Polymarket predicts Democrats taking both houses of Congress this November. Instead of a more typical election year focus on hearth and home, economy and peace, Trump devotedly pursues deep state continuity and endless war. His administration is rallying what is left of our military to vainly extend the life of a dying petrodollar. Trump’s Israel obsession, and Israel’s amoral maximalism, is producing global chaos designed to advance Israel’s interests as it consumes American bone and sinew, much as the US is consuming Ukraine’s in the proxy war with Russia.
As Saddam Hussein and Muammar Qadhafi found out last century, one must never reject the US dollar. Washington is the heart and soul of 21st century colonialism, enforcing its will militarily, technologically and economically around the world. It interferes in elections, even selecting the leaders of dozens of nations, including this ridiculous example of downward directed global democracy.
The Trump presidency is drowning, but not in a valiant struggle against the deep state in the DC swamp. Instead, it is choking on its own grift, overwhelmed by outlandish lies and ever shifting “objectives,” and deluged with fear at the highest levels. The lies and the grift are well accepted by Americans and not unique to this administration. But we are noticing the institutional fear seeping from the swamp, from the administration, from the deep state.
The US debt clock is nearing $40 trillion, and the great Dave Collum has a small prize for whomever gets the screen shot of a spectacular $40,000,000,000,000 rollover. Trump’s tariffs were supposed to close deficits and make American industry stronger, but as real economists predicted, Trump’s random, reactionary and punitive tariffs did nothing to address the trade balance, and funneled even more taxpayer dollars into government coffers. The Tax Policy Center’s evaluation of tariff costs shows regressive tax effects, extracting more earnings from lower tier taxpayers than those in higher brackets.
If war is the bulk of the US economy, Trump is certainly pimping the machine, but a dollar spent on the military industrial complex is both unauditable, and ineffective in creating significant jobs or national industrial capacity. Look no further than this broad ranging discussion between Danny Davis and Larry Johnson on what the MIC has done to our capabilities. An example of what the MIC does best is General Dynamics’ Mesquite, Texas ammo plant dumpster fire. For the past 70 years we have experienced and critiqued similar design, production or acquisition disasters that broke taxpayer backs, provided no measurable defense advantage, and yet were remarkably profitable to the MIC. The list grows by the minute, with the 2026 saga of the USS Gerald Ford, or the Littoral Combat Ship, or the overheating, non-stealthy, struggling to reach a 25% FMC rate, enormously expensive F-35, using 2000’s technology.
In his dotage, Donald Trump demonstrates his own late stage executive madness, with an utterly mind-blowing pretense of knowledge. When confronted with man and machine literally falling apart on the USS Abe Lincoln, he says, “Nine months at sea isn’t long enough!” China has already mastered electromagnetic catapult systems using direct current instead of alternating current, and holds hundreds of catapult patents. The All-Knowing Trump, confronted with the failing and very expensive electromagnetic catapult system on the new USS Gerald Ford, demands – as a king might call for a favorite dish at a banquet – a return to steam, just like mommy used to make it.
The unification of the presidency and the state, the rise of an executive state, the soft totalitarianism of a permanent bureaucracy, whatever you want to call it, has today fully subsumed the presidency and converted this important part of the Constitutional “balance of power” into little more than a mole on the face of unsentient statism. We are transfixed by our uniquely ineffectual presidency, and cannot take our eyes off it.
Trump’s presidency, like the mole on the face of the “Mole” in Austin Powers’ Goldmember, focuses our gaze and disrupts our understanding of the real issues of war and the state, a coming US governmental bankruptcy, accelerating wealth transfer from the people to political lackeys, oligarchies, and bureaucracies and the collateralization of everything.
We demand “No Kings” and deplore the unitary executive, and this makes some sense. Yet staring at the unbelievable and hypnotic presidential drama in DC, we are witnessing in real time – not the metastasizing emperor or all powerful don – but the disappearing presidency. How easy it was for Trump, like Obama before him, to promise they would be a savior, a wise and understanding father figure, to gain the popular blessing and to stimulate hope. They ran for an office that does not actually exist anymore, and one that may be filled by the most amoral and incompetent among us to a never-ending applause track.
Trump’s recent misadventure out of Ankara illustrates the insignificance of Trump’s presidency amidst his own personal cowardice and moral vacancy, and the fake world he inhabits. Phil Giraldi sums it up, and Trump’s own explanation is that he, the most powerful man in the world, listens to whoever scares him the most that day, and follows without question the instructions of the corrupt cops who guard him, and may have tried to kill him previously. Yet he obeys without question, a cardboard man who – if he truly believed the false threat against him – would have calculatedly watched most of his staff, several cabinet members, media and crew murdered in midair, without the decency of a maggot, without warning his friends, or giving them the option to follow his frightened and idiotic example.
None of this is to say any of his recent predecessors – or competitors for the office – would have done anything even remotely differently. Clinton seeking a diversion from a civil suit/pending impeachment for taking advantage of his position with a youthful female employee (or being seduced by a Mossad agent – it really doesn’t matter) launched the “Monica Missiles,” a fresh and unwarranted attack on Iraq in 1998, spending billions of dollars, pointlessly adding to the despair of Iraqis, creating more contempt for the US government. Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mitt Romney or John McCain, Biden and Harris – who can imagine more venal candidates for this fading appendage of the Constitution?
The executive branch is itself massive, outweighing the other two branches of the republic – but it isn’t led or controlled by an elected president. That office is disappearing apace, as we watch its aging and confused occupant struggle to understand why he’s losing his sanity.
To explain our current situation as well as you have in this short article, most authors would need to write a book. Keep up the good work Karen, and don’t even consider ruining your life by running for office. It’s far too late to save our country. It will have to start from scratch, to even have a chance.
You're one smart cookie, Karen.