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Juan Cole, Trump and the Return of the White Man’s Burden

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Once again, the “President of Peace” Donald Trump who, while running for office in 2016, announced that “regime change is a proven, absolute failure,” has taken out after “the natives,” eager to change regimes in distant lands. These days, of course, the country on which he’s particularly focused is Iran, parts of which he’s been blasting to smithereens. Last year, as Al-Jazeera reported, he managed to bomb (at least in passing) seven countries: Iran, Iraq, Nigeria, Somalia, Syria, Yemen, and Venezuela. And now, of course, he’s been battering Iran in an all-too-striking fashion. And if, leaving aside the modern technology of destruction involved, this reminds you of European powers and the United States dealing with those same “natives” in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries via what then passed for “gunboat diplomacy,” no surprise there.

As he showed in Venezuela this year, capturing its president (and his wife) at the point of… well, not a sword, of course, but bombs and even a secret weapon he labeled “the Discombobulator,” once he makes up his mind to be Donald Trump, president of the planet, nothing can stand in his way. (Or perhaps I mean that nothing can remain standing in his way.) And remember, we’re not even a year and a half into his second term in office. So just imagine seven countries a year for almost three years to come and, while you’re at it, try to imagine the planet we’re likely to find ourselves on by then.

It should take your breath away. And while you’re thinking about Donald Trump’s urge to take us all into an airborne version of a distinctly colonial past in a particularly chaotic fashion, let TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, who runs the remarkable Informed Comment website, remind you of the role that White nationalism, an old favorite of colonial powers past, is once again playing in the Trump era in which so much that was old is new again. Sigh. Tom

“The Horror! The Horror!”

Colonial Nostalgia and Aryan Reliability

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Under President Donald J. Trump, the United States has now become an engine for the promulgation of White nationalism. Not since the 1930s has such an ideology, which exalts those ethnic groups it codes as "White," while denigrating all others, underpinned the domestic and foreign policies of a major world power. Typically (for our moment), Trump’s recent National Security Strategy (NSS) depicted Europe as in distinct “civilizational decline" because of the European Union’s commitment to multiracial democracy and international humanitarian law. These days, thanks to its racial policies, the Trump team even finds a way to inject racial hatred into dry economic statistics, complaining that “Continental Europe has been losing share of global GDP [gross domestic product] -- down from 25 percent in 1990 to 14 percent today.”

A Mayor Named Khan

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Mattea Kramer, Breaking Bread in Authoritarian America

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Donald Trump’s urges couldn’t be stranger, more destructive, or more violent. The most recent example has, of course, been his decision to attack Iran, where, on the very first day of his attack (and Israel’s), 165 people, mostly young girls, were slaughtered in a single primary — yes, primary! — school in the southern part of that country. And that, of course, was just the beginning.

Meanwhile, in this country, the president and his crew have loosed ICE agents on immigrants in a distinctly devastating fashion. They have driven many Americans (or future Americans) into their homes for fear that their world might soon be all too literally ripped away from them, while actually killing or wounding others of us. No American, it seems, is beyond the Trumpian grasp anymore. Even in my own neighborhood in New York City recently, ICE agents (who lied to get into her apartment) grabbed Elmina Aghayeva, a 29-year-old Columbia University student from Azerbaijan, and only released her when this city’s mayor, Zohran Mamdani, went to the White House and spoke out for her.

And she, of course, was a — or perhaps the — lucky one in Donald Trump’s America, the place that TomDispatch regular Mattea Kramer considers today in a distinctly up close and personal fashion. Tom

After Loneliness

Left for Dead in Donald Trump’s America, Communal Life Stirs

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All the way back in 2023, the surgeon general diagnosed Americans as suffering from an epidemic of loneliness. More recently, amid the rise of American fascism, I started to notice that people were not only lonely but had also begun referring to the world as simply "the news." Perceived that way -- as a phenomenon pre-packaged via our devices -- our bond with the world was distilled into just two options: consume the news or don’t. A sense of powerlessness is baked into such a perception.

By contrast, I remembered once reading an interview with billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, who described the world as atoms constantly shifting and moving. With intention and focus, she pointed out, you can move those atoms yourself, and so move the world. Baked into that worldview was a sense of interconnectedness, not to mention power.

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Janet Abou-Elias and William D. Hartung, Planet Palantir

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Yes, he used the American war machine to seize Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, with a naval armada off that country’s coast and special operations forces flown into its capital to capture its leader.  And once Maduro was in a prison in Brooklyn, New York, he turned his attention passingly to Greenland and then began placing American forces, including not one but two aircraft carrier task forces (one of which, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, had played a key role in the Venezuelan operation), in position around Iran, along with all sorts of other ships and planes.  And the next thing the world knew — hard to believe as it might have been — with only a single ally, Israel, he was at war with Iran.

What fun! Right? Donald Trump gets to make war or threaten war or fake war on anyone he pleases on this planet of ours. I mean, why else would you want to be president of the United States? Oh, except that it gives you the right to carry on for nearly two hours on national television with half your audience rising to “clap like seals” after more or less every sentence.

Two aircraft carrier task forces going anywhere in the world that you want, endless applause, being capable of launching wars wherever you please, and being able to speak deep into the night on just about any major channel around, while saying more or less anything that crosses your mind — what more could you ask for?  What a wonderful world, don’t you think (even if foreign leaders, as Paul Krugman pointed out recently, “have completely lost faith in America”)? Hey, maybe the president could decide to send those aircraft carriers to the waters off Vietnam next, just for an old-times-sake (and bone-spur) encore to his life.

And Donald Trump is lucky indeed, because he has at his command what TomDispatch regular William Hartung and new TomDispatch writer Janet Abou-Elias term a “brave new war machine” that is indeed something of a techno-wonder. Or at least given all the techno-figures now increasingly involved in American war production and war-making, a techno-profiteer that may leave Americans and the rest of the world in a truly dangerous situation. Tom

The Brave New War Machine

How a Clique of Unhinged Techno-Optimists Is Putting Humanity at Risk

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“I love the idea of getting a drone and having light fentanyl-laced urine spraying on analysts that tried to screw us,” said Alex Karp, the CEO of the emerging military tech firm Palantir. Far from an offhand outburst, his statement reflects a broader ethos taking hold in Silicon Valley’s military-tech sector, one that treats coercion as innovation, cruelty as candor, and the unchecked application of technological power as both inevitable and desirable.

Karp loves verbal combat as much as he likes running a firm that makes high-tech weaponry. His company has helped Israel increase the pace at which it has bombed and slaughtered Palestinians in Gaza, and its technology has helped ICE accelerate deportations, while also helping locate and identify demonstrators in Minneapolis. Not only is Karp unapologetic about the damage done by his company’s products, he openly revels in it.

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