder), NPD (narcissistic personality disorder), OCPD (obsessive-compulsive personality disorder), PAPD (passive-aggressive personality disorder), PPD (paranoid personality disorder), SzPD (schizoid personality disorder), etc.

But sometimes nothing but the hard, unvarnished, naked word will suffice. In  this case, the word is: psychopath. 

So what—or perhaps I should say who—is a psychopath? A psychopath is defined as:
Someone with a personality disorder that involves a lack of empathy and remorse, and a tendency toward antisocial behavior. Psychopaths may also be impulsive, manipulative, and exploitative. 

Principal Characteristics 

-         Impulsivity: Psychopaths may act in risky ways.

-         Lack of empathy: Psychopaths may not care about other people's feelings.

-         Manipulation: Psychopaths may be charismatic and exploitative.

-         Egocentrism: Psychopaths may be self-centered.

-         Disregard for rules: Psychopaths may not follow rules, norms, or the law.

-         Physical aggression: Psychopaths may be violent or cruel to others.

-         Lack of remorse: Psychopaths may not feel sorry for their actions.

Psychopathy has been associated with amorality—an absence of, indifference towards, or disregard for moral beliefs. More specifically, Robert D. Hare, a renowned Canadian forensic psychologist credited with having created a definitive  “psychopath checklist” in the 1970s that is still the psychopathy gold standard test used today by forensic psychologists, writes that “Psychopaths have a narcissistic and incredibly inflated view of their own importance and self-worth. They have huge egos. They’re self-centered to an incredible degree.” According to Hare, psychopaths have “a truly astounding egocentricity and sense of entitlement, and see themselves as the center of the universe, justified in living according to their own rules.”

Another clue to psychopathy, according to Hare, is that while psychopaths love to talk about huge goals, “they typically have no idea of what it takes to achieve them.” And, he indicates, they definitely don’t have a plan for how to achieve them.

Everybody seeks rewards. Rewards drive a lot of our behavior. Even people who have spent their whole lives giving generously to others are at least somewhat focused on the rewarding experience of giving, and seeing the results that it brings.  But psychopaths are obsessively focused on the prize and have no moral, ethical or legal boundaries or compunction when it comes to achieving it. They are incapable of taking a step back and weighing the consequences of what they do, because they are wired to achieve their personal goals no matter what the cost, especially to others, might be. They are almost literally blind to anything other than their own personal goals.

I’ve been looking into these issues, in the interest of journalistic integrity, to ensure that I’m not talking out of turn when I’m tempted to refer to the current president of the United States as “a madman”. The more I research, the harder I’m finding it not to say the words out loud, because it’s not name-calling (something MAGA types seem to be very concerned about…unless it is they who are calling the names) when it is an unavoidable conclusion.

I submit that our country is, regardless of how many people voted for him, being run by a madman. And we should be worried.  

For instance, what sort of a man, in the face of a national tragedy, twists the facts to blame a totally unrelated policy of the previous administration for that tragedy simply because expunging that policy is what he happens to be obsessing on at this very moment? And then too, because the catastrophe in question caused attention to be taken off of him in the news cycle. According to the president, the worst American air tragedy in six decades was caused by policies aimed at promoting diversity, equity and inclusion in American society—which in any logical, human and socially healthy mind should be viewed as a plus in American society. But regardless of one’s feelings about (initials again) DEI, blaming a horrifying air tragedy on it is simply insane. (And was, by the way, repeated by the president’s surrogate lunatic Elon Musk on X, his social media platform).

More evidence of the president’s profound lack of empathy and humanity: When asked by a reporter, in the face of such a tragedy, with the families of the sixty-seven people who died still in shock, if he would go to the crash site, the president responded, “I have a plan to visit, not the site. Because you tell me, what’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”

So let’s examine that rhetorical question of mine about what sort of man would do that. The answers have been right under our noses for nearly a decade. And yet, here we are again!

The answer is:

The sort of man who said, just hours before the US surpassed two hundred thousand COVID-19 deaths (headed for a million deaths of people of all ages before it was all over),  “Now we know it. It affects elderly people. Elderly people with heart problems and other problems. But they have other problems, that's what it really affects, that's it…But it affects virtually nobody. It's an amazing thing.”

The sort of man who, speaking of one of the most iconic military heroes of the Vietnam War, says, “He's not a war hero…He's a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren't captured, okay? I hate to tell you.” He was talking about Senator John McCain, a former naval aviator, who,  during Operation Rolling Thunder in  the Vietnam War, was shot down over the North Vietnamese capital of Hanoi, was refused medical attention by the enemy for wounds sustained in the crash, was repeatedly tortured and beaten, and remained a prisoner of war from 1967 to 1973. During that time, since his father was a renowned admiral, the Vietcong sought to negotiate a deal for his release, early on in his captivity. McCain refused any such effort as long as his fellow US prisoners remained POWs. The man saying McCain wasn’t a hero, the man who is now president and commander-in-chief, himself acquired five college deferments and eventually managed to finagle a medical deferment for “bone spurs” in his heels, in order to avoid being drafted into the military.

The kind of man who, as commander-in-chief, stands on the hallowed ground of Arlington National Cemetery with a retired four-star Marine general—who, himself, has lost a son in combat seven years earlier in the Middle East—looks out over the vast sea of crosses of America’s war dead and says, “I don’t get it. What was in it for them?” Because, clearly, he can’t even imagine doing anything in which there isn’t something in it for him, and certainly can’t imagine making the supreme sacrifice for something as unrelated to his personal priorities as his nation.

The kind of man who refuses to have US combat amputees present at a White House military event because their presence “doesn’t look good for me.”

The kind of man who publicly belittles the parents of Humayun Khan, a US Army captain, a Gold Star recipient, and a Muslim killed in Iraq, after they dared to criticize him for his anti-Muslim rhetoric.

The kind of man who, as US president and commander-in-chief, didn’t want to waste his precious time visiting a cemetery in France devoted to American soldiers who fought and died on French soil during World War I, because he considered them “suckers and losers.”

The kind of man who says he’s entitled to force unwanted kisses on women—“I just start kissing them…I don’t even wait”— or to “grab them by the pussy” because he’s “a star”.

The kind of man (monster) who sexually assaults a woman in a department store dressing room. And then slanders her publicly and calls her a liar.

The kind of man, the kind of leader,  who incites his most radical supporters to “fight like hell” to halt certification of an election in which he was definitively beaten, and then calmly sits back to watch the violence unfold on TV for three hours without lifting a finger to stop it.

The kind of man, the kind of president, who, after more than sixty courts and his own attorney general have ruled out his charges of election fraud, tries to steal the election anyway by pressuring officials to falsify the results.

The kind of man who still can’t move on from that loss, even though he has again been elected to office, and who is now dividing the nation and wasting time and national treasure in mounting a widespread witch-hunt to fire, smear, sue and discredit anyone and everyone who rightly and justly took part in prosecution of the perpetrators of the violent post-2020 election uprising, which he incited.

The kind of man who makes no secret of his admiration for dictators and famous gangsters, and even less of a secret of his disdain for democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law.

The kind of man who, in all the time that we, the people, have known him, has consistently and famously and provably lied about, well, just about everything you can imagine—thirty thousand lies (count them, fact-checkers did) just in his first term—a man who seems to have no concept of facts or truth, no grip on reality, a man driven only by his personal ambitions, his vendettas, and, more importantly, by his personal hatred, with which he charismatically infects his base.

Last year, forensic psychologist Dr. Vince Greenwood developed a scientific study of the current president’s background and past behavior in an attempt to establish whether the populist GOP leader is, indeed, a psychopath. He used the well-established Hare Psychopathy Checklist as the basis for his study.   According to his results, the president scored thirty-three.  The usual cutoff point for clinical psychopathy is thirty. Greenwood writes,  “For each item (on the checklist), the diagnostician is asked to give a rating on the pervasiveness of the trait. The guidelines to diagnose psychopathy are straightforward, but the demands on the diagnostician are rigorous.” The test is so rigorous, in fact, that professionals administering it have to undergo specialized training before being cleared to give it.

The doctor’s conclusion? That the president is “a garden-variety example of a particular and precisely delineated psychiatric condition.” Dr. Greenwood goes on to say that “he is, sadly for him and dangerously for the rest of us, a prisoner of his psychopathology, a puppet on the strings of a set of destructive personality traits that dictate his behavior. He is at the mercy of those traits, and, by extension, so are we.”

So what does that score of thirty-three signify on a comparative basis? According to Dr. Greenwood’s study, “The average score for individuals in a maximum security prison setting is 22. I mention that because the typical cutoff to get a formal diagnosis of psychopathy is 30. It’s a high bar that even most serious criminals don’t meet.” 

As to criteria and sources used in the study, Dr. Greenwood writes, “He (the president) is arguably the most well-chronicled candidate in history. A partial list of informational sources would include 13 autobiographical efforts as well as his social media posts, 71 biographies, many of which are richly sourced, and hundreds of interviews from print, radio, and television. A clinical interview is not necessary to diagnose the (then) former president for this condition. Indeed, there is research to indicate that the interview can detract from the assessment of a psychopath because of their facility for lying.”

This was what the president’s psychopathy scorecard looked like:

1. Glibness/superficial charm — 2

2.Egocentricity/grandiose sense of self-worth — 2
3.Proneness to boredom/need for stimulation — 2
4. Pathological lying and deception/gaslighting — 2
5. Conning/lack of sincerity — 2
6. Lack of remorse or guilt — 2
7. Shallow affect — 2
8. Callous/lack of empathy — 2
9. Parasitic lifestyle — 0
10. Poor behavioral controls — 2
11. Promiscuous sexual behavior — 2
12. Early behavior problems — 2
13. Lack of realistic long-term goals — 1
14. Impulsivity — 2
15. Irresponsibility — 2
16. Failure to accept responsibility for own actions — 2
17. Many short-term marital relationships — 1
18. Juvenile delinquency — 1
19. Revocation of parole — 0
20. Criminal versatility — 2
Total = 33

And this is not the only study that has arrived at the same conclusion since the president burst onto the political scene a decade ago. Indeed, two hundred thirty American psychiatrists last year signed an open letter affirming their belief that the man currently occupying the White House is far too mentally unstable to be president.

Also, during the current president’s former term in office, twenty-seven psychiatrists collaborated on a book entitled The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, in which they agreed that, although a diagnosis should not be made without formal examination of the patient, dangerousness may be assessed from observed behavior. And their unanimous conclusion was that this man was a clear and present danger to the US and to the world. One particularly chilling passage concludes that the president “is now the most powerful head of state in the world,” but is also “one of the most impulsive, arrogant, ignorant, disorganized, chaotic, nihilistic, self-contradictory, self-important, and self-serving” of world leaders. It goes on to warn that it is tremendously dangerous, considering the president’s mental state, for him to have “his finger on the triggers of a thousand or more of the most powerful thermonuclear weapons in the world. That means he could kill more people in a few seconds than any dictator in past history has been able to kill during his entire years in power.” It is worth recalling that when the president first entered office in 2017, one of the first questions he asked was, if the US has nuclear weapons, why can’t we use them?

The book also points to the effect the president’s mental pathology has had on society as a whole, creating a “malignant normality” in which “what was previously considered unthinkable becomes the norm. Some therapists have seen patients suffering from trauma and re-trauma resulting from the president’s actions, which mimic those of an aggressive abuser.” 

So if I say that a lawless madman is running the country, it’s not hyperbole. It is a stark scientific and medical reality. The country, the world, all of us, are at the mercy of the whims of a diagnosed psychopath. And half the country has apparently fallen under his lunatic spell.

We should all, in the interest of self-preservation, be worried about that. The whole country. The whole world. It’s a monkey-with-a-razor moment in the most militarily powerful nation on earth, and we—Americans and humankind as a whole—are all potential victims of it.

 

THE TRUMP CULT – MORE OF THE SAME…ONLY WORSE

 Donald Trump’s new term in power is beginning just the way the other one ended, with utter disrespect for the law, for the justice system, for law enforcement, for every single person who isn’t a hundred percent behind the Führer or who doesn’t fall within the narrow characteristics of the MAGA ideal, and with open contempt for compromise and unity, and for the Constitution of the United States.  It has begun, literally, “with a vengeance” and with a burning desire to further divide Americans rather than bringing them together.

He wasn’t in office more than a few hours before he overrode investigators, the federal courts system and juries that had worked tirelessly to bring to justice insurrectionists who had raided the Capitol Building on January Sixth of 2021, doing hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage, injuring one hundred forty police officers, some very seriously, and killing another, while threatening with bodily harm or murder, members of Congress and Trump’s own vice president, Mike Pence. Fifteen hundred rioters in total, some still in the process of trial and conviction, and hundreds of others already serving or having served sentences. He also commuted the sentences of six dangerous urban terrorist leaders who conspired to mount the insurrection—among them were Stewart Rhodes, founder and leader of the so-called Oath Keepers and Enrique Tario, leader of the self-styled Proud Boys gang, perhaps the most militant of the shock-force groups supporting Trump.

The Proud Boys are a neo-fascist ad hoc organization that Tario describes as “Western chauvinists”.  It is an all-male, white-supremacist, domestic terrorist gang. They emerged on the national stage as an active terrorist counterforce during violent race riots following the public suffocation-torture and  murder of Minnesota African American George Floyd by veteran white Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, in May of 2020, the last year of Trump’s first term.

When, during the 2020 presidential debate, moderator Chris Wallace asked Trump if he would denounce white-supremacy, the then-president hedged. When his opponent, Joe Biden, mentioned the Proud Boys, Wallace asked what Trump had to say to that group. Chillingly, Trump answered that he would tell them to “Stand back, and stand by.”

After he lost the election later that year and, after failing to legitimize his false claim that the election had been “stolen”, the meaning of that ominous message to the Proud Boys became clear, as they, in the style of Mussolini’s Blackshirts of old, led other extremists in mounting the January Sixth Insurrection, which will go down in history as one of the darkest days in American democracy. Despite the fact that, in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election Trump surrogates including Vice President J.D. Vance had assured the public that violent criminals involved in the J-6 riots would not be pardoned, Trump’s sweeping decree has fully pardoned or commuted the sentences of virtually every insurrectionist involved in those tragic events, and has stymied the trials of hundreds of others still under investigation.

Trump continues to tout the insurrectionists and terrorist gangs that took part in the extreme violence at the Capitol as “patriots”, and as “hostages” of the Biden administration. Underlying those patently false descriptions, however, is an effort by Trump to obfuscate his own responsibility for the insurrection. Clearly, there were well-documented federal criminal charges against him for inciting the January Sixth Insurrection, prior to his winning the 2024 election, which rendered his prosecution moot. By casting the insurrectionists as “patriots”, perpetuating the lie that the 2020 election was “stolen”, and pardoning every single person involved, as if the whole thing had merely been cooked up by the Biden administration, Trump may well be offering up a hail Mary that charges against him will simply go away completely once he is no longer president.

In his first hours in office, President Trump has also come with promises—more like blood oaths, actually—to “go after” all of those who did their jobs and served their country, the rule of law and democracy in seeking to prosecute him, to the full extent of the law, for the provable and proven misdeeds that he perpetrated during his first administration (which, in any country or party that cared one iota about democracy and the rule of law, should have been his last). And he makes no secret of the fact that he will weaponize the Justice Department to do it, while falsely claiming that it was weaponized against him and his cronies.

The newly installed president has been chomping at the bit for four years. Not to put forward a formula to make the US a better, kinder, more inclusive place for all Americans, but rather, to exact revenge for his own personal grievances, and to undo every good and humanitarian measure enacted by all administrations but his own going back a quarter of a century. All the way back, indeed, to the Bush junior era, in which that administration introduced plans for legal status and a path to citizenship for twelve million undocumented immigrants, as well as being at least half-heartedly empathic toward the LGBTQ community. As Tim Marshall of Seattle Pride puts it, “Thanks George W. Bush, for being the least regressive GOP politician of the ‘00s. We’ll remember you like a pair of ultra-low-rise jeans: a pain to live with but impossible to forget.”

Regarding this point, clearly, during his last administration, Trump targeted women’s reproductive rights by packing the Supreme Court with radical far-right justices who overturned Roe v Wade, a half-century-old landmark precedent that protected women’s rights to make decisions about their own bodies. New restrictions on women’s rights are expected as the far-right’s Project 2025 starts meshing with executive action. But this time, Trump also seems bent of annulling all of the progress the LBGTQ community has made in attaining equal rights over the course of the last quarter-century. Trump pointedly announced during his whining, bullying, divisive and self-congratulatory inaugural address that “As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.”  Note, that he said “of the US government,” not of his administration, presuming, then, to speak for all three branches, regardless of opinions and/or legislation to the contrary. Spoken, in other words, like the despot he plans to be.

He hours later backed this up by signing a sweeping executive order recognizing only two sexes, male and female, and directing federal agencies to cease promotion of the concept of gender transition. Trump is actively promoting discrimination against the LGBTQ community by vowing to his radically right-wing base that he will rid the US of what he calls “transgender insanity”. This is an only thinly veiled invitation to his radicalized followers to marginalize LGBTQ people across American society.  

Indeed, Trump’s immediate authoritarianism has extended beyond the two-gender rule to also do away with all measures currently promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, measures which, until now, have been a bastion of fairness and humanitarianism hard fought and earned over long years since the Civil Rights Era.  His orders regarding the civil rights of these minority sectors of society include giving departments and agencies of the Executive Branch an ultimatum to eliminate all diversity, equity and inclusion programs within sixty days, as of his first day in office.

This action includes firing all chief diversity officers and scrapping all equity action plans. He is also ordering a veritable witch-hunt requiring all departments and agencies to give the  White House Office of Management and Budget a full accounting of any and all previous diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts, including the listing of names of DEI grant recipients and DEI government contractors. In short, in the mean and vindictive second autocracy of Donald Trump, diversity, equity and inclusion will have no place. Indeed, they will be areas targeted for persecution, with the Trump administration already encouraging government workers to report any attempt to keep some form of DEI alive in their bureaus.

Other rights violations are in the offing.

For instance, Trump plans—and has issued an executive order to prove it—to do away with birthright citizenship. Birthright citizenship (fittingly in this immigrant nation, in which most of use descended, not from indigenous peoples, but from boats) is guaranteed  under the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. In other words, anyone born on US soil is automatically an American.  Trump’s  order arbitrarily asserts that a child born in the US is not a citizen if  the mother doesn’t have legal immigration status or “is in the country legally but only temporarily,” and if the father is not a US citizen or lawful permanent resident. The order further forbids US agencies from issuing any document recognizing such a child as a citizen or from accepting any state document recognizing such citizenship.

In other words, Trump is rendering children across an entire segment of US society virtually stateless, and robbing native citizens of their birthright. This is already under challenge in the federal court system.

Oh, and, remember George W. Bush’s “war on terror”, which gave us the invasive Patriot Act, with all of its “state of siege”-style tweaking of the Bill of Rights, the introduction of torture under the euphemism of “enhanced interrogation”, and the holding of certain types of prisoners, without charges and at the disposal of the Executive Branch—all things that administration had in common with every dictatorship I’ve ever covered as a journalist? Well, Trump is now going that one better by planning to use the military in domestic policing operations, with the excuse that illegal immigration is “a matter of national security" and "an invasion,” that entitles him,  as commander-in-chief, to call out “his” troops.

Buenos Aires, March 1976

Never mind that this is a blatant violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which restricts use of military personnel in domestic law enforcement actions. As I pored over Trump’s barrage of royal decrees, I was recalling the night of the military coup in Argentina in 1976. The Junta issued a series of repressive decrees to let the country know that there was a new sheriff in town and that the constitutional rulebook had just been heaved into the dumpster.

Trump has made it clear that churches and schools will no longer be considered off-limits in plans for government persecution of the undocumented. This brought back memories of my leaving the newspaper where I worked late on that March night in ’76. There were Army trucks everywhere, and soldiers armed with carbines, sidearms, shotguns and light machine guns were checking papers and loading people onto the trucks for transport. Now too, I imagine churches and schools in the US surrounded by military convoys and people being dragged away to concentration camps.

Buenos Aires, March 1976

Oh yes, did I forget to mention that Trump has also enunciated plans to use military bases to create concentration camps for undocumented migrants? Yes, he’s calling them “migrant camps”, but make no mistake, the idea is to create concentration camps within military jurisdictions. And don’t kid yourself, once the genie is out of the bottle in terms of authoritarian designs, there’s no putting it back. Nor is there any reason to believe that, in a state of virtual lawlessness, other sectors of American society could not also find themselves in an autocrat’s sights. There is a reason, in a healthy democracy, that the role of the military is external, not domestic, and a reason too that soldiers and officers alike swear to uphold and defend the Constitution, not a king or dictator.

In short, I’ve seen (lived) this movie before, elsewhere in the world, and know how it ends. And it doesn’t end well. This is not the American representative democracy that we grew up with. This is a populist authoritarian regime, headed up by a megalomaniacal demagogue, whose only goal is to be the most powerful man on earth.

 

IN THE DARK

The Tim Campbell cartoon above aptly pictures the humiliating capitulation that Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos forced on what has long been a bastion of democracy and investigative journalism, when he overrode a decision by the Post board, in the run-up to the 2024 election, to endorse Kamala Harris for president, and to give their reasons why.

I have no personal bone to pick with Bezos. As an independent writer, I'm really grateful to Bezos's organization for creating Kindle Direct Publishing, which I consider the greatest publishing equalizer since the Gutenberg printing press. KDP is a highly democratic and necessary medium for writers whose work might otherwise never come to light. That said, however, in the case of the Washington Post, Bezos’s judgment couldn’t have been more ill-advised.

The fact is that what the Washington Post sells isn’t merely newspapers and online information. What it sells is trust and journalistic integrity, both in its investigative coverage and in its editorial observations. And once that trust is broken, you can’t simply say, “Well, it was just this one time. From now on, it’s a clean slate and we’ll be trustworthy again.”

In everyday life, once caught in a lie, it becomes difficult to ever regain the complete trust of those around us, often even that of the people closest to us. This is even more true for newspapers, some of whose reputations have been irrecoverably damage by a single poorly sourced story. What Bezos’s erroneous decision not to let the Post pronounce its honest view of the consequences of another Donald Trump administration tacitly indicates to the public is, "Well, maybe another Trump presidency won't be so bad for American democracy after all," when the truth is that it stands to be devastating, as the Post's journalists and board know all too well.

What publisher Bezos did by intervening in what should have been a journalistic rather than business call was, basically, to censor, in an arbitrary act of corporate despotism, one of the erstwhile most courageous and democratic organs of the free press in the US. His silencing of the editorial board is, nevertheless, and unfortunately, a sign of the times.

We should make no mistake. The real threat to American democracy is the dominance of oligarchic corporate influence over every aspect of American life. Money and power, in other words, over truth and democracy. In-coming and former President Donald Trump is just the tool for it, and the caricaturesque symbol of it—a highly pernicious effect, rather than the root cause.

The op-ed attached below and published, at the time, by Boston University, further explains the significance of Bezos’s shortsighted move.

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/lack-of-endorsement-shows-bezos-willing-to-bow-to-trump/

 

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE FELON IN CHIEF