Welcome to the Great American Cruelty Regime by Taya Graham and Stephen Janis

Source: TRNN

A  few weeks ago, we argued the Trump administration was seeking to invent new ways to punish Americans. The idea was that the authoritarian impulses of the MAGA-run government will need to dial up the cruelty in order to sow chaos and pave the way for a broader assault on democracy.

Well, this week a rule was issued by Medicare and Medicaid services that shows just how proficient the Trump administration is at inflicting pain. And the consequences for poor, seriously ill Americans could be devastating.

Before we explain the rule, it’s worth contemplating the often destructive role healthcare — both the lack of it and exorbitant costs associated with it — play in the lives of working-class Americans.

Poll after poll shows that working people rank anxiety over healthcare costs at the top of the list of high-priority concerns. Unpaid medical bills are the most likely cause of personal bankruptcy in the US. Unlike any other wealthy nation on earth, when Americans lose their jobs, they often lose access to a doctor as well.

The US healthcare system is already inherently extractive — making it even more prohibitively expensive means more people will suffer with diseases that can be cured and die from afflictions that would otherwise be treatable. All of this makes the working class vulnerable and likewise incapable of asserting their right to be healthy.

And that’s where the new rule comes in.

The government agency that administers Medicaid has created a new criterion, ‘medically frail,’ which must be met to qualify for the program without working — even if you only have weeks to live. It didn’t exist prior to the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill. 

Before that landmark legislation was signed into law, Medicaid was primarily a means-tested program, accessible to those with low enough incomes to qualify. But the new rule means even if you have pancreatic cancer, HIV, or Parkinson’s, you will have to meet work requirements to maintain eligibility, or prove you are too sick to comply. Your doctor’s opinion won’t matter. It will be up to the bureaucrats.

Essentially, this amounts to navigating a process fashioned explicitly to kick people off the program. That means filling out forms and filing papers and hoping someone sitting at a desk determines you comply with a definition critics say is vaguely written and open to interpretation.

This is all part of a scheme hatched during the passage of the massively destructive Big Beautiful Bill last year. Trump and his MAGA cohorts wanted to give a trillion-dollar tax break to the top one percent. But the cuts were projected to add trillions to an already historically high federal debt.

So, to conjure a so-called “pay for,” Republicans turned to Medicaid, the critical program that provides healthcare to the poorest Americans.

Simply slashing funding was politically unpalatable, even for the party best known for trying to dismantle Obamacare multiple times without providing a viable alternative. So Republicans came up with a workaround: make it more difficult to qualify.

In practice, that translated into the aforementioned new work requirements.

The medical frailty rule shows, in part, how this overarching plan will lead to fewer beneficiaries: create a complicated bureaucracy difficult to navigate, then cut people who can’t comply.

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects the additional work rules will lead to 11.8 million people dropping Medicaid over the next decade — 7 million of whom they project will not find insurance elsewhere.

And it won’t be millions of idle young men playing video games and refusing to work who are affected by the new rules, as House Speaker Mike Johnson suggested. Instead, as the CBO concludes, the burdensome paperwork and subjective standards will lead to most people simply dropping out, whether they qualify or not.

Democrats are pushing back hard against the regulation. In a letter to the Health and Human Services secretary, a group of Connecticut representatives argued that the rule exceeded the intent of the law.

“The overwhelming impact of this rule is that eligible citizens will be denied Medicaid coverage, states will expend unacceptable resources processing complex paperwork, safety-net providers will be further burdened, and population health will decline,” wrote Democratic Reps. John Larson, Joe Courtney, Rosa DeLauro, Jim Himes, and Jahana Hayes.

On the House floor, Courtney said vague standards and arbitrary rules would create confusion for critically ill people without care.

“The hope was that a medical diagnosis for cancer or HIV or other serious chronic conditions would qualify for protection. Instead the rule makes clear that a cancer diagnosis will not automatically qualify for an exception. Instead the patient will have to document that the disease actually impairs their ability to work,” he said.

“This rule will create chaos and dramatically increase the number of desperately ill people who will lose their coverage.”

We reached out to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the agency that administers both programs. They have yet to respond.

In the meantime, if you’re skeptical that work requirements are mostly aimed at reducing the number of people on Medicaid, consider what’s happening with the federal government’s primary program for distributing food aid to low-income families.

Known as SNAP, or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, it’s been a frequent target for Republicans, who argue it’s rife with fraud and abuse. Those claims are exaggerated or unfounded — but, again, the Big Beautiful Bill imposed work requirements, and the consequences have been catastrophic.

A recent New York Times article reported that since the new paperwork requirements for SNAP were instituted in Arizona, nearly 440,000 recipients have lost assistance. The piece recounts how the bureaucratic demands are so extreme that some beneficiaries have been asked to provide documentation of money obtained from panhandling.

If this is what people receiving SNAP benefits have been subjected to, imagine what’s going to happen to people who will need to navigate the new Medicare requirements while struggling with a debilitating or terminal illness.

The point is that the same burdensome processes are combining to leave some of the poorest, sickest Americans facing death without care. That’s cruelty with a capital C. The frightening part is that it seems this administration is just getting started.

Musings

 

The Israeli Spy Behind PragerU’s Plan to Rewrite American Education To Indoctrinate Children by Alan Macleod

Source: AlanMacleod

 

PragerU is trying to take over American schools. The right-wing, pseudo-educational group is now an official educational partner in at least ten states, and blitzes children with highly questionable messaging on race, history, and politics. Even more concerning, PragerU is led by former Israeli spy, Marissa Streit, who has stated she uses the tactics and techniques honed by IDF military intelligence on the American peop

Streit’s company is involved in a big-money operation targeting children with neoconservative, pro-war, pro-business, pro-Israel messaging, attempting to indoctrinate them at their youngest and most impressionable age.

MintPress explores this increasingly powerful group, with ambitions to completely overhaul the American educational system.

 

Leave Our Kids Alone

You have probably seen a PragerU video. An estimated one-in-three Americans have. The billionaire-funded media machine is a powerful force on the American right, providing highly-produced conservative content attempting to push U.S. politics and society rightwards.

Recently, however, PragerU has set its sights on children, and is seeking to hijack the American education system. Since 2023, it has signed deals with ten states – Alaska, Arizona, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Montana, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Utah – to become an official education provider, supplying books, videos, and other content to schools across the United States. Students in New Hampshire, meanwhile, can earn credits by completing online PragerU courses. And with PragerU Español, it has plans to expand into Latin America as well.

Florida was the trailblazer in this phenomenon. As part of his Stop WOKE Act – a bill that sought to eradicate liberal ideology from public life – Governor Ron DeSantis partnered with the organization, identifying it as one that “aligned with the state’s revised civics and government standards.” PragerU now provides ultra-conservative “American values” messaging for use in grades K-12.

Florida’s post Stop WOKE Act curriculum now requires middle school teachers to instruct students on the benefits of slavery for black Americans, including that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”

It has also rewritten the 1920 Ocoee Massacre – a pogrom that saw a white mob kill dozens of black residents and permanently ethnically cleanse the Florida town of its black population – as an “act of violence perpetrated against and by African Americans.”

College students at Southeastern University in Lakeland, Florida, meanwhile, can earn extra credit by taking a PragerU history course. This, despite the fact that, despite its branding, PragerU is not an accredited educational institution, let alone a university.

Oklahoma, however, has gone even further. Last year, the state’s superintendent of education, Ryan Walters, launched a controversial teacher evaluation test developed by PragerU to vet teachers for their ideology and filter out applicants considered insufficiently conservative. The plan even withheld teaching certificates from educators from what Walters described as “woke states.” Walters left his position to head the Teacher Freedom Alliance, a conservative pressure group opposed to teachers unions.

 

Free Healthcare is Slavery, But Actual Slavery is A-OK

The PragerU content being shown to American schoolchildren contains a number of highly controversial viewpoints presented as common sense. Most “lessons” are presented in cartoon format, with one about the founding of America including an animated Christopher Columbus stating that slavery was “no big deal.” “Slavery is as old as time and has taken place in every corner of the world,” he said; “Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no? I don’t see the problem.” Further justifying the enslavement and genocide of two continents, Columbus tells those watching that, “The place I discovered was beautiful, but it wasn’t exactly a paradise of civilization, and the native people were far from peaceful.”

Another video lesson grossly distorts the views of abolitionist Frederick Douglass, with an animated Douglas justifying slavery in America, stating that “the founding fathers made a compromise [supporting slavery] to achieve something great: the making of the United States.”

PragerU Kids videos also cover more contemporary issues. One video, titled “Los Angeles: Mateo Backs the Blue,” deals with the murder of George Floyd, whom the narrator describes as a “black man who resisted arrest.” The video claims that “violent protests” and “looting” were sparked by “false claims” of racist policing spread by unnamed “activists.” Mateo, a Los Angeles child, is aghast by protestors “threatening police,” or, as the video calls them, “protectors,” and decides to stand firmly in solidarity with the Blue Lives Matter movement.

Another educational resource approved for use in schools is a lecture called “Is Fascism Right or Left?” by controversial conspiracist Dinesh D’Souza, in which he insists that, “Fascism bears a deep kinship to the ideology of today’s left.” In 2014, D’Souza pled guilty for violating federal campaign financing laws.

Unsurprisingly for a conservative movement funded by fracking billionaires, PragerU also instructs children to reject the overwhelming consensus on climate change. However, it takes it to absurd levels, comparing the supposed oppression of climate skeptics to the living in Warsaw Ghetto, where upwards of 300,000 Jewish people were killed by the Nazis.

In “Poland: Ania’s Energy Crisis,” the titular character is fed propaganda at school about the disastrous impact of human-made climate change, only to have her eyes opened by her conservative parents. Ania is ostracized by the other children for merely expressing her concerns. Luckily, her grandfather Jakub gives her the strength to continue, by telling her about the Warsaw Uprising. “Through her family’s stories, Ania is realizing that fighting oppression is risky, and that it always takes courage,” viewers are told.

On India, American children are told that the country benefitted greatly from British imperialism, who “spread the influence of Christianity and Western values through India” and “discouraged or even outlawed harmful traditions,” and “gave” India its independence in 1947. “Western influence helped transform the country in many positive ways, but some ancient customs are harder to change than others,” the video concludes, framing India’s problems as entirely down to their own backward culture, rather than centuries of direct rule and oppression.

Another video lambasts Canada’s free healthcare system and highlights the supposed dangers of socialized medicine, while extolling the for-profit privatized American system, despite it being by far the most expensive, comparatively, and having the worst outcomes of any developed country, according to international studies.

PragerU also sets its targets on Cuba, China, Venezuela, and North Korea as well, publishing videos demonizing those countries as authoritarian nightmare regimes in need of U.S. intervention.

 

Netanyahu’s Favorite Channel

No nation, however, concerns PragerU as much as Israel. The organization has dedicated a huge amount of time and resources to defending and promoting the country. Their “Israel at War” series of lectures denounces the “lie” that Israel is occupying its neighbors, and includes a link to sign a petition “to condemn Hamas and stand with Israel.”

A lesson plan designed for young children shows teachers how they can make a model Iron Dome out of juice boxes and straws, in order to educate American children on how Israel is defending itself from Palestinian terror, interspersed with messaging like Israel and the U.S. are best friends that “share values that are tied to God.”

Another video, explaining the current crisis in the region to older children, claims that, “Like the United States, Israel is a nation of immigrants, which prides itself on its freedoms for all citizens, no matter their religion, ethnicity, or race,” and, “Uniquely, Israel is the only country in the Middle East that does not oppress its minority populations.”

This will come as some surprise to Israel’s Arab minority, who face systematic and institutionalized discrimination, including restrictions on land ownership, jobs, and education, and to human rights organizations such as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, who describe Israel as an Apartheid state carrying out a genocide against Muslims and Christians.

PragerU, however, frames Israel as the victim. Israelis, they tell their audience, grow up under “ongoing attacks from terrorist organizations, whose primary goal is to destroy Israel.” “On many occasions,” it continues, “Israel sought peace with surrounding countries, and the local Palestinians,” but to no avail.

The network even comes with an endorsement from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who shared their video, “Israel: The World’s Most Moral Army,” with his followers. “We stand with Israel,” PragerU replied.

 

PragerU: Run by an Israeli Spy

This unconditional support is unsurprising, given who actually runs the company. PragerU CEO Marissa Streit is, after all, an Israeli spy. On her eighteenth birthday, Streit joined Unit 8200, the Israeli Defense Force’s spying agency. In interviews, she has admitted that she was an officer in the controversial unit, and stated that she uses the tactics and techniques honed by Israeli spying agency on the American people. “Coming back here to the United States with the gifts that Israel had given me during my military training, I felt compelled to employ them here in my nation of the United States,” she explained.

Exactly what her role as a Unit 8200 officer remains a mystery. Streit has said of her time there that, “We were tasked with looking at problems that the intelligence community might be missing.” Given that her service coincides with the Second Palestinian Intifada, however, one can speculate that suppressing domestic resistance to occupation was among her tasks.

One does not join Unit 8200 by chance. The group is Israel’s most elite spying agency, accepting only the top 1% of applicants. Rich parents spent fortunes on extra STEM classes for their children in the hopes that they will be chosen to serve in the unit, knowing that serving there is a fast track into the upper echelons of Israeli society.

Unit 8200 is responsible for cyberwarfare and psychological operations worldwide. The group has created a massive surveillance dragnet targeting Palestinians, and uses the data to generate massive A.I.-derived kill lists. It is widely identified as the group behind the 2024 Lebanese Pager Attack, which injured thousands of civilians.

Unit 8200 agents are also responsible for producing much of the world’s most invasive spyware that is sold to authoritarian regimes across the planet. This includes the notorious Pegasus software, which was used to surveil tens of thousands of politicians, journalists, human rights defenders, and union leaders. The Saudi government, for example, used Pegasus to track Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, dismembering him with a bone saw inside their embassy in Türkiye. “So much of what I learned in Israeli military intelligence has impacted the way I think today. It is such a gift, what they have given me,” Streit said.

From there, she moved back to the U.S. to work for pro-Israel pressure group, the Israeli-American Council. She sees Israel and the United States as fundamentally linked together, and both under threat from progressive values.

“We are losing America to radicals who hate the West and everything we stand for… We must teach our children to be grateful to live in America,” she said, adding:

“Students should learn to cherish our Judeo-Christian heritage, which is the foundation of our great society… If we provide our children with a proper education, grounded in truth, justice, goodness and liberty, then I can assure you that they will grow to love both America and Israel.” 

 

Streit has made her own views on Israel’s attack on Palestine clear. She has justified attacks on civilians in Gaza, claiming that they are “harboring terrorists and hostages in their homes,” suggested that Hamas plans to “kill all Jews including nursery children,” and asserted that slogans such as “Free Palestine” are “synonymous with ‘destroy the West.’”

 

Make America Dumb Again

Streit has been at PragerU since its inception in 2009. Her views on politics and Israel/Palestine, however, could almost be described as moderate, compared with company founder, Dennis Prager.

The right-wing talk show host has visited Israel dozens of times, including leading a “Stand with Israel” tour across the country, including into occupied East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. He labeled Palestinians as “among the world’s most morally unimpressive national groups” and claimed that “lying is a Palestinian art form.” Prager, who has campaigned for whites to be allowed to use the N-word, fell in his bathroom in 2024, and was left quadriplegic and paralyzed from the neck down, and since has taken a back seat in the organization.

The empire he built was bankrolled to the tune of millions by fracking billionaires, Dan and Farris Wilks, although the pair later pulled their money after Prager was insufficiently homophobic for their liking. By this time, however, the company was funded by Israeli-American megadonor Miriam Adelson, and had grown from strength to strength. By 2024, its revenue climbed to a reported $70 million, and it could afford to hire A-list conservatives such as Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nigel Farage, and Douglas Murray to present their videos.

The original plan was for PragerU to pursue university accreditation (hence the name). However, this was quickly dropped. And yet, despite holding no educational accreditation whatsoever, they kept the misleading moniker.

This sort of callous relationship with the truth has been a constant feature of the organization. It is regularly criticized for producing content with little to no intellectual merit. Multiple sources have cataloged what they call the “blatant lies” present in the outlet’s videos.

Officially, PragerU is a non-political organization. “We’re a 501(c)(3)” non-profit, company co-founder Allen Estrin said. “We don’t have any political involvement with anybody. That would be against our charter.”

Few, however, would take this at face value, especially as Streit herself posted a video of her dancing with President Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence, with the caption “Make Education Great Again! Thank you President Trump.”

PragerU has strongly supported Trump’s wholesale attacks on the education system and teachers unions, who they see as the primary obstacle to their plan to “disrupt the education market.” Trump has also attempted to cut funding for PBS children’s programming – music to PragerU’s ears, as the organization attempts to shape young minds from infancy stepping in to fill the vacuum left by Trump’s gutting of the U.S. education system.

 

Racist Sesame Street

PragerU sits at the apex between neoconservative foreign policy, reactionary social policy at home, and relentless pro-Israel advocacy. But the primacy of all three of these positions are increasingly under threat in the United States, and are becoming progressively more unpopular.

Large majorities of Americans support a system of socialized medicine that PragerU so actively campaigns against, as well as making colleges free to attend, and building social housing nationwide. Sixty-two percent of young Americans hold a favorable view of socialism.

Polls show the country overwhelmingly disapproves of Trump’s aggression against Iran. And after nearly three years of genocide, the tide is turning on Israel. An April Pew Research Center study found that even four in ten Republicans hold an unfavorable view of the country. That figure rises to 57% of Republicans under the age of fifty. Top right-wing media figures, such as Candace Owens, and Nick Fuentes, are all vehemently anti-Israel. Meanwhile, pro-Israel conservative thought leaders, such as PragerU’s Ben Shapiro, have seen their audience crater by up to 90%.

For pro-war, pro-Israel, pro-billionaire PragerU then, the situation is grave. Despite years of extremely well-funded P.R., they have been unable to stem the tide of public opinion. Their new strategy of targeting children appears to be an attempt to inculcate Americans with these values when they are at their most impressionable; to stop the rot before it gets started.

PragerU is enthusiastically backing Trump’s dismantling of the U.S. education system, and is poised to step in to fill the void. In this sense, they are hoping to do to American education what Israel has done to Palestine. And with a former Israeli spook at the helm, they are in a perfect position to do so, blasting young minds with a blitz of reactionary propaganda, making them passionate advocates of a system that fundamentally does not work for them.

 

 

Poisoning The World Cup: The American Way by Graham Peebles

 

 Source: GrahamPeebles

 

The football has been brilliant, because football is brilliant. But the 2026 World Cup—hosted across the US, Canada, and Mexico—mainly in America—is the most corrupt, polluted tournament in the tournament’s 96-year history.

Let’s start with discrimination: Omar Artan, the first Somali referee ever invited to officiate at a World Cup, was refused entry at Miami airport—having been issued a US visa—based on spurious claims of “terrorist connections.” He flew home to a hero’s welcome, celebrated for his dignified response to a humiliating ordeal.

Palestinian Football Federation President Jibril al-Rajoub was denied entry to the US; fifteen members of Iran’s delegation were refused visas, and the Iran national team was forced to commute from Mexico for matches in the US.

Iraqi striker Aymen Hussein was detained for nearly seven hours at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport, his mobile phone confiscated and searched; Iraqi team photographer Talal Salah was deported after more than ten hours in detention; Brazilian journalist Karine Alves was racially profiled and subjected to a strip search upon arrival at a New Jersey airport.

Senegal and Ivory Coast fans were barred by Trump’s travel bans. The Ivory Coast supporters’ group president stated: “the US government does not want to see supporters from certain countries, including Ivory Coast, on its soil.”

Dozens of Moroccan supporters were denied entry into the US. Many had purchased match tickets of around $500 each, with some buying three-match packages totalling $1,500, and paid visa fees of $180, with total individual losses reaching up to $2,000, plus flights and hotel costs.

The exclusion of African and Muslim-majority nations was the pattern, a level of discrimination that makes a mockery of FIFA’s claim that this was the “most inclusive World Cup in history.”

Corruption and Greed

It is the financial exploitation of supporters that stands out as the crudest, most visible form of corruption. From FIFA’s eye-watering ticket prices to inflated air and train fares in the US, visceral greed has polluted this World Cup.

Less than 2 per cent of tickets have been made available at the much-trumpeted “budget” $60 price point (for the worst seats in the stadium), and even these were commanding resale prices averaging $1,600. The cheapest ticket for the final exceeds $2,600; the top category, originally priced at $6,730, rose to $32,970—an increase of 417 per cent—thanks to “dynamic pricing,” a demand-based system designed to maximise FIFA’s revenue.

US airlines operating flights to host cities bumped up fares by an average of 42 per cent. Public transport to stadiums has been similarly exploited: a standard $13 journey from New York to MetLife Stadium rose to $98 on match days.

FIFA’s ticket pricing has been so extortionate that prosecutors in New York and New Jersey have launched legal investigations into FIFA’s tariffs, citing “unreasonably high” ticket costs.

Total revenue for the 2022–2026 cycle is projected to be FIFA’s highest ever—hitting $13 billion—virtually double the $7.57 billion generated in the previous period, and a 73% increase on the 2019–2022 cycle.

The 2026 World Cup is the perfect union of filth and greed: the major host, America—a country led by the most corrupt president in US history—and FIFA, an unethical, unaccountable organisation led by a sycophantic megalomaniac—Gianni Infantino—who appears to see himself as the head of a nation state, rather than football’s governing body.

As Reboot FIFA states: “FIFA isn’t fit to govern world football and needs to be rebooted as an organisation so that it runs the global game in the interests of players, supporters and communities, rather than the interests of corrupt football elites, big business and authoritarian states.”

FIFA’s institutional cowardice was revealed in the starkest way on 5 July, when the US forward, Folarin Balogun, who had been given a red card in the match with Bosnia-Herzegovina, miraculously had his automatic suspension lifted—just before the knock-out game against Belgium.

It turned out that Trump, who admits to not knowing anything about football, had telephoned Infantino and asked FIFA to review the red card decision. Infantino agreed and the one-match ban was swiftly suspended, allowing Balogun to play against Belgium. Trump later boasted: “I’m the one that got them to do it.”

To the delight of football fans around the world, who were outraged by the injustice of FIFA’s actions, Belgium hammered the USA 4-1. By playing Balogun, the US team revealed itself to be devoid of principles, complicit in the corruption of Trump and Infantino.

Poisoning everything

All of this filth—the manipulation of the rules, the discrimination, and the corruption—reveals two entwined issues, pervasive and polluting: the total disregard for the law by the rich and powerful, particularly Trump and other demagogues; and the socio-economic doctrine of greed and division, which affects the lives of everyone everywhere. An unjust reductive system that reduces everything to a commodity and everyone to a consumer.

This is the American way: a world without substance, where money and winning are everything. A crass, materialistic world in which wealth and power buy impunity, and the vulnerable and marginalised can be ignored and exploited. It is loud and hollow, and it poisons everything it touches.

In spite of all the ugliness, and to the utter credit of the players and the fans, the football has been brilliant—because football is brilliant, uniting people across cultures, creating moments of collective joy and drama that will live long in the memory.

 

Why Nihilism is Taking Over Modern Society

 

 

 Source- Aperture

Why Were All Ancient Humans Black?

 

Dr Eddie Glaude Explains Why He thinks It’s ‘dangerous’ To Love America

 

Sportswashing: How Capitalism Kills the Game for Poor and Working Class People While Normalizing How Imperialism Oppresses and Kills Them by Anthony Karefa Rogers-Wright

 Source: BAR

 

A single working mother could once take her child to a Yankees game for $40, but today that money would not even cover the online service fees. Sporting events have been stolen from poor and working class people and are now reserved only for the wealthy elite.

Capitalism has a way of rendering what was once accessible to, and tactile for the masses into distant memories that themselves become the only thing that can be possessed, which is not a bad thing until said memories become the only thing that can be possessed due to profound wealth and income iniquity.  For myself, I remember a time when my single, working class mother and I could impulsively decide to go to a Yankees game or a Knicks game the same day they were being played. Moms would head to the Chemical Bank ATM, take out $40, and have the ability to purchase two decent seats along with refreshments for both of us to enjoy. Today, $40 would not even be enough to pay for the service charges that are tacked onto online ticket sales, which demonstrates the fact that attending sporting events are included in the growing list of things including, but not limited to, quality housing,  healthcare, education, and access to healthy and nutritious foods that have been pillaged from  poor and working class people as racial capitalism continues to solidify the obscene idea that only the bourgeois and elements of the petty bourgeois have a right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. 

The use of sporting events by empires to appease, mollify, and distract the masses as well as act as a tool to demonstrate the superiority and exceptionalism of a given society is nothing new. For instance, in 1936 when the Olympic Games were hosted in Nazi Germany, Adolf Hitler aimed to use the games as a massive propaganda tool to showcase the “superiority” of the Aryan race. To accentuate the propaganda tool, Hitler ordered over $30 Million in state spending to subsidize travel, build grand venues such as the Olympiastadion Berlin, and lower lodging and railway costs by as much as 50% - and even put measures in place to prevent price gouging and keep costs artificially low for tourists. By doing so, Hitler successfully engendered a pastiche of the so-called age of enlightenment, which provided a propaganda palette that portrayed a society of equal rights and liberal values which could not possibly carry out the litany of atrocities we now know took place during and after the 1936 Olympic Games. And centuries before the Third Reich, the Roman Empire instituted a similar praxis for its gladiatorial games by making them free for its citizens. The games were actually funded by the emperor and wealthy elites to provide “bread and circuses” as a form of propaganda to keep the masses happy and distracted from the empire’s decadence and perpetual imperialism. 

You would think the U.S. empire, which is responsible for more murderous atrocities and profound subjugation of colonized and oppressed people, both globally and domestically, than Nazi Germany would apply a similar praxis…but this would be a myopic way of thinking.  At a time when U.S. empire is contemporaneously exercising barbarous imperialism in nearly every corner of the world from Latin America and the Caribbean, to the Middle East, and Africa  rather than use sporting events to distract the masses from its bellicose activities, it’s instead using sporting events to normalize them. This, in part, explains why the U.S. and its legion of corporate henchmen could give a damn about the fact that the vast majority of poor and working class people cannot attend sporting events that have been seized by the capitalist dictatorship. 

I recently spoke with Black Alliance for Peace National Co-Coordinator Erica Caines who explained the dichotomy of the rhapsody and contradictions associated with the recently crowned National Basketball Association (NBA) World Champion New York Knicks. On the one hand, New Yorkers like her and myself are ecstatic about the fact that our team delivered a championship after a 53-year drought - many New Yorkers have been waiting for this for their entire lives. At the same time, the NBA playoffs, and particularly the games played in New York City’s Madison Square Garden, showcased how capitalism has firmly entrenched the notion that watching sporting events in person is a luxury only available and accessible to the elite. Ticket prices for some of the Knicks’s playoff games were selling as high as $102,880 for the twelfth row. To put this into perspective, the $40 Moms used to spend to take us to a Knicks game represents 0.0004 percent of the price for a higher end 2026 Knicks playoff game ticket. As Caines noted, the people longing the most for a Knicks championship were watching their historic playoff run outside in the streets. 

 The 2026 FIFA World Cup acts as yet another example of the scandalous grift that attending sporting events has become. By some estimates, to attend the U.S. soccer team’s next match in Seattle, Washington, total costs, including travel, but not accommodations, are nearly $,2,000 for a nose bleed seat. Prices skyrocket for World Cup matches taking place in New York/New Jersey with seats costing as high as $10,990, which does not include the cost of taking a train from New York City to Met Life Stadium (located in New Jersey), which are going for $98. New York City Mayor, Zohran Mamdani, recently discussed the issue of exorbitant prices to both the Knicks playoff games and the World Cup, the latter of which he assisted some New Yorkers with attending by instituting a raffle for a limited number of tickets that also provided free travel to and from the city. While Mamdani’s concerns and benevolence for a choice few New Yorkers is somewhat laudable, we must also take note of the contradictions he’s normalizing as well as the contradiction that while one of the most vile human beings in human history, Adolf Hitler, subsidized games and instituted interdiction for ticket price gouging, a socialist mayor did and has not. 

And speaking of socialism, what makes the inaccessibility to the World Cup, and many other sporting events, for the masses even more sadistic is the fact that the games in the US are being played in stadiums heavily subsidized by public funding. According to one study, the amount of public money [to build sports stadiums]has risen, from a median of $168 million in public funds per stadium in the 1990s, to $350 million in the 2010s, to $500 million in the 2020s across the four major U.S. sports leagues [NBA. NFL, MLB, and NHL].”  All said, that public dollars are utilized to accommodate the construction of stadiums where World Cup matches are being held yet they are not accessible to the majority of the public is further proof that we exist in a society that provides socialism for the wealthy and capitalism for the poor and working class masses. Worse yet, be it the NBA playoffs or the World Cup, we are witnessing not just the normalization of monopoly capitalism, but the imperialism necessary to maintain it. And this normalization also includes the oppression and subjugation of colonized and oppressed people domestically who are under perpetual threat of slaughter and brutality by militarized forces like ICE and local law enforcement agencies exercising and maintaining domestic colonialism as FIFA exploits the labor of the very people who cannot afford to attend World Cup matches, while not being afforded self determination and the ability to walk the streets of their cities in safety. 

This is why the work of the Anti Fascist Football Coalition (AFFC) is more salient than ever. It’s important for the masses to understand, as Caines named, that their boycott of the World Cup is not just about boycotting the games, but also about raising consciousness and awareness about what the games are normalizing and attempting to perambulate in an effort to obfuscate, distract, and confuse the masses through its well funded and well oiled sportswashing project. To this end, the work and larger initiative of the AFFC must and will continue long after the World Cup matches conclude. Continuing this work is up to us, the global majority of poor and working class people, the oppressed and the colonized. We must collectively send the message that socialism is only appropriate for those of the bourgeois willing to commit class suicide in service to the masses and the proletariat dictatorship - this is a very diplomatic and compassionate approach, at a time when the world has just witnessed its first trillionaire,  when the alternative could, and perhaps should be the guillotine. 

The veil has been lifted, the choice to see what has been revealed and act accordingly is entirely in our hands. 

Elon Musk and the Politics of Trillionaire Fascism by Henry Giroux

 

You can’t have capitalism without racism.

–Malcolm X

Elon Musk is less an aberration than the grotesque byproduct of a capitalist order that converts inequality into virtue, exploitation into spectacle, and mistakes its own deepest failures for its greatest successes. The media frenzy surrounding the prospect of Musk becoming the world’s first trillionaire is not a celebration of human progress or individual initiative. It is a symptom of a deeper social and political crisis, one that exposes the power of class privilege, the corrupting forces of gangster capitalism, and a culture increasingly incapable of distinguishing wealth from worth or exploitation from human flourishing.

Musk is symptomatic of the rot of a capitalist system that generates staggering inequalities while concentrating wealth and power in the hands of a tiny elite whose fortunes depend not simply on markets, but on public subsidies, collective labor, social institutions, and shared resources, all sustained by an authoritarian culture animated by white supremacy, ultranationalism, and the mobilizing passions of fascist politics, especially in the age of Trump.  As Dan Dinello argues, Musk has become an “avatar of chaos, cruelty, and death.” The description is difficult to dismiss. How else are we to understand his role as Trump’s chief enforcer?

 In this case, the world’s richest man played a crucial role in closing and slashing aid for the U.S. humanitarian assistance agency (USAID). To be sure, USAID embodied the contradictions of American power. While it funded vital global health and humanitarian programs, it also functioned as an instrument of U.S. soft power, advancing development agendas and political arrangements often aligned with American geopolitical and economic interests. Its history reminds us that humanitarianism under capitalism has frequently been entangled with empire, shaped as much by the imperatives of power and profit as by the demands of justice and human need. Yet acknowledging these contradictions does not diminish the catastrophic consequences of dismantling the agency. The consequences have been almost unimaginable. Becky Ferreira states that:

According to monitoring models, the collapse of USAID may have already caused 762,000 preventable deaths, 500,000 of which are children, while the cuts could lead to more than nine million preventable deaths by 2030, according to a study published in February 2026….[In addition], after USAID closed, there was a rapid increase in the likelihood of violence, the severity of conflict, and the lethality of conflict, in nearly a thousand administrative regions across Africa.

 Yet the mythology surrounding Musk erases these social foundations. The self-made billionaire is transformed into a heroic figure, while the workers, public investments, and democratic institutions that made his fortune possible disappear from view. Jenni Krithara is right in stating that “Elon Musk has become a symbol of success! In reality, however, he is nothing more than a symbol of inequality and exploitation. No billionaire created the wealth he possesses alone. Behind every corporate empire are workers, public infrastructure, universities, research programs, natural resources and entire societies.”

At the same time, Musk’s ascent reveals the power of a culture and public pedagogy that normalizes and celebrates massive inequities in wealth and power. In a society saturated by myths of entrepreneurial genius and limitless success, extreme concentrations of wealth and power are legitimated as objects of admiration rather than outrage. The scandal is not simply that one person can possess more wealth than entire nations while millions struggle to survive and are relegated to life-threatening poverty and lack of adequate health care.

As Thomas Piketty makes clear in Capital in the Twenty-First Century, people are taught to view the grotesque imbalance and staggering levels of inequality and power as natural, inevitable, and even desirable. At work here is a politics that normalizes economic injustice, while depoliticizing any attempt to analyze it and hold a system and individuals responsible for propagating it. It is hardly surprising that Musk regards empathy as a threat to the authoritarian ethic of white Christian nationalism and treats free speech as a disposable principle, useful only when it serves the interests of power.

Under these conditions, inequality becomes a spectacle sustained by a lethal public pedagogy in which exploitation is rebranded as achievement and democracy itself is endangered as economic power increasingly shapes politics, public discourse, and everyday life. The media’s celebration of Musk’s wealth is not innocent reportage. It teaches people to admire concentrations of wealth that earlier generations would have regarded as obscene. It transforms plutocracy into aspiration and dispossession into a private failing rather than a public injustice. Under such conditions, private issues rooted in a celebrity discourse are severed from the broader systems of power and inequality that produce them. To understand Musk’s appeal, however, requires examining the spectacle through which his power is organized and legitimized.

Spectacle in the age of Musk no longer functions simply as distraction. It has become a mode of governance. Musk understands that power today depends less upon persuading people than upon occupying the circuits of attention through which people experience reality itself. The billionaire is no longer merely an owner of capital. He is an engineer of attention, a curator of affect, and an architect of the public imagination.

What Debord once called the society of the spectacle has entered a new phase. Spectacle is no longer confined to television screens, political rallies, or advertising campaigns. It is now embedded in algorithms that organize desire, shape perception, and reward outrage. In Musk’s universe, visibility itself becomes power. Every provocation, conspiracy theory, racist insinuation, or theatrical gesture feeds an economy of attention in which shock displaces thought and notoriety becomes indistinguishable from authority.

The spectacle no longer hides domination. It glamorizes it. Wealth appears as genius, cruelty as authenticity, and the dismantling of democratic institutions as evidence of courage. Politics becomes performance while the public sphere collapses into a marketplace of emotions organized around fear, resentment, and manufactured grievance.

Yet Musk’s wealth is inseparable from the politics it enables. Economic power at this scale does not merely influence public life; it reshapes the very conditions under which democracy can survive. Musk’s politics intensify these dangers.He has used his immense wealth and control over digital platforms to amplify conspiracy theories, attack democratic institutions, and lend support to far-right and nationalist movements in the United States and abroad. He has embraced the language of racial panic, amplified antisemitic and white nationalist narratives, promoted accounts trafficking in racist conspiracy theories, and used X to normalize forms of hatred once relegated to the political margins. Wealth at this scale is not simply economic. It is political, cultural, and pedagogical. It shapes public consciousness while insulating itself from democratic accountability.

Musk represents something historically new: the fusion of celebrity culture, algorithmic power, and authoritarian politics into a single figure whose influence extends across nations and institutions. He is not simply a capitalist with political opinions. He is a spectacle unto himself, a brand organized around excess, provocation, and the performance of transgression. The appeal of such figures cannot be understood through economics alone. It must also be understood aesthetically.

Susan Sontag once argued that fascist aesthetics transforms politics into an intoxicating drama of style, ritual, and emotional intensity. The attraction lies less in ideas than in sensations: the thrill of power, the seduction of force, the glamour of transgression. Musk updates this tradition for the digital age. He stages himself as the outlaw billionaire, the rebellious genius unconstrained by norms, laws, or democratic accountability. What he offers his followers is not merely a politics but an affective experience: the pleasure of belonging to a movement that mistakes cruelty for courage and domination for freedom.

The spectacle’s greatest deception is that it draws attention to Musk the personality while obscuring Musk the architect of a new political economy. Behind the oscillating images of genius and martyr lies a project aimed not merely at dismantling parts of the public sphere but at reorganizing them around private power—integrating his companies into state and military infrastructures, weakening the institutions charged with regulating them, and converting public resources into engines of oligarchic wealth and influence.

The spectacle’s greatest deception is that it draws attention to Musk the personality while obscuring Musk the architect of a new political economy. Behind the oscillating images of genius and martyr lies a project aimed not merely at dismantling parts of the public sphere but at reorganizing them around private power—integrating his companies into state and military infrastructures, weakening the institutions charged with regulating them, and converting public resources into engines of oligarchic wealth and influence.

Musk’s rise is not a triumph of individual initiative or entrepreneurial genius. It is the product of a social order in which public resources, state subsidies, collective labor, and technological infrastructures are privatized and redirected toward the enrichment of a tiny oligarchic elite. He despises the social contract because it places obligations on wealth and imposes democratic limits on power. As Quinn Slobodian and Ben Tarnoff note in Muskism: A Guide for the Perplexed, in its place, Musk advances a far-right vision that fuses state power with technological control, elevates algorithmic governance over democratic accountability, and normalizes racialized exclusion as a principle of social order. Musk’s political project promises freedom while producing new forms of dependence, claiming to democratize technology even as it concentrates unprecedented power in private hands.

Will Bunch is right in stating that Musk has transformed X into a global amplifier for racial resentment and white nationalist politics. Under the guise of defending “free speech,” he has repeatedly elevated far-right influencers, reinstated accounts banned for hate speech, and promoted narratives that depict immigrants and racial minorities as existential threats to Western civilization. Just before the Belfast anti-immigrant riots in 2026, Musk amplified calls by the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson for people to “hit the streets,” adding his own exhortation: “Only by protesting REPEATEDLY and LOUDLY will there be any change!!” The consequences were immediate and terrifying: attacks on immigrant communities, immigrant addresses posted online and  homes set ablaze, and an online culture of racial hatred legitimated and endorsed by the world’s richest man.

Zadie Smith has observed that the propaganda machinery of fascism once relied on posters, radios, and megaphones, crude instruments compared to what Elon Musk now commands. The comparison is instructive. The danger today lies not simply in extremist messages but in the infrastructures that circulate them. Algorithms reward outrage, synchronize emotions, and impose forms of conformity that often operate invisibly. The propaganda machine no longer shouts at citizens from a distance. It lives in their pockets, curates their desires, and quietly organizes their fears.

Musk presides over precisely such a machinery. X functions not simply as a platform for communication but as an apparatus for manufacturing attention, resentment, and ideological belonging. The result is a culture in which people increasingly surrender the burdens of judgment and critical thought to the emotional rhythms of the feed. Spectacle becomes a form of social organization, teaching individuals to react rather than reflect and to experience political life as an endless theater of outrage and enemies.

X is no longer merely a communication network. It has become an infrastructure of authoritarian politics, normalizing racism, rewarding outrage, and converting white grievance into a global spectacle of resentment and cruelty. The richest man on the planet has become one of the chief architects of a politics of white victimhood, one in which white people are perpetually under siege by dangerous invaders who happen to be Black, Brown, and immigrants. How else to explain his barrage of racist posts and conspiratorial rhetoric, along with his support for far-right anti-immigrant movements such as Restore Britain?

X has become one of the most powerful pedagogical apparatuses of the digital age, teaching millions to equate cruelty with courage, racial hierarchy with common sense, and hatred with truth. What is marketed as free speech increasingly operates as a machinery of authoritarian desire that erodes the civic and ethical foundations of democratic life. The symbolism surrounding Musk has become increasingly ominous. After making a gesture at a political rally that was widely condemned as echoing a Nazi salute, Musk responded to the ensuing criticism with mockery rather than reflection. The episode was revealing because it exposed an authoritarian politics in which provocation becomes spectacle, cruelty becomes a public virtue, and historical amnesia becomes a precondition for making fascist ideas appear ordinary, even commonsensical. Fascism rarely begins with concentration camps or military coups. It begins with the normalization of contempt, the trivialization of violence, and the celebration of power unmoored from ethical responsibility.

Musk’s growing influence has become a warning sign of a new form of oligarchic rule in which immense wealth, technological power, and political influence converge to hollow out democratic life from within. The danger lies not only in his embrace of far-right movements and authoritarian figures abroad, but in the extraordinary capacity of a single billionaire to distort public debate, destabilize democratic institutions, and shape political life across national borders. Musk is not the real issue. He is the symptom. The larger question is whether any vestige of democracy can survive when private wealth acquires such immense power over the institutions and cultures that sustain public life.

The spectacle of the world’s richest man accumulating unimaginable wealth while endorsing politics that deepen social divisions and undermine democratic norms exposes the moral bankruptcy of a gangster capitalism that rewards accumulation while abandoning social responsibility. Trillionaire politics is not simply the concentration of wealth. It is the concentration of power, influence, and the capacity to shape the stories societies tell about themselves.

The gravest danger is not Musk himself but the culture that celebrates him. Citizens are increasingly schooled to applaud the very forces that diminish their agency and erode their social protections. They are encouraged to admire those who dominate them, to mistake cruelty for strength, and to equate democracy with the freedom of billionaires to exercise unchecked power. Trillionaire politics is the end point of a society inhabited by what might be called the walking dead: citizens politically numbed and morally anesthetized, taught to applaud their own dispossession, embrace loneliness as freedom, and accept misery as the price of greatness.

The first trillionaire is not a monument to human achievement. He is an indictment of a corrupt social order that mistakes accumulation for greatness, toxic masculinity for leadership, and domination for success.  Is it any wonder that Musk views empathy as a weakness and free speech as a disposable principle? Both stand in the way of the politics of cruelty, white nationalism, and unchecked power he increasingly champions.

 Musk is the product of a culture that worships wealth, mistakes spectacle for truth, and increasingly confuses domination with freedom. He represents the emergence of a new authoritarian formation in which capitalism, digital technologies, and fascist sensibilities converge in unprecedented ways. He is the avatar of a techno-fascist order, an updated form of neoliberal gangster capitalism in which state power, digital technologies, and oligarchic wealth converge to erode democratic institutions and remake society in the interests of a predatory elite.

The danger he poses lies not only in the policies he supports or the movements he amplifies. It lies in the world he helps create: a world in which algorithms replace judgment, cruelty becomes entertainment, racism is repackaged as realism, and democracy is hollowed out by spectacles of resentment and manufactured consent.

If Trump embodies the theatrical politics of authoritarianism, Musk represents its technological future. He is the engineer of a new machinery of spectacle, one capable of shaping consciousness on a planetary scale. In this sense, Musk is not simply the world’s richest man. He is among the most powerful public pedagogues of the twenty-first century, educating millions in the pleasures of unfreedom and the aesthetics of authoritarian desire.

Musk is not an exception to our time. He is the most visible symptom of a society in which cruelty is celebrated as strength, democracy is hollowed out by oligarchic power, and freedom is reduced to the prerogatives of the rich. This is more than a failed society. It is capitalism stripped of its myths and revealed in all of its gangster, authoritarian, and fascist impulses.

 

The Liquor Cabinet is Drunk on Power

 

Why Fascism Fails

The Right Amount of Crazy by Fintan O'Toole

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 Source: New York Review of Books

In January, when The New York Times asked DonaldTrump whether there were any limits on his global powers, he replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind.” Since whatever morality he ever possessed has long since departed, the remaining question is whether he has also lost his mind. Given that, in the course of his war on Iran, he has chosen to present himself to the world as a genocidal maniac—posting on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will”—the answer may seem all too obvious.

Yet to arrive at it we have to tease out the relationships that are always at the heart of his persona: the complex connections between performance and reality, method and madness, bombast and bombs. With Trump, these oppositions are never absolute. The borders between them are always porous. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that in Trump’s chaotic mind there lurks the Madman Theory, a belief that acting crazy is a rational strategy. Richard Nixon coined the phrase for his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, during the Vietnam War:

I call it the Madman Theory, Bob. I want the North Vietnamese to believe I’ve reached the point where I might do anything to stop the war. We’ll just slip the word to them that “for God’s sake, you know Nixon is obsessed about Communism. We can’t restrain him when he’s angry—and he has his hand on the nuclear button”—and Ho Chi Minh himself will be in Paris in two days begging for peace.

The belief that Trump has been following Nixon’s playbook in relation to Iran has been a staple of recent media analysis. It is certainly valid. Yet it raises a further question: Is it possible for someone to act the lunatic while actually being one? We are faced with a vastly more consequential version of a Catch-22. In Joseph Heller’s novel, claiming to be crazy is taken as evidence of sanity. Likewise the only evidence that Trump might not be crazy is his obvious determination to seem so.

To get our bearings in this maze we might begin with Irving. He appears, shorn of a surname, in the book Tony Schwartz ghostwrote for Trump, The Art of the Deal (1987). While still at college, Trump has done his first deal, buying with his father and refurbishing an apartment complex in Cincinnati. He hires Irving to manage the project. Trump suspects that he is a thief and calls him “a short, fat, bald-headed guy with thick glasses and hands like Jell-O, who’d never lifted anything in his life beside a pen, and who had no physical ability whatsoever.”

But his saving grace is “an incredible mouth.” According to Trump, Irving would collect rents from the most recalcitrant tenants by putting on a show of frenzy:

He’d ring the doorbell, and when someone came to the door, he’d go crazy. He’d get red in the face, use every filthy word he could think of, and make every threat in the book. It was an act, but it was very effective: usually they paid up right then and there.

One day, while Irving was on his rounds, he knocked on a door, and a little ten-year-old girl answered. Irving said, “You go tell your father to pay his f—ing rent or I’m going to knock his ass off.”

Irving, says Trump, “left a very vivid impression on me.” Trump learned early on that screaming obscenities at ten-year-old girls and making every threat in the book was a good way to get what he wanted. There would seem to be a clear path from Irving to the flamboyantly demented Trump of his Easter Sunday morning post: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell – JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah.”

For Trump’s apologists, he is thus not a mad King Lear, an (almost) eighty-year-old monarch raving on the heath. He is a Hamlet who has chosen “to put an antic disposition on,” the better to achieve his purposes. There’s every reason to believe that this is the way Trump sees himself. William Barr, who served as Trump’s attorney general in the latter part of his first term, recalls in his memoir, One Damn Thing After Another (2022), an occasion when Trump wished to make a public claim of vindication:

Then, studying me, with a twinkle in his eye, he added, “I am going to go and tweet about this.”

I glanced up with a look of discomfort. He smiled playfully. “Do you know what the secret is of a really good tweet?” he asked, looking at each of us one by one. We all looked blank. “Just the right amount of crazy,” he said.

Likewise, Nikki Haley recalled that when she was serving as his ambassador to the United Nations, Trump told her how to deal with the North Koreans: “Tell them you just talked to the president…. Make them think I’m crazy.” In 2017 Axios reported an exchange between Trump and his trade representative Robert Lighthizer, who was negotiating with South Korea: “I’ll tell the Koreans they’ve got 30 days,” Lighthizer said. Trump rebuked him: “No, no, no. That’s not how you negotiate. You don’t tell them they’ve got 30 days. You tell them, ‘This guy’s so crazy he could pull out any minute.’” In 2024 Trump told The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board that he would not have to use military force to prevent a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, because President Xi “respects me and he knows I’m f—crazy.”

The conviction that putting on an antic disposition is a winning geopolitical strategy has a long history. Henry Kissinger articulated it in a lecture in Peshawar in 1962. In the cold war confrontation with the Soviet Union, he said,

the only way one can communicate one’s determination, I think, is by conducting a policy in which one indicates a high capacity for irrationality. What one has to do is prove that in certain situations one is likely to go out of control, and that regardless of what sober calculation would show one is simply so nervous that the gun is going to go off. A madman who is holding a hand grenade in his hand has a very great bargaining advantage.

In this theater of bluff, the president of the United States is Irving writ large. If he goes red in the face, uses every filthy word he can think of, and makes vile threats, he is in fact being coldly calculating and lucidly shrewd. According to this line of thinking, there is not just a gap between appearance and reality—the two are complete opposites. The rationale is that the higher the seeming capacity for irrationality, the more rational the president is because the more probable it is that the enemy will be terrified and make large concessions. By this logic, Trump’s genocidal ravings at Iran are proof that he really is, as he insists, a very stable genius.

The Chinese, of course, have a dismissive phrase of their own for the Madman Theory: paper tiger. Like all performances, the crazy act must be able to command at least a suspension of disbelief. In Trump’s case, his infinite hype produces diminishing returns of credibility. His warning in 2017 that “we will have no choice but to totally destroy North Korea,” whose threats would be “met with fire and fury like the world has never seen,” was followed the next year by his declaration that he and Kim Jong Un “fell in love” after exchanging letters. The paper tiger went into the shredder.

The odd thing, though, is that these two realities—that Trump is playing out his own version of the Madman Theory and that his act has long worn thin—seem to point toward the same apparent conclusion. The first appeals to his fans, the second to his detractors. But both suggest that there is only the show. Some think it’s a great show, some think it’s terrible. Yet the truth is that Trump is always acting in both senses. There is no border between pretense and practice, shadow and substance.

Shakespeare gives us more than Lear or Hamlet, real or feigned mental derangement. There is a third possibility. Titus Andronicus begins by pretending to be mad and then becomes so in reality. To translate this into the history of the American presidency, we need only return to Nixon. Just because you’ve invented and acted on the Madman Theory doesn’t mean you can’t go mad: Nixon’s paranoia, enemies lists, conspiracy theories, and seemingly drunken order to nuke North Korea do not speak of robust mental health. The Madman Theory, it seems, can be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Trump’s genocidal threats are a much madder version of the theory than anyone previously had in mind. They go against two of its basic requirements. When Kissinger set it out in 1962, he added that unfortunately, “given the public opinion of Western democracy, this is not a policy that can be conducted.” The Madman Theory, even when put into practice by Nixon, is a strictly limited form of coterie theater. The performance is only for hostile governments. It must be kept from one’s own citizens because public opinion matters; the leader of a democracy does not want his voters to think he has truly lost his marbles.

Second, Kissinger suggested that since there were such limits on democratically elected leaders’ use of the strategy, the alternative for the US was to transform its alliances “from what were in effect unilateral American guarantees” into “efforts of real cooperation to prevent threats to countries from being overrun.” The US can’t have its allies thinking that its president has gone crazy either. So it must instead offer them real cooperation in joint efforts to deter invaders.

Trump’s homicidal hysteria breaks both of these rules. It is not a private performance for the benefit of a highly select audience (in this case the members of the Iranian regime). It is a stadium spectacular, simulcast live to the whole world. It displays psychosis to American voters and to America’s allies. It sunders any common interest with friendly European and Anglophone nations. It is thus unmoored from the constraints either of democracy or of alliance.

This does not merely indicate “a high capacity for irrationality.” It is actually and wildly irrational. It makes a kind of sense only if one’s own voters and one’s supposed international allies are also legitimate targets of the mad threats, if they too are to be terrorized by the specter of the deranged emperor. Trump’s mad act has a logic only if the performer this time really sees both voters and allies as enemies to be overawed.

Trump told Barr that a good tweet has “the right amount of crazy.” His capacity for that kind of calibration has never been impressive: if the original benchmark is screaming obscenities at ten-year-old girls, fine gradations are probably not in his skillset. But however skilled he may once have been, it is now obvious that he can no longer control the dosage. Threatening genocide is the wrong amount of crazy—wrong in itself but also wrong because it tells those at whom the threat is aimed that they have nothing left to lose. They may as well bring as many of their enemies down with them as they can.

It would be impertinent to offer a clinical diagnosis of Trump, though that is not a courtesy he has afforded others. He reportedly called his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, “mentally retarded”; repeatedly cast doubt on whether Joe Biden was “mentally fit to be president”; said his chief of staff John Kelly “wasn’t mentally fit for the job”; claimed that “Kamala Harris doesn’t have the mental capacity to do a REAL Debate against me”; and called his former national security adviser John Bolton a “total & unhinged WARMONGER, the red faced ‘boiler ready to explode’ was one of those very stupid voices that got us into the Middle East quicksand.”

But whatever its clinical definition, the political diagnosis of Trump’s form of madness was made a long time ago by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan:

The Passion, whose violence, or continuance maketh Madnesse, is either great Vaine-Glory; which is commonly called Pride, and Selfe-Conceipt…. Pride, subjecteth a man to Anger, the excesse whereof, is the Madnesse called RAGE, and FURY.

Or, in this case, Operation Epic Fury.

Fury, Hobbes wrote, arises when a belief that one is uniquely inspired clashes with the refusal of others to bend to this exceptional insight: “If there were nothing else that bewrayed their madnesse; yet that very arrogating such inspiration to themselves, is argument enough.” While sane people “would be unwilling the vanity and Extravagance of their thoughts…should be publiquely seen,” those in the grip of this delusion are all too happy to put them on display. Hobbes pointed out that if someone were to tell you that he “were God the Father,” you would require no further proof of madness. When Pope Leo XIV recently denounced “the delusion of omnipotence,” Trump replied by posting an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus healing a sick man in a bed while a soldier and a nurse look on in awe. Trump is the Savior whom Leo is pledged to serve—the ultimate in one-upmanship.

Rage and fury are the words Shakespeare most often associates with madness. We know that as soon as Trump was elected in 2016, those Republicans who saw him up close began to dread the eruption of his unbridled temper. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in Peril (2021), the then speaker of the house Paul Ryan felt it necessary to read up on narcissistic personality disorder: “Ryan’s main takeaway: Do not humiliate Trump in public. Humiliating a narcissist risked real danger, a frantic lashing out if he felt threatened or criticized.”

This frantic lashing out has been described over and over by those who worked with Trump in the White House during his first administration. “I thought about Trump’s anger. I heard his voice screaming in my head,” recalled the loyal White House aide Cliff Sims. “Trump was railing about everyone at that time. He called Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell ‘a dirty bastard, that motherfucker,’” recalls the former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham in I’ll Take Your Questions Now (2021). The chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Mark Milley “was certain Trump had gone into a serious mental decline in the aftermath of the [2020] election, with Trump now all but manic, screaming at officials and constructing his own alternate reality about endless election conspiracies.”

The relevant point about these maniacal outbursts is that they are not performative. They are not strategic enactments of the Madman Theory. They are merely the way he is. Grisham believed that Trump’s public rages were performative until she experienced them in private:

I was not prepared for the way he spoke to or yelled at people, which I know sounds crazy when you consider his Twitter account or even his interviews with the press. But when I began to see how his temper wasn’t just for shock value or the cameras, I began to regret my decision to go to the West Wing.

This fury—constantly compared by those who worked with him to the tantrums of a toddler—is, as Ryan realized, dangerous, and all the more so when allied to another aspect of his character: his loss of a connection to objective reality. Rage has to be controlled when it comes up against outside limitations, but there is a sense in which, for Trump, there is no outside. According to The Divider (2022), Peter Baker and Susan Glasser’s history of Trump’s first term, John Kelly and “other top officials who served during the Trump administration came to believe that Trump was mentally ill, unable or unwilling to process basic information necessary to do his job, and dangerously uninformed.” Kelly himself “considered Trump a pathological liar, not just someone disconnected from reality but someone who did not even seem to understand that there was a reality other than what he decided it was.”

These, bear in mind, are testimonies from Trump’s first term, when he was a younger man and showed fewer signs of cognitive decline. The fury of thwarted narcissism and the lack of any sense of an external reality can only be more dangerous in a second term, when Trump is even more disinhibited, hearing only voices that, in all their sycophantic echoing of his own desires, might as well be inside his head.

The case for invoking the Constitution’s Twenty-Fifth Amendment and removing Trump from power is strong, and Trump himself joked about it during a cabinet meeting in late March. “I can’t say what we’re going to do, because if I did, I wouldn’t be sitting here for long. They’d probably—what is it called? The Twenty-Fifth Amendment?” Democrats in Congress have become much more willing to call openly for Trump’s ejection on the grounds of his mental incapacity to govern. But the same Republican obsequiousness that has made Trump’s madness ever more dangerous makes his removal a practical impossibility.

The madness, after all, is not just personal. It is structural. When the balance of power is lost and democratic accountability is replaced by a cult of the divinely inspired leader, the conditions that exacerbate derangement become the principles of governance. Writing of the Nixon White House, Arthur Schlesinger remarked:

In such conditions wish tended to rule fact and, in George McGovern’s phrase, government fell prey “to its own delusions and fantasies.” At the far end of this road lay the madness of totalitarian government, where leaders tried to remold reality by force of personality and terror.

Nixon fell, but the American republic itself fell prey to the delusion that the far end of that road could never be reached. The remolding of America and the world through the force of personality and terror is what Trump offered the American electorate in 2024, after the Madman Theory had been put into practice in the violent theater of the invasion of the Capitol on January 6, 2021. When a majority of voters decided to accept that this was just the right amount of crazy, they would have been mad not to expect an ever deeper derangement.