Covers Off the Trumpire

Image: Lieutenant Colonel J. R. Webster, DSO, MC, of the British Empire, 1919, Wikimedia

The Orwellian double speak of the Trump administration is mind numbing. The speed at which the lies are spoken and regurgitated can make it challenging to discern what’s what, to keep up. It can require a moment to disconnect, to breathe and clear one’s mind, gather thoughts to reconnect and remember what was and what remains true and righteous. In a world of deep fakes and big techs collusion with murderous and treacherous oligarchs, we must look with our hearts, and what is real, what must be common sense.

When images on the matrix portray a crowd celebrating in Venezuela after their capital is bombed and dozens of their fellow civilians have lost their lives, the realness must be questioned. Indeed, these videos were AI generated by various persons, one of whom is an anonymous account on X called the “Wall Street Apes,” who have been generating misleading AI videos for several years now, (Venezuelans Kneeling in Tears for Trump? Fake AI Video Explodes on X – “Total Deepfake Hoax,” Experts Warn | IBTimes UK). And after the catastrophe, when Trump is aboard Air Force One clearly gloating about the kidnapping of Nicolas Maduro, he never offers any sympathies for the lives of the civilians killed; instead he and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick gluttonously opine on the oil, steel, aluminum, and other abundant resources that they will be able to exploit.

When masked men armed with weapons of war swarm elementary schools and parks and separate grandmothers from their grandchildren, and we are told that they are enforcing the law, one must question the righteousness of said laws. Remembering that a time, not too long ago, it was the law to own another human being. No doubt, it is the same legislators and enforcers of these new inhumane laws that reminisce longingly of chattel slavery.

When a mother and a teacher is shot in the face and, in the moments after, her desperate neighbors plea with an ICE agent to allow them to give her immediate medical attention, the agent tells them to “calm down,” to which the exacerbated neighbor responds, “How can I calm down? You just killed my neighbor!” And shortly after, Kristi Noem tells the nation that Renee Good was a domestic terrorist. Good was a mother and a teacher, who was serving the most oppressed in her community and clearly attempting to drive away, not into, the cold-blooded ICE agent Jonathan Ross. The FBI has been duplicitous in withholding evidence from Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, thus preventing him from conducting a transparent and judicious investigation of the homicide.

Prior to Trump’s election, he promised to release the Epstein files, but now he has done everything to withhold them. Prior to his election, he promised to not meddle in the affairs of foreign countries, but, to date, he has bombed Yemen, Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Gaza vis-à-vis Israel, and now is now threatening Greenland. He promised to end the war in Ukraine on his first day in office, yet the war rages on.

Trump is a classical bully, as Political Science professor John Mearsheimer explained in a discussion with Economics professor Jeffrey Sachs. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ntkc7AWujEU).

When people push back against Trump, he moves on to a target that offers less resistance, which he will then exploit maximally. Mearsheimer provided a few examples of this. Trump threatened massive tariffs on China to which China responded with its own tariffs, and then the next day, Trump reduced his tariffs extensively. Trump threatened the Houthis, a rebel group in Yemen, with war but ceased after one series of bombings. And it was the Houthis’ staunch resistance, along with international pressures, that may have been most responsible for the recent Israel-Hamas ceasefire. Also, immediately after Columbian president Gustavo Petro and the people of Columbia offered great resistance to Trump’s threats, Trump completely backpedaled from his previous threats saying he would like to invite him to the White House.

 And in contrast, for nations that have not resisted Trump’s bullying, he continues to exploit. For example, he has demanded more and more from Europe and now threatens to occupy Greenland, an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, claiming that it is necessary to prevent China and Russia from using its resources. The US already has complete military access to Greenland because of its NATO membership; it is obvious that Trump, led by the nose by Katie Miller, has no interest in protecting the people of Greenland or its resources; instead he plans to exploit them (Greenland’s people and its resources) for his own personal gain. 

The Trump administration’s international thuggery is blatantly revealing the immoral depravity of American domestic and foreign policy. However, it is policy that is only new in its unapologetic bullishness. Recall the hundreds of treaties broken by the US government with Native Americans and the blasphemous doctrine of Manifest Destiny during the Indian Wars. How the economic draft of the Buffalo Soldiers during the Indian Wars can compare to that of Latinx serving in Tom Homan’s new ICE. Observe the similarities of Trump’s policies with those of George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Condoleezza Rice when they murdered a million civilians in Iraq on false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction. And Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s intervention in Libya, “rather than helping the United States combat terrorism, as Gadhafi did during his last decade in power, Libya [began to serve] as a safe haven for militias affiliated with both al-Qaida and the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIS). The Libya intervention has harmed other US interests as well: undermining nuclear nonproliferation, chilling Russian cooperation at the U.N., and fueling Syria’s civil war.” (https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/19/barack-obama-libya-airstrikes-1224550).

Might the collective horror and awakening of Trump’s AmeriKKKa finally inspire a break from centuries’ old commitments to imperialist gunboat diplomacy, toward a trajectory of real international revelatory freedom and reconciliation based on equal human rights and ecological preservation. 

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