Skip to main content

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

 

Comments

  1. Oh, gawd, Marilyn, keeping it real is just so depressing. But thanks for getting it straight and putting it down, black on white, pixel by pixel.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

IN CASE OF EMERGENCY BREAK GLASS

A vocal critic of Benito Mussolini, Antonio Gramsci, Italian philosopher and politician,  was imprisoned for his political views in 1926; he remained in prison until shortly before his death in 1937.   From his cell, he wrote the  Prison Letters in which he famously said, “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will."   In this time of upheaval, when the post-World War II world order is dying, a new world order is being born, and monsters roam the earth, it is from Gramsci's dual perspective that I write this post.    I will be brief. Th e window to oppose America’ s headlong rush into authoritarianism at home and neo-imperialism abroad by congressional or judicial means has closed.   Law firms, universities, businesses, the press, media, foundations, and individuals alike who have been deemed "insufficiently aligned" with the Administration's agenda, have been intimidated into submission by frivolous lawsuits, expe...

DISPUTING KEATS

The great English poet John Keats wrote in his magnificent 1819 poem, Ode on a Grecian Urn , “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,--that is all Ye know on earth, and all Ye need to know.”  Were that it were so!   But poetry cannot hide the fact that the truth is sometimes ugly.  Consider two current cases. First, the war in Gaza and the destruction and famine it has wrought.   Policy makers, scholars, and pundits can argue whether what is happening in Gaza (and to some extent, in the West Bank) is genocide, whether the leveling of Gaza and the systematic killing of its people is equivalent to the Holocaust, or whether Palestinians have the right to free themselves by any means necessary from an open-air prison.   They can debate whether Israel has become an apartheid, undemocratic state, or whether the only way to achieve security in Israel is to ring-fence or destroy Hamas. And they can construct theories about who has the “right” to live in historic Palestine, e...

THE IRON TRIANGLE

Corruption.   It’s like an operating system running in the background on the Computer of Life that inflects and infects everything we do and what is done to us.   Corruption is epidemic, endemic, and systemic. Universal, it is everywhere and all at once.   When he was the director of the FBI, Robert E. Mueller III gave an address to the Citizens Crime Commission of New York and opened a new window on the operating system of corruption:   transnational organized crime.   He called this new operating system an “iron triangle.” Its three sides:  organized criminals, corrupt government officials, and business leaders.    In her June 17, 2025, Substack , Heather Cox Richardson recalled Mueller’s address in an account of foreign investment in President Trump’s businesses.   She wrote: Eliot Brown of the Wall Street Journal reported that Mukesh Ambani, the richest man in India, is now one of the many wealthy foreign real estate develope...