Donald Trump declared a triumphalist vision and a golden age for the United States this week. Yet, had it been an autopsy, the Democratic side of the chamber presented like a giant deflated left lung with just a touch of pink.
Trump has known for many years that the United States is not healthy, nor on a healthy track. “America is Back!” is aspirational, but it takes more than a good slogan to coax, push, and inspire an over-stressed, tired, broke-ass nation to peace and prosperity.
With his New York bluntness occasionally revealing a soft heart, Trump makes me think of Dr. Ron Paul – the kindest and wisest of men, with his fist cheerfully raised at the deep state for the past 50 years. Trump’s aim – to align America’s actions and principles with fairness, prosperity and peace – is Paulian. Both men share an energetic and uncontrived political radicalism in support of this vision. I don’t know if God saved Trump from a deep state bullet for a higher purpose in 2025, as he has mentioned. I do know that the limited government mantra that Ron Paul revived over 40 years ago, from the old anti-war Right, is the reason we have a populist President today, who wants to end wars, shrink the bureaucracy, and abandon serfdom to the state.
Planned Chaos
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Trump’s foreign policy message to Congress was mainly about tariffs, and an incipient peace in Ukraine. Trump understands the existent Russian victory, he wants organic elections in Ukraine, and the end of the Zelensky era and NATO expansion. Trump’s approach is pragmatic, realistic, popular – and radical only because it simultaneously breaks up the revenue stream, the narrative, and the credibility of the corrupt oligarchies of Europe and America.
Trump mentioned another Republican president, economic protectionist and territorial expansionist William McKinley, first elected in 1896. Trump admires McKinley, and McKinley’s role in the 1896 Republican Party resurgence. Thomas DiLorenzo recently observed, “…the Republican party by that time stood for imperialism, emboldened by its conquest of the South and its campaign of genocide against the Plains Indians from 1865-1890.” McKinley, incidentally, was also responsible for the 1900 Gold Standard Act, making all issued paper dollars redeemable in gold, an act abrogated by FDR in 1933.
It is not hard to see Trump as more McKinley, and less Paul. Yet, despite his affection for tariffs and mercantilism, Trump seems to have simultaneously and schizophrenically internalized the opposing idea that “if goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.”
Trump’s explanation of his rare earth deal with Ukraine is as much Bastiat as it is crony imperialist McKinley. McKinley learned economics “as an Army supply officer in Lincoln’s army.” Trump learned economics from his successful father, and the rough and tumble New York real estate and construction world. McKinley launched troops to take Hawaii, to finish off the Plains Indians, and subdue the Philippines; Trump believes “if we are economically in Ukraine, it is more a deterrent of Russian or NATO violence [than a standing army would ever be].” To be fair, Trump’s “shared investment” in Ukrainian “rare earths” after a 2014 US-fomented coup and civil war reeks of American hypocrisy, disaster state-capitalism, and old style imperialism.
And yet, Trump implied he was late to Congress on Wednesday because he was waiting for confirmation that a Blackrock-led consortium had purchased two ports on both sides of the Panama Canal. Like it or not, Trump sees an American investment presence – American “ownership” as a healthy substitute for western armies, whether in Ukraine, in Panama, in Greenland, or in Gaza. He sees American “ownership” as a way to reduce military expenditures structurally and substantially, while enriching all sides.
We can – because of Trump – visualize a lasting peace in a neutral Ukraine. We can imagine a more American-friendly Panama Canal. We can chuckle nervously with Vance and Johnson about the 56,000 mostly Native Inuits in Greenland and how we will make them “very safe and very rich.” However, most Trump observers remain shocked at his proposal for Gaza, which amounts to funding and assisting Israel’s bipartisan and bloody conclusion of decades of slow genocide in Gaza.
Over two million Palestinians were crowded into the Gaza Strip during previous Israeli wars and by habitual Zionist expansion, in repeated spasmodic bouts of ethnic cleansing since 1948. In the past seventeen months, over 45,000 Gazans killed by the IDF were officially identified and buried. Gazan corpses decomposing under collapsed buildings, unreachable and unidentifiable, sometimes being eaten by dogs and cats, or frozen to death, or dying for lack of medical care, pushes the death toll to closer to 150,000 or more. Of course, Trump would never consider ethnic cleansing the 56,000 native men, women and children who live on top of the Greenland’s minerals, fresh water, strategic lines of communication and passage, and energy reserves.
Trump’s “Gaza without Gazans” plan was countered by Egypt. To be funded by Israel’s Arab neighbors, the Egyptian plan includes Gazans remaining on their land, as part of a necessary and committed workforce to rebuild their wasted hospitals, schools, universities, factories, parks, and playgrounds. Trump rejected this plan within hours of hearing about it. In shocking contrast to open claims of national interest made in the Greenland offer, Israel and the US are silent about what they want in Gaza: full ownership of Gaza’s offshore gas deposits, its strategic location, and a “final solution” for Palestinian physical and moral resistance to the Zionist project.
9 Presidents Who Screw...
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Like every US president since 1963, President Trump is a shill for Israel’s government. Trump’s biggest donors, and his appointments, his musings of owning Gaza, and his actions bear this out.
William McKinley was not a particularly smart man. He was shaped by his experience in the Union Army during and after the Civil War, and by a political career beholden to the crony capitalists of his day. Trump has been shaped by different forces, and the result of his life experience has blinded him to Zionism’s excessive and never-ending financial, military and moral cost to America. Trump likes to talk about getting what we pay for with NATO, in Ukraine, of fair trade and shared prosperity. As we saw in his address to Congress, and in every one of his rallies, Trump knows many details about innocent people who have had terrible crimes committed against them, and he seeks justice – with one massive exception.
A“shill” endorses a product in public forums with the pretense of sincerity, when in fact he is being paid for his services.” Is Israel a tiny bit concerned about Trump’s second term sincerity, given where the rest if his policies seem to be heading? Is this why, despite getting everything AIPAC has demanded, including bans on pro-Palestinian assemblies and speech on college campuses, Netanyahu’s cabinet doesn’t seem particularly grateful, or elated with the White House? Is this why AIPAC and its reliable proxies like Tom Cotton in the Senate are panicked about the upcoming confirmation of Ridge Colby? Is why the we cannot watch the BBC documentary “Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone” or find a showing of last week’s Oscar winner “No Other Land?”
Present-day Israeli leadership will never allow Trump to own Gaza, nor to define and dictate the strategic pace of their limitless regional land grabs. They expect the US President hand over hundreds of billions in war support, and to endorse all of Israel’s crimes sincerely, without pretense, exactly as he was paid to do. If not corrected, Trump’s “Israel exception” will completely destroy his much touted “Golden Age” legacy, and bury America with it.
