New Enemies — Foreign and Domestic

In recent days, the Musk-Trump administration and their allies have made a further series of terrifying moves and decisions. So fast and furious is their shutdown of the current world order and their national democratic institutions that it’s hard to keep up, and the collusion of the oligarchic media owners is making it increasingly hard to share the information.

Jeff Bezos, the world’s second richest person, issued a decree this week that the opinion section of the Washington Post must defend free speech and the free market in his third public attack on the editorial independence of the storied paper he owns. But this is just the tip of the iceberg.

The White House has asserted further control over the information environment by stating that they will unilaterally decide which media get access to the President, a role traditionally held by the White House Correspondents’ Association.

Journalists who play along with the Musk-Trump administration can be well rewarded for their loyalty. Just ask Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth, who got promoted to that job from the ranks — of Fox News.

Hegseth, for his part, fired the Army and Air Force’s Judge Advocates General (the Navy JAG was already vacant), the military branches’ top lawyers whose responsibility it is, among other things, to interpret the constitutional legality of orders. It does not take a lot of imagination to understand why an authoritarian government would want the military’s top legal leadership to be fired and replaced with allies whose loyalties to the leader are greater than their loyalties to the law.

At the same time, Hegseth also fired two of the joint chiefs, the committee of top leaders of each branch of the military, including the chairman. Which two? The black one and the female one, of course. His pick for a new chairman, Lt General Dan Caine, does not meet the legal requirements to be the chairman of the joint chiefs and will require a waiver from the President to take the role — which shouldn’t be hard to get.

As part of the continued seizure of the American security state, another little-noticed but worrying event took place last week when Elon Musk’s personal, private security were deputised by the US Marshalls service, giving them the power of arrest and the right to carry fire-arms in federal buildings. If he requires security, one wonders why the Secret Service are not the ones providing it. Musk having a private army reporting directly to him rather than the US government while wielding federal powers has very serious implications. When he can enter any government department with a posse of armed men that answer only to him, his brute power has no remaining limits. His objectives here are clearly spelled out by former US Labor Secretary Robert Reich:

What Trump is really trying to do

The domestic power grab is only part of the story. Internationally, while Trump threatens tariffs against Canada, Mexico, and now the European Union which he says was “formed to screw the United States”, his government is also shifting its allegiances on the international stage in dramatic fashion. During the election, Trump promised to find an end to the war in Ukraine. It was plainly obvious from then that the only way he could conceivably do that would be to ally with Russia and abandon Ukraine to its fate.

This has been happening far more brazenly and destructively than I thought possible. Ahead of last week’s Munich Security Conference, a United States delegation led by Trump’s Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent is reporeted to have presented Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy with a memorandum demanding essentially the entire country’s mineral reserves in exchange for (wildly exaggerated) contributions already made to the war effort by the US. And they gave Zelenskyy just one hour to respond. That sounds more like a mafia shakedown of the country than peaceward negotiations and Zelenskyy initially told them to pound sand.

With the United States snubbed in its comprehensive economic takeover of the Ukraine, they went on to the next logical step. Ukraine brought forward a strongly strongly worded motion to the United Nations General Assembly this week condemning the Russian invasion of, and calling for an end to the war in, Ukraine and a restoration of its territorial integrity and the return of its captured citizens. The motion passed overwhelmingly with a 93-18 margin.

While Canada voted for the motion, even Russian ally Iran abstained on the vote. The United States was joined only by a who’s-who of democratically dysfunctional countries including Belarus, Hungary, Israel, North Korea, and Russia in opposing it.

Then a tentative compromise was reached between the US and Ukraine on giving up those mineral rights, and the US invited Zelenskyy to the White House under the guise of finalising it. Instead, Trump and vice president Vance berated, gaslit, and attacked the Ukrainian president for the better part of an hour before cancelling their joint press conference and kicking him out of the building in one of the most shameful and embarrassing episodes by an already shameful and embarrassing leader.

Trump is taking over every aspect of the American security state and systematically shutting down the constitution while attacking the country’s traditional allies. The implications are as obvious as they are terrifying.

There is an unsubstantiated rumour floating around the Internet that Trump was recruited as a KGB agent in the 1980s under the code name Krasnov, started by a former KGB officer on facebook. There’s no proof, but the ties between Russia and Trump are not exactly denied by Russia, with Russian state-run media Tass publishing a story a week after the November election quoting senior Vladimir Putin aide Nikolay Patrushev: “To achieve success in the election, Donald Trump relied on certain forces to which he has corresponding obligations. As a responsible person, he will be obliged to fulfil them.”

So far, he seems to be doing exactly that.