The Subversion of the Next Election

 

Trump’s threat to cancel the midterm elections is not a feign. He attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election and said he would not accept the outcome of the 2024 election if he lost. He ruminates about defying the Constitution to serve a third term. He is determined to retain absolute control — buttressed by an obsequious Republican majority — in Congress. 

He fears, if he loses control of Congress, impeachment. He fears impediments to the rapid reconfiguration of America as an authoritarian state. He fears losing the monuments he is building to himself — his name emblazoned on federal buildings, including the Kennedy Center, his scrapping of free entry to National Parks on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and replacing it with his own birthday, his seizure of Greenland and who knows, maybe Canada, his ability to put cities, such as Minneapolis, under siege and snatch legal residents off the streets.

Dictators love elections as long as they are fixed. The dictatorships I covered in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and the Balkans staged highly choreographed election spectacles. These spectacles were a cynical prop whose outcome was preordained. They were used to legitimize iron control over a captive population, mask the enrichment of the dictator, his family and his inner circle, criminalize all dissent and ban opposition political parties in the name of “the will of the people.”

When Saddam Hussein held a presidential referendum in Oct. 1995, the only question on the ballot was “Do you approve of President Saddam Hussein being the President of the Republic?” Voters marked ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ The official results saw Hussein win 99.96 percent of some 8.4 million votes cast. Turnout was reported at 99.47 percent. His counterpart in Egypt, the former general Hosni Mubarak, in 2005 was re-elected for a fifth consecutive six-year term with a more modest mandate of 88.6 percent of the vote. My less than reverential coverage of the elections held in Syria in 1991, where there was only one candidate on the ballot, President Hafez al-Assad, who reportedly got 99.9 percent of the vote, saw me banned from the country.

These spectacles are the model, I expect, for what comes next, unless Trump gets his deepest wish, which is to emulate Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia — whose security detail assassinated my colleague and friend Jamal Khashoggi in 2018 in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul — and hold no elections at all.

Wannabe president-for-life Trump floats the idea of canceling the 2026 midterm elections, telling Reuters that, “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.” When President Volodymyr Zelensky informed Trump elections were not held in Ukraine because of the war, Trump gushed, “So you mean if we happen to be in a war with somebody, no more elections? Oh, that’s good.”

Trump told The New York Times he regrets not directing the National Guard to seize voting machines after the 2020 election. He wants to abolish mail-in voting, along with voting machines and tabulators, which allow boards of elections to post results on election night. Better to slow the process down and like the Chicago political machine under Mayor Richard J. Daley, stuff boxes with ballots after the polls close to ensure victory.

Trump’s administration is prohibiting voter registration drives at naturalization centers. It is imposing nation-wide restrictive voter ID laws. It is reducing the hours that federal employees have to leave work and vote. In Texas, the new redistricting map blatantly disenfranchises Black and Latino voters, a move upheld by the Supreme Court. It is expected to eradicate five Congressional Democratic seats.

Our money-drenched elections, coupled with aggressive gerrymandering, mean few races for Congress are competitive. Recent redistricting has, so far, all but guaranteed the Republicans another nine seats in Texas, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio and six for the Democrats, five in California and one in Utah. Republicans intend to carry out more redistricting in Florida and Democrats plan a redistricting ballot initiative in Virginia. If the Supreme Court continues to gut the Voting Rights Act, then Republican redistricting will explode, possibly cementing into place a Republican victory whether the majority of voters want it or not. No one can call redistricting democratic.

The Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United took from us any real input into elections. Citizens United permitted unlimited money from corporations and wealthy individuals to rig the election process in the name of protected speech under the First Amendment. It ruled that heavily financed and organized lobbying by large corporations is an application of the people’s right to petition their government.

Our most basic rights, including the freedom from wholesale government surveillance, have been steadily revoked by judicial and legislative fiat.

The “consent of the governed” is a cruel joke.

There are few substantial differences between the Democrats and Republicans. They exist to provide the illusion of representative democracy. The Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt tolerant positions on issues regarding race, religion, immigration, women’s rights and sexual identity, and pretend this is politics. The right wing uses those on the margins of society — especially immigrants and the phantom “radical left” — as scapegoats. But on all the major issues — war, trade deals, austerity, militarized police, the vast carceral state and deindustrialization — they are in lockstep.

“One cannot point to any national institution[s] that can accurately be described as democratic,” the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin noted in his book “Democracy Incorporated,” “surely not in the highly managed, money-saturated elections, the lobby-infested Congress, the imperial presidency, the class-biased judicial and penal system, or, least of all, the media.”

Wolin called our system of governance “inverted totalitarianism.” It paid outward fealty to the façade of electoral politics, the Constitution, civil liberties, freedom of the press, the independence of the judiciary, and the iconography, traditions and language of American patriotism, while it allowed corporations and oligarchs to effectively seize all of the mechanisms of power to render the citizen impotent.

The emptiness of the political landscape under “inverted totalitarianism” saw politics merge with entertainment. It fostered a ceaseless political burlesque, a politics without politics. The subject of empire, along with unregulated corporate power, endless war, poverty and social inequality, became taboo.

These political spectacles create manufactured political personalities, Trump’s fictitious persona, a product of “The Apprentice.” They thrive on empty rhetoric, sophisticated public relations, slick advertising, propaganda and the constant use of focus groups and opinion polls to loop back to voters what they want to hear. The vapid, issueless and celebrity-driven presidential campaign of Kamala Harris was a sterling example of this political performance art.

The assault on democracy, carried out by the two ruling parties, set the stage for Trump. They emasculated our democratic institutions, stripped us of our most basic rights and cemented into place the machinery of authoritarian control, including the imperial presidency. All Trump had to do was flick the switch.

The indiscriminate police violence familiar in poor urban communities, where militarized police serve as judge, jury and executioner, long ago handed the state the power to “legally” harass and kill citizens with impunity. It spawned the largest prison population in the world. This evisceration of civil liberties and due process has now been turned on the rest of us. Trump did not initiate it. He expanded it. Terror is the point.

Trump, like all dictators, is intoxicated by militarism. He is calling for the Pentagon’s budget to be raised from $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion. Congress, in passing Trump’s One Big Beautiful Act, has allocated more than $170 billion for border and interior enforcement, including $75 billion for ICE over the next four years. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined.

“When a constitutionally limited government utilizes weapons of horrendous destructive power, subsidizes their development, and becomes the world’s largest arms dealer,” Wolin writes, “the Constitution is conscripted to serve as power’s apprentice rather than its conscience.”

He goes on:

That the patriotic citizen unswervingly supports the military and its huge budget means that conservatives have succeeded in persuading the public that the military is distinct from government. Thus, the most substantial element of state power is removed from public debate. Similarly, in his/her new status as imperial citizen the believer remains contemptuous of bureaucracy yet does not hesitate to obey the directives issued by the Department of Homeland Security, the largest and most intrusive governmental department in the history of the nation. Identification with militarism and patriotism, along with the images of American might projected by the media, serves to make the individual citizen feel stronger, thereby compensating for the feelings of weakness visited by the economy upon an overworked, exhausted, and insecure labor force.

The Democrats in the next election — if there is one — will offer up least-worst alternatives while doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward authoritarianism. They will remain hostage to the demands of corporate lobbyists and oligarchs. The party, which stands for nothing and fights for nothing, could well hand Trump a victory in the midterms. But Trump does not want to take that chance.

Trump and his minions are energetically closing the last exit built into the system that prevents absolute dictatorship. They intend to orchestrate the sham elections familiar in all dictatorships or abolish them. They are not joking. This will be the death blow to the American experiment. There will be no going back. We will become a police state. Our freedoms, already under heavy assault, will be extinguished. At that point, only mass mobilizations and strikes will thwart the solidification of the dictatorship. And such actions, as we see in Minneapolis, will be greeted with lethal state repression.

The subverting of the next elections will offer two stark choices to Trump’s most vocal opponents. Exile or arrest and imprisonment at the hands of ICE thugs.

Resistance to the beast, as in all dictatorships, will come at a very high cost.

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"Are we really losing our fundamental freedoms under Donald Trump?"

 

Nebraska mom Jamie Bonkiewicz filmed her interaction with Secret Service agents and police who came to her door because of a tweet. “The Secret Service came to my door today because of a tweet. No threats. No violence. Just words. That’s where we are now.”

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is going after multiple Democratic members of the House and Senate, the governors of two states, and the mayor of Minneapolis. And any Republican who speaks against Trump or his lickspittles: Jerome Powell, Lisa Cook, Mark Kelly, Elissa Slotkin, Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, Adam Schiff, Eric Swalwell, Chris Christie, Jack Smith, Christopher Krebs, James Comey, Letitia James, John Bolton, Tim Walz, Jacob Frey, Miles Taylor…

Are we really losing our fundamental freedoms under Donald Trump?

Back in 1994, I was invited by a parents’ group in Singapore to speak about education and ADHD; my book on the topic had just made the cover of TIME magazine. I flew in, they put me up in the city/state’s fanciest hotel, and late the following afternoon I gave my speech. When, during the Q&A afterward, somebody asked me how best to institute the public school reforms I’d suggested, I said words to the effect of, “Get politically active, get your politicians involved, as they control and fund the schools.”

The room went completely quiet, which I thought odd, but then the conversation moved on and I didn’t think about it again until a few hours later when I arrived back at the hotel. My room had been ransacked. The bed was askew, drawers emptied, my suitcase all over the floor, even my toiletry kit spread across the bathroom floor.

When I called down to the hotel’s switchboard to let them know what had happened, the manager came up to my room and carefully told me that the police had visited my room while I was out. “You must have done or said something suspicious,” he told me. That’s when I remembered the eerie silence in response to my suggestion that people get politically active.

America isn’t Singapore. Yet. Or Russia, where even standing in the street with a blank sign will get you prison time. Yet. Or Hungary, where posting on Facebook against Viktor Orbán will get you thrown into jail. Yet.

But we’re sure as hell moving in that direction.

Retired professor Barbara Wien stood outside Stephen Miller’s home passing out “No Nazis in NOVA” [North Virginia] fliers with his picture and the slogan, “Wanted for crimes against humanity.” Three weeks later, she was visited by agents of the FBI, the Secret Service, and a Virginia State Policeman because Miller’s podcaster wife had reportedly called them.

In addition to intimidating Wien, they had a search warrant signed by a judge and took her phone. The New York Times notes: “The activist, Barbara Wien, has not been charged with any crime, though the Virginia State Police still have her phone. The investigation remains active, leaving it unclear whether law enforcement has since gathered additional evidence.”

Her lawyer told the Times about his client and the activists who’d been distributing similar flyers in town: “They were speaking truth to power, and that is really at the core of our Constitution. It’s a principle and a right that our country was founded on.” 

True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson had been reporting on Donald Trump’s corruption and reorganization of our government, so FBI agents showed up at her home and took her phone, her laptop, and her sports watch, which had a record of everywhere she’d visited for the past few weeks. They were apparently looking for the names and locations of the federal employees she may have interviewed. As The New York Times reported:

“It is exceedingly rare, even in investigations of classified disclosures, for federal agents to search a reporter’s home. A 1980 law generally bars search warrants for reporters’ work materials, unless the reporters themselves are suspected of committing a crime related to the materials.” True, but the Trump regime doesn’t care about the law.

Meanwhile, a Reagan-appointed federal judge in Boston just said out loud what millions of Americans are feeling in their gut. U.S. District Judge William G. Young, hardly a lefty firebrand, looked at the evidence in front of him and concluded that the Trump administration is using the machinery of the state to punish speech it doesn’t like.

“I find it breathtaking,” Young said, that he was forced to conclude that “high-level officers of our government — cabinet secretaries — [were] conspiring to infringe the First Amendment rights of people with such rights here in the United States.”

Young was presiding over a case involving the arrest and threatened deportation of non-citizen college students and scholars who spoke out on Palestine. What troubled him wasn’t just the individual cases, but the pattern. The brown-nosers around Trump, he said (without using that word), appeared to be deliberately chilling dissent by turning immigration enforcement into a political weapon.

“The record in this case convinces me,” Young said, “that these high officials — and I include the president of the United States — have a fearful view of freedom. A view that defines the freedom here in the United States by who’s excluded.” In other words, free speech for those who agree with Trump, Miller, Vance, Noem, et al, but fear, harassment, and punishment for those who don’t.

Then Young went farther, in a way judges almost never do. He openly described Trump’s governing style as authoritarian: “It’s fairly clear that this president believes, as an authoritarian, that when he speaks, everyone — everyone in Article II — is going to toe the line absolutely.”

When a Reagan judge with impeccable conservative credentials and four decades on the bench is sounding alarms about authoritarianism and the collapse of First Amendment norms, it’s not partisan noise. It’s a warning flare shot up into the night. But, of course, the Trump regime doesn’t care about norms or the Constitution. And if what’s going on isn’t clear enough, Steven Miller posted last night about Minneapolis: “Local and state police have been ordered to stand down and surrender.”

I spent decades doing international relief work in some of the worst places on the planet. I’ve had government soldiers threaten my life, police put automatic weapons in my face, and government ministers on three continents solicit bribes from me and my organization.

I’ve met with political prisoners and families whose members were murdered by the state for simply having the wrong political view. I’ve held children as they stopped breathing from starvation and had an aid worker shot to death in front of me.

This is the road to third-world-style-governance that our corrupt felon of a president has put America on. He justifies the execution of Renee Good in Minneapolis, sets his rabid mobs on judges who don’t rule the way he wants, intimidates reporters and sues news outlets to shut them up, and is now threatening to deploy the full force of the federal government to silence dissent, criminalize protest, and punish individual speech he finds inconvenient.

He’s destroying our European alliance to the benefit of his friend and mentor Vladimir Putin, writing to the Norwegian Prime Minister as if Trump alone can determine American foreign policy like some sort of emperor or America’s mad king: “Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace…”

He’s dragging this country step by step toward the sort of strongman state like the ones I used to work in, where loyalty matters more than the law and fear crowds out personal freedom. He’s overseeing a rapid and radical transformation of America from a democratic republic into a strongman oligarchy where billionaires like him, Musk, the 13 billionaires in his cabinet, and the 140 billionaires who supported him in 2024 run the show.

He’s turned America into an oligarchy, in other words. Rich people buy pardons, corporations buy regulations and subsidies they want, and average people are screwed, particularly if they complain too loudly. But history teaches us that oligarchies are unstable systems of government.

They typically either collapse from their own internal rot (as happened here in 1932 when the Republican Great Depression brought down the oligarchs of the Roaring Twenties) or get overthrown by their own people (as happened here in the 1860s when the fascist Confederate system that had taken over the Old South was destroyed by the Civil War).

And when oligarchies don’t collapse or get overthrown, they morph into tyranny; usually that happens within a single generation.

That’s what happened in Russia. It went from the chaos of the 1990s oligarchy to Putin’s authoritarian state in less than twenty years. It’s also what happened in Hungary, where Viktor Orbán took a newly liberated democracy and turned it into an authoritarian state in less than a decade. It’s also what’s happening right now in Turkey, the Philippines, Brazil, India, and multiple other countries around the world.

Tyranny doesn’t typically pop up fully formed and all at once. It comes incrementally, moving step by inexorable step, until it hits a tipping point where it can no longer be stopped. Even days before that tipping point is reached, most people still think the system will correct itself, that once everyone figures out what’s happening, things will go back to normal. They’re almost always wrong.

America is now in that dangerous zone between oligarchy and tyranny. Because of the corrupt Supreme Court Citizens United decision and its 1978 parent Bellotti, our nation’s oligarchs have controlled our politics for a solid forty years.

They own the media, have captured the courts, and have bought most of Congress. The question for today is whether they’ll be satisfied with their comfortable oligarchy or whether they’ll join Donald Trump’s and the GOP’s push for America’s final transition to outright dictatorship.

Steve Bannon told us what the goal was: “Deconstruct the administrative state.” That’s tyrant-speak for dismantling the institutions that might dare or have the ability to constrain oligarchic power.

As a result, we’re in a race against time and the window for successful action is narrowing. Every week that the Trump regime isn’t seriously challenged in the states, courts, the press, or at the ballot box, America’s oligarchs tighten their grip. Every election they buy makes the next election easier to purchase. Every judge they install makes the next judge easier to intimidate or buy off.

This isn’t alarmism: it’s the historical pattern, repeated across dozens of countries and thousands of years. I’ve seen it, repeatedly, with my own eyes. Oligarchies either collapse or they become tyrannies; there’s no third option.

Thus, the only real question now is whether enough of us will recognize what’s happening while there’s still time to stop it. Republics like ours die — like Russia and Hungary did — when ordinary people convince themselves that the warning signs aren’t real. At least until the knock on the door comes for them. And then, of course, it’s too late…

Louise’s Daily Song: “A Fearful View of Freedom”

Listen now · 3:09

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Ozymandias

 

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Aug. 4, 1792 – July 8, 1822)

                       

Rejecting U.S. Claim to Greenland

 

It’s not often that Europe speaks with one voice – or responds with such urgency. But US President Donald Trump’s announcement Saturday of sanctions against several European countries that reject any US claim to Greenland, a Danish territory, was one of those moments.

EU ambassadors are holding an emergency meeting in Brussels on Sunday in response to Trump’s threat, which he made after an estimated quarter of the population of Greenland’s capital Nuuk joined protests against any potential annexation.

Across the continent, among allies that usually tread carefully in responding to utterances from the White House, the response was immediate and emphatic, and recognized an existential threat to the transatlantic alliance.

French President Emmanuel Macron, who has tried to cultivate a good personal relationship with Trump, led the charge – describing the threat of tariffs as “unacceptable.”

“No intimidation or threat will influence us – neither in Ukraine, nor in Greenland, nor anywhere else in the world when we are confronted with such situations,” he said on X. “Europeans will respond in a united and coordinated manner should they be confirmed. We will ensure that European sovereignty is upheld.”

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer chimed in, saying in a statement that “applying tariffs on allies for pursuing the collective security of NATO allies is completely wrong.” Even Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has typically had positive relations with the US President, described the move as an “error” in a handout video from a state visit to South Korea.

Revealing she had already had a phone conversation with Trump, Meloni said she “doesn’t agree” with the idea of imposing tariffs against countries that contribute to Greenland’s security. Eight European countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany and France, issued a joint statement Sunday saying that, “tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral. We will continue to stand united and coordinated in our response.”

Trump, in a lengthy social media post Saturday, said the United States needed possession of Greenland to counter Chinese and Russian threats in the Arctic and develop what he has called the Golden Dome to protect North America from ballistic missiles.

Experts say that the US does not need to own Greenland for the Dome to be effective, thanks to a 1951 agreement that gives the US the right to build defense facilities on the island. The Pituffik Space Base, which US Vice President JD Vance visited last March, is focused on missile warning, space surveillance, and satellite command and control missions.

European politicians said Trump’s unilateralism over Greenland, and his treatment of long-standing allies, was playing into Moscow and Beijing’s hands. “China and Russia must be having a field day. They are the ones who benefit from divisions among allies,” said EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez took a similar line. In an interview with Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, he said any military action ‍by the U.S. against Denmark’s vast Arctic Island would damage NATO and delight Russian President Vladimir Putin.

It would make Putin “the happiest man in the world. Why? Because it would legitimize his attempted invasion of Ukraine,” he said. “If the United States were to use force, it would be the death knell for NATO. Putin would be doubly happy,” Sanchez warned.

“The measures against NATO allies announced today will not help in ensuring security in the Arctic,” said the President of the European Parliament, Roberta Metsola on X. “They risk the opposite, emboldening our joint enemies and those who wish to destroy our common values and way of life.”

One casualty of the tariff threat may be the US-EU trade deal agreed last year, which the European Parliament was set to debate this week. The leader of the largest group in the assembly, Manfred Weber, said on X that “given Donald Trump’s threats regarding Greenland, approval is not possible at this stage.”

There have been plenty of occasions during both Trump administrations that European governments have reeled in shock at the rhetoric from the White House and then embarked on careful damage limitation. But many Europeans recognize in the second Trump administration a far more strident tone, beginning when Vance excoriated Europe as woke, soft on immigration and anti-democratic in a speech at the Munich Security Conference last February.

Trump’s National Security Strategy in November doubled down on the scorn. “It is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies” two decades from now, it said. The document sneered at what it called the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” in Europe, claiming “censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”

And earlier this month, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper, “We live in a world, in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”

“For the United States to secure the Arctic region, to protect and defend NATO and NATO interests, obviously, Greenland should be part of the United States,” Miller added. Essentially, in this White House, a strong transatlantic relationship is no longer thought critical to US national security or its dominance of the Western hemisphere. But strong words from the capitals of Europe are just that: The challenge is to build greater self-reliance in defense and security, a process that takes decades rather than months.

In the meantime, some may recall then UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s exasperation over the planning for D-Day, the operation that would liberate Western Europe from Nazi Germany. “There is only one thing worse than fighting with allies, and that is fighting without them,” Churchill said later.

Analysis by Tim Lister, CNN

 

"Much to his credit, Aaron James pointed this out..."

Almost everyone now knows that Donald Trump is an asshole. Much to his credit, Aaron James pointed this out in Assholes: A Theory (Anchor Books 2012) well before Trump took center stage in American politics. In his new book, James sets out to develop this idea in greater detail. According to the back cover, the book does not ask whether Trump is an asshole. This much is assumed. Instead, it raises the further question: What sort of asshole is Trump? As such, the book is presented as a contribution to what the author calls “assholeology”.

Readers will quickly learn that the book covers much more than this. Only the introduction and the first chapter are, properly speaking, exercises in assholeology. Even the first chapter, “The Ass-Clown and Asshole”, is more about offering a general theory of Trump’s person than a strict examination of his assholery, and the final three chapters not only ask whether having an asshole like Trump for president is a “sound proposition”, they also point to the larger problem of what James calls “asshole political capitalism”.

James begins the work by recapping the definition of the asshole he developed in his first book. On this view, the asshole has three essential features: First, he – James notes that assholes are mostly men – “allows himself special advantages in social relationships in a systematic way”; second, he is “motivated by an entrenched (and mistaken) sense of entitlement”; and third, he is “immunized against the complaints of other people”. 

Although James presents these as three separate yet equal features of the asshole, the entrenched sense of entitlement seems to be the causal mechanism behind the asshole’s systematic privileging of himself as well as his immunity to the criticisms of others. So understood, an asshole might simply be someone with an entrenched sense of entitlement.

James claims that Trump is – like Ted Cruz – an asshole in this sense, but “being an assclown is Trump’s distinctive style of assholery”. According to James, the assclown “is someone who seeks an audience’s attention and enjoyment while being slow to understand how it views him”. Much like a man who chases women to flatter his own ego, Trump chases the electorate “to affirm his worth by being seen as powerful, the center of attention”. To win the affections of this lover, Trump must become a showman. Like a clown, he seeks to entertain, but like an ass, Trump fails to understand that he is the clown. For these reasons, James classifies Trump as an assclown.

Although there are good reasons for thinking that Trump is an asshole so defined, two aspects of James’ analysis seem to conflict with this generally agreed upon premise. First, despite the common term “ass”, assclowns and assholes appear to be distinct and mutually exclusive types. Whereas the asshole’s immunity to criticism implies that he has little concern for the opinion of others, the assclown seeks the affection of others and so seems to lack the asshole’s innate sense that he is something special. 

Second, James eventually backpedals on his promise – implicit in the title – to offer “a theory of Donald Trump”. Because Trump is so many things – showman, bullshitter, racist, sexist, civically oblivious, authoritarian, demagogue – James concludes that there is no “real” Trump. But if there is no “real” Trump, Trump cannot really be an asshole. In contrast, the various aspects of Trump’s person that James identifies seem to be explained by a single fact: he really is an asshole!

Chapter two, “A Force for Good?”, raises the question of whether an asshole like Trump is really good for our democracy, and James presents the interesting thesis that many value Trump as an über-asshole capable of managing all the other assholes – like Ted Cruz and Chris Christie – that inhabit the political sphere. Nevertheless, James proceeds to claim in chapter three, “The Strongman”, that an asshole president “will only further unravel the soft fabric of cooperation upon which our experiment is premised”, and he devotes the final chapter, “Saving the Marriage”, to exploring ways that we might rescue our democracy from the proliferation of assholes.

There is much in James’ work that will interest the philosophically inclined reader, and he should be applauded for bringing philosophical theories to bear directly on contemporary issues. However, readers may question some of the specific moves James makes along the way. For instance, he often appeals to Hobbes and Rousseau to unpack a number of his ideas but in ways that do not always fit his argument. 

On the one hand, James claims that the aforementioned “strategy of asshole management” can be traced back to Hobbes. However, there seems to be an important difference between a proto-fascist über-asshole and Hobbes’ absolute sovereign: whereas the former rises to power by crushing opposition and promising benefits to a certain in-group of supporters at the expense of others, the latter is largely established through a consensual and mutual transfer of rights for the benefit of all.

On the other hand, James’ claim that the asshole suffers from an inflamed sense of Rousseau’s amour-propre seems to be misguided. Whereas amour-propre instils in us a burning desire to appear well and be regarded as superior in the eyes of others, the asshole, again, is not particularly concerned with how others regard him. This is because he recognizes himself as superior and treats others accordingly. If anyone suffers from amour-propre in James’ analysis, it seems to be the non-asshole who resents the way in which the asshole refuses to recognize him or her as a person worthy of equal respect.

In the end, there is much to be said for a central thesis that runs throughout the final chapters of James’ work: the ethos of capitalism breeds a culture of assholes that, in turn, threatens the moral and social fabric essential to a healthy democracy and a well-functioning economy. Nevertheless, Assholes: A Theory of Donald Trump is a work written quickly for a popular audience in response to current events, and so the aforementioned thesis deserves more serious reflection than this book provides. 

Although James covers some of this ground in his first book and I encourage interested readers to consult it, the history of philosophy may have more to say about the asshole than James’ writings thus far suggest. Critical treatments of asshole-like psychologies by Plato – the tyrant of Republic IX – and Aristotle – improper self-love in the Nicomachean Ethics – as well as arguably more positive assessments by Hume – “Greatness of Mind” in A Treatise of Human Nature – and Nietzsche – the “nobles” of the first essay of On the Genealogy of Morality – immediately come to mind, and we would do well to turn to these resources in thinking about assholes more generally and the ever-increasing threat that one particular asshole poses to our democracy.

The rise of the American asshole is a serious issue, and we should not only thank James for drawing our attention to it but also hope that his most recent work stimulates further conversation among both philosophers and the broader public alike.

Matthew Meyer is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Scranton. He is the author of the recently published Reading Niezsche Through The Ancients (de Gruyter).

 

Last Week in Ukraine

 

 

Last week brought renewed attacks, widespread power outages, and harsh winter conditions; yet Ukraine continues to resist and push for a just and lasting peace. 🔥 Attacks on Energy & Civilian Infrastructure Russia launched another wave of missile and drone strikes across Ukraine, deliberately targeting power plants, substations, and civilian areas. Entire neighborhoods were left without electricity, heating, or water as temperatures dropped. Families sheltered in the dark, relying on generators and community aid to stay warm. Once again, civilians are paying the price for a war they did not choose. ✈️ Ukraine Pushes Back — Strategic Pressure Intensifies Despite these challenges, Ukrainian forces carried out precise strikes against key Russian military assets, including airfields, logistics hubs, and energy-related infrastructure used to support the war effort, both in occupied territories and deep inside Russia. These operations aim to weaken Russia’s ability to continue large-scale attacks. 🕊️ Diplomacy & the Path to Peace President Volodymyr Zelenskyy continued to press Ukraine’s Peace Formula on the global stage, emphasizing territorial integrity, accountability for war crimes, food and energy security, and firm guarantees against future aggression. Ukraine remains steadfast: peace is possible, but only if it is just, lasting, and rooted in international law. Thank you for standing with Ukraine, friends. Your support truly matters. Slava Ukraini 💙💛 Support Ukraine-Support Freedom T-Shirt | Ukrainian Apparel

The Absurdity and Barbarity of the “Immigration Debate”: Breaking Free of the “Colonial Framework”

Andrew Jackson led armed forces into what is now Alabama on a homicidal mission against Creek Indians. Refusing to discriminate between the armed and helpless; men and women; adults and children, his agents of genocide murdered eight hundred Indigenous people. It was such a “successful” attack that Jackson feared his military superiors would not trust the veracity of his account. Given the mores and incentives of prevailing US culture ,they would assume that he was exaggerating to receive promotion, accolades, and other professional benefits.

To gather evidence, he had his men slice off the noses of each fatality, and place them in handmade wicker baskets that, in an act of grave robbery, they stole from the villages of the murdered Natives. Jackson would later receive the award of becoming president. The US celebrates and honors his legacy with the placement of his face on the twenty-dollar bill; currency functioning, without intention, as a nifty metaphor for the dark side of American “progress” and affluence.

A portrait of Jackson’s face also adorns a wall in the Oval Office, where Donald Trump, while claiming to advance the legacy of his “populist” predecessor, decides what cities to strike with his secret police force, what immigrants to accost, abuse, and assign to overseas torture chambers, and what excuses to offer, no matter how flimsy, for the cold-blooded execution of American citizens in the middle of residential streets.

Jackson’s war crimes amount to a straw of hay in a haystack. Through a series of official massacres, the awarding of lucrative bounties for private killers responsible for the deaths of Indigenous people, and forced removal programs, most infamously the “Trail of Tears” on which 16,000 Natives died due to starvation, freezing conditions, and preventable diseases, the US, a nation no small amount of patriotic politicians and academics tell us was founded on the ideals of freedom and equality, eliminated 96 percent of the Native population, while confiscating 98 percent of their ancestral lands.

These lands included most of the minerals and resources, from fertile ground for agriculture to timber, and eventually, natural gas and oil, that allowed the US to become the wealthiest nation since the fall of the Roman Empire. Of crucial significance is the Indigenous land that settlers would transform into cotton plantations, making viable the entire system of chattel slavery for Africans.

Like a pack of wolves tearing into the flesh of mutilated deer, the US appetite for expansion was ravenous, its thirst for the spoils of bloody conquest unquenchable. From 1846 to 1848, the US fought a war with Mexico, declaring that it had a God-given right to their land. Not bothering to obtain notarization from the office of real estate in Heaven, American forces invaded Mexico, treating the people who had already lived there as brush to clear on a ranch. 

The result of the “Manifest Destiny” policy of invasion was Mexico’s cessation of what the world now calls Texas, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, and the southern part of California. Novelist Carlos Fuentes referred to the borderline between Mexico and the US as a “scar.” Immigration activists have often said, “We didn’t cross the border. The border crossed us.”

There is a word that applies to the US slaughter of the indigenous population, the expropriation of natural resources, and the violent theft of land from its neighbor to the south: colonialism. This is also the word missing from the immigration “debate” in current US discourse. Its absence renders said debate as absurd, degrading it from an opportunity for clarity, edification, and leadership into insipid chatter for officials and pundits who take for granted that the white figures of authority who inherited the benefits and advantages of the colonial system have the right to impose their will on any given situation, no matter the human costs or social consequences.

The willful failure to acknowledge the legacy and influence of colonialism creates a culture that functions according to the colonial mindset. One of the main features of this mentality is suspicion, if not outright contempt, for the population caught in the crosshairs. They are the problem, not the men or the system aiming the weapon.

And so, we arrive at the hideous point of escalation when an agency founded as recently as 2003 under the name, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, has murdered an American citizen in broad daylight. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, attempted to steer her vehicle away from an ICE checkpoint, not unlike the stations of armed interrogation in occupied cities of war, when a masked ICE officer fired three bullets directly into her vehicle.

If the Trump administration did not order ICE to patrol, raid, and terrorize Minneapolis, the city where the shooting occurred, Renee Good would be alive. Blaming individuals, no matter how psychopathic, misses the point, but in case anyone was prepared to resort to the “bad apple” theory, the vice president of the United States, JD Vance put that notion to rest. Standing at a podium in the White House, like a vampire whose eyeliner protects him from the sun, he said, “The precedent here is very simple. You have a federal law enforcement official engaging in federal law enforcement action. That’s a federal issue. That guy is protected by absolute immunity.”

Acting and retired prosecutors, as well as legal scholars, have rejected Vance’s “absolute immunity claim.” Legalities aside, Vance’s heartless assertion is politically useful, as it concedes governmental responsibility for Good’s death. Her murder wasn’t merely the act of a rogue agent, but the predictable consequence and logical endpoint of official US policy. Vance requested prayers for the killer, but not the victim’s family.

The victim, like the millions of Indigenous people before her, the Mexican fatalities of the Mexican-American war, and immigrants who ICE separates from their families, assaults, and intimidates, are not human beings. They are colonial subjects, whose removal, as in the Indian Removal Act that led to the “Trail of Tears,” and exclusion, as in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which codified oppressive measures against Chinese immigrants, is essential to the maintenance of colonial society.

Renee Good was white, but her shared identity with the dominant culture did not provide her with any protection. Like the white allies who police beat nearly to death at Selma, she had crossed over to the other side, becoming a traitor to her race and class. After receiving training as an ICE observer through her aptly named church, St. Joan of Arc, she pledged solidarity with immigrants, vowing to use the agency of her citizenship to monitor, and to the extent that it was possible, mitigate the destructive immigration policies of US power. One protestor in Minneapolis asked on television, “If they killed a white woman in front of witnesses, how are they treating Black and brown people behind closed doors?”

She could find the answer to her question in Louisiana, where thousands of former detainees of ICE detention centers have spoken to journalists, the ACLU, and the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Center about widespread physical abuse, sexual harassment and assault, medical neglect, and arbitrary and retaliatory solitary confinement. Inhumane conditions include cockroach-infested food, filthy drinking water, lack of feminine hygiene products, and the use of painful shackles.

ICE sadists target women for the worst forms of violence and humiliation, advancing the colonial tradition of reserving particularly intense hatred for those who bear and most often nurture children, and therefore, protect and promote the future of their people. 

Beginning in the 1920s and extending through the 1970s (not exactly ancient history), federal and state programs across the US sterilized Black, Latina, and Indigenous women, either through force or without their consent during other surgical procedures.

As many as 150,000 women, according to documentation obtained through a federal lawsuit, were victims of genocidal eugenics. Outside the continental United States, American officials enhanced its imperial relationship with Puerto Rico by sterilizing nearly one third of Puerto Rican women between the ages of 20 and 49. The program persisted into the 1960s. Depriving despised women of the ability to conceive children became so common that Fannie Lou Hamer, herself a victim of involuntary sterilization, referred to it as “the Mississippi appendectomy.”

The first words that the ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Good spoke after observing her vehicle crash into a telephone pole were, “fucking bitch.” The derogation is an echo from the killing fields of Indigenous land, the Trail of Tears, and the operating rooms where thousands of women, under anesthesia and unable to speak, suffered the theft of their potential for motherhood.

The mainstream media’s indifference to the Louisiana story, along with the general public’s relative silence in the face of daily ICE actions against Latino immigrants, provokes the painful, but necessary inquiry into the morality and priorities of the American people. Vance’s admission of federal responsibility for Renee Good’s murder reflects onto the citizenry. Despite the Trump regime’s best efforts, the US is still a democracy. As a result, the people, or “demos,” are culpable in Good’s murder, ICE’s systemic abuse of detainees, and the ongoing violation of human rights from border to border.

Camilo Pérez-Bustillo, a law professor and member of the leadership team at Witness at the Border, an immigrant advocacy and ICE-tracking organization, has dedicated his life to the cultivation of solidarity, anti-racist organization, and the elevation of consciousness within a dormant democracy. When I spoke to Pérez-Bustillo, he said, “Colonialism and imperialism provide a useful framework for connecting what is happening in Minneapolis, other cities, Venezuela, and at the border. It is not only theoretical or rhetorical. It is also concrete and material.”

“The poison of rhetoric from the White House,” as Pérez-Bustillo calls it, is intended to “not only dehumanize Renee Nicole Good, but also demonize and criminalize what she represents.” Through his work and connections with Witness at the Border, Pérez-Bustillo was able to confirm that Good received training as a “legal ICE observer.” To disparage such civil and lawful activism as “domestic terrorism,” as Vance has done repeatedly, is to spotlight that Good enrolled into the resistance against, to use Pérez-Bustillo’s words, “the colonial occupation of American cities.”

“To understand the deployment of ICE as an occupational force in our communities is the same way that the Black Panthers understood white police in Black neighborhoods,” Pérez-Bustillo said. He then referred to the civil rights movement more broadly, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King’s Riverside Church address against the Vietnam War: “The bombs that fall in Vietnam explode at home.”

In a rhythmic reprise of the late 1960s, the Trump regime’s imperial incursion into Venezuela, murder of 40 Venezuelans in their capture of Nicolás Maduro and promise to expropriate the country’s oil forms of a figure eight knot with the domestic war against immigrants of color. The white nationalist obsession with countering an increasingly multicultural American demography, in which whites have become a minority in many cities and several states, harmonizes with the Trump administration aim to establish hemispheric dominance through the installation of right-wing governments in South America.

The “Donroe Doctrine,” as Trump calls it to remind everyone that the malevolence of modern fascism is on par with its stupidity, is a more aggressive and brazen iteration of Ronald Reagan’s murderous interventions in Latin America, Bush the elder’s capture of Noriega in Nicaragua, and W. Bush’s attempted coup in Venezuela.

If Donald Trump is fentanyl to the body politic, there were plenty of gateway drugs. Perhaps there is no issue on which the inducement of psychosis that functions as US politics is more destructive than immigration. 

Through a series of military aggressions, typically producing high death counts, ruination of local economic orders, and termination of homegrown political movements, the US created the very conditions that birthed the so-called “migrant crisis” of mass immigration across the southern border.

To maintain economic domination and political influence in the region, the US toppled governments in Guatemala, Chile, Nicaragua, and Ecuador. With subterfuge and subversion, often using tactics of violence, the US has also “intervened” in the affairs of El Salvador, Panama, and the Dominican Republic, while the CIA, with Operation CHAOS, undermined several political independence movements in Puerto Rico.

Add exploitative “trade deals,” and it becomes clear that many of the Latino immigrants to the US are merely following their wealth in search of the freedom that colonial forces on the ground in their own countries had obliterated. When they arrive, they can find employment with a multinational corporation, performing backbreaking and unsanitary labor for miserly wages, then contend with a political movement that targets them for hate crimes and harassment.

To underline the racist intent of the Trump regime, and to trace a clear connection between the colonial founding of the US and present-day policy, ICE recently detained five Native Americans in Minneapolis. Agents also tried to gain entry to Little Earth, an urban Native housing project. This is the equivalent of a cat burglar calling the police to arrest the residents of the house he plans to rob.

Camilo Pérez-Bustillo makes it clear that it is only an escape from the “colonial framework” that will emancipate the US from its cycle of violence and generate a genuine transformation in political policy and morality. The inability to break free of the ideological restrains of the colonial mentality explains why, according to Pérez-Bustillo, nearly everyone across the mainstream political spectrum “concedes that undocumented immigrants, or at least many of them, constitute a threat to the United States, and concedes the necessity of militarization of the border.”

“A decolonial framework can liberate us from the limits of our discourse,” Pérez-Bustillo said. As ICE spreads terror in American cities, with tactics that now include homicide, it is helpful to remember that “Abolish ICE” was once a popular slogan and movement on the left. All Republicans and most Democrats treated the position as it was a manifesto for the demolition of indoor plumbing…

As millions of people struggle for freedom and self-determination, they await an extinction event for colonialism. The murder of Renee Nicole Good, like the deaths of immigrants whose names the powerful never even utter, becomes yet another tragic means of marking the time until there is transformation of our political ecology. It is a transformation that depends upon the propulsion of mourning; the alchemy of pain into action.

For the entire essay: The Absurdity and Barbarity of the “Immigration Debate”: Breaking Free of the “Colonial Framework” - CounterPunch.org

This essay also ran on the author’s Substack, Absurdia Now. 

-David Masciotra is the author of six books, including Exurbia Now: The Battleground of American Democracy and I Am Somebody: Why Jesse Jackson Matters. He has written for the Progressive, New Republic, Liberties, and many other publications about politics, literature, and music. His Substack is Absurdia Now.