The US Empire is Going SUPERNOVA
President Trump has set off a truly extraordinary string of global-order-destabilizing campaigns that have left the world reeling. From his attacks on Venezuela and promises of “action” against Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Iran, to his threats against allies in “securing” Greenland, it feels like one of those weeks Lenin had promised long ago: There are decades where nothing happens, and weeks when decades happen.
In a mere week, it feels like Trump has turned the world upside down and flushed international law down with it.
Spoiler alert: This may not altogether be a bad thing.
Many world leaders and global figures have reacted to this unprecedented turn of events. Germany’s president Steinmeier:
Arnaud Bertrand summarizes:
Truly extraordinary language by German President Steinmeier:
He says the US's values are "broken", that they're changing the world "into a den of thieves in which the most unscrupulous take what they want," and treat "whole countries" as their "property".
Pretty hypocritical too, Germany has a lot of self-reflecting to when it comes to breaking "values" given their stance on Gaza, and their general enabling of the US. In a very real way, it's also very much Europeans' fault.
Even the Pope was aghast at the degradation of the post-bellum “comity of nations” which has at various times been codified as the ‘rules based order’ or ‘international law’:
Trump even further outlined his vision of this restructuring by stating that international law does not apply to him, and he is guided only by the rubric of his own lofty moral compass:
His personal advisor Stephen Miller fleshed it out even further:
“You can say whatever you want about international niceties and stuff like that. But we live in a real world that is governed by force, coercion, and authority. This is the iron law of the world” — Stephen Miller, Adviser to the President of the United States on Homeland Security.
Whispers from Europa’s interior tell us that the apparatchiks are panicking behind the scenes—the upending of their sacred order means a total reorganization of power balances at a time when European countries have no clout to demand a ‘place at the table’ for the ensuing negotiations over the leftover scraps. They now appear to be gravely rethinking their foolhardy choice in placing all their eggs in ‘daddy’ US’s patchy basket:
But the truth is, this is not the same old whinging about Trump’s upending of international paradigms which you can find saturating every corner of the infospace. Rather, I wanted to peer more closely at one very specific aspect of ongoing developments: the mechanism by which US presidents seem to devolve into the worst caricatures of neocon archetypes soon after becoming elected.
Why is it that Trump so quickly back-pedaled into a seeming warmonger after promising no foreign entanglements and wasting of American resources on endless and fruitless geopolitical adventures? In short, why has Trump descended into a parody of Caligula to the point where many are questioning his mental sanity? And most importantly, what implications does this plunge into chaotic amorality have for the future of America as a whole?
Let us begin:
The Rise of Donigula
Trump follows in the footsteps of most presidents in that he must over-promise in order to get elected, which only results in the disappointment of under-delivering when the rubber of political realities finally meets asphalt.
The main reason we’re now seeing Trump veer so hard into inciting geopolitical flashpoints and military powder-kegs everywhere is because—as previous presidents before him each figured it out on their own—it is the most natural way to generate a sense of political momentum while simultaneously over-powering news cycles to drown out ‘negative press’, in this case the Epstein files scandal that has hagridden Trump for the past year.
When presidents come to power, the first thing they learn is that achieving political aims via consensus with the various political factions in Congress is next to impossible. Thus, presidents become mired in the vicious cycle of infighting and backbiting, the endless circus of budget battles, government shutdowns, and filibusters which sap all impetus from an administration’s early post-victory euphoric phase. In Trump’s case, the ‘revolutionary’ energy of the MAGA movement required a constant sense of forward-motion and accomplishment, a kind of hero’s arc of triumph over the DNC Dark Forces. Trump quickly realized this could only be achieved with the ‘abuse’ of executive authority by embarking on various adventures which could be justified via a thieve’s bag of legal tricks.
For instance, in the case of Venezuela we heard Rubio try to obfuscate the legalities of the admin’s actions, claiming that Congress did not need to be notified because it was a hair-trigger operation reliant on weather—as if that somehow has anything to do with Congressional authority. Trump ended up informing Big Oil execs beforehand, but not Congress, because, as his own officials put it: “Congress likes to leak.”
Two days ago Congress moved to nullify Trump’s ability to use the military unilaterally in Venezuela:
Only for JD Vance to call the 1973 War Powers Resolution a “fake” act, implying the Constitution itself is fake, given its article authorizing exclusively Congress to declare war on nations.
The bigger point is that Trump quickly realized that the military sphere is the one area where he can act swiftly and unilaterally—given the military-industrial-complex’s perennial and apolitical chafing lust for action. It allows him to generate the needed inertia that keeps at least the potential of positive and triumphalist news spinning through the cycles in his favor, and of course simultaneously wipes away inconvenient narratives, like economic stagnation, unprecedented subversion of the US by a foreign power, etc. The big red button becomes the most facile and expedient way to generate a critical mass of ‘inertia’ easily milked by proper media messaging into a sense of revolutionary vigor for a country in desperate need of optimism.
But there are dark implications for where such illusions and national-spirit-building parlor tricks ultimately lead.
Corporo-Nation
When a nation begins its long decline into spiritual listlessness and amorality, it proceeds to reflect these aspects in the rise of a new political class which exhibits characteristics no longer associated with those original manifestations which formed the nation as people once knew it.
A nation, in its purest sense, is the extension of the family unit. Nations form as prototypical tribes: their rulers being tribal chiefs who rise to power based on the shared social, familial, spiritual, and moral values with the people in their immediate surroundings, whom they rule based on a direct trust. The most successful nations, even as they grow into seemingly unwieldy giants, continue to exhibit this natural extension of their early embryonic form, where leaders retain a sense of dignity and moral duty to their governed, which reflects like a mirror the intrinsic civic-spiritual fiber of the people.
In the US, this process has already long been subverted, mutating into something toxic and cynical. Trump represents a kind of egregore of decades of expansive American vanity: an in-the-flesh consummation of the country’s long-building narrative arc of cutthroat consumerism, transactional hierarchies, volatile cultural excesses, and the natural culmination of its hyper-financialized state capitalism. Throw them all into a blender, mix it up, then pour the product into a mold of a kind-of homunculus-as-populist-folk hero.
Nations are extensions of the community—the narod/volk whose leaders were originally chosen from amongst the best and most virtuous to represent the cultural identity which was the microcosmic seed of the very nation itself. When these nations become corrupted, they are slowly overrun by oligarchic interests: barons, tycoons, moguls, and titans of industry—a matrix of power which ends up electing “one of their own ilk” by virtue of their uncurbed financial influence.
These newly-elected tycoon representatives instill the nation with new sets of core values no longer hinged on the early prototypical virtues of the people, but on business-first considerations. Core values like honor, virtue, civic pride, etc., are replaced with transactionalism, winner-take-all greed, and other rapacious qualities which are the worst traits of humanity. It’s the conversion of nation from family unit comprised of a culturally-united people to a corporation of ‘customers’ or stockholders who are merely there to be pacified by the managing director with the vague lure of some up-trending stock.
We are witnessing this now with Trump’s instructive actions against Venezuela and his own allies: the nation’s ‘father’ figure imparts the lesson on his people that taking others’ possessions is a purely righteous act simply by virtue of its ‘economic benefits’. The people of the nation thereby become spiritually sickened by this inhuman approach to national selfhood, inured to a sense of exceptionalism and racism: that they are the only “chosen and worthy” ones, while all other people of the earth are merely resources to be extracted after ‘righteous’ pillaging.
This begets the slow descent and decay of the entire concept of nationhood into terminal moral decline to the point where the very fabric of society itself begins to reflect this debasement of values until there is nothing of worth left. A nation which celebrates greed and rapaciousness as pillars of virtue will eventually die from this very spiritual poison: the people thereof become deracinated, spiritless vessels of corporate values, and nothing more, and they reflect these values onto each other as well, which becomes evident in the breakdown of civility and neighborliness. In short, we are witnessing the civic and cultural debasement of the entire populace by the ‘shared values’ instilled of the corrupted political class.
Trump is bringing a business-industry cut-throat thuggishness to world and domestic politics, which he views as some kind of revolutionary ‘patriotism’ he calls ‘America First’. Trump’s treatment at the hands of his Democrat opponents may have also warped his sense of risk-reward. Having survived the various slings and arrows, which include assassination attempts, he may now feel ‘entitled’ to take whatever he wants from the world, achieving glory at any cost simply because he’s now “owed” his greatness by the travails he had fought through; it is a kind of warped messianic victim complex at a universal scale that is both dangerous, yet perhaps ultimately useful, to the world.
Such an escalation spiral has no real exit strategy, because the further Trump doubles down, the more enemies and bad-will he engenders which increasingly condemns his future to an unenviable fate: his opponents will likely hunt him for life for all the perceived legal iniquities he committed, both domestic and international. The only way to escape such a spiral is by burning the whole system down behind himself, a kind of anarchic Sunk Cost pedal-to-the-mettle policy of turbo-escalation. Push the system to the breaking point until there is nothing left to “chase him” after he’s done, whether he succeeds in his aims or not; logically speaking, it’s at least a sound strategy.
And through this natural arc, in the spirit of the supernova, the American Age seems to be going supercritical by the combustion of its own runaway excesses. It’s a process that can only stampede forward and may end up engulfing the entire world before it settles because there is far too much blood in its trail for the drivers of the process to ever be able to stop and turn back.
Again, despite how it may sound, this is not a generic slam against Trump because he’s the product of a system, and a long-running culmination of things set into motion long before him. He merely serves as the apostle of a terminal age of American decline, and in some ways cannot be personally blamed since he’s a kind of logical byproduct of everything that the American system has been building toward for decades. Now all we can do is strap in, enjoy the ride, and hope that—in the spirit of true anarchy—he at least takes down the bad along with the good, for all our sakes.
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