Trump’s hyper-imperialism

 

Donald Trump’s rhetoric and actions against Iran, Venezuela and Cuba over the last year have few parallels in modern history. They have to be seen as marking a new stage. As such they call for a reevaluation of analysis and strategy on the part of the Left.

Trump’s repeated threat to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages where they belong” is unmatched by the rhetoric of even the most notorious and brutal heads of state over the recent past. Decapitating the entire leadership of a country to compel total submission, as Washington and Tel Aviv have done in Iran, is also a novelty in war strategy. 

The kidnapping of Venezuela’s president and First Lady as a first step in attempting to establish a colonial relationship by taking complete control of the country’s principal source of revenue, namely petroleum, represents a throwback to practices associated with centuries-old imperial rule

These are examples of “hyper-imperialism,” a concept theorized by Samir Amin to describe the United States “as the sole capitalist superpower.” More recently, the Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research has observed that U.S. hyper-imperialism persists despite a marked erosion of its economic and, though to a lesser extent, financial power. Its military supremacy is not only unrivaled, but is complemented by hybrid warfare, most notably “hyper-sanctions” and the use of lawfare.

What needs to be added to the concept of hyper-imperialism, particularly Trump’s version of it, is its sui generis nature. To find a parallel for the kind of hegemony the United States now exercises – highlighted by the continuous indiscriminate use of force and the threat of it – one would have to look back to the Roman empire or even earlier. 

One of Trump’s innovations is his deployment of the military to reinforce the system of economic sanctions, examples being the interdiction of oil tankers, the quarantine of Cuban oil, and full-scale war against Iran.

Trump II’s foreign policy hardly represents a complete break from the past. The groundwork was laid by past Democratic and Republican administrations. However, his actions force the Left not only to reformulate strategies, but to reconsider past evaluations and analyses of nations of the Global South subjected to extreme forms of imperialist aggression. 

The resistance to U.S. aggression must be given greater weight when evaluating governments. In addition, the popular desperation and exhaustion that erode revolutionary fervor and distance people from those same governments should be understood in light of the daily trauma people endure as a direct result of imperialist actions.

What Trump’s hyper-imperialism tells us

The starting point is to recognize that since Trump’s return to the White House, Iran, Venezuela and Cuba have been in a de facto state of war, which is an escalation of the multiple forms of hostility and aggression of past years. This is key to how all three nations should be judged. While the Left’s commitment to democracy needs to remain unquestionable and unwavering, in these cases primary responsibility for democracy’s somewhat uncertain prospects lies with the siege imposed by imperialist powers. No one other than James Madison said “Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded.”

The encirclement imposed by hyper-imperialism on Iran, Cuba, and Venezuela illuminates salient features of imperialism going back in time: first, Washington has honed the sanctions regime into a powerful tool, sometimes inflicting damage comparable to armed intervention; second, imperialism is the principal driver of the pressing economic problems facing the three nations; third, the justification for the actions taken against the three nations does not hold up under scrutiny; and fourth the brutality of the sanctions system underscores the need for its complete elimination. The discussion below looks at these points.

Tehran’s response to Operation Epic Fury underscores the crushing impact of sanctions. The nation’s leaders have made clear that the lifting of sanctions – as well as “international guarantees of U.S. non-interference” in the nation’s internal affairs – is a non-negotiable condition for ending the current conflict. That is to say, the Iranian leaders place the destruction caused by the sanctions on a similar footing as the bombs.

In the case of Venezuela, the events leading up to the abduction of Nicolás Maduro and Cilia Flores on January 3, 2026, reveal the far-reaching and highly coordinated machinery underpinning the sanctions regime. The second Trump administration’s tracking of the “ghost fleet” carrying Venezuela’s sanctioned oil—and its interdiction of several of those vessels— underscores how far Washington has gone in perfecting sanctions enforcement since the early years of the Cuban Revolution.

The first Trump administration pioneered in promoting “overcompliance” in which Washington’s well-publicized monitoring was designed to assure that companies and financial institutions world-wide would shun all transactions with Venezuela, even ones not specifically targeted by the sanctions. 

The aim was to impose a veritable blockade. Mike Pompeyo and Elliot Abrams spearheaded a campaign – drawing on the FBI, the Treasury, U.S. embassies, and the intelligence community – to scrutinize the dealings of companies worldwide with Venezuela, in what amounted to a warning shot to companies throughout the world. Even firms that engaged in oil-for-food swaps, which were not proscribed by the sanction regime, were warned that they ran risks. Companies under investigation were likewise told that penalties could be suspended if they halted all dealings with Venezuela.

A retrospective look at the first Trump administration’s sweeping enforcement measures and their devastating impact reinforces the argument that the sanctions have been so harmful that they need to be dismantled unconditionally and entirely. This position contrasts with that of liberals such as the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA), which criticized the sanctions against Venezuela yet called for using “negotiations to flexible financial and oil sanctions” as leverage to secure concessions. Indeed, power brokers in Washington also favored sanctions relief as a bargaining tool to push the Maduro government to enact market-oriented reforms to the benefit of U.S. capital.

A full grasp of the scale and severity of Washington’s “war” on Venezuela undercuts the notion upheld by some on the left who argue that the sanctions were no more to blame for the nation’s pressing problems than government mismanagement. An even harsher position on the left affirms that the sanctions “do not explain the root causes of the societal collapse we have lived through.”

Likewise, the forcible removal of Maduro and Flores demonstrates that Washington was intent on dismantling a government whose example and policies ran counter to U.S. interests. Prior to the January 3 kidnapping, some on the left in Venezuela and elsewhere denied that Washington sought to remove Maduro from power because they were convinced that he had effectively sold out. 

But they were wrong insofar as Washington clearly wanted Maduro out. Pedro Eusse, a leading member of the Communist Party of Venezuela (PCV), which broke with the Maduro government in 2020, wrote in July 2025, “Everything indicates that the true intention of the US and its allies’ policy of aggression toward the Venezuelan government has not been its overthrow, but its subordination.”

In the case of Cuba, the extreme measures of the Trump II administration against the nation also shine light on the cruelty and effectiveness of the system of sanctions per se. Trump’s navy-enforced quarantine on oil shipments is a first for the nation since the October 1962 missile crisis. The result has been recurring 16-hour blackouts that have disrupted water delivery, hospital operations, food production, and garbage collection.

The quarantine spotlights Cuba’s near total dependence on oil, in contrast to nearby Jamaica and the Dominican Republic, which generate a significant share of their electricity from coal and natural gas. The dependence stems precisely from the sanctions, which impeded imports and pushed Cuba into relying almost entirely on Venezuelan oil—only for Trump to cut off that supply too.

Indeed, the quarantine underscores Cuba’s reliance on Venezuelan oil and the reciprocal solidarity that saw fuel exchanged for Cuban medical personnel. That’s a plus for Maduro. The program undercuts the claim of some on the left that Maduro’s foreign policy, in the words of the PCV, never moved beyond an “anti-imperialist rhetoric” without substance.

The Washington-crafted narrative on Cuba and the reaction to it by the mainstream media and the Left are curious. In contrast to the demonization directed at Venezuela and Iran, Washington’s condemnation of Cuba has been relatively hollow and has gained little traction in mainstream outlets or left-leaning circles. The anti-Cuba vilification—driven by hardline anti-Communism—remains largely confined to the far right, epi-centered in Miami. 

The official rhetoric is a departure from the wording in 1982 when the State Department designated Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism due to “its long history of providing advice, safe haven, communications, training, and financial support to guerrilla groups and individual terrorists.” Now the Trump administration’s justification for the same designation is that the Cuban government grants “safe harbor to terrorists” and refuses to extradite them.

As false as the narco-terrorism case against Maduro is, it nonetheless offered a rationale that undoubtedly resonated with at least a slice of public opinion. Compare that to Marco Rubio’s line on Cuba which flatly denies the catastrophic effects of the oil quarantine. Rubio claims “we’ve done nothing punitive against the Cuban regime” and adds, the blackouts “have nothing to do with us.” Instead Rubio faults the Cuban leadership on grounds that “they want to control everything.” A classic case of victim-blaming, but with few buying into it. A YouGov survey in March found that only 28 percent of U.S. adults support the U.S.’s blocking of oil shipments to Cuba, as opposed to 46 percent opposed.

In addition, Rubio’s assertion that the only novelty is that Cuba is “not getting free Venezuelan oil anymore” is blatantly fallacious. Rubio is well aware of Venezuela’s swap with Cuba involving the latter’s International Medical Brigades, which maintain a sizeable presence in Venezuela and elsewhere. This is precisely why Rubio has vigorously attempted to sabotage the program throughout the region, unfortunately with a degree of success.

If the oil quarantine demonstrates anything it’s that the hardships facing the Cuban people are rooted in Washington’s war on Cuba, now going on 65 years. Criticism of Cuban government policies, or of socialism itself, comes in a distant second place.

The Trump II disaster should be an eye-opener

Trump’s bullying offensive abroad has fueled mounting opposition to interventionism and has even fostered anti-imperialist sentiment in the United States. Just one week into the 2026 Iranian bombings, 53 percent of the U.S. population opposed the strikes, in sharp contrast to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam, the Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq, which enjoyed large majority support at the outset. That the former editor of The New Republic called the U.S. war on Iran imperialistic is telling. In a New York Times op-ed, Peter Beinart wrote “Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision is imperialism.”

One lesson of recent events is particularly relevant for the Left: the demonization of heads of state is a sine qua non for military intervention. In the case of Iran and Venezuela, the discrediting combines some fact with a large dosage of fake news. In the case of Maduro, the demonization which dates back to shortly after he assumed office in 2013, was taken to higher levels as a result of the controversial presidential election of July 28, 2024, which the opposition claimed was fraudulent. 

Subsequently the corporate media consistently tagged the word “autocrat” and “dictator” onto Maduro’s name. Six months later, Trump was in office and the vilification escalated to a new pitch. Indeed, the branding of Maduro as a narco-terrorist was an indispensable prelude to the bombing of boats in the Caribbean and the subsequent kidnappings – notwithstanding the doubts raised by some media outlets regarding the veracity of the claim.

The takeaway is that the Left needs to distinguish between criticism and demonization and take cognizance of the possible dire consequences of the latter.

The demonization of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and his inner circle also set the stage for imperialist actions, but, of course, his government could not be placed in the same category as those of Cuba and Venezuela. The Iranian government is theocratic, not leftist, and it actively defends patriarchal values. Furthermore, the level of lethal repression unleashed during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests in 2022—and in the demonstrations that erupted beginning late last year—has no parallel in Venezuela or Cuba.

Nevertheless, the U.S.-imposed stranglehold on Iran makes a peaceful path to democratization highly unlikely. Furthermore, as in Venezuela and Cuba, harsh sanctions have been conducive to shadow economies, clientelist networks, and fraudulent dealings, patterns well documented in numerous studies on sanctions throughout the world.

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, a prolific scholar on Iran who is highly critical of the government, told Jacobin “While the Islamic Republic is paranoid, it is also very much under siege from all sides.” He also notes the intrinsic relationship between the sanctions and the nation’s pressing problems: “Sanctions and structural weaknesses of the Iranian economy feed off one another — there’s a symbiotic relationship between them.”

In short, any serious reading of Iran must foreground the role of sanctions—an approach that inevitably tempers the tendency to cast its leadership in purely demonizing terms.

The lessons of July 28, 2024

The issue of the accurateness of the July 28, 2024, election tallies in Venezuela needs to be reframed. Those elections could not have been democratic, regardless of the announced results, because Venezuelan voters had a gun pointed at their heads: reelect Maduro and the sanctions continue; elect an opposition candidate and the sanctions will be lifted.

The overwhelming majority of Venezuelans knew full well what was at stake. Luis Vicente León – the nation’s leading pollster, himself a member of the opposition – reported that 92 percent of the population believed that the sanctions negatively impacted the economy, and most characterized the effect as “very negative.” (The poll puts the lie to the State Department’s repeated claim that the sanctions only harm government officials.)

A similar scenario played out in the Nicaraguan presidential elections of 1990 when opposition candidate Violeta Chamorro upset the Sandinistas in the midst of a devastating, U.S.-promoted civil war. But there was a fundamental difference. Far from demonizing the Sandinistas, Chamorro accepted a power-sharing transition agreement with them. In contrast, for over a decade prior to the July 28 elections the opposition’s main leader, María Corina Machado, had ruled out negotiations with those who had allegedly violated human rights. 

She never tired of voicing the slogans “no immunity, no to amnesty,” “no agreements with criminals,” often with specific reference to the Chavistas and to Maduro himself. Maduro and his followers had every reason to fear the type of repression that the opposition initiated during the two-day abortive coup it staged in April 2002 against the Chavista government. Even opposition pollster León admitted that the fear was well-founded.

Marta Harnecker, the renowned leftist theoretician, wrote that the Sandinistas erred in holding the 1990 elections amid U.S.-promoted violence and sabotage. Harnecker labeled the decision to organize elections “on terrain shaped by the counterrevolution” a “strategic error.”

A reevaluation and reinterpretation of the July 28 elections is instructive. The hard-core Chavistas accept the official results which showed Maduro winning with nearly 52 percent of the vote. The opposition refutes that claim. A third position is defended by supporters of Maduro who nevertheless express skepticism and point out that because of a massive hacking attack from outside the country, it may be impossible to ever know the true count.

The debate about the accuracy of the official results of July 28 sidesteps the overriding issue of whether the elections should have been held in the first place. Indeed, the idea of conditioning elections on the lifting of sanctions was not far-fetched. A year before the elections, Maduro, in a reference to the United States, declared: “If they want free elections, we want elections free of sanctions.” 

Subsequently, Elvis Amoroso, the Chavista head of the nation’s electoral council, tied the participation of European Union electoral observers to its lifting of sanctions. At the same time, the Biden administration indicated its willingness to bargain with the Venezuelan government along those lines.

Carlos Ron, a former vice-minister and currently an analyst for Tricontinental, told me that the Chavista leadership ruled out delaying the elections in order to demonstrate its democratic credentials in the face of the international smear campaign. Ron said “At that moment, greater importance was placed on the need to defend the democratic character of the Bolivarian political process and its continuity, and abide by the Constitution, in the face of imperialist pressures.”

Maduro’s intentions may have been commendable. But the decision overlooked one compelling reason to suspend the electoral process. Tying the holding of elections to the removal of the sanctions would have placed the entire blame for setbacks to democracy where it belonged: U.S. intervention in Venezuela’s internal affairs.

In defense of democracy

As a rule, the Left has always championed the defense of democracy. In this sense, the Left’s vision compares favorably with U.S.-style “liberal democracy,” shaped by the influence of big money and other inherently undemocratic practices such as gerrymandering, the Electoral College and voter suppression.

Historically, however, the Left has faced formidable obstacles on this front. For instance, it has come to power in countries like Russia, China and Cuba that were lacking in democratic tradition. That, however, was the least of the problem. Its main problem has been, and continues to be, imperialist hostility which limits options.

Precisely for that reason, the Left needs to tread cautiously in the way it frames the issue of democracy in nations that are in the crosshairs of imperialism. In the three countries discussed in this article, the Left can’t deny that democracy has been infringed upon. The Maduro government, for instance, stripped the PCV – the country’s oldest political party, forged in a history of militant struggle including two periods of clandestine resistance and armed struggle in the 1950s and 1960s – of its legal status, transferring recognition to a marginal breakaway faction that appropriated its name and symbols.

Nor can it deny that discontent is currently widespread in the three nations, which became most evident in the Iranian “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests and those of the first days of this year. In Cuba and Venezuela, protests reflect widespread disillusionment, even while the mobilizations have been manipulated and financed from abroad.

One troubling sign in Venezuela is that the disturbances have spread out from upper-middle class neighborhoods where they were confined during the 4-month protests (the “guarimba”) of 2014 and, albeit less so, during those of 2017. The two days following the July 28, 2024 elections, for instance, protests were registered in Caracas barrios such as Petare, the city’s largest. Reflecting on the protests, long-standing Caracas resident and international commentator Phil Gunson reported “Petare is a traditionally Chavista zone, but ever since a few years ago, people have been distancing themselves from the government.”

The Left can’t turn its back on this reality. But nor can it join mainstream voices that channel dissatisfaction into blanket vilification of governments under imperial siege. Rather its line has to be basically: “What do you expect!” In the face of hyper-imperialist aggression these countries are at war, figuratively and in some cases literally speaking. Criticism needs to be framed within this context.

Lenin’s concept of democratic centralism – the principle designed to guide the internal workings of his political party – is instructive. In his writing throughout his political career, party democracy remained a constant, but the degree of centralism depended on the political climate in the nation. Along similar lines, the Left’s adherence to democracy can never be minimized. However, valid criticism of undemocratic practices in countries like Venezuela and Cuba in which the Left is in power needs to be viewed as overreactions to imperialist aggression.

In this era of intensified hyper-imperialism, the Left is compelled to stand behind nations like Cuba and Venezuela and recognize that the real blame for backsliding including violation of democratic norms lies with imperialism. The barbaric actions of Trump II are making this imperative clearer than ever.

Steve Ellner is a retired professor of the Universidad de Oriente in Venezuela where he lived for over 40 years and is currently Associate Managing Editor of Latin American Perspectives. He is the author and editor of over a dozen books on Latin American politics and history. In 2018 he spoke in over twenty cities in the U.S. and Canada as part of a Venezuelan solidarity tour.

 

"Like a 12-year-old, he bullies everyone and kicks every can down the road"

 

Presidencies birth their own rhetorical shorthand. Bill Clinton is remembered for the definition of “is.” TV pitchman Donald Trump has given us numerous options, including the current front-runner, “The cruelty is the point.” Years from now, though, I suspect this administration’s lasting phrasal monument will be, “Everyone is 12 now.”

The creator of the “Everyone is 12” theory of Trumpism is the lawyer-musician-podcaster Patrick Cosmos, who described it as an attempt to draw “a unified theory of American reality.” The idea that Donald Trump never mentally developed past age 12 once seemed relatively benign, because childishly rejecting niceties can sound like truth-telling when your opponents are choking in dishonest message-tested cant. But the benign reading is no longer possible.

The idea now works because, like a 12-year-old, he bullies everyone and kicks every can down the road. The easiest way to fix problems you don’t want to fix is just to say that they’re fixed, blame those who notice they’re not and propose an alternative that seems snotty or funny but is also the dumbest thing anyone has ever heard of. Then threaten critics with jail.

This, then, is how you get to hitting Iran with a decapitation strike and hoping that everyone’s so scared of you that they do what you say. Or why it sounds like a good idea to threaten genocide, forget about it, make another threat, forget about it, then make another. We’re going to win the war anyway, because we’re special; we know karate, and our dad works for NASA.

We don’t need our friends, because they’re stupid and losers, but if we lose, it’s because they’re fake friends and didn’t show up. We’re going to make a free-trade club, and they can’t join. “Oh, you’re gonna close the Strait of Hormuz??? Well, I’m also going to close the Strait of Hormuz.”

Like a 12-year-old, he bullies everyone and kicks every can down the road.

The preteen mentality is the one that sees someone who’s been a Catholic for the length of a spa weekend challenge the pope to exegetical combat, then not actually quote anything. It is 100% also how the speaker of the House and VP dismiss the Pope Leo’s criticism of the war in Iran by citing the Catholic “just war theory” without Googling it and noticing that the text indicts them both. 

But 12-year-olds don’t look things up. What they do is be a member of a fundamentalist Christian sect, go to quote a homicidal part of the Bible, whiff and quote “Pulp Fiction.”

The Department of Government Efficiency was a deeply 12-years-old concept. It had to be, as it relied on a chain of assumptions that could only be connected in a preadolescent mind palace. There were trillions lurking in the government that no one noticed, and functions could be cut even when statutorily forbidden. They didn’t give the slightest concern to effects on the economy and state capacity, because children don’t care about that, and someone else gives them shelter.

They never asked if America would save more than it would eventually give up by losing lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit. Most importantly, the only people who could see the secret map to ”National Treasure 3: The Deep-State Vault” were guys with names like “Big Balls” and the designer of the Cybertruck — arguably the most 12-year-old vehicle in automotive history — who thinks the coolest letter in the alphabet is X, who has been pissing his pants on the internet for six years because people stopped complimenting him, and who eventually had to buy a part of it and algorithmically adjust it to make him seem cool.

Even in a functional system, a person who refuses to stop being entitled and intolerable can get away with a lot. Others just assume they’re someone else’s problem; and those other people often just want to give the shrieking brat whatever it wants to go away. It got Trump to the Oval. Imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, it also got an administration and political party whose operating theory is, “What if we made the entire store out of its worst customer?”

It turns out nothing works because everybody’s a jackass with no impulse control. The executive is stuffed with Chan dweebs who daily say something so racist that Trent Lott would have to resign from the Senate 11 more times to proportionally atone for them if he’d said any of them in 2007. The secretary of the Treasury can dismiss rising seas from anthropogenic climate change with, “As we all know, the natural habitat for the Earth is actually water,” because 12-year-olds think other people’s mass deaths or immiseration are stupid and kind of funny, because they have children’s brains. 

A person who refuses to stop being entitled and intolerable can get away with a lot.

Answering grownups’ dumb questions by pretending to be a colossal dunce is funny just as a practice. See also: Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett saying, “Imagine if oil prices start going back down because the [Strait of Hormuz] situation resolves itself somehow, you could be looking at an inflation close to zero. That’s something the Fed needs to pay attention to.” Sure thing, Kev. While we’re at it, we can re-task the Hubble to look for Luke Skywalker’s ship when he comes to Earth to tell you that you’re his hero. Go home and sleep in your race car.

This perpetually preadolescent mentality keeps rolling downhill to the dittoheads, and it’s a killing joke that stands to run for a generation. Cheap gags roll around in the background of everyday and end up at what might as well be murder. 

Somewhere, one of the poorest people you could ever meet in your life is being deported to a country they’ve never been to, because that’s funny if you’re 12. Somewhere, someone in a boat is exploding, because only the president was genius enough to realize that the solution to drug trafficking is bombing it away via a globe-spanning murder spree, because — you guessed it — he’s a fucking child.

The child shall lead them. The Republican Party will be stuck with this mentality for a very long time, and the rest of us may be too. Trump’s term is supposed to end in January 2029, but the Supreme Court has already found that everything the conservative majority wants is legal, and everything their opponents try to do is a crime. You can probably guess what kind of thinking went into that.

-Jeb Lund, Truthdig

 

Insider Trading Suspicions

 

Unusual trading patterns in financial markets have preceded several major announcements by President Donald Trump during his second term, raising questions about potential insider trading.

An examination of market data by the BBC identified consistent spikes in trading activity hours or minutes before Trump made significant market-moving statements on social media or in interviews, and some financial analysts say the pattern bears hallmarks of illegal insider trading, while others contend traders have simply become more adept at anticipating presidential interventions.

In one notable instance on March 9, oil futures traders placed unusually large bets on falling oil prices 47 minutes before Trump told CBS News the Iran conflict was "very complete, pretty much." When the reporter posted the interview on X, oil prices plunged 25 percent, and traders holding those positions profited millions of dollars.

A similar pattern emerged March 23, when oil bets surged 14 minutes before Trump posted about reaching a "complete and total resolution" to hostilities with Iran. Oil prices subsequently dropped 11 percent.

Trading anomalies also preceded Trump's announcement of a 90-day tariff pause on April 9, 2025, when the S&P 500 index jumped 9.5 percent — one of its largest single-day gains since World War II. Contract trading jumped to over 10,000 per minute shortly before the announcement, compared to hundreds earlier that day. Some traders bet over $2 million on stock increases, potentially generating nearly $20 million in profits.

On prediction markets, unusual activity accompanied other major announcements. One Poly-market account called Burdensome-Mix placed $32,500 in bets predicting Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro's ouster by Jan. 31, then won $436,000 when U.S. special forces seized Maduro on Jan. 3. The account subsequently changed its username and stopped betting.

Six Poly-market accounts created in February collectively earned $1.2 million betting on U.S. strikes against Iran by February 28, then largely ceased activity afterward.

The SEC declined to comment on allegations that presidential announcements may have "enriched administration insiders and friends." The White House did not respond to BBC requests for comment. A White House spokesman previously stated that implications of official involvement in insider trading were "baseless and irresponsible."

Legal experts note that proving insider trading remains difficult without identifying information sources. No government officials have been prosecuted under insider trading laws despite the prohibition being extended to federal officials in 2012.

-Travis Gettys, Newsbreak

"We will pay the price for decades for an ignorant, mentally unwell U.S. president’s sabotage of America’s distinctive assets, stupidly abetted by cowardly Republicans"

Trump’s exaggerated, confusing, and downright false remarks about a deal with Iran only underscore the perception of the American president as untrustworthy and chaotic, if not insane. A chief beneficiary of his embarrassing performance, coupled with his bullying, disastrous wars, and mindless tariffs, is China. Since Trump does not understand what makes America so powerful, he cannot comprehend that his actions destroy those advantages, thereby boosting China on the world stage.

Nowhere is Trump’s penchant for self-owns more evident than in his determination to blow up alliances. Long ago, Trump alienated progressive leaders in Europe (e.g. Spain, UK, France), and now has become toxic to ones on the far rightwing. Politico reports that far-right French leader Marine Le Pen warned her party “to keep our distance” from Trump. Ouch. Not even the neo-Nazi AfD party in Germany wants to get too close to him, observing that Vice President JD Vance’s visit “hung like millstones around [the former Hungarian leader’s] neck.”

Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, once Trump’s biggest supporter in the EU, had enough when Trump attacked Pope Leo. “I find President Trump’s words towards the Holy Father unacceptable,” she said in unusually harsh terms. “The Pope is the head of the Catholic Church, and it is right and normal for him to call for peace and to condemn every form of war.” Given that her voters abhor Trump and he has diminished the value of the U.S. as an ally (by launching tariffs, abandoning Ukraine, and cozying up to Russia), her move after losing a recent referendum makes perfect political sense.

The deterioration in U.S. standing with the public in democratic countries, which in turn affects leaders’ decision-making, is breathtaking. When Politico pollsters asked if China or the U.S. was a more reliable partner, “57 percent of Canadians, 40 percent of Germans, and 42 percent of Britons said China — a sharp decline in America’s perceived trustworthiness,” Robert Kagan wrote recently. “In the past, America’s alliance relationships have survived waves of public disapproval because governments knew that whatever errors the United States made and however unpopular Washington might be, it remained fully committed to defending the order that protected them.” Well, not anymore.

And here is where China makes its move. When Trump snapped back at Meloni, declaring, “She’s the one who’s unacceptable,” China was quick to rush forward. At a meeting in China on economic and trade cooperation, Minister Wang Wentao told Italy’s delegation: “China is willing to work with Italy to further tap into the potential for cooperation.” He added, “Italy is expected to play a constructive role in promoting the healthy and stable development of China-European Union economic and trade relations.”

Time and again, China has shown finesse in capitalizing on Trump’s compulsion to offend and attack allies. Trump’s moves to bludgeon trading partners with tariffs and leave them to bear the brunt of a reckless, counterproductive war with Iran (then threatening NATO when Europeans refused to back him) opened the door for China to present itself as a model of stability in a world of Trumpian chaos.

The Iran war certainly intensified the shift in power and influence away from the U.S. Trump’s decision to move assets to the Middle East furthered China’s strategic objectives, ceding (at least temporarily) the U.S.’s ability to project force and offer protection for its allies. China did not lift a finger to push U.S. forces out of the Indo-Pacific.

As Andrew P. Miller and Michael Clark explained, Trump’s adventurism in Venezuela and Iran have served “to deplete U.S. resources, tank the United States’ reputation, and raise fuel prices,” as well as force the U.S. to reposition personnel and material away from Asia. “With the U.S. military bogged down in the Middle East, China has a freer hand in East Asia,” they wrote. “China can present itself as a responsible peacemaker … [after] the United States has injured its reputation by acting unpredictably, betraying its allies, and starting a war that has done serious damage to the global economy.”

China’s position, if anything, will only improve after (and if) the fighting stops in the Middle East. China no doubt will eagerly offer to participate, if not lead, reconstruction in the region. Trump has given it a golden opportunity to make itself a more attractive partner than the United States, which caused the wreckage. Given resentment toward the U.S. over casualties and physical destruction, its deceptive promises (Regime change! Gulf allies will be fine!), and virulent anti-Muslim language, Middle East leaders may be quite receptive to China’s overtures.

Consider China’s advantage (facilitated by Trump anti-green energy derangement) in clean energy. Its ability to sell EV’s and solar panels throughout the Middle East, Asia, and Africa is now unmatched. “It’s not hard to imagine policymakers from across the developing world looking at examples like these and concluding that betting on Beijing isn’t actually the riskier option,” Bloomberg reports. Given Trump’s hostility to green energy and his bewildering international conduct, if “the only options are dependence on predictably mercantilist Beijing and on an erratic, self-centered and disruptive U.S., the choice is obvious.”

If there were any doubt as to the fallout from Trump’s war, diplomatic cables show the damage the war has done to U.S. relations with Muslim countries such as Azerbaijan, Bahrain, and Indonesia, Politico reports. “Some of the cables describe anti-U.S. sentiment that is having an immediate impact, while others raise concerns that relationships could be in danger if the war continues much longer.”)

In sum, Trump has never understood that U.S. power and prestige rely on our long-standing alliances, technological prowess, attractiveness as a destination for the best and the brightest, and moral stature. Whether isolating the U.S. from European allies, waging a reckless war, burning through U.S. munitions, ceding China the lead in green energy, undercutting our university scientific research system, chasing away immigrants, or destroying our moral authority (hence, our standing to pressure China on human rights), Trump has unilaterally disarmed the U.S. By jettisoning our inherent strengths, Trump boosts China, which never had those advantages.

When historians look back on this period to understand how the U.S. lost global preeminence to China, the question will not be “Who lost China?” but “Who lost superpower status to China?” We will pay the price for decades for an ignorant, mentally unwell U.S. president’s sabotage of America’s distinctive assets, stupidly abetted by cowardly Republicans.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is reader-supported. To enable us to provide independent journalism while holding accountable those who wage senseless wars (at home and abroad), please join our community as a subscriber.

 

Thomas, Reagan, Trump

 

People feel like there’s a darkness that’s spread across America in the 15 months since Trump took office a second time. It’s being noticed all over the world, from the Pope to the leaders of our (formerly) allied nations and is being embraced by dictators like Putin and MBS.

The most corrupt Supreme Court justice in history, Clarence Thomas, who’s taken millions from billionaires and then voted to promote their interests, inadvertently helped us all see clearly the source of this depravity that’s permeated so much of our government at all levels. Last week he gave a speech at the University of Texas, Austin, and blamed the ills of the world (and America) on the rise of “progressivism.”

Thomas blamed progressivism for everything from the rise of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao to racial segregation and the eugenics movement that Hitler borrowed from America and Britain to excuse his Final Solution.

In fact, Thomas is following an old tradition that was explained a century ago when arch-conservative propagandist Joseph Goebbels famously said, “Accuse the other side of that which you are guilty.” It’s the foundation of the modern saying, “Every accusation is a confession.”

My father fancied himself a conservative back when I was a kid during the Eisenhower and Kennedy era, but in his mind that simply meant that one doesn’t radically or rapidly change society without first thinking through the consequences in detail and then, when you do decide to make changes to the rules of society, you move forward in measured increments. Conservatively.

At least that’s how Dad explained it to me, and how both Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower and his then-VP Richard Nixon explained it in their own ways.

Eisenhower, writing to his brother in 1954, warned that any party that tried to abolish Social Security, unemployment insurance, or other social programs would “disappear,” noting that only “a tiny splinter group” believed such a rollback was even possible. Nixon, two decades later, was just as blunt about the need for pragmatic, incremental governance, famously observing in a 1971 message to Congress that “we are all Keynesians now.”

In other words, the conservatism of that era wasn’t about blowing up the New Deal with its programs of Social Security, the minimum wage, labor protections, funding scientific research and education, etc.; it was about tending it carefully, changing it cautiously, and conserving what worked.

Today’s modern conservative movement, though, isn’t conservative at all, and hasn’t been since the Reagan Revolution: it’s reactionary and, through the two Trump presidencies and the Project 2025 embrace of Orbánism and Putinism, has now become fully fascistic.

It all began in a big way when, in 1954, the Supreme Court reversed their 1898 Plessy v Ferguson “separate but equal” decision with Brown v Board of Education, mandating that Black children must participate in racially integrated classrooms.

Petro-billionaire Fred Koch, who’d made his initial fortune in the Soviet Union, was offended and threw major funding into the virulently anticommunist John Birch Society, which was running billboards across America calling for the impeachment of Chief Justice Earl Warren over the Brown decision.

While that impeachment never happened, the movement grew (my dad introduced me to the JBS when I was 13, saying, “You should hear what the crazies are saying”) and soon JBS’ morbidly rich funders decided that paying taxes to fund programs that would benefit “poor people” (aka Black people) was also an abomination just as bad as white kids having to sit with Black kids in public school classrooms.

In 1980, Reagan rode that racist message (along with sabotaging Jimmy Carter by cutting a deal with the Ayatollah to hold the American hostages until after the election) to the White House with millions in dark money support from those same petro-billionaires.

Reagan’s first official campaign stop had been to speak at an all-white county fair near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the site of the brutal murder of three civil rights workers, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, in 1964. The subject of his speech was “states’ rights,” which everybody knew was code for “let the Southern states continue their segregation programs.”

On the 1980 campaign trail, Reagan told the story of the “strapping young buck” in line at the supermarket upsetting all the hard-working white people when he whipped out his food stamps to pay for his “steak and beer”; it was the male complement to Reagan’s Black “welfare queen” myth. Cut off his food stamps, the logic went, and he’ll be forced to look for gainful employment…even if there were no jobs within miles and white employers wouldn’t then hire Black people.

But Reagan didn’t just talk about stopping affirmative action: he took steps to push America back to the white supremacist 1950s. As The Washington Post noted:

“In the 1980s, the Reagan administration began to roll back civil rights protections and legally designated targets for affirmative action hires, thus bringing the politics of reverse discrimination to the White House. Under the now familiar banner of ‘Let’s Make America Great Again,’ Reagan campaigned vigorously against affirmative action in 1980, promising voters he would overturn policies that mandated, in his view, ‘federal guidelines or quotas which require race, ethnicity, or sex . . . to be the principle factor in hiring or education.’”

Clarence Thomas, of course, worked for Reagan back then, doing everything he could to sabotage affirmative action programs. He began hanging out with billionaires in a classic example of, “I’ve got mine, screw you.”

Once the petro-billionaire’s agenda — gut social programs and regulations that protect working class people and children, all to pay for over $38 trillion in tax cuts for themselves — got rolling, other billionaires from other industries jumped on board, funding think tanks, publications, radio and TV stations and networks, universities, and a massive legal effort to pack the courts with Clarence Thomas-type judges and justices.

Because the New Deal — which they were explicitly trying to repeal, root and branch — was so popular, they had to bullshit the American people with an intensity and ferocity that America hadn’t seen since the “Horse and Sparrow” days of the last Gilded Age:

— Tax cuts for billionaires would “trickle down” to workers.
— Unions hurt and rip off their members.
— Regulations stunt economic growth and thus kill jobs.
— Social Security is going broke.
— “Free Trade” will “lift all boats.”
— For-profit schools and prisons do a better job.
— America can’t afford a national healthcare system.
— Corporations are “persons” and should have rights under the Bill of Rights.
— Giving millions to a politician or president isn’t bribery; it’s “free speech.”
— When young people get free college, they don’t value it.
— More CO2 is good for plants and climate change is a hoax.
— Government isn’t the solution to our problems; it is the problem itself.
— Corporate monopolies “increase efficiency” and are thus a good thing.

Once the system got up and running it began to run on autopilot, fueled into hyperdrive by Clarence Thomas’ deciding vote in Citizens United (at the same time he was taking big bucks from the same billionaires the decision freed to bribe judges and politicians). It was spread across America by Limbaugh and an Australian billionaire who made his initial fortune complaining about Black American GIs “raping” white Australian women when US troops were stationed there during WWII.

And now we have a low-IQ nepo-baby psychopath sitting in the White House because he promised a roomful of petro-billionaires and Elon Musk that he’d cut their taxes, kill off green programs, and let Musk dismantle any agency that was investigating him or his businesses. Trump’s so certain of his royal prerogatives that yesterday he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media site a clip of Frank Sinatra singing My Way.

Like other conservative/fascist movements across history, from Mussolini to Stalin to Hitler to Putin to Orbán — all grounded in first defining an “other” who must be feared and stopped — today’s GOP has morphed into something that Eisenhower and even Nixon wouldn’t recognize.

And now he’s threatening to start World War III, all because neither he nor his nepo-baby son-in-law nor any of the 13 billionaires in his cabinet know the first thing about how to actually negotiate on the world stage.

Although Pope Leo XIV says his remarks weren’t specifically directed at Trump, his claim that the world is “being ravaged by a handful of tyrants” certainly hits the mark. This is not conservativism, this new “one man above all” ideology that drives today’s GOP. It’s raw, naked evil. And it’s about damn time that Democrats and Americans of good will begin to call it out for what it is.

-Thom Hartmann

Justice According to Trump

The Justice Department has moved to drop the last remaining January 6 insurrection criminal matters: the Oath Keepers and Proud Boys seditious conspiracy cases. It’s a gratuitous move. On the first day of his second term, Trump issued full pardons to more than 1500 people who overran the Capitol on January 6. Then he commuted the sentences of 14 of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers defendants, the people convicted of the most serious January 6-related offense, seditious conspiracy. Getting clemency got them out of prison, but it didn’t erase their convictions.

So earlier this week, Trump’s U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, moved to vacate the convictions of prominent insurrectionists including Stewart Rhodes and Ethan Nordean. She wrote that doing so was “in the interests of justice.”

 

Here’s what that means: The government wants to pretend the indictments didn’t occur and juries never convicted these defendants on some of the most serious charges that can be leveled against people in a democracy. Vacating a conviction means it never happened.

Prosecutors need a judge’s permission to dismiss a case after it has been indicted. These cases are on appeal, and the government filed its request to vacate before the defendant/appellants’ first briefs are due. Pirro explained “The government respectfully requests that, before the defendants are required to file their opening brief, the Court vacate their convictions under 28 U.S.C. § 2106 and remand so that the government may move to dismiss the indictment with prejudice.” A defendant’s conviction isn’t final until it has been affirmed on appeal, and these convictions haven’t been, so it’s still possible to do away with them. The government argues that judges “routinely” grant these types of motions.

One might hope that the judges here will inquire further into precisely how fulfilling the government’s requests serves “the interests of justice.” But rejecting them could easily result in mandamus orders from a higher court requiring the judges to do so. It’s likely Trump will get his way.

This is what Donald Trump does for his friends—the people willing to plot a violent insurrection in hopes he could hold onto power after losing the 2020 election. He treats the people he thinks of as enemies very differently, but the stench of corruption is the same.

The current example is former CIA Director John Brennan—one of the ultimate catches on Trump’s revenge prosecution list. Trump became convinced during his first term in office that Brennan had been involved in some shadowy plot against him, and although nothing in the extensive “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation carried out by then AG Bill Barr and Special Counsel John Durham bore that out, Trump apparently still holds a grudge. Trump has always been sensitive to the 2017 intelligence assessment that found ​Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election in order to help him, and since Brennan was at the CIA when that happened, Trump seems to hold him responsible. The intelligence assessment appears to have been accurate; both the FBI and a bipartisan Senate Committee agreed.

Brennan is now the target of an investigation in the Southern District of Florida, which appears to be amping up, despite the fact that the career prosecutor who has been running that investigation had been resisting “pressure to quickly bring charges against the former CIA director and prominent critic of President Donald Trump,” according to CNN. She reportedly questioned the strength of the evidence and was subsequently removed from the case. She will be replaced by Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. Attorney during the Reagan administration. diGenova is one of the lawyers who helped with Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election.

CNN went on to report that the Justice Department said in a statement that it is a routine practice to move attorneys around on cases “so offices can most effectively allocate resources.” The statement continued, “It is completely healthy and normal to change members of legal teams.” That’s unlikely to fool anyone. It’s counterproductive and wasteful of time and deep knowledge about the evidence in a case to make a move like this, and it doesn’t happen in the absence of solid reason. Here, it appears to be happening, as we saw in the Eric Adam’s case in New York, and the cases involving Jim Comey and Letitia James in the Eastern District of Virginia, to remove an unwilling prosecutor and replace her with a more compliant one. We don’t yet know what the potential charges might look like here, and the government seems confident, with the matter proceeding in Judge Aileen Cannon’s district. But it’s hard to imagine there’s anything of substance here.

The polar opposite treatment of these two cases clarifies just how defunct the Justice Department is. During Trump’s first term in office and his bid for reelection, I repeatedly spoke of the danger he posed to our criminal justice system and hence to our democracy, the risk he would turn us into a banana republic where an authoritarian leader uses the criminal justice system to reward his friends and punish his enemies. And here we are. This is what the stakes are in the midterm elections. Because a president who is willing to do all of this—and has a party behind him that is willing to be complicit—will try to do whatever it takes to hold onto power. It’s a moment where no one can afford to stay on the sidelines.

This isn’t about one case or a handful of defendants. It’s about whether the rule of law still has meaning, whether Trump will succeed in eroding it into yet another political tool; applying it differently to people depending on who they are—and whose side they’re on. When a president can make convictions disappear for his allies while leaning on prosecutors to go after his critics, the damage isn’t just theoretical, it’s already happening in front of our eyes. And once that line is crossed, it doesn’t easily uncross itself. It’s on all of us to see it clearly and refuse to look away.

Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse and making it possible, through you subscriptions, for me to write the newsletter.

We’re in this together,

-Joyce Vance

 

Trump Lies

— Trump Moves Toward $20 Billion Iran Deal After Blasting Obama for Far Less. Remember when President Obama signed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) with Iran in 2015 (which ended their uranium enrichment and led to the release of 4 US hostages they held) and part of the deal was to return $400 million of their own money to them that we’d held frozen for years? Trump went nuts, calling a press conference and saying, “Iran was in big trouble, they had sanctions, they were dying, we took off the sanctions and made this horrible deal and now they’re a power. We paid $400 million for the hostages. Such a bad precedent was set by Obama. … What we’re doing is insane.” Well, it appears that insanity is contagious: multiple sources are reporting that the Trump regime is considering giving the Iranian government as much as $20 billion for the uranium they have. After the deal was reported, Trump claimed it was never serious; did he just get caught? Will it go forward anyway? It’s really impossible to know when Mango Mussolini is so desperate for a way out of his insane, illegal war, so seriously mentally ill, and so deeply unstable… — Is Cuba next? Trump has already commenced violent hostilities and war-making — without congressional authority and without provocation — against Iran, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nigeria and Somalia and now it appears that Cuba will be next. The guy revels in blood, be it watching gladiators bloody each other in UFC fights, watching the daily “blow them up” reels the Pentagon gives him of people he’s killing in small boats in the Caribbean and in Iran, or cheering on Netanyahu’s slaughters in Gaza and now Lebanon. He apparently gets joy from pain and death, like every other psychopathic leader in history. Now we learn that the Pentagon is laying the groundwork for an invasion of Cuba. Because, of course, why not? If nothing else, ‘Lil Marco thinks it’ll help his ‘28 presidential chances, and every Republican in the House and Senate except a small handful have given him complete authority to ignore the Constitution and Congress. He said on Monday, “We may stop by Cuba after we’re finished with this,” and last month said he hopes to have “the honor of taking Cuba,” adding that he “can do anything I want with it.” This is Caligula-level hubris. Congress must act to reign this in, and then follow it up by impeaching him. — Trump Eyes Billions From IRS in Stunning Cash Grab. Looks like billions of your and my tax dollars are going straight into Trump’s money bin. An IRS official leaked some of Trump’s tax information to the press years ago, so now he’s suing the IRS for $10 billion for his pain and suffering. Instead of fighting the lawsuit, the agency — which falls under the Executive Branch and is headed up by Trump’s billionaire New York real estate buddy Scott Bessent, who works for Trump — is now “negotiating” with Trump to decide how many millions or billions they’ll give him to make the lawsuit go away. As he said in a moment of cynical candor: “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself. We could make it a substantial amount, nobody would care, because it’s gonna go to numerous, very good charities.” Right. Like the children’s cancer charity he and Eric stole from? Or the phony Trump Foundation that gave a big bribe to Pam Bondi when she began to investigate his phony university back when she was Florida AG, and then was shut down with a court order that all 3 of his children take classes in how to not scam people with nonprofits? Can you imagine the media meltdown if a Democrat had done something like this? They swooned for a week when Obama wore a tan suit… — Is the Grocery Aisle the New Front Line of Economic Crisis? The recession is real: people are using credit to buy groceries. About a third of Buy Now Pay Later users (29 percent) are using these high-interest short-term credit programs to buy groceries, a big spike up from 14 percent two years ago, with 38 percent of Gen Z’ers saying they’ve done the same. Forty-seven percent of them also report they’ve been late making BNPL payments in the past year since Trump began his “Liberation Day” tariffs and took an axe to our economy. Ten of the last eleven recessions happened during Republican presidencies, almost always following massive tax breaks for billionaires and cuts to benefits for poor and middle-class people. GOP policies are designed to impoverish most Americans while creating an elite upper class; they’re just a reboot of a system that Adam Smith characterized in the 1700s in his book A Theory of Moral Sentiments and have been pushed by billionaires or their equivalent in every generation since. Warren Buffett famously said, “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” He was right. — Did a Trump Megadonor Just Prove ‘America First’ Was Always Optional? One of Trump’s biggest donors — over $50 million — is moving a small musical instrument factory to China, killing 150 jobs in Eastlake, Ohio. This is, of course, what billionaires do; squeeze every imaginable penny out of everything they touch. Billionaire John Paulson could have just continued to operate the factory he bought — which has supplied brass instruments to high school marching bands for generations — but, hey, he could make a few extra bucks by using cheap Chinese labor instead. His MAGA workers are feeling betrayed with one telling a reporter, “I’m starting to regret my vote for Trump.” Nonetheless, the cult runs deep; five of six MAGA workers who’ll now be unemployed tell reporters they’ll continue to vote for Republicans. After all, they all hate the same (Black, Hispanic, Queer) people, right? And that’s what counts the most… — When an 85-Year-Old Gets Detained, What Does It Say About ICE? France is outraged at ICE brutality against an 85-year-old French woman who’d come to America to marry her wartime sweetheart. Marie-Thérèse Ross-Mahé came here on a tourist visa and forgot to renew it; ICE busted her and threw her into a hellhole concentration camp for weeks. She was released this week after intervention by the French government, which is furious. Foreign Affairs Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said she was subject to “acts of violence” and the story is all over the French newspapers. She’d married former American GI Bill Ross, who she’d met in the 1950s at a NATO base in France, and the couple reconnected decades later after both were widowed. She’d started the formal immigration process to get a green card, which may be what flagged ICE that she was in the system (some reports suggest her husband’s son, a former cop, turned her in to get more of his dad’s estate). We’re holding at least 70,000 people, including thousands of children, in these brutal camps with no due process. Meanwhile, ICE is hiring people who’ve been fired by police departments and flunked out of police academies in their effort to get as many masked, armed thugs onto the streets as they can before the election this fall. Fourteen months into his chancellorship, Hitler only had 40,000 people in his detention camps; history tells us where this all goes and it ain’t pretty… The Hartmann Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.