Tags
https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/19/detecting-post-soviet-russias-black-narrative-of-revenge-for-89-and-91/; https://conflict-backchannels.com/2024/11/08/well-have-it-fixed-so-good-said-donald-trump/; https://conflict-backchannels.com/2025/02/18/trump-piracy-board-disarm-and-plunder-the-united-states-of-america/; https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-property/.
AI Presents The Malignant
I once joked that Donald Trump never met an enterprise he couldn’t ruin and run into bankruptcy. That wry observation appears to be coming true with the United States of America. At issue and perhaps at the bottom of it all is the mentality of the leader, that delusional and paranoid malignant narcissism so sensitive to the possibility of further humiliation and shame that it needs its insularity in a theater all its own enabled by the crass and shielded by sycophancy. We Americans have been spoiled in the main by responsible and responsive governments that play by the rules, more or less, and if committing crimes get caught by internal investigators, FBI, and whistleblowers. Not this time, my fellow Americans. The darker side of the nation has taken the wheel–and it’s taking us on a joy ride into an archaic, criminal, and feudal-medieval hell.
I have left out some notables on this pass but have worked up a short list with “criminality” in mind–not crimes, per se, but just the mentality that would go along with an incompetent mafia-style leader. Were they students, their folder notes might suggest laziness about homework and wild imaginations drifting off into the most improbable and surreal of private fantasy. Of course, today, they are our “leaders” –>
Kash Patel: “As a co-host of a talk show for The Epoch Times, a media company known for spreading baseless conspiracy theories, a review by NBC found Patel shared unfounded claims about supposed conspiracies aimed at undermining Trump perpetrated by government officials, the FBI, social media platforms, the media and others”– https://www.npr.org/2024/12/09/nx-s1-5213692/kash-patel-conspiracy-theories-fbi.
Linda McMahon: “The suit alleges McMahon, her husband, the WWE and TKO Group Holdings, the league’s parent company, knowingly allowed employee Melvin Phillips Jr. to use his position as ringside announcer to sexually exploit children. / The filing alleges Phillips would recruit children to work as “Ring Boys,” helping him set up and take down wrestling rings at WWE events. However, the job was a guise for sexually exploiting the children, which Phillips would do even in front of wrestlers and executives in the locker area, the lawsuit alleges. He also would often film his sexual abuse, according to the filing” — https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/21/business/linda-mcmahon-abuse-wwe-trump-education/index.html.
Pete Hegseth: “The woman, referred to throughout the report as Jane Doe, said Mr. Hegseth took her phone, blocked his hotel room door when she tried to leave, and sexually assaulted her, ejaculating on her stomach. She said that her memory was hazy, and that she had drunk far more alcohol than usual throughout the day” — https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/us/politics/police-report-sexual-assault-claim-hegseth.html#.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.: “At midlife, Mr. Kennedy won public acclaim as a crusading environmental lawyer who sued corporate polluters, cleaned up rivers and lobbied to protect New York’s drinking water. But he was also a serial philanderer who kept a journal chronicling his encounters and assigned numerical scores to women, even as he berated himself for his inability to control his actions” — https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/kennedy-rfk-profile-trump.html.
Russell Vought: “We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma” — https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/10/who-is-russell-vought-trump-office-of-management-and-budget.
Tulsi Gabbard: “Most notoriously, she was perhaps the most prominent US politician to show solidarity with al-Assad after his brutal crackdown on anti-regime protests escalated into a catastrophic civil war, one marked by allegations of crimes against humanity committed by his regime with the backing of Russian forces. / Gabbard repeatedly voiced doubts about well-documented evidence of these crimes. In one infamous incident on a congressional visit to Syria in 2015, she suggested to victims of an airstrike that it may not have been launched by the Syrian military but by the so-called Islamic State group, which has never had an air force” — https://www.euronews.com/2025/01/29/who-is-trumps-intelligence-nominee-tulsi-gabbard-and-why-is-she-so-controversial.
By now, most Americans have caught on to the notion that “Trump-Putin” (on X, #TrumpPutin) is a real thing and the American President not much more than a traitor in fact and in spirit to the United States of America. As an usurper of power obtained through Trumpian lies–start with the whopper that was “Stop The Steal” when he had prepared fraudulent Electoral College ballots for Mike Pence to put in place of authentic ones on January 6, 2021–the unfaithful president has proceeded with the help of his fellow weaklings to degrade America’s Federal Government in the most barbaric and crude fashion. By Trump’s will, Federal agencies and departments from Education to Veterans Affairs have come under the most thoughtless and unstudied attacks on their very existence.
Don’t expect impact studies.
The Trumpian Coup–call it what it is, for Trump infamously lied his way back into power–has turned out a criminal enterprise certain to collapse America’s economy, impoverish millions of Americans (for most locales hosting Federal offices, the Federal dollar is a primary dollar, i.e., a dollar imported from the Federal Government to be spent and spent again locally until partially recaptured in taxes). The Trump Administration appears to care not at all about what it is stealing from America’s cities, states, and regions in relation to massive Federal contraction.
What might Putin want?
For starters, I would suggest an “American Mafia State” mirroring the “Russian Mafia State” with its “Vertical of Power” leader, its corruption, and its oligarchy made so by the favor of Putin–for Americans, by the favor of Trump.
Whatever follows Trump’s degradation, desperation will be a part of it–and an American government deeply downsized and in disarray will not be able to help ordinary Americans just starting to burn through their savings. Perhaps states will rise the occasion. Perhaps not. It’s certain that no one will have solid answers as the bills mount for basic family support, housing, and transportation. Crime will follow as may an American Gulag — an extensive and vacuous prison system for Americans stressed beyond limits. That’s a vision, of course but one fit to a know-nothing president who has had a debt to repay to Moscow and the related state and mafia power that saved his ass after American banks had learned the hard way to refuse his business.
Probably, for a literal show stopper, Putin would be happy with an insolvent America. Musk and Trump appear to be doing everything in their power to make that happen. Between now and that: desperation; enserfment (enslavement for a buck–no dignity, no freedom, no pride — and if not free to choose one’s chains, then prison where choice may not exist).
Related Online
https://apnews.com/article/epa-budget-staffing-cuts-doge-9260514fd1be2397d39a80dc054d19df
https://apnews.com/article/veterans-affairs-cuts-doge-musk-trump-f587a6bc3db6a460e9c357592e165712
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx24gze60yzo
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/opm-memo-mass-federal-firings/?intcid=CNR-01-0623
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/trump-administration-fires-over-400-dhs-employees/
https://www.cnn.com/2024/11/21/business/linda-mcmahon-abuse-wwe-trump-education/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/06/politics/trump-education-department-shut-down-order/index.html
https://www.npr.org/2024/12/09/nx-s1-5213692/kash-patel-conspiracy-theories-fbi
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/us/politics/police-report-sexual-assault-claim-hegseth.html#
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/kennedy-rfk-profile-trump.html
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