Donald Trump has not been working for the United States of America. He has been working for himself at the least and then possibly for Russia within the company of compromised and narrowed autocrats in NATO who have chosen to treat their nations as fiefs for their families and theaters for their own fragile but grasping personalities.

Erdogan, Orban, and Trump — oh my!

In reference, here’s how Tayyip Recep Erdogan’s consolidation of power took place: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_at_Home_Council | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Turkish_coup_attempt | https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/07/13/turkeys-post-coup-purge-and-erdogans-private-army-sadat-perincek-gulen/. With an attempted coup for his casus belli, Erdogan had the situation needed to completely overhaul the order established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, improved upon by Ismet Inonu, and then sustained into instability by political change (Cemal Gursel), a coup and transformation into a multiparty system.

The massive purges that began shortly after the failed coup has seen hundreds of thousands of civil servants, judges, security officials, and employees of state-run institutions fired. Their positions are being rapidly filled, often by under- or unqualified replacements, via the Turkish patronage system of kadrolasma — literally, the building of loyalist cadres. The military is no exception. NATO’s top commander, Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, raised the alarm back in December, when he warned of a “degradation” of the alliance’s command operations following the firing of “talented, capable” senior Turkish military officials.

Leela, Jacinto. “Turkey’s Post-Coup Purge and Erdogan’s Private Army.” Politico, July 13, 2017.

Behind the scenes: “A leaked report by Intcen, the EU’s joint intelligence service, concluded that Erdogan had planned a purge before July 2016 and an array of soldiers, fearing the upcoming mass firings, hastily launched a coup.”

Viktor Orban’s populism began with a hard knock in the school of political life:

In 2002, Orban committed a rare gaffe that resulted in defeat: playing more forcefully to the emerging middle class than to the much larger pool of older, uneducated, poor, rural voters—those ravaged by International Monetary Fund (IMF) and EU-driven market reforms. This group either shied from the polls or voted socialist left. It was not a mistake Orban would make twice.

Fidesz was out of office for the next eight years, and by the late aughts, Orban had transformed it from a conservative party to a populist vehicle that appealed not to a class but to a nation. He purged Fidesz of critical minds, centralized it around himself, and polarized Hungary’s discourse by casting political opponents as the nation’s enemies. Hockenos, Paul. “Hungary’s Descent Into Dictatorship: How Viktor Orban pulled off the unthinkable.” Foreign Policy, December 6, 2024.

Consider the two, Erdogan and Orban, role models for Donald Trump.

Ignorant, lying, and unconscionable personalities may more easily serve archaic feudal-medieval power than talents valuing their own integrity and schooled in cultures cosmopolitan, modern, and rigorous. In fact, one might suggest archaic power would appear to prefer corrupt or corruptible damaged, greed-ridden, and power hungry sycophants over qualified executives, warriors, and scholars properly equipped with backbones of their own.

Orban’s next move, broadly speaking, as chief of his own family and friends state mafia: extraordinary corruptions and nepotism (Hockenos, op. cit.).

One may expect no less of a bravura attempt at dictatorship from the confirmed felonious Trump.

With financial supplements removed from a body of poor Americans and Trump tariffs raising the cost of living for all Americans but those floating in their own clouds while living in their own compounds, Americans would seem positioned for abuse, exploitation, impoverishment, and a de facto enslavement ramped high by desperation and fear or enforced by related crime, imprisonment, and control–and all of that without meaningful appeal to the hard fought for liberal values of the greater western civilization known today to Canada, most of Europe (minus Hungary), and a Ukraine that has been fighting for its freedom from the Russian mafia state since the 2014 Euromaidan Revolution of Dignity.

For Trump now attempting to cleave military and police power from fealty to community, state, and nation and channel the same into his own system of private patronage, the challenge appears that of provoking his opposition to violence and claiming for his corrupt and apparently unconscionable and shameless Administration its own casus belli.

One hopes the American Left will not make life that easy for him.

One may hope as well that American military and police will defend the Constitution, the laws of the nation extant, and honor the oath sworn to attend such defense and further choose to refuse the wheedling maneuvers of a deeply delusional and dishonest American criminal and traitor.

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Addendum: American Character and Integrity Matter — and Truth Matters Most of All

Reference About Donald Trump

Apartments

https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/28/news/trump-apartment-tenants/; https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/trump-tenants-lawsuit/2020/12/04/db4a82e6-367a-11eb-8d38-6aea1adb3839_story.html; https://thehill.com/homenews/news/528714-tenants-sue-trump-over-scheme-that-increased-their-rent-report/; https://www.newsweek.com/2016/10/28/donald-trump-business-busts-victims-511034.html.

January 6, 2021 – Insurrection

https://businessinsider.com/pentagon-hindered-dc-national-guard-response-to-insurrection-attempt-report-2021-1; https://cnn.com/2023/12/28/politics/recordings-trump-team-fake-elector-ballots/index.html.

Malignant Narcissism

Signal: delusional, grandiose, messianic ideation absent of normal boundaries and limits, i.e., the parameters of normal conscience.

Process: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/10/malignant-narcissistic-process-distilled/.

Ramification: https://conflict-backchannels.com/2024/04/22/trump-delusional-and-innocent/.

Russia! Russia! Russia!

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2022/07/19/detecting-post-soviet-russias-black-narrative-of-revenge-for-89-and-91/; https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/oct/29/czechoslovakia-spied-on-trump-to-exploit-ties-to-highest-echelons-of-us-power; 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/.

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“The Big Hurry: Why So Anxious For Dictatorship Right Now?” Behind the rush job to collapse the rule of law. Jim Stewartson, Oct 04, 2025 | Trump authorizes national guard deployment to Chicago, White House says, as border patrol there shoots woman: Illinois governor JB Pritzker says administration is escalating ‘aggression against Illinois citizens and residents’, Guardian Staff, October 4, 2025 | Protest erupts after woman shot by ICE agent during confrontation in Brighton Park-CBS Chicago, October 4, 2025 | Judge Blocks Trump’s Deployment of National Guard in Portland, Ore. – A federal judge appointed by President Trump issued a temporary restraining order, siding for now with Oregon and Portland lawyers who called federalizing the guard a presidential overreach – Anna Griffin – NYT – October 4, 2025.

Read along with Jim?

I may be “suffering” from, oh, let’s call it an “Online Cognitive Battle Fatigue” that has formed from my same day every day round of blogs, newspapers, substacks, and videos sprawling across the world’s conflict and political issues and themes, chief among them the Donald Trump’s transformation of America’s modern secular democratic republic into his own kingdom, a private patronage system built on the back of GOP and other cowards, criminals, sycophants, and traitors.

Art thou not sick of the vile ignoramus?

Out of habit and inertia, I’ll probably continue for a while my political posterbating at https://x.com/JS_Oppenheim but . . . for what? We have each developed our own Internet habits, rounds, routines even while losing, perhaps, our political and social efficacy online.

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ICESTAPO – ICE Fishing in America

An outraged “Parkrose Permaculture” defends American laws, principles, and values –>

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Regarding “The Morning Gloss” (have you Glossed yet?) 🙂 , it should be evident that I have been fiddling with how to deal with the earliest portion of each day’s barrage of impressions involving the mediation of reality.

What should one get out of the comparatively isolated experience of sitting at a desktop computer (or other device) absorbing opinion and reportage from around the world?

Where is one to dwell?

In some ways, the shine has come off the Internet with familiarity and the formation of routines involving it. Politics, pizza, porn, and groceries plus unlimited other shopping have not only brought worlds to my eyes but (within the bounds of both law and preference for an honorable existence) to my door.

For all the improvements . . . where has been the improvement?

So with an electronic node on the pulse of the world as well as options for enjoying someone else’s ride through the countryside (virtual drives), I am with age approaching decluttering, downsizing, essentializing — not minimalizing: one may still enjoy having options within every common category of accoutrement, hobby, and tool — and the melancholy but necessary business of cleaning up after one’s own life.

What to do with BackChannels?

Rather than answer, my first inclination is to retreat some from “life online”, return to reading at length for depth and insight as well as the pleasure of it when in the company of accomplished authors and poets.

We are very few of us — analysts, bloggers, researchers — possessed of power beyond our insights and perspectives, and I would guess many prefer as I do a healthy solitude.

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By the Editorial Board of The Washington Post:

The events of the past week in Virginia mark a dark new stage in President Trump’s effort to turn federal law enforcement into a personal tool of oppression and vengeance. He is undermining a core promise of the American justice system: the fair and equal enforcement of the law.

On Thursday evening his handpicked federal prosecutor for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, obtained an indictment of the former F.B.I. director James Comey on highly dubious charges. The indictment came just four days after Mr. Trump installed her on an interim basis and just days before the statute of limitations on the charges would have expired.

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The charges were filed in the eastern district of Virginia only after Erik Siebert was forced out as US attorney for reportedly finding no grounds to indict Comey. The justice department replaced him with a Trump loyalist with little prosecutorial experience, Lindsey Halligan, and shortly after, a grand jury indicted Comey on one count of making a false statement to Congress and one count of obstruction of a congressional proceeding.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/26/james-comey-indictment-reaction

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About Lindsey Halligan

Before she was sworn in Monday as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Lindsey Halligan, a 36-year-old former White House aide and Florida insurance lawyer, had no prosecutorial experience. Less than four days into her new role, she brought charges against former FBI director James B. Comey, despite the objections of career prosecutors that there was insufficient evidence to do so.

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Scraping’s the worst . . . but every look-see into the paranoid delusional work of the world’s now foremost malignant narcissist tells of the methodical degrading of American law, national security, and power. Donald Trump has become his own worst enemy, inspiring contempt, not respect, for his unchecked authoritarian stance and the cowardice and sycophancy required for him to achieve and sustain it. His persecution of James Comey — criminals hate investigators and judges — will play before a cognizant and reasoning public, and he will find his place in memory beside Hitler, Mussolini, Putin, and Stalin–only he will be judged more backward, cowardly, deranged, and smaller than any of the others on which he appears to have modeled himself.

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On X: https://x.com/JS_Oppenheim.

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