The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts are cannibalising the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.
Blinded by hubris and unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism, and politics with threats and loyalty oaths. Agencies and departments created and funded by acts of Congress are going up in smoke.
They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement. They are pulling out of the World Health Organization. They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former Defence Minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza. They suggest that Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal. They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under U.S. control, which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the U.S.
Donald Trump’s regime is a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.
Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianized” state led by a divinely anointed leader. They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration. Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain. A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.
The near collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before Trump’s arrival. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana. The day is not far off when Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, has already acquiesced to the inevitable.
The question is not whether we go down but how many millions of innocents we will take with us. Given the industrial violence our empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.
The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — Elon Musk claims is run by ‘a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America’ — is an example of how these arsonists are clueless about how empires function.
Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponised to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organisations that vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance—those who don’t do not.
Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the empire’s grip.
USAID, for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed ‘as a counterweight’ to the ‘radical’ Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia. It then funded organisations and initiatives, including training programs so Bolivian youth could be taught American business practices once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.
The client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. However, the inequality these programs facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.
Meanwhile, the 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialisation lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas.
The U.S. disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.
Humanitarian aid, often described as ‘soft power,’ is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by U.S. corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the U.S. military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child labourers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.
I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organisations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.
Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the U.S. will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates. The funding of 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.
The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the crushing of civil liberties including due process, torture, militarised police, the massive prison system, drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.
The devouring of the empire’s carcass to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.
