Remember the Titan: The Fragility of Trump’s Golden Egg
When the moment of criticality arrives, we better have a plan.
Titan(ic)
On June 18th, 2023, the Titan submersible, an experimental private submarine, took a handful of billionaires to see the wreckage of the Titanic at bottom of the ocean—and ended up staying there forever.
There was no particular design flaw that caused the problem; it was a buildup of tiny cracks in the carbon fiber shell that was detected getting a tiny bit worse after every trip. The crucial error was made by the owner, Stockton Rush, who ignored signs of what he saw as minor deterioration, believing the cracks were not big enough to be a problem.
But just as one can never know when a tectonic plate will slip, or when an avalanche will be triggered by a passing bird, any complex, rigid system with no automatic error-correction will eventually fail from an accumulation of small errors—cracks that lead to fissures, that lead to a moment of criticality when it all collapses.
Trump’s Golden Submersible
Now imagine the Trump regime as the Titan, and the pilot is the president, descending as rapidly as possible toward the bottom of the ocean—the pressure mounting. He’s done this before, ignored the warnings, and managed to come back to the surface every time. Why not do it again? What could go wrong?
But in reality, like the Titan, Trump’s mathematics doesn’t add up; his physics doesn’t work; and the cracks in his golden shell are widening with every meter he drops.
As I’ve written, Trump’s regime is a mirror of his psychology. The U.S. federal government has been converted into a performative, dysfunctional shell for Trump’s flailing ego, dutifully shielding the instrument of its own destruction.
You can think of Trump as a Venn diagram of three major destructive pathologies: malignant narcissism, accelerating dementia, and narcissistic collapse.
If you wanted to design the single worst person to control a nuclear superpower, you could not do any better than this combination.
St. Patrick’s Meltdown
“My name is Patrick. I am a sinner, a simple country person, and the least of all believers.” —St. Patrick’s Confessio
On Saint Patrick’s Day in the White House, Trump hosted the traditional meeting with the Irish president—and celebrated with his traditional meltdown. After telling dozens of different stories over the last few weeks about his reasons for going to war on Iran, Trump casually admitted what appears to be much closer to the truth.
According to himself, Trump noticed how high the stock market was at the end of last year and calculated because of that, he could afford to go to war with Iran. He openly described his mental arithmetic—an exchange of his perceived political capital from the stock market rise for a theoretical long-term financial gain.
The deaths of American soldiers—and thousands of Iranians—never entered his calculus.
To get advice on his idea of attacking Iran for money, Trump says he asked his chief of staff Susie Wiles, who infamously never challenges Trump about anything.
I said Susie do you mind if I take a little excursion here? Do you mind if I you know we’re hitting all these records, right? …
But I said you mind of I take a little excursion Because we have to do something and it’ll be a short term excursion? But we have all these great things going and we had to say you know, we could have. …
Doing great in every way and I say oh, we have to put out this this cancer. It’s a cancer We had to take that operation and we did and it was very successful and continues frankly as somebody said very they could leave today. …
We don’t ever want to have that problem again. Not with lunatics. We can’t have lunatics controlling nuclear weaponry. So I just want to thank everybody.
[Full transcript here]
The last line of Trump’s rant is perhaps the most telling, and chilling. He is correct, but for all the wrong reasons: We can’t have lunatics controlling nuclear weaponry.
Of course, the most dangerous lunatics already have them.
Supercriticality
Like a submersible hull collapse, a nuclear weapon also relies on criticality. In a bomb, radioactive material is manipulated to begin a fission reaction—which does not immediately explode. The pressure and heat builds as more and more neutrons start to collide with others, creating more and more fission events. At a certain stage, the fissile material achieves supercriticality and the runaway chain reaction creates a mushroom cloud.
In a geopolitical system, if enough cracks show up in the hull, if collisions between the leaders keeps getting more and more frequent, eventually you will reach critical mass. Whether you get an implosion like the Titan collapse, or an explosion, like Hiroshima, depends on the details—and whether the opposition anticipates it.
For example, in 1914, Europe was a complex, loosely organized set of alliances, treaties, and agreements that uneasily kept the relative peace for decades until the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated by a 19-year-old in Sarajevo. In a slightly different Europe, under slightly different circumstances, this would have imploded into a national or regional conflict. But the tensions, and fissures, in the system had been building for so long that two bullets led to a chain reaction—a supercriticality that left tens of millions dead.
Today, I’m afraid, the world has been forced by the Trump regime into a similar scenario—one that could lead to an implosion limited to America, or an explosion into a global apocalypse.
Kent Always Get What You Want
On the same day that Donald Trump confessed to sending American troops to war based on political and financial motivations, his White House Counterterrorism Director, white nationalist Joe Kent, quit:
“I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby.“
While Joe Kent is a veteran and says he’s uncomfortable risking American troops without an imminent threat, he is also associated with well-known antisemites like Nick Fuentes and the Proud Boys. It is the relationship with Israel that made it unacceptable to Kent, not the principle.
Regardless, it’s another crack in the hull of Trump’s descending Golden Egg, another part of his base splitting off, and another example of how the pressure is accelerating the severity of his failures.
Internationally, Trump is alone, except for his two most important customers, Bibi Netanyahu and Vladimir Putin. Each of our traditional allies, including Ireland and all of NATO, has declined Trump’s “demand” that they help open the Hormuz Strait.
Nevertheless, he has not aborted his mission to exploit Iran. He is determined to find a way to profit from this disaster no matter how many lives it costs. As I wrote, it appears more and more likely that Trump is treading water until Marines arrive to occupy Kharg Island—or as Trump calls it: “the pipes.”
Trump’s Golden Egg is leaking at the seams but he’s still steering full speed toward the bottom.
Rip Cord
While it is impossible to predict specific timelines which would lead to a criticality in a scenario like America’s, you can rationally point out the potential for a triggering event based on psychology, systems theory, and data.
As a close observer, I am growing increasingly certain that Trump cannot continue on this trajectory for much longer without generating a criticality, meaning some kind of shock event that will either overturn his presidency—or, alternately, the global world order. In other words, Trump’s Golden Egg is too leaky to fix, it’s headed down too fast, and the pressure is too intense.
The question is: Will it implode into a domestic crisis, or will it explode into a catastrophic world war?
While I hesitate to bring up the dreaded notion of bipartisanship, the best way to try to prevent the explosive scenario, to try and contain the criticality when it happens, is for the political system to present a combined show of force that draws a red line before it happens.
If he’s not given a sandbox to play in, Trump will take the entire playground.
For example, if the Democrats and 20 GOP Senators could find a way to agree publicly that if Trump engages in a preemptive nuclear strike for any reason without consulting Congress, he will be impeached and removed immediately. Even if he was not considering such a strike, just the statement would make clear to him that he is not, in fact, omnipotent.
We have plenty of information to know Trump is on an unsustainable trajectory. As he descends into the abyss, we can either go down with him into war, or give ourselves a ripcord and let him hit bottom alone.
War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,
Is over all the width of Europe whirled,
Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled
Are all Art's ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling. Love's wine's thin.
The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.
—Wilfred Owen, “1914”
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What are the chances that Epstein knew Trump's darkest secrets and shared(sold) them with Putin and Netanyahu?
And the idea (from Rep. Pete Sessions, R-TX) that 2500 Marines are poised to take Kharg Island is another red flag. Sessions didn't want to call it 'boots on the ground' but that is exactly what it is. And they'd be sitting ducks, fifteen miles off the coast of Iran. The casualty rate is going to be unsustainable - Iran has drones and knows how to use them. We are being led by a fool, who is only concerned with his money.