Through the Looking Glass

Evan Vucci for AP via The New York Times

What more to say?

Since January 20, we have experienced a distillation of all the kleptocracies I have studied—from Nigeria to Nepal, Bahrain to Azarbaijan.  The exactitude is dizzying.

That predator’s pounce, the instant the Trump administration took power, should have been expected.  Windows of opportunity—as I wrote in 2023—are fleeting and contested.  They must be anticipated and exploited full throttle. 

Someone on that side got the message.  

Of course there are details you wouldn’t have predicted.  The Paypal Posse and its 20-something geeks amok in the U.S. government’s accounts payable database, while their boss is in regular contact with Russian dictator Vladimir Putin?  Open season for US businesses to bribe foreign officials?  (Is reciprocity expected, or just invited?)  Blackmailing an apparently corrupt big city mayor with a federal prosecution paused but not dropped?  

Watching the familiar pattern take shape through the particulars of current American governing systems has been…something.

You have likely been drowning in words, not all of them clarifying.  The following is to spell out a couple of points and offer a myth that may provide some perspective.

1. The United States is a nascent dictatorship.

It’s a shocking term, a synonym for the tyrannical rule that this country was created to counter.  But as I listen to one pundit after another hesitate to declare a constitutional crisis, it seems time to cut through the equivocation.  

When a president and his proxies have summarily violated U.S. contractual engagements with thousands of employees and suppliers, ostentatiously broken or halted enforcement of enacted laws, and refused to spend monies allocated by Congress (the branch with the sole authority to commit them); when they have ignored orders of the other co-equal branch, the judiciary, and threatened its members with impeachment—much as a superior officer can court marshal soldiers for insubordination—a constitutional crisis is underway.

Let’s take a look at some other basic characteristics.

• One-man rule, enforced by fear and enabled by a fawning coalition eager to anticipate their chief’s every whim;

• Personal control of the armed forces;

• Personal control of government payments—allowing for improper expenditures as well as non-payment of public debts;

• The end of any government oversight function;

• Blurred lines between government property and the ruler’s personal possessions;

• A campaign to erase truth as a functioning concept—using lies as litmus tests instead.

• A demonstrated determination never to relinquish power. 

Is it starting to add up?  

To be sure, the American dictatorship is not yet entrenched enough to unleash the uninhibited violence against dissent that tends to characterize that form of government.  But the intent is on display.  Greenlighting Israel to deploy starvation as bargaining leverage against people under its control is a warning.

Those, therefore, who presume that elections will take place as usual in two or four years, under the stewardship of trustworthy functionaries, have not yet woken up to the moment.  The assumption should be electoral sabotage, via a combination of infiltration, intimidation, force, and digital subterfuge.  The ballot box will not save us.  

It will take revolution of some description.  This rising dictatorship will not be overthrown through a return to some fantasy of a pre-trumpian “normalcy.”  Those times—the comfortable elite consensus of the 1990s and 2000s—failed the vast majority of Americans while feeding an insatiable hunger in the wealthiest.  These Midas-diseased super-rich are the most dangerous enemies democracy has ever known.  Now that they hold uncontested power, the crisis they are unleashing offers us and European democracies an epic opportunity.  Now we are free to reinvent government by and for the people, and the web of relationships—including with the natural world and its nonhuman denizens—that flow from it.  No less than such a paradigm shift will defeat the tyranny that is now taking root. 

That is the task before each of us: to start reinventing.  What should the inviolable principles of a rebirthed democracy be?  Its fundamental objectives?  Does the new union have to stretch from sea to sea?  Who participates in the process of making, executing, and enforcing the rules and for how long?  How are those people selected?  How are they themselves governed?  What excesses are guarded against and what virtues incentivized?  How?  

Here's an even more immediate question: Can we start living those virtues now and demanding them of our leaders?  Can we learn how to vote with our feet, and by example, to start changing American culture today?

This is the creative imagining to which we are called.

2. Donald Trump is a Russian asset.

When Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller decided—for reasons of Justice Department policy, not the facts of the case—against recommending Trump’s prosecution for unlawful dealings with a foreign adversary in view of the 2016 election, Democrats dropped the whole Russia issue as if it were radioactive.  Trump’s jeer that it was all a hoax has stood uncontested.

Why?  

The compilation of raw intelligence at the basis of the initial questions was gathered by an experienced and cautious UK professional, Christopher Steele.  He never passed it off as anything more than reports from uncorroborated but long trusted sources, urgently passed to U.S. counterparts because of  the terrifying implications for U.S. and world security.  Yet even legacy media took to deriding the dossier, and by extension Steele himself, in terms that might have been penned in Trump’s public affairs office.

Steele’s fears have been amply realized, and worse is to come.  Yet the days when he or any other upstanding foreign operative will share valuable intelligence with American services are over.

For my part, just the body language between Putin and Trump as they stepped onstage after their 2018 summit in Helsinki (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaymlbmVwbc around minute 18:35) was eloquent testimony to Putin’s mastery over the American president.  (For hard-hitting substantiation, see Luke Harding’s 2017 book Collusion. )  Later, the two were meeting privately with no U.S. note-taker or translator present.  

Absolutely unheard of.

During that first term, Trump was too hamstrung by the experience and principles of those serving in his administration to make good on the Kremlin’s well-known objectives, such as sanctions relief.  And now?  Putin himself could not have scripted the despicable scene in the Oval Office on February 28, when Trump and vice president J.D. Vance unloaded on Ukrainian President Volodimir Zalensky, who has led his country as courageously and tirelessly as Churchill led England during the Second World War.  But Putin might have drafted the raft of pro-Kremlin, anti-European policy initiatives that have surrounded that moment, including Tuesday’s halt to arms shipments for Ukraine.

The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman concluded his shocked column about the Oval Office episode with a warning: “My fellow Americans,” he wrote, “we are in completely uncharted waters, led by a president, who — well, I cannot believe he is a Russian agent, but he sure plays one on TV.”

My advice to Friedman?  Start believing. 

My advice to European leaders?  Better start believing, too. 

Hastily gathering in summit after summit to reorganize around this new reality, they seem still to be grasping for some vestige of the United States they have known.  They’re squinting at Trump’s moves, struggling to conjure some rationale that can be made to fit with the old order—Trump’s storied “transactional approach,” for example.  At all costs, they’re telling each other, we must keep Washington at least nominally on board with collective support for an independent Ukraine.  

They are wasting their time.  Those precious moments and all that energy would be better spent planning for a world where they are flanked by dictatorships—or Mafias—east and west, whose narcissistic bosses must expand to exist. 

Here’s a crucial point about this kind of personality: it cannot be appeased.  Capitulation does not satisfy the insatiable appetite; it whets it.  The only way to stop the momentum is to stand up to the man.  Europe must draw the line now.     

Military planning does not refer to worst or best case scenarios, but “most likely” and “most dangerous” ones.  The two are converging. 

Can the continent provide the support Ukraine needs to prevail against Russian aggression?  It can.  Estonia has mounted a military drone industry.  France has a nuclear capability independent of U.S. technology.  European leaders must start, now, to build a nimble, stealthy, completely interoperable collective defense force.  (They could probably learn a lot from their Ukrainian allies.)

European nations and citizens can vote with their feet, too.  They can summarily cancel all current arms and energy contracts with the United States; they can sell their Teslas and stop using Amazon and products and services pushed by like-minded colluders.  They can choose instead to patronize U.S. states and local industries that respect democratic principles, the rule of law, and social and environmental protections, and thicken ties with these American resisters.

We need your help, Europe.

3.  Trickster gods and their excruciating antics are required for life.

Those of you who have been following my work know that by “myth” I don’t mean something blatantly untrue that only dupes believe, which is today's common but erroneous usage.  I mean myth in the old sense: something deeply true, but told in a more poetic and thought-provoking way than modern science tells its truths.

Every pre-monotheistic belief system included a trickster god, usually feared and revered and laughed at in equal measure.  For many Native American communities, he was Coyote: the archetypical hurler of wrenches into works—often, hilariously, his own, but of the whole human drama, too.  Coyote is the mega-disrupter, without whose catastrophic escapades there can be no regeneration.  I heard one howl in the woods by my cabin recently, and was struck by this thought: What if this whole thing is a giant Coyote play?

The devastation that ensues can be fierce.  And calamity doesn’t guarantee rebirth on better foundations.  But at least it opens that possibility.  May our efforts to midwife such a rebirth be worthy of the cost.