Contra Trump

咎由自取

 

A renowned journalist, writer, commentator and broadcaster, Chris Hedges has featured in China Heritage over the years, as well as in our Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium series. For other chapters in the series featuring Hedges’s work, see:

• The Creatures that Emerge from the Devastation; and,
• Unless we ourselves are The Barbarians … .
• T2 – A Feature, Not a Bug

***

Following his resignation from The New York Times in 2005, something triggered in part by his outspoken criticism of America’s deadly debacle in Iraq, Hedges became increasingly active in the public sphere. Over the past two decades he has been America’s contemporary Cassandra.

In The Backlash Blues in Black History Month, a previous chapter in Contra Trump, we quoted the political scientist Erica Chenowet who told the writer Rebecca Solnit that:

The best study on the subject [of resisting authoritarianism] in my opinion suggests that in the long term, institutions really can’t save us; that civil society and mass mobilization are a more potent check on a backsliding democracy in the long term than relying on institutional checks and balances alone.

The warnings that Chris Hedges has issued over the years in articles, books, speeches and interviews, along with his calls for public protest and resistance may now, in the second Trump presidency, not be regarded as particularly cringe-worthy, radical or impractical. Below we reproduce two recent essays by Hedges, the first focuses on the Christian fascists and what he sees as the looming collapse of American power; the second takes up the theme while offering an overview of the depredations of Donald Trump’s ‘mafia state’. Like Chenowet, Hedges talks about the role of activism and mass mobilisation. His prose, his analyses as well as his solutions offer a heady brew. Caveat lector.

***

Donald Trump’s Caeserism is not only supported by America’s Christian fascists, the Heritage Foundation and kleptocratic billionaires, a clutch of muddled thinkers like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin have helped pave the way and offer a reactionary program of nihilism in the name of renewal. See Triumph of the Cod Philosophers and their Dark Enlightenment, also in this series.

Given the unfolding devastation in Washington, we recall Augustus, a Caesar turned emperor cum god who famously remarked that:

Marmoream relinquo, quam latericiam accepi.

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble.

The Trump clique has occupied the marble structures of Washington and is in the process of replacing them with brick.

***

The Chinese rubric of this chapter in Contra Trump — 咎由自取 jiù yóu zì qǔ — is, in this context, best understood in the context of a passage in Galatians:

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.

The YouTube clip of the ‘laying on of hands’, the image of Samuel L. Jackson — a reference to his role as Uncle Sam in Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl LIX halftime show — as well as ‘Tesla Man’ by the Portuguese artist Zez Vaz, recommended by Linda Jaivin, have been added by China Heritage.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
16 February 2025

---

‘To say no to President Trump would be saying no to God.’

— Paula White, televangelist and head of the White House Faith Office

‘Worshipping at the feet of Moloch. It’s idolatry. It’s heresy. It’s the sacralization of human and political power.’

— Chris Hedges

***

The Empire Self-Destructs

We share the pathologies of all dying empires with their mixture of buffoonery, rampant corruption, military fiascos, economic collapse and savage state repression.

Chris Hedges

8 February 2025

The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.

Blinded by hubris, unable to fathom the empire’s diminishing power, the mandarins in the Trump administration have retreated into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts no longer intrude. They sputter incoherent absurdities while they usurp the Constitution and replace diplomacy, multilateralism and politics with threats and loyalty oaths. Agencies and departments, created and funded by acts of Congress, are going up in smoke.

They are removing government reports and data on climate change and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement,. They are pulling out of the World Health Organization. They are sanctioning officials who work at the International Criminal Court — which issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and former defense minister Yoav Gallant over war crimes in Gaza. They suggested Canada become the 51st state. They have formed a task force to “eradicate anti-Christian bias.” They call for the annexation of Greenland and the seizure of the Panama Canal. They propose the construction of luxury resorts on the coast of a depopulated Gaza under U.S. control which, if it takes place, would bring down the Arab regimes propped up by the U.S.

The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero or Charles I, the last Habsburg ruler, are as incoherent as the Mad Hatter, uttering nonsensical remarks, posing unanswerable riddles and reciting word salads of inanities. They, like Donald Trump, are a reflection of the moral, intellectual and physical rot that plague a diseased society.

I spent two years researching and writing about the warped ideologues of those who have now seized power in my book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. Read it while you still can. Seriously.

These Christian fascists, who define the core ideology of the Trump administration, are unapologetic about their hatred for pluralistic, secular democracies. They seek, as they exhaustively detail in numerous “Christian” books and documents such as the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, to deform the judiciary and legislative branches of government, along with the media and academia, into appendages to a “Christianized” state led by a divinely anointed leader. They openly admire Nazi apologists such as Rousas John Rushdoony, a supporter of eugenics who argues that education and social welfare should be handed over to the churches and Biblical law must replace the secular legal code, and Nazi party theorists such as Carl Schmitt. They are avowed racists, misogynists and homophobes. They embrace bizarre conspiracy theories from the white replacement theory to a shadowy monster they call “the woke.” Suffice it to say, they are not grounded in a reality based universe.

Christian fascists come out of a theocratic sect called Dominionism. This sect teaches that American Christians have been mandated to make America a Christian state and an agent of God. Political and intellectual opponents of this militant Biblicalism are condemned as agents of Satan.

“Under Christian dominion, America will no longer be a sinful and fallen nation but one in which the 10 Commandments form the basis of our legal system, creationism and ‘Christian values’ form the basis of our educational system, and the media and the government proclaim the Good News to one and all,” I noted in my book. “Labor unions, civil-rights laws and public schools will be abolished. Women will be removed from the workforce to stay at home, and all those deemed insufficiently Christian will be denied citizenship. Aside from its proselytizing mandate, the federal government will be reduced to the protection of property rights and ‘homeland’ security.”

The Christian fascists and their billionaire funders, I noted, “speak in terms and phrases that are familiar and comforting to most Americans, but they no longer use words to mean what they meant in the past.” They commit logocide, killing old definitions and replacing them with new ones. Words — including truth, wisdom, death, liberty, life and love — are deconstructed and assigned diametrically opposed meanings. Life and death, for example, mean life in Christ or death to Christ, a signal of belief or unbelief. Wisdom refers to the level of commitment and obedience to the doctrine. Liberty is not about freedom, but the liberty that comes from following Jesus Christ and being liberated from the dictates of secularism. Love is twisted to mean an unquestioned obedience to those, such as Trump, who claim to speak and act for God.

As the death spiral accelerates, phantom enemies, domestic and foreign, will be blamed for the demise, persecuted and slated for obliteration. Once the wreckage is complete, ensuring the immiseration of the citizenry, a breakdown in public services and engendering an inchoate rage, only the blunt instrument of state violence will remain. A lot of people will suffer, especially as the climate crisis inflicts with greater and greater intensity its lethal retribution.

The near-collapse of our constitutional system of checks and balances took place long before the arrival of Trump. Trump’s return to power represents the death rattle of the Pax Americana. The day is not far off when, like the Roman Senate in 27 BC, Congress will take its last significant vote and surrender power to a dictator. The Democratic Party, whose strategy seems to be to do nothing and hope Trump implodes, have already acquiesced to the inevitable.

The question is not whether we go down, but how many millions of innocents we will take with us. Given the industrial violence our empire wields, it could be a lot, especially if those in charge decide to reach for the nukes.

The dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) — Elon Musk claims is run by “a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America” — is an example of how these arsonists are clueless about how empires function.

Foreign aid is not benevolent. It is weaponized to maintain primacy over the United Nations and remove governments the empire deems hostile. Those nations in the U.N. and other multilateral organizations who vote the way the empire demands, who surrender their sovereignty to global corporations and the U.S. military, receive assistance. Those who don’t do not.

When the U.S. offered to build the airport in Haiti’s capital Port-au-Prince, investigative journalist Matt Kennard reports, it required that Haiti oppose Cuba’s admittance into the Organization of American States, which it did.

Foreign aid builds infrastructure projects so corporations can operate global sweatshops and extract resources. It funds “democracy promotion” and “judicial reform” that thwart the aspirations of political leaders and governments that seek to remain independent from the grip of the empire.

USAID, for example, paid for a “political party reform project” that was designed “as a counterweight” to the “radical” Movement Toward Socialism (Movimiento al Socialismo) and sought to prevent socialists like Evo Morales from being elected in Bolivia. It then funded organizations and initiatives, including training programs so Bolivian youth could be taught the American business practices, once Morales assumed the presidency, to weaken his hold on power.

Kennard in his book, The Racket: A Rogue Reporter vs The American Empire, documents how U.S. institutions such as the National Endowment for Democracy, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Inter-American Development Bank, USAID and the Drug Enforcement Administration, work in tandem with the Pentagon and Central Intelligence Agency to subjugate and oppress the Global South.

Client states that receive aid must break unions, impose austerity measures, keep wages low and maintain puppet governments. The heavily funded aid programs, designed to bring down Morales, eventually led the Bolivian president to throw USAID out of the country.

The lie peddled to the public is that this aid benefits both the needy overseas and us at home. But the inequality these programs facilitate abroad replicates the inequality imposed domestically. The wealth extracted from the Global South is not equitably distributed. It ends up in the hands of the billionaire class, often stashed in overseas bank accounts to avoid taxation.

Our tax dollars, meanwhile, disproportionately funds the military, which is the iron fist that sustains the system of exploitation. The 30 million Americans who were victims of mass layoffs and deindustrialization lost their jobs to workers in sweatshops overseas. As Kennard notes, both home and abroad, it is a vast “transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich globally and domestically.”

“The same people that devise the myths about what we do abroad have also built up a similar ideological system that legitimizes theft at home; theft from the poorest, by the richest,” he writes. “The poor and working people of Harlem have more in common with the poor and working people of Haiti than they do with their elites, but this has to be obscured for the racket to work.”

Foreign aid maintains sweatshops or “special economic zones” in countries such as Haiti, where workers toil for pennies an hour and often in unsafe conditions for global corporations.

“One of the facets of special economic zones, and one of the incentives for corporations in the U.S., is that special economic zones have even less regulations than the national state on how you can treat labor and taxes and customs,” Kennard told me in an interview. “You open these sweatshops in the special economic zones. You pay the workers a pittance. You get all the resources out without having to pay customs or tax. The state in Mexico or Haiti or wherever it is, where they’re offshoring this production, doesn’t benefit at all. That’s by design. The coffers of the state are always the ones that never get increased. It’s the corporations that benefit.”

These same U.S. institutions and mechanisms of control, Kennard writes in his book, were employed to sabotage the electoral campaign of Jeremy Corbyn, a fierce critic of the U.S. empire, for prime minister in Britain.

The U.S. disbursed nearly $72 billion in foreign aid in fiscal year 2023. It funded clean water initiatives, HIV/Aids treatments, energy security and anti-corruption work. In 2024, it provided 42 percent of all humanitarian aid tracked by the United Nations.

Humanitarian aid, often described as “soft power,” is designed to mask the theft of resources in the Global South by U.S. corporations, the expansion of the footprint of the U.S. military, the rigid control of foreign governments, the devastation caused by fossil fuel extraction, the systemic abuse of workers in global sweatshops and the poisoning of child laborers in places like the Congo, where they are used to mine lithium.

[Note: For a different perspective on USAID under the Trump-Musk-Vought triumvirate, see Peter Wehner, The Cruel Attack on USAID, The Atlantic, 11 February 2025. — Ed.]

I doubt Musk and his army of young minions in the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) — which isn’t an official department within the federal government — have any idea about how the organizations they are destroying work, why they exist or what it will mean for the demise of American power.

The seizure of government personnel records and classified material, the effort to terminate hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts — mostly those which relate to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), the offers of buyouts to “drain the swamp” including a buyout offer to the entire workforce of the Central Intelligence Agency — now temporarily blocked by a judge — the firing of 17 or 18 inspectors generals and federal prosecutors, the halting of government funding and grants, sees them cannibalize the leviathan they worship.

They plan to dismantle the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service, part of the internal machinery of the empire. The more dysfunctional the state becomes, the more it creates a business opportunity for predatory corporations and private equity firms. These billionaires will make a fortune “harvesting” the remains of the empire. But they are ultimately slaying the beast that created American wealth and power.

Once the dollar is no longer the world’s reserve currency, something the dismantling of the empire guarantees, the U.S. will be unable to pay for its huge deficits by selling Treasury bonds. The American economy will fall into a devastating depression. This will trigger a breakdown of civil society, soaring prices, especially for imported products, stagnant wages and high unemployment rates. The funding of at least 750 overseas military bases and our bloated military will become impossible to sustain. The empire will instantly contract. It will become a shadow of itself. Hypernationalism, fueled by an inchoate rage and widespread despair, will morph into a hate-filled American fascism.

“The demise of the United States as the preeminent global power could come far more quickly than anyone imagines,” the historian Alfred W. McCoy writes in his book In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power:

Despite the aura of omnipotence empires often project, most are surprisingly fragile, lacking the inherent strength of even a modest nation-state. Indeed, a glance at their history should remind us that the greatest of them are susceptible to collapse from diverse causes, with fiscal pressures usually a prime factor. For the better part of two centuries, the security and prosperity of the homeland has been the main objective for most stable states, making foreign or imperial adventures an expendable option, usually allocated no more than 5 percent of the domestic budget. Without the financing that arises almost organically inside a sovereign nation, empires are famously predatory in their relentless hunt for plunder or profit — witness the Atlantic slave trade, Belgium’s rubber lust in the Congo, British India’s opium commerce, the Third Reich’s rape of Europe, or the Soviet exploitation of Eastern Europe.

When revenues shrink or collapse, McCoy points out, “empires become brittle.”

“So delicate is their ecology of power that, when things start to go truly wrong, empires regularly unravel with unholy speed: just a year for Portugal, two years for the Soviet Union, eight years for France, eleven years for the Ottomans, seventeen for Great Britain, and, in all likelihood, just twenty-seven years for the United States, counting from the crucial year 2003 [when the U.S. invaded Iraq],” he writes.

The array of tools used for global dominance — wholesale surveillance, the evisceration of civil liberties including due process, torture, militarized police, the massive prison system, militarized drones and satellites — will be employed against a restive and enraged population.

The devouring of the carcass of the empire to feed the outsized greed and egos of these scavengers presages a new dark age.

***

Source:

• Chris Hedges, The Empire Self Destructs, 8 February 2025

---

***

The Mafia State

Chris Hedges

15 February 2025

 

Kiss the ring. Grovel before the Godfather. Give him tribute, a cut of the spoils. If he and his family get rich you get rich. Enter his inner circle, his “made” men and women, and you do not have to follow rules or obey the law. You can disembowel the machinery of government. You can turn us and the natural world into commodities to exploit until exhaustion or collapse. You can commit crimes with impunity. You can make a mockery of democratic norms and social responsibility. Perfidy is very profitable at first. In the long term it is collective suicide.

America is a full blown kleptocracy. The demolition of the social and political structure, begun long before Trump, makes a few very, very rich and immiserates everyone else. Mafia capitalism always leads to a mafia state. The two ruling parties gave us the first. Now we get the second. It is not only our wealth that is being taken from us, but our liberty.

Since the election of Donald Trump, Elon Musk, currently worth $394 billion, saw his wealth increase by $170 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, worth $254 billion, saw his net worth increaseby nearly $41 billion.

Tidy sums for kneeling before Moloch.

At least 11 federal agencies that have been affected by the slash and burn campaign of the Trump administration have more than 32 continuing investigations, pending complaints or enforcement actions, into Musk’s six companies, according to a review by The New York Times.

The mafia state ignores legal constraints and regulations. It lacks external and internal control. It cannibalizes everything, includingthe ecosystem, until there is nothing left but a wasteland. It cannot distinguish between reality and illusion, which obscures and exacerbates gross incompetence. And then the hollowed-out edifice will collapse leaving in its wake a hollowed out country with nukes. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. So did the Mayans and the sclerotic reign of the French monarch Louis XVI.

In the final stages of decay for all empires, the rulers, focused exclusively on personal enrichment, ensconced in their versions of Versailles or The Forbidden City, squeeze the last drops of profit from an increasingly oppressed and impoverished population and ravaged environment.

Unprecedented wealth is inseparable from unprecedented poverty.

The more extreme life becomes, the more extreme ideologies become. Huge segments of the population, unable to absorb the despair and bleakness, severs itself from a reality-based universe. It takes comfort in magical thinking, a bizarre millennialism — one embodied for us in a Christianized fascism — which turns con artists, morons, criminals, charlatans, gangsters and grifters into prophets while branding those who decry the pillage and corruption into traitors. The rush towards self-immolation accelerates intellectual and moral paralysis.

The mafia state makes no pretense of defending the common good. Trump, Musk and their minions are swiftly repealing executive orders regarding health, environmental and safety regulations, food assistance, as well as child care programs such as Head Start. They are fighting a court order to halt their dismantling of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which has ensured that Americans have been reimbursed with more than $21 billion due to cancelled debts, financial compensation and other forms of consumer relief. They are abolishing the U.S. Agency for International Development. They are closing federal defenders’ offices, which provide legal representation to the poor. They have cut billions of dollars from the budget of the National Institute of Health jeopardizing biomedical research and clinical trials. They have frozen permits for solar and wind projects, including sign-offs needed for projects on private land. They fired more than 300 staffers at the National Nuclear Security Administration, the agency that manages our nuclear stockpile. They are gutting the workforce of the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service and the United States Geological Survey.

The mafia state, its blueprint contained in Project 2025, ignores the dire lessons from history of extreme social inequality, political disintegration, wanton ecological plunder and the evisceration of the rule of law.

We are, of course, not naturally destined for freedom. It was two millennia before democracy reappeared in Europe after its collapse — largely because Athens became an empire — in ancient Greece. The mafia state, not democracies, may be the wave of the future, one where the wealthiest one percent of the globe owns some 43 percent of all global financial assets – more than 95 percent of the human race — while 44 percent of the planet’s population lives below the World Bank’s poverty line of less than $6.85 per day. These calcified regimes endure solely because of draconian systems of internal control, wholesale surveillance and the evisceration of civil liberties.

We have at the same time wiped out 90 percent of the large fish such as cod, sharks, halibut, grouper, tuna, swordfish, and marlin and degraded or destroyed two thirds of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet. Lack of access to safe drinking water, and the resultant spread of infectious diseases, kills at least 1.4 million people annually — 3,836 per day — and also contributes to 50 percent of global malnutrition, according to the World Bank. Between 150 and 200 million children are impaired by malnourishment. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is well above the 350 parts per million that most climate scientists warn is the maximum level for sustaining life as we know it. By May of this year, atmospheric CO2 levels are forecast to reach 429.6 ppm, the highest concentration in over two million years. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the measurement could reach 541 to 970 ppm by the year 2100. At that point huge parts of the planet, beset with high population density, droughts, soil erosion, freak storms, massive crop failures and rising sea levels, will be unfit for human existence.

Clans, in the later period of the Easter Island civilization, competed to honor their ancestors by constructing larger and larger hewn stoner images, which demanded the last remnants of the timber, rope and manpower on the island. By the year 1400 the woods were gone. The soil had eroded and washed into the sea. The islanders began to fight over old timbers and were reduced to eating their dogs and soon all the nesting birds.

The desperate islanders developed a magical belief system that the erected stone gods, the moai, would come to life and save them from disaster.

The belief by Christian nationalists in the rapture, which does not exist in the Bible, is no less fantastic. These Christian fascists — embodied in Trump appointees such as Russell Vought, head of Trump’s Office of Budget and Management, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Mike Huckabee, nominated to be the ambassador to Israel — intend to use schools and universities, the media, the judiciary and the federal government as platforms to carry out indoctrination and enforce conformity.

The followers of this movement defer to a leader they believe has been anointed by God. They embrace the illusion that the righteous will be saved, floating naked upwards into heaven, at the end of time and the secularists they despise will perish. This retreat into magical thinking, which is the foundation of all totalitarian movements, explains their suffering. It helps them cope with despair and anxiety. It gives them the illusion of security. It also ensures retribution against a long list of enemies — liberals, intellectuals, gays, immigrants, the deep state — blamed for their economic and social misery.

Our millennialism is an updated version of the faith in the moai, the doomed Taki Onqoy revolt against the Spanish invaders in Peru, the Aztec prophecies of the 1530s and the Ghost Dance, which Native Americans believed would see the return of the buffalo herds and slain warriors rise alive from the earth to vanquish the white colonizers.

This retreat into fantasy is what happens when reality becomes too bleak to be absorbed. It is the appeal of Trump. Of course, this time it will be different. When we go down the whole planet will go with us. There will be no new lands to pillage, no new peoples to exploit. We will be exterminated in a global death trap.

Karl Polanyi in “The Great Transformation” writes that once a society surrenders to the dictates of the market, once its mafia economy becomes a mafia state, once it succumbs to what he calls “the ravages of this satanic mill,” it inevitably leads to “the demolition of society.”

The mafia state cannot be reformed. We must organize to break our chains, one-by-one, to use the power of the strike to cripple the state machinery. We must embrace a radical militancy, one that offers a new vision and a new social structure. We must hold fast to moral imperatives. We must forgive mortgage and student debt, institute universal health care and break up monopolies. We must raise the minimum wage and end the squandering of resources and funds to sustain the empire and the war industry. We must establish a nationwide jobs program to rebuild the country’s collapsing infrastructure. We must nationalize the banks, pharmaceutical corporations, military contractors and transportation and embrace environmentally sustainable energy sources.

None of this will happen until we resist.

The mafia state will be brutal with any who revolt. Capitalists, as Eduardo Galeano writes, view communal cultures as “enemy cultures.” The billionaire class will do to us what it did to the radicals who rose up to form militant unions in the past. We had the bloodiest labor wars in the industrialized world. Hundreds of American workers were killed, tens of thousands were beaten, wounded, jailed and blacklisted. Unions were infiltrated, shut down and outlawed. We cannot be naïve. It will be difficult, costly and painful. But this confrontation is our only hope. Otherwise, we, and the planet that sustains us, are doomed.

***

Source:

• Chris Hedges, The Mafia State, The Chris Hedges Report, 15 February 2025

***

***

---

---