Epistemic Winter: Fallout from Trump’s First Strike On Reality

Trump’s UN speech was the opening shot in a new Cold War for control of shared reality

Donald Trump delivered a uniquely dangerous and unprecedented speech to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) today. While the chamber has seen theatrics before, no world leader has ever addressed the planet and demanded it adopt his alternate reality—complete with its own physics, economy, and cosmology.

Unlike his predecessors, Trump did not deliver an argument about ideologies, borders, or geopolitics; he delivered a new set of ‘facts’—with an implied set of threats to go with them.

“To every terrorist thug smuggling poisonous drugs… we will blow you out of existence.”

[Transcript]

Castro and Khrushchev 1960

At the peak of the Cold War in 1960, Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev each gave historic speeches at the UNGA. Castro gave a marathon 4-hour speech attacking U.S. imperialism, denouncing CIA plots against him, and calling for “decolonization.” He portrayed Cuba as the vanguard of anti-imperialism and embraced the Soviet Union.

During the same session, Nikita Khrushchev followed Castro’s lead by shouting over other nations, banging his shoe on the table, and demanding admission for newly independent countries. Like Castro, Khrushchev condemned Western “imperialist warmongers” and challenged the United States to a debate on colonialism.

The next April, the United States attempted the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion—setting the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis the following year.

Chavez 2006

At the height of U.S.-Venezuela tensions over oil and foreign policy, Hugo Chávez gave a speech that accused the west of imperialism, quoted from Noam Chomsky, echoing calls for a “multipolar world.”

Most famously, Chavez said this about George Bush:

“The devil came here yesterday… it smells of sulfur still.”

This elicited howls from the Bush White House—“unworthy of a head of state”—while UN officials called it a “disgrace.”

Gaddafi 2009

Perhaps the closest to Trump’s 2025 UN speech was Muammar Gaddafi 16 years earlier. Gaddafi spent 96 minutes railing against the UN Security Council as a colonial tool, demanded $7.7 trillion in reparations for Africa and the Middle East, and spent time diving into conspiracy theories about 9/11 and the US deliberately creating diseases like H1N1.

This was the late stage of a narcissistic, increasingly isolated dictator, who was killed during a popular uprising just two years later.

Trump 2025

Even Gaddafi didn’t do what Donald Trump did at the United Nations. While Gaddafi expanded on conspiracy theories and made unfounded accusations, Donald Trump presented his own alternate reality to the world as metaphysical truth, and demanded adherence under threat that “your countries are going to hell.”

Trump’s portrayal of America as the “hottest country anywhere in the world“ is not new, but none of the dictators that came before him would dream of saying something so inane in the General Assembly of the United Nations.

“But today, just eight months into my administration, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. And there is no other country even close.”

But Trump was unsatisfied with unprovable platitudes. He simply took objective facts about the American economy, turned them upside down and presented them as the reality upon which you should base the rest of his demands.

“This is indeed the golden age of America. We are rapidly reversing the economic calamity we inherited… including ruinous price increases and record setting inflation… Under my leadership, energy costs are down, gasoline prices are down, grocery prices are down, mortgage rates are down, and inflation has been defeated.“

This is a clear inversion of what any American who reads the newspaper, buys groceries, or goes to the gas station knows very well: it’s just lie after lie, all stacked up.

As Trump was telling flagrant falsehoods about ending seven wars—while those countries were in attendance watching—he complained that his teleprompter wasn’t working and used the moment as a way to demean and dominate the institution he was speaking to.

“In a period of just seven months, I have ended seven unendable wars. They said they were unendable…

All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle. If the first lady wasn't in great shape, she would have fallen. But she's in great shape. We're both in good shape. We both stood and then a teleprompter that didn't work. This is these are the two things I got from the United Nations. A bad escalator and a bad teleprompter…

Everyone says that I should get the Nobel Peace Prize for each one of these achievements.”

Trump spent a considerable amount of time trying to convince European leaders that what they need is ethnic cleansing with the rationale: “trust me bro.” It was a speech with the clear fingerprints of Stephen Miller validating white supremacist, anti-immigration movements in Europe—and threatening its national leaders if they don’t fall in line.

“When your prisons are filled with so-called asylum seekers who were repaying kindness, and that's what they did. They repaid kindness with crime. It's time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. See, I can tell you I'm really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”

Trump touts his criminal operation to do extrajudicial mass killings on the high seas near Venezuela as an example of how you deal with immigration. To my knowledge, no other leader has ever bragged about war crimes to the UN like this.

“There aren't too many boats that are traveling on on the seas by Venezuela. They tend not to want to travel very quickly anymore. And we've virtually stopped drugs coming into our country by sea. We call them the water drugs.“

Trump saved some of his greatest reality distortion theater for energy. It was a performance unworthy of a tattered cardboard-sign—a completely backwards picture of an existentially important set of challenges. Again, his evidence for these claims is “I’m really good at predicting things.”

“Energy is another area where the United States is now thriving like never before. We're getting rid of the falsely named renewables. By the way, they're a joke. They don't work… Most expensive energy ever conceived.

It's climate change because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there's climate change. It's the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world in my opinion… If you don't get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail. And I'm really good at predicting things.“

Finally, to prove to the UNGA that his alternate reality is the one that they should appropriate for their own countries, he highlights a campaign hat which is inspired by Mussolini’s slogan—“il duce ha sempre ragione,” “The leader is always right.”

Otherwise, according to Trump, “your country is going to fail.”

“You know, they actually said during the campaign, they had a hat, the bestselling hat. Trump was right about everything. And I don't say that in a braggadocious way, but it's true. I've been right about everything. And I'm telling you that if you don't get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail. And if you don't stop people that you've never seen before, that you have nothing in common with, your country is going to fail.”

Fallout: The Day After

As with many things about the Trump regime, his UN speech was unprecedented. There has never been a leader of a superpower on the world stage demanding that other leaders not just change their minds to match his will, but that they change their facts. Trump’s previous UN speeches, while they poked and prodded at global institutions, did not require that the world live in his Upside Down.

So what happens now? What happens when the “leader of the free world” says to his fellow heads of state: “actually I don’t want you to live in the free world, I want you to live in the deranged alternate reality in my head”?

Effectively, Trump has put the ultimate loyalty test to the whole world, as a gate to achieve cooperation with the most powerful nation on Earth.

• If a would-be vassal nation: pretends climate change is a hoax, performs mass deportations, and praises Donald Trump as the supreme, omniscient leader, they will be granted “gold card” status as a satellite state.

  • If not: “nice country you have there, shame if it went to hell.”

Trump is currently meeting with numerous nations after his UN manifesto. He has forced them all to consider a risk-benefit analysis of, for example, ending green initiatives in their countries in exchange for a friendly Truth post and a promise not to attack them.

We have seen the collapse of major parts of America’s institutional backbone as a result of Trump’s illegal abuse of power. There is no reason to think smaller countries won’t show the same weakness under pressure. Some have already submitted to his whims, but now they all have what amounts to an ultimatum.

Behind the theater lies a predictable psychological engine.

Collapse Dynamics

Trump’s speech was a textbook display of narcissistic collapse dynamics—but televised in a snow globe the size of the Earth. He is deeply terrified of future revelations about his potential crimes with Epstein, and of his own corruption in office, so he is bending reality around himself. Trump’s structural lies both project his own shame, and protect his shattered ego. Assuming Epstein doesn’t go away, neither does Trump’s endless quest for a bottom.

In the last week, Trump has attempted to scapegoat:

• Antifa, which doesn’t exist

• Jimmy Kimmel, for telling a joke

• Venezuelan drug boats, which may not be drug boats at all

• Tylenol, another medical conspiracy theory with no basis

• The United Nations: Europe, immigrants, windmills, and climate science

A collapsing narcissist always get worse—until there is an intervention. Unfortunately, that usually comes after people are forced to act. It is the nature of the abuser to make it very difficult to step out of line.

Nevertheless, we must.

Not Normal, Not a Bit

When the President of a superpower stands on the world stage and demands that every other country renounce reason, logic and facts, it should be a very big deal.

Zero presidents, prime ministers, kings, or ambassadors have stood at the podium in the United Nations and demanded that people live in their personal world, or claimed “I’ve been right about everything.”

It is not normal. No reporter should skip to the few bits of the speech where he didn’t distort objective reality into a pretzel and pretend that was the substance of the speech. It was not. The substance of the speech was Trump’s deranged myth-making—and demands that his myth be ratified by an institution that, whatever its faults, has been a key part of keeping world peace for 80 years.

First Strike

Trump’s speech, while serving a personal psychological need, also served as an epistemic first strike—an attack on the world’s ability to access, discern, and share, knowledge.

If the president of the United States has made it clear to the nations of the world that they will be punished for living in objective reality, most nations will simply stop trusting America for anything. Trump’s alternate world isolates the U.S. behind a wall of learned insanity—a choice between voluntarily relinquishing epistemic control, or being rejected.

The fallout has only begun to rain down from this attack on sanity and common sense. By attacking reality, through assaults on free speech, the press, and global sanity—Trump has set the stage for a sort of epistemic winter, a world with no shared reality, a world covered over in a radioactive haze of Trump’s diffused bullshit.

“Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute.” — Hannah Arendt, Truth and Politics (1967)

The only rational response to a world facing this kind of danger is to harden our own attack surfaces, deepen and diversify our connections to valued, truthful information, and reject capitulation of those around us to a fascist alternate world.

“Facts are stubborn things.” — John Adams (1770)

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