WHAT IF…?

Everything is happening everywhere all at once under Trump 2.0.  But what if there is a method to this madness? 

·       Systematic dismantling of the administrative state.

·       State capture of the judicial system and shakedown of big law firms.

·       Upending the world economic order with tariffs of 104% on China, 25% on the EU, but 0% on Russia.

·       Upending the international rules-based order by supporting Russia’s invasion of Ukraine while threatening to take over Greenland, Panama, and Canada.

·       Intimidation and marginalization of news organizations critical of the Administration.

·       Book bans in public libraries and removal of exhibits in museums.

·       Erasure of historical, sports, and military figures deemed unworthy as DEI picks.

·       Deportation of non-citizens without due process to off-shore gulags.

·       Rumblings about a federal ban on abortion but possible support for IVF.

What if these events, executive orders, and power moves (and others) only seem random and unrelated, but what if they’re actually deliberate and connected?  What if they were designed for exactly the outcomes they’re producing?   

For example…

What if the systematic dismantling the administrative state is about making a democratically elected government so weak and ineffective that voters rightly conclude it doesn’t work, refuse to support it, and turn instead to an autocrat?

What if the capture of the judicial system through the politicization of the Court of Last Resort and the intimidation and co-management of law firms by the state is designed to eliminate all legal pathways to state opposition? 

What if the tariffs have not just an economic rationale (bogus or not) but also a geopolitical purpose; namely, to divide the world into three Great Power spheres of influence:  1) the Greater United States, with its annexation of Canada, Panama, and Greenland; 2) China, with its annexation  of Taiwan and possible "vassalization" of Japan, Vietnam, and South Korea; and 3) Imperial Russia, with its annexation of Ukraine and possibly Poland, Moldova, Georgia, and the Baltic states, peeling off Hungary and Slovakia in the process, thereby isolating the EU and threatening its existence as an economic and geopolitical counterweight?

What if intimidating and marginalizing news organizations critical of the Administration while using pro-Administration news organizations as propagandists and a pipeline into the Administration itself; banning books from public libraries; deciding what can and cannot be taught in a public school or university or exhibited in a public museum or heard in a public concert hall; or erasing personalities from the cultural archives is really about making a a citizenry so poorly educated and ill-informed that it will acquiesce to, or perhaps not even notice, the disappearance of facts?

What if the deportations, restrictions on legal immigration, and militarized border controls, as well as abortion restrictions but with carve outs for IVF, are all about population control and making sure the investors in re-shored manufacturing and domestic agribusiness have a guaranteed supply of home-grown “essential workers” willing to do whatever asked because they aren’t trained to do much else?

What if all of these what if’s lead to the big WHAT IF?  That is, what if the goal is to make people

·       so dissatisfied with their government that they simply give up on free and fair elections,

·       so incapable of thinking critically that they can’t understand what is happening to them,

·       so unprotected by the legal system that they fear for their safety,

·       so unsupported by the social safety net that they fear for their well-being, even as they are forced to have children they may not be able to care for emotionally or economically,

in short, what if people feel so un-moored, so forgotten, so angry, so scared, that they willingly surrender their freedom and their power to the state? That would leave them at the mercy of an autocrat in charge of the Greater United States, living in a world whose riches have been carved up, even as they've been carved out.   

What if that’s the plan?

Keep it real!

Marilyn