In 2016 a now-notorious 2005 conversation between podcaster Billy Bush and Donald Trump unintentionally laid out Trump’s vision of foreign policy and the presidency. Describing his finely honed approach to women, Trump was recorded as saying: “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything…Grab ’em by the p*ssy. You can do anything.”
Strangely, this garish statement perfectly encapsulates Trump’s foreign policy. He sees a country and he wants to grab it, control it, exploit it. He is incapable of recognizing a nation as a collection of human beings with wills, needs, desires, and integrity of their own. Whether Venezuela, Gaza, Greenland, Yemen, Mexico, Nigeria, Iran “those shithole countries” (his words), and even the United States, countries, like women, are there to exploit for sex or wealth. The zeroes in his bank account, as for too many others, are the only measure of self-esteen he values. This is ironic, as all those zeroes add up to what people like Trump amount to—zero.
For Trump, Venezuela et al are all about the entitlement to “grab ’em by the p*ssy”. That is the measure of the man, the measure of his presidency. Venezuela’s interim president condemns the abduction of Maduro and his wife and Trump threatens to do the same to her. With Greenland and all of NATO lined up against the Greenland seizure, Trump, sounding like his role model Putin or any cheap action movie, said “if we can’t do it the easy way, we’re going to do it the hard way.” Tough guy, eh?
It’s not only the depravity of the man, it’s the complete disregard for the dangers of the equivalent of diplomatic rape. By supporting Putin and Netanyahu, seizing oil tankers on the high seas, shattering the NATO alliance, and doing to Venezuela and Greenland precisely what Russia is doing to Ukraine and China plans for Taiwan, he has pushed the world closer to nuclear war than at any time since the missile crisis of October, 1962.
In 2017 I wrote an article titled “Will the Generals Follow the Mad King’s Command?” Well, here we are, the operative word not “king” but “mad”. Trump’s degeneracy is not only a deeply moral flaw, it is an addiction. Manipulators, con artists, psychopaths, sociopaths, and bullies feed off each new “win”. Deeply narcissistic and damaged, their successful bluffs feed their sense of power and immunity. Trump was notorious in business for always trying to cheat his contractors, stonewalling payment till they accepted a fraction of the contracted price. The several dozen accusations of sexual assault against him, ranging from molestation to rape, and his close association with Jeffrey Epstein, blur the line between his business, sexual, and diplomatic practices. Where once he drove his own companies into bankruptcy and hurt women one by one, now he threatens to plunge the world into chaos and violence that can easily slide into a nuclear exchange.
Trump’s domestic policies are no different from his foreign policy. As a racist he campaigns with the same techniques used by Hitler and his chief propagandists, Joseph Goebbels and Albert Rosenberg. Hitler was schooled in the theories of Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew known as “the father of public relations” and “the man who brainwashed America.” Bernays was not a Nazi sympathizer but his book about how to mold public opinion enthralled Hitler, who studied its techniques.
One important lesson Trump learned from Hitler and all the miserable dictators who have left their stain on the 20th and 21st centuries is how to build a secret police beholden to no law but himself. In Germany, as the Nazis built their power base, they were Brown Shirts, men recruited from the population who held semi-formal military exercises on weekends or after dinner. Soon, however, the Brown Shirts were beating and killing Jews, politicians, journalists, “misfits”, and educators to intimidate the German populace. In 1934, during the Night of the Long Knives (June 30 – July 2nd), hundreds of Brown Shirts, including their leader Ernst Rohm, were rounded up and executed in an operation ordered and run by Hitler, Goering, and Himmler. Rohm’s organization numbered three million and he was viewed as a threat to Hitler’s rule. Rohm’s hostility to the German aristocracy and financial elites, whose backing the Nazis needed, made his brand of Nazism counter-productive to the aims of Hitler and his backers. The Brown Shirts were recast into two state agencies, the Gestapo, or secret police, and the SS, an all purpose murder, massacre, and genocide machine under Heinrich Himmler, whose somewhat parallel role in Trump’s administration has been assumed by Stephen Miller.
The depredations of ICE parallel the actions of Rohm’s Brown Shirts. The “illegal immigrant” round-up rationale is not only illegal and a libel against the vast majority of non-citizen immigrants in the U.S., but is the cover for establishing a secret police that threatens to evolve much as the Brown Shirts did. We likely will not witness a Night of the Long Knives but we are well on the way to ICE becoming a more focused weapon of an American dictatorship. If Trump, as he so recently claimed, is beholden only to his own sense of morality—a notion that in his hands is equivalent to declaring himself high priest and god of his own religion—how long will it be before his political opponents, whom he already labels as traitors, are seized and imprisoned or deported to foreign prisons? In fact, the White House just announced a $100 million initiative to recruit 10,000 more ICE agents, raising their number to 30,000. Recruitment reportedly will focus on gun shows and military has-beens and wanna-bes, as well as supporting the drive with millions of dollars in spending for Snapchat ads, influencers and live streamers on Rumble.
And it is not only ICE. Private U.S. mercenary contractors such as Constellis (which grew out of a merger with Blackwater, once the most well-known among them) and DynCorp are in effect private armies that have conducted operations around the world, including fighting alongside US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq. All are available to supplement domestic suppression efforts.
Of course there’s an A.I. angle to all of this. This past September Constellis announced a strategic partnership with Ouster Gemini, a leader in “physical A.I.” What is physical AI? Let’s ask AI Overview! “Physical AI enables machines to perceive, understand, reason about, and interact with the real, physical world using sensors…and actuators…to perform complex, adaptive actions beyond simple pre-programmed tasks, bridging digital intelligence with physical reality, seen in robots, autonomous vehicles, and smart manufacturing…allowing machines to learn, adapt, and act autonomously in dynamic, unpredictable environments, essentially giving AI a body and senses to engage with our world.” To which we might ask, on whose behalf?
Gemini is one of AI’s hottest programs. Here’s Ouster’s home page blurb that describes Gemini: “People, object detection and classification for actionable, intuitive, and tailorable insights in traffic, security, crowd, and retail management and analytics.” And robots? Listen to Nvidia, currently the company with the highest valuation in the world: “Physical AI elevates robots from rigid automation to true autonomy. Enabling them to sense, reason, and act in real time helps them perform with greater safety, precision, and adaptability in any environment.” Wow. I can hardly wait.
Referencing just these few developments we see how ICE’s people-grabbing, deportation, and imprisonment projects will likely evolve. ICE’s expansion will balloon from collaboration by local and state police and an amenable FBI. By applying the latest AI and robotic technology to implement saturated surveillance, render snap situational and personal assessments, and initiate immediate operational responses to whomever the government chooses to target, these capabilities will be institutionalized and corporatized. Ultimately they will define the default social and political environment of our country.
That is the path that Trump’s pathology in his sexual, business, and political behavior, is leading us down. Elon Musk, a Rumplestiltskin on steroids, cheers him on while pursuing his goal of becoming a trillionaire. Stephen Miller is lost in his deviant fantasies of social sadism. Kristi Noem shows up everywhere like the 5th runner-up in a Shania Twain look-alike contest. The Supreme 6 commit treason every time they meet as they destroy the Constitution. Mike Johnson talks to god without ever wondering why god would even want to talk to him. And of course RFK Jr, is doing his best to encourage the return of the world’s most devastating plagues. And behind this mad circus gather the growing storm clouds of a secret police equipped with the most advanced, ubiquitous, and thorough reality-distorting technologies of manipulation and control the world has ever seen while their Master Dunce lurches towards a final cataclysm.
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