Threat Assessment
Donald Trump is in his lame duck term, or so history informs us. But his tenure thus far has been anything but anodyne as he tears apart the world order, destroys the domestic economy and seeks to line his pockets before exiting stage right. In fact, this might have been the most consequential start to a second term in modern history, considering the long-term implications of his actions. A new global order. The end of dollar dominance. The eradication of the rule of law. Complete and total immunity now and in perpetuity.
Looking ahead, what I’m about to suggest is unscientific. It’s a gut check. For all of the madness surrounding this White House, these past few days have been quiet. For any other administration, this wouldn’t be the case. But for Trump, it’s quiet.
It may not feel that way to most. The Epstein files once again dominate the headlines as media outlets and independent journalists sift through the torrent of newly released documents. We will be awash in lurid details about the lives of disgusting and powerful men and marvel at their depravity. The Melania documentary, the equivalent of Susan Alexander Kane’s operatic debut, is now fodder for late night television. There’s Tom Homan’s reassignment to Minnesota amidst the ongoing protests and the Democrat’s weak attempt to reign in DHS. All things happening in Trump’s orbit but not directly because of him.
I actually think this is the calm before the storm.
There’s a classic literary trope of the predator closing in on its prey, the detective and the criminal, agent and serial killer; melding to become flip sides of the same coin, where they begin to think alike. Michael Mann has built an entire filmography around this concept from Manhunter to Heat. I’m beginning to feel like one of these characters and my Spidey senses are tingling. I feel like I can spot his next move.
Until recently, unpredictability had been his superpower. Now, his predictable unpredictability is a tell rather than a secret weapon. And if that’s the case, it feels as though his magnum opus might be near. Mind you I don’t credit him with the capacity to plan for such events, just the ability to see the endgame and have the willingness to go along with whatever works in service of it. Steve Bannon, Russell Vought and Stephen Miran are the ones with the detailed plans and Trump is the figure with the authority, gravitas and lack of conscience to see them through.
So if we think about his end game then the next steps and timing of them become more predictable, right? We know this much: His goal is absolute power. Maybe not in the obvious sense of becoming president for life, but in securing the trappings of it. The ability to manipulate the agenda and maneuver the pieces, to rule in absentia if not from the throne directly. And to be unfathomably wealthy. Our institutions are supposed to be strong enough to curtail these authoritarian tendencies. But institutions are not made of granite and stone, they’re made of rules and regulations. They are not forces of nature that are inevitable, they are of human design and therefore fallible. What has been done can be undone.
Our entire UNFTR canon has been devoted to exploring the unwinding of institutions, the untying of knots. Revealing the multigenerational effort on the part of a psychotic libertarian cabal that believes their white nationalist cause to be a righteous one. They use words like “natural law” and “free markets” as an excuse to tear down monuments to democracy from higher education to social welfare. They believe, as Madison did, that our institutions should protect the opulent minority from the tyranny of the masses. Unlike Madison who believed that the institutions could be rigged to favor the elite while offering pablum to the masses in the form of one person, one vote—or white man, one vote—these men dropped the pretense of paternalism long ago. They simply want power.
But absolute power cannot be grabbed in a functioning system. It can only be seized in a vacuum. These kinds of power vacuums come about during system failures that lead to a level of economic precarity and personal security concerns that outweigh rational behavior. The first year of this term has been all about testing the limits of executive power, and so far they haven’t found them. The bombing of Iran came and went without recrimination. And so we took Caracas and again, nothing. Some pundits think that Trump chickened out when Europe put up a united front against us taking Greenland, but that was really a response to the bond market, the only cooling mechanism we have left.
The tariff regime was yet another test. Destroying Fed independence. Pushing for a private cryptocurrency regime. Currency market interventions. Calculated tests to find the weak points in our monetary system. All designed by Stephen Miran and his so-called Mar-a-Lago Accords.
DOGE and mass federal employee layoffs were designed to test Congressional authority. Impoundment, made illegal after Nixon, was tested in practice when Trump clawed back Biden-era appropriations. Something the courts allowed. Defunding or functionally dismantling whole agencies. All designed by Russell Vought.
Calling election integrity into question. Storming the Capitol. Seizing ballots in Georgia and generally sowing doubt in the electorate. Cozying up to dictators, threatening the “globalists” of the existing world order and insisting that Trump will indeed remain in power after this term. Steve Bannon’s playbook.
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All three men are running the playbooks responsible for what we see from this administration.
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All three men share a deeply held belief that there should be no checks on executive authority.
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Trump needs to stay healthy and in power just long enough to execute the long game. But time isn’t on their side, so this is the pivotal year.
If we take emotion out of the mix and allow ourselves to think like the killers, the order of things becomes clear. The Democratic Party has played its hand. They have one move remaining—to run the table at the midterms. The assumption is that our institutions will hold until then, elections will go off as planned and Congress can finally intervene to slow the administration.
Knowing this, if you’re the killer, what would you do?
First you would want to nail down your currency play. And this is where crypto comes back into focus.
The Clarity Act hit a bump, but they’re reconvening and driving toward sidelining the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in favor of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) to regulate crypto. The holdout there is the idea of rewards, something the banks have resisted and it’s why the Clarity Act stalled. A reward is a fancy way of saying interest, which is why the banking industry held it up. A crypto industry regulated by the chronically underfunded and understaffed CFTC is one thing. The same industry with the ability to offer rewards, i.e. interest on deposits, makes it a de facto shadow banking system.
The last piece of legislation, the anti Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) bill, would prohibit the Federal Reserve from issuing a digital currency outside of the wholesale market. This could massively boost the market for stablecoins as a mechanism to purchase U.S. treasury notes.
This is the business the Trump family is in now. In theory, the executive branch could strongly suggest (direct) the CFTC to clear certain stablecoins for treasury purchases, giving the revenue generating mechanism of the Fed to private stablecoin issuers like the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial—which is back in the news after it was revealed that they secretly sold a $500 million stake to an investment firm in the UAE on the eve of Trump’s second inauguration.
This story isn’t going away.
You would also want to destroy Fed independence to the greatest extent possible and reorganize the role and responsibility of the Federal Reserve. Stephen Miran wrote this plan in great detail when he was part of the Manhattan Institute. To do so you would need a loyalist in charge of the Fed and a Congress willing to rewrite legislation to support this vision to grant emergency power authority for rates and money printing under the executive branch. Miran’s words, not mine. Kevin Warsh, the new nominee to the Fed, has been calling for a complete “regime change” at the Fed for years.
And now for the “break glass in case of emergency” part of their plan.
Because part of the so-called Mar-a-Lago Accords is to devalue the U.S. dollar through tariffs while shrinking the Fed’s balance sheet to force a new global monetary order, they know that inflation is coming with a vengeance this year. The Producer Price Index (PPI) numbers bear this out already as producers can no longer absorb the cost of tariffs and are beginning to finally pass them along. This will break the spirit of the American people and drive people into the streets more than the already palpable anger over Trump’s masked militia murdering Americans in cold blood.
Imagine a summer with rising inflation and unemployment on top of how we’re already feeling? A total tinderbox. That leaves them with more options, not less.
For example they could just start a war. Right now, with the positioning of our fleets, we’re signaling a takeover of Cuba or an armed strike on Iran. Maybe both. According to Drop Site, their sources indicate the latter plan might be imminent. There are several problems with this distraction technique, however. One is that it also adds to inflation by pressuring oil prices. Second, if no neighboring countries take the bait and try to stop us then they’ll be as short-lived as the stunning overthrow of Venezuela. The third option is impossible to predict and therefore difficult to weigh our exposure. What if someone retaliates? Or it causes Russia to increase pressure in Ukraine or gives the green light to China to move on Taiwan? Messy and unpredictable.
This might be more palatable to the American people than the domestic option which would be to foment more resistance and protest at home. More crackdowns by ICE. Violent responses to economic protests in the summer heat when more people are more inclined to take to the streets. Basically large scale uprisings that provide cover for martial law. This belongs partly to Bannon and partly to Vought.
These intentional sparks, whether here or abroad, could thrust the United States into complete and utter chaos. Inflation. Unemployment. Military units patrolling the streets. Regime changes and war theaters breaking out across the globe. This is the classic authoritarian “strategy of tension” where the state deliberately foments chaos to justify repression. This is pure Bannon.
An understanding of the circumstances they have created and the options available to them reveal the danger we face through resistance if we continue to see things through the prism we’ve become accustomed to. Our natural response to an economic crisis, state sponsored domestic violence and illegal foreign interventions would be to take to the streets. But what if that’s exactly the response they intend to elicit in order to clamp down on dissent and declare martial law?
Another response is to rebel at the ballot box. But what if Congressional authority has been ceded to the executive by this time, especially knowing the president has been inoculated by the Supreme Court’s decision to grant full presidential immunity? By dragging their feet in Trump’s first term and failing to prosecute him in a timely manner under Biden, the Democratic Party—thinking it had time and history on its side—might have lost the opportunity forever.
Wait another year, and it might not matter. Take to the streets and they might violently respond and further harm American citizens, not just with impunity but with the support of state mouthpieces like Fox News, the Wall Street Journal and other outlets who do the bidding of the administration.
Gaming this out and we’re left with the realization that we are boxed in. The question isn’t whether they won or not. They did. The question is whether they won the battle or the war.
There is an answer. It’s as far fetched as the notion of martial law and suspension of elections is to most of us. But there is indeed an answer. Before I get there, let’s be clear on what the culmination of the opposition vision looks like.
We can operate under a quasi-democratic, quasi-authoritarian rule with an expanded executive. And much of our daily life would look the same if you’re part of the mechanisms of civil society and the economy that contribute to the areas that interest them. We can exist with extreme poverty and an economy that services the elite. We can maintain a massive economic presence through the auspices of military force and transition to a more domineering version of what Russia has become.
We can go along to get along and even hold elections that are practically meaningless as in the case of autocratic regimes that allow regional elections and bureaucratic power brokers like Turkey.
In fact, our monetary base is so expansive and our corporations are so dominant that we can manage to run a functional quasi-capitalist autocracy similar to China.
There are other models out there.
The model we chose to ignore was the one that Brazil followed when its justice system imprisoned Jair Bolsonaro for attempting to overthrow the government. How it leaned into cooperative trade agreements and chose to balance environmental conservation with corporate interests. We had the chance to do that and have it matter to the rest of the world, but conservative democrats decided to tank that agenda and Biden’s justice department failed to meet the moment. So here we are.
So what is the option to stem the tide of authoritarianism and the very obvious sequence of events that the men who control Trump are planning? The only one that has worked in the post-Enlightenment era of nation states; the first Russian Revolution in 1905 that limited the powers of the tsar. A worker revolt. The Grenelle Agreements in 1968 France. A worker revolt. The Velvet Revolution of 1989 in Czechoslovakia. A worker revolt. Widespread and at times revolutionary change that came about as the result of a general strike.
They were all imperfect and incomplete. Some were violently repressed by the state. But they broke the spirit of the authoritarian rule and restored a semblance of power to the working class. I hate to specifically namecheck a creator in the midst of a general opus like this but Scott Galloway recently introduced the concept of a mass action to “resist and unsubscribe” for a full month to hit the tech giants in the pocketbook. And I wanted to throw my laptop off the building and myself along with it when I read it.
Talk about a failure of imagination. The ultimate armchair resistance masquerading as mass action. We should be using the tools of the corporate state to organize, not cancelling subscriptions for a month to send a message. Evidence of this is in the disclaimer on the hastily organized website:
“Hey, we’d boycott Instagram too if we could, but we need it to get this message to you.”
My eyes rolled so far back in my head when I read this I was temporarily blinded.
1968 France is likely the closest approximation to what’s necessary to stop this administration in its tracks. What started as a student protest over Vietnam and sexual freedom quickly morphed into a widespread general strike with upwards of 10 million French citizens bringing the economy to a grinding halt. France is no stranger to upheaval and powerful labor movements and it retains the traditions of socialist agitators such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in a way that other nations no longer remember.
People like Galloway are circling the problem and prescribing aspirin for cancer. We need to introduce the concept of a general strike where the wheels of commerce fall off the truck. Temporarily cancelling subscriptions to Amazon Prime and Netflix is a scratch on the bumper of an 18 wheeler, a move that wouldn’t even warrant a footnote in their earnings call. A widespread, sustained labor action hurts everyone, but it shocks the system and clears the way for two important steps. The first is to get the ruling class to turn on itself. Get the Jamie Dimons, Warren Buffets and Mary Barras of the traditional elite to put an end to the techno-bro reign of terror under Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
An alliance of convenience between the traditional corporate class and the working class is a necessary step to thwart the intentions of the crypto-elite and technofeudalists who are driving this new agenda. It’s in this scrum that the next vital but unpredictable step comes to life. We need a hero. Yes, I’m holding out for a hero.
It’s only when a regime is off balance that it fails to properly assess the real threat. An economic and political populist who captures the imagination of working people. Someone who becomes inevitable in political circles and the avatar of change. Throughout American history these figures have been unsuccessful in taking the top spot because the corporate class finds its footing quickly in turbulent times. But it knows how to make deals and capitulate on key issues to reorder affairs. Figures like Eugene Debs, Martin Luther King Jr. or Bernie Sanders introduce what’s possible and force the pendulum to swing back to center. Debs gained prominence in the post-industrial era when labor was crushed at the hands of the Pinkertons. Without Debs, there is no Teddy Roosevelt. Martin Luther King Jr. rose above the Civil Rights riots to put a face to change and cleared the way for JFK and LBJ. Bernie rose to fame during the Occupy movement and ironically cleared the way for Donald Trump, because the Democrats failed to feel the ground shifting beneath them.
But this position is still available. Bernie is now an OG of the movement. An elder statesman. And he has allies and acolytes in the establishment. When he began his career in Congress he was virtually alone, but now there are scores of progressives at the ready, and even more blow-with-the-wind Democrats who would begrudgingly align themselves with a new progressive ground movement.
I’m under no illusion that this Mamdani-like figure, born in the U.S. and with all the necessary credentials, would ever be allowed to be the next president. But they would have the ability to move us back to center and allow Fabian-style progressives in statehouses and Congress to begin the long and difficult process of pulling it further to the left. Medicare for All. A roof over every head. Increased minimum wage. Powerful bureaucratic policies that benefit the masses and give us a fighting chance to reclaim our democracy and put an end to Trump’s destructive reign.
