Trump is clearly insane, you can’t spend any time watching him without recognizing that he’s cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, Bermuda triangle, batshit crazy. That’s obvious, I can’t even imagine what moments off camera might look like. But he has something that an array of disparate, illiberal, and downright evil agents of change and disaster desperately want, and they’ll put up with anything to get a piece of it. Of course, that is the keys to power, and right now those keys are the 70-80 million Americans who have bought into the cult of personality of a madman, and his promise of doling out retribution to their perceived enemies. Various players have rallied around Trump and are the forces driving what’s happening right now and how effectively they’ve been able to carry out this carnage, because like I said, Trump himself is insane. The others however, have recognized the power that can be had within this kind of arrangement, namely running the show while the mad king keeps everyone entertained. We should name the big ones: Silicon Valley, all the groups that make up Project 2025, mainly Heritage, the Republican party (who cultivated this base before it was stolen by Trump), a slew of billionaires, and an army of American CEOs who are all interested in making the United States (can we still say that?) the richest third-world nation on earth—and democracy is something that just doesn’t fit into that equation. Fascism, by whatever name they want to give it, is much better for capitalism.
I should clarify my usage of a couple of terms here. One, I’m intentionally using the term third-world nation, a description considered to be outdated with exploitative colonial baggage, precisely because it has that connotation. And as I’ve said many times, I don’t use the label of fascism lightly; the term was coined by Mussolini, but Hitler’s blend of fascism was modeled after the American Jim Crow laws that centered on preserving a racial hierarchy. We were practicing fascism before it had the name, and we called it democracy. So for clarity, I prefer fascism because we generally agree on what it means. And it sounds as scary as it should, unlike the term Unitary President, which is basically a softball term for dictator used by the likes of the Heritage Foundation and the other contributors to Project 2025, of which it’s estimated that over fifty members have roles in the current administration. So I prefer the brutish, scary terms for the brutish, scary things
In any case, all of these groups riding Trump’s hold on the American populace are all drunk with power and blinded by their obsessions, because let’s face it, everything they’re working to build, or better described as destroy, can only lead to a major economic and environmental crisis that will likely end in violence. It always does when you give these kinds of control freaks the keys to power; our history is littered with their calamities. From the French Revolution to the Great Depression to whatever it is that’s about to happen next. The good news is that, after they blow it all to hell, we usually have an opportunity to effect real lasting change. Unfortunately, blowing it all to hell can be a really devastating thing to have to live through. It would be better to stop this thing in its tracks and glean from history all of the necessary lessons to apply. Unfortunately, we humans rarely do that kind of thing.
But as much as they seem to have the upper hand right now, they’ve got a big problem. Trump’s clearly insane, and unhealthy, and eventually, maybe sooner than everyone is ready for, he’s going to die. And with his death comes the unravelling of their main source of power. His cult-like hold on millions of Americans, who are also clearly living under a set of alternative facts. This bank heist, and by bank heist I mean becoming an autocratic police state, because that’s what’s required to make the U.S.A. the richest third-world nation on earth, cannot be achieved without their support. They are figuratively and literally the keys to power. And that’s why this fragile collection of players that make up this regime are rushing to put in place a militarized police state as quickly as they can. Silicon Valley is supplying the surveillance, the Republicans are allowing a Gestapo to be built, and American CEOs are acting like everything is just normal. But when people realize that the retribution they were promised is now coming for them, which many of them eventually will, they’ll shut down, and if there isn’t a mechanism of control akin to the police state that resembles something like Jim Crow—which Hitler modeled his Jewish ghettos after—where due process and free elections cease to exist for the marginalized population, there won’t be a way to keep everyone in line.
So maybe I should take a moment to explain in more depth what I mean by the richest third-world country on earth. It should be obvious, but third-world nations aren’t just poor, undeveloped nations. They have often been countries with a very thin ruling class getting extremely rich from the exploitation of the land and the labor. So, if you haven’t noticed, we already have a foothold on that title. Over the past 50 years, by most measures, much of our population has fallen into third-world status when it comes to healthcare, wealth disparity, infant mortality rates, quality of life, access to healthy food, affordable housing and having a meaningful social safety net to rely on. But we still have a much longer and steeper descent in front of us, and the One Big Beautiful Bill was designed to further erode what little investment and support we have for our middle class.
Of course, the other part of being a third-world country is the exploitation of natural resources, something we’ve worked to preserve since the beginning of the 20th century, against impossible odds. The One Big Beautiful Bill is designed to undue those efforts by opening up once-protected federal land to development and ending regulations and oversight meant to prevent spoiling the air, water and land we all depend on. It guts all attempts to mediate climate change; in fact, Trump is striking deals to export oil and gas on a level we’ve never seen before. Using the threat of tariffs to push countries to purchase hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fossil fuels from America, which will require trashing our own environment to allow the oil industry to make billions off of our now preserved landscapes. The administration is also fast-tracking data centers to produce AI and has signed an edict—oh, I mean executive order, sorry, let’s use the soft words here—that will allow them to burn dirty energy as a power source while they also threaten to quickly use up scarce water resources throughout the country. The age of trying to preserve our environment for future generations is over—if they succeed.
The bill also does nothing to protect labor from the coming onslaught of AI and automation; in fact, Trump is busting unions within the federal workforce left and right. Factor in rising costs due to Trump’s tariffs, the already declining job reports, and the diminishing aforementioned social safety net, and we’re in for some rough times. Did I mention how precarious the dollar is? Let’s not, that is also truly scary, and a lot to get into.
And that’s why they need a police state, like yesterday, pronto, because those tough times are coming soon to a town near you. So that’s the phase we are in. It’s one thing to take control of an undeveloped country filled with indigenous populations that don’t have the military might to fend off an occupier and turn it into a colony ripe for exploitation (how most third-world nations were born, including our own) but it’s quite another to take a developed nation and deconstruct its hard fought social safety net, labor laws, human rights protections and environmental regulations, but that is what weve been witnessing for the past 50 years. We’ve been fighting these forces since day one of this country, and as you may have noticed, we’ve managed to beat them back for much of the last century; unfortunately, they’ve now taken the lead. But their advantage is tenuous; it depends on the cult of personality of one man. One very unhealthy and mentally deranged man who has managed to gain an unnatural hold on much of our population. It’ll be a phenomenon to study in the coming decades, if we’re lucky enough to do so.
But for now, the race is on. Once the One Big Beautiful Bill really kicks in, the effects will be so devastating that it will be impossible for the current regime to stay in power within the framework of anything that resembles a democracy. So they need a police state before the midterms, and before Dear Leader becomes so obviously incapacitated that the spell wears off for enough of his supporters. Once they can secure next year’s elections and put a sizeable police state in place, then they can basically martyr Trump. It’s what Fidel did in Cuba with Che Guevara. The people loved Fidel at first, but they also loved Che, and posthumously, Che came to represent the roots of the revolution. Statues and parks were established all over the country to remind people of that. And as the Castro regime became less and less advantageous for its population, Che was propped up to keep the people still willing to be deceived, entranced by the nostalgia.
Nobody likes JD Vance, or Marco Rubio, and Stephen Miller is like spraying DEET in your mouth, but a lot of people will accept them when their commemorating memorials to the fallen warrior that was Trump. As they praise his memory and name buildings and airports and highways after him. And as the statues get raised in the squares, policed by men with AK-47s at their sides. Men who likely used to be Proud Boys and Three Percenters, but now make up huge swaths of our newly established peace force—or whatever Orwellian name they come up with. That’s another component of the One Big Beautiful Bill: hundreds of billions of dollars to invest in ICE and purge and restaff the FBI with loyalists and money for the surveillance company Palantir to aid both of them. All of that will be installed over the next few months and will be firmly in place by next summer, well in advance of the midterms.
I’m not saying they’re going to succeed; if anything, they’re fragile and racing against time to lock everything down. So now’s the time to shut them down. And as I’ve said before, there’s gonna have to be trials. We can’t just let people like Stephen Miller, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, J.D. Vance, Tom Homan, Pam Bondi, Russel Vought, Mike Johnson, James Comey, Elise Stefanik, Jim Jordan, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, Leonard Leo, Robert Kennedy Jr., Linda McMahon, Tulsi Gabbard, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Susie Wiles, Howard Lutnick, Brooke Rollins, Stephen Miller again because he deserves to be tried like seventeen times, John Ratcliffe, Mitch McConnel even though he’s demented now, Marty Makary, Doug Collins, Sean Duffy, Jeanine Pirro, Kayleigh McEnany, willfully being untethered from reality is not a legal excuse, Steve Scalise, Russel Fry, Blake Moore, Andy Biggs, Paul Gosar, Anna Paulina Luna, I’m going to leave Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert out of this and just let them duke it out on the sidelines, the weird guy with the eyepatch and the raised fist guy that ran away on Jan 6th, can’t remember their names, the other John Kennedy with the cartoonish accent he made up, Marsha Blackburn, Bill Hagerty, anyway the list will go on and on. And as long as we punish a few hundred, or better a few thousand of them, the rest will scurry back to the shadows.
And then we can start the tedious work of deprogramming our fellow citizens and try to reclaim some semblance of a shared reality. But it can’t happen without trials. And if we don’t think we have the stomach for that kind of thing, well, then, maybe I’ll see you around at the Trump Center for the Arts, or one of the many Trump International Airports, or at the Mount Trumpmore, or at the Trump Monument in Trump D.C. It’ll be golden.