Although predicting the exact future is impossible, we can certainly identify trends and try to make projections as to where they will lead. Going into the beginning of the Biden period after the most “unique” presidential elections in American history, the trends and signals seemed to be for a complete reversal or derailment of everything Trump attempted to do. It seemed evident that human-suit Biden’s job was to be an “anti-Trump”. But at this point we are sitting and looking at foreign policy actions from a Democrat White House that one would have expected from Trump. This is all rather strange.

One of the big issues of the Trump period was various witch-hunts for connections between himself and Russia. This was mostly a superficial tactic underlying a new core dynamic. During the period of 2016-2020 it became clear that the Democrats saw Russia as the great external enemy and the Republicans saw China as the real core threat. Trump himself never particularly expressed a passion for Russia, what he did express was a desire to work with them. Now when it comes to rhetoric, Trump has blasted and bluntly identified the Chinese as enemy #1 and he has not faltered in this position to this day. Russia’s religious conservative turn during the Putin era also bought some favour among Right-Wingers that can intellectually comprehend and emotionally accept that Communism ended, with Trump being one of them. As we all remember the Democrats whole-heartedly put Russia on their demonization pedestal for the entire Trump period. This all started mostly during Obama but it really took center stage during the Donald’s time in power.

This is what made the whole AUKUS move (or scandal from a French/NATO perspective) such a shock. One would have expected a Biden presidency (Democrat, Anti-Russian) to be somewhat lenient to the Red Dragon and yet this entire AUKUS concept looks right out of Trump’s playbook – putting more pressure on the Chinese using allies that actually do something rather than dead-weight NATO. In fact this unexpected decision may be yet another nail in the NATO coffin that Trump tried to cobble together.

Trump’s miraculous achievement of starting no new wars as POTUS could have only been topped by drawing down some bigger stagnant conflicts to a final conclusion. Warmongers scolded him for this, and the only Mainstream Media praise that Trump got en masse was when he sort of shot some ineffectual rockets at Syria. This makes it oh so surprising that Biden not only bailed from Afghanistan in a sloppied rush, but then gave his historic and surprising “MAGA” speech signaling the end of expensive and seemingly pointless “nation-building”. Again this type of action looks like something to be expected from a lame-duck Donald in the White House not a vengeance filled puppet Democrat.

Trump wanted to find a partner in now Christian and Conservative Russia, perhaps out of goodwill, but probably to fight the Chinese, or at least break up their growing economic and military symbiosis. So one would think that it would have been Trump to back off of Nord Stream-2 to give Russia a sign of hope and breathing room. But it was Biden who has granted leniency about this profitable energy export to Europe.

Furthermore, the drums of war were being ramped up in Kiev during the ugliness on Capitol Hill. Both Moscow and Kiev were sure that this new Democrat leadership would come in and fan the fires of a possibly apocalyptic conflict in Europe’s empty bread basket. And yet, after getting their preferred candidate in the Oval Office, Kiev is getting little more now than when Obama was in the big chair. The expected massive push in the Donbass never came to be. Zelensky has not been completely abandoned, but if Biden continues to mimic Trump then he may find himself living the rest of his life in a maximum security prison near Norilsk, with the Ukraine being partitioned and reformed into various chunks, most of which would go to Russia.

To be clear, Biden’s foreign policy is surprising, while his domestic policy, which is much easier to control, is completely in line with what we would expect. Millions of Americans are going to get the LGBTGreat Reset that they voted for.

The “America First” foreign policy that Trump was planning as a sort of restart for American greatness has strangely lined up with the sloppy international backpedaling under Biden. But the question is why is this happening? There are a few possible reasons.

1. Trump was extremely effective at pushing his agenda. The fear that spewed from the Mainstream Media at him was not irrational or paranoid but fully justified as he was a force to be reckoned with. Somehow in four years he changed the direction of things enough that it is impossible to follow the previous status quo. The avalanche is already falling and there is nothing that can be done.

2. Similar situations created similar reactions. Although clothing, language and religions may differ, all medieval societies have some overlapping tendencies. The system was the way it was based on the realities of that time, and if we found ourselves under those circumstances again we may be forced to embrace that lifestyle for a second time.

In this sense, it could be that ultimately, both Biden and Trump were tasked with managing a crumbling global empire, trying to keep the sinking ship afloat as long as possible waiting for something to change. Thus, their reactions to events and plans could look similar because of the similar causes that underlie them, even if the spirit behind the actions are radically different. Like it or not NATO may just be obsolete, Afghanistan may have just been too expensive, China may just be too powerful. The reactions to these situations could wind up being similar out of necessity or a lack of options. Both Trump and Biden faced these same realities.

3. The Democrats are petty enough to have fought Trump’s ideas/plans simply because they were his. Now they are free to copy and paste his Foreign Policy while continuing the Postmodern Push at home. This sounds insane but when we look at the sea of narcissism that we are drowning in, in the West it does not seem so far-fetched of a concept.

This is a critical moment in American history, where 75% of Republicans and 30% of Democrats agree that the 2020 Election was stolen from Trump, as our cited polling data below makes clear. Confidence in American institutions also continues to decline, while a new Trafalgar poll shows that Harris inspires no confidence at all among 60% of Americans.

The July 23 and 13 Trafalgar/Convention of States poll surveyed more than 1,100 likely voters for the 2022 midterm election with a startling 64 percent of respondents expressing little confidence that Harris is ready to be president. The bulk of these, close to 60 percent, said they were “not confident at all.” Mind you, a Vice-President is elected on the basis that they would be ready to serve as president whenever conditions may come to pass where the sitting president was unable.

In a parallel universe where Democrats don’t steal elections, this would be a disconcerting poll result.

The DNC needs to be building post-Biden energy now, as they enter the mid-term election cycle. Especially so now with MAGA activists pushing on every state legislature where they can, to push back against the Dominion/Smartmatic electronic voting systems and other voting integrity matters.

An election worker checks Dominion systems in Miami-Dade County in this uncredited photo from November 2020

MAGA voters are motivated by the de facto leader of the newly reformed Republican Party, Donald Trump. They are acting against election fraud, critical race theory, open and wanton double standards from the DOJ in handling the January 6^th protestors compared to the leniency given to Antifa/BLM, the movement against lockdowns with no basis in science, and more.

The DNC doesn’t have an answer. They appear to keep offering up Harris and Buttigieg. All of their gas was spent in an anti-Trump message that lacked a positive message.

Well, to the extent there was a message, promises made by Biden, most of these have been broken.

Elections – Why bother?

Post-Biden energy would, in that parallel universe, be very important for the Democrat Party considering how much organic energy the MAGA movement continues to generate. Back during the DNC convention in 2020, Joe Biden himself said he was just a placeholder, inferring that he realized he would be a one-term president if elected. The future of the party sits with Pete Buttigieg and Kamala Harris according to DNC insiders and their Trans-Atlantic corporate and bankers masters.

As unbelievable as that sounds, keep in mind that this is a party that only was able to come into the White House based upon what Biden himself called the most “extensive and inclusive voter fraud organization” ever assembled. Some may say this was a slip, others would retort that it was a Freudian slip.

At least 1/3^rd of Americans believe that Biden occupies the White House as the result of election fraud, according to late June 2021 Monmouth University poll. Looking at the methodology, it’s possible this number is tremendously higher.

Another reason this figure is probably many times higher, is a parallel Rasmussen Poll from late November 2020 that showed that 20-30% of Democrats, yes Democrats, believed that the election was stolen from Trump.

The picture becomes clearer when we look at the YouGov poll which asked Republican voters how accurate the statements:

“millions of fraudulent mail and absentee ballots were cast”, and whether; “voting machines were manipulated to add tens of thousands of votes for Joe Biden.”

Lastly YouGov asked for respondents’ responses to the statement;

 “thousands of votes were recorded for dead people.”

As even the liberal WaPo reported: For each of these false statements [sic], more than 50 percent of Republican respondents said it was “very accurate”; over 75 percent of Republican voters said each one was “very accurate” or “somewhat accurate.”

This is not a matter that will go away. Many Americans historically felt that differences between Republicans and Democrats at the level of the Executive Branch were not decisive. But as times have gotten harder, Americans have look less to private enterprise and more to executive action to deliver on endemic and now multi-generational problems.

A Pro-Trump ‘Stop the Steal’ protest, in this unsourced image.

The MAGA movement is one that largely connects geopolitical and geo-economic issues of the trade imbalance with China and the outsourcing of key production to the intolerable conditions and uncertainty that prevails across the heartland. Much of America still hadn’t recovered from the 2007/2008 financial crisis, and we should note that real wages had been falling against growth for decades before.

Provocations and Hardships

It’s almost as if congress isn’t aware of this economic decline now more than forty years in the works. But we think they are, since they’re the ones who had an in depth Congressional Research Service report which highlights the fact of continued declining wage trends for the past forty years in the opening summary.

One of America’s fast growing “Tent Cities” – Nov. 10, 2017 photo, Stephanie Beasley, 36, foreground, a former resident (AP Photo/Mike Cardew/Beacon Journal/Ohio.com)/Akron Beacon Journal via AP)

It’s almost as if all of this is a provocation, intended on provoking the kind of ‘uprising of the deplorables’ that January 6^th wasn’t. The open abuse of institutions, fraudulent elections, growing unemployment and uncertainty, the grotesque rising trend of medical bankruptcy, and the eventual rolling out of vaccine passports (whether governmental or de facto as a condition of employment and travel) are indeed horrific. And they would be all the more horrific if these were intentionally being orchestrated to provoke a reaction from the American people which would then be used as a pretext to double-down harder on the rising police state.

Given Biden’s state of mental deterioration, there is no possibility he is really developing policy, foreign or domestic. That’s what cabinets do anyhow, but historically there has been some notion that the ship has a captain other than the IMF, CFR and the World Economic Forum’s Nicolas Berggruen. It was he who financed John Podesta’s terroristic and secessionist war-game to oust trump, the Transition Integrity Project. There is also someone clearly telling Biden what to say through his earpiece, and his executive orders are signed in what appears to be his wife’s handwriting.

And with Pete Buttigieg showing off some decree of election theft acumen himself back in the Spring of 2020, guaranteeing a win against Bernie Sanders in the Iowa straw poll by using a crooked app made by Shadow Inc. (you can’t make this stuff up), we see a clearer picture. Biden’s role is to break every promise made, promises necessary to get those 50 or 60 million Americans who actually voted for him to turn out.

The future of the DNC relies on printing fake ballots, ballot harvesting, and media censorship if anyone tries to raise these facts. The announcement that the White House would be coordinating with Big Tech to further censor and repress Americans is most definitely a violation of the 1^st Amendment, given that this is now an act of government deciding which political speech will be allowed.

And with all of that, it looks very much like the end-game here is to have a Harris and Buttigieg ticket for 2024. Having Harris and Buttigieg forced onto a majority pro-Trump America, would be a hardship and a provocation that could finally push America over the edge into disintegration.

Liars Do Their Work

Buttigieg and Harris rank very high on what the decidedly unlikable people in charge think likability looks like.

What’s more, there’s a very good chance that Biden won’t even finish his term, word on the streets is that foreign leaders and diplomatic missions have bet pools on which month in 2022 or 2023 that Biden steps down for one reason or another.

Because the DNC pretends also to be the party of organized labor and more, imagines that it represents the interests of the most vulnerable and socioeconomically oppressed strata, it can make these betrayals seem to be a step above what ‘Orange-man-bad’ would have been able to offer. Most American workers won’t believe it; they didn’t in 2016 or in 2020. But with voter fraud, election theft, social media censorship, and let’s throw in cyber-terrorism and a magical pandemic, food shortages and black-outs, the idea may very well just be to simply pummel and demoralize American workers into submission.

These deep state games are being played on very shaky ground, with Americans institutions suffering a growing loss of confidence among the public. An early July 2021 Gallup poll shows a continued decline in confidence since 1973, and this trend has been a consistent one.

This strongly suggests that Atlantic Council claims, used to justify censorship and repression, that Russian misinformation vectors are responsible for the loss of confidence are false. Instead, we can see that the loss of confidence parallels both the growing income inequality (Pew Research) and gap between economic growth and real earnings over the same exact period of time.

Despite this, there is a profound disconnect between DNC loyal professional ‘activists’ and pundits and the public at large, a special class that continues to have faith in the system they are paid to have.

The quacking pundit class of policy wonks and university graduate NGO ‘specialists’ living in a fantasy-land where there is some viable progressive strategy to ‘win back’ the DNC from the corporations will do their job in 2022 and 2024. Their job is to create a hyper-reality simulacrum of hope, so that big-hearted progressives continue to vote Democrat.

This all comes together beautifully. So long as these professional pundits on both mainstream and DNC backed ‘alternative’ media sell the story, then the rapidly diminishing strata of baby-boomer and older Gen X progressives might actually think that the ‘Democrat Landslide’ electoral outcomes in 2022 and 2024 were legitimate.

Restoring Democracy in America?

The election results continue to inspire incredulity still eight months after the November election. Once people lose confidence in that system, and as confidence in institutions erodes, people start to dig. Then they discover stock price manipulation, and start to pull out investments from there. Once the system loses buy-in from the public, then there’s very little left they can squeeze from the public. This is a basic question of the social contract.

Between big questions about election integrity, and a ‘Great Reset’ being forced onto the U.S. and the world by a banking class trying to hold on to power in a post financial world, a growing percentage of Americans – about 20% of all Americans – want the U.S. military to take matters in their own hands, and conduct military tribunals that would see large swaths of ‘elected’ officials, leaders of intelligence agencies, and even celebrities (thought to be involved in ritual child abuse), tried and possibly executed at Gitmo.

There are simple solutions to voter integrity issues, and genuinely open and fair elections could go a long way not only in restoring faith in institutions, but electing representatives that can do the kind of ‘reset’ that Americans actually want.

Historic voter disenfranchisement suffered by Black Americans is a provable phenomenon, caused by the prison-industrial complex and recidivism, DMV offices being used to issue state ID’s despite these being located hundreds of miles away in some states larger inter-county systems.

But the work-arounds proposed by Democrats to solve disenfranchisement are actually just covers for election fraud.

An undated Alabama State House disenfranchisement protest endorsed by the NAACP – source NYT

Those ‘solutions’ also simply treat Black Americans as default Democrats – and so ballots are stuffed ‘on their behalf’. That’s likely what poll workers who stuffed ballot boxes thought they were doing it in the name of justice. It’s understandable on a certain level, the existing injustices can certainly inspire a type of vigilantism at the counting tables. But this was used to take the election from Trump, who also earned more votes from Black America than any Republican since Reconstruction after the Civil War.

But it’s this half of the story that many conservatives are loath to appreciate. Their demands are pretty straight forward and rational: end electronic voting, return to a paper ballot-only system. Require a state ID to vote.

Election fraud effects all Americans, but what’s often not considered is the particularly negative impact it has on the historically disenfranchised black community. This is because election fraud is also used in Democrat primaries, meaning that Democrats that offer no real solutions for Black America can win primaries, leaving this vulnerable community without a working electoral system. Election fraud, because of who is behind it, benefits corporate America which perhaps counter-intuitively for old liberals, backed Biden and worked very hard to take the election from Trump.

What’s next for 74 million of the former president’s supporters?

By Andrew J. BACEVICH

In the grand narrative of the American presidency, the Age of Trump will prove to be little more than a momentary distraction, the equivalent of taking the wrong exit off an interstate highway. Within weeks of his departure from office, his successor was already repairing the damage Trump had inflicted on the nation and the world. As measured by substantive impact, his was an ephemeral presidency: plenty of noise and commotion, but little permanent harm and virtually no lasting achievements.

Even so, to judge by last November’s balloting, tens of millions of our fellow citizens remain willing buyers of what Trump sells. Before the election and after, the MAGA masses displayed passion, zeal, and astonishing loyalty. If there were doubts on that score, the January 6 assault on the Capitol settled them.

While denied reelection, Trump hauled in a whopping 74,222,958 votes, the second highest total of any U.S. presidential candidate ever. The significance of that figure, which exceeds Hillary Clinton’s 2016 popular vote by nearly ten million, can scarcely be overstated. It expresses the essential meaning of the Trump moment: What he did or did not do in office will soon be forgotten, but by tapping into and unleashing long dormant forces, Trump transformed the landscape of national politics.

Observers hastening to enshrine the Biden presidency as a welcome return to normalcy are not keen to reflect on what the 74 million signify, implicitly dismissing them as retrograde yahoos or “deplorables,” in Mrs. Clinton’s notorious formulation. Note that to do so amounts to writing off approximately half of the nation’s politically active population.

According to convention, Trump supporters are poor, white, uneducated, and mostly male, their numbers including a substantial cohort of unrepentant, gun-wielding racists. In progressive quarters, this self-serving conception of who comprises the 74 million plays well. But it is at least misleading, if not flat-out wrong. Even in 2016, women, African Americans, Hispanics, and Asian Americans voted for Trump in surprising numbers. Four years later, Trump’s support in each of these demographic categories actually increased. Among white women who voted in 2020, for example, 55 percent cast their ballot for Trump, up from 47 percent four years earlier.

How to explain such electoral behavior? One option is to classify Trump supporters as cretins.  According to one irate professor of gender studies at the University of Southern California, writing for New York magazine, women voting for Trump simply sold out. These “wine moms” willingly accept a “second-class status with their gender, as long as the Republican Party puts them first with race and keeps them safe.” From this perspective, the millions of women supporting Trump are too stupid or too craven to act pursuant to their actual interests. A similar judgment ostensibly applies to anyone in the BIPOC/LGBTQ universe who, in voting for Trump, disregarded the dictates of identity politics.

When I was young, commentators would cite farmers or veterans or Catholics as holding the key to some upcoming election. Today, especially in progressive circles, political forecasters cite tribal identity as the factor that will determine the outcome. When the African-American journalist Juan Williams took to the pages of the New York Times to announce that “the black vote now defines American politics,” he was conferring on his own tribe a dominant status. In fact, it makes no more sense to assign black voters a preeminent role than to confer a similar status on women, Hispanics, Asian-Americans or any other comparable group.

What proponents of identity politics miss is that ultimately the broad political center — inevitably including voters of every imaginable race, creed, color, and other distinguishing trait — will determine the future of American politics. In that regard, Trump’s 74 million will likely play a pivotal role. If Democrats can peel off a dozen or so of those millions, they will own Washington. If the Republican party consolidates and continues to expand Trump’s base, then the GOP may well recover from its present state of confusion and disarray.

The key question is this: As the aging and besieged Trump himself inevitably fades from view (or is shoved aside) and his supporters thereby come up for grabs, who will corral them? Who will claim this rich political harvest?

That it won’t be “Sleepy Joe” Biden is a safe bet. I say that meaning no disrespect to the president. As Trump’s successor, Biden is a transitional figure rather than a transformational one.  He will fill in potholes, repair fences, and distribute vaccines (faster, please). After four years during which Trump disdained the day-to-day work of governance, we should be grateful to have a chief executive who actually tends to his duties.

Yet Biden possesses neither the energy nor the intellectual acuity to redefine the political center. He is a past-his-prime plodder. His domestic agenda is warmed-over Obama and therefore about as salient to the present moment as Adlai Stevenson’s. Regarding America’s role in the world, Biden recycles once fashionable bromides about American global leadership, a euphemism for ideological and economic primacy sustained by military supremacy. For a brief time in the late twentieth century, this perspective seemed valid, until 9/11, multiple economic crises, failed wars, the rise of China, the growing threat of climate change, and finally the coronavirus pandemic swept it away.

So Biden’s allotted role is to serve as a placeholder. If he succeeds in holding things together until Providence, fate, or the American people in their wisdom determine what should come next, history will treat him generously. What comes next will emerge from a reframing of the political center, yet to be undertaken.

The center tends to be boring. Political movements draw sustenance from the antics of the extremes, whether left or right. Recent events have validated this truism. At the opposite ends of the contemporary political spectrum, weirdness flourishes. In San Francisco, a proudly “woke” school board votes to expunge from public schools the names of notable Americans judged guilty of past sins, including George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. On the far right, meanwhile, belief that a Washington, DC, pizzeria served as a front for a child sex-trafficking ring directed by Hillary Clinton and other Democratic luminaries gains a large following, inducing one demented individual to shoot up the place.

I cite these bizarre episodes merely to illustrate how in recent years politics-as-theater has eclipsed politics-as-governance, a phenomenon to which Donald Trump and the Trump-hating media have jointly contributed. A new political center capable of gaining the support of a durable majority will necessarily tend to more substantive matters.

The place to begin? Jettison taken-for-granted propositions that have manifestly outlived their usefulness. These propositions are not difficult to identify. As mainstays of American politics since the end of the Cold War and in some instances even earlier, they have contributed mightily to the country’s present disunity and distress. A first step for any individual, movement, or party seriously committed to getting the nation back on track will be to:

• concede that the so-called unipolar moment has ended;
• admit that U.S. military supremacy is a dangerous illusion;
• acknowledge that the American “way of life” condemns large numbers of American citizens to lives of want, squalor, and spiritual emptiness;
• appreciate the insidiousness of information technology in undermining genuine freedom;
• cease to ignore the underside of American materialism, which confuses more with better; and
• acknowledge the social disarray stemming directly from the abandonment of traditional moral norms.

These six imperatives are inherently neither liberal nor conservative. Yet I submit that they touch on matters of greater relevance to the crisis of our time than anything Trump said or did as president. Only by facing up to the truths to which they testify will it become possible to break free from the smelly orthodoxies to which so many in the political mainstream continue to swear fealty.

Reduce them all to a single pithy sentence and you get this: The American Century, the era of ostensible U.S. global primacy dating from World War II, is gone for good, as is the post–Cold War reverie that did so much to hasten its demise. Consigning the American Century to the past is a precondition for restoring some sense of relevance and integrity to national politics. Pretending to resuscitate it, as the Biden administration appears intent on doing with the president’s endless assurances that “America is back,” is to perpetrate a fraud.

To say aloud that the American Century has ended is to clear away an accumulated debris of lies and deceptions of far greater consequence than any of Trump’s outrages. Doing so will make honesty in the arena of national politics possible. Furthermore, such an admission just might resonate with the 74 million whose disgust with the establishment brought them to Trump in the first place and who will be left politically homeless as it becomes apparent that their champion has been permanently dethroned.

It will take courage for anyone aspiring to a position of national leadership to say aloud that the American Century has ended. The first would-be president to do so will likely absorb some big hits. But he or she will be doing their country a great service.

So all of you patriotic Americans out there, however you may have voted last year, be brave and repeat after me: the unipolar moment has ended; U.S. military supremacy is a dangerous illusion; the American way of life needs serious fixing; information technology debases and corrupts; more is not better; and without a shared moral code, there is neither decency nor civilization.

theamericanconservative.com

Even as Biden continued to rack up votes in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, Trump tweeted and told aides that he would refuse to concede the election, hold periodic campaign “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) rallies across the country, refuse to depart from the White House on January 20, and even suggested he might stage a rival inauguration in January as Biden is sworn in as president on the west façade of the U.S. Capitol building.

The establishment of rival governments has generally never been successful for the illicit claimants to power. Perhaps the most well-known rivalry for power took pace in the 14^thCentury when seven successive rival Roman Catholic Popes claimed the papacy from their Holy See capital in Avignon in the Kingdom of Arles, then part of the Holy Roman Empire. In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII, in a papal bull issued in Rome, declared that “every human creature be subject to the Roman pontiff.” That constituted a direct attack on King Philip IV of France, who refused to bow down to the dictates of the Roman Pope.

In 1303, Italian allies of King Philip broke into the papal residency in Rome and severely beat Pope Boniface as he was preparing to issue an edict excommunicating the French King. The Pope died shortly thereafter and was replaced by Pope Benedict XI, who absolved the French King of any wrongdoing. Benedict died after eight months as Pope and was replaced with the pro-French Pope Clement V. In 1305, in order for the French King to wrest the papacy away from the influence of powerful Roman families, seven successive French Popes all resided in Avignon. That was until Pope Gregory XI decided to move the Holy See back to Rome. Three French claimants to the papacy, called “Antipopes,” continued to reside in France after Gregory moved the papacy back to Rome in 1376. In 1378, the French Cardinals of the church revolted when the papacy in Rome returned to an Italian, Pope Urban VI. The French Cardinals recognized the French Pope Clement VII as the pope in Avignon. The period of rival Popes and Holy Sees was called the “Western Schism” and the “Babylonian Captivity.” The schism did not end until 1417.

Some religious historians point to the rare case that there are currently two living pontiffs, Benedict VXIII, who resigned the papacy in 2013 amid a Vatican pedophile scandal, and his replacement, Pope Francis I, the first Jesuit pontiff in the history of the Church. Benedict, who has continued to involve himself in conservative Vatican politics from his apartment in the Holy See, has found himself challenging many of the liberalized decisions of Francis. The schism has revived the enigma, in some Catholics’ minds, of the 14^th Century Popes and Antipopes.

If Mr. Trump were to stage a rival, but unconstitutional, inauguration as “president” on January 20, 2021, a president and anti-president situation might unfold, similar to the Western Schism of the 14^th Century in Europe. Monarchical history of Europe and other countries is replete with cases of rival claimants to thrones, but the situation is quite rare in democracies, where leaders serve according to the wishes, expressed in elections, of the people. However, there have been cases where two political leaders, both claiming victories in elections, have become rivals for the presidency.

In December 2001, Madagascar incumbent President Didier Ratsiraka claimed victory in the presidential election. On February 22, 2002, supporters of Ratsiraka’s opponent, Marc Ravalomanana, rallied to their candidate’s support after he declared himself the victor over Ratsiraka, who was accused of widespread cheating. Ravalomanana proceeded to name an alternative government to that of Ratsiraka’s. As the mayor of the capital city of Antananarivo, Ravalomanana had the infrastructure to appoint a rival government. After Ravalomanana swore himself in as president before a crowd of 750,000 supporters, Ratsiraka declared a national state of emergency. Since neither candidate had achieved an outright majority, the election had been heading for a run-off on March 24, 2002. During the interim, Madagascar had two rival presidents, both claiming control over the nation. Fighting broke out between supporters of the two would-be presidents. Ravalomanana’s forces took control of Antananarivo and Ratsiraka and his forces retreated to Toamasina, on the east coast of the island nation. The United States, Germany, and France recognized Ravalomanana as the legitimate winner of the December 2001 election and the rightful president of Madagascar. In July 2002, with Ravalomanana’s forces bearing down on Toamasina, reportedly with the help of French forces who helped capture the key port of Diego Suarez from Ratsiraka’s loyalists, Ratsiraka and his family fled to Seychelles aboard an Antonov plane owned by Ratsiraka’s son, Xaxier.

Could such a scenario play out in January in the United States? If Mr. Trump fails to leave the White House at the constitutionally-mandated hour of noon on January 20, 2021, he and his family and staff would be physically removed from the Executive Mansion by federal law enforcement officers. President Biden would be free to move into the White House and take up his post in the Oval Office. Trump may decide to forgo such a public humiliation of being placed under arrest and stage a rival inauguration at his private club at Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Florida, in the hope that Republican officials, including Florida’s Republican governor and two U.S. senators, as well as other Republican officeholders, pro-Trump county sheriffs in Florida, and a few Trump-appointed federal judges, might be in attendance.

Trump may also decide to seek the support of wealthy right-wing Cuban, Colombian, and Venezuelan interests in South Florida to help defend his rival administration, taking a cue from Venezuelan National Assembly leader Juan Guaido, who, on January 23, 2019, declared himself the acting president of Venezuela in opposition to the re-election on May 20, 2018 of incumbent President Nicolas Maduro. The stage was set for two rival presidents of Venezuela. Maduro accused the Trump administration of fomenting a coup to establish a U.S. “puppet state” in Venezuela. Guaido’s rival regime was quickly recognized by the U.S., Canada, Britain, France, and members of the Organization of American States’ Lima Group of Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia. Russia, China, Iran, Syria, Cuba, Nicaragua, Turkey, and the United Nations continued to recognize Maduro as the legitimate president of Venezuela.

Trump, if he were to establish a rival presidential administration in Palm Beach, might receive diplomatic support from his far-right foreign allies, including Presidents Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, Ivan Duque of Colombia, as well as Venezuelan “Interim President” Guaido. Bolsonaro’s son, Brazilian Congressman Eduardo Bolsonaro, took to social media to push right-wing conspiracy theories about election fraud in the U.S. presidential election. As of this writing, President-elect Biden had not yet received any congratulatory phone calls from Trump’s international allies, who, in addition to the Latin American neo-fascist leaders, included the prime ministers of Hungary and Slovenia and the president of Turkey.

Trump’s prospects for leading a rival U.S. administration for any significant length of time are dim. Ratsiraka returned from exile to Madagascar, but he agreed to refrain from active politics. Guaido has been discredited after a failed U.S.-backed coup in Venezuela – the May 2020 Operation GIDEON – and his squandering of large amounts of international aid money for personal benefit.

There have been rival claimants to presidential palaces following contested results of elections in Kenya, Malawi, Benin, Guinea, Nigeria, Guinea-Bissau, Cote d’Ivoire, Niger, Togo, South Sudan, Djibouti, Maldives, Gambia, Afghanistan, Guyana, Belarus, and several other countries. However, these elections have largely been in developing democracies and have been marked by violence and bloodshed. It remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump and his supporters are willing to go that far in striving to retain a spurious claim for control of the U.S. Executive Branch of government. If they do, the United States may descend into the type of civil strife not seen since the Civil War between the Union and the Confederacy.

Trump eschews facts as often as he is able. The 1918 flu, incorrectly called the “Spanish flu” was first detected in the United States on March 4, 1918. “Patient zero” was identified as Albert Gitchell, a U.S. Army cook at Camp Funston in Kansas.

Facts matter, except for a select group of fascist and proto-fascist leaders who include Trump, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, Colombian President Ivan Duque, Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte, and a few other delusional presidents and prime ministers scattered around the globe.

Trump’s logic on the Covid-19 virus is as bizarre as his botching the time line of the 1918 flu. Trump repeatedly claimed the United States had more cases of Covid-19 because it was conducting more tests. Trump also admitted that he ordered less tests because that action would result in fewer cases. Of course, such a statement is that of a madman and is similar to someone claiming that if he or she was not tested for cancer, they would not contract cancer.

It is historical revisionism by Trump and his acolytes that presents the most danger for the United States and the world. George Orwell’s novel about a dystopian fascistic future, “1984,” introduced the quote, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” That fascist precept, a canon of fictional Oceania’s “Ministry of Truth,” is dominant in Trump’s administration and Republican Party, the latter having become a personal political vehicle for would-be dictator Trump.

Alteration of American history lies at the heart of Trump’s attempt to re-brand the Old Confederacy. Trump has held up politicians and generals of the Confederate States of America, over which the United States was ultimately victorious in the U.S. Civil War, as part of the “heritage” of America. “Heritage” is a word that has become synonymous with adulation of the Confederacy, Jim Crow-era racism, plantation system slavery, and esteem for Confederate leaders. In order to re-write history, Trump and his Republicans have acted to develop fictional stories about the past.

In Mississippi, the Republicans opposed to removing the Confederate battle flag from the state flag have incorrectly stated that the flag was designed by “an African-American Confederate soldier.” State senator Kathy Chism, a Republican supporter of Trump, wrote on Facebook about the black Confederate soldier, who she failed to identify, “I can only imagine how proud he was that his art, his flag design was chosen to represent our State and now we want to strip him of his pride, his hard work. I’m sure he put a lot of thought into this design.” Chism made up the entire claim.

First, there were no black soldiers who fought for the Confederacy. Second, the current Mississippi flag was designed in 1894 by one of her predecessors in the state Senate, Edward Scudder, a white man who wanted to honor the Confederacy. Scudder’s wife actually sewed the flag as both she and her husband were ardent supporters of the segregationist South. What better way to both honor the Confederacy and send a strong message to Mississippi’s large black population than to place the flag of a defeated secessionist and racist confederation of states on the flag of Mississippi!

Another disturbing alteration of history can be linked directly to the neo-fascist global movement of former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon. The neo-fascist catechism holds forth that Adolf Hitler and his Nazis were not far-right-wingers but represented “left-wing socialism.” This false historical narrative, pushed by officials in both the Trump and Bolsonaro administrations, reasons that because “National Socialism,” the political tenet of the Nazis, contain the word “socialism,” that makes Hitler and his Nazis “socialists.” Those who believe such codswallop refuse to recognize that Germany’s true Socialists and Communists were either executed by Hitler’s paramilitary forces or sent to the death camps, where few survived. To Hitler, socialism represented Bolshevik Marxism, Socialism, and Communism. There was absolutely nothing “leftist” about Hitler and his Nazis.

Trump and his supporters’ entire campaign to paint the news as “fake” and history, as we know it, as false is an Orwellian attempt to own the past, dictate the present, and control the future. Trump has given more than one “wink and nod” to an extreme fringe of right-wingers, who call themselves “Qanon,” who believe that even more far-out fantasies are true. One is that John F. Kennedy, Jr., the son of the 35th president who died along with his wife and sister-in-law in a 1999 plane crash, faked his own death in order to re-emerge one day to join Trump in battling an international pedophile ring. Several Qanon followers have emerged to join Trump on the Republican ballot in several states for the November 3 election. Qanon has a major outlet for their bizarre views on a cable “news” network, One America News Network, which is based in San Diego, California.

The FBI has deemed the Qanon poses a potential terrorist threat. A number of Qanon members have been arrested for, among other crimes, murder and attempted terrorism. Qanon is similar to a Nazi death cult. Its members not only believe that Covid-19 is a ruse concocted by some secretive global cabal – a belief that has been given succor by Trump – but, more dangerously, they freely throw around names of public figures who they believe should be “eliminated.”

Qanon and other right-wing extremist groups have made death threats against several public health officials around the country – all claimed to be part of some “deep state” – who have been at the forefront of crafting special health measures, including the wearing of masks and social distancing, to avoid the spread of Covid-19. Among those who have been targeted are Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease expert; Dr. Barbara Ferrer, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health; and Dr. Amy Acton, the former public health director of Ohio. Acton was forced to resign as director after protesters, some spurred on by Qanon nonsense, showed up at her home.

Alternative history pervades the Trump administration. Trump’s Housing and Urban Development Secretary, Dr. Ben Carson, called the importation of slaves to the Americas from Africa “involuntary immigration.” He added that despite being sold into slavery, African slaves were merely “immigrants [who] made the choice to come to America.” Carson has not been alone in creating personal fantasies about history.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos cited historically black colleges and universities as being “real pioneers” of school choice, ignoring the fact that these schools of higher education were established out of necessity because segregation barred many African-Americans from attending white colleges and universities.

The attempt by Trump, Bolsonaro, and others to control the past, ensuring their control of the present and future, will depend on educators and the press being more vigilant than at any time in the past in spotting fake history, news, and science.

It was reasonable to suppose, however, that Trump’s attitude might have indicated Washington’s policy, in that it seemed to be intended to establish cordial relations and expand trade and generally cooperate with Russia. Not a bit of it, because on June 11 the U.S. Senate legislated further sanctions targeting involvement in construction of the Russia-Germany Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline – intensifying the sanctions regime approved by Trump in 2019. There was no consultation with either Russia or Germany, and the German Economy Minister, Peter Altmaier, stated bluntly that “The German government has long had the view that sanctions with extraterritorial effects are in conflict with international law and that they’re not a contribution to advancing international cooperation. This position hasn’t changed.”

That statement of German policy was made on the same day as a report in the New York Times that the U.S. intended to cut the number of its military personnel in Germany by 25 per cent. Washington did not consider it necessary to consult with the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, or with the Secretary General of Nato, Jens Stoltenberg, whose reaction was predictably servile, in stating he expected “ongoing dialogue.” German foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said plaintively that “Neither the state department nor the Pentagon has been able to provide any information about this,” and that the matter “definitely need to be talked about”. Indeed it does, not least because, as noted by Deutsche Welle “an estimated 20 [U.S.] nuclear weapons are believed to be kept at Germany’s Büchel Air Base in western Germany.”

Nato achieves nothing in Europe – or anywhere else – by its presence, but Trump’s reasons for withdrawing troops from Germany have nothing to do with strategy, refinement of international relations or rethinking the relevance of Nato. It was petulant reaction to Germany’s failure to meet a military expenditure target. But as the Guardian noted, “Contrary to Trump’s repeated claims, Germany does not owe payments to Nato or the U.S., but falls short of a Nato target in which members commit 2% of their annual GDP to military spending by 2024.” As reported by Stars and Stripes, “The Pentagon, which appears to have been blindsided by Trump’s decision, has been mum on the issue. U.S. European Command also has declined to comment, referring questions to the National Security Council in Washington.”

There was no assessment in Washington of what Trump’s decision would cost, but it will be extremely expensive for the U.S. taxpayer, as it is far from easy to move 9,500 personnel and all their dependents, and reorganise the massive number of military facilities involved. The economic impact on communities in Germany where troops are based is going to be most severe, but this is the last thing that would cross the mind of Donald Trump.

It has long been known that Trump is an erratic, inconsistent, blustering ignoramus – but the fact remains that he directs the foreign policy of the United States, using others of similar characteristics to carry out his directives. John Bolton, his former national security adviser (a drum-thumping war hawk with a most unpleasant character) said in an interview that “I don’t think he’s fit for office. I don’t think he has the competence to carry out the job,” and he speaks for many people. But Trump will continue to strut the world stage and indulge in incoherent diatribes about every aspect of international affairs. His insulting comment about Bolton that he is “a disgruntled boring fool who only wanted to go to war. Never had a clue, was ostracized & happily dumped. What a dope!”, although generally accepted as being accurate, only added to the atmosphere of feverish turmoil that pervades Washington.

As the BBC reported, “President Trump has been a persistent critic of the Nato military bloc, calling on other members to boost their spending. Despite this the U.S. remains a member, but Mr Bolton says [in his book] that at a 2018 Nato summit Mr Trump had decided to quit. ‘We will walk out, and not defend those who have not [paid],’ the president said, according to Mr Bolton.” So what does that mean for U.S. policy concerning Europe? What does it mean for Russia, which is the focus for Nato’s increasingly aggressive deployment of military forces in Eastern Europe? Nobody knows, because the president of the United States twists and turns and leaps and ricochets, and the result has been confusion and incertitude.

Then on June 15 Stars and Stripes reported U.S. and Polish officials as saying that “negotiations for an American troop boost in Poland are still on track and the number of service members in that country could be larger than originally planned,” while the U.S. Ambassador to Poland, Georgette Mosbacher, tweeted that Polish President Andrzej Duda’s “vision for increased U.S. presence in Poland will be even greater than originally outlined” – but nobody else in Europe or in Nato appears to know anything about this significant policy change.

As stated by Nato, its “Enhanced Forward Presence” of troops and aircraft along Russia’s borders consists of “four multinational battle groups in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. These battle groups, led by the United Kingdom, Canada, Germany and the United States respectively, are multinational, and combat-ready, demonstrating the strength of the transatlantic bond… [and] form part of the biggest reinforcement of NATO’s collective defence in a generation.” But does Trump realise that he will be expanding the Forward Presence even more by transferring U.S. troops in Germany to Poland?

For the moment, his policy regarding Poland appears to be supportive, in that he invited Polish President Duda to visit Washington on June 24, when, according to the White House, the focus is to be “advancing our co-operation on defence, as well as trade, energy, and telecommunications security”. There cannot be many presidents who would fly off on a visit to a foreign country just four days before a national election, but Politico explained that it would be “a potential political boost for Duda, who . . . has been losing ground in recent opinion polls. Poland is one of the most pro-American countries in Europe, and one of the few where photos of a meeting with Trump could turn into an electoral advantage.”

It is evident that Trump is sending some sort of message to Europe and Russia about Poland, but as with much of his international policy it is decidedly mixed and can contribute only to existing and potentially dangerous confusion. His own campaign for re-election is gathering impetus, and for the sake of the world as a whole it must be hoped that the people of the United States also understand that mixed messages and confusion do not contribute to Making America Great Again.

That slogan guaranteed Nixon’s election, and was coined by Kevin Phillips, then an expert in “ethnic voting patterns”.

Philips makes for a very interesting case. In 1999, he became the author of a seminal book: The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-America, where he tracks how a “small Tudor kingdom” ended up establishing global hegemony.

The division of the English-speaking community into two great powers – “one aristocratic, ‘chosen’ and imperial; and one democratic, ‘chosen’ and manifest destiny-driven”, as Philips correctly establishes – was accomplished by, what else, a war triptych: the English Civil War, the American revolution and the U.S. Civil War.

Now, we may be at the threshold of a fourth war – with unpredictable and unforeseen consequences.

As it stands, what we have is a do-or-die clash of models: MAGA against an exclusivist Fed/Wall Street/Silicon Valley-controlled system.

MAGA – which is a rehash of the American dream – simply cannot happen when society is viciously polarized; vast sectors of the middle class are being completely erased; and mass immigration is coming from the Global South.

In contrast, the Fed as a Wall Street hedge fund meets Silicon Valley model, a supremely elitist 0.001% concoction, has ample margins to thrive.

The model is based on even more rigid corporate monopoly; the preeminence of capital markets, where a Wall Street boom is guaranteed by government debt-buybacks of its own debt; and life itself regulated by algorithms and Big Data.

This is the Brave New World dreamed by the techno-financial Masters of the Universe.

Trump’s MAGA woes have been compounded by a shoddy geopolitical move in tandem with Law and Order: his re-election campaign will be under the sign of “China, China, China.” When in trouble, blame a foreign enemy.

That comes from serially failed opportunist Steve Bannon and his Chinese billionaire sidekick Guo Wengui, or Miles Guo. Here they are in Statue of Liberty mode announcing their no holds barred infowar campaign to demonize the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to Kingdom Come and “free the Chinese people”.

Bannon’s preferred talking point is that if his infowar fails, there will be “kinetic war”. That is nonsense. Beijing’s priorities are elsewhere. Only a few neo-conned Dr. Strangeloves would envisage “kinetic war”- as in a pre-emptive nuclear strike against Chinese territory.

Alastair Crooke has masterfully shown how the geoeconomic game, as Trump sees it, is above all to preserve the power of the U.S. dollar: “His particular concern would be to see a Europe that was umbilically linked to the financial and technological heavyweight that is China. This, in itself, effectively would presage a different world financial governance.”

But then there’s The Leopard syndrome: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change”. Enter Covid-19 as a particle accelerator, used by the Masters of the Universe to tweak “things” a bit so they not only stay as they are but the Master grip on the world tightens.

The problem is Covid-19 behaves as a set of – uncontrollable – free electrons. That means nobody, even the Masters of the Universe, is able to really weigh the full consequences of a runaway, compounded financial/social crisis.

Deconstructing Nixon-Trump

Russiagate, now totally debunked, has unfolded in effect as a running coup: a color non-revolution metastasizing into Ukrainegate and the impeachment fiasco. In this poorly scripted and evidence-free morality play with shades of Watergate, Trump was cast by the Democrats as Nixon.

Big mistake. Watergate had nothing to do with a Hollywood-celebrated couple of daring reporters. Watergate represented the industrial-military-security-media complex going after Nixon. Deep Throat and other sources came from inside the Deep State. And it was not by accident that they were steering the Washington Post – which, among other roles, plays the part of CIA mouthpiece to perfection.

Trump is a completely different matter. The Deep State keeps him under control. One just needs to look at the record: more funds for the Pentagon, $1 trillion in brand new nuclear weapons, perennial sanctions on Russia, non-stop threats to Russia’s western borders, (failed) efforts to derail Nord Stream 2. And this is only a partial list.

So, from a Deep State point of view, the geopolitical front – containment of Russia-China – is assured. Domestically, it’s much more complicated.

As much as Black Lives Matter does not threaten the system even remotely like the Black Panthers in the 60s, Trump believes his own Law & Order, like Nixon, will once again prevail. The key will be to attract the white women suburban vote. Republican pollsters are extremely optimistic and even talking about a “landslide”.

Yet the behavior of an extra crucial vector must be understood: what corporate America wants.

When we look at who’s supporting Black Lives Matter – and Antifa – we find, among others, Adidas, Amazon, Airbnb, American Express, Bank of America, BMW, Burger King, Citigroup, Coca Cola, DHL, Disney, eBay, General Motors, Goldman Sachs, Google, IBM, Mastercard, McDonald’s, Microsoft, Netflix, Nike, Pfizer, Procter & Gamble, Sony, Starbucks, Twitter, Verizon, WalMart, Warner Brothers and YouTube.

This who’s who would suggest a completely isolated Trump. But then we have to look at what really matters; the class war dynamics in what is in fact a caste system, as Laurence Brahm argues.

Black Lives Matter, the organization and its ramifications, is essentially being instrumentalized by selected corporate interests to accelerate their own priority: to crush the U.S. working classes into a state of perpetual anomie, as a new automated economy rises.

That may always happen under Trump. But it will be faster without Trump.

What’s fascinating is how this current strategy of tension scenario is being developed as a classic CIA/NED playbook color revolution.

An undisputed, genuine grievance – over police brutality and systemic racism – has been completely manipulated, showered with lavish funds, infiltrated, and even weaponized against “the regime”.

Just to control Trump is not enough for the Deep State – due to the maximum instability and unreliability of his Demented Narcissus persona. Thus, in yet another priceless historical irony, “Assad must go” metastasized into “Trump must go”.

The cadaver in the basement

One must never lose track of the fundamental objectives of those who firmly control that assembly of bought and paid for patsies in Capitol Hill: to always privilege Divide and Rule – on class, race, identity politics.

After all, the majority of the population is considered expendable. It helps that the instrumentalized are playing their part to perfection, totally legitimized by mainstream media. No one will hear lavishly funded Black Lives Matter addressing the real heart of the matter: the reset of the predatory Restored Neoliberalism project, barely purged of its veneer of Hybrid Neofascism. The blueprint is the Great Reset to be launched by the World Economic Forum in January 2021.

It will be fascinating to watch how Trump deals with this “Summer of Love” remake of Maidan transposed to the Seattle commune. The hint from Team Trump circles is that he will do nothing: a coalition of white supremacists and motorcycle gangs might take care of the “problem” on the Fourth of July.

None of this sweetens the fact that Trump is at the heart of a crossfire hurricane: his disastrous response to Covid-19; the upcoming, devastating effects of the New Great Depression; and his intimations pointing to what could turn into martial law.

Still, the legendary Hollywood maxim – “no one knows anything” – rules. Even running with a semi-cadaver in a basement, the Democrats may win in November just by doing nothing. Yet Teflon Trump should never be underestimated. The Deep State may even realize he’s more useful than they think.

The Coronavirus Pandemic much like any crisis, in a political sense, opens the doors for new opportunities. It seems as though governments cannot make major changes without a strong boot in the rear from some set of rough circumstances. Like it or not, political action requires a catalyst. Trump, the man who dreamt of Making America Great Again now has the big overarching excuse he needs to push his agenda onto the nation, but the question is just how can the President of the United States use this pandemic to his advantage?

Firstly, it is important to note that there is nothing inherently morally evil in exploiting a crisis for political gains, unless you were the one who created the crisis in the first place. Again it cannot be understated, crisis is the catalyst for sweeping political action, and we shouldn’t blame anyone for striking while the iron is hot. Most people who do all the loud virtue signaling about tragedies being exploited by politicians seem to always go silent when the exploitation serves their interest. Let’s all put on our big boy pants and accept that politicians, can, will and probably should use opportunities from dark days so long as they were not the ones who darkened them in the first place.

A Borderful World

The same people who yesterday argued for an open world with no borders are the same ones who will beg for totalitarian levels of protection to “save” their lives from even the most minor of threats. This is probably why the heavy restrictions on international travel that are being put into place have so far met little to no resistance. 2020 feels like a trip back in time to a far less globalized and more local world that seems to have arisen at least semi-willingly. In this context, now is the perfect time for Trump to attack illegal immigration and migrant workers.

Migrant labor is often very damaging to the host country, and is more often than not, also bad for the migrants themselves. It undercuts the cost of labor making locals lose their jobs only to have them given to an exploitable/expendable group of people to do them like slaves. This also allows the governments of the nations they came from to continue their sloth and ineptitude as their young/active populace has a means of finding work elsewhere and not fighting for change at home. This a lose/lose situation and Trump knows it.

However, there is a persistent belief on the Left, that migrant labor is some kind of necessity and cannot be avoided. Some of the most extreme Liberals in America fear that the U.S. might starve without migrant labor helping out down on the farm, but is this really the case? Can America really starve to death in the 21st century without exploitable semi-slave labor?

Apparently not, as about half of people who work on U.S. farms are still surprisingly American-born. Upping salaries to attract U.S. citizen farm hands would probably not drive up food costs anywhere near what the pro-migrant crowd would suggest. Modern farming does not require hordes of hands to get the corn on store shelves. Paying Americans a lot more to do the same job would seem to some to be non-viable under normal economic conditions, but this is a crisis, so the normal rules go out the window.

Trump right now (especially with extremely cheap oil to compensate for labor cost increases) can prove that migrant workers were never really needed. Foreign, mostly illegal grunt workers, used to be a victim in the public’s eyes, but now they are plague carriers that can be removed with the free hand of a regulated market forcing Americans into their stead. A large part of Making America Great Again is a Living Wage and paying U.S. citizens $20 an hour to deal with beets would sure help move the country back towards greatness.

Additionally, due to this panic, Trump could attack those who are trying to give birth to anchor babies, and increase the severity of travel bans from countries he doesn’t like. Both of these options are on the table at the moment while the virus is hot. Migrant labor was a key focus of Trump’s campaign, but there are many other aspects to closed borders that he could work with right now. A globalized America seems to be a much poorer and weaker one, this is the chance for Trump to put up the right economic “walls” to restore the country.

Photo: Pen strokes are much more powerful and easy to do during a national crisis.

In Case of Fire Break China

Trump blamed “Chy-nuh” for the virus outbreak, and he can thus blame them for America’s economic downturn, which means he is justified by bureaucratic logic to do anything he can to rid of American dependence on China. Trump has wanted to do this from day one of his presidential campaign but only now does he really have the political inertia.

Trump says America is “winning (the) war” on the Coronavirus, which really doesn’t make any sense. How do you wage war on a virus? Then again, let him call it whatever he wants if it is going to be an excuse to re-industrialize America as if a real war was going on. Eliminating dependence on China is good for the U.S. if the virus provides the catalyst to start this process then so be it.

It Isn’t “Welfare” If You Are Responsible For It

Trump has already stolen some of Andrew Yang’s thunder by deciding to give money back to the taxpayers to help them survive the Covid-19 Crisis. For Conservatives, like the kind Trump claims to be, handouts and Roosevelt Era Welfare policies are seen as the devil. But, if the President were to shove Universal Basic Income down the throats of the nation it would be a massive win for the Right as it would absolve the government of many of its duties and pointless programs, and be a fantastic excuse for “small government” to be ushered in.

If everyone gets back a $1000 or so from the government per month, then it can be legally/logically assumed that as long as the person receiving the money is sane then they have the means to take care of themselves without the State being involved. This strategy could eliminate the need for all sorts of bulky inefficient bureaucratic monstrosities like food stamps, vouchers and various forms of “assistance”. This would allow the government to vastly reduce its size as it would just throw monthly checks at the populace and let them deal with their own problems themselves, which just so happens to be part of the American Way – Personal Responsibility. And for those who waste their money, well too bad, you had your chance, the government gave you the bootstraps, you chose not to pull yourself up.

Celebrities are Non-Essential

Many of the media elites who hate Trump for reasons that they cannot put into cohesive arguments have found themselves to be “Non-Essential” during the crisis and have to stay home. Furthermore, the Coronavirus has helped remind society that doctors and the guys who work at grocery stores do more for society than rappers with the prefix “lil” in front of their names.

This new glaring divide between Essential and Non-Essential labor could be very exploitable by Trump as a means to focus positive government attention on the Essentials as the backbone of his MAGA vision. It would not be surprising at all for them to receive some support from the President in the near future, especially in an election year. Two new dividing groups in American society have emerged due to the pandemic and this divide, like all divides, is exploitable and will surely be exploited by politicians.

Taxation Is Theft Says Robin Trump

Trump and the Republican Right hate taxes and blame them for economic stagnation. Well, the economy of the U.S. is stagnating due to the Coronavirus, so Trump really has carte blanche to go on an executive order tax slaying spree or at least propose one to his boys in Congress for them to fight for in a more constitutional way.

It is very surprising that Trump hasn’t jumped on the “taxation is theft” mantra, but now would be a good time, any excuse to ease bureaucracy and keep Americans’ money in their pockets is urgent and justified thanks to the pandemic. Trump has the justification to kill pretty much any taxation that he sees fit.

MAGA Time Is Now

Obviously, real human lives have been lost to this disease internationally and that is a tragedy. No one wants their life, or the lives of their friends and family to be cut short. But the situation the world is in has the potential to create some very MAGA-ish transformations in American society if Trump is actually willing to jump on the wave and ride it out. Right now the crisis is glowing hot, the economy needs help/action, borders are now trendy again, and despite it all the U.S. is still the most powerful nation on Earth. Oh, what a lovely time it is for a charismatic President to push forward some pro-American objectives.

Not just stupid, monumentally stupid. Breathtakingly stupid.

And I don’t say this as someone who hates Trump without reservation. In fact, I continue to hope he will wake up one day and stop being the Donald Trump I know and be the Donald Trump he needs to be.

I don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome of any sort. Neither MAGApede nor Q-Tard, an Orange Man Bad cultist or NPC Soy Boy, I see Trump for what he is – a well-intentioned, if miseducated man with severe personal deficiencies which manifest themselves in occasionally brilliant but mostly disastrous behavior.

Energy Dominance was always a misguided and Quixotic endeavor. Why? Because Trump could never turn financial engineering a shale boom into a sustainable advantage over lower-cost producers like Russia and the OPEC nations.

The policy of blasting open the U.S. oil spigots to produce a production boom built on an endless supply of near-zero cost credit was always going to run into a wall of oversupply and not enough demand.

The dramatic collapse of U.S. oil prices in the futures markets which saw the May contract close on April 20th at $-40.57 per barrel is the Shale Miracle hitting the fan of low demand and leaving the producers and consumers in a state which can only happen thanks to biblical levels of government intervention.

A broken market.

The next morning, ever needing to look like the good guy, Trump tweets out:

We will never let the great U.S. Oil & Gas Industry down. I have instructed the Secretary of Energy and Secretary of the Treasury to formulate a plan which will make funds available so that these very important companies and jobs will be secured long into the future!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 21, 2020

It’s clear from this statement that Trump is ready to throw more trillions at the oil industry to keep it and the millions of jobs from disappearing as he does what he always does when confronted with a real problem, doubles down on the behavior that caused it in the first place.

Politicians, even the best ones, are ultimately vandals. They have no other tool than to reallocate scarce capital towards their ends rather than that demanded by the market.

And the main reason why Trump was never going to win the Energy Dominance War he started was because the world doesn’t want the type and kind of oil the U.S. produces at the quantities needed to “Win!”

Ultra-light sweet crude coming from the Bakken, Eagle Ford and Permian simply isn’t that high in demand for export. It’s of limited usage. And, in the end, if the price is right enough, offering oil for sale in ‘not-dollars’ only makes that demand curve even more elastic.

The collapse in oil prices which Trump is desperate to stop won’t simply because Trump stands there like King Canute, arms outstretched. He and his terrible energy policy stand naked now that the tide has gone out.

And the reason for this is simple. There is more to the world economy than money. Money is what makes the economy work but it, in and of itself, is incapable of creating wealth. All money does is act as a means to express our needs and desires at the moment of the trade.

Trump’s vandalizing the world’s energy markets for the past three and a half years now comes back to bite him. To prop up surging U.S. production he has:

Supported a disastrous war against the people of Yemen

Repurposed U.S. troops clinging to positions in Syria while stealing their oil

Nearly started a shooting war with Iran…. Twice.

Embargoed Venezuela, stole its money, attempted a failed coup and brought even more support to President Maduro from Russia and China.

Spent billions pointing missiles at Russia via NATO.

Supported a vicious war to prevent the secession of the Donbass.

Delayed the construction of Nordstream 2.

Sowed chaos enough to set Turkey to claiming the Eastern Mediterranean while fighting a losing war in Libya.

Started a massive trade war with China.

Spent trillions throwing the U.S. budget deficit for 2020 out beyond 20% of the U.S.’s 2019 GDP.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. None of these acts are defensible as anything other than immoral and counterproductive.

Having antagonized literally more than three-quarters of the world with this insanity, Trump will now turn his destructive gaze on the very people he purports to serve, the American people. Saving jobs through subsidies is capital destructive. It doesn’t matter who does it, Trump, Putin, Xi or FDR.

If Trump tariffs on imports it will only keep the cost of energy for Americans higher than it should be at a time when they need it to be as cheap as possible.

The incentive to improve performance by these companies, shutter expensive wells, default on debt or shift capital away from the unproductive will not happen. The healthy cleansing of bankruptcy is averted. The vultures who profited on the way up will not go bankrupt because the bust is avoided and those that were prudent waiting for this moment will not be rewarded with the reins of the means of production.

And again, we see another one-way trade for Wall St.

All Trump will do here is entrench the very powers that he thinks he’s been fighting, destroying small businesses, nationalizing, in effect, whole swaths of the U.S. economy and setting up the day when everyone else around the world shrugs when he bark.

Because the net effect has been to see the rise in more of the oil trade conducted in currencies other than the U.S. dollar. That trend will continue in a deflating price environment where the need to service dollar-denominated debt is soaking up the supply of dollars faster than the Fed can monetize the debt issued by the U.S. Treasury.

The oil trade will shift from dollars. Dollars will be used to pay off debt, the world will decouple from the dollar and all those dollars currently hoarded overseas and whose demand today will be supply tomorrow will ensure the U.S. economy suffers the worst kind of depression, one of rising commodity prices, falling asset prices and falling wages.

So, Trump will continue to be, as I put it recently, The Master of the Seen, choosing, as always, to ignore the unseen effects of propping up firms that should rightly go the way of all bad ideas, like Marxism.

The U.S. had a grenade dropped on its budget. It looks like a nuclear bomb, but that’s only because of the continued arrogance and necessity of politicians, like Trump, needing to be ‘seen’ doing something caused far more damage than it would have if they hadn’t intervened in the first place.

The adage, “never let a crisis go to waste,” is apropos here. Politicians use the cover of crisis to act. They have to be ‘seen’ acting rather than not. Trump is acutely aware of this because he truly can’t stand criticism.

A man without principles, Trump acts mostly out of his need to deflect criticism and be ‘seen’ by his base as their champion.

But no, Trump outs himself as the biggest Marxist of all time, defending the workers while robbing them of their future through the destruction of their real wealth. His policy mistakes become our real problems. And he compounded those problems by listening to the medical complex vultures about COVID-19 and now he’s trapped but everyone else will pay the price.

He is someone without the sense or the understanding that sometimes the best thing to do is admit defeat, reverse course and put down the scepter of power. But Trump doesn’t know how to do that. He doesn’t know how to actually lead.

Energy Dominance will turn into an Energy Albatross and it will weigh on Trump’s neck in his second term that will see him leave office reviled as the great destroyer of not only the U.S.’s wealth, but more importantly, its standing in the world.