So Trump, Musk & Big Balls Think It Needs To Be MAGA Against The Rest Of Mankind

Trump's America— Distrusted And Friendless

"A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To Mars" by Nancy Ohanian

In 2018, Bannon— who has finally agreed to plead guilty to  his border wall fraud case in New York in exchange for no prison time— told Michael Lewis that MAGA’s “real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” He’s been calling it the “Days of Thunder… “The media is a complete total meltdown… Ezra Klein argued this week that flooding the zone isn’t a sign of strength, but masks the reality of a weak executive with narrow majorities and thin popular support. ‘The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness,’ Klein argued, urging Democrats: ‘Don’t believe him.’ Klein floated what he thought would be a more worrisome alternative: if Trump ‘went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.’... If the media is actually the opposition party, then Bannon’s right: Trump has seized total control of the narrative… But there’s an alternate possibility. Maybe the weakened mass media is a valuable punching bag and rallying point— but also a bit of a distraction. Maybe Trump’s victories in the day-to-day narrative have cost him control, in the long term, of his own agenda. In six months, national politics could well be defined by an inadvertent decision that he, or Musk, or one of their anonymous deputies made amid the January frenzy. The Democrats, limping back to life, can pick their targets, and as Trump showed, a vibrant opposition party no longer depends on the strength of the media to set the agenda.”

Noah Smith mentioned the other day that “of all the chaos that Donald Trump’s second term is  visiting upon America, nothing compares to DOGE… With the blessing of the Trump administration, DOGE has been going through every part of the U.S. federal government, looking for payments to cancel, programs to suspend, and employees to fire or place on leave. Over the last two weeks, DOGE has moved so fast, and often so secretively, that nobody can quite seem to figure out what it’s doing. The whole thing is shrouded in a fog of chaos, with accusations and counter-accusations of illegality flying thick and fast. It’s very hard to follow all of these, much less evaluate their accuracy.”

He decided to help his readers understand what the actual purpose of DOGE. His premise is that “the true purpose of DOGE— or at least, the main purpose— is to change the ideological character of the federal workforce, and of federal programs, rather than to eliminate them. The civil service has a reputation for leaning to the left ideologically.”

“Rage” wrote Greg Sargent, “is mounting among Trump’s allies over the losses that Trump’s agenda has suffered in court, which are clearly becoming a serious obstacle to him. It’s gotten so bad that Elon Musk shared a tweet from someone who suggested that it may be time to defy the courts. Musk also boosted Trump allies who are seething over these rulings. All that amounts to a pretty dark threat from Musk: He and MAGA appear to be steeling themselves to defy judicial rulings.”

On Monday, Paul Krugman noted that even with judges trying to thwart Trump’s destruction of USAID, it’s probably too late to save the agency, “a prime example of what Dan Drezner calls Humpty Dumpty foreign policy, as in, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put him back together again. By furloughing the agency’s employees, ordering those working abroad to come home and canceling crucial programs and grants, the Musk/Trump administration undermined decades’ worth of relationship-building. Even if the courts eventually order everything the wreckers did reversed, it will be hard if not impossible to put the structure back together again. USAID is just the most extreme example of how the Musk/Trump administration is sabotaging the American Empire. For yes, America is or was an imperial power, although in a different way from most past empires— less reliant on force, more reliant on good will and trust. What Musk and Trump have done is to destroy much of the basis for U.S. influence, leaving America far weaker than it was just a few weeks ago. America’s imperial era— the Pax Americana— began after World War II. With Europe and Japan in ruins and Britain exhausted, the U.S. had no military or economic peers outside the Soviet bloc. As Phillips O’Brien recently noted, America could easily have gobbled up lots of territory if it had thought in conventional Great Power terms. But our leaders were more sophisticated than that. I don’t know whether they had read Norman Angell’s The Great Illusion about how conquest no longer made sense, but they certainly understood that America needed prosperous, willing allies, not more territory.”

Trump, Musk, Big Balls and their enablers haven’t read it and they do have a Great Power perspective on foreign policy, which explains Trump’s moves to gobble up Greenland, the Panama Canal Zone, Gaza and even Canada. After WW II, the U.S. “created a system of military alliances, NATO in particular, that were notable in the formal equality they granted to all their members. Everyone knew that America was the senior partner, but we were careful to avoid any hint that we were treating our allies as subject nations, required to obey U.S. orders. Above all, America was a nation that honored its agreements.” Trump is upending all of that— and turning America’s image and moral authority to shit. “[I]n less than three weeks Musk, Trump and their minions have taken a wrecking ball to the foundations of the Pax Americana… [F]oreign aid is no longer a major part of US spending. But the abrupt demolition of USAID, apparently in response to right-wing conspiracy theories and the claim that the agency was full of ‘radical-left marxists who hate America,’ didn’t just leave millions relying on American aid in the lurch. It said that America doesn’t believe in helping people in need, and considers anyone who does suspicious. So much for moral authority… [N]ow we’re a nation that doesn’t keep its word, that can’t be trusted to honor its agreements.”

All of this makes us distrusted and friendless. It also makes us weak, because America needs allies even more now than it did during the Cold War.

Back then the U.S. economy was considerably larger than that of our major rival; it was always a severe strain on the Soviet Union to maintain anything resembling military parity. Now, however, as the chart at the top of this post shows, China’s GDP, adjusted for differences in price levels, is significantly larger than America’s. And that’s the right measure if you’re thinking about raw power. As the chart also shows, however, the world’s democracies as a group still considerably outweigh the major autocratic powers.

So this is a really bad time to be alienating democracies around the world and destroying America’s reputation as a trustworthy partner.

I mean, what we’re seeing is what you’d expect if China and Russia had somehow managed to install people who wanted to sabotage America’s international position at the highest levels of the U.S. government.