Contra Trump

肥了自己瘦了美國

In July 1976, summer holiday back in Australia was bracketed by two events: the bicentenary of the American revolution on the fourth of the month and the Tangshan Earthquake on the twenty-eighth.

With friends, I watched America celebrate Fourth of July when passing through Hong Kong, having set out on the long train journey from Shenyang, Liaoning province in China’s northeast, where I was living as an exchange student, a few days earlier. Three weeks later, as I was getting ready to return to China from Sydney, we learned that a calamitous earthquake had struck Tangshan in Hebei province. Arriving in Beijing after days in a ‘hard seat’ carriage of the Guangzhou-Beijing rail line, I learned that all transportation ‘beyond the pass’ 關外, that is outside the Great Wall and thence to the northeast China, would be slow and circuitous. It would also confront travellers with the heartbreaking ruins of towns and villages along the route.

Earlier that month, the international media had reported the celebrations in America with considerable fanfare; in late July, the extent of China’s tragedy, and its vast human toll, was hidden by Maoist propagandists ever anxious to reinforce the myth that even in the face of natural devastation, the Chinese Communist Party remained ‘magnificent, glorious and infallible’ 偉大的、光榮的、正確的.

In 2026, half a century later, Beijing has just proudly marked the 105th anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party while in America, a conflicted and sombre mood mars the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

***

China Heritage marks 4 July 2026 with a chapter in our Contra Trump series featuring four essays. Two contrasting works by American writers and two by long-term observers, one in the United Kingdom, the other in Australia. But, we start with a speech delivered by Zohran Mamdani, Mayor of New York, and broadcast on the eve of July Fourth.

The Chinese rubric of this chapter in Contra Trump is inspired by a famous expression in the poem ‘To the Tune of As If a Dream: Scattered Rain and Gusts of Wind Last Night’ 如夢令·昨夜雨疏風驟 by Li Qingzhao (李清照, 1084-1155) that reads 綠肥紅瘦, ‘the green [leaves] are full yet the red [flowers] fade’:

如夢令·昨夜雨疏風驟

李清照

昨夜雨疏風驟，濃睡不消殘酒。
試問捲簾人，卻道海棠依舊。
知否，知否。應是綠肥紅瘦。

The Chinese rubric — 肥了自己瘦了美國 — refers to the edacity of the Trump regime and the depletion of America.

— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
4 July 2026

***

Related Material:

• The Dotard State on Donald J. Trump’s Eightieth Birthday
• June Fourth 2026 — Seeds of Fire, the Substrate and the Longest Relay
• The Unhomed — Mourning in the Future Tense

---

---

***

Not Dead Yet

America’s 250th is a day for celebrating the defiant pulse of the living.

Meghan Houser

The Contrarian

3 July 2026

One might think, given Trump’s propensity to plaster his name on everything, that he’s obsessed with legacy. He is, insofar as it’s the way to advance the game of writing one’s name upon the world (in, as always, the most stupidly literal way possible). But his long-term plan is closer to the opposite of planning for posterity. He cannot creatively envision a future in which he is no longer the main character, except to hate and fear it. He is going un-gently into that good night — and once he’s gone, as far as he’s concerned, everybody’s party might as well be over.

Our president is trying to take America down with him.

There’s been a few years’ worth of chatter around the phenomenon of MAGA’s “death drive,” or “suicide rightism.” What’s with the alt-right love for seppuku-committing ultranationalist author Yukio Mishima? Why did DHS post a video of the penguin who walks off to its seeming doom in Werner Herzog’s Arctic documentary with the caption “Americans have always known why”? Why does Pete Hegseth say “lethality” like it’s not the means but the end? I dismissed some of this (minus Hegseth) as would-be edgy manifestations of masculinity in crisis…until realizing that the commander-in-chief is on the same page, which explains a lot.

What does a death-driven administration look like, aesthetically? It looks like blood sport on the White House lawn. It looks like one failed attempt after another to wrest control of nature, from a paved-over rose garden, to a scum-choked reflecting pool, to a coterie of human bodies shellacked to parodic levels of denial of decay. It looks like the inability to attract crowds for, much less successfully host, anything resembling a celebration of life. The president’s charisma may play on the airing of grievances–to–riot incitement bandwidth, but collective joy is beyond him.

What do such an administration’s policies look like? They look like turning off the lights of knowledge and memory one by one, much like an unspecified 79-year-old sliding into senescence. They look like the antithesis of life: brutality in the streets, inhumane detention conditions, murder. They look like climate change denial and the rapacious stripping of environmental regulations. They look like antagonizing the UN and eliminating USAID, starting tariff wars with allies, and a literal war in the Middle East that scuttles a nuclear détente.

Many watchers have been baffled by Trump’s diplomacy because it is so flagrantly shortsighted; the Occam’s razor explanation is that he does not care about the long term. As though riding one of his once-buddy Musk’s privatized rockets, Trump is getting as far into the stratosphere of kleptocratic wealth as he can by burning through every bit of goodwill/democratic norm/actual hydrocarbon that it took 250 years to produce (or, in hydrocarbon’s case, far longer). Which is fine if you simply do not care about the place or the people you’re leaving behind.

I’m sorry to mark our 250th anniversary by recapping the horrible present. But it’s necessary to put into context just how much this administration has no business celebrating a milestone of national life and evolution, a date that should serve as the springboard for hard-fought, generative discussions about where we’ve been and where we’re going. That’s what anniversaries are for, if used well.

They’re just another date, but in bearing the shape of a pivotal moment, they invite us to remember that we can choose any moment, this one included, to turn in the direction of progress.

The administration has never wanted to look candidly back, and it is becoming increasingly clear that they have no interest in or capacity for looking ahead. The far right is adrift in a curdling fantasy of an America with a past that never existed and a future that even they, it seems, don’t care to stick around for.

Luckily, they do not represent the America that has survived this long.

Here’s what life looks like. It looks like Kansans welcoming Algerians and Minnesotans standing up to ICE. It looks like a Knicks-inspired ode to pluralism and 8 million people marching against kings. It looks like the Seneca Falls Convention, the Emancipation Proclamation, and the March on Washington. It looks like Good Trouble and Stonewall and rock n’ roll. E.B. White defined democracy as, among other things, “the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles” and “the feeling of vitality everywhere.” That defiant pulse is with us still.

I’ve found myself thinking lately of a poem by Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me.” After limning what it is to be a Black woman in this country, the speaker ends with a fierce invocation to celebrate the fact that, every day of her life: “something has tried to kill me / and has failed.”

That’s enough to celebrate this July Fourth. And we have much more. The forces of dull, narrow imagination and greed have failed to take this opportunity for joy and reflection from us (however much they muddle the Reflecting Pool), just as they have failed to take our future. They are the ones passing through and away.

***

Source:

• Meghan Houser, Not Dead Yet, The Contrarian, 3 July 2026

---

***

Requiem for America on the Fourth of July

The con of neoliberalism has gutted our democracy and paved the way for fascism.

Chris Hedges

3 July 2026

Neoliberalism, better understood by its less sanitized term cutthroat capitalism, is the poison that destroyed our democracy. It gave the billionaire class and corporations the ideological cover to impoverish the working class, impose crippling austerity, hollow out democratic institutions, buy off our two ruling political parties and deform our courts into appendages of corporations and the rich.

Neoliberalism drove tens of millions of disenfranchised, desperate people into the arms of Christian fascists, who preyed on their despair and sold them the fantasy of magic Jesus. It drove them into the arms of conspiracy theorists and right-wing charlatans. It drove them down the self-destructive rabbit holes of alcoholism and opioid addiction, compulsive gambling, domestic and sexual violence. These were the inevitable consequences of personal stagnation, disempowerment and feelings of worthlessness, frustration and profound despair.

Neoliberalism ignores the cries of its victims. It dismisses their suffering and rage as irrational, ignorant and racist. It neuters liberal reforms, rendering them cosmetic and useless. Liberal apologists for neoliberalism, no longer concerned with economic justice, retreat into boutique activism. They mouth empty slogans about diversity and political correctness while pretending the relentless class war, unleashed globally since the 1970s, does not exist. The victims of neoliberal deindustrialization, 30 million of whom lost their jobs in the U.S. in mass layoffs, understand that the precarity of their existence does not concern their neoliberal masters.

Right-wing pundits and politicians, such as Donald Trump, who issue crude, vulgar and expletive-laden insults against the traditional neoliberal establishment are celebrated by the disenfranchised for exposing the political charade. These demagogues promise moral and economic renewal for the betrayed, albeit grounded in magical thinking.

Neoliberals peddle their own form of magical thinking. Neoliberalism is as absurd and infantile as the Christian Rapture and Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Trump lies like he breathes, but so did previous presidents including Joe Biden, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Trump embraces fantasies, but so did they. Trump, like his Democratic predecessors, enriches himself and his family, although with far more ostentation and greed. He, like them, facilitates the ongoing pillage by the billionaire class. Trump is the fascist iteration of the neoliberal con.

Concentrating wealth in the hands of a global oligarchic elite — the twelve richest billionaires own more wealth than the poorest half of the world — is designed to create massive income inequality and monopoly power. It is the antithesis of democratic equality. It is designed to fuel political extremism and foster social and cultural divisions. It is designed to hollow out democratic institutions. Economic rationality is not the point. David Harvey calls neoliberalism “accumulation by dispossession.”

As a ruling ideology, neoliberalism is a brilliant success. Starting in the 1970s, its Keynesian mainstream critics were marginalized or pushed out of academia, state institutions and financial organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. The same is true of the media. Compliant courtiers and intellectual poseurs such as Milton Friedman or New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman were given prominent platforms and lavish corporate funding. They slavishly disseminated the official mantra of fringe, discredited economic theories popularized by Friedrich Hayek and the third-rate writer Ayn Rand.

Once the country was forced to kneel before the dictates of the marketplace, once government regulations were abolished, once taxes on the rich were slashed, once money was permitted to flow across borders, once unions were crushed and once trade deals were signed that sent jobs to sweatshops in Mexico and China, the world, these poseurs assured us, would be happier, freer and wealthier. It was a scam. But it worked. And it fueled the rival con game of the demagogues and fascists who were vomited up out of the moral and political morass.

The media bears much of the blame. In the name of objectivity, better understood as neutrality, it absented itself from the class war. It did not investigate the mounting abuses of the rich, corporations or its bought-and-paid-for political class. It did not expose the absurdity of neoliberalism. It rendered the victims invisible. By shutting themselves out of the debate, the media, a vital pillar of any democracy, neutered itself. It too became despised.

Individual freedom, which neoliberalism holds up as the highest good, and social justice are not compatible. Social justice, Harvey writes in A Brief History of Neoliberalism, requires social solidarity and “a willingness to submerge individual wants, needs, and desires in the cause of some more general struggle for, say, social equality and environmental justice.” Neoliberal rhetoric is able to “split off libertarianism, identity politics, multiculturalism, and eventually narcissistic consumerism from the social forces ranged in pursuit of social justice through the conquest of state power.”

Neoliberalism, as Ece Temelkuran writes in How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps From Democracy to Fascism, exiles morality from public life. It isolates it in the private space of the individual. It corrals it into “the holding pen of religion” while religion is “clipped and cropped into market-friendly ‘spiritualities.’” Justice and mercy are no longer shared concepts. Personal and public morality are severed. How, she asks, “can we convince people not to commit evil in those realms of public life from which law enforcement is absent?”

“Humans,” she writes, “are incapable of functioning and living together without a good story to bind them and keep a certain set of values intact. That’s why the lack of a story in neoliberalism, the lack of meaning and cause, can be unbearable for the human mind. Since humans are forced to live in a state of mild antipathy — an acceptable amount of antipathy that is crucial to the neoliberal system — they are forever in dire need of a cause, a central triangulation point that they can use to orient themselves in relation to what’s good and what’s bad. The ethical vacuum of neoliberalism, its dismissal of the fact that human nature needs meaning and desperately seeks reasons to live, creates fertile ground for the invention of causes, and sometimes the most groundless or shallowest ones.”

Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation distinguishes between bad freedoms and good freedoms. Bad freedoms are sacrosanct under neoliberalism. They permit the powerful to exploit workers and the natural world until exhaustion or collapse. Pharmaceutical and health care corporations, for example, jeopardize the lives of those who cannot afford their exorbitant prices. The fossil fuel industry is driving us towards extinction.

Good freedoms — freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, freedom of meeting, freedom of association, freedom to choose one’s job — are snuffed out by bad freedoms. The freedom of the many is transformed into the freedom of the few. The result is fascism.

Fascism uses the blunt instruments of fear, intimidation and violence to curb the mounting disquiet. It divides the country into warring factions — the patriots vs. the enemies of the state. It obliterates shared values. It champions the cruelty of hypermasculinity. Those who dissent are branded domestic terrorists. Civil liberties are abolished in the name of national security.

The 30- to 100-year sentences meted out to eight anti-ICE protesters in Texas, who were portrayed in court as an “antifa terror cell,” are being normalized. A ninth defendant, David Rolando Sanchez Estrada, was not present at the protest, but was sentenced to 30 years after being convicted of concealing documents when he moved a box of political zines and other materials. A second group of defendants in the broader Prairieland case were sentenced on July 1. Six who accepted plea agreements received prison terms ranging from nearly two years to 15 years, while Ines Soto, who rejected a plea agreement and went to trial, received 50 years.

The equation of civil disobedience with terrorism is routine in countries such as Turkey, Russia and India. It is being cemented into place in Europe. A British judge, in a ruling that mirrors what took place in Texas, recently sentenced four members of Palestine Action as terrorists, sending them to prison for five to nine years, even though they were neither charged nor convicted of terrorism offenses.

It does not matter if Donald Trump, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Narendra Modi, Vladimir Putin or Nigel Farage disappear. The tens in of millions of people “fired up by their message will still be there, and will still be ready to act upon the orders of a similar figure,” Temelkuran writes. “And unfortunately, as we experienced in Turkey in a very destructive way, even if you are determined to stay away from the world of politics, the minions will find you, even in your own personal space, armed with their own set of values and ready to hunt down anybody who doesn’t resemble themselves.”

Our country, as we once knew it, no longer exists. It was methodically destroyed by neoliberal con artists. The institutions and legal protections that once shielded us from tyranny no longer function. Those who champion an open society are orphans, smeared as traitors, excoriated as the “radical left.” I mourn what we have lost. I mourn what we are about to lose. This social isolation will soon be physical isolation. We will be criminalized or driven into exile.

Trump and his fascistic cabal, epitomized by billionaires such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, are constructing a mafia state. A nation of gangsters and marks. A nation where they alone have unlimited freedom to pillage and exploit. A nation where the government is privatized. A nation where we are enslaved to corporate technology. A nation where we have no place.

We must name our enemies this Fourth of July. They are the fascists who have seized power. And they are those who, selling us the con of neoliberalism, put them there.

***

Source:

• Chris Hedges, Requiem for America on the Fourth of July, 3 July 2026

---

***

Ice, Ice Baby: America’s national decline

The 250th anniversary is corrupt, embarrassing and an utter failure. It’s the perfect encapsulation of Trump’s US.

Ian Dunt

3 July 2026

It’s not going well. There are many definitions of failure, but Vanilla Ice has historically been the most widely accepted. In cultures across the world and in different eras, Vanilla Ice has functioned as one of the key metrics for decline, the gold standard measurement for what happens when you’re a gurning cunt.

The ancient Egyptians used to feature him on the inside of a Pharaoh’s tomb. The Normans stitched images of him looming over the battle scenes in the Bayeux Tapestry. It is a rule as old as time: If your country is relying on Vanilla Ice to save its national reputation, then something has gone horribly wrong.

Now he has come again, like Halley’s Comet, to inflict a devastating moment of humiliation on America’s 250th birthday. The problem began when the artists who had been booked to perform at the celebrations realised what was happening. What had been presented to them as an event for the country as a whole was in fact a piece of idol-worship for an insane president.

Seven of the nine musical acts pulled out. “What? What are you talking about?” Freedom Williams said, in a post filmed in a bathroom. “I don’t fuck with Trump… I know where I stand. I know who the fuck I am.”

In the end, and with the lamentations of history, there was just Vanilla Ice and one other act. He posted an Instagram video insisting he was still up for it, circling a pool while trying to quell a sense of growing existential terror. “I’m super honoured to do this concert with everybody,” he said plaintively. But in the end, even this was not possible. The concert had to be cancelled because of the weather.

America’s 250th celebration is a disaster. It is so bad that it has even failed to hold a Vanilla Ice concert.

A Trump speech on the mall last week was sparsely attended. The Great American State Fair, which has taken over downtown Washington, is a debacle. There’s hardly anyone there. Several states declined to send representatives, leaving their booths empty. The air conditioning in several booths stopped working in the middle of a heat wave, forcing them to close down.

Attendees are not allowed to bring food or water and the only shaded space to sit is in a food tent, where visitors can buy a bottle of water for $5, or the Phorm energy drink by Ultimate Fighting Championship president and Trump ally Dana White. On the fair’s first full day, a man was arrested after witnesses saw him filming female performers while vaping, with one hand down his pants.

The US Semiquincentennial stopped being about American history the moment Trump returned to office. At that point it became about corruption. This followed the standard populist pattern, established by Vladimir Putin and VIktor Orban and then replicated across the world. The corruption feeds the political narrative, which then assists with the corruption, in a closed circle of mutual advantage.

A report this week by the Democratic staff of the House of Representatives’ natural resources committee’s oversight and investigations subcommittee documented how this was done.

In 2016, Congress established an independent, non-partisan Semiquincentennial Commission to organise the celebrations. It established America250, which was intended to lead celebrations for everyone, regardless of their political views or the character of the current administration. Financially, it was grounded in the Congressionally chartered National Park Foundation – the official philanthropic partner of the National Park Service. These are old, reliable organisations with heritage and a long-earned sense of public trust.

Then Trump got into power and naturally tried to turn it into a form of emperor worship towards himself. When America250 kicked back against his demands for political propaganda and personal fealty, the White House established Freedom 250 LLC as a wholly owned subsidiary of the National Park Foundation. It allowed Trump and his allies to operate under the credibility and reputation of the brand but avoid any requirement for accountability or transparency.

Funds were surreptitiously diverted, leaving America250 starved of cash. Sources interviewed by Democrats on the committee said prospective America250 donors were actually provided with Freedom 250’s bank details. This would be wire fraud, if America still had a functioning legal system. Sponsorship packages were turned into a classic corruption racket, with people paying $10 million for guaranteed time with Trump, complete with a “historic photo opportunity”.

It then worked to steer funding towards campaign loyalists, in much the same way that Orban would direct funding towards his supporters. Event Strategies, which planned the January 6th rally which preceded the attempted coup, was awarded 18 federal contracts and an indefinite master contract, worth a combined $140 million.

Perhaps the most gauche last-days-of-Rome moment came when an Ultimate Fighting Championship event was held on the South Lawn to celebrate Trump’s 80th birthday. The statue of Abraham Lincoln looked down on the spectacle below and it honestly felt as if his face would twist into disapproval, the nation’s father turning in his grave as his children squandered the constitutional riches he left them.

Quite apart from the sense of cultural degeneracy, it was an act of blatant corruption, run without any sense of shame or concealment. The event was sponsored by companies facing federal regulation. Fighters received bonuses in a cryptocurrency issued by World Liberty Financial, a trust run by Trump’s children, which he holds stocks in.

“Under President Donald Trump, this anniversary has been hijacked and perverted into a hotbed of corruption and self-enrichment,” the Congressional report concluded. “The machinery built for a national commemoration was converted, deliberately and over a period of months, into an apparatus for raising and spending money in service of the president’s ego, political ideology, and pet projects.”

This is the anniversary that America deserves.

I was talking with a friend the other day about the celebrations. He loves America, is fascinated with it, knows its history well, adores its music and its films. His reaction when the subject came up was instantaneous. “They haven’t got a thing to be proud of. They don’t have anything to celebrate.”

We rarely speak about the wave of anti-Americanism sweeping the world. News reports still operate as if America has an assumed leadership role – not just militarily or economically, but culturally. Yet its reputation is tanking. Global polling found that the proportion of people who believed it had an overall positive influence on world affairs fell in 26 out of 29 countries in the six months leading to April. In Britain, one of America’s most reliable allies, just 39% believe it has a positive influence. In France, its oldest ally, it’s 30%. In Canada, its closest ally, it’s 19%.

Four million fewer foreign visitors went to the US in 2025 compared to 2024, with total spending decreasing by more than $8 billion. It’s the worst single-year decline in two decades outside of covid. “We used to be a country that others wanted to emulate,” Juliette Kayyem, faculty chair of the Homeland Security Project at the Harvard Kennedy School, said forlornly. “That narrative no longer exists.”

It is easy to blame Trump, to say that this is not the real America and that he is some a horrible contorted version of its true face. Perhaps it was still possible to hold that view between 2016 and 2020. But by the time he was elected a second time, it was clear that many Americans either approved of what he represented or were sufficiently ambivalent to wave him through.

This point is usually made in relation to the US’ domestic politics. But it is also true about the way that America sees the world. We now have a pretty good impression of how many Americans see us and what they truly think of us. We know that, because Trump is commendably clear. He and JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and the others seem to resent the rest of the world. They admire strongmen leaders, sure, but their allies are there to be bullied, mocked, disparaged and humiliated. When it came to election day, most American voters either approved or didn’t object.

It is hard to square this version of America with the one you experience when you’re there: the nice lady in the queue at the airport who wants to talk about her son-in-law, the eccentric wiseguy taxi driver, the bloke who sits down next to you by the bar and starts up a conversation, the great social openness of the American personality. But we have to accept that this is obviously a core aspect of what the country is. If it wasn’t, it would not be happening.

It is particularly vexing to find that America’s core message to the world is now one of victimhood. Every day, Trump has some new sob story he wants to tell, about how unfair trade is, how much money America spends on the military, why everyone has taken advantage of them. This would be grating from anyone but it is particularly irritating from the US.

This is a country that committed genocide against its indigenous population, enslaved black people, fought a civil war to avoid freeing them, secured superpower status by its late entry into two world wars, sponsored murder and tyranny in some of the poorest countries on earth, and has enjoyed the outrageous benefits of its own global order and world reserve currency. It has vast natural resources and a level of material wealth which is without precedent in the history of man. And what has it done with it? Banked it, enjoyed it, and now complained about what a hard time it’s having.

When Trump imposed his Liberation Day tariffs he took time out to complain about how unfair Vietnam had been to the US. Vietnam, for god sake. I might just keep writing it again and again. Vietnam. Fucking Vietnam. Is there a better example of the state of complete moral myopia which the nation has descended to?

It felt for a while, when I was growing up, that America might occasionally feel a bit of guilt over what it did in Vietnam. We had all those years watching films about the war, some of them among the greatest films of the 20th Century.

But perhaps those films told us something else. Apocalypse Now, Full Metal Jacket, The Deer Hunter. I love many of these films, but none of them were about what happened to the Vietnamese. They were about how massacring Vietnamese people was really difficult for young American men and hurt them very much. There was no real moment of introspection, except that which was pertinent to its own countrymen. And that is how you come to this orange crybaby saying how mean the Vietnamese are to America because the Americans want to buy their stuff.

There’s a better part to the American personality, but you wouldn’t want to rely on it. The horrible reality, and it is one which we shouldn’t shy away from out of mere politeness, is that this is the anniversary which America deserves. It is corrupt, tawdry, embarrassing, a failure. It perfectly encapsulates this moment in the country’s history.