Sue Coe, Touchless Fascism, 2024. Courtesy the artist.

Preface: Emigre politics

When writers go into exile, I read somewhere, they discuss the politics of their former countries more than before they left. I have an image of that in my head – scruffy emigres huddled over coffee and schnapps in a smoke-filled café. Voices are raised, tables are pounded, and drinks are spilled, before a quiet settles on the group — the silence of displacement.

My writer friends here in Norwich are all British, and they don’t go in for fist pounding. Their take on American politics is mostly expressed in eyerolls and feigned shock. They always knew, they seem to be saying, there was something terribly the matter with the U.S; now it’s wrongs are laid bare. “You’re the American,” they say, “what do you think?” In the quiet that follows those conversations, I don’t feel displaced, just a little nauseous.

1. Fascism is embarrassing

The press and liberal politicians have responded with suitable alarm to the Trump administration’s attacks upon education, the environment, law, non-profits, immigrants, the economy (tariffs) and the courts. They have described violations of due process, and the threat of authoritarianism. They have predicted recession, inflation, or stagflation, and warned about the costs to the nation–material, intellectual, cultural-of the deportation or exclusion of immigrants.

Trump’s onslaught has been relentless, and no one is safe. If legal residents – immigrants and students – protected by the first amendment, are subject to deportation because of their speech, so are birthright or naturalized citizens. If law firms are punished for their selection of clients, no one can be confident of obtaining legal representation when they need it. If research scientists can have their funding cut for ignoring Trump administration priorities, then nobody can be sure public health and safety are protected; if non-profits are targeted for their charitable work, how many people will step up to fill the gaps left by a tattered social safety net?

Just before the 2024 election, the words fascist or Nazi were beginning to be used by Democratic politicians – including Joe Biden and Kamela Harris – to describe Trump. Those terms have now largely disappeared from public discourse. The savants say they were politically ineffective, turning off the very voters who most needed to be engaged. There’s no evidence to back up those claims. I think the real reason is different: the wolf at the door has taken up residence in our living rooms, and that fact is simply too shameful to acknowledge. A majority of American voters freely elected a fascist, an approbation even Hitler never received. What’s more, they elected a congress willing to disable itself to enable him. Who would want to admit such things?

2. Universal tariffs — a Hitlerian policy

Since inauguration, Trump has done everything he can to cement his power. That’s what dictators do. In Hitler’s time, the process was called Gleichschaltung, meaning stabilization or bringing into alignment. The Reichstag (parliament), the courts, businesses, education, law, unions, the police and military, and the organs of civil society, including charities and arts organizations, were all made to toe the Nazi line. Many did so willingly. Those that didn’t were steamrolled or destroyed.

Hitler accomplished Gleichschaltung in a matter of months. Trump has been in office just four months and has already managed to dismantle entire government agencies and subvert well-established consumer, investor, civil and environmental protections. He has disbanded U.S.A.I.D., the government’s largest provider of foreign aid, and brought to heel some of the nation’s biggest law firms and a few of its wealthiest universities. It’s a veritable Anschluss, and as with Austria, those who accede to the dictator will remain in his thrall for as long as he’s in power. Trump has been less successful so-far, however, in accomplishing what got him elected: improving the economy by reducing prices.

Trump’s economic policies appear at first glance conventional. By embracing the budget framework put forward by the U.S. House – which slashes about $1.5 trillion in spending — Trump plants himself firmly in the camp of austerity. That’s the policy of every Republican since Herbert Hoover. The theory behind it is roughly as follows: Cut spending to reduce the supply of money and lower inflation and interest rates. That makes it easier for businesses to borrow to invest in new enterprises and produce more goods and services. That in turn, increases hiring and raises salaries (because of competition for workers) and improves the general welfare of the nation.

In fact, austerity never works like that. Cuts in spending reduce both employment levels and the social safety net, disempowering workers, and emboldening businesses to lower salaries. Eventually, a lack of consumer demand idles factories and services, propelling the economy into recession. The crisis can be long or short, depending upon outside forces available of to stem the crisis – war or militarization, a major government stimulus, a large increase of credit, or a paradigm changing technology. Under monopoly capitalism, as Paul Sweezy wrote, “stagnation is the norm, good times the exception.” In recent years, the economy has been propped up by enormous profits in the financial sector, but little of that has trickled down to the mass of the population; thus, the continued anger and disillusionment of the American working-class, comprising 70% or more of the population. (The working class consists of those who live on salary alone, paycheck-to-paycheck, not investments).

By firing thousands of federal workers and shuttering whole agencies, Trump is a typical austerity-loving Republican. (That despite stuffing the White House with gold-plated bling.) His vow to cut taxes for the wealthy – even though that would vastly increase the deficit – is also standard Republican fare. It’s always the poor, not the rich, who are forced to accept austerity. But where Trump parts ways with Republican orthodoxy is his plan to achieve economic autarchy (self-sufficiency) through tariffs. His model here isn’t so much President McKinley, Trump’s favorite president, as Adolf Hitler, with whom he also has a relationship.

A tariff is a duty or tax on an imported good. They have been used for millennia, mostly for corrupt purposes, such as increasing the wealth of a ruler or raising funds for wars of conquest. As early as the 15^th century, however, tariffs were used for more benign, or at least more rational reasons: import substitution. Successive English monarchs taxed imported woolens so that domestic producers could gain a bigger share of the market. Indeed, because of tariffs – plus a large navy — England ultimately gained global dominance in cloth manufacture and sale. The English Corn Laws (1815-46) too were a set of tariffs intended to protect British manufacture and trade. They prevented the importation of grain, raising the prices of domestic products and enriching landowners. However, they also increased food costs, exacerbating starvation in Ireland (under English control), and antagonizing manufacturers forced to pay their workers higher wages.

Some of Trump’s “reciprocal” tariffs, April 2, 2025. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

The goal of Trump’s tariff program is something like Britain’s – empire building, or in this case, empire repair. American global dominance has been in decline for a generation, and China is now the world’s leading manufacturer (by far) and the leading trading nation. A closer parallel than imperial Britain, therefore, is Nazi Germany. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he faced an economic crisis. His country was deeply dependent upon imports – especially oil, rubber, animal feed and fertilizer – but lacked the export income to pay for them. In addition, Germany still owed significant war reparations to the United States — those to France and England had already been cancelled. Hitler’s policy therefore, devised by his economic minister Hjalmar Schacht, was to abrogate remaining reparations agreements, embrace tariffs to prioritize exports over imports, and pursue relative autarchy — “a selective policy of disengagement,” as Adam Tooze called it — with its chief trading partners, including the U.S. The roll out of this program was fraught with challenges, but it ultimately allowed the Nazi regime to rapidly re-arm while at the same time boosting the domestic economy. Germany achieved full employment by 1938 with the significant exception of Jews forced from their jobs by the repressive Nuremberg Laws. By 1940, labor shortages began to arise, quickly compensated by slave labor performed by Jews and war prisoners. In the end, of course, Hitler’s economy could not sustain such a massive war effort against the combined forces of the U.S. and US.S.R. and by the spring of 1945, it was decisively defeated.

Like Hitler, Trump is focused on disengaging from historical trading partners – Canada, Mexico, the EU, U.K., Japan, Soth Korea and China — and achieving relative autarchy. He wants to strengthen American imperialism, and expand the American Lebensraum to include Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal. His chief economic target is China, which he’s hit with tariffs as high as 145%, but every nation in the world (including non-nations, like the Heard and McDonald Islands, inhabited only by penguins) are subject to tariffs in an effort to reduce foreign dependency, increase domestic production, and raise money.

Tariffs of the kind currently implemented or proposed, make no economic sense and have no chance of either heading off stagnation or restoring lost dominance. If Trump wants to raise enough money from tariffs to cut or eliminate income taxes, he’s bound to fail since rates high enough to pay for U.S. government services and spending will quickly reduce imports, cutting off the very revenue tariffs are supposed to raise. If his goal is instead to use tariffs to foster domestic manufacturing (import substitution), he must fail since imports – raw materials, silicon chips, machine parts and exotic food items (such as avocados) – are essential to U.S. business expansion and consumer spending. China’s retaliatory threat to cut-off U.S. access to essential rare earth elements is one example of the necessity of imports.

Finally, the underlying premise that high tariffs always buttress American prosperity is fundamentally flawed. Consider the following thought experiment:

The Chinese government, in “an expression of love for the great American people”, decides to give to every American adult an electric car worth about $50,000. The U.S. government at first thinks this is a Trojan Horse, but after examining a thousand cars sent as a downpayment, discovers there are no booby-traps or listening devices. The American public rejoices. Car manufacturers and the U.A.W. are furious.

Question: What should the U.S. do?

Answer: Take the cars.

If the Chinese people want to dispense raw materials, capital and labor with a value of $50,000 – we’d be idiots to turn it down. The cars would increase the net worth (as well as mobility) of American adults, allowing them to buy other goods and services. They would stimulate the economy and greatly reduce the emission of greenhouse gasses. There would be a rush to build charging stations and electric generation to power them, and lots of scrap metal to make new steel. If some auto workers lose their jobs, they can be employed in industries juiced by the $1.25 trillion Chinese gift. The U.S. government can support workers with the transition.

Now suppose the Chinese only offered the value of one-half, one-third, or even just one-tenth of a car? The answer must be is the same – take the money. Turning down cheap Chinese and other imports is the equivalent of turning down the car, so long as the goods are sold at prices below the global, average necessary labor time required for their production. (For model calculations, please see Zhming Long, et al. Also Larry Summers.)

This hypothetical transfer of resources is not in fact, exceptional; it is the basis of Imperialism. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, the expropriation of colonial resources and exploitation of people enriched the metropolitan powers, including the U.S. The difference today is that many, so-called “developing” countries self-exploit to establish domestic industries sufficient to move their populations out of extreme poverty. Moreover, they accept as payment for their goods dollars used to buy American products or U.S. Treasury bonds. China is the greatest example of this self-exploiting practice, but its willingness to continue is being tested right now. It may decide to simply accelerate existing plans to increase domestic consumption in pursuit of a long-term policy of “de-globalization” and “co-development.”

In the face Chinese push back, Trump’s protectionist and Hitlerian trade policy is ludicrous. His plans to impose further tariffs on computer chips and pharmaceuticals, or even charge nations to trade with the U.S will, if implemented, speed the coming recession, or deepen it when it arrives. The only plausible way to ameliorate the declining fortunes of the American working class are the ones that Trump and other Republicans (and most Democrats) have ruled out from the start: subsidize or nationalize industries key to a sustainable, green economy; restore high marginal tax rates, like those in effect from 1944-63; tax wealth to reduce inequality; support the growth of labor unions to ensure fair wages; clip the wings of the non-productive finance sector by imposing fees on stock trades; limit patent protection; and establish good, non-coercive trading relationships with other nations.

2. Trump aims to punish immigrants to validate his racism

Trump’s tariff policy discomfits allies and adversaries alike. His capriciousness – tariffs raised one day and lowered the next — is not a flaw in his system, it’s the purpose. By controlling with a word or a tweet the rise and fall of global markets, or a nation’s trade and monetary policies, Trump manifests his dreamed omnipotence, the product of a narcissism that’s Hitlerian in scale if not so far in impact. The pathology is not limited to the economic domain. It’s also apparent in immigration policy, the other issue that got him elected.

During the presidential campaign, Trump called immigrants from non-European countries murderers, rapists, diseased, vermin and blood poisoners, language borrowed from Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels and other Nazis. He proposed arresting and expelling twenty million of them (even though there are only about 11 million undocumented workers in the U.S.) and building an archipelago of camps to facilitate the process.

Trump is not alone in his extremism. He’s supported by a vast organizational and personnel infrastructure that includes anti-immigrant think tanks, “English only” advocates (a policy recently advanced by executive order), and opponents of diversity and educational multiculturalism such as Christopher Rufo. Among Trump’s most committed individual allies, naturally, is his vice-president, former Ohio Senator J.D. Vance, who infamously claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating resident’s pets, and last week stated, prior to his visit to the Vatican, that the U.S. Conference of Bishops was settling “illegal immigrants” just to collect federal aid. (A rumor is growing that Vance killed the pope. I have no evidence to prove or disprove the claim.)

Many other prominent Republicans, including Texas Governor Greg Abbott, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, House Speaker Mike Johnson, Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton and Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller have expressed similarly hateful views.

Miller in the past endorsed openly racist, online publications such as VDARE and American Renaissance and recently demanded “reparations” for all the damage done to U.S. families by “uncontrolled, illegal, mass immigration.”

Lately, Trump has moved away from Nazi-inspired, biological racist language to a rhetoric that focusses instead on public safety. He’s accused large numbers of Latin American immigrants of being members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, and the El Salvadorian gang MS-13. That was the pretext used to deport about 200 immigrants to a notoriously brutal prison in El Salvador. Few if any of the deportees were afforded due process, and most are neither gang members nor in fact guilty of any crime. (Under federal law, being undocumented is a civil, not criminal offense.) The case of Kilmar Ábrego García, a Venezuelan legal immigrant, deported due to an “administrative error” according to the government, remains the focus of intense interest. Despite a Supreme Court judgement that the U.S. must “facilitate” his release, he remains in prison. Further deportations to El Salvador are currently blocked by a Supreme Court order.

In late March, work was begun on an immigrant detention center at Fort Bliss, in El Paso, Texas. It will hold about 8,000. (Biden previously housed an unknown number of unaccompanied migrant children at Fort Bliss.) The camp would be a model for about ten others at bases across the country from Niagara Falls Air Reserve Station near Buffalo, N.Y., to Hill Air Force Base in Utah. Assuming all are built – an unlikely prospect given the coordination and focus required — that would mean that 80,000 immigrants could be housed in camps, awaiting processing, a small fraction of the promised 20 million deportations.

In fact, Trump has so far detained and expelled fewer immigrants than Biden at the same point in his term. The reasons are both banal and programmatic. Trump fired most of the people at the Department of Homeland Security who knew what they were doing. But more important, Trump recognizes that any program of mass expulsions would be devastating to the American economy. At least 40% of U.S. farmworkers are undocumented; 31% of workers in the hospitality sector; and smaller but still large percentages in health care and construction.

Site Monitor, Fort Bliss, April 10, 2025. (Photo: Rose Thayer for Stars and Stripes (U.S. Department of Defense).

Another focus of racial and xenophobic bias is college students. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security has expanded its scope to arrest legally resident, but foreign-born students. Many of them – around 1700 so far, but possibly many more — have been involved in pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel protests. Others have had their visas revoked for minor legal infractions, including speeding tickets, or for having been charged, but not convicted of misdemeanors. These students are not however immigrants at all; they are recipients of U.S. educational exports. Foreign-born students collectively add almost $45 billion to the U.S. economy and support almost 380,000 jobs, about ½ the impact of the U.S. auto industry. The improve the U.S. balance of trade.

The point of Trump’s detentions and expulsions is not to end immigration, or even significantly reduce its numbers. It’s to stigmatize immigrants and non-whites, thereby validating the national and racial superiority of the president, his allies and supporters. Still more broadly, it’s to affirm the naturalness and inevitability of a political, economic and social system – challenged by developing nations, allies and rivals — in which the United States occupies the center of the global order. By his actions on tariffs and immigration, Trump is inadvertently hastening the end of that dominance. For that we can thank him. But what will be the cost?

The post Three Theses on Trump’s Rule appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.

Photo by Jon Sailer

As President Donald Trump’s second term is about to hit the wall of 100 days, one critique has grown louder: his inconsistency. Critics point to his sudden reversals, contradictory pronouncements, and policies that shift as quickly as his moods. In an age of social media and 24-hour news cycles, these whiplash decisions are magnified—and often amplified. The result is a presidency that feels deeply unmoored, erratic, and impulsive. But is Trump truly the most inconsistent president in modern history? Or is the chaos simply louder now?

History offers a few instructive parallels. And while no two presidents are the same, Trump’s volatility does echo the struggles of past leaders whose inconsistent or indecisive styles defined—and in some cases derailed—their presidencies.

Throughout his first term, Trump’s approach to policy could best be described as transactional. He pulled the United States out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, only to later suggest rejoining it. He simultaneously praised and criticized NATO. One day he was threatening to “totally destroy North Korea,” the next he was praising Kim Jong-un’s leadership. This pattern wasn’t limited to foreign policy. On COVID-19, he vacillated between downplaying its danger and declaring a national emergency—sometimes in the same week.

In his second term, the trend hasn’t changed. Trump has imposed massive and broad tariffs, only to lift them days later, reimpose them, lift, and so on. He has promised mass deportations while signaling support for undocumented workers in politically useful industries. His stance on tech regulation oscillates between government intervention and libertarian restraint. For critics, the result is confusion. For supporters, it’s “strategy”.

But while we find ourselves so deeply immersed, every single day, in all things Trump, it’s worth stepping back for a second and noting that this governing style is not without precedent.

Andrew Johnson, who ascended to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination, was similarly unpredictable. Though he was a Democrat on a Republican ticket, many hoped Johnson could help reunite the country after the Civil War. Instead, his presidency devolved into a combative and contradictory mess. He opposed Reconstruction, vetoed civil rights legislation, and clashed violently with Congress—often simply because he could.

From my recollection of college history decades ago, Johnson’s inconsistencies were personal as much as they were political—just like Trump, especially Trump volume 2. To me, both men are deeply led by their own egos—even to the point where not putting your ego into some heart-shaped box will spell almost certain destruction.

Johnson’s refusal to build coalitions or stick to a coherent policy path led to paralysis—and impeachment. Though he survived removal by a single Senate vote, his presidency is widely considered a cautionary tale in leadership undone by personal volatility.

Another instructive comparison is Jimmy Carter. Where Johnson and Trump governed from their gut, Carter was a technocrat, often paralyzed by his own desire to do the right thing. But that didn’t translate into clarity. His foreign policy swung between a moral commitment to human rights and a pragmatic embrace of problematic allies. On energy, he made strong public pronouncements but failed to unify his party around a plan. And during the Iran hostage crisis, his inability to commit to a clear strategy left Americans with a sense that he had lost control.

I remember studying Carter in real time and being struck by his overarching decency. He seemed, at least to me, as someone beautifully fit for the American presidency in theory and hideously so in practice. He was indecisive, like Trump, but this was exacerbated by something completely absent from the Trump persona—deep weakness.

When we look at all of this holistically, the key difference with Trump at least appears to be that his inconsistency isn’t just incidental—it’s wildly performative. He doesn’t hide his unpredictability; he champions it. “I like to be unpredictable,” he has boasted more than once, framing his policy reversals as strategic misdirection, a way of keeping allies, enemies, and the media guessing.

That may serve him in the political arena, but in government, inconsistency has a cost. Foreign allies don’t know whether American promises will last. Government agencies can’t implement policies that change week to week. Business leaders, hungry for regulatory clarity, are left in limbo. And citizens lose faith that their leaders are working with a steady hand. All we need to do is look at today’s news—China refuting Trump’s claim that talks are well underway to again and hopefully finally remove absurdly punitive tariffs between the nations.

There is, of course, a difference between flexibility and flippancy. Great presidents adapt. They change course when new facts demand it. But they do so with purpose, signaling to the nation and the world that leadership means more than instinct. It means coherence.

That’s where Trump’s approach falters. His inconsistency isn’t just about policy—it’s about process. There is often no clear deliberation, no evident consultation with experts, no structured roll-out. A policy may be announced on Monday, walked back on Tuesday, and forgotten by Friday. This instability erodes credibility—not just for Trump, but for the entire government.

Supporters argue that this chaos is intentional—that Trump is a disruptor breaking old norms. They see his reversals not as failures but as recalibrations in real time. But disruption, when not grounded in vision, becomes noise. And governing by impulse is not the same as leading with intent.

Leadership requires clarity. Allies need to trust in American constancy. Citizens need to believe their president governs with something more enduring than impulse. Trump’s challenge is that he blends the stubborn populism of Andrew Johnson with the managerial disarray of Jimmy Carter, in an era where every misstep is immediately broadcast—and archived forever.

Whether this second Trump term results in transformative policy or a deepening of dysfunction will depend not just on what Trump chooses to do, but whether he can ever truly decide what he stands for. History has not been kind to presidents who flail. It remembers those who led.

And leadership, in the end, is not about keeping people guessing. It’s about giving them something to believe in.

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Photograph Source: Sean Spicer – Public Domain

On 27 March 2025, President Donald Trump did one of his favorite things: he issued an Executive Order (EO). He is drawn to issue these proclamations because doing so reinforces his sense of “self-importance, control and perceived superiority, which, in turn, are features of [his] narcissistic personality.”

Past Trump EOs have resulted in real time destruction such as depriving millions of people of their livelihood, damage to the environment, destruction of parts of the national health grid, etc. All of those proclamations ate away at the American quality of life, while allegedly preparing the nation for revival of past greatness. How such national masochism is supposed to make the USA “great again” is a mystery only Donald Trump seems capable of unraveling. Nonetheless, while these past EOs constituted an official blitzkrieg on the present, they lacked that special Orwellian commitment to bending future generations to the will of our present empowered narcissist.

However, now we have the 27 March EO. Why is it different?

Entitled, “Restoring Truth and sanity to American History” this EO seeks to assure control of future American perceptions by putting a stop to any reexamination of the nation’s aging batch of “justification myths”.* Hence, quoting this most recent EO: “Section 1. Purpose and Policy.  Over the past decade, Americans have witnessed a concerted and widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.” My italics.

It is fascinating to witness Donald Trump’s ability to project onto his opponents pretty much what he himself is doing or intends to do. For instance, he is asserting that revision (based on historical evidence) of an idealized, self-glorifying U.S. history is creating a “distorted  narrative.” When, in his opinion, someone else is allegedly “replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative” it is a monstrous fault, maybe even a crime. When Trump himself does this same thing, it is heroically redemptive.

What is going on here?

First of all, we should realize that it is quite possible to propagandize a population into believing that a foundation myth or justifications myths are historically factual. It is done by taking as nearly total control of a national narrative as is possible. The Chinese have done this, the Russians did it for nearly a hundred years, believing Christian, Muslims, Hindus have done this relative to their religions. Jews of the Zionist persuasion have done it when it comes to Israel. Finally, a large subset of Americans has bought into their nation’s idealized myths as fact. Yet, now we find that, in the case of the USA, there has been substantial slippage. Where did that come from?

It has been much more than a decade that a large number of historians of U.S. history have been examining America’s various justification myths. This effort has been largely motivated by taking seriously the experience of America’s non-white minorities and colonized people. As a result, such claims as the USA represents to the world an “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty, individual rights, and human happiness” has been called into question. We are thus presented with the choice: (1) To take seriously the work of hundreds of historians over decades exploring such subjects of American history as slavery; a persistent post-Civil War practice of deep-seeded racial bigotry resulting in segregation and persecution; the destruction of the American Indians; the imperial adventures of the 19th and 20th centuries, and so on. (2) Or, accept Trump’s claim, made in his March EO, of America’s “unparalleled legacy of advancing liberty …” as a statement of “objective fact.” Both positions cannot be simultaneously true.

It is option (1) representing an effort to introduce the stories of those long excluded from American history that Trump finds “sexist, oppressive, or otherwise irredeemably flawed.” Putting the cart before the horse, he charges that the result of “the widespread effort to rewrite history also deepens societal divides and fosters a sense of national shame. It seems to me that this is the equivalent of accusing the little fellow who proclaimed “the emperor has no clothes” of pornography.

There is no doubt about it, Donald Trump and those pushing this message have taken a stand that belief in a simplistic, ethically skewed idealization of national history is the only acceptable foundation of patriotism. No doubt millions of patriots in hundreds of other countries take the same stand. But Trump seems to want to go further suggesting that to challenge the myth is itself undermining truth. That might sound like a contradiction based on denial and confusion—but it is obviously a confusion President Trump has taken to heart.

Looking beyond the Tapestry

Why would Trump and his supporters, including some very well educated people: (1) insist that myth is really “objective truth.” (2) That a second look at the historical record will only distort the truth. Specifically, (3) why characterize that second look as “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive, or an otherwise irredeemably flawed”? This is what is being said in recent attacks on the Smithsonian Institution, The National Museum of African American History and Culture, and American Women’s History Museum. Again, quoting from the 27 March  EO:

“Once widely respected as a symbol of American excellence and a global icon of cultural achievement, the Smithsonian Institution has, in recent years, come under the influence of a divisive, race-centered ideology.  This shift has promoted narratives that portray American and Western values as inherently harmful and oppressive. For example, an exhibit representing that “societies including the United States have used race to establish and maintain systems of power, privilege, and disenfranchisement” …. The National Museum of African American History and Culture has proclaimed that “hard work,” “individualism,” and “the nuclear family” are aspects of “White culture.”  The forthcoming Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum plans on celebrating the exploits of male athletes participating in women’s sports.”

The Trump administration attack on the Smithsonian and other federal institutions is a good example of Confirmation Bias—the habit of selecting what evidence supports your point of view and ignoring or dismissing all the rest. In our case this use of confirmation bias facilitates turning the Smithsonian and other institutions into shrines—like so many Revolutionary and Civil War battlefields.

Such an effort implies real fear of a balanced view. More specifically, what these attacks suggest is that Trump and his backers are seriously afraid of the “inherently racist, sexist, oppressive” facts that happen to be truthful parts of American history. They refuse to countenance any program of revision based on evidence. Why? Perhaps because these facts represent aspects of history that are incompatible with the claim that we can “MAGA” our way to recovering alleged past glory. As such, historical revision is seen not just as an attack on the national image, but what Trump imagines to be the collective ego of the white America. Denial is the only alternative.

The Fact of Prevailing Ignorance 

It is hard to believe that any broadly educated American would believe Trump’s doublespeak—and, indeed, maybe most such people would not. But one must realize just how few folks are broadly educated, and how the majority of even college graduates are narrowly educated because their schooling has been compartmentalized into occupational specialties. That means that unless they have taken it upon themselves to supplement their education with broad reading, your typical engineer, accountant, businessperson, as well as carpenter, plumber, electrician, etc. will know no more about the historical background of current events than he or she reads in the newspaper. And, newspapers are not well known for presenting objective truth or, for that matter, even paying for fact-checkers.

You can carry this theme of compartmentalization further. A society like the U.S. has always been and remains racially segregated. That means the subset of the white population that voted for and continues to support Trump has no sociological context for understanding why charges of  “institutional racism” or the notions of “woke culture” would make sense to socially aware African Americans. Nor can they historically understand the essential role of immigrants in the history and economy of the U.S.  Existing in what essentially has long been a self-imposed ethnic ghetto, these white Americans have been easily manipulated. This, in turn, has allowed the present government to summarily shut down every federally funded Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) program in the country.

The Tale’s Present Consequences

First, the broad attack on DEI, followed up by the near erasure of public recognition of historical events such as the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, the deletion of photographic records of the contributions of American Indians during World War II, and others constitutes no less than a denial that non-white Americans have any role in the nation’s history except as well-treated supplicants.

Second, once you publicly assert such a mythologized version of your own history as the unassailable, you will be forced to continuously lie to support it. In other words, once you set foot down that path you will be forced to increasingly rely on official censorship and propaganda to maintain the unreal image. Simultaneously, you must claim that any attempt at revision using evidence based research is itself an attempt at distortion. This is a complicated maneuver, even for someone as devious as Trump, and can only be maintained through denial and sustained ignorance.

Third, there is no nation on the planet whose actual history is beyond sin and guilt. The only way you can create that image is by turning history into a fairy tale. Strangely, as far as one can tell, President Trump constantly seeks to present his own history/biography in just this fashion. Now he seeks to do the same with the United States—perhaps as part of a narcissistic process to make the country conform to the notion that,  history is just what President Trump says it is. And, if you contest that claim, you must be some sort of traitor. 

* Justification myths are like foundation myths which, usually growing up around a few actual events, set in place a self-glorifying narrative to explain the nation’s founding, and then, periodically, enhance the narrative with compatible myths justifying subsequent national actions.

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Photograph Source: Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies – Public Domain

While the mainstream media was copiously tracing the physical and mental decline of President Joe Biden during the presidential campaign of 2024, Donald Trump’s decline was largely ignored or downplayed.  The media seemed obliged to track Biden’s every move and stumble.  Conversely, the media seemed obliged to ignore the worst of Trump’s faltering executive decision-making, but—even worse—believed it was their duty to make Trump’s irrational utterances appear to be rational.

There are already obvious political differences between the first term Trump and the second term Trump, but the cognitive decline of the Donald cannot be explained solely by the fact that there were a few rational advisers in the White House the first time around, and simply no competent advisors or leaders on hand for the second term.  Economic advisers, such as Gary Cohn and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin, played a very important moderating role in the first term.  The three and four-star generals in the first term were a particular surprise, doing their best to calm the roiled waters of the White House and the roiled behavior of the president himself.

In the second term, such economic players as Secretary of Commerce Howard Luttnick and Peter Navarro, are making things worse and making decision making more capricious and random.  It’s safe to say that there isn’t one competent player in Trump’s inner circle, and falsely-labeled moderates such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio will find their reputations soiled by their experiences in toadying to the president.  The moderate generals of the first term (Generals Kelley, Milley, and McMasters) have been replaced by an incompetent and unqualified secretary of defense who has conducted a quiet purge of the senior ranks and the Judge Advocate Generals that the media has played down.

An ironic example of the huge differences between Trump I and Trump II is the different handling of deportation cases that dominated Trump’s first term and the early weeks of his second term.  Seven years ago, for example, an Iraqi immigrant who had been living in the United States for nearly 25 years, was mistakenly swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and deported to Iraq in violation of a court order.  The Trump administration soon realized that a serious error had been made, and that led to a month-long odyssey to track down and retrieve a man who never should have been deported in the first place.

The case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia has followed a far different pattern.  Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi falsely refer to Abrego Garcia as being a member of the violent MS-13 gang, although he has never been charged with being in a gang and a government lawyer even acknowledged his deportation was an error.  The lawyer was fired because of his honesty.

But the total unwillingness to work to bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States differs from efforts of the leaders of Trump’s first term, when ICE immediately and affirmatively went to the court to acknowledge that it had violated the Court’s orders.  There was coordination between the U.S. Embassy in Iraq and the Iraqi government.  The government itself conceded that the Iraqi immigrant had been removed to Iraq despite the court order.  Several months later, the Iraqi immigrant was tracked down and returned to the United States.

In the current confrontation, Trump and his closest aides (Miller, Bondi, Homan) are ignoring the decisions of the federal and district courts, even the Supreme Court, to ensure that Abrego Garcia remains in notorious prisons in El Salvador, where he faces indefinite lockup.  They are playing a game with the Supreme Court, focusing on the Court’s use of the word “facilitate” to say that they can’t do that because he’s out of U.S. control.

In any event, the intransigence of the Trump administration ignored the courts demands for “facilitating” the return of Abrego Garcia; providing “regular updates” on the steps that have been taken; and halting the deportation proceedings.  The administration is challenging the constitution’s demands for due process, and the checks and balances that accompany the separation of powers.

Trump has called Senator Chris Van Hollen a “fool” and a “grandstander” for meeting with Abrego Garcia last week in El Salvador.  El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who has received $6 million from the Trump administration to keep the deportees in the notorious Cecot prison, also ridiculed Van Hollen’s meeting with ugly postings on X to match the mendacious postings of Donald Trump.  Bukele has used a two-year state of emergency to reduce crime and violence in El Salvador at the expense of democracy and civil liberties that no longer exist.

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court has temporarily blocked the government’s removal of an additional 30 Venezuelan men held in Texas under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The vote was 7-2, with Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito predictably dissenting.  The decision on Saturday follows an astounding array of Trump’s unconstitutional actions, including the elimination of federal agencies created by statute; the refusal to spend federal funds allocated by federal law; the firing of those working in the executive branch; and the elimination of birthright citizenship.

No two events demonstrate the meanness and mendacity of the Trump presidency more than the 2025 meetings in the Oval Office between Trump and Ukrainian President Zelensky and between Trump and Bukele.  Trump’s deceitful condemnation of Zelensky in February for starting the war with Russia (“You should have never started it.”), and the grotesque spectacle between Trump and Bukele exuding smug impunity over the illegal deportation of Abrego Garcia to the notorious Cecot mega-prison.  U.S. citizens had never before witnessed such abject cruelty and heartlessness from their commander-in-chief.

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Street art in Venezuela, depicting Uncle Sam and accusing the U.S. government of imperialism. Photograph Source: Erik Cleves Kristensen – CC BY 2.0

Nobody is complaining anymore about Latin America and the Caribbean being neglected by the hegemon to the north. The Trump administration is contending with it on multiple fronts: prioritizing “massive deportations,” halting the “flood of drugs,” combatting “threats to US security,” and stopping other countries from “ripping us off” in trade. The over 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine is alive and on steroids. 

But has Washington taken a sharp right turn, qualitatively departing from past practices, or simply intensified an already manifest imperial trajectory? And, from a south-of-the-border perspective, to what extent are the perceived problems “made in the USA”?

Externalization of problems

The view from Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is that the Yankees have a problem; they project their issues onto their southern neighbors. An extreme example is Barack Obama’s baseless declaration in 2015 of a “national emergency” – subsequently reaffirmed by each successive president – because of the “unusual and extraordinary threat” posed by Venezuela.

From Washington’s imperial perspective, problems are seen as coming from the south with the US as the victim when, as in the case of Venezuela’s national security, reality is inverted. 

Another case in point: migration is seen as a supply-side conundrum; “they” are “invading us.” In practice, deliberate past US policy (Trump has largely ended these practices) encouraged migration from Venezuela, Nicaragua, and especially Cuba to weaken their governments. 

More to the point, as has been admitted by some of the perpetrators, the main driver for migrants to leave their homes and face great risks in transit are not pull factors, such as a purported love of “our democracy,” but push factors. These range from capitalist exploitation of Central America’s Northern Triangle to the impoverishment caused by US unilateral coercive measures in Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua. 

As for drugs, trenchantly pointed out by Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to her US counterpart, the US itself harbors cartels, is the largest narcotic consumer market, exports the majority of armaments used by drug barons and hosts money laundering banks. 

Rather than “ripping off” Uncle Sam in trade, the LAC region runs lopsided deficits in service industries, a trade benefit conveniently ignored when Trump’s tariffs were calculated. US firms also benefit from LAC as a low-cost source of inputs and assembly for their supply chains. The imperialist narrative conveniently omits crediting its access to strategic resources at favorable terms and the dominance of US firms and dollar-based finance. Various trade agreements, which Trump treats as giveaways, in practice favor US corporations. Unequal exchange is established as a key factor in underdevelopment of the LAC region, despite Trump’s assertion of the opposite.

Finally, gang violence is another US export: literally so in the case of the notorious Mara Salvatrucha and Barrio 18 gangs which originated in Los Angeles and whose members were deported by US authorities to El Salvador.  

Migration becomes “invasion”

Biden’s ambivalence on migration, tightening aspects of border controls but encouraging more than half a million Latinos to enter the US via “humanitarian parole,” gave Trump an opening. He sold his working class base the notion that migrants were not just taking US jobs but were “criminals.” His populist argument appears to side with US workers, but doesn’t impact the corporate elites who support him.

In fact, deportations have not increased, but are now much higher profile and overtly political. So Venezuelans are arbitrarily characterized as gang members and sent to prison in El Salvador. Deportations to other countries have involved waving the big stick: supposed “allies,” Costa Rica and Panama, have even been obliged to accept asylum seekers from elsewhere, rejected and abandoned by Washington.

The “war on drugs” risks becoming a literal war

Trump’s anti-drug policy has maintained a decades-long focus on supply-side enforcement with a renewed emphasis on deploying military assets to attack cartels and interdict drug shipments. 

What has distinguished his approach is not so much the policy itself, but the blunt and often unilateral manner in which it is being implemented. Support is overtly conditioned on political alignment with Washington’s objectives. 

So troops are deployed on the southern border and Mexico’s cartels are threatened with drone attacks, with no promise to consult Mexican authorities. Alleged members of Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang are treated as terrorists, and wartime legislation is deployed against them as supposed agents of a narco-terrorist state.

Hemispheric security

The focus of current US policy in the region is countering Chinese influence, particularly Beijing’s investments in infrastructure, telecommunications, and energy. “The expanding role of the Chinese Communist Party in the Western Hemisphere,” Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio complains, “threatens US interests.” 

Yet while the US approaches geopolitics as a “zero-sum game” in which its military dominance is a priority, China professes to follow the principles of “equality and mutual benefit,” offering carrots rather than waving a stick.

China’s economic penetration has been spectacular, making it the region’s second largest trading partner and the first in South America itself. However, Trump has succeeded in forcing Panama to leave China’s Belt and Road Initiative, while Brazil and Mexico, the region’s two largest economies have yet to join, presumably due to US pressure. In Peru, users of a major port developed by China may be threatened by special tariffs. 

The US International Development Finance Corporation’s budget is slated to double. According to Foreign Policy, it should be strengthened still further to combat China’s influence. However, China has an enormous head start, and the US will struggle to catch up, especially as its other development agency, USAID, has had its budget decimated.

Militarily, Trump has increased the visibility and scope of US security operations in the region. Joint exercises, port calls, and programs like the Caribbean Basin Security Initiative continue to be ramped up. While Latin American leaders at April’s CELAC summit called for the region to be a “zone of peace,” Trump threatens war: 

+ Panama has been strong-armed into accepting a greater US military presence, in what has been dubbed a camouflaged invasion. 

+ Ecuador’s President Noboa is accepting US military help as well as the private mercenaries of Blackwater’s Erik Prince, in his own “war” against gang violence. 

+ Marco Rubio has warned Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro that “we have a big navy, and it can get almost anywhere,” threatening to deploy forces in neighboring Guyana.

NATO’s presence in the region has been growing with Colombia already a “partner” and Argentina working to become one. The latter’s collaboration is vital to the West’s military role in the South Atlantic. Its president Milei has become tellingly ambivalent about his country’s claim to the British-occupied Malvinas islands, which are key to strategic dominance. 

War by other means – tariffs and sanctions

Washington’s enormous machinery of unilateral coercive measures (aka “sanctions”), now total 15,373 (of which over 5,000 were imposed in Trump’s first term). The US blockade of Cuba has been tightened, and it is even attempting to throttle Cuba’s extraordinarily effective and popular medical missions abroad. Rubio issued an ominous warning: “The moment of truth is arriving, Cuba is literally collapsing.”

Sanctions against Venezuela have also been strengthened, despite Trump initially hinting at a more collaborative approach. Nicaragua has so far evaded new sanctions, but is threatened both with exclusion from the regional trade agreement (CAFTA) which benefits its exports, and with the loss of its remaining multilateral source of development finance.

The region escaped relatively lightly from Trump’s “Liberation Day” declarations, with a new, minimum 10 percent tariff. Mexico still faces heavy tariff barriers and higher “reciprocal” tariffs on some other LAC countries – Guyana, Venezuela and Nicaragua – have been postponed until July.

Prospects for LAC unity or sowing seeds in the sea

Fragmentation of regional unity has been a long-standing US policy objective. Trump, in particular, openly disdains multilateralism, which is really another term for opposition to US imperialism. 

Left-leaning electoral victories in Mexico (2018), Chile and Honduras (2021), and Colombia and Brazil (2022) have bolstered regional unity. This so-called Pink Tide added to the successes and leadership of Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela and their respective socialist revolutions. 

But upcoming elections in Chile and Honduras (November), and Colombia and Brazil (both 2026) could significantly reverse those gains. Continuation of leftist rule in Bolivia after this coming August’s election looks dim, given bitter splits in its ranks. In a reportedly fraudulent election in Ecuador, the leftist challenge to the incumbent Noboa appears to have failed. However, current rightist hegemony in Peru’s 2026 election could be challenged. 

Foreign Affairs predicts: “Widespread frustration over organized crime throughout the hemisphere, as well as social changes such as the spread of evangelical Christianity, mean that right-wing leaders may be favored to win upcoming elections.” 

The future for progressive unity is therefore uncertain and has constrained LAC’s response to the Trumpocalypse. The Organization of American States will not question US imperialism. The alternative regional mechanism, CELAC, was set up without Washington’s participation, in part to rectify the OAS’s deficiencies. A broad, anti-imperialist statement drafted by Honduran President Xiomara Castro for its recent summit was heavily watered down by Argentina and Paraguay, who then rejected even the weakened version (Nicaragua also rejected it, for the opposite reasons). CELAC ended up decrying sanctions and calling for LAC to be a zone of peace, but failed to explicitly support Cuba or Venezuela against US aggression.

The multilateral body with a potentially strong but as yet unclear regional influence is the BRICS, of which Brazil is a founding member and now has associates Cuba and Bolivia. Other LAC countries are keen to join. But (in another show of regional disunity, this time on the left) Venezuela’s and Nicaragua’s recent applications were blocked by Brazil. 

From Biden to Trump – a bridge or a break?

Independent of the theatre surrounding Trump’s performance style – inflammatory language, threats, and public ultimatums – his underlying policies are mostly aligned with the bipartisan consensus that has long guided US policy for the region. These include support for market-oriented reforms, militarized security assistance, antagonism to leftist governments, and containment of Chinese influence.

When the actual consequences are examined, what might be called the “Biden bridge” underlies, at least in part, Trump’s distinctively confrontational practices. For instance, in March 2020, Trump placed a $15M bounty on the head of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Biden reciprocated, upping the ante to $25M in January 2025. Or, compare the number of deportees in Trump’s term to-date in 2025 to a comparable period in 2024, when Biden booted out even more migrants. 

Under Trump’s first administration, Biden’s interim tenure, and now Trump’s return, deportation machinery remained largely intact, enforcement funding stayed robust, and private detention centers prospered. In effect, Biden normalized the enforcement-heavy model, just without Trump’s nativist overtones. 

In short, Washington’s regional policy has become increasingly shaped by institutional inertia and bipartisan enforcement consensus, rather than sharply divergent ideological commitments. 

That is not to say the policy has been static. In fact, the trajectory has been precipitously to the right. Warning that the “anti-leftist component of Trumpism can’t be overstated.” Latin America analyst Steve Ellner predicts, “when threats and populism lose their momentum, the anti-communist hawks may get their way.”

So, there is a “Biden-bridge” in the sense of the continuation of a trajectory of increasingly aggressive imperialism from one president to the next. But there is also a “bridge too far” aspect, of which dumping migrants in El Salvador’s pay-by-the-head prison is (so far) the most extreme example. 

If there is an upside to Trump’s return to the Oval Office, it is that he unapologetically exposes the core imperialist drive for naked domination, making explicit the coercive foundations of US hegemony in the region. While Trump pays scant regard to international commitments, disregarding trade treaties, his predecessors – Biden, Obama, Clinton, and Bush – all promoted the “rules-based order” to reflect US priorities, conveniently replacing international law. 

Trump’s policies have been a stark amplification of enduring US priorities. They have revealed the structural limits of regional autonomy under Yankee hegemony, especially as Trump’s new territorial ambitions stretch from Greenland to Panama. The strongarm underpinnings of policies, previously cloaked in the hypocritical language of partnership, now take the form of mafia-style threats. 

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Image by Ronit Shaked.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent visit to Washington was no ordinary trip. The consensus among Israeli analysts, barring a few remaining loyalists, is that Netanyahu was not invited but, rather, summoned by US President Donald Trump.

All evidence supports this assertion. Netanyahu rarely travels to the US without extensive Israeli media fanfare, leveraging his touted relationships with various US administrations as a “hasbara” opportunity to reinforce his image as Israel’s strongman.

This time, there was no room for such campaigns. Netanyahu was informed of Trump’s summons while on an official trip to Hungary. There, he was received by Hungarian President Viktor Orbán with exaggerated diplomatic accolades, signaling defiance against international condemnation of Netanyahu, an accused war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), and portraying him as anything but an isolated leader of an increasingly pariah state.

The capstone of Netanyahu’s short-lived Hungarian victory lap was Orbán’s announcement of Hungary’s withdrawal from the ICC, a move with profoundly unsettling implications.

It would have been convenient for Netanyahu to use his Washington visit to deflect from his failed war in Gaza and internal strife in Israel. However, as the Arabic saying goes, “the wind often blows contrary to the ship’s desires.”

The notion that Netanyahu was summoned, not invited, is corroborated by Israeli media reports that he attempted to postpone the visit under various pretexts. He failed, ultimately flying to Washington on the date determined by the White House. Initially, reports circulated that no press conference would be held, denying Netanyahu the platform to tout Washington’s unwavering support for his military actions and to expound on the “special relationship” between the two countries.

A press conference was held, though it was largely dominated by Trump’s contradictory messages and typical rhetoric. Netanyahu spoke briefly, attempting to project the same confident body language observed during his previous Washington visit, where he sat with an erect posture and spread out his legs, as if in command. But this time, his body language betrayed him; his eyes shifted nervously, and he appeared stiff and surprised, particularly when Trump announced that the US and Iran would begin direct talks in Oman soon.

Trump also mentioned the need to end the war in Gaza, but the Iran announcement clearly shocked Netanyahu. He desperately tried to align his discourse with Trump’s, referencing Libya’s disarmament under Muammar Gaddafi. But that was never part of Israel’s official regional plan. Israel had consistently advocated for US military intervention against Iran, despite the certainty that such a war would destabilize the entire region, potentially drawing the US into a conflict far more protracted and devastating than the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Further evidence of the US’ diverging views from Israel’s regional ambitions—centered on perpetual war, territorial expansion, and geopolitical dominance—lies in the fact that key political and intellectual figures within the Trump administration recognize the futility of such conflicts. In leaked exchanges on the encrypted messaging platform Signal, JD Vance protested that escalating the war in Yemen benefits Europe, not the US, a continent with which the US is increasingly decoupling, if not engaging in a trade war.

The Yemen war, like a potential conflict with Iran, is widely perceived as being waged on Israel’s behalf. Figures like Tucker Carlson, a prominent commentator, articulated the growing frustration among right-wing intellectuals in the US, tweeting that “anyone advocating for conflict with Iran is not an ally of the United States, but an enemy.”

Trump’s willingness to openly challenge Netanyahu’s policies remains unclear. His conflicting statements, such as calling for an end to the Gaza war while simultaneously advocating for the expulsion of Palestinians, add to the ambiguity. However, recent reports suggest a determined US intention to end the war in Gaza as part of a broader strategy, linking Gaza to Yemen, Lebanon, and Iran. This aligns with Washington’s need to stabilize the region as it prepares for a new phase of competition with China, requiring comprehensive economic, political, and military readiness.

Should Trump prove capable of doing what others could not, will Netanyahu finally submit to American pressure?

In 2015, Netanyahu demonstrated Israel’s unparalleled influence on US foreign and domestic policy when he addressed both chambers of Congress. Despite a few insignificant protests, Republican and Democratic policymakers applauded enthusiastically as Netanyahu criticized then-President Barack Obama, who did not attend and appeared isolated by his own political class.

However, if Netanyahu believes he can replicate that moment, he is mistaken. Those years are long gone. Trump, a populist leader, is not beholden to finding political balances in Congress. Now in his second and final term, he could, in theory, abandon the US’s ingrained reliance on Israel’s approval and its aggressive lobby in Washington.

Moreover, Netanyahu’s political standing is diminished. He is perceived as a failed political leader and military strategist, unable to secure decisive victories or extract political concessions from his adversaries. He is a leader without a clear plan, grappling with a legitimacy crisis unlike any faced by his predecessors.

Ultimately, the outcome hinges on Trump’s willingness to confront Netanyahu. If he does, and sustains the pressure, Netanyahu could find himself in an unenviable position, marking a rare instance in modern history where the US dictates its terms, and Israel listens. Time will tell.

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Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

“Man is what he eats,” (“Der Mensch ist was er isst“) is a well-known pun in German on ist (to be) and isst (to eat) from the 19^th century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach. More than a pun in German, it is an excellent short summary of Feuerbach’s material criticism of Christianity. Today’s front-page radar on President Trump’s on-and-off global tariff impositions is decidedly materialistic. Over 70 leaders from around the world are vying to come to Washington to see how they can get their country’s tariffs lowered. Materialism reigns; the world is playing Trump’s transactional game.

But what about Trump’s disrespect for human rights, the rule of law and separation of powers as well as his gutting foreign assistance? Beyond the kerfuffle about tariffs and trade balances, will any of the state leaders negotiating with Washington speak truth to power and admonish Trump’s autocratic rejection of liberal values? (Negotiating with China’s Xi Jinping is a similar experience. How many leaders mention human rights when negotiating business deals in Beijing?)

As an example: What could Switzerland do when negotiating with Trump? The Swiss are always defending the importance of the rule of law and consider Geneva the world’s center of human rights. But they have said very little when their Sister Republic welcomed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House, Netanyahu who is under an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court.

Furthermore, what about the Swiss defending multilateralism in general and International Geneva in particular with the U.S.? The World Trade Organization (WTO) is based in Geneva. Will the Swiss remind Trump of the U.S.’s legal WTO commitments? In the face of Trump’s proposed tariff violations of WTO rules, the Swiss, Singapore and 34 other countries issued a declaration that reaffirmed “our collective commitment to the principles of the WTO and to maintaining open trade is more crucial than ever” and deplored “the rise of protectionism” without specifically mentioning the United States. When negotiating tariffs, will the Swiss argue for a U.S. commitment to WTO tariff rules and push the U.S. to deblock the deadlock over appointments to the WTO’s Appellate Body?

Second, the rules of humanitarian law are being egregiously violated, and not just by Israel. The Swiss Federal Council established a task force to develop a strategy to counter the announced 31% Trump tariff imposition. Why not establish a task force to defend IHL in the face of flagrant violations since Switzerland is the depositary state of the Geneva Conventions, the foundation of International Humanitarian Law (IHL)? Common Article 1 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions says that States Parties to the Conventions undertake to “respect and ensure respect” for the Conventions. Shouldn’t the Swiss and other countries lobbying for lower tariffs also lobby for ensuring respect for IHL?

More generally, Trump and Company have no respect for the international rule of law which is a bedrock of Swiss foreign policy. “The work of international bodies such as the Human Rights Council, the International Criminal Court and the various U.N. investigation and fact-finding mechanisms is of great importance,” Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis stressed at the U.N. Security Council in November 2023. “It is crucial that all states, as well as the Security Council, cooperate fully with these bodies” he stated. “Switzerland will work towards further strengthening rule of law during its tenure in the Security Council,” he added.

Will any of this be brought up when the Swiss discuss tariffs with American representatives? Swiss companies, like the pharmaceutical giant Novartis, have promised to invest more in the U.S. – $23 billion over five years – in order to lower the tariff proposed. Are the only discussions between Switzerland and the U.S. about money and how much more Switzerland will invest in the United States?

During the writing of the Declaration of Independence, legend has it that Thomas Jefferson changed the unalienable rights in the Preamble from “Life, Liberty and Property” to “Life, liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” because of his familiarity with the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Burlamaqui. If man is more than what he eats and the pursuit of happiness is an unalienable right, there must be more to negotiate with the United States than just property and tariffs.

To return to Feuerbach: There was also more than basic materialism in Feuerbach’s message. In arguing for man’s responsibility for himself instead of some otherworldly being, Feuerbach set the stage for radical political action. As he wrote, “It is a question today…not whether we are Christians or heathens, theists or atheists, but whether we are or can become men, healthy in soul and body, free, active and full of vitality.” (Feuerbach’s attacks on religion laid the framework for revolutionary political actions and strongly influenced Karl Marx. See Marx’s 1845 “Theses on Feuerbach”)

Recently, at a rally in Los Angeles on the Fight Oligarchy tour, Senator Bernie Sanders also stated that there were issues with Trump beyond economic materialism; “When we talk about oligarchy, it is not just economics,” he told 36,000 enthusiastic listeners. He went on to describe the corrupt Trump administration and how the system now bends towards greed and violations of the rule of law; “We are fighting a president who undermines our Constitution every day and threatens our freedom of speech and assembly,” Sanders shouted to the cheering crowd.

The kerfuffle over tariffs is necessary; an international trade war will have dire global consequences. But it is not sufficient. Caving in to Trump’s outlandish economic demands will not change the downward spiral of his assault on liberal values. The leaders speaking to Trump to lower his tariffs – especially the Swiss with their traditional role in human rights, humanitarian law and multilateralism – cannot, should not forget values other than economic materialism. Instead of caving in to Trump’s transactional paradigm, they must speak truth to power about non-material values and norms.

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Photo by Nick Fewings

Over the last five or so decades, American elections have become increasingly defined by what they don’t accomplish. The classical liberal model of free and fair elections to select representatives who act in the public interest has been replaced with a rogue foreign policy establishment attached to public – private mechanisms (propaganda, censorship, and surveillance) meant to maintain social control. Rampant slaughter abroad and political repression at home now represent America’s relationship with the world.

In recent history, few Americans recognized the Biden administration’s end run around left politics for what it was. Recall, the left critique of woke ideology isn’t that it is directionally wrong. The critique is that it is misguided politics. Many of us who put the argument forward lived through the creation and long, sad, decline of Affirmative Action. The problem is that the frame of LeBron James being oppressed because he is black, while my neighbor who digs cans out of the garbage to live is privileged because he is white, is flawed.

For those who lived through it, the attack on Affirmative Action came by placing largely contrived, but otherwise representative, accounts of poor and working-class whites being denied opportunities in favor of ‘minorities.’ In fact, large corporations become large by crushing smaller competitors. And with nonexistent economic mobility in the US, the children of the rich inherit social control over the children of working people and the poor. Capitalism is a system of economic domination, not of equitable distribution. Just ask Donald Trump.

The two points made as the national Democrats acted to change the subject from economic maldistribution to identity-based bias were 1) the US has been down this road before, and the strategy that didn’t work was state-sponsored bias remediation and 2) the corporations ‘voluntarily’ launching DEI programs would abandon them the minute that the political tide turned. We can argue theory until we are blue in the face, but it was the left critique that produced the correct prediction about how DEI would be ended.

The broader question of liberal impact has it that income and wealth distribution are as concentrated as they have ever been, racial segregation is today accomplished through economic (class) segregation, and the US is ruled by a small group of oligarchs who use the state to make themselves ever richer. The Democrats have governed through enough of this to have these be their policies as well. Bill Clinton was one of the few Americans who really subscribed to Ronald Reagan’s neoliberal economic vision.

The domestic political result is that the two branches of the uniparty are now dedicated to reversing each other’s policies rather than conducting the people’s business. The way that this currently appears is that the Trump administration is reversing the state mechanisms that facilitated the Democrats’ hold on power 1933 – 1973, aka the New Deal. Through a weak read of history, Donald Trump’s supporters imagine that the gilded age that both branches of the uniparty have spent decades trying to recreate presented opportunities that it didn’t.

In his 1980 contest against Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan presented what is today called neoliberalism as a radical rebuke of state power. His (Reagan’s) project was to shift power from the state that had sponsored the Vietnam War to capital that had supplied ‘us’ with Hula-Hoops and black-and-white televisions. However, in a now disappeared quote. LBJ offered that ‘he can’t end the (Vietnam) war because his friends were making too much money from it.’ This later represented Joe Biden’s explanation of why war in Ukraine and genocide in Gaza are good for the US.

Graph: the bipartisan trend in privatizing Medicare finds recent Democrat and Republican administrations privatizing approximately the same proportions, with 8% going to the recent Democrat and 7% going to the past and current Republican. What swings the balance however (thus far) is that it is the ‘best practices’ provision in the ACA that will lead to the total privatization. The provision gives political hacks working for economic hacks the power to declare privatization a ‘best practice,’ making it official Medicare policy. Source: kff.org.

For those who missed it, Donald Trump hasn’t offered that his policies would benefit ‘us all.’ He has argued that his policies will benefit ‘the worthy.’ This is (Bill) Clintonism 101. Both Clinton and Trump argued that ‘opportunity’ is the best that the state can offer. Bill Clinton asserted that ‘a level playing field’ united the autoworkers who his passage of NAFTA rendered unemployed with Donald Trump, who in the mid-1970s inherited a real estate empire worth about $300 million dollars (inflation adjusted). Both men oversaw the return of income and wealth concentration to gilded age levels.

“True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds.” Michael Parenti.

The problem, for those who choose to see it, is that the entire ‘left’ program that was handed to the Democrats in both 2016 and 2020, from Bernie Sanders’ ascendance to the Black Lives Matter protests, is now a flaming bag of dog excrement waiting to be stomped out. The phrase ‘the Democratic party is the graveyard of social movements’ comes to mind. Sure, Donald Trump’s political program certainly gives the US the appearance of a former empire in free-fall. But then so did the DNC propping up Genocide Joe in a low-budget remake of Weekend at Bernie’s.

With Donald Trump throwing policy bombs and lighting fires domestically, the global class war that has been raging for the last fifty years has been brought home. Mr. Trump’s proponents see him, and themselves, on the winning side of history. This is exactly how American Democrats perceived themselves in the aftermath of the 2020 election of Joe Biden. But outside of life and death, history doesn’t have winners and losers. As Bob Dylan put it “… the loser now, will be later to win.’ History isn’t over until it is over.

This is to point to the folly of ideologically driven reforms rather than coming to some level of public agreement, sometimes known as democratic consent, over national governance. The Democrats enacted DEI and the next Republican president reversed it. Donald Trump tears down the permanent government and the Democrats spend the next four years launching foreign wars. That Democrats don’t know that their party is overwhelmingly responsible for privatizing Medicare begs the question of agency?

It is a sense of repeating cycles that replaces one national ideological predisposition with its opposite. But if history has a voice, it ties to underlying causes. The pattern hasn’t been a symmetrical back-and-forth where national balance is recovered. For five decades now, American politics have represented a relentless march to the hard right. No balance has been recovered via the electoral back-and-forth between the parties.

This point is important to understand. Both Democrats and Republicans claim ideologies. That the national politics has moved hard-right for five decades implies either that Republicans have controlled the politics for all five of these decades— which they haven’t, or that both Democrats and Republicans are right-wing parties. Given that the parties have taken turns governing, Republicans haven’t led the move hard-right. The answer that remains is that the Democrats are a hard-right party. As irony has it, neither party would last five minutes without the other.

This may be painful to read inside the sense of emergency being caused by Mr. Trump’s current idiot-King schtick as it is being applied to actual human lives. But Mr. Trump neither caused the dysfunction that brought him to power (twice), nor does he stand any more chance than the Democrats of fixing it. The result is that both parties have migrated from pretending to solve national problems to erasing the efforts of the other party. Mr. Trump is currently winning that effort to the great detriment of the American people.

There was a blood sport of sorts begun in the 1990s of guessing how long it would take various European Social Democratic parties to govern from the neoliberal right after winning election. They would run on the European equivalent of the political marketing campaigns of American Democrats, and then govern from the neoliberal-right upon election. What became apparent was that there were supra-national forces, call them political economy, that converted the wills of disparate electorates into a unified neoliberal front that transcended national borders.

Graph: it’s easy enough for those unfamiliar with the data to associate the large decline in life expectancy with the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. The problem with doing so is that the graph looks largely the same in relative terms, when compared with peer nations. What this suggests is that the Covid-19 pandemic brought-to-light the existing deficiencies of the US healthcare system that were supposed to have been fixed by passage of the ACA. After shoveling billions more dollars in public largesse into health insurer executive bonus pools, the ACA has produced the worst healthcare system in the developed world. Why? Source: worldbank.org.

This paradox, where voters vote but donors control the policies that emerge, represents political disempowerment for all but the rich. With more nuance than yours truly imagined likely, Donald Trump’s targeting of Federal employees has targeted the PMC (professional-managerial class), meaning Democrats, quite effectively. This was Mr. Trump’s variation on Bill Clinton’s use of NAFTA to realign the Democrats with the interests of capital. The class that will remain in the burned-out shell of the US will be the oligarchs.

Key to this effort has been to conflate what politicians say about their policies with what the policies actually accomplish. Remarkably, even as a key provision in the ACA (Affordable Care Act) represents the clearest path for the Trump administration to privatize all of Medicare, Democrats are quadrupling down on their commitment to the program. The ACA provision, called ‘best practices,’ allows one politician in a position of authority to define privatized Medicare (Medicare Advantage) a ‘best practice,’ making it Federal policy to end non-private Medicare.

Graph: after relentlessly criticizing the deportation of immigrants by the Trump administration, Democrats slept through the Biden administration’s massive increase in deportations. The irony is that the Trump campaign spent its prior four years downplaying what the Democrats were doing. It was selling the fantasy of a ‘massive increase in illegal immigration.’ This is why I keep asking my Republican friends why they don’t vote for Democrats? Joe Biden did exactly what they just elected Donald Trump to do. Source: nytimes.com.

As readers certainly know by now, 54% of Medicare (graph below) has already been privatized, mainly by Democrats. The incongruity of Democrats nodding in the affirmative to claims by Democratic politicians that they will ‘save’ Medicare (and Social Security) is perfectly contradicted by the facts. Not only have Democrats privatized more of Medicare than have Republicans, but the ‘best practices’ provision of Obamacare seems designed to privatize all of Medicare. That Democrats don’t know this makes them dangerously misinformed.

In a similar vein, righteous anger over the Trump administration’s violent and likely illegal deportation of Venezuelan citizens who were legally in the US to a gulag in El Salvador is based on ignorance of the actual history of deportations by Presidents. As the graph above illustrates, following the public anguish over Donald Trump’s deportation of immigrants during his first term, the Biden administration doubled the number of deportations. Democrats who oppose the mass deportation of immigrants need to learn at least a few facts about the party that they claim to support.

To possible distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ deportations, the left has fought capital over open borders for several centuries. Industrialists long fought for open borders so as to flood the US with desperate workers in order to lower wages. The politics that took labor out of consideration is telling. Those who don’t care about labor tend to be aligned with capital. This would be the PMC left, American liberals, and the oligarchs. Having worked white-collar and blue-collar jobs, no working person would voluntarily open the door for their replacement.

While I didn’t participate in the national ‘Hands Offs’ protests, I spoke with friends who attended local events. The local politicians who attended are neoliberal, neoconservative, Zionist, apparatchiks. In a city plagued by FBI efforts to entrap its citizens in fake ‘terrorist’ plots, and that is a dumping ground for state projects that can’t be built elsewhere due to public opposition from powerful forces, the local politicians are aligned with national Democrats against the citizens.

The richest 1% of Americans (the oligarchs) owns over half of the stock market. And the richest 10% owns ninety percent of the stock market. Finance is what empowered the oligarchs. Ending its value could restore something resembling a democratic social order. Note that Democrats have spent the last five decades doing everything in their power to raise the value of the stock market. Bill Clinton was / is a stock market god, having overseen the largest market bubble until the next two market bubbles.

The point is that the stock market is a major source of the oligarch’s power. Letting the stock market fall to valuation levels of earlier stock market history would cut the economic power of the oligarchs down to size. Broadly economically adverse outcomes would accompany the move. But without dampening the economic power of the oligarchs, restoring economic and / or political democracy is impossible. Concentrated wealth will continue to purchase political power until it is made to stop doing so.

The current political lining-up, with Democrats protesting Mr. Trump and his policies under the idea that the next Genocide Joe will be incrementally better than the Republican alternative, misses that the US is an empire in free-fall. The post-War period when the US had the only intact industrial base is long past. The Democrats were urged to put together an industrial policy, and chose not to. This left the Trump – right to inflict its version of an industrial policy. The best guess here is that it will not end well.

Changing economic relations from the bipartisan neoliberal model to something else can proceed from the right or the left. Both the Democrats and the Republicans chose to hand the task to the Trump-right. Please re-read the quote from Michael Parenti above. In extraordinary circumstances, count on the Democrats to side with the right. What the US needs is economic redistribution to accomplish political redistribution. But the American Social Democrats (Democrats) like the current arrangement just fine.

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Photo by Eric Brehm

“The whole world has decided that the U.S. government has no idea what it’s doing.”

– Mark Blyth, “Inflation: A Guide for Users and Losers,” (New York Times, April 14, 2025.)

Professor Mark Blyth’s remarks were aimed at the Trump administration’s creation of turmoil in the world’s financial markets due to its completely inept handling of the bond markets and the start of a trade war with China.  But Blyth’s charge could have been leveled at every aspect of Trump’s governance over the past three months, beginning with the appointment of the most inexperienced and least capable cabinet secretaries and agency heads in the history of the United States.  Donald Trump’s inauguration address for his first term in 2017 talked of “American Carnage.”  Well, eight years later, here we are—American Carnage.

In less than 90 days, the United States under Trump has become a very different country.  It is not an exaggeration to say that the United States is facing a meltdown that will be difficult to reverse.  The executive branch has taken on powers that are usually associated with wartime requirements.  The legislative branch has been largely neutralized because of the near total abdication of the Republican Party.  And the judicial system is facing an unprecedented challenge from a president and vice president who have no respect for our courts and our judges.  Trump has fired at least 15 inspectors general who were tasked by the Congress to root out abuses in federal agencies.  This is an open invitation for corruption and abuse.

The United States is facing existential, constitutional, and identity crises that mark the country’s decline; the impact can already be seen in terms of our domestic and international instability.

THE CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS:  Donald Trump’s failure to obey the Supreme Court’s unsigned order last week to take steps to garner the return of a Salvadoran migrant—Kilmar Abrego Garcia—marked the beginning of a constitutional crisis that was anticipated by many who feared Trump’s return to the White House.  Abrego Garcia was wrongfully deported to the most notorious prison in El Salvador, and there is still no evidence of wrongdoing on his part.  He has never been arrested or accused of a crime.  El Salvador President Nayib Bukele told Trump on April 14 that he would not return Abrego Garcia, and Attorney General Pam Bondi, sitting next to Trump, said that it was up to El Salvador to decide.  In a perfect example of the abject cruelty and heartlessness of the Trump administration, Bondi added that “if they want to return him, we would facilitate it, meaning provide a plane.”

Last week, Trump said he had no respect for the decisions of federal courts, but would obey the decisions of the Supreme Court.  Two days later, the Trump administration threw down the gauntlet, stating that it was not required to engage El Salvador’s government in order to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.  Abrego Garcia’s deportation amounted to a case of “official kidnapping,” as he was removed from the United States without due process.  Trump’s tone of defiance was backed by his Department of Justice that is moving to expand the powers of the executive branch in ways that are illegal and even unconstitutional.

THE EXISTENTIAL CRISIS:  The constitutional crisis places the United States in an existential crisis that finds leading members of the administration, particularly the Attorney General and the Deputy Chief of Staff to the president questioning fundamental concepts of the rule of law and freedom itself.  There has not been a challenge of this magnitude at any time in U.S. history with the exception of the Civil War period in the 1860s.  For the past 150 years, U.S. politicians and historians have prided the United States on its exceptionalism, which set the United States apart and justified the export of U.S. traditions and values.  “Exceptionalism” no longer works as a trope in political speeches and historical narratives.

Over the past 80 years, the United States took particular pride in playing an indispensable role in ridding the world of Fascist and Communist threats, but the Trump administration has created strategic confusion concerning U.S. goals and objectives.  The state of the Atlantic alliance is now in question; the trade and tariff war with China is worsening; and the pressure on Ukraine has raised doubts about U.S. support among allies in Europe and Asia.

THE IDENTITY CRISIS:  The identity crisis is marked by the profound meanness of Trump himself, who is personally responsible for the cruelty that marks his administration’s illegal and unconstitutional handling of refugees.  The poem on the Statue of Liberty expresses the statue’s role as a symbol of welcome and hope.  Now refugees in the United States, who have encountered violence in their own countries, find greater violence in the United States.  Trump has committed himself to deporting one million immigrants in his first year, and only a lack of funding and staffing will probably prevent that goal.  Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller is directing the deportation effort, pressing 30 countries to take migrants who are not their citizens.  The case of Abrego Garcia is typical of the overwhelming meanness of the Trump team.

The revocation of the visas of foreign students by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, which appears to be his only activity these days, is another marker of the new U.S. identity.  In less than 60 days, more than 1,000 international students have had their visas revoked as part of a phony effort to fight anti-semitism on college campuses.  Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil was the first case in this crackdown, and it has caused many international students to self-deport, which is exactly what Trump, Rubio, and Miller favor.  As a result, foreign students will not consider U.S. universities for their higher education, especially since Canada and Australia offer far more safety and support.

American citizens themselves are also experiencing the meanness of the Trump team.  Trump has revoked security protection for President Joe Biden’s son and daughter, and even talked of Hunter Biden as deserving of the death penalty, which explains why Biden pardoned his son before leaving office in the first place.  Trump’s language has created serous serious concerns for former national security adviser John Bolton, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and General Mark Milley, which probably explains Trump’s delight in removing their security protection. More than a dozen prosecutors who worked for special council Jack Smith’s criminal investigation of Trump have been fired.

Every important institution in the United States is being targeted by the troglodytes in the Trump administration, even libraries and museums that we rely on as the “most trusted sources of information in this country,” according to the CEO of the American Alliance of Museums.  We used to say that the Soviet Union was the only country in the world that had an “unpredictable past,” but that charge could be applied to the United States as well.  Last month, Trump issued an executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which promises a revision of our historical narrative.

Trump himself has targeted the Smithsonian Institution and the National Museum of African American History and Culture for retooling and revision.  Vice President J.D. Vance, who now sits on the Smithsonian’s board, is in charge of removing the institution’s “improper ideology.”  Elite universities; successful regulatory agencies; health departments; and prestigious law firms  are being targeted and weakened in the process.  Donald Trump even engineered a a direct takeover of the Kennedy Center, which was an example of his pathological narcissism.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said that the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was the “greatest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century.”  It is possible that the Soviet collapse endowed the United States with too much power for its own good, leading to the misuse of power in the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; the twenty years of war in Afghanistan, and a continued military presence in Iraq that followed a similar twenty-year war.  The greatest geopolitical disaster thus far in the 21st century may be the political and economic meltdown of the United States, which is having far-reaching results for the entire international community.

In addition to the domestic turmoil initiated by the Trump administration, the United States has been losing power and influence in the international arena, including the decline of U.S. influence in the Atlantic Alliance that had secured the safety of U.S. relations with Western Europe; the mindless and “monumental split” between the United States and China that makes no geopolitical sense whatsoever; the retreat from arms control and disarmament; the purge and politicization of the professional military; and last week’s threat to the global financial system that had secured the primacy of the U.S. dollar and U.S. bonds in international markets.  Britain lost the primacy of the pound in the wake of the Suez War in 1956.  History does not repeat itself, but it does rhyme; perhaps we are witnessing the lost primacy of the dollar due to the idiocy of the Trump national security team.

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I first watched Breaking Bad a few years ago, after the show had completed its original run. During these past two months, I’ve rewatched the entire series, which–in light of the Trumpian reign of terror–seems oddly cathartic.   

The locus of Breaking Bad is Albuquerque, New Mexico. Its protagonist is Walter White (Bryan Cranston), a downtrodden, underappreciated high school chemistry teacher.  White, we learn, is a onetime scientific hotshot and had been a core founder of a startup business–an endeavor that made a fortune after his own ignoble exit, robbing him of money and prestige. He lives in a sort of purgatory.

White is suddenly faced with the catastrophic medical diagnosis of advanced, most likely fatal, cancer. A high school teacher has insurance coverage, of course, but in White’s case it is not adequate enough for the first-rate care that will potentially extend or save his life. The show presents this without editorializing or even explanation: It is simply understood that the system will not fully provide.

White taps into his reservoir of chemical expertise and—joining forces with his scabrous (and very funny) ex-student, Jesse Pinkman (played brilliantly by Aaron Paul)—begins to manufacture meth, ostensibly to cover his medical expenses and leave his family a nest egg when he’s gone. Breaking Bad chronicles White’s gradual, pathological transformation from teacher to ruthless criminal mastermind.

A survey of Breaking Bad’s many plot complexities and vast, vivid canvas of characters could fill a book. There is perhaps the most stunning montage I’ve ever seen, delineating the beginning of Walt and Jesse’s new business endeavor. Incongruously juxtaposed with a sprightly lounge-jazz tune and bright, cheery lyrics, Jesse makes his sales rounds amid desolate parking lots, a mostly empty laundromat, and the subsistence-level motels that can be found all over the United States. His meth-consuming clientele ranges from the rough-looking, the haggard, the sinister—and in one telling instance, the prosperous.  It is life in these United States.

Breaking Bad loosely follows in the Godfather lineage, in which enshrined American archetypes are utilized for nefarious purposes. Vito Corleone arrives at Ellis Island with nothing, and thanks to his discipline, hard work, and foresight, rises to the top. It is the classic American success story. Likewise, Walter White, faced with catastrophe, takes a can-do attitude and uses his scientific skills to save himself and his family.

The Godfather canon also explicitly links organized crime to capitalist success: the idea that the Mafia is a business is an ongoing trope. This is made even more explicit in Breaking Bad. (And interestingly, both Michael Corleone and Water White start out as criminal neophytes, and both eventually out-brutalize hardened criminals.)

White has followed the classic entrepreneurial playbook by launching his own startup. This particular startup is illegal, but it mimics legitimate business models and harnesses those cherished concepts of “disruption” and “innovation.” His meth has a distinctive blue tint that makes for effective branding. The quality and purity of the product keep the customers coming back. White even brands himself with an attention-grabbing alias: Heisenberg, in a perverted homage to the German scientist-philosopher Werner Heisenberg.

White takes immense pride in his product, its purity, and in that blue tint. But like so many entrepreneurs, Walt and Jesse certainly have the technical know-how, yet are lacking in expertise when it comes to effective product distribution. It could be grist for a TED Talk.

In order to move their product, they enter into a business alliance with Gus Fring, the straitlaced, courteous owner of the Los Pollos Hermanos fast-food chicken chain: paragon of respectability, civic booster, friend of the police—and, in reality, a brutal drug kingpin.

Breaking Bad is set in a United States full of sinister nooks and crannies. The high school teacher produces meth. The friendly fast-food outlet is, in reality, a crime epicenter. Even the local vacuum cleaner store is the place of nefarious secrets. The proprietor of one such store—played by the late Robert Forster, in his final role—is known as the “disappearer.” For a large sum of money, he can provide you with an entirely new identity and place to live. The viewer is not privy to any backstory; we have no idea who this disappearer really is. All we have is shadowy conjecture.

In the Breaking Bad constellation, there are deceptions large and small, violence at every turn, white supremacists. The New Mexico desert is simply a utilitarian device to dispose of contraband or bodies.

Authority figures are inept: White is growing his burgeoning drug empire under the very nose of his brother-in-law, a highly placed drug enforcement agent. If they’re not inept, they’re part of the rot and grand deception. There is the twisted, cheerfully amoral lawyer and fixer Saul Goodman (titular character of the Better Call Saul spinoff) and the ruthless henchman Mike Ehrmantraut, who is a defrocked Philadelphia policeman.

Breaking Bad is a study in fear: If one enters Walter White’s orbit, the threats come from a wide array of sources. Nobody will help you. And it is strongly implied that nobody will help you, really, even if you stay out of Walter White’s orbit.

The United States as a whole is saturated with shadow and incongruity. Are there other countries this continuously frightened?  We are being invaded by fearsome migrants, so ferocious as to eat household pets. There is ANTIFA, Black Lives Matter—posing threats nobody can define–Venezuelan gangs, a trans and gay “agenda”—which also has no definition–and a president who was secretly a Kenyan. We are being visited by UFOs that potentially bear the threat of annihilation—and the government knows this and is keeping the salient details hidden. In the outside world, we are beset with a growing list of lethal threats: Iran, China, North Korea, Cuba, Islamic fundamentalism. And in the Trump universe, even the dead have malevolent power: they vote, they collect Social Security benefits.

Breaking Bad is fiction and comes to a delineated conclusion—which may be why watching it has been cathartic. It is a startlingly accurate look at the twisted, frightened American psyche.

Our unfolding political and social catastrophe is, of course, very real. There is no conclusion, delineated or otherwise. In fact, this is just the beginning.

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Photo credits: Public domain and Steve Jurvetson (CC BY-SA 2.0).

Amazon’s Project Kuiper is sending its first satellites into space. The company’s founder and executive chair, Jeff Bezos, seems keen to challenge all things Musk—including Elon’s SpaceX Starlink system.

The satellites in Amazon’s $10 billion-plus Kuiper Atlas project are being launched with the Lockheed Martin-designed Atlas V rocket, at Cape Canaveral’s Space Force Station.

OK, a few thoughts on the matter that corporate media probably won’t contemplate.

Astronomical Funding

Fifteen years ago, Barack Obama’s White House trumpeted an increase in NASA funding. Obama said it would “help improve the daily lives of people here on Earth” and help companies produce “new means of carrying people and materials out of our atmosphere”—first to an asteroid, later to Mars. I’m just a little unclear about how, overall, sending hundreds of billions of dollars into space has been improving my daily life so far. If you ask me, money for reliable bus service would help a lot more. Universal medical care. Free higher education.

The benefits to the planet’s most massive corporations are obvious. I hear Amazon’s lining up deals in Britain, Indonesia, Australia, and potentially Taiwan.

This lucrative new space race feeds off the human need for information, especially where internet access is sparse.

Profit Streams

Yes, Starlink connects people in far-flung places with internet services. And it calls these people markets. It’s not hard to imagine unbanked populations being converted into profit streams, once they’re online.

Moreover, when wealthy companies secure US government backing, they can become political instruments, manipulating the populations they claim to serve. Polish taxpayers have forked over an annual $50 million to provide Starlink’s services to Ukraine. But Poland’s foreign minister tweeted out concerns about the trustworthiness of US-based Starlink. Be quiet, small man, Musk snapped back. (Musk then bragged about having challenged Putin to one-on-one physical combat.)

People with unfathomable wealth take more billions in handouts from the US military in the name of national security. General Chance Saltzman, Chief of Space Operations for the US Space Force, recently named SpaceX as a recipient of nearly $6 billion more. Saltzman called the contract “a strategic necessity that delivers the critical space capabilities our warfighters depend on to fight and win.”

Got it. Warfighters gonna warfight. Blam! Zonk! Kapow! Splat!

Cosmic Sprawl

So here comes Jeff Bezos, a prominent player in Donald Trump’s troupe of lickspittles since January. With the Trump regime now describing Amazon Prime as a model for deportation, who knows? Maybe “alien enemies” (those people who have autism awareness tattoos or otherwise ruffle the regime’s feathers) could be shipped into orbit.

In any case, Amazon’s space project will pile 3,200+ satellites onto the tens of thousands that Elon’s launching into the low Earth orbit (within a 1,200-mile band around Earth). Space scientists have long pressed for reviews of the satellites’ impact on the delicate balance of elements and molecules in the air when these things ultimately burn up in our atmosphere.

And the Federal Communications Commission enables it all.

Welcome to outer space in the Anthropocene.

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Photograph Source: Oren Rozen – CC BY-SA 4.0

In conversations about Israel and Palestine, I am often asked about my views on the internal resistance to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government.

My questioners point to hundreds of thousands of Israelis who have been taking to the streets to protest against the government and its efforts to introduce a judicial overhaul over the past two years and inquire why I remain apathetic to these efforts to end Netanyahu’s rule.

My answer is simple – the real problem facing Israel is not its current government. The government might fall, but until we radically transform the nature of the regime, not much will change, and particularly not in relation to the basic human rights of Palestinians. A recent Israeli Supreme Court decision underscores my point.

On March 18, 2024, five Israeli human rights organizations filed an urgent petition with Israel’s Supreme Court, asking the court to instruct the Israeli government and military to fulfill their obligations under international humanitarian law and address the civilian population’s humanitarian needs amid the catastrophic conditions in Gaza.

The petition was submitted at a time when aid was entering Gaza, but the amount crossing the border was far from sufficient to meet the minimal needs of the population, of whom 75 percent had already been displaced. The rights groups wanted the government to lift all restrictions on the passage of aid, equipment and personnel into Gaza, particularly in the north where there were already documented cases of children dying from malnutrition and dehydration.

The court did not issue a ruling for more than a year, effectively allowing the government to continue restricting aid unchecked. Three weeks after the rights groups filed the petition, the court convened only to provide the government additional time to update its preliminary response to the petition. This set the tone for how the petition would proceed over the next 12 months.

Each time the petitioners provided data on the worsening conditions of the civilian population and emphasized the urgent need for judicial intervention, the court simply asked the government for further updates. In its April 17 update, for example, the government insisted that it had significantly increased the number of aid trucks entering Gaza, claiming that between October 7, 2023, and April 12, 2024, it had allowed 22,763 trucks to cross the checkpoints. This amounts to 121 trucks per day, which according to every humanitarian agency working in Gaza, does not come close to meeting the population’s needs.

In October 2024, at least half a year after the petition was submitted, the rights organizations asked the court to issue an injunction after the government deliberately blocked humanitarian aid for two weeks. In response, the government claimed that it had been monitoring the situation in northern Gaza closely and that there was “no shortage of food”. Two months later, however, the government confessed that it had underestimated the number of Palestinian residents trapped in northern Gaza – thus acknowledging that the aid entering the Strip was insufficient.

On March 18, 2025, after Israel breached the ceasefire agreement and resumed its bombardment of Gaza and the minister of energy and infrastructure halted the supply of electricity to the Strip, the petitioners submitted yet another urgent request for an interim order against the government’s decision to prevent the passage of humanitarian aid. Again, the court failed to issue a ruling.

Finally, on March 27, more than a year after the rights organizations had filed the petition, the court issued a verdict. Chief Justice Yitzhak Amit and Justices Noam Sohlberg and David Mintz unanimously ruled that it lacked merit. Justice David Mintz interlaced his response with Jewish religious texts, characterizing Israel’s attacks as a war of divine duty, while concluding that, “[The Israeli military] and the respondents went above and beyond to enable the provision of humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, even while taking the risk that the aid transferred would reach the hands of the Hamas terrorist organization and be used by it to fight against Israel.”

Thus, at a time when humanitarian agencies have pointed again and again to acute levels of malnutrition and starvation, Israel’s Supreme Court – both in the way it handled the judicial process and in its ruling – has ignored Israel’s legal obligation to refrain from depriving a civilian population of objects indispensable to their survival, including by wilfully impeding relief supplies. In effect, the court legitimized the use of starvation as a weapon of war.

This is the court that hundreds of thousands of Israelis are trying to save. It’s March 27 ruling – and almost all other rulings involving Palestinians – reveal that the Supreme Court of Israel is a colonial court – one that protects the rights of the settler population while legitimizing the dispossession, displacement, and horrific violence perpetrated against the Indigenous Palestinians. And while the Supreme Court might not reflect the values of the existing government – particularly on issues relating to political corruption – it undoubtedly reflects and has always reflected the values of the colonial regime.

Hence, the liberal Zionists who fill Tel Aviv’s streets every weekend are not demonstrating against a judicial overhaul that endangers democracy, but against an overhaul that endangers Jewish democracy. Few of these protesters have any real qualms about the court’s horrific ruling on humanitarian aid, or, for that matter, on how the court has consistently upheld Israeli apartheid and colonial pillars. The regime, in other words, can continue to eliminate Palestinians unhindered as long as the rights of Israel’s Jewish citizenry are secured.

This article first appeared in Al Jazeera.

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Photograph Source: Tasnim News Agency – CC BY 4.0

The Israeli killing of medical workers in Gaza is further proof of a lack of any restraint on the part of Israel’s Defense Forces (IDF). They have been accused of executing 15 handcuffed medics before burying them in a mass grave underneath their crushed ambulances in southern Gaza. As Middle East Eye reported on the medics: “They were found over the weekend in a mass grave with around 20 multiple gunshots in each one of them.” According to Mahmoud Basal, spokesperson for the Palestinian Civil Defence in Gaza; “At least one of them had their legs bound, another was decapitated and a third topless,” he added.

Here are some of the reactions to the execution:

The top United Nations interim official for the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Jonathan Whittall, told journalists: “What is happening here defies decency, it defies humanity, it defies the law. It really is a war without limits. It’s an endless loop of blood, pain, and death.”

The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) was “outraged.” IFRC Secretary General Jagan Chapagain stated: “Even in the most complex conflict zones, there are rules. These rules of International Humanitarian Law could not be clearer – civilians must be protected; humanitarians must be protected. Health services must be protected.”

“Preliminary analysis suggests they were executed, not from a distant range,” a forensic consultant who examined the exhumed bodies told The Guardian, “since the locations of the bullet wounds were specific and intentional,” he said. “One observation is that the bullets were aimed at one person’s head, another at their heart, and a third person had been shot with six or seven bullets in the torso.”

What was Israel’s explanation? “When Hamas terrorists operate in active combat zones — while using humanitarian vehicles as cover, launching rockets from hospitals and stealing aid — Israel will do whatever it takes to protect its soldiers and citizens,” justified Jonathan Harounoff, a spokesman for Israel’s mission to the U.N.

The New York Times contradicted Israel’s version of what happened: “The video obtained by the Timesshows that the approaching ambulances and fire truck were clearly marked and had their emergency signal lights on when Israeli troops hit them with a barrage of gunfire.” The video was discovered on the cellphone of one of the dead paramedics.

After watching the video, Farnaz Fassihi and Christoph Koettl described what they saw and heard in the Times. It is worth repeating the gruesome details:

“Rescue workers, at least two of whom can be seen wearing uniforms, are seen exiting a fire truck and an ambulance marked with the emblem of the Red Crescent and approaching the ambulance derailed to the side. Then, sounds of intense gunfire break out. A barrage of gunshots is seen and heard in the video hitting the convoy. The camera shakes, the video goes dark. But the audio continues for five minutes, and the rat-a-tat of gunfire does not stop. A man says in Arabic that there are Israelis present.

The paramedic filming is heard on the video reciting, over and over, the ‘shahada,’ or a Muslim declaration of faith, which people recite when facing death. ’There is no God but God, Muhammad is his messenger,’ the paramedic is heard saying. He asks God for forgiveness and says he knows he is going to die.

‘Forgive me, mother. This is the path I chose — to help people,’ he said.’”

After reports on the video went public, Israeli officials modified their initial justifications. “The Israeli military on Saturday [April 5] acknowledged that the initial accounts from troops involved in the killing last month of 15 people in southern Gaza — who the United Nations said were paramedics and rescue workers — had been partially ‘mistaken,’” journalist Isabel Kershner reported from Jerusalem. Israel now says the episode was “under thorough examination.” (The Times has interviewed several witnesses to the shootings Eyewitnesses Recount Deadly Israeli Attack on Medics in Gaza – The New York Times)

The outright assassination of medical workers is a new and different form of Israeli violations of International Humanitarian Law (IHL) in its continuing refusal to respect international norms. Over 50,000 people, including women, the elderly and children, have died in Gaza. An entire infrastructure has been destroyed. Millions have been displaced. IHL in all its complexities is only effective if it is respected by all parties to a conflict. Israel signed the Geneva Conventions on Dec. 8, 1949, and ratified them on July 6, 1951.

What happens if a party to a conflict like Israel continues to violate IHL in the most egregious manner? So far, very little. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visits Hungary and the United States as if they were normal diplomatic trips, ignoring the fact that the International Criminal Court has issued search warrants for his arrest. (The U.S. and has no obligation to arrest Netanyahu since is not party to the Rome Treaty.)

For years, my dear friend Eugene Schulman often wore a keffiyeh to honor the Palestinian people. He would regularly unfurl a Palestinian flag on his Geneva balcony in support of a Palestinian state. A non-practicing Jew, Gene was constantly outraged at how Palestinians were treated by Israel. Gene died five years ago next month – Matthew Stevenson movingly described him in CounterPunch (Our Friend Eugene Schulman – CounterPunch.org.). Gene would be beyond outrage today at what is happening to Palestinians.

Hunters have seasons to shoot. Their prey have respites. The IDF and Israeli military have shown it is an open season in Gaza. Nothing is out of bounds. There is no respite for anyone, including humanitarian workers and medics. Even the erudite Gene Schulman would not find words to describe what is taking place. He would be, as we all should be, beyond outrage.

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Photograph Source: SWinxy – CC BY 4.0

We live in an age when disappearance is no longer a metaphor. It is both a threat and a governing principle. Under the Trump regime, language is no longer a prelude to violence—it is its echo, its announcement, its choreography. The rhetoric of erasure has been sharpened into policy, and policy has become the staging ground for an unfolding theater of cruelty. Immigrants, dissidents, students, institutions, and even sovereign nations are now targets of an authoritarian imagination that seeks not merely to silence but to unmake. What once lived in the realm of the unspeakable now materializes in the architecture of state violence, abduction, deportation, and political terror.

Dissent, once the lifeblood of democracy, is now branded as terrorism. The protester is no longer a citizen with a voice but a suspect under surveillance, a body to be silenced, imprisoned, or vanished—sometimes in distant nations where autocrats echo Trump’s contempt for law and human rights. Under the creeping shadow of authoritarianism, a student with a green card becomes a threat, a journalist is branded a traitor, entire immigrant populations of color are  viewed as a threat to national security and rendered disposable. Atrocities—such as the relentless bombardment and starvation of Palestinian women and children—vanish from mainstream coverage, their suffering lost in the machinery of genocide and indifference. In a culture fragmented into a thousand soundbites, social responsibility holds no market value; it evaporates in the toxic air of manufactured ignorance, hate, and despair. The moral compass of American society spins wildly, as cruelty becomes normalized, and conscience is silenced in the name of security, profit, and power.

When Stephen Miller stood before a cheering crowd at Madison Square Garden on October 27, 2024, and declared that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” he was not merely indulging in a grotesque strain of ultra-nationalism—he was resurrecting the death-scented language of racial purity. His words, echoing the rhetoric of Hitler, did more than exclude immigrants; they targeted the very idea of shared humanity. The message was clear: not only Black and Latino immigrants, but anyone who defends their dignity and rights, belongs outside the nation’s moral and political borders. The crowd roared in approval as Miller gave voice to Trump’s own warning—that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”—signaling the full return of a fascist logic in which citizenship is no longer a democratic right but a racialized weapon. In this worldview, those who do not conform—by birth, by belief, or by the color of their skin—are marked for removal, erasure, or expulsion.

We are now living through a globalized necropolitics in which the meaning of “citizen,” once tethered to democratic representation and civic belonging, has been hollowed out. What remains is a brutal calculus of disposability, a politics of unbeing. Entire populations are thrust into a liminal space, a state of enforced invisibility. As Achille Mbembe warns, “vast populations are subject to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead”—ghosts in plain sight, denied recognition until they disrupt, at which point they are declared pathological or dangerous, and swiftly cast out. In a corporate-controlled media landscape saturated with spectacle, education has been hollowed out and repurposed as a pedagogy of unreason—a toxic bullhorn for glorifying war, normalizing cruelty, and disseminating the lies, racial fantasies, and authoritarian dreams that sustain fascist ideology.

This assault on critical consciousness doesn’t just distort reality—it dismembers the very frameworks of belonging, paving the way for what Zygmunt Bauman calls “social homelessness”—a condition in which people are not simply unhoused but stripped of the very social and political structures that confer existence. This is the logic of neoliberal fascism, where the free market is sacrosanct, but the poor, the sick, the elderly, and the racialized are disposable. In this wasteland of abandonment, exclusion is terminal. Protection is denied, rights are withdrawn, and existence itself is rendered conditional.

But what is most chilling is that it is not just bodies that disappear. What vanishes in this discourse is memory, truth, solidarity, and the possibility of justice. Trump’s authoritarian grammar of erasure now extends even to entire nations. His fantastical threats to annex Greenland, Canada, or Panama are not the ravings of a deluded mind—they are ideological gestures toward empire, conquest, and the disappearance of sovereignty itself. What begins as ideological erasure—of history, borders, and human worth—inevitably manifests in real-world violence, where bodies are seized, visas are revoked, and lives discarded with bureaucratic precision.

The abductions of Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk by plainclothes agents of the state mark a terrifying threshold in the unfolding drama of American authoritarianism. These acts were not isolated law enforcement errors but political kidnappings, signaling that fascism in the United States is no longer a creeping threat—it is a reality. These young scholars, legal U.S. residents, were seized, denied due process, and imprisoned in remote detention centers for nothing more than their dissent against the Israeli-American genocide in Gaza. And many more were to follow. This is the new state terror: bureaucratically sanitized, legally justified, and ideologically ruthless.

To call these abductions “acts of state terror” is to recognize the intent behind them—not just the physical violence or legal abuses, but the psychological and political message they send. As in fascist regimes of the past, the disappearances are not meant solely to silence the individuals targeted. They are warnings to the rest of us: dissent will be punished, protest will be surveilled, and critique will be criminalized. The invocation of “support for terrorism” without evidence, and the convenient deployment of national security rhetoric, is eerily reminiscent of the Nazi regime’s use of “protective custody” and “public order” to justify mass arrests and detentions.

What allows this to happen—especially in elite spaces like Columbia University—is not simply external pressure from the state, but the internal corrosion of governance within higher education itself. Universities, once regarded as citadels of critical thought, have increasingly capitulated to political expediency, financial pressures, and market logics. They have surrendered to the seductions and rewards of neoliberalism and now function as craven adjuncts of a state captured by billionaires and ideological extremists. Institutions like Columbia and Harvard, by prioritizing corporate donations, federal contracts, and their own reputational security over academic freedom and human rights, have chosen cowardice over conscience. In refusing to defend Mahmoud Khalil, Columbia did not simply fail a student—it failed the very democratic ideals it claims to uphold.

The lessons of history make clear where this road leads. In 1933, as part of a national effort to align German institutions with Nazi ideology—a process known as Gleichschaltung—the regime targeted universities as key sites for ideological control. At Goethe University Frankfurt, Jewish professors were summarily dismissed, and Jewish students expelled. Many faculty members, rather than resisting, colluded—choosing the security of their positions and the continuation of their research over solidarity with colleagues and the defense of institutional autonomy. The same pattern unfolded at Heidelberg University, Munich, and others, where universities traded academic freedom for ideological conformity.

This history is not a relic; it is a warning. Today, when institutions like the University of Pennsylvania suspend students for political speech, or when MIT distances itself from scholars who criticize U.S. foreign policy, we are witnessing a similar erosion of moral courage and intellectual independence. Then as now, universities become accomplices in repression not only through what they do—but through what they refuse to defend. As Michael Roth bravely argues, it is time to challenge this institutional cowardice. Universities are not compelled to roll over in the face of political pressure; they have both the moral responsibility and the democratic obligation to support student activism and uphold the principles of free speech and modes of critical education that make such activism possible. Yet, As Samuel Karlin  in Left Curve notes, it is crucial  to   that academics join with both their unions and worker’s unions “take a stand and use the power of their labor to disrupt business as usual at universities, especially since so many administrators are caving to the Far Right.”

The broader institutional landscape mirrors this complicity. As Jason Stanley, the prominent philosopher of fascism, has made clear in his decision to leave Yale for a university in Ontario, there is now a systemic failure across U.S. academic and civic institutions to stand up to the fascist turn. His departure is not only a personal choice; it is a public indictment of a nation drifting—or rather, plunging—into authoritarianism.

In the face of Trump’s three-pronged assault—on the Palestinian movement, on immigrants, and on the autonomy of universities—the mainstream media offers only minimal resistance, and even that fails to connect these intersecting attacks as core elements of a fascist politics. Meanwhile, universities capitulate. Law firms once proud to defend civil rights now retreat. Together, these failures mark the collapse of civic imagination and moral courage. History teaches us that tyrants always move first against legal experts, educators, and other so-called “enemies of the state.” Strip away the defenders of law, and the victims of repression stand alone. When universities yield to fascist pressure, they don’t just betray their mission—they embolden further attacks on free thought. The assault on First Amendment rights is no anomaly; it’s a well-worn tactic of authoritarian rule. As G.S. Hans writes in Balls and Strikes:

By targeting lawyers and law firms for their advocacy, the White House mimics authoritarian regimes abroad, where despots intimidate or even kill lawyers who resist. In the Philippines, over sixty lawyers were murdered under Duterte. In China, human rights attorneys were jailed for defending dissidents. Without meaningful legal representation, activists either fall silent—or face brutal reprisal.

Khalil’s case, as I wrote recently, is about the fate of democracy itself. When legal residents with green cards are abducted and deported for expressing solidarity with Palestinians, we are no longer operating within a democratic framework. We are witnessing a perversion of law, where legality is weaponized to uphold injustice, and due process becomes an optional formality.

Donald Trump’s declaration that he wants to be “dictator for a day,” his chilling assertion that “he who saves the country does not violate the law,” and his claim that he intends to run for a third term—despite constitutional limits—are not rhetorical slips. They are the ideological scaffolding of fascism. We are now living in what I have called “authoritarianism with fascist overtones,” where the state no longer hides its contempt for democracy, but broadcasts it as a badge of strength. The machinery of repression today is draped in the language of legality, national security, and patriotism. But its core purpose remains: to suppress opposition, erase memory, and consolidate power.

Trump and his movement have already dehumanized vast swaths of the population—migrants, Muslims, people of color, and now students and educators. They are cast not as citizens but as threats. As Judith Butler has noted, such dehumanization is not incidental; it is foundational to fascist politics, which requires scapegoats to function.

Trump’s politics of perpetual turmoil—his ceaseless crises, dog whistles, and vendettas—serve a strategic purpose. They exhaust democratic response, disorient the public, and allow authoritarian measures to be passed under the cover of chaos. These are choreographed spectacles of trauma, animated by the energies of the dead, designed not only to terrorize but to numb—to make violence feel ordinary, to render dissent unimaginable. The true danger lies not only in what the state enacts, but in what the public comes to accept as normal, even necessary. What is at stake is more than a culture of silence or the routine cruelty of a politics of disappearance—it is the slow, methodical construction of a fascist subject. This is a subjectivity shaped by fear, seduced by obedience, and ultimately stripped of the capacity to recognize—or reject—the very forces that dominate it. It is not merely that people surrender to authoritarianism, but that they are fashioned by it, habituated to its violence, until resistance feels futile and complicity feels natural.

Yet, even amid this darkness, resistance is growing. The nationwide protests on April 5 signaled a new wave of opposition: tens of thousands in New York and Washington, thousands more in small towns, all rising to say that the line has been crossed. The creativity and moral clarity of these demonstrations offer a glimpse of what is possible. The question is not whether resistance will emerge—it has. The question is whether it will be sustained, deepened, and radicalized.

From here, we must push toward a broad-based front of democratic refusal. Universities must become sanctuaries for truth, not outposts of surveillance. Artists, journalists, educators, and students must converge to defend critical spaces, reclaim memory, and affirm a radical imagination. Law firms must unite against the fascist threats of the Trump administration. Moreover, they must all acknowledge that what they have in common is the need to resist together against the plague of fascism in its updated forms. As Robin D.G. Kelley insists, this moment demands more than protest—it requires organized, collective nonviolent direct action. Kelley calls for a resurgent solidarity among workers, unions, students, young people, educators, and higher education institutions. This is not merely a call for resistance, but for disruption—for coordinated actions that prevent this authoritarian regime from functioning. From strikes and walkouts to divestment campaigns and sanctuary networks, the goal is not to plead with power but to undermine its capacity to rule without legitimacy.

As Kelley reminds us in “Notes on Fighting Fascism,” “If we are going to ever defeat Trumpism, modern fascism, and wage a viable challenge to gendered racial capitalism, we must revive the old IWW slogan, ‘An injury to one is an injury to all.’” This means thinking with an energizing and informed class consciousness, organizing across identities, and reviving a politics rooted in justice, collective power, and radical imagination. Building on Robin Kelley’s call for resistance, Samuel Karlin insists that any meaningful struggle must break free from illusions about capitalist institutions. Resistance, he argues, cannot be rooted in the very structures that sustain exploitation and domination. As Karlin writes:

As the Trump administration increases its authoritarian measures against Palestine activists, immigrants, universities, and more, it is essential that all those fighting these attacks rely on ourselves, not the institutions of capitalists. We need to start organizing spaces that can bring our movements together to debate and decide on how to fight these attacks. It will require broad democratic campaigns that mobilize masses across the country. And it is essential that unions, especially academic workers’ unions, take a stand and use the power of their labor to disrupt business as usual at universities, especially since so many administrators are caving to the Far Right.

History is not merely warning us. It is demanding that we act. The fascist capture of America is not inevitable, but its consolidation becomes more likely with every act of silence, complicity, and moral retreat. Democracy cannot survive if people look away, lapse into complicity, or speak out yet refuse to collectively organize against and tear down a gangster capitalism that now proudly displays its fascist mobilizing passions.  Democracy as a radical idea and practice will survive if—and only if—people rise with courage, defiance, and militant hope. It is time to pay attention, learn from history, connect the dots in order to recognize the totality of this authoritarian system, and make resistance a necessity rather than an afterthought. This is not merely about one administration or a single demagogue. It is about the fate of public memory, the survival of political agency, and the right to speak and act without fear. The United States is not approaching a crisis—it is already engulfed in a four-alarm fire. And the only antidote to this rising tide of authoritarianism is a resistance that is collective, courageous, and unrelenting.

We are not standing at the edge of fascism—we are living through its rehearsal, its staging ground, its opening act. The question is no longer whether we see it, but whether we have the will to stop it before the final curtain falls. Resistance offers no guarantees. But without it—if it falters, if it remains timid or fragmented—what dies is not only democracy as we know it, but the very possibility of imagining it anew.

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Dear Xenophobic America,

On November 14, 2024, I “confessed” that my late Mexican immigrant mother, Carmen Mejía Huerta, “stole” White American jobs. My mother’s “high crimes and misdemeanors” consisted of working as a domestic worker (doméstica)for over four decades, “stealing jobs” from White American women. These are the same gendered jobs that millions of White women discarded and outsourced during the second half of the 20^th Century (to the present) to pursue leisure and employment opportunities.

Like my mother, my late Mexican immigrant father, Salomón Chávez Huerta, participated in “criminal behavior” in the American workplace, “taking away jobs” from White American men. His first “American job heist” occurred during the 1960s, as a guest worker for the Bracero Program (or Mexican Farm Labor Program). As I documented in a past essay, “The day my Mexican father met César Chávez,” the “…Bracero Program represented a guest worker program between the United States and Mexico. From 1942 to 1964, the Mexican government exported an estimated 4.6 million Mexicans to meet this country’s labor shortage not only in the agricultural fields during two major wars (WWII and Korean War), but also in the railroad sector.”

While invited as a “guest” during a critical economic time in American history, my father and millions of his paisanosexperienced exploitation and humiliation in the workplace. Instead of being honored as essential farm workers (campesinos), they were treated more like animals—not that animals, as non-humans, should be abused or neglected. At the Mexican and U.S. processing centers for this bi-national program, government officials forced the Mexican men from the countryside to strip naked in large groups without privacy. The immoral officials sprayed the prospective braceros with the pesticide DDT.  DDT causes cancer, among other illnesses.

After suffering from this traumatizing and humiliating experience, my father rarely spoke about it. Once working on the agricultural fields, the exposure to toxic chemicals continued for my father and his paisanos, as the immoral farmers sprayed their agricultural fields with pesticides linked to cancer and other illnesses. These are the same pesticides that the United Farm Workers (UFW) fought against for many years.

From 1975 to 1985, my father “stole” another American job, when he worked as a janitor in a manufacturing factory. The factory produced chrome wheels for automobiles.  For a decade, my father was exposed to high levels of hexavalent chromium, as part of the chrome-plating process. Like DDT and other pesticides, hexavalent chromium causes cancer and other illnesses.  One day, a young White foreman ordered my father to work closer to the furnaces.  Instead of exposing himself to more heat and toxic chemicals, he quit. Like in the 1960s, when he worked as a farm worker, my father experienced toxic exposure and workplace abuse at the factory while never exceeding the federal minimum wage!

Racial capitalism broke my father’s work spirit.

Defeated, he sporadically worked as a day laborer (jornalero) into his early sixties.

On March 9, 1996, my father died—on his 66^th birthday—of cancer.

Racial capitalism killed my father.

As I critically reflect on my father’s tragic death, I don’t even need to apply my rigorous social science training from UC Berkeley to link my father’s exposure to carcinogens—at high levels for many years—to his early death.

If the xenophobic lords and complicit enablers want me to “return” the earned meager wages by my late immigrant parents, while toiling in discarded American jobs, they must perform a miracle.

Return my Mexican parents from the dead—if only for one day—so I can tell them, individually, what I failed miserably as their proud son to express:

“I love you.”

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Photo by Megan Lee

Veterans who get their health care from “The VA,” actually the cabinet-level Department of Veterans Affairs, need to be aware that the Trump administration is quietly working to privatize the healthcare facet (Veterans Health Administration, or VHA) of the VA.

In May of 2014, it was alleged that 40 veterans had died while waiting for appointments at the VHA hospital in Phoenix, Arizona. This claim was soon disproven, but investigation revealed that management at that hospital had created a policy of awarding bonuses to hospital employees who misrepresented appointment times. The resulting scandal led to the Veterans Access, Choice, and Accountability Act of 2014, and a three-year trial program known as Veterans

Choice. Based upon the very real circumstances wherein many veterans lived a sizable distance from the nearest VHA facility, and some of those facilities lacked the equipment or professional staff to deal with the veteran’s unique medical or mental status, the Choice program allowed a private vendor company to assign those vets to obtain care at a private or for-profit provider, with payment to that provider to come out of the VA’s budget. At least one of the vendor companies initiated a policy of paying the civilian providers exactly half of what they had billed, and putting the other half into their own corporate coffers.

By 2017, the Choice program had resulted in $2 billion in cost overruns, including $90 million in overbilling by its two main contractors. Before long, a large percentage of private providers refused to see VA/Choice referrals. The contractor companies ignored the problems and referred more and more veterans, regardless of location, to the private sector.

The Choice program was replaced by 2018’s Mission Act, which handed the ball to another vendor corporation, Community Care, which promptly outsourced even more veterans to for-profit walk-in clinics without a referral. Even worse, those private providers are not required to adhere to the VHA’s standards of care, and there is no provision for oversight by the VA to ensure quality of care. Again, payments for these questionable services come out of the VA’s budget. By 2019, the VHA had approximately 67,000 openings for doctors, nurses, psychiatrists, and psychologists, but there were no provisions to increase wages for those positions. Payouts from the VA budget to private providers chosen by Community Care have skyrocketed. Veteran suicides continued to increase at a rate far exceeding that of the general public.

Will referrals of veterans healthcare to the private sector actually result in shorter appointment times, or any improvement in the levels of care provided? According to one government study, 77 percent of all U.S. counties face severe shortages of practicing psychiatrists, psychologists,  or social workers. Fifty-five percent, all rural counties, have no mental health professionals at all. (Southwest Virginia is an example). Even when private-sector psychiatrists are available, many are unwilling to accept either private insurances or federal reimbursement. Under such “market conditions,” not only do private-sector patients wait too long for appointments, according to the National Institute of Mental Health, 40% of Americans with schizophrenia and 51% suffering from bipolar disorder go untreated in any given year.

By contrast, data available on Capitol Hill in 2018 showed that the waiting time to see a VHA mental health professional averaged four days! And, the VHA personnel are trained to deal with the unique mental issues encountered by combat veterans such as PTSD. Proponents of VA privatization have doggedly refused to require any specialized training for the professionals to whom veterans will be outsourced. While campaigning for a second term as President, Donald Trump denied any familiarity with Project 2025, a guidebook created by the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation with wide-ranging recommendations for the second Trump regime. Currently, adhering to the Project 2025 script, Trump / DOGE are working to gut the VA which is terribly understaffed, by cutting staff another 80,000.

Even more troubling, the Veterans ACCESS Act, currently being reviewed by committees in both the House and Senate, will, if passed, increase outsourcing of VA medical and mental health patients to the private medical industry. Hidden in the depths of the ACCESS ACT like a ticking time bomb is a provision intended to dismantle the VHA system quicker than you can say “privatization,” enabling all veterans seeking help for addiction or mental health challenges to walk into virtually any private medical or mental health provider and request outpatient care without any VA authorization, referral, approval, or oversight of the care provided.

The ultimate goal of the ACCESS Act, as stated in the Project 2025 playbook, is to eliminate all VA hospitals in approximately three years, and increase the number of Community Based Outpatient Clinics (CBOCs) to re-make VA health care into a chain of facilities resembling “urgent care” clinics. Within a very few years, the VA would be transformed into an insurance company, only able to pay the private industry from its $369 billion annual budget.

This project is already under way. Elon Musk’s DOGE has already fired 2,400 VA employees, a Reduction in Force (RIF) order was issued February 26th, and the goal is to reduce the VA’s employee count by 80,000 in the short term.

It should be noted that passage of the PACT Act, allowing VA coverage of ailments related to toxic substances such as Agent Orange in Vietnam veterans, and smoke from toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan, has resulted in the addition of 400,000 more VA patients, and is expected to add another 400,000 in the near future. DOGE has also cut the VA’s research into muscular dystrophy, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s Disease), and assorted cancers.

President Trump’s new Secretary of Veterans Affairs Doug Collins has predicted that cuts to the VA’s workforce will “eliminate waste, reduce management and bureaucracy…and increase workforce efficiency.” Secretary Collins pledged to do this “without making cuts to healthcare or benefits” and warned critics that “we will be making major changes. So get used to it.”

Surveys indicate that 92% of veterans currently getting their health care from the VA prefer to get their care from it. Studies consistently show that VA health care is equal to or better than private-sector care without even considering that the VA is the only entity suited to treat medical and psychological issues specific to military service.

Again, the Veterans ACCESS Act is awaiting action in committees in both the U.S. Senate and the House of Representatives, and veterans are urgently needed to contact their Reps and Senators and urge them to deny this unscrupulous bill. A call to the U.S. Capitol switchboard at (202) 224-3121 will guide you to the specific phone number for your Representative or Senator. If you hope to have VA medical care in the (near) future, you need to call today.

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Image by Paul Teysen.

Donald Trump’s paleo-conservative, isolationist attack on global capitalist trade is already having formidable impacts. If tariff levels and targeted announced on ‘Liberation Day,’ April 2, are sustained, a full-blown economic catastrophe could result, perhaps reminiscent of 1930s-scale Make America Great Depression Again.

Transactional Trump

The worst danger: national elites in victim countries will be divided-and-conquered. Even South African President Cyril Ramaphosa – who 15 months ago had bravely challenged Washington’s ‘rule of law’ fakery by authorizing Pretoria’s challenge to Israel’s genocide at the International Court of Justice – apparently feels compelled to dream up utterly irrational deals for Trump, ideally sealed over a game of golf. Ramaphosa’s spokesperson told the NY Times last month that Ramaphosa may soon offer to U.S. Big Oil firms generous offshore leases for methane gas exploration and extraction, in spite of enormous climate damage, Shell Oil’s courtroom setbacks, and widespread shoreline protests.

He’s not alone; more than 50 world leaders have ‘reached out’ to Washington in an obsequious manner, leading Trump to brag, “They are coming to the table. They want to talk but there’s no talk unless they pay us a lot of money on a yearly basis.”

Even before the April 2 announcements, Trump imposed 25% universal tariffs on imports of steel and aluminum (effective March 12) and on cars (and auto parts) (March 26), radically lowering demand for what are traditionally the three main South African exports to the U.S. under the tariff-free Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA).

According to Business Leadership South Africa’s Busisiwe Mavuso:

“Trump has made it clear that he wants concessions from each country if he is going to reduce or drop the tariffs. He emphasized that the tariffs put the U.S. in a position of power in the series of bilateral negotiations that are to come. Given the transactional nature of US politics, we have to think hard on what is commercially available and viable for all parties. The U.S. has exempted many of our key metal exports, including platinum, gold, manganese, copper, zinc and nickel, because these are considered critical to the U.S. economy.”

Twisted economic logic

Setting aside the exemptions on raw materials, which makes the whole operation appear as a neo-colonial resource grab that simultaneously stifles poor countries’ manufacturing sectors, what would justify these highest tariffs on U.S. imports in 130 years? Trump’s chief economic advisor (and investment banker) Stephen Miran, who holds a Harvard doctorate in economics, explained the underlying theory in a November 2024 report, celebrating the potential for a:

“generational change in the international trade and financial systems. The root of the economic imbalances lies in persistent dollar overvaluation that prevents the balancing of international trade… Tariffs provide revenue, and if offset by currency adjustments, present minimal inflationary or otherwise adverse side effects, consistent with the experience in 2018-2019. While currency offset can inhibit adjustments to trade flows, it suggests that tariffs are ultimately financed by the tariffed nation, whose real purchasing power and wealth decline…”

This is wishful thinking, most experts believe. Currency adjustments are hard to predict but the dollar’s decline on April 2-3 (about 1%) is already being offset by its ‘safe haven’ status, providing a quick valuation bounce-back. The reason: international financial volatility always encourages global footloose capital’s short-term flight to dollar-denominated assets, no matter how irrational that may be in the medium term.

U.S. consumer inflation will soar, it’s fair to predict. Already, those whose pensions have been invested in the world’s (admittedly way-overvalued) stock markets have suffered major losses, e.g. in South Africa and the U.S., more 10% on April 3-4 alone. As nervous money floods out of vulnerable countries, the interest rates investors demand to fund 10-year bonds are soaring, in South Africa’s case by 2.2%, from 8.9% at the end of January to a painful 11.1% in early April (at a time of long-term average inflation of 5%).

And as a distributional matter, left economist Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy and Research points out,

“Import taxes are highly regressive, meaning that tariffs will cost ordinary working people a much higher share of their income than for high income people. This is because working people tend to spend most or all of their income, while high income people save a large portion of their income. Also, working people are more likely to spend their money on the goods subject to tariffs, whereas higher income people spend more money on services.”

Splintered oppositional narratives

Beyond Miran’s fantasies, five other narratives are generating anti-Trump ideologies that – without a coherent stitching together – risk splintering critics:

1. mainstream neoliberalism

The corporate and state elites who in most countries typically back neo-liberal trade deregulation are now in shock, as their own personal share portfolios crash. The Economist summed up, “Trump’s mindless tariffs will cause economic havoc.”

In alliance with market-friendly ‘bastard Keynesians‘ like Paul Krugman, the neoliberals are expressing utter disgust at Trump because precepts of free trade are being violated in the most primitive manner. The powers and legitimacy of the Geneva-based World Trade Organization (WTO) to police tariffs and trade are being trampled by Trump – leaving the body’s defense to some of the world’s most aggrieved neoliberal forces, in Beijing.

Because Trump is launching “economic nuclear war on every country,” even Bill Ackman – a strong supporter of the president and a billionaire fund manager – conceded, “we will severely damage our reputation with the rest of the world that will take years and potentially decades to rehabilitate.” Quite right.

(This growing establishment hatred of Washington is extremely useful if progressives want to forge even brief alliances, e.g. to ‘Vote Trump off the G20 Island,’ a true Survivor approach which would be indisputably popular in the bloc’s capital cities, except for Buenos Aires and maybe Rome, and set the stage for the 2026 G20 not to be held in the U.S., but maybe jointly by Mexico and Canada instead, as should the 2026 soccer World Cup and 2028 Olympics.)

2. radical Keynesianism combined with dependency theory

Both these approaches are highly critical of international trade, but not for the reasons Trump is. The last century’s leading British economist, John Maynard Keynes, at one point – in his 1933 Yale Review article – firmly advocated tariffs and other forms of protectionism, so as to support domestic industries and thus achieve much more balanced internal development: “let goods be homespun whenever it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and, above all, let finance be primarily national” (using tightened exchange controls).

As for global economic regulation, Keynes’ last (unsuccessful) major project was to propose penalties for economies that ran trade surpluses: the ‘Bancor’ International Currency Union proposal at Bretton Woods in 1944. His objective was to use trade and currency controls to achieve self-correcting international economic stability, in the wake of a Great Depression and war caused in part by extreme commercial and financial volatility.

From the Global South, a different critique of international trade and an even stronger advocacy of tariffs together aim to promote poor countries’ ‘delinking’ from dangerous international circuits of capital, and to protect infant manufacturing industries. Africa’s main contributor to this dependencia school was Egyptian political economist Samir Amin. He understood the differential labor values and ‘unequal ecological exchange’ (resource looting) that are embodied in South-to-North trade as benefiting transnational corporations, and causing Africa’s underdevelopment.

Amin also criticized trade between impoverished countries and South Africa which – even after apartheid was defeated in 1994 – he viewed (until his death in 2018) as a malevolent capitalist power on the continent: “nothing has changed. South Africa’s sub-imperialist role has been reinforced, still dominated as it is by the Anglo-American mining monopolies.”

Indeed AngloGold Ashanti and many similar Johannesburg firms have benefited from the South African National Defence Force’s ersatz quarter-century-long military presence in the eastern Congo. (Last November, these troops were recognized by the UN not for heroism, but as the peace-keeping force’s worst offenders for sexual exploitation, abuse and paternity lawsuits.) Pretoria’s troops were recently forced out of the DRC by invading Rwandan forces (and also lost battles in Northern Mozambique and the Central African Republic since 2013), but the critique of sub-imperial interests remains intact.

3. climate consciousness

Opponents of ecocide – surely, all of us who aren’t climate denialists – regret the massive greenhouse gas emissions caused by excessive, often pointless international trade: 7%+ of all CO2 emanates from shipping and air transport, according to the International Transport Forum.

And while the International Maritime Organization has hosted a decade of talks about its members’ dirty bunker-fuel emissions – which for the sake of ‘polluter pays’ policy, should be costed at $1056/tonne (even the World Economic Forum admits) – these have been futile. The modest $150/tonne tax on shipping emissions demanded by increasingly-desperate Pacific and Caribbean small island states is this week being rejected by rich Western countries and also by an alliance centered on four BRICS members: Brazil, China, Indonesia and South Africa.

Moreover, genuine ‘Just Transition’ plans are widely recognized as necessary to wean workers and affected communities off CO2-intensive export production, e.g. the West’s (highly flawed yet necessary) Just Energy Transition Partnerships and Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanisms, but these and other climate obligations Trump has simply walked away from. The Pan African Climate Justice Alliance had already called on the world to impose trade sanctions on the U.S. as a result, a call that now has much more purchase.

Indeed, to that end, many would support a ‘degrowth‘ approach seeking to stabilize and indeed diminish much of the high-carbon industrial output exported by many economies into the U.S. Those include steel, aluminum and automobiles – now 25% tariff victims – due to the vast waste involved in rich-country consumption. And South Africa is one of the worst, with the ‘Energy Intensive Users Group‘ of 27 multinational corporate exporters guzzling more than 40% of the country’s scarce electricity but hiring only 4% of workers in the formal sector.

4. African nationalism

African patriots logically perceive Trump’s hatred of the continent (full of ‘S-hole countries‘) as, in part, behind attacks on its trade-surplus countries. Tiny Lesotho was hit by Trump with the highest new tariff on April 2 mainly because of its $240 million trade surplus with the U.S.: mostly Levi’s and Wrangler jeans and diamond exports, whereas imports from the U.S. are indirect, as they first are cleared by customs in South Africa. Trump also imposed 40%+ tariffs on Madagascar and Mauritius, because of their trade surpluses.

The context for the continent’s (and world’s) rising anti-Americanism is Trump and Pretoria-born Elon Musk’s halt to financial support for African healthcare (especially AIDS-related – which could lead to 6.3 million unnecessary deaths by 2029 – and maternal), climate (mitigating emissions, strengthening resilience and covering ‘loss & damage’ relief), renewable energy and vitally-needed emergency humanitarian food supplies. Some critics here suggest these cuts reflect Trump’s white supremacy, called out by Pretoria’s fired ambassador to Washington, amplified by the fiscal chainsaw wielded by Musk, against whom protest is rapidly rising.

All this means Trump is discarding Washington’s soft power, which notwithstanding the vast destruction in the meantime, could ultimately be very useful for anti-imperialists (in contrast to last November’s internecine squabbling over a controversial National Endowment for Democracy conference held in Johannesburg).

4. Marxist political economy

Readers of Das Kapital understand that capitalist crises and the ‘devaluation’ of ‘overaccumulated capital’ (e.g. deindustrialization once businesses addicted to exports to the U.S. shut down) reflect the mode of production’s intrinsic contradictions. In reaction, capitalism often degenerates into inter-imperial and imperial/sub-imperial rivalries, generalized trade wars (often based on tit-for-tat tariffs) and stock market turbulence. The conclusion drawn is that eco-socialist planning of the global economy in the public and environmental interest, is the only route out. (Disclosure: that’s my main bias but I’ll travel a long way with advocates of positions 2-4 as well.)

For those outside mainstream, neoliberal logic, can the latter four framings be fused together for not only a coherent analysis but also a clear political response? The danger of not having a strategy linking Keynesians, environmentalists, nationalists and anti-capitalists is four-fold:

1/ under a beggar-thy-neighbour ‘reciprocal tariff’ trade war, we all face a new version of a 1930 Smoot-Hawley Act and then a 1930s-style Great Depression (which by the way, was an extremely constructive period for South African capitalism, which grew 8% per year as a result of import-substitution industrialization);

2/ recognizing the durable power of U.S. economic imperialism, individual governments will go cap-in-hand to Trump to beg for a bit of relief, offering absurd concessions in the process such as Ramaphosa’s invitation to drill baby drill;

3/ surplus countries will redirect already-produced (or in-production) manufactured goods and commodities away from the now shuttered U.S. market, flooding all other potential buyers, thus further deindustrializing South Africa – whose main anti-dumping measures applied by the International Trade Administration Commission are against various ultra-cheap imports from China; and

4/ Naturally the mainstream logic of ‘searching for new markets’ – now that the U.S. is closing its trade doors – won’t get at the root cause of the problem. That cause is sometimes termed ‘uneven and combined development,’ in which over the past 40 years, the global trading system became exceptionally volatile and generative of ever worsening inequalities (especially unequal ecological exchange), i.e., depleting, polluting and emitting against the interests of poor economies and natural environments.

A long pattern of economic abuse

This extreme abuse of commercial power being exercised with a vengeance by Trump, no matter how self-destructive financial markets have judged his Liberation Day, is only the latest reflection of Western economic chaos. The world has suffered extreme uneven development after the recovery from early-1980s global recession, as ‘Washington Consensus’ liberalization kicked in everywhere due to debt crises and IMF/World Bank squeezing, and especially via global commerce following the capture by nearly all governments’ policies by the World Trade Organization after 1994.

The limits of trade globalization became clear in 2008 – the peak year of world trade/GDP until until 2022 – as did the limits of financialised economies in recent months, in the form of overvalued ‘Buffett Indicators‘ of stock market capitalization, unprecedented debt loads, currency volatility and recognition of the $’s malevolence after two Fed-led ‘Quantitative Easings’ and interest rate manipulations, etc.

The damage done to South Africa’s industrial economy was amongst the most severe, as we lost most labor-intensive industries – clothing, textiles, footwear, appliances, electronics, etc – which had driven the manufacturing/GDP ratio up to 24%, before the steady decline to less than 13% by the 2010s. So the challenge is reversing that imbalance – i.e. fighting against uneven and combined development – with progressive policies, not merely relying upon the program of dissatisfied export-oriented capitalists.

Here in South Africa, the de facto retraction of AGOA zero-tariff access for locally-made luxury cars, aluminum, steel, petrochems, vineyard products and plantation nuts and citrus reminds that the main losers are capital-intensive extractive industries, carbon-intensive smelters and super-exploitative plantations, all with mainly white ownership. From Washington, the imperialist Hudson Institute last month even recommended not cutting the tariff-free AGOA trade program, since “The communities that benefit most from the AGOA largely support South Africa’s pro-American political parties.”

In contrast to Trump’s paleo-con isolationism and to neoliberal trade promotion, the four historically-progressive ideologies of Keynesianism, environmental justice, African nationalism and eco-socialism represent countervailing views. Programmatically, to move in their direction can only be assessed once the dust settles a bit and the distinction between those national leaders who are either fighting or who are obsequious, becomes clear.

So far, South Africa’s leaders, under threat of losing their Government of National Unity related to a budget dispute caused by excessive neoliberalism, are decidedly in the latter category.

In contrast, the potential for China to guide the international fightback is not merely witnessed in its WTO complaint against Trump, quickly filed on April 4. The same day, Beijing’s central bank experimented with a much more rapid, blockchain-secured digital alternative to the dollar-denominated cross-border bank settlement and clearance system, with 10 regional and another six West Asian economies now reportedly able to avoid the Brussels-based SWIFT network, even if merely for cost and speed savings.

There have been far too many false alarms and hyped hopes about de-dollarization. If it began in earnest thanks to Trump’s misstep, we’d much more likely see the venal, volatile Bitcoin take over, as Blackrock CEO Larry Fink warns, than the renminbi.

All this suggests a far more durable approach is needed, to get out from under Trump’s thumb and then the dollar’s domination, and then escape the tyranny of capital. A series of non-reformist reforms were offered to Democracy Now! by Indian radical economist Jayati Ghosh, worth mulling over for countries like South Africa, and all others, as a last word:

“There’s a silver lining in this for developing countries, which is that for too long, for maybe three decades, we’ve been told that the only way we can develop is through export-led growth. And that’s really — it’s been unfortunate, because we have never seen giving our own workers a fair deal as a good option. We’ve always seen wages as a cost, not as a source of our own domestic demand and market. It’s now time to actually change, to shift gears, to think about different trading arrangements, more regional arrangements, looking at other developing countries as markets, looking at our own population as markets, and thinking about the things we can do to create sustainable production, that’s not ecologically damaging, that actually provides living wages and decent working conditions within our own countries.”

(The University of Johannesburg Centre for Social Change will convene a webinar on Trump tariffs in the G20-from-below series on Tuesday, April 15, 3pm SA time, 9am Washington time, here: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84736248638 )

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