Foreign and Domestic: Trump Reemerges to Declare War
Fascism requires war to sustain itself, and to grow more radical.
After seven days in total silence, Donald Trump re-emerged to announce that he will move Space Force Command from Colorado to Huntsville, Alabama. He explicitly blamed mail-in ballots for his decision to move critical operations from a mountainous central region, to a coastal swamp, although in truth it has been a political goal of his for years.
The only mention of his uniquely long absence from the camera was a joke from Trump’s designated foil, Fox’s Steve Doocy, about whether Trump read reports about his own death. No one in the White House press corps dared go any further.
But after a prepared speech that he mostly read from, Trump started two wars, one foreign, one domestic.
Foreign War
Just at the end of his speech, after an array of delighted Alabama politicians weighed in on Trump’s decision to move Space Command, Trump mumbled this announcement that the US military had “shot out” a “drug-carrying boat…out of Venezuela.”
“When you come out and when you leave the room, you'll see that we just -- over the last few minutes, literally, shot out a -- about a drug-carrying boat, a lot of drugs in that boat…
And we just -- these came out of Venezuela and coming out very heavily from Venezuela. A lot of things are coming out of Venezuela, so we took it out, and you'll get to see that after this meeting is over.”
This is a blatant provocation of Venezuelan dictator Maduro, who has been saber-rattling over the last 48 hours about Trump’s “harassment.” Maduro deployed his own troops and warships last week and said yesterday: “In the face of this maximum military pressure, we have declared maximum preparedness for the defense of Venezuela.”
It has been clear since the moment Trump started sending troops toward Venezuela that this was going to be a wag-the-dog situation. Now he has begun the tit-for-tat that inevitably leads to escalation.
Nearby Venezuela right now are multiple Aegis destroyers, an amphibious ready group (e.g., USS Iwo Jima/USS San Antonio/USS Fort Lauderdale), and a fast-attack submarine, with ~4,500 sailors and Marines. P-8s have been flying ISR missions over international waters. You don’t send this kind of firepower unless you plan to use it.
Domestic War
After announcing a military strike on a Venezuelan boat, Trump took questions and said this about American cities, including Los Angeles where I live.
Chicago is a hellhole right now. Baltimore is a hellhole right now. Parts of Los Angeles are terrible. If we didn't put out the fires -- and I mean the other fires, the bullet fires -- they didn't do a good job with it.
Trump went on to target Chicago specifically: “We’re going in… we’re going in. I didn’t say when, but we’re going in.”
Trump said this knowing that a federal appeals court ruled this morning that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard in California was illegal, according to the Posse Comitatus Act, which Trump has been deliberately trying to erode.
In response to Trump’s promise to send federal agents to Chicago, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker gave a remarkable speech alongside the mayor and Cook County President. It’s worth watching for its clarity and defiant tone. He is an excellent communicator.
Perhaps the most alarming part of Pritzker’s speech was his description of the forces being arrayed inside Chicago in advance of a large operation to “fight crime.” Specifically, Pritzker said that he had been told by “patriots” inside the government that Texas National Guard troops have been deployed.
“The administration is staging Texas National Guard troops here in Illinois without our consent. That is not a deployment, that is an invasion.” —JB Pritzker
The founders of the United states would have been humiliated and appalled that a part of the Constitution that they struggled so hard to get right has been turned into a tool of federal tyranny, and a way to wage a soft civil war between the States. For the federal government to send one state’s militia (National Guard) into another state against its wishes is a complete inversion of the debates that led to ratification.
Trump Needs War
The only thing Trump accomplished while he disappeared is to risk the lives of millions of people by putting an unqualified Peter Thiel anarcho-capitalist in charge of the Centers for Disease Control—a move that has received universal outrage from scientists.
Tomorrow, more than a hundred survivors of Jeffrey Epstein will have a press conference and a rally in Washington DC at 10:30AM to protest the horrifically friendly treatment of Ghislaine Maxwell by the Justice Department. To counter-program it, at 11:00AM Donald Trump has ordered a military flyover of the White House—allegedly for a visit from the Polish president.
This is no coincidence This is a deeply symbolic, desperate show of dominance and projection over the girls, now women, who haunt him. Trump cannot escape the ghost of Jeffrey Epstein so he counters their presence with the roar of a B2 Stealth bomber over Washington.
Fascism Needs War
Just after Trump’s speech in the White House, fascist Senator Mike Lee introduced this bill, long promised, to change the name of the Department of Defense to the “Department of War.” This is a deliberate signal that Trump is no longer interested in a Nobel Peace Prize but instead wants to go to regain his self-image through violence.
War has long been recognized as a necessary and eternal requirement of fascist and totalitarian regimes.
Robert Paxton, in Anatomy of Fascism (2004) gave a sobering definition which should sound all too familiar to Americans:
“Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood, and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.”
In his 1995 essay “Ur-Fascism” novelist, historian and philosopher Umberto Eco wrote:
“For Ur-Fascism, disagreement is treason. … Life is permanent warfare. This, however, brings about an Armageddon complex. Since enemies must be defeated, there must be a final battle.”
But scholars of fascism may not be the most important people to listen to on the subject of war. The people one should listen to are the fascists themselves.
In Italian dictator Benito Mussolini‘s Doctrine of Fascism, originally written in 1927 and first published in 1932, Mussolini wrote:
“War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it. All other trials are substitutes, which never really put a man face to face with himself in the alternative of life or death.”
In Mein Kampf (1925) Adolf Hitler said this about an existential “war of annihilation”:
“The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only in eternal struggle is humanity preserved. Every improvement in the human species has been the result of the struggle for existence, which is always a war of annihilation.”
The urge dominate the weak simply because you can is a behavior trait that most parents see as undesirable in their children. The desire to bully others is sociopathic by its nature—while planning to bully the weak is pure psychopathy. These traits are unscalable in humans: a world full of people who have no empathy would collapse into brutality. And that is exactly what fascists want, so they can rebuild the world in their own image.
War It Shall Be
Donald Trump and the people he’s surrounded himself with see themselves not as public servants, but as crusaders in different holy wars: Hegseth is in a holy war against Muslims; Stephen Miller is in a holy war against Latinos; JD Vance is in Peter Thiel’s holy war against democracy and science; and Donald Trump is in a holy war against his own demons. America, unfortunately will have to fight all of these wars at once.
While JB Pritzker’s speech was a welcome sign of political opposition, we are going to need to see more than just words from our public servants and We The People. We are going to need to see action. This regime’s war on the world, on Blue states, and on Trump’s personal enemies will escalate—until someone stops it. War, after all, is the only thing you can guarantee about fascists.
It is time to face facts: Trump has declared war, both foreign and domestic. And war is the only promise fascists ever keep.
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Trump wants to use war abroad and at home to distract from the Epstein Files.
I was happier yesterday when I thought he was dying.
Trump-Fox interview 2014-talking about crime and violence in America:
“You know what solves it? When the economy crashes, when the economy goes to total hell and everything is a disaster. Then you’ll have, you know, you’ll have riots to go back to where we were when we were great.”
Trump wants America to crash and burn. As Jim so beautifully wrote: it is time to face facts: “Trump has declared war, both foreign and domestic. And war is the only promise fascists ever keep”.