Musk and Trump are busy trying to destroy the civil service. Musk has installed 20 something "protegees" of Peter Thiel in OPM and the Treasury, all while firing career employees who are attemptingto do their jobs of protecting sensitive financial and personnel information, so EXCUSE ME if I don'tget all dewy eyed over your pollyanna-ish take that maybe Donnie's a far-sighted foreign policy maven.
And, Beattie's white supremacist and misogynistic comments are one bridge too far. But sure, throw American women and minorities under the bus.
Think of how well these “career employees” have been doing in managing the war on Gaza, or our relationship with Pakistan. What makes you think the people in charge of your tax info (or whatever else) are doing a better job?
Personally, I’ll take the whiz kid who won a global competition to decipher burnt scrolls from ancient Pompeii using AI, now working at DOGE with Musk to decipher government spending. Back in the days of the New Deal, all our best and brightest went to work in the FDR administration, to accomplish great things like the electrification of Tennessee. We could have that, again.
There's a lot of distance between FDR and Trump. When it comes to the ultra-rich, FDR said "I welcome their hatred." Trump gave them the best seats in the House for his inauguration. The ultra rich tried to run a coup against FDR and Trump is the guy running the coup. There's lots that need fixing but I wouldn't hold my breath expecting these creatures to fix any of it.
I don't think you know what the word "coup" means. Did FDR make some drastic changes in a time of great suffering and turmoil? Yes. He also got elected four times which means the people approved what he was doing. Yarvin doesn't believe in elections. I understand the idea that a highly intelligent person should be fully in charge without having to go through the rigmarole of an election. I thought I should be king of the world.. when I was 10!
Well, we can call the emerging foreign policy by different names -- Bertrand's "end of the American empire," Trump's "America First," Bannon's "nationalist populism" (in a convo with Douthat of NYT)... and the old-fashioned term of "isolationist" foreign policy.
What seems to be emerging from the rapid and seemingly chaotic moves of the Trump regime is the following:
a) there's no real taste for war, or spending American tax dollars on war;
b) the tariffs are a typical Trump business-negotiating ploy, and he'll get something out of it, and give some as necessary;
c) there's an acceptance of a multipolar world -- to replace the neocon vision of hegemony -- as articulated by Marco Rubio; and lastly
d) all of the above has the Democrats back on their heels, completely discombobulated and hapless.
Don't have much to say other than I am so grateful for your work, Ryan. Helps us remember we're not crazy, we're not confused... We're just really paying actual attention.
Except for PEPFAR and a few other programs that are actually doing some good, I can’t wait to see USAID and its subversive buddy The National Endowment for Democracy dismantled along with the CIA. It’s almost mind-blowing that over 50 years after the movie State of Siege was released, US imperialism, hegemony and subversion have gotten infinitely worse.
Trump hasn’t done anything yet to gift him with either ridicule or praise. It’s a lot of theatre to keep the public distracted because no one wants to face the truth. The national debt and the poor economy is coming for us.
I can easily give you hundreds of things T and his total lack of character has done to invite ridicule and little to praise. But, finally as Juliana pointed out we are reading the substacks and excellent journalism (Ryan) trying to figure out what is going on now and the way forward beyond the neocons. Can we fix what gave us the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and invariably supporting the wrong sides in South and Central America. The cost was likely 15 trillion dollars (maybe half of the national debt) and millions of lives. It has resulted in an overblown military budget, and yes, a huge national debt as a result (Thank you GlobalChief). When was the last real discussion of the military budget beyond the Ukraine and Israel dictating our foreign policy that basically has resolved nothing long term and utterly destroyed Palestine and now the West Bank. Open discussions like this are the key foundations of a democracy.
I'm not sure about any of this, Ryan. The human mind always struggles to find order in chaos and chaos is Trump's specialty. The energy around these people is very dark so I think you're right about the "monsters" part. This sounds a bit like "Yes, he had some , ummm, "issues" but at least Mr Hitler gave us the Volkswagen Beetle. It's hard to believe there's going to be any reduction in hegemony as I sit here in Canada after Trump has postponed his tariffs but still says he wants to conquer us.
Here's another take: both Trump and Musk
are seriously mentally ill. Trump is the greatest con man who's ever lived and the tariffs are a stock market play where his buddies shorted the market, he threatens the tariffs, the market tanks like it did today, they make a fortune and buy back in low making another fortune.
Marco Rubio is no peacenik and Trump doesn't give a shit about fentanyl. It's a pain killer and why are so many Americans in pain? If he cared about the people he would be doing something for the middle class instead of hoping that tariff revenue will be able to cover his tax cuts for the rich.
You're also missing that this is straight out of Project 2025. From chapter 9: "The Biden Administration has deformed the agency (USAID) by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism."
"CONCLUSION
The next conservative Administration will have a unique opportunity to realign U.S. foreign assistance with American national interests and the principles of good governance and more accurately reflect the U.S. taxpayer’s unmatched charitable desire to help those in need. It can build on a strong baseline of conservative reforms undertaken by the Trump Administration to counter Communist China’s strategy of world domination. However, this will require that bold steps are taken on Day One to undo the gross misuse of foreign aid by the current Administration to promote a radical ideology that is politically divisive at home and harms our global standing."
I think we're headed for a lot of monsters and very few Volkswagens.
In October last year, Drop Site News published an essay by Sam Butler which outlined the "Dark Enlightenment" philosophy behind Musk's embrace of Trump. Ryan has completely ignored all of that context in his portrait of Trump 2.0. There is nothing anti-imperialist in what Musk and Trump are doing. They are attempting to destroy the last vestiges of popular sovereignty that exist in the state and replace it with a government owned by (wealthy) shareholders. As Butler writes at the end of his essay, quoting from Nick Land's playbook of how to implement just such a transformation:
"If anyone were in position to see that “the entire social landscape of political [lobbying] is exactly mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares,” it would be person in charge of “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.”"
Musk's DOGE is the first step, mapping the entire social landscape of political lobbying, and his dismantling of USAID is the second, converting the privileges accessed through such lobbying into fungible shares. The fact that commentators like Ryan, Greenwald and Taibbi could confuse this with anti-imperialism, and worse, obfuscate on behalf of these elites as they destroy the last vestiges of democracy, shows the extent to which the populist rhetoric of libertarianism has poisoned their brains.
The current plutocratic dissolving of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, into the State Department under arch plutocrats Trump, Musk, and Rubio is a money grab and a power grab and a de-regulation. The American Empire will continue to exist, but it will be increasingly de-regulated. In practice this means swapping out public/state government for private/plutocrat government. Private/plutocrat government will get bigger, public/state government will get smaller. This is all about increasing power and control and ownership of private/plutocratic real estate and resources, banking and money, technology and law... And decreasing public/state ownership, power, and control of these and other pillars of civilization. De-regulating Empire means even more direct control of the world by the plutocracy.
Nope, I think they are up to something far more sinister. They want to extend empire to the north and to the south for the resources to be had there as we go further into climate catastrophe. And maybe they think tariffs would weaken those countries enough that they would just roll over if invaded at a later date. I want U.S. empire to end just as much as the rest of y'all but this isn't it.
I'm very sceptical of any claims that USAID for HIV, as well as no doubt dishing out vaccines for people, including kids of course, in Africa is an unalloyed good thing, for those people at least.
No mention of BRICS? Seems to me BRICS countries have a work-around for $USD, SWIFT and sanctions, as well as the other regime-changing US weapon called IMF. It might be more important than real estate deals for Saudi to NOT join BRICS like so many others. Gaza has made BRICS look good in terms of the moral high ground too eg China hosting a political forum for Palestinian orgs whilst the Empire sends more bombs.
I like your analysis but every time you quote Musk’s words thinking people will see how ridiculous they are, you are actually amplifying them as more people see them when you repeat them. Progressives unintentionally amplify the Right’s words all the time.
The strategy of “maybe if we censor the Right hard enough people won’t support them anymore” decisively failed. (See: banning Trump from social media in 2021, how did that one work out for you all?)
Musk and Trump are busy trying to destroy the civil service. Musk has installed 20 something "protegees" of Peter Thiel in OPM and the Treasury, all while firing career employees who are attemptingto do their jobs of protecting sensitive financial and personnel information, so EXCUSE ME if I don'tget all dewy eyed over your pollyanna-ish take that maybe Donnie's a far-sighted foreign policy maven.
And, Beattie's white supremacist and misogynistic comments are one bridge too far. But sure, throw American women and minorities under the bus.
.
Think of how well these “career employees” have been doing in managing the war on Gaza, or our relationship with Pakistan. What makes you think the people in charge of your tax info (or whatever else) are doing a better job?
Personally, I’ll take the whiz kid who won a global competition to decipher burnt scrolls from ancient Pompeii using AI, now working at DOGE with Musk to decipher government spending. Back in the days of the New Deal, all our best and brightest went to work in the FDR administration, to accomplish great things like the electrification of Tennessee. We could have that, again.
There's a lot of distance between FDR and Trump. When it comes to the ultra-rich, FDR said "I welcome their hatred." Trump gave them the best seats in the House for his inauguration. The ultra rich tried to run a coup against FDR and Trump is the guy running the coup. There's lots that need fixing but I wouldn't hold my breath expecting these creatures to fix any of it.
FDR totally ran a coup, fundamentally changed the nature of our government.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/18/magazine/curtis-yarvin-interview.html
I don't think you know what the word "coup" means. Did FDR make some drastic changes in a time of great suffering and turmoil? Yes. He also got elected four times which means the people approved what he was doing. Yarvin doesn't believe in elections. I understand the idea that a highly intelligent person should be fully in charge without having to go through the rigmarole of an election. I thought I should be king of the world.. when I was 10!
Well, we can call the emerging foreign policy by different names -- Bertrand's "end of the American empire," Trump's "America First," Bannon's "nationalist populism" (in a convo with Douthat of NYT)... and the old-fashioned term of "isolationist" foreign policy.
What seems to be emerging from the rapid and seemingly chaotic moves of the Trump regime is the following:
a) there's no real taste for war, or spending American tax dollars on war;
b) the tariffs are a typical Trump business-negotiating ploy, and he'll get something out of it, and give some as necessary;
c) there's an acceptance of a multipolar world -- to replace the neocon vision of hegemony -- as articulated by Marco Rubio; and lastly
d) all of the above has the Democrats back on their heels, completely discombobulated and hapless.
Don't have much to say other than I am so grateful for your work, Ryan. Helps us remember we're not crazy, we're not confused... We're just really paying actual attention.
Except for PEPFAR and a few other programs that are actually doing some good, I can’t wait to see USAID and its subversive buddy The National Endowment for Democracy dismantled along with the CIA. It’s almost mind-blowing that over 50 years after the movie State of Siege was released, US imperialism, hegemony and subversion have gotten infinitely worse.
Trump hasn’t done anything yet to gift him with either ridicule or praise. It’s a lot of theatre to keep the public distracted because no one wants to face the truth. The national debt and the poor economy is coming for us.
I can easily give you hundreds of things T and his total lack of character has done to invite ridicule and little to praise. But, finally as Juliana pointed out we are reading the substacks and excellent journalism (Ryan) trying to figure out what is going on now and the way forward beyond the neocons. Can we fix what gave us the Korean, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and invariably supporting the wrong sides in South and Central America. The cost was likely 15 trillion dollars (maybe half of the national debt) and millions of lives. It has resulted in an overblown military budget, and yes, a huge national debt as a result (Thank you GlobalChief). When was the last real discussion of the military budget beyond the Ukraine and Israel dictating our foreign policy that basically has resolved nothing long term and utterly destroyed Palestine and now the West Bank. Open discussions like this are the key foundations of a democracy.
Apparently, I am getting more or less exactly what I voted for. I hear that is pretty rare, so I’m quite happy about it.
I'm not sure about any of this, Ryan. The human mind always struggles to find order in chaos and chaos is Trump's specialty. The energy around these people is very dark so I think you're right about the "monsters" part. This sounds a bit like "Yes, he had some , ummm, "issues" but at least Mr Hitler gave us the Volkswagen Beetle. It's hard to believe there's going to be any reduction in hegemony as I sit here in Canada after Trump has postponed his tariffs but still says he wants to conquer us.
Here's another take: both Trump and Musk
are seriously mentally ill. Trump is the greatest con man who's ever lived and the tariffs are a stock market play where his buddies shorted the market, he threatens the tariffs, the market tanks like it did today, they make a fortune and buy back in low making another fortune.
Marco Rubio is no peacenik and Trump doesn't give a shit about fentanyl. It's a pain killer and why are so many Americans in pain? If he cared about the people he would be doing something for the middle class instead of hoping that tariff revenue will be able to cover his tax cuts for the rich.
You're also missing that this is straight out of Project 2025. From chapter 9: "The Biden Administration has deformed the agency (USAID) by treating it as a global platform to pursue overseas a divisive political and cultural agenda that promotes abortion, climate extremism, gender radicalism, and interventions against perceived systemic racism."
"CONCLUSION
The next conservative Administration will have a unique opportunity to realign U.S. foreign assistance with American national interests and the principles of good governance and more accurately reflect the U.S. taxpayer’s unmatched charitable desire to help those in need. It can build on a strong baseline of conservative reforms undertaken by the Trump Administration to counter Communist China’s strategy of world domination. However, this will require that bold steps are taken on Day One to undo the gross misuse of foreign aid by the current Administration to promote a radical ideology that is politically divisive at home and harms our global standing."
I think we're headed for a lot of monsters and very few Volkswagens.
I too smell a Rat.
In October last year, Drop Site News published an essay by Sam Butler which outlined the "Dark Enlightenment" philosophy behind Musk's embrace of Trump. Ryan has completely ignored all of that context in his portrait of Trump 2.0. There is nothing anti-imperialist in what Musk and Trump are doing. They are attempting to destroy the last vestiges of popular sovereignty that exist in the state and replace it with a government owned by (wealthy) shareholders. As Butler writes at the end of his essay, quoting from Nick Land's playbook of how to implement just such a transformation:
"If anyone were in position to see that “the entire social landscape of political [lobbying] is exactly mapped, and the administrative, legislative, judicial, media, and academic privileges accessed by such bribes are converted into fungible shares,” it would be person in charge of “a complete financial and performance audit of the entire federal government.”"
Musk's DOGE is the first step, mapping the entire social landscape of political lobbying, and his dismantling of USAID is the second, converting the privileges accessed through such lobbying into fungible shares. The fact that commentators like Ryan, Greenwald and Taibbi could confuse this with anti-imperialism, and worse, obfuscate on behalf of these elites as they destroy the last vestiges of democracy, shows the extent to which the populist rhetoric of libertarianism has poisoned their brains.
The current plutocratic dissolving of USAID, the United States Agency for International Development, into the State Department under arch plutocrats Trump, Musk, and Rubio is a money grab and a power grab and a de-regulation. The American Empire will continue to exist, but it will be increasingly de-regulated. In practice this means swapping out public/state government for private/plutocrat government. Private/plutocrat government will get bigger, public/state government will get smaller. This is all about increasing power and control and ownership of private/plutocratic real estate and resources, banking and money, technology and law... And decreasing public/state ownership, power, and control of these and other pillars of civilization. De-regulating Empire means even more direct control of the world by the plutocracy.
Nope, I think they are up to something far more sinister. They want to extend empire to the north and to the south for the resources to be had there as we go further into climate catastrophe. And maybe they think tariffs would weaken those countries enough that they would just roll over if invaded at a later date. I want U.S. empire to end just as much as the rest of y'all but this isn't it.
Thank you for this post! Yes, Trump is trying to unwind the entire world order, and dissolve sovereignty and other currencies all over the world. You can read his playbook, right here: https://kathleenmccroskey.substack.com/p/read-trumps-playbook-right-here
We have a loose cannon in charge of the world now.
NO.
I'm very sceptical of any claims that USAID for HIV, as well as no doubt dishing out vaccines for people, including kids of course, in Africa is an unalloyed good thing, for those people at least.
No mention of BRICS? Seems to me BRICS countries have a work-around for $USD, SWIFT and sanctions, as well as the other regime-changing US weapon called IMF. It might be more important than real estate deals for Saudi to NOT join BRICS like so many others. Gaza has made BRICS look good in terms of the moral high ground too eg China hosting a political forum for Palestinian orgs whilst the Empire sends more bombs.
Excellent piece Ryan!
I like your analysis but every time you quote Musk’s words thinking people will see how ridiculous they are, you are actually amplifying them as more people see them when you repeat them. Progressives unintentionally amplify the Right’s words all the time.
The strategy of “maybe if we censor the Right hard enough people won’t support them anymore” decisively failed. (See: banning Trump from social media in 2021, how did that one work out for you all?)