Trump’s violent ICE agency is about to escalate its war against any or all “illegals” in a dramatic fashion while engaging local law enforcement in its repression. And this should come as no surprise to us.
Every authoritarian regime in recent history has formed its own elite corps of feared special police and/or military units to suppress dissent and act as the spearhead of state repression.
The Revolutionary Guard and the Morality Police in Iran. The GRU and the Spetsnaz in Russia. Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard. The GOPE in Mexico. DINA in Chile. The AAA and the Federal Police during the Argentine dictatorship were inseparable from the horrific death squads. And, of course, the SS in Nazi Germany.
The Military Law Task Force of the National Lawyers Guild is opposed to the use of military forces to “put down” or “control” the heartfelt reactions by community members to workplace immigration raids in Los Angeles and other cities.
The Trump administration claims the use of the troops is necessary because local police are incapable of protecting the masked, non-uniformed, but heavily armed, federal forces from ICE, DHS, ATF and the FBI. Nothing could be further from the truth.
In California, for example, Governor Gavin Newsom has denounced the use of military troops as a dangerous escalation of the confrontations.
The Trump administration’s deployment of national guard troops to Los Angeles to intervene in civilian protests in the face of opposition from the Californian governor is a major escalation that risks the politicisation of the US military, armed service veterans are warning.
Former top military figures have told the Guardian that the decision to put up to 2,000 troops under federal control and send them into the streets of LA is a violation of the military’s commitment to keep out of domestic politics in all but the most exceptional circumstances. The last time a US president federalised the national guard against the wishes of a state governor was in 1965, when Lyndon Johnson deployed them to protect civil rights marchers in Alabama.
President Donald Trump’s deployment of troops to crack down on protests against neighborhood raids in Los Angeles is going to cost over a hundred million dollars, the Pentagon has said — money that could have instead been spent on causes like wildfire relief, as California Governor Gavin Newsom has pointed out. In a hearing before the House Appropriations defense subcommittee on Tuesday…
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem appeared to take a step toward circumventing federal laws that bar the military from taking part in domestic law enforcement in a letter she sent to the Department of Defense Sunday as the National Guard was deployed to Los Angeles amid mass protests over immigration raids. In a letter obtained by The San Francisco Chronicle, Noem wrote to Defense…
California union leader David Huerta has been released from federal custody after his arrest by federal immigration agents sparked an outcry from labor and other advocates across the country amid President Donald Trump’s rogue, militarized raid of Los Angeles. Service Employees International Union (SEIU) California President David Huerta was arrested on Friday while protesting an immigration…
In an aphorism sometimes attributed to Leo Tolstoy, sometimes to John Gardner, all literature relies on one of two plots: a person goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town. Let me offer my own version. We might summarize the entire history of the human race in two words: people move. Everything else is just elaboration on that basic plot. Some of history’s worst atrocities can be…
President Trump has inflamed tensions over immigration raids in Los Angeles, which his top adviser Stephen Miller described as an insurrection. “They want protesters to react violently to distract from what is really happening, which is that families are being separated, our communities are being devastated, and the people of Los Angeles are standing up to say, ‘We will not stand for this…
On Monday, a federal court ruled in favor of several federally qualified health centers and LGBTQ+ resource organizations that had either lost funding or faced grant threats under the Trump administration. The decision blocks portions of Trump’s executive orders targeting diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, as well as programs accused of promoting so-called “gender ideology.
In Trump’s America, the bar for martial law is no longer constitutional—it’s personal.
What is unfolding right now in California—with hundreds of Marines deployed domestically; thousands of National Guard troops federalized; and military weapons, tactics and equipment on full display—is intended to intimidate, distract and discourage us from pulling back the curtain on the reality of the self-serving corruption, grift, graft, overreach and abuse that have become synonymous with his Administration.
Don’t be distracted. Don’t be intimidated. Don’t be sidelined by the spectacle of a police state.
When Trump issues a call to “BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” explaining to reporters that he wants to have them “everywhere,” we should all be alarmed.
This is martial law without a formal declaration of war.
This heavy-handed, chest-thumping, politicized, militarized response to what is clearly a matter for local government is yet another example of Trump’s disregard for the Constitution and the limits of his power.
Political protests are protected by the First Amendment until they cross the line from non-violent to violent. Even when protests turn violent, constitutional protocols remain in place to safeguard communities: law and order must flow through local and state chains of command, not from federal muscle.
By breaking that chain of command, Trump is breaking the Constitution.
Deploying the military to deal with domestic matters that can—and should—be handled by civilian police, despite the objections of local and state leaders, crosses the line into authoritarianism.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
In the span of a single week, the Trump administration is providing the clearest glimpse yet of its unapologetic, uncompromising, corrupt allegiance to the authoritarian Deep State.
These two events—the federalization of the National Guard deployed to California in response to protests and the president’s lavish, taxpayer-funded military parade in the nation’s capital—bookend the administration’s unmistakable message: dissent will be crushed, and power will be performed.
Trump governs by force (military deployment), fear (ICE raids, militarized policing), and spectacle (the parade).
This is the spectacle of a police state. One side of the coin is militarized suppression. The other is theatrical dominance. Together, they constitute the language of force and authoritarian control.
Yet this is more than political theater; it is a constitutional crisis in motion.
As we have warned before, this tactic is a familiar one.
In times of political unrest, authoritarian regimes often invoke national emergencies as a pretext to impose military solutions. The result? The Constitution is suspended, civilian control is overrun, and the machinery of the state turns against its own people.
This is precisely what the Founders feared when they warned against standing armies on American soil: that one day, the military might be used not to defend the people, but to control them.
It is a textbook play from the authoritarian handbook, deployed with increasing frequency under Trump. The optics are meant to intimidate, broadcast control, and discourage resistance before it even begins.
Thus, deploying the National Guard in this manner is not just a political maneuver—it is a strategic act of fear-based governance designed to instill terror, particularly among vulnerable communities, and ensure compliance.
America is being transformed into a battlefield before our eyes.
Militarized police. Riot squads. Black uniforms. Armored vehicles. Pepper spray. Tear gas. Stun grenades. Crowd control and intimidation tactics.
This is not the language of freedom. This is not even the language of law and order.
This is the language of force.
This transformation is not accidental—it’s strategic. The government now sees the public not as constituents to be served but as potential combatants to be surveilled, managed, and subdued. In this new paradigm, dissent is treated as insurrection, and constitutional rights are treated as threats to national security.
What we are witnessing today is also part of a broader setup: an excuse to use civil unrest as a pretext for militarized overreach.
We saw signs of this strategy in Charlottesville, Virginia, where police failed to de-escalate and at times exacerbated tensions during protests that should have remained peaceful. The resulting chaos gave authorities cover to crack down—not to protect the public, but to reframe protest as provocation and dissent as disorder.
Then and now, the objective wasn’t to preserve peace and protect the public. It was to delegitimize dissent and cast protest as provocation.
It’s all part of an elaborate setup by the architects of the Deep State. The government wants a reason to crack down, lock down, and bring in its biggest guns.
This is how it begins.
Trump’s use of the military against civilians violates the spirit—if not the letter—of the Posse Comitatus Act, which is meant to bar federal military involvement in domestic affairs. It also raises severe constitutional questions about the infringement of First Amendment rights to protest and Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless search and seizure.
Modern tools of repression compound the threat. AI-driven surveillance, predictive policing software, biometric databases, and fusion centers have made mass control seamless and silent. The state doesn’t just respond to dissent anymore; it predicts and preempts it.
While boots are on the ground in California, preparations are underway for a military spectacle in Washington, D.C.
At first glance, a military procession might seem like a patriotic display. But in this context, it is not a celebration of service; it is a declaration of supremacy. It is not about honoring troops; it is about reminding the populace who holds the power and who wields the guns.
This is how authoritarian regimes govern—through spectacle.
By sandwiching a military crackdown between a domestic troop deployment and a showy parade, Trump is sending a unified message: This is about raw, unchecked, theatrical power. And whether we, the people, will accept a government that rules not by consent, but by coercion.
The Constitution was not written to accommodate authoritarian pageantry. It was written to restrain it. It was never meant to sanctify conquest as a form of governance.
We are at a crossroads.
Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed. Strip away that consent, and all that remains is conquest through force, spectacle, and fear.
As I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People and in its fictional counterpart The Erik Blair Diaries, if we allow the language of fear, the spectacle of dominance, and the machinery of militarized governance to become normalized, then we are no longer citizens of a republic—we are subjects of a police state.
That was how American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick responded on social media Monday to reporting that a man impersonating a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent zip-tied a woman working as a cashier at a cash-only auto repair shop in Philadelphia and stole around $1,000 on Sunday afternoon.
The incident comes as Republican U.S. President Donald Trump tries to deliver on his campaign promise of mass deportations, sparking protests, including in Los Angeles, where Trump has deployed Marines and federalized the California National Guard—a move the state’s Democratic governor and attorney general are challenging in court.
“Expect many, many more stories like this. The Trump administration is a criminal enterprise, emboldening street crimes and white collar crimes.”
“He kept saying he is immigration officer,” the 50-year-old cashier in Philadelphia, a legal U.S. resident who is from the Dominican Republic, toldFox 29‘s Steve Keeley. Showing the journalist her bruises, she said that the man tied her arms behind her back, and “every time I tried to turn around to look at his face, he twisted me around roughly.”
Although the shop is next to the Philadelphia Police 15th District, it took over two hours before the victim could connect with law enforcement. Police said in a Tuesday statement that the man, who escaped in a white Ford cargo van with red dashes around the middle, remains at large.
Police released surveillance photos of the van and the man, described as a white male in a “black baseball cap with U.S. flag on the front, black sunglasses, black long sleeve shirt, wearing gloves, black tactical vest with ‘Security Enforcement Agent,’ and dark green cargo pants.”
— (@)
In response to Keeley’s social media posts about the robbery, journalist Ryan Grim said early Tuesday that “this type of crime is now possible because ICE agents insist on going around like masked thugs.”
Author and Philadelphia native Robert A. Karl warned: “Expect many, many more stories like this. The Trump administration is a criminal enterprise, emboldening street crimes and white collar crimes.”
The social media account of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party in Minnesota’s Senate District 45 similarly said: “Any criminal can now put on a mask, say he is from ICE, and conduct any crime (including kidnapping and rape) and people are expected to just stand aside? Actual law enforcement DOES NOT conceal their identity and act like street thugs while doing their job. This must stop!”
This post was originally published on Common Dreams.
When Donald Trump finished his first term, he left a radically reshaped federal judiciary in his wake. The president successfully appointed 234 judges to lifetime positions, including three Supreme Court justices, leaving a stamp of conservatism on the courts for decades to come. Now, federal judges have never been more in the public eye. As Trump aims to enact his unlawful agenda…
Janine Jackson interviewed the Revolving Door Project’s Jeff Hauser about DOGE “after” Elon Musk for the June 6, 2025, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: “A Bruised Musk Leaves Washington,” the New York Timestold readers. USA Todaysaid, “Musk Leaves Trump Administration, Capping His Run as Federal Government Slasher.” The Washington Postsaid “his departure marks the end of a turbulent chapter.”
While most outlets acknowledge that the impacts of Musk’s time as “special government employee” are still in effect, and even that many of the minions he placed are still hard at work, the focus was still very much on the great man—What drives him? What will he do next?—rather than on the structures and systems whose flaws are highlighted by the maneuvers of Musk and the so-called Department Of Government Efficiency.
Our guest says now is not the time to take our eye off the ball. Jeff Hauser is the executive director of the Revolving Door Project. He joins us now by phone. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Jeff Hauser.
Jeff Hauser: Hi, great to be here.
JJ: I feel as though we spoke recently because we spoke recently, but for the press corps, there’s a new story. To imagine, as some headlines suggest, that Elon Musk has packed up his toys and left town, so some kind of chapter has concluded—that’s not just inaccurate, but rather worrisomely so, don’t you think?
JH: Absolutely. Elon Musk brought dozens of people with him to Washington, DC, to government. They were very homogeneous, in the sense that none of them were qualified to work at senior levels of government, and they all were motivated by a hatred for public service and a hatred for government protecting ordinary people from the whims of corporate America.
And they remain in government right now. They’re implementing Musk’s agenda, which happens to be pretty similar to Russell Vought’s agenda, which happens to be very similar to Project 2025’s agenda, which was an agenda that Donald Trump disavowed, but is obviously governing with.
JJ: Talk about Russell Vought a little bit. I know he’s head of the Office of Management and Budget, but what else do we need to know about him, in this context?
JH: Russell Vought is sort of like Elon Musk, if Elon Musk had been paying attention to politics for a couple of decades, and minus the allegations of ketamine usage. Russell Vought brings a unique combination of hard-right social views and hard libertarian views on economic policy. He is the personal marriage of all the sort of worst tendencies within the Republican coalition, and he knows what he’s doing.
He had a senior role in the Trump administration go-around one. He thinks that they underperformed, that they could have attacked government more, they could have made the country even “freer” and more supportive of the richest, most rapacious corporations; and he’s determined that they succeed at doing so again. And he spent the four-year interregnum planning, in exquisite detail, how to bring about the devastation of American government–of the professionalization of the American government that has been the project for more than 140 years, since the Pendleton Act and the rise of the civil service in the early 1880s.
JJ: ProPublicarevealed some speeches Vought gave a little while back, and touching on Project 2025, which he’s an architect of, goes right to what you’re just saying. Part of myriad things they want to do is revive Schedule F, which would make it easier to fire large groups of government workers who right now have civil service protections. But what struck me was the quote; this is Vought:
We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected. When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry, because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.
I have a feeling if that quote were put in front of people, it might provide some light on the project here.
JH: Absolutely. It was hiding in plain sight. They told us what they were going to do, but Donald Trump disavowed it. Donald Trump said, I’m not going to run on Project 2025. This stuff is so extreme. It’s crazy. Obviously I’m not going to do it. But they’re doing it, note for note.
And I can tell you, as somebody who not only does politics but lives in Washington, DC, when you’re in the community, there are a lot of traumatized public servants who really, deeply believe in the mission of their agencies, people who could have made a lot more money and had easier, more comfortable lives outside of government service, but are in government for the right reasons. And they are genuinely traumatized right now, and they have a lot of capacity to do good in the world that was underappreciated. Now they are being radically disempowered, and it’s going to take a very long time; it’s going to take a lot of great energy, to ever rebuild this government that Russell Vought, Elon Musk and Donald Trump are destroying.
JJ: I think it’s so interesting how you say that, even though this Trump administration is acting out the points of Project 2025, the story is still, “Oh, he disavowed it.” And it really highlights the way media have difficulty focusing on what’s happening when they’re so busy listening to what folks are saying, and what other folks are saying about what those folks are saying. But what we really need them to do is to track actual actions.
JH: Absolutely. It’d be great if the media were more focused on letting people understand what it is that the government can be doing, ordinarily does, is doing and should be doing.
I don’t think people have a good understanding of government. Even political junkies who can tell you a lot about Nebraska’s Second District, and the chances of Democrats taking back that house seat, and how that one electoral vote might influence the Electoral College in the presidential cycle—people who know that level of minutia can’t really tell you what the Office of Management and Budget does.
They almost certainly can’t tell you what OIRA, which is a subset of the Office of Management and Budget that focuses on regulatory issues, does. They wouldn’t have been able to tell you about what the civil service does, or the role of the EPA as law enforcement against corporate criminality. They don’t know these things. The media do not convey these things.
And so if there is an abstract threat about government bureaucrats, even political junkies don’t understand, definitely, what that will mean for their real lives. And I think it’s going to become, unfortunately, painfully clear in the coming years what that means. But the process is not immediate, and it’s incumbent upon the media to, as things go wrong, show the causality, show how these bad things were made much more likely to occur by Trump’s actions, by Musk’s actions, by Vought’s actions, by their disdain for public service, and their embrace of corporate titans being able to do whatever they want to do.
JJ: I want to just ask you, finally, what Revolving Door is up to, but I just saw this quote from AP, which said Musk “succeeded in providing a dose of shock therapy to the federal government, but he has fallen short of other goals.” And we’re supposed to take away that providing “shock therapy” to the federal government is somehow benign or necessary or a good thing; it’s remarkable.
But let me ask you, finally, what Revolving Door is up to, and how you hope journalists and others can use the tools and the information that you’re providing?
Jeff Hauser: “Taking seriously the notion that Musk was some sort of deficit hawk is part of the inanity of American political coverage.”
JH: Yeah, I think the quote really actually gets at a lot of what the Revolving Door Project is up to, because we do two types of work. One is pushing back on Trump, on creeping authoritarianism, and rapacious oligarchs destroying the government so they can pillage society.
So we do that work, but we also fight back against neoliberals within the Democratic Party. We’re a nonpartisan organization, and we attack neoliberalism in all of its many forms. And the idea that government required shock therapy, that there were too many people working in government, even though the number of people working in government is the same as it was two or three generations ago, when America’s population was half of what it currently is.
But the notion of this is a nonpartisan idea, that government required shock therapy: That is the marriage of Democratic neoliberals and Republican neoliberals, and that is what allowed Musk and DOGE and Trump to happen. It’s that belief that things really were broken, that there was some legitimacy to the concept of DOGE from the jump. No one should have ever validated the idea of DOGE, or talked about, “Here’s my vision for what government efficiency pursuits would happen.”
Because Musk’s goals were not to cut government spending. In fact, Silicon Valley wants way more financial support for their artificial intelligence data centers and the like. They want subsidies for all sorts of tech projects, and they want a bigger military industrial complex that is more heavily dependent on Silicon Valley. So they want lots of spending, they just want it on their priorities. They want to attack government workers, because those government workers enforce the rules that limit and constrain corporate oligarchs.
So that’s what they wanted. They did not want to reduce the deficit, and taking seriously the notion that Musk was some sort of deficit hawk is part of the inanity of American political coverage. And I’d like the media to be less credulous about people who have obvious economic stakes in public policy, and pretending that the rhetoric that they deploy, especially when they’re known liars, is something that we should take seriously.
JJ: And so the work you’re doing is tracking the ins and outs of what these predations have meant, and what they could mean, and how to stay on top of them?
JH: Yes. We are cataloging under our DOGE Watch feature the ways in which Trump and Musk are attacking the ability of government to protect ordinary people. And we’re also monitoring, separately—we have a website, Hackwatch.us—how ostensible Democratic-aligned, center-left neoliberal pundits, people like Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias and Derek Thompson, are making things easier for corporate oligarchs, are carrying water for Silicon Valley and are pursuing neoliberalism, because we’re against neoliberalism in all forms.
JJ: All right, we’ll end on that note—for now. We’ve been speaking with Jeff Hauser from the Revolving Door Project. Jeff Hauser, thank you so much for joining us this week on CounterSpin.
Masked federal agents with military gear have been firing flash-bang grenades, teargas and rubber bullets at civilians in the streets of Los Angeles for the last three days. On Saturday, President Trump federalized the National Guard to help crush protests — not just there but potentially anywhere in the U.S. where people demonstrate against federal law enforcement. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth…
During Donald Trump’s first term, the Afghan American community dodged a bullet. This time, we weren’t so lucky. The new “Muslim ban 2.0,” the successor to Trump’s original Muslim ban, went into effect today, with 12 countries on its list, including Afghanistan. When President Trump began his second term in office on January 20, he issued an executive order asking for a 60-day review of…
US Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth delivered an extremely hawkish speech in which he demonized China as a “threat” and said, “We are preparing for war”.
“Those who long for peace, must prepare for war. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. We are preparing for war, in order to deter war — to achieve peace through strength”, Hegseth stated.
The top Donald Trump administration official made these aggressive remarks at the Shangri-La Dialogue 2025, a summit held in Singapore on 31 May.
“The threat China poses is real, and it could be imminent. We hope not, but it certainly could be”, Hegseth claimed, indicating that the Pentagon was preparing for a war over Taiwan.
Hundreds of workers at the National Institutes of Health on Monday openly protested the Trump administration’s cuts to the agency and consequences for human lives, writing in a sharply worded letter that its actions are causing “a dramatic reduction in life-saving research.” In a June 9 letter to NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya, NIH workers said they felt “compelled to speak up when our…
New polling demonstrates that a majority of Americans are concerned about the cuts to Medicaid and other social health programs in President Donald Trump’s reconciliation bill, with most believing that the cuts will likely increase their family’s health costs. The KFF poll, published last week, comes shortly after a new analysis by health experts shows that millions will lose their health…
US president Donald Trump has essentially waged a war of revenge on California after mass protests against illegal state abductions. And it true authoritarian style, one police officer even turned his gun on a nearby journalist in broad daylight.
LA protests: cops turn violent
Protests in LA began on Friday 6 June after a series of violent immigration enforcement (ICE) raids in Los Angeles.
One saw the highly provocative abduction and injury of union leader David Huerta, which added further momentum to the demonstrations at the weekend. Although the LAPD called the protests peaceful, the Trump regime decided on 7 June to send 2,000 “civilian soldiers” of the National Guard.
Cops and the National Guard have caused an escalation since:
Academic Steve Vladeck called this “a significant (and, in my view, unnecessary) escalation of events in a context in which no local or state authorities have requested such federal assistance”. A legal officer for the ACLU civil rights group, meanwhile, said:
The Trump administration’s baseless deployment of the National Guard is plainly retaliation against California, a stronghold for immigrant communities, and is akin to a declaration of war on all Californians…
There is no rational reason to deploy the National Guard on Angelenos, who are rightfully outraged by the federal government’s attack on our communities
And as Australian journalist Lauren Tomasi filmed the LA protests, one LAPD officer surprised her with an unprovoked act of aggression:
Directly aims at her, as she is moving away, and clearly on air. No threat.
Tomasi’s own outlet, however, faced criticism for framing the incident as her being “caught in the crossfire”. Satirical website The Chaser reacted by posting:
"We are sad that the journalist didn't dodge the projectile that chose to go towards her" said her employer. pic.twitter.com/PxY4PK2XWS
Between 2002 to 2009, the Los Angeles Police Department’s chief and deputy chief traveled to Israel for training multiple times.
This is common throughout the US, with “police exchange programs” sending officers to Israel “for training that advocates say further militarizes the police and exacerbates harm to marginalized communities”. And it goes both ways, with Israeli occupation forces learning techniques from US ‘enforcement’ officers too.
The same politicians that say flying a Mexican flag in LA is cause for deportation have an office like this pic.twitter.com/enCWC9s6XR
— Secular Talk (KyleKulinskiShow@bsky.social) (@KyleKulinski) June 8, 2025
California governor Gavin Newsom and other politicians have insisted that Trump’s actions over the LA protests have been dictatorial:
– Inciting and provoking violence
– Creating mass chaos
– Militarizing cities
– Arresting opponents
In reality, it’s very much in keeping with a long tradition of racist settler governments using such tactics to exert control over the territory they occupy.
Palau’s president says the US order to fast-track deep sea mining is not a good idea.
Deep sea mining frontrunner The Metals Company (TMC) has since confirmed it will not apply for a mining licence through the International Seabed Authority (ISA), instead opting to apply through US regulations.
Surangel Whipps Jr. said the high seas belongs to the entire world so everyone must exercise caution.
“We should be responsible, and what we’ve asked for is a moratorium, or a temporary pause . . . until you have the right information to make the most important informed decision,” Whipps told RNZ Pacific.
Whipps said it’s important for those with concerns to have an opportunity to speak to US President Donald Trump.
“Because it’s about partnership. And I think a lot of times it’s the lack of information and lack of sharing information.
“It’s our job now as the Pacific to stand up and say, this direction could be detrimental to all of us that depend on the Pacific ocean and the ocean and we ask that you act responsibly for humankind and for the Pacific.”
US seabed policy
Trump’s executive order states: “It is the policy of the US to advance United States leadership in seabed mineral development.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) was directed to, within 60 days, “expedite the process for reviewing and issuing seabed mineral exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits in areas beyond national jurisdiction under the Deep Seabed Hard Mineral Resources Act”.
Pacific Islands Forum Leader’s retreat 2024 in Vava’u, Tonga. Image: RNZ Pacific/Lydia Lewis
It directs the US Science and Environmental Agency to expedite permits for companies to mine the ocean floor in the US and international waters.
The Metals Company has praised the US deep sea mining licensing pathway.
In a press release, its chief executive Gerard Barron made direct reference to Trump’s order, titled “Unleashing America’s Offshore Critical Minerals and Resources”.
He said he was heartened by its call “for a joint assessment of a seabed benefit-sharing mechanism” and was certain that “big ocean states” like Nauru would continue to play a leading role in the deep sea mining industry.
There are divergent views on deep sea exploration and mining in the Pacific, with many nations, civil society groups, and even some governments advocating for a moratorium or outright ban.
Exploration contracts
However, Tonga, Nauru, Kiribati and the Cook Islands have exploration contracts with mining representatives.
Vanuatu’s Climate Minister Ralph Regenvanu told RNZ Pacific in 2023 that Vanuatu’s position is for no deep sea mining at any point.
“We have a lot to think about in the Pacific. We are the region that is spearheading for seabed minerals,” he said.
The Cook Islands has sought China’s expertise in seabed mining through “high-level” discussions on Prime Minister Mark Brown’s February 2025 trip to China.
Nauru President David Adeang (left) with Cook Islands PM Mark Brown at the opening of the 53rd Pacific Islands Forum Leaders’ Meeting in Nuku’alofa, Tonga, in August 2024. Image: RNZ Pacific/Lydia Lewis
Whipps said “you have to give [The Metals Company] credit” that they have been able to get in there and convince Donald Trump that this is a good direction to go.
But as the president of a nation with close ties to the US and Taiwan, and the host of the PIF Ocean’s Commissioner, he has concerns.
“We don’t know the impacts to the rest of what we have in the Pacific — which is for us in the Pacific, it’s tuna [which] is our biggest resource,” Whipps said.
“How is that going to impact on the food chain and all of that?
“Because we’re talking about bringing, first of all, impacting the largest carbon sink that we have, which is the oceans, right? So we say our islands are sinking, but now we want to go and do something that helps our islands sink.
“That’s not a good idea.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
Chaos at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site in Rafah. Photo: AP
Recent reports say that US AID is considering giving $500 million to the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF)—an “aid” initiative launched at Israel’s request. At first glance, that might sound like a generous effort to help desperate Palestinians in Gaza. But peel back even one layer, and you’ll find a deadly political scheme masquerading as humanitarian relief.
This is not about helping hungry people. It’s about controlling them, displacing them, and starving them into submission.
Let’s start with some basics. The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation is not a humanitarian organization. It’s a U.S.- and Israeli-backed scheme run by people with no track record in neutral aid work. Its first director Jake Wood, resigned on May 25, saying the organization failed to uphold humanitarian principles. Then the Boston Consulting Group, which had secretly helped design GHF’s aid operations, pulled out and apologized to staff who were furious about the firm’s complicity in a system that enabled forced displacement and sidelined trusted UN agencies.
GHF’s brand new director is Johnnie Moore, an American evangelical PR executive best known for helping Donald Trump recognize Israeli sovereignty over Jerusalem and push the U.S. embassy move there—a move that only fanned the flames of conflict.
GHF’s entire premise is rooted in deception. It was launched with Israeli government oversight, without transparency, without independence, and—critically—without the participation of the United Nations or any respected humanitarian agencies. In fact, the UN has refused to have anything to do with it. So have groups like Doctors Without Borders, the Red Cross, and the World Food Programme, whose leaders have warned in no uncertain terms that GHF’s model militarizes aid, violates humanitarian norms, and places Palestinian lives at even greater risk.
GHF has never been about delivering aid. It’s about using the illusion of aid to control the population of Gaza—and to give cover to war crimes.
People in Gaza are starving because Israel wants them to. There are thousands of aid trucks, many loaded with supplies from the United Nations, that—for months—have been blocked from entering Gaza. They contain food, water, medicine, shelter materials—the lifeblood of a besieged civilian population. But instead of letting them through, the U.S. and Israel are pushing their own version of aid: a privatized, militarized operation. Armed U.S. contractors working with the GHF are reportedly earning up to $1,100 per day, along with a $10,000 signing bonus.
The GHF plan is to make aid available only in the south, forcibly displacing people from the north—driving them toward the Egyptian border, where many fear a permanent expulsion is being engineered.
From the very start of GHF’s operations, with the opening of two distribution sites in southern Gaza on May 26, the chaos turned deadly, with Israeli military shooting at hungry people seeking food. In its short time of operation, nearly 100 Palestinians have been killed and hundreds more wounded. These are not tragic accidents—they are predictable outcomes of militarizing aid.
Let’s also address the fear-mongering claim that when the UN was in charge of aid delivery, food was being stolen by Hamas. There is no credible evidence of this and Cindy McCain, head of the World Food Programme, has publicly refuted this allegation, saying that trucks have been looted by hungry, desperate people.
The real threat to aid integrity isn’t Hamas—it’s the blockade itself, which has created an artificial scarcity and fueled black markets, desperation, and chaos..
To truly help the people of Gaza, here’s what needs to happen:
Shut down GHF and reject all militarized aid schemes.
Restore full U.S. funding to UNRWA and the World Food Programme—trusted, experienced agencies that know how to do this work.
Demand that Israel end the blockade. Let aid trucks in—UN trucks, Red Cross trucks, WFP trucks. Flood the strip with food, medicines, tents.
Demand an immediate ceasefire to stop the killing and create space for meaningful relief and political solutions.
The starvation in Gaza is not a logistical failure. It is Israel’s political choice. And GHF is not a lifeline. It is a lie. It is complicity. It is diabolical. And U.S. taxpayers should not be forced to fund it.
New survey data out Friday shows that Republicans are wrong if they remain unconcerned about public sentiment as it relates to the evisceration of Medicaid or healthcare support systems that would result from passage of their colossal legislation now making its way through Congress — a bill that, if passed, would see coverage stripped from an estimated 11-16 million people in the coming years.
The rich, powerful, narcissistic men of the world decided that 5 June would be the day they all had their hissy fits. Just like when women’s periods sync up.
This was JUST posted by Trump, about Elon Musk on Truth Social.
This breakup is so goddamn epic and I’m going to enjoy every fucking second of it. pic.twitter.com/aezggNVrDZ
— Liberal Lisa in Oklahoma (@lisa_liberal) June 5, 2025
Elon Musk and Donald Trump were slandering each other online, while Reform’s Zia Yusuf, Nigel Farage, and Rupert Lowe were up in arms over burqas – you know, the issue at the top of every British person’s agenda right now.
Why is anyone surprised at the state of the world, while rich white psychopaths are in power?
Elon Musk, Donald Trump, Zia Yusuf, Nigel Farage, Rupert Lowe
So many of the world’s biggest whoppers all having spats & hissy fits on the same day
Who’d have thought self-serving, egotistical, narcissistic psychopaths would all eventually fall out with each other #ReformUK
In a post on X, Elon Musk alleged, without providing evidence, that Trump has not released the government files related to Jeffrey Epstein because he is implicated in them. He also called for Trump to resign and stated that the US needed a new political party. Good luck with that Elon. Most of America hates you now.
Obviously, the White House shut down the allegations, claiming Musk was unhappy with the governments new policies.
Let’s not fool ourselves. What we are witnessing is a battle between two grifting, serial lying sociopaths. Trump and Elon Musk are both greed-driven conmen who are evil as fuck. pic.twitter.com/Em2mqXspz9
In retaliation, Trump then claimed on his Truth Social network that Musk “just went CRAZY”.
This was JUST posted by Trump, about Elon Musk on Truth Social.
This breakup is so goddamn epic and I’m going to enjoy every fucking second of it. pic.twitter.com/aezggNVrDZ
— Liberal Lisa in Oklahoma (@lisa_liberal) June 5, 2025
He followed it up by suggesting that he would end Musk’s billions in government subsidies and contracts.
— Dr Shola Mos-Shogbamimu (@SholaMos1) June 5, 2025
I mean, public breakups are always messy.
But Trump is getting more and more unhinged. On the same day, he made a ridiculous comment to the ‘president’ of Germany.
I know we’re all enjoying the Trump-Musk content, but don’t sleep on this wild quote from Trump’s press conference with the president of GERMANY pic.twitter.com/3pby2az4dT
Zia Yusuf has resigned as the chair of Reform UK after suggesting it was “dumb” of the party’s newest MP to ask the prime minister if he would ban the burqa.
Farage temporarily lost the chairman of his party, on the same day that his two far-right billionaire buddies decided they hate each other.
Spare a thought for Nigel Farage trying to work out which far-right billionaire’s side he’s on. pic.twitter.com/l4Z2LQyN8B
Zia Yusuf is just one of the growing list of Reformers who are resigning – except he of course has now come back.
Ben Habib – gone
Rupert Lowe – gone
Zia Yusuf – gone
If Nigel Farage can’t even hold this tiny group together, imagine what a disaster he would be in government.
Farage can’t manage five MPs – he doesn’t stand much chance of running a country.
First Rupert Lowe. Now Zia Yusuf. You don’t have to oppose Reform’s politics to wonder whether Nigel Farage is suited to frontline leadership. If he can’t manage a party or five MPs without losing his chairman in under a year, how can he run a country of nearly 70 million?
There is nothing new about rich, powerful men being in it for themselves, so there’s no surprise when they throw an infantile public tantrum when things don’t go their way. Obviously, blaming each other for their cock-ups along the way.
Whether it’s Trump and Musk or the Reform rabble – rich, powerful men getting into petty arguments is turning attention away from the real issues. And they know exactly what they’re doing.
The last days of dying empires are dominated by idiots. The Roman, Mayan, French, Habsburg, Ottoman, Romanoff, Iranian and Soviet dynasties crumbled under the stupidity of their decadent rulers who absented themselves from reality, plundered their nations and retreated into echo chambers where fact and fiction were indistinguishable.
Donald Trump, and the sycophantic buffoons in his administration, are updated versions of the reigns of the Roman emperor Nero, who allocated vast state expenditures to attain magical powers; the Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huang, who funded repeated expeditions to a mythical island of immortals to bring back a potion that would give him eternal life.
During an end-of-year investor call this February, Palantir co-founder and militant Zionist Alex Karp bragged that his company was making a financial killing by enabling mass murder.
“Palantir is here to disrupt and make the institutions we partner with the very best in the world and, when it’s necessary, to scare enemies,” he stated, adding: “And on occasion, kill them.”
On this front, Karp claimed Palantir was “crushing it,” and he professed to be “super-proud of the role we play, especially in places we can’t talk about.”
Karp went on to predict social “disruption” ahead that would be “very good for Palantir.”
Works of dystopian fiction, from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, to Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, once seemed like dark fantasies of an authoritarian future. Their themes were warnings, not forecasts. Now, in 21st Century America, with the political landscape being fashioned by Donald Trump, MAGA, the Republican Party, Elon Musk’s DOGE, and their Christian nationalist and white supremacist allies, literary nightmares are no longer speculative. What once was fiction is now the stuff of daily headlines.
Dystopian themes such as: Big Brother watching; censorship threatening; women’s rights eroding; history rewritten; and violent white gangs roaming the political landscape, once viewed as hyperbolic, are now today’s reality.
American politics is being shaped by hundreds ofexecutive orders, social media rants, and an alarming number of reactionary proposals by Republican controlled in states across the country. Some of these actions are more horrifying than plots cooked up by the best of our speculative fiction writers. And while dystopian legislation is being crafted, right-wing domestic terrorist groups are metastasizing.
The election of Donald Trump, with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint at his fingertips, has set these disruptive events into motion. And the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn a woman’s right to abortion opened the floodgates to proposals that were once thought of as pure fiction.
Big Brother is Watching—And Tweeting
The Orwellian surveillance state has evolved in real-time. But it’s not just government agencies monitoring citizens; private tech giants, partisan watchdogs, and shadowy right-wing influencers are mining data, tracking dissent, and amplifying disinformation. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter—rebranded as “X” — turned the site into a breeding ground for conspiracy theories and extremist propaganda. This once dystopian future, now present, isn’t just being surveilled; it’s being promoted, curated and manipulated by billionaires and bots.
In MAGA’s America, Trump is attempting to stretch surveillance society, as dissenters are targeted, reporters vilified, and protesters charged as criminals. And as state governments push for laws that would allow tracking of women’s pregnancies and menstrual cycles, Orwell’s vision seems almost quaint by comparison.
Burning Books Without Flames
Bradbury envisioned a world where books were burned to control thought. In today’s America, while book burning is rare, books are being removed from the shelves of public schools and libraries, and military academies. Conservative lawmakers and school boards are banning books en masse—particularly those that discuss race, gender, sexuality, or America’s darker historical truths. Librarians are being harassed, even doxxed.
The control of knowledge and information is power, and the MAGA movement knows it.
Reproductive Dystopia
The Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade opened the floodgates to extremist legislation that was once confined to the realm of dystopian fiction. In Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, women are stripped of autonomy and used as vessels for reproduction. Today, in America, state legislators openly float proposals to track pregnancies, criminalize miscarriages, and prosecute women for seeking abortion care. Some have even suggested the death penalty. The right’s Rolling Thunder project aims to outlaw the use of mifepristone.
No longer a slippery slope—it’s a full-on sprint toward theocracy. Red cloaks and white bonnets are no longer costumes for protest. They are warnings of what’s to come.
Rewriting the Past to Control the Future
“Who controls the past controls the future,” Orwell wrote. In some states slavery is being reframed as “involuntary relocation” or a jobs program! “Don’t Say Gay” laws muzzle teachers from acknowledging the existence of LGBTQ+ people. AP African American Studies is gutted. Teaching truth becomes a revolutionary act.
Disappearing or re-written school textbooks and on government websites, history is being edited, erased and repackaged to fit Trump and his acolytes white nationalist agenda.
A Clockwork Orange America
Meanwhile, political violence is becoming normalized. From the January 6th insurrection to armed extremists intimidating voters, the American far-right is increasingly militant and unrepentant. Anthony Burgess’s vision of a violent youth culture run amok feels unnervingly familiar—except now it’s grown men in camo, tactical gear, and MAGA hats, and ramping up talk of civil war. The MAGA movement is a coordinated ideology that seeks to replace democracy with an authoritarian state.
Project 2025: The Authoritarian Blueprint
The blueprint for much of what we are seeing is the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, a roadmap for dismantling the administrative state, purging government agencies of dissenters, and centralizing executive power in the White House. After claiming during the presidential campaign that he knew nothing about it, Trump has peopled his administration with Project 2025 contributors including Russel Vought Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Peter Navarro, Senior Counselor for Trade and Manufacturing, and Brendan Carr, of the Federal Communications Commission. Trump’s goal: a government loyal to him above all else.
We Are Living the Plot Twist
What were once speculative fantasies, are now the substance of our daily news. The line between fiction and reality has blurred. Orwell, Bradbury, Atwood, and Burgess wrote to warn us. They hoped their worlds would remain on the page. But in Trump’s America, the 20th century’s worst literary nightmares are becoming the 21st century’s political reality.
Whether a world war, a proxy conflict, an armed intervention, a psyop, or a regime change mission, the United States has not enjoyed a single moment of true, unadulterated peace.
And it’s not just at war with nations abroad. The US is also at war with itself.
Positive peace is not just the absence of violence, but also the absence of oppression. In all the years of this country’s existence, oppression has flourished, leaching away the lies told about the land of the free. Many pretend not to see the institutional apartheid and chronic subjection of minorities, but it lurks in every city, town, and neighborhood, right under the nose of the social theater we all take part in.
Well, the US is in hospice, and it’s lashing out—a last gasping breath of the inhumane, psychopathic systems that perpetuate violence, at home and abroad.
As Ariel Durant wrote, “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” No country needs to declare war on the United States—it’s caught in its own self-destructive web.
There are many casualties in war other than people. Truth was killed a long time ago, a necessary death for the proliferation of our military and the subjugation of countries and people that act against our interests. The next casualties will be the very values we tell ourselves we stand for, written boldly in our Constitution—though weren’t they also a lie? Overseas, human rights are meaningless. We’ve bombed and murdered scores of people, over and over and over again, and we’ve smiled with rotting teeth and declared it was all for the greater good.
Turns out the rot was coming from within.
If the US is at war with the world and itself, then every battlefield is a frontline—Ukraine, Gaza, China, the entire exploited global south, the self-declared allies with no true sovereignty… and here, university campuses are merely one more frontline.
Universities have a particular power in the US. They generally enjoy the ability to intellectually critique the US, its subjection of people, and the crimes it has inflicted on the global population. They are meant to have a level of separation from government interference and operate as beacons of education and places of global interaction and community. This doesn’t always happen, but sometimes it does.
Why are educational institutions a threat? Because they have the tools needed to see through the cognitive shroud of militarized capitalism and talk about it. Students are the real change-makers because they haven’t spent a lifetime beaten down by the system, exhausted by its impossibilities, and bent hopeless by the apparent futility of trying to make change. Change is slow, but students are young, energized, hopeful, open-minded, and visionary. They are also the future.
Students observe injustice, and they act on it. They’ve protested every war we’ve decided was wrong long after the fact—Vietnam, Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Palestine. And every time, the government has cracked down on students, demanding arrests and university compliance with its global agenda. The Trump administration is not doing anything new—they’ve just crossed a few more lines and been obvious about it.
University protests and encampments protesting the Gaza genocide were the major catalyst for the most recent crackdowns on academia, providing the government justification for launching probes to investigate “antisemitism” on campuses. The Trump administration has also been actively targeting what they perceive to be “anti-American” fields of study, like postcolonialism, critical race theory, gender studies, and social theory—the very fields that act as tools to outthink the militarized capitalism thinking bubble. They emphasize a need for “patriotic education,” which is the newest terminology for imperialist propaganda.
These actions coincided with unprecedented persecution of students and professors who have actively criticized the Gaza genocide and the United States’ role in funding it. Visa and green card holders alike have been arrested and face ongoing deportations merely for having an opinion that acts in opposition to state interests… the very definition of fascism.
Harvard is an interesting case. Widely seen as a symbol of American elitism, it almost seems counterintuitive for an oligarchic government to oppose. But there are no rules here, and the internal power systems have gone rabid, turning on themselves in an effort to choke out their own active failings. Trump plays the populist card well, but he’s hiding behind a mirror of his own gross corruption. He calls to “drain the swamp,” while bringing his ragtag group of billionaire friends into the White House and giving them political power they should never have—a blatant contradiction many choose to ignore.
Initially, Harvard University refused to capitulate to Trump’s demands, arguing they directly violated the university’s independence and constitutional rights. In response, Trump ordered federal agencies to freeze over $100 million in funds and attempted to revoke Harvard’s ability to enroll international students.
Harvard president Alan Gerber remains steadfast in his refusal to surrender, saying that Harvard must “stand firm” and set an example for other universities that will continue to be targeted.
To counter Harvard’s steadfastness, the administration’s most recent move reached absurd new heights. Last week, a joint letter from three congressional committees accused Harvard of partaking in global supervillain-esque activities such as training genocidal paramilitary groups from China, partnering with the Chinese military using US defense funds, collaborating with Iranian government-backed scientists, and even potentially helping to develop next-gen spy robots and transplant technology with illegal organ-harvesters.
The letter was ridiculous, reading less like a serious national security inquiry and more like a bureaucratic fever dream fueled by a conspiracy-laced Wikipedia binge. The “training” of a Chinese paramilitary group was actually a public health course that was attended by members of a Chinese administrative body. The accusations of Iran funding was regarding medical research on the bacterial properties of particles done in conjunction between Imam Khomeini International University, Harvard Medical School, and Zhejiang University-University of Edinburgh Joint Institute—a great display of an international, collaborative scientific study that could help improve the lives of all people (There is clearly a profound misunderstanding on how scientific and medical research works. These fields are collaborative by design, and all nearly of these studies are public, peer-reviewed work).
And the most bizarre claim of all is that Harvard’s liver regeneration research is somehow aiding and abetting organ harvesting conspiracies. Do I even need to speak to that?
Ultimately, this letter has nothing to do with national security concerns and is merely another weapon for the current administration to throw at Harvard in its efforts to get it to capitulate to their demands. And if the anti-China warhawks can push their agenda a bit more by using their red-baiting, xenophobic grab-bag of buzzwords, then what’s stopping them? They will conflate academic exchange with espionage, collaboration with treason, and conference panels with covert operations as long as it helps obtain their end goal of wiping independent thinking off syllabuses and replacing it with strictly I-love-America propaganda. At the end of the day, they don’t want you to know how to think—they want to tell you what to think.
If the Trump administration thinks that defunding our top academic institutions will improve the already lagging education systems, and that censoring free speech and prohibiting collaborative research will be a boon for progress and productivity, they have another thing coming. These actions will only hurt the US and drag it further behind on its last-ditch efforts to maintain its slipping grasp on world domination.
Montesquieu wrote, “The corruption of each government almost always begins with that of its principles.” Well, the US has never represented the principles that it’s long claimed to stand for. Men have never been treated equally, speech has never been free, and liberty and liberation have always been things to strive for, never things that are. This is not a change that spontaneously occurred, but something that is inherent within the imperialist system. And now the decay is becoming visible, and the empire with its “immoderate greatness” is turning on itself—eating itself—and we are all vulnerable to its collapse.
Trump calls it a ‘layered defense shield, safeguarding the American homeland with unwavering precision, ensuring the security and resilience of our nation’. Trump shared few specifics in the May 20 news conference, saying “Golden Dome will be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from other sides of the world and even if they are launched from space.”
Early cost estimates from Congressional sources range from $550 billion to trillions over 20 years. Trump wants a $25 billion down payment for the program in 2025. Canada is being brought into Golden Dome likely to help pay for it. We should expect that NATO members will also be hit up to help cover the massive costs.
Sandpit politics is rarely edifying, and grown toddlers taking their fists to each other is unlikely to interest. But when they feature US President Donald Trump and the world’s wealthiest man, the picture alters. Disputes are bound to be on scale, rippling in their consequences.
No crystal ball was required regarding the eventual sundering of the relationship between Trump and Elon Musk. Here were noisy, brash egos who had formed a rancid union in American politics, with Musk lending his resources and public machinery to The Donald, knowing he could also have sway in the Trump administration as a “special government employee”. That sway took the form of DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency), a crude attempt to right the wrongs of misspending in government while politicising the public service. Awaking from a narcotised daze, Musk decided to focus on his floundering companies, notably Tesla, and step back from the inferno. In doing so, he expected “to remain a friend and adviser, and if there’s anything the president wants me to do, I’m at this service.” Gazing at the raging inferno that is Trumpian policy, that convivial attitude has all but evaporated.
For one thing, Trump’s proposed tax breaks and increases in defence spending, espoused in his One Big Beautiful Bill Act, seemed to undermine the very premise of DOGE and its zealous mission of reducing government spending. The legislation promises to slash $1.5 trillion in government spending but increase the debt limit by $4 trillion. “I was disappointed to see the massive spending bill, frankly,” Musk said in an interview with CBS Sunday Morning last month. Such a plan merely inflated, not reduced, the budget deficit. “I think a bill can be big or beautiful. I don’t know if it can be both.”
This month, Musk became even more irritable. His temper had frayed. “I’m sorry, I just can’t stand it anymore,” he barked on his X platform on June 3. “This massive, outrageous, pork-filled Congressional spending bill is a disgusting abomination.” He continued to heap shame on members of Congress “who voted for it: you know you did wrong. You know it.”
On June 5, Trump expressed his disappointment “because Elon knew the inner workings of this bill”, leaving open the possibility that the billionaire might be suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome.” Musk had “only developed the problem when he found out that we’re going to have to cut the [electric vehicle] mandate.”
A blow was in the offing, coming in the form of a post on Truth Social: “The easiest way to save money in our Budget, Billions and Billions of dollars, is to terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts. I was always surprised Biden didn’t do it!” Musk’s embittered retort: “Such an obvious lie. So sad.” He also proposed, in light of the President’s announcement, the decommissioning of SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, vehicles used by NASA to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station. The ripples were finally getting violent.
Musk then decided to do what he called dropping “the really big bomb”. Trump, he revealed, “is in the Epstein files. This is the real reason they have not been made public.” Given Musk’s estranged relationship with reality and its facets, this can only be taken at face value. It’s a matter of record that Trump, along with a fat who’s who of power, knew the late Jeffrey Epstein, financier and convicted sex offender, for many years.
The trove of government documents known as The Epstein Files has offered the easily titillated some manna but, thus far, few bombs. On February 27, US Attorney General Pamela Bondi released what were described as the “first phase” of files relating to the financier and “his exploitation of over 250 underage girls at his homes in New York and Florida, among other locations.” In an interview with Fox News on February 21, Bondi revealed that Epstein’s client list lay “on my desk right now.”
Trump’s response to Musk’s latest gobbet of accusation proved almost melancholic. “I don’t mind Elon turning against me, but he should have done so months ago.” He went on to praise “one of the Greatest Bills ever presented to Congress.”
In characteristically bratty fashion, Musk went on to share a post agreeing with the proposition that Trump be impeached and replaced by the Vice President, J.D. Vance, advocate “a new political party in America that actually represents the 80% in the middle” (a touching billionaire’s wish), and predict “a recession in the second half of this year” caused by Trump’s global tariff regime.
In the scheme of things, Trump has survived impeachment, prosecution, litigation, and a divided US electorate that gave him a majority in both the Electoral College and the popular vote. Like a Teflon-coated mafia don, he has made compromising people a minor art. Musk, compromised in his support and having second thoughts, can only go noisily into the confused night.
Is the Donald Trump-Elon Musk bromance finally over? President Trump is threatening to cut off billions of dollars in federal contracts with Musk after the two billionaires engaged in a dramatic online feud just days after Musk called Trump’s budget bill a “disgusting abomination.” Musk appeared to back the impeachment of Trump and claimed the president is named in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Chaos at Gaza Humanitarian Foundation distribution site in Rafah. Photo: AP
