Donald Trump unilateraly declared a cruel World War in Iran causing international chaos without any definable purpose.

'This excellent essay published in the New York Review of Books by Fintan O'Toole is a brilliant review about how Donald Trump unilaterally decided to put Americans into another unwinnable and unjustified Middle East war.  It is like Mr. O'Toole is able to sit inside of Donald Trump's demented unconsciousness.  A brutal review about the horrible decisions (like a "crazy historical pageant") made by past administrations reminds us about how this Trump World War in Iran is doomed to fail. Nevertheless, even in failure, Israel is achieving the goal to disable its enemies while the United States is paying the bills, with U.S. military blood, to fund an unwinnable war. 

Signifying Absolutely Nothing

Mr. O'Toole writes:  In Donald Trump’s World War against Iran, everything is meta except the bombs. At the point of impact, where buildings shatter and flesh is shredded, the war inhabits the material world of awful human consequences. But, up to that point, as it exists in Trump’s mind, it seems to be a crazy historical pageant in which disconnected scenes from past American imperial misadventures are randomly reenacted.

It is apt that Trump’s declaration of war was disembodied: a prerecorded video message announcing a major combat operation that had yet to begin. Time in that video is completely distorted; events that are about to happen are referred to in the past tense. Throughout it gives the feeling of being in a time warp: Trump cited as a casus belli “the marine barracks bombing in Beirut that killed 241 American military personnel” in 1983. The forty-three-year gap between provocation and retaliation is a void between cause and effect into which all temporal logic vanishes.

In that eight-minute video, Trump performed what could be regarded as unconscious parodies of three different scenes from past wars. First, he defined his objective “to defend the American people by eliminating imminent threats from the Iranian regime.” This replays, of course, the buildup to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. The George W. Bush administration carefully avoided the word “imminent,” but its rhetoric projected the illusion of clear and present danger. The UK government of Bush’s ally Tony Blair produced an infamous dossier claiming that Iraq could deploy chemical and biological weapons against the West within forty-five minutes of an order from Saddam Hussein.

The second parody was Trump’s message to Iran’s Revolutionary Guard and armed forces: “I say tonight that you must lay down your weapons and have complete immunity. Or in the alternative, face certain death. So, lay down your arms.” This echoes Bush’s warning in 2003: “I urge every member of the Iraqi military and intelligence services, if war comes, do not fight for a dying regime that is not worth your own life.” The film running in Trump’s head is a newsreel of Iraqi conscripts surrendering in droves to American forces, having decided that a rotten regime was not worth dying for.

Third, Trump evoked the idea of a mass insurrection by the Iranian people in the aftermath of a bombing campaign by the US and Israel: “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.” This too was an act of mimicry. In February 1991, during the first Gulf War, President George H.W. Bush urged “the Iraqi military and the Iraqi people to take matters into their own hands and force Saddam Hussein, the dictator, to step aside.” Aircraft from a coalition of countries led by the US dropped leaflets calling on Iraqi soldiers and civilians to “fill the streets and alleys and bring down Saddam Hussein and his aides.”

To say that these are reruns is not to deny the novel elements in Trump’s warmongering. His boldest innovation is to invoke not past glories but past disasters, summoning the ghosts of the United States’ catastrophic interventions in Iraq. In the Republican primary debate in December 2015, Trump declared American and Iraqi deaths in that conflict to have been pointless:

We have done a tremendous disservice, not only to Middle East [sic], we’ve done a tremendous disservice to humanity. The people that have been killed, the people that have wiped away [sic], and for what? It’s not like we had victory.

It is hard to think of any precedent for a leader stirring the memories of a war he regards as a colossal waste in order to justify starting a new one.

More profoundly, Trump’s rhetoric diverges from its Iraq War templates in signifying absolutely nothing. It is in itself (though of course not in its consequences) entirely free of external referents in the real world. Trump, with that strange honesty of his, indicated this himself by the manner of his declaration of war. Such announcements have an established visual language of solemnity and moral magnitude: the live address to the nation and the world from the White House, the rows of five-star generals in the Situation Room, the military briefings, the sense of historic moment. Trump’s video and his schmoozing of guests at Mar-a-Lago on the night of Friday, February 27 (“Have a good time, everybody…. I gotta go to work,” he told the attendees), seemed as deliberately flippant as his dismissal of the likely deaths of Americans: “We may have casualties. That often happens in war.” (“That’s the way it is,” he said later, after the first US soldiers were killed.)

The word “important” was used the following evening: Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, described the MAGA fundraiser that Trump attended on Saturday night as “more important than ever.” It was certainly more important than providing any rationale to the American people for their embarkation on another war. This is a war of choice, but it was presented to the American people more as a war of caprice, initiated in the festive atmosphere of a Florida resort and announced in cut-and-paste phrases from half-remembered conflicts.

The casual nature of the declaration of war matched the unmoored nature of Trump’s imperial cosplay. The rhetoric he seemed vaguely to be recalling had relationships to actual events. The “imminent threat” motif was, in 2003, a reckless and dishonest exaggeration. But there was at least the truth that Saddam had previously developed and used chemical weapons. The idea of enemy soldiers surrendering en masse was not fanciful—it happened in both Gulf Wars. The call for the people to rise up against their oppressors in 1991, had some substance: Kurdish and Shia opponents of Saddam had rebelled in the recent past and did so again.

But, what recurs now is pure linguistic gesture—the second time as empty effigy. The idea that Iran poses an imminent threat to the US is not merely not credible—credibility is entirely irrelevant. In 2003, the George W. Bush administration went through the motions of presenting a case that Saddam might have weapons of mass destruction and might wish to use them against the US. It was a bad case, concocted to provide the pretext for putting into action a preconceived plan: violent regime change in Iraq. But, some people in the American and British administrations at least half believed it, and more importantly, they wanted other people—their own citizens and foreign governments—to believe it too. Some effort at persuasion seemed to be an accepted precondition for war.

This time, Trump can’t be bothered to lie, if by lying we mean stating a claim that is intended to deceive. No one in his administration believes in the imminent threat, and no one outside it is expected to believe in it either. “Imminent threats” here functions like a TV trope, a corny catchphrase—it might as well be “Follow that car!” or (in words Trump has actually used, in his belligerent demands that Greenland be ceded to him) “The easy way” or “the hard way!” It signals only that Trump is going through the motions of wartime leadership and that, at best, his followers should likewise go through the motions of being led into war.

Even while declaring war, Trump made a mockery of the supposed Iranian threat: “We obliterated the regime’s nuclear program.” Now its missile industry will “be totally again obliterated”—the “again” suggesting that he believes he had wiped it out before. And his characterization of Iran’s alleged intentions to rebuild its nuclear weapons program dissolved into bathos:

We warned them never to resume their malicious pursuit of nuclear weapons, and we sought repeatedly to make a deal. We tried. They wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. Again they wanted to do it. They didn’t want to do it. They didn’t know what was happening. They just wanted to practice evil.

The imminent threat, then, comes from Bond movie villains who love doing evil but are crippled by chronic indecision, less Dr. No than Dr. Maybe. Trump made the ayatollahs sound risibly inept and hopelessly out of touch. The childishness of his expressions infantilized a genuinely vicious regime, painting it as more peevish than petrifying. Compared with the hair-raising language Trump has habitually used about immigrants in the US, his evocation of the Iranian menace was notably underpowered. He is good at conjuring monsters—this time he barely tried.

The idea that the Revolutionary Guard and Iranian armed forces should surrender their weapons in return for immunity is equally free of any objective correlative. It harks back to 1991 and 2003, when there were huge numbers of American and allied forces on the ground, in Kuwait and Iraq, to whom Iraqis could surrender. Whom now are they supposed to surrender to? A bomber pilot 50,000 feet above them? And who has the authority to grant members of the regime’s forces, who have committed atrocities against Iranians and foreign civilians, immunity from future prosecution? Trump told the Iranian people that their country is “yours to take.” How could they possibly take it without being free to act against those who have murdered and tortured with impunity, and how could it be theirs if crucial decisions about their future have already been made by Trump himself?

The most cynical of Trump’s retreads of the neoimperial past is his incitement of the Iranian people to rise up against the Islamic Republic. In echoing Bush’s call to the Iraqis in 1991, Trump was recycling a moment of great betrayal. Those Iraqis who believed America’s implied promise of support against Saddam paid for their naiveté with their blood. The US refused to give the rebels arms captured from the Iraqi regime’s forces, instead opting to destroy the weapons, return them to the regime, or (in a grotesque irony) give them to the Mujahideen in Afghanistan. 

Although the Americans had total dominance over Iraqi airspace, the decision was to stand back as Saddam unleashed helicopter gunships on the rebels. Somewhere between 30,000 and 60,000 Shias were killed, along with some 20,000 Kurds.

Even if young Iranians don’t remember what happened in Iraq thirty-five years ago, they certainly remember what happened in their own country earlier this year. On January 13 Trump posted a message to those engaged in mass protests against the regime in Tehran: “Iranian Patriots, KEEP PROTESTING – TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS!!!… HELP IS ON ITS WAY.” He warned that there would be “very strong action” if the regime executed protesters. There was no action, and help was not on its way. The government massacred an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 protesters. This is the most gaping vacancy of all—Trump gestures toward two American incitements, one historic, one extremely recent. Both deployed words that were fatally empty of meaning.

These vacuities are part of a greater absence: there is no story. America’s wars beyond the Western Hemisphere have always been underpinned by grand narratives: making the world safe for democracy (World War I), defeating fascism (World War II), saving civilization from communism (Korea and Vietnam), upholding international law and the sovereignty of nations (Kuwait), responding to the atrocities of September 11 through the “war on terror” (Afghanistan and Iraq). Each of these stories had sufficient purchase on reality to command widespread initial (if by no means universal) consent. There seemed to be a cause large enough in its historic import to be worth killing and dying for. Even when, as with the invasion of Iraq, the stated rationale was quickly exposed as fraudulent, the drama of retaliation for September 11 and the reassertion of American power after the exposure of terrible vulnerability held their grip.

Insofar as Trump’s imperial posturing has a story line, it is supposed to be written in the National Security Strategy published in November. The tale it wants to tell is one of hemispheric hegemony: the US must control all of the Americas.
Where does Iran fit into that script? Nowhere. Its significance is, in fact, dismissed in a few lines:

Conflict remains the Middle East’s most troublesome dynamic, but there is today less to this problem than headlines might lead one to believe. Iran—the region’s chief destabilizing force—has been greatly weakened by Israeli actions since October 7, 2023, and President Trump’s June 2025 Operation Midnight Hammer, which significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.

Given that Trump never knowingly engages in understatement, this is a rare example of verbal deflation. The fake news to be discounted is those hyped-up headlines portraying Iran as anything other than a decisively weakened foe. Not only, moreover, is Iran less troublesome, but the whole region is becoming steadily less important to the US: “As this administration rescinds or eases restrictive energy policies and American energy production ramps up, America’s historic reason for focusing on the Middle East will recede.” The broad scenario is one in which Iran is, at best, a minor blot in the rearview mirror as America’s interests move elsewhere.

There is no American narrative for this war because it is not primarily an American story. It belongs to Benjamin Netanyahu. He has long sought to frame the Iranian regime in the most extreme terms imaginable—as the successor to the Nazis. “As the Nazis strived to trample civilization and replace it with a ‘master race’ while destroying the Jewish people,” he said in a speech at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in 2015, “so is Iran striving to take over the region and expand further with a declared goal of destroying the Jewish state.”

As a political fable this is potent stuff. Doing a deal with a Nazi-like state in which it promises not to develop nuclear weapons—as the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, together with Germany and the European Union, did that year—is delusional, since the supposed purpose of the Iranian state is, like Hitler’s Germany, the mass extermination of Jews. That deal had to be torn up, and in 2018 Trump duly withdrew the US from it.

But vile as the Islamic Republic may be, it is not remotely like Nazi Germany. The allegory serves a specific purpose: to preserve Israel’s monopoly on the possession of nuclear weapons in the Middle East. Trump clearly doesn’t believe it, since his stated goal has been to make precisely the kind of bargain with Iran that the Nazi analogy is meant to preclude. The incoherence of Trump’s war aims is rooted in this gross discrepancy between his desire for a settlement with Iran—“We sought repeatedly to make a deal”—and Netanyahu’s vision of an apocalyptic battle in which the only possible outcomes are the binary opposites of absolute triumph or utter extinction. Trump’s playbook is The Art of the Deal; Netanyahu’s is the Book of Joshua.

There are, as a result, two different endgames for this war, one ultimately bureaucratic and diplomatic, the other existential. Trump started to threaten Iran again in recent months as a tactic for achieving the first. He has collapsed into the second, adapting Netanyahu’s existential dread as if it applied to the United States as much as to Israel. This means getting into a much more unbounded conflict than he seems to have imagined.

This is, in a sense, a proxy war, but one in which America is the proxy. It manifests overwhelming military strength but also stark political weakness. Marco Rubio’s admission that the US attacked Iran because it knew that Israel was about to do so—and thus feared that America would be a target of Iranian retaliation—depicts Trump not as a mighty leader but as a helpless follower. Instead of leaning on a rival boss, he is being led by Netanyahu into a generational conflict to remake the entire Middle East.

The dramatic first act of the war—the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and (according to Trump) another forty-seven senior officials “in one shot”—is a spectacular success that also exemplifies these contradictions. From an Israeli point of view, the more Iranian leaders killed, the better. Yet, Trump told Jonathan Karl, ABC News’ chief Washington correspondent, that his administration had identified possible leaders to replace Khamenei, but “the attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates. It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.” 

On March 3, Trump’s account tipped further into morbid farce: “Most of the people we had in mind are dead…. Now we have another group. They may be dead also, based on reports. So I guess you have a third wave coming. Pretty soon we’re not going to know anybody.”

In this telling, the war’s opening act was a literal overkill. Combined with self-styled secretary of war Pete Hegseth’s bizarre statement that “this is not a so-called regime-change war, but the regime sure did change,” it suggests that from the very beginning America’s war stumbled over its intended limits. It was supposed to be a Venezuela-style operation in which the enemy leader was eliminated and replaced by a more compliant figure within the same regime. This new leader (of another oil-rich nation) would have been placed on notice that the US could and would kill him at any time if he disobeyed. Essentially, the Islamic Republic was to remain intact, except that now it would operate on license from Trump.

The terms and conditions of such a license most definitely do not include democracy or human rights. Hegseth has insisted that the objective of the war “doesn’t include nation-building or democracy building goals.” A free Iran is no part of the envisaged outcome. If the people were to rise up at the risk of being slaughtered, they would be doing so merely to put in place a government that would be free to maintain the same levels of internal repression and theocratic control, so long as its foreign policy remained acceptable to Washington. That is hardly a cause worthy of martyrdom.

Yet even this contradictory approach seems to have unraveled as soon as the war started. The old adage that no military plan survives first contact with the enemy has been given a new twist: first contact was not chastening but excessively efficacious. From the American point of view the almost instant wiping out of so much of the senior Iranian leadership raised the stakes beyond what Trump initially wanted. The limited goal of bringing the regime to heel expanded immediately into its unconditional surrender and potential annihilation. And this escalation occurred without the administration giving any prior thought to what the implosion of Iran might mean, either for its own citizens or for the wider region. Or what an unchecked air war directed by Netanyahu looks like: Gaza.

Here we see how the current problem of American military power lies not in its limits but in its virtual limitlessness. It is not just that the US military is vastly superior to that of any immediate battlefield opponent. It is that it’s untethered from the need to place a set of actions within a comprehensible story. For the first time in US history, American physical dominance is being fused with American political anarchy. Freed from all the entanglements that come with having to launch a ground invasion, air war can overfly not just morality and law but arguments, rationales, the calibration of risks to rewards and of suffering to satisfaction. Military might under Trump is all power and no purpose, all tactics and no strategy, all violence and no vision, all means and no ends. Having ditched any larger claims (building democracy, fighting tyranny, advancing freedom), it is its own justification.

This cutting of the bonds that tie war making to grand geopolitical narratives is a kind of liberation. The agony of America’s post-1945 wars has been their gradual inducement of a sense of futility. The wars stop making sense, and thus the human and financial sacrifices come to seem pointless. What’s happening now under Trump is one sort of answer to the anguish and humiliation of defeat in Afghanistan in his first term. Wars can stop making sense only when they are supposed to make sense in the first place. They become pointless only when there is meant to be a clear point. Futility arises only when a stated goal is not being achieved in spite of all the anguish and effort. If there is no goal—or if, as now, there are so many contradictory objectives that they cancel one another out—nothing can be futile.

This negative logic is reinforced by Trump’s own psychological condition. The attack on Iran is what war making looks like in an authoritarian state: not politics by other means but the absence of politics by other means. It is another stage in the working through of a disinhibition that is both institutional (the Republican-dominated Congress refusing to fulfill its constitutional obligation to restrain executive power) and personal (the president’s combination of inherent narcissism with the effects of old age). As Trump told The New York Times in January, he regards himself as unfettered from all constraints except those of “my own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

One constraint that used to operate within Trump’s own mind was a squeamish reluctance to get blood on his hands, a fastidiousness about actual killing somewhat akin to his notorious germophobia. We know that this extended in his first term to the idea of bombing Iran. After the Iranians shot down an unmanned American surveillance drone in June 2019, he ordered retaliatory strikes. But when he was told there would likely be 150 casualties, he called the planes back. As he posted on what was then Twitter, “We were cocked & loaded to retaliate last night on 3 different sights [sic] when I asked, how many will die.” Now the specifics of how many will die are no longer of concern to him: unnumbered deaths often happen in war.

It is obvious that making war is a useful distraction—for himself as well as for the world—from the Epstein scandal. But it is also now the purest form of self-pleasuring. Usually a president going to war is taking on burdens. Trump is shrugging them off, entering a state of weightlessness where all thought of consequences and all concern for mundane irritants like inflation and affordability are left behind. He declares war from his vacation home at Mar-a-Lago because it is a kind of leisure activity. Strikingly, in rebutting allegations that he will lose interest if the Iran adventure goes on too long, he used a term from his favorite hobby, golf. “I don’t have the yips with respect to boots on the ground,” he told the New York Post. The yips are a sudden onset of nerves that cause a golfer to miss an easy putt.

What is weightless for Trump lies very heavy on the American republic. The anarchic nature of his war does not make it merely aberrant. The lurch from declaring fears about Iran to be mere media exaggerations to invoking imminent threat, from demanding the Nobel Peace Prize to luxuriating in lethality, is the essence of the autocrat’s monopoly on unpredictability.
Self-contradiction is a test of loyalty: the sycophants will fall over themselves to justify the leader’s wisdom even when it is the opposite of yesterday’s wisdom. When the leader can make up a war as it goes along, his whims have become law.

Extreme violence is now a large part of this repertoire of arbitrariness. Trump has pushed domestic terror to the point where his agents can murder American citizens on the street without accountability. He is now pushing the use of overwhelming force abroad into a terrain where accountability becomes impossible because there are no clear objectives by which to distinguish purpose from pointlessness, right from wrong, success from failure. But what happens abroad does not stay abroad: one of the things Trump has never lied about is that for him the real war is on the home front. He is showing that he can declare it however and whenever he feels like it. 💢❗😡😢

—March 12, 2026

Americn media must not normalize Donald Trump and maga Fascist behavior! Use real words to describe the actual crimes!

https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/02/26/the-crime-of-witness-fintan-otoole/

The Crime of Witness Fintan O’Toole

Published in The New York Review of Books:

Renee Good and Alex Pretti were murdered for daring to interfere with the Trump administration’s efforts to normalize abductions and state violence. February 26, 2026 issue
This article was originally published online January 29, 2026, in slightly modified form. —The Editors

Renee Good and Alex Pretti murdered by ICE in Minneapolis

Donald Trump’s desire to name everything from the Kennedy Center to the Gulf of Mexico after himself (“I wanted to call it the Gulf of Trump,” he declared in January) can seem almost comically childish. But it has become a killing joke: his regime brands those it executes “terrorists” and drags their names through the dirt. This renaming is an assertion of absolute power, and the United States is at a moment when Trump’s claim to dominion over language has become lethal—both for individuals and for the American republic itself. If the murder of Alex Pretti on the streets of Minneapolis cannot be called murder, an authoritarian regime has passed one of its crucial tests: it can reverse all meanings, turning the ultimate moral transgression upside down, making the victim the perpetrator, the perpetrator the victim.

It is striking that the capital offense for which both Mr. Pretti and Ms, Renee Good, who weeks earlier was shot multiple times at close range by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, were summarily executed was the crime of witness.  Ms. Good was watching ICE at work from her car. Pretti was filming Border Patrol agents on the street. Both were engaged in the task that democracies assign to citizens: that of paying close attention to the workings of power. If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, a country that inflicts the ultimate punishment on those who dare to be vigilant can no longer be free.

Watchfulness is the most dangerous form of resistance because it obstructs the Trump regime’s project of habituation. Fascism works by making the extreme normal. 

Habit, as Samuel Beckett said, is a great deadener. It has been obvious since the start of Trump’s second term that he is trying to make the sight of armed and masked men with virtually unlimited powers one to which Americans are accustomed.

First by dispatching National Guard troops to Los Angeles and other cities, then by sending ICE contingents to Washington, Memphis, Nashville, Atlanta, Charlotte, New Orleans, Brownsville, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Newark, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and Minneapolis,❗ the (illegal) 💢 Trump regime is redefining not just legal and political norms but normalcy itself. It is making the threat of arbitrary state violence routine, stitching it into the fabric of daily urban life. The hope is that most Americans can be schooled to go about their mundane preoccupations even while they are being visibly occupied.

I know, by the way, that this is quite possible. For thirty years, in parts of my native island of Ireland, troops with machine guns crouching in shop doorways or skulking in the back gardens of ordinary houses were so taken for granted that one saw them, if at all, out of the corner of one’s eye. What is always there becomes barely there at all.

This procedure of habituation is also a process of escalation. Authoritarian takeover in a long-established democracy must be gradual. And the gradations are primarily moral. The populace must be desensitized. People must get used to images of little children being kidnapped by unidentified masked agents. They must become acclimated to young women being grabbed and hustled into unmarked vans by faceless men; they must learn not to acknowledge abduction.

They must become familiar with official disappearances—an idea once confined to the outer darkness beyond the southern border but now fully domesticated. They must get used to killing—first to the out-of-the-way obscure deaths of migrants: thirty-two people died in ICE custody in 2025, often because of the authorities’ refusal to treat acute medical conditions. And then they must get used to the public, open, and flagrant killings of American citizens. In this logic of escalation, a cold-blooded summary execution is not an accident. It is a climax.

The murder of Alex Pretti was in itself an obviously intentional act, but it was also politically deliberate. After the killing of Ms. Renee Good on January 7, 2026, an administration that was not bent on establishing autocracy would have called a halt to the ICE surges. Good’s death would have been treated as a disaster—not just a private calamity but a terrible governmental screwup. Trump would have made clear that it had never been meant to happen.

Of course he and his subordinates did the precise opposite, branding Good a domestic terrorist and justifying her killing as an act of both individual and institutional self-defense. But, in order to make this tactic unexceptional, to establish such executions as part of the order of things, Ms. Good’s death could not be a one-off. There had to be a doubling down. Domestic terrorists, by definition, do not come alone. They are multiple—and the actions needed to defend against them must be multiplied, too.

This does not mean that Pretti’s killing was specifically ordered. But the template for it was certainly prepared in advance. “Sentence first—verdict afterwards,” says Lewis Carroll’s Queen of Hearts. Here it is a case of justification first, execution afterwards. The license to kill Pretti was issued when Good was redefined as a domestic terrorist attempting to kill an officer.

Pretti’s scarcely cold body was stuffed into this preformulated narrative. He was a thwarted mass killer. Within hours of his murder Trump’s senior adviser Stephen Miller posted on X, “A would-be assassin tried to murder federal law enforcement and the official Democrat account sides with the terrorists.” Both Gregory Bovino, the then commander-at-large of the US Border Patrol, and Tricia McLaughlin, an assistant homeland security secretary, claimed Pretti was about to “do maximum damage and massacre law enforcement.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem used almost the exact same phrase, leaving little doubt that it had been consciously crafted.

The big lie of the threat allegedly posed by Good is here deliberately made bigger. Ms. Good was engaged in “domestic terrorism”; Miller slipped  into the plural, making Mr. Pretti merely one of “the terrorists.” (Since they are unnumbered, they could be legion.) Good was trying to kill one officer. Pretti was planning a massacre—not just of the agents present but of “law enforcement” itself. Trump’s grotesque inflation of language, his bemonstering of opposition politicians, is now fully integrated into the organized street violence of his regime. So it must always be in the authoritarian state: the existential menace can be defeated only if those who embody it can be deprived of their very existences.

It does not matter that this hyped-up story is harder to make credible than the usual kind of official lying that characterizes such killings merely as unfortunate accidents whose true cause is impossible to determine. Getting people to accept a vaguely credible account is a lesser manifestation of absolute power than getting them to accept—or even better, to just shrug their shoulders at—a wildly incredible one.

There is, in much of the American media, a learned habit of shoulder shrugging, a civilized avoidance of calling an occupation an occupation, a lie a lie, a murder a murder. As Jem Bartholomew noted in the Columbia Journalism Review soon after Mr. Pretti’s killing, “The press is still squeamish about directly calling out the administration’s lies.” But this misplaced timidity in fact adds fuel to the flames. When the incendiaries are in the White House and their targets are all legal, institutional, political, civic, and moral restraints on Trump’s ability to do, as he so openly proclaims, “whatever I want,” the deadening of language has fatal consequences.

Thus, even while The New York Times did excellent work in analyzing the video footage of Mr. Pretti’s execution, it initially resorted to the bland conclusion that “videos analyzed by The New York Times appear to contradict federal accounts of the shooting.” Appear? As the paper implicitly acknowledged later, the truth is that “videos directly contradict descriptions of the encounter by administration officials.” It is good that the instinctive resort to fuzzy circumlocution was eventually overcome, but surely, once the paper’s analysis showed definitively that the administration was brazenly lying about an official murder, that ought to have been the starkest of headlines.

Meanwhile, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal declared that although he did not deserve to be shot dead, “Mr. Pretti made a tragic mistake by interfering with ICE agents.” His error was that he “attempted, foolishly, to assist a woman who had been pepper-sprayed by agents.” It is clear from the rest of the article that the Journal believes the Trump administration to be lying about its unjustified killing of an American citizen, but the import of this otherwise astounding truth is diluted by the suggestion that he was, after all, a fool. In an authoritarian state, who but a fool would try to help a woman who has been pepper-sprayed by the great leader’s shock troops?

The sin of civic “interference” is in fact the saving grace of democracy. Ms. Good and Mr. Pretti and thousands of other citizens have been getting in the way of the armed overthrow of democratic freedoms by doing what journalism is supposed to do: pay attention to the actual, on-the-ground reality. The phone that Mr. Pretti had in his hand was a connection to a communal determination to refuse the narcotic of normalization. The videos that expose the administration’s mendacity about its own use of extreme violence against peaceful dissent are themselves products of the courage to show up, to be there, to see for yourself—the impulses journalists are supposed to value above all others, aside from the use of accurate language to name what you see.

The challenge the videos present is that of uncomfortably incontrovertible evidence—proof of sanctioned executions and of a government’s systematic lying. If the evidence so bravely gathered does not lead to a profound reversal, Trump’s temporary yielding to public outrage (diluting the smear campaign against Mr. Pretti, removing Bovino from Minneapolis, and placing the two officers who shot Mr. Pretti on administrative leave) will be merely a tactical retreat—another stage in the piecemeal habituation of Americans to the arbitrary application of martial law. The name of the condition to which the US will have surrendered itself is written all over Europe’s history books. .

Donald Trump and the ghost of "will not die" Jeffrey Epstein files

On July 26, 2025, Donald Trump played a round of golf at his own Turnberry course in Scotland. 

Echo opinion by Fintan O'Toole published in The New York Review of Books: A Guy Who Never Dies

Over footage of the event from Sky News, we hear a reporter shouting, “Mr. Trump, can you escape the Jeffrey Epstein crisis?” At that point in the clip, the volume surges on the song Trump’s large entourage is blasting: “Memory” from the musical Cats. The tinny playback of the singer’s voice envelops Trump as he gets back in his golf cart and drives away: “It’s so easy to leave me/All alone with the memory/Of my days in the sun.”

Trump does not look like he’s enjoying the memory of the days when he and Epstein were close friends. But, Donald Trump's staff know this song is an aural comfort blanket for their boss. 

In her memoir, I’ll Take Your Questions Now: What I Saw at the Trump White House, his former press secretary Stephanie Grisham writes that “when he was in a bad mood or a scary rage, we’d send for a staffer he referred to as ‘the Music Man.’” This aide would switch on “Trump's favorite songs—‘Memory’ from Cats, the Rolling Stones’ ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ and others—and the staffer would go in and play the music to distract or calm him down. It was sort of like soothing the savage beast.”

What is it about “the Jeffrey Epstein crisis” that triggered the urgent need for this auditory pacifier? Ten days before the Turnberry incident, Trump uncharacteristically vented his scary rage on those of his loyal fans who were demanding the release of all official files on Epstein, ranting on Truth Social:

My PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will…. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

Trump does not normally disavow support from anyone, however vile or extreme. For him to consign a large body of the MAGA base to a PAST (when presumably he and they knew what happiness was) suggests that something about the Epstein story gets under Trump’s very thick skin. It places him, for the first time in his astonishing political career, at the center of a cognitive maze from which he can see no exit.

For Trump, the great problem of the Epstein story is that it is the point at which paranoid fantasy melds into grotesque reality. It is a hybrid of fevered conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy. 

Jeffrey Epstein''s ghost: The Trumpian conspiracy that will not die

It lives at once in a gothic horror movie he has helped to script and in the all-too-tangible world of untrammeled power and merciless exploitation he actually inhabits. It provokes both wild surmises and entirely rational questions. This is a combustible mix that Trump does not know how to control.

Paranoia persists through every era of the history of the American republic. We can, for example, recall President John F. Kennedy speaking in 1961 of the far-right fringes of the Republican party: “They look suspiciously at their neighbors and their leaders. They call for ‘a man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people. They find treason in our churches, in our highest court, in our treatment of water.”

He could be talking about Trump-world. But not exactly. For not all conspiracy theories work the same way. They can take one of two distinct shapes. The first is a false “explanation” for real events. This is what Kennedy was referring to in 1961:

Financial crises could be explained by the presence of too many immigrants or too few greenbacks. War could be attributed to munitions makers or international bankers. Peace conferences failed because we were duped by the British, or tricked by the French, or deceived by the Russians. It was not the presence of Soviet troops in Eastern Europe that drove it to communism, it was the sellout at Yalta. It was not a civil war that removed China from the Free World, it was treason in high places.

This is the classic form of the conspiracy theory. There is a genuine and undisputed fact—China going communist, a financial crisis, a military defeat, fluoride in the water, wildfires devouring the land. What is hidden is the surreptitious motive force: Communists, Freemasons, Jews, Jewish Communists, Jewish space lasers.

Yet Trumpian paranoia doesn’t quite take this form. Conspiracy theories are crucial to Trump’s appeal, but his are indifferent to the reality or otherwise of the phenomena they seek to explain. 

Trump's made up conspiracies may relate to external facts. Immigration happened because Joe Biden and Kamala Harris connived to bring “more than 20 million criminals into the country.” An apparently sluggish economy is an illusion created by a “rigged” set of official job creation figures. They can also be pure fabrications: Barack Obama was not born in America. Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the assassination of JFK. (“His father was with Lee Harvey Oswald prior to Oswald’s being—you know, shot…. I mean, what was he doing—what was he doing with Lee Harvey Oswald shortly before the death❓”) 

Hillary Clinton was involved in an “unthinkable plot” to rig the 2016, presidential election by linking Trump to interference by Russia. To adapt A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Trump’s “imagination bodies forth/The forms of things unknown,…/Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.”

Unlike the first, more basic kind of conspiracy theory, Trump’s version does not rely on agreed-upon public facts to generate emotions—fear, distrust, anger. As a federal judge put it in 2023 while dismissing Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and others in relation to their alleged plot, the suit was “a hodgepodge of disconnected, often immaterial events, followed by an implausible conclusion.” “Immaterial events” is an apt phrase: in Trump’s conspiracy theories, there is no genuine surface to go behind. Both the “event” and its “explanation” are cut from whole cloth.

Yet this tactic has of course been spectacularly successful—it has helped Trump to become a two-time president. It works because, being pure invention, it does not need to concern itself with mere evidence. These conspiracies float in the Trumpian universe of alternative facts—otherwise known as fictions. They are part of the never-ending show in which Trump demands of his fans not belief in the veracity of his claims but rather suspension of disbelief. What matters is those emotions of dread and antagonism, and Trump has always understood that lurid fictions are the most effective in provoking them. It is striking, indeed, that when Trump had to provide alleged facts to support his most important conspiracy theory—the stealing of his victory in the 2020, presidential election—he was risibly helpless. He pursued over sixty law cases and all of them were thrown out (some by judges he himself had appointed) or withdrawn because he could not present the courts with anything other than outlandish concoctions.

For the most part, though, Trump has been able to operate in that world of immaterial events. He has been greatly assisted by the potency within his base of a conspiracy theory that is even further removed from the idea of evidence: QAnon. It is not his creation but it overlaps with his own conspiratorial strategies. It has the same free-floating freedom from any agreed reality, the same fictive exuberance.

QAnon, like Trump himself, is a comic provocation that became an American truth. As James Ball showed in his excellent The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World, it took off from the hacking by Russian intelligence and subsequent publication of a trove of e-mail archives belonging to Clinton’s adviser John Podesta and the Democratic National Committee. The Podesta e-mails were disappointingly dull—they disclosed no crimes or conspiracies. But, as Ball explains, they served as the template for a word game played on the Internet forum 4chan:

Whether as a joke, a troll or some sort of political act, a few 4chan users jumped on the Podesta emails and decided to try to stoke up some interest in them. 

One technique worked beyond the wildest imaginings of anyone involved. A group of users decided that the seemingly innocuous emails were in fact a code. “Hotdog,” they decided, meant “boy.” “Pizza” meant “girl.” “Cheese” meant “little girl,” while “ice cream” meant “male prostitute.” The seemingly innocuous Podesta email cache in reality contained proof of a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by key aides of Hillary Clinton—and they had cracked the code used to discuss their crimes.

By 2020, fewer than half of Americans polled by Ipsos for NPR definitively rejected the proposition that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media,” with 37 percent unsure and 17 percent in agreement. In 2022, Trump semaphored his endorsement of QAnon by reposting an image of himself wearing a Q lapel pin bearing the words “The Storm is Coming.” (In QAnon’s arcane lexicon the “storm” is Trump’s version of the Last Judgment, when his satanic opponents will be tried, and perhaps executed, live on television.)

QAnon, like Trump’s own conspiracy theories, is a solution without a problem, a signifier without a signified. It recycles preexisting paranoid tropes: the antisemitic myth of Jews preying on Christian children (one of QAnon’s most visible early influencers ranted about the “synagogue of Satan”); the threat of witches in league with the devil; the promise of an omnipotent messiah (in this case Trump himself) who will vanquish the evildoers and instigate a new order. It also offers a more specific flight from contemporary reality: it is hard not to see the popularity of QAnon among conservative Christians as a displacement of the anxiety generated by the revelation of widespread child abuse by evangelical church leaders and Catholic priests. (One study found that in 2016, and 2017, when QAnon was taking off, there were “192 instances of a leader from an influential church or evangelical institution being publicly charged with sexual crimes involving a minor, including rape, molestation, battery and child pornography.”) The rerouting of these horrors onto a cabal of senior Democrats is a way of coping with the cognitive dissonance generated by the betrayals.

Trump could exploit QAnon because it functions in the way his own conspiracy theories do—in the absence of any agreed reality beyond itself. But only up to a point. That point has a local habitation and a name: Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein is the portal through which, as Ball puts it, “The real world provided a tantalizing way into the madness of QAnon.” And also the other way around: the Epstein case gave QAnon’s believers a foothold in reality. There truly was a highly sophisticated child abuse ring operated by a man with very close connections to business and political elites.

And there really are, as the investigative journalist Barry Levine recently noted in The New York Times, unanswered questions about Epstein’s ability to prey on children for so long with such impunity. How did he amass an estimated $600 million? How was he able to traffic girls and women into the US from Russia, Belarus, Turkey, and Turkmenistan without apparent interference from the immigration authorities? Why was Alex Acosta—who as the US attorney for the Southern District of Florida gave Epstein an extraordinary lenient plea deal—told, as he later claimed, that “Mr. Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone”? What is contained on the forty computer and electronic devices, twenty-six storage drives, more than seventy CDs, and six recording devices gathered by the FBI from Epstein’s properties?

And what exactly do all of these records say about Epstein’s close friendship over almost fifteen years with Trump, who told New York Magazine in 2002 that his pal was a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side”? In her book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist who did the most to expose the Epstein scandal, recounts claims made in a lawsuit filed by one of Epstein’s victims:

Once, Epstein took the girl to Mar-a-Lago, where he introduced her to Donald Trump. She was fourteen at the time and recalls that upon meeting Trump, Epstein elbowed him and said: “This is a good one, right?” Trump smiled and nodded in agreement, the suit says.

Brown also writes that “in early 2016, an anonymous woman filed a civil complaint in federal court in California, under the pseudonym ‘Katie Johnson.’ She alleged that she was sexually abused and raped by Trump and Epstein when she was thirteen, over a four-month period from June to September 1994.”

Such allegations may well be untrue, and of course Trump denies any knowledge of, much less involvement in, Epstein’s crimes. At the time of the Katie Johnson lawsuit Trump’s attorney Alan Garten told the Miami Herald that its claims were “unequivocally false.” (A federal judge dismissed the first Johnson suit in May 2016; two subsequent suits were withdrawn.) Brown notes that “there has never been any evidence that [Trump] had inappropriate sexual relations with minors.” 

Many people have many reasons to want to smear him by association with Epstein, and it is important not to fall into the trap of believing allegations because they chime with established preconceptions.

Trump’s difficulty with the QAnon-influenced section of his base, however, is that people whose preconceptions include the existence of a massive conspiracy of elite pedophile satanists are not well trained in the habits of skepticism. And for a time, rather than telling them to forget all about it, Trump encouraged those people to double down on their belief in a massive Epstein-related conspiracy. In August 2019, after Epstein’s apparent suicide in prison, Trump retweeted a post: “Died of SUICIDE on 24/7 SUICIDE WATCH? Yeah right! How does that happen #JefferyEpstein (sic) had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.”

When he retweeted that post Trump clearly felt that Epstein really was safely dead and that questions about their long friendship had died with him. But in reality he was breathing life into Epstein’s corpse. To suggest that Epstein was murdered to silence him is to give him a vigorous afterlife of proliferating mysteries. In his current rage at the resurrection of this unfinished story, Trump railed against those who, instead of basking in the glory of his administration, keep talking about “a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.” This is a strange echo of one of the celebrity tributes received by Epstein on his sixty-third birthday in 2016 and recently published by The New York Times. Woody Allen compared the sumptuous dinners at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse to those hosted in Castle Dracula, “where Lugosi has three young female vampires who service the place,” and suggested, about Epstein, that “one can picture him sleeping in damp earth.”

The undead Epstein continues to stalk the land partly because of the overlap of his true story with QAnon’s wild imaginings and partly because his vampiric activities dramatize much larger realities. He embodies the monstrously exploitative operations of both patriarchy and social class. As with Dracula, the superrich overlord is the predator and the girls from working-class families are the prey. Many of Epstein’s victims lived in financially precarious households in West Palm Beach—as the Justice Department put it, they were “typically from single-mother households and difficult financial circumstances.” The two or three hundred dollars they were each offered to perform massages on middle-aged men was a lot of money for these girls and their families. To cross the bridge into Palm Beach was to enter a different world of extravagant opulence. This is a tale of two Americas, and of the awful things one of them can do to the other.

Trump’s political genius lies in his ability to embody these same realities of male power and economic abuse while simultaneously presenting himself as the savior of those who suffer under them. But Epstein is his all too obviously evil twin. He reminds Trump’s base what an exploitative elite really looks like. His network of friends and enablers brings back to their minds Trump’s original political message of 2015 and 2016: the idea that the true divide is not between Republicans and Democrats but between parasitic elites and ordinary people. His proximity to Epstein threatens to drag Trump back onto the side of that line where he actually belongs.

It is the hybrid nature of the Epstein conspiracy theory—part rational demand for answers to legitimate public concerns, part QAnon fever dream—that stymies Trump’s response. It generates within the MAGA base what C. Wright Mills once called (in a very different context) crackpot realism, the belief that mad questions (in this case the truth about the satanic pedophile cabal) can be answered by sensible means (reading the trove of documents and examining the recordings that constitute the Epstein files). The word puzzle that began with the substitution of “pizza” with “girl” will be solved by poring over and teasing out the true meaning of millions of other words—if only Trump would do what the Russians did with the Podesta e-mails and set them free.

This naive faith is the other side of the American paranoid imagination. Even while it conjures the vast potency of the conspirators, it also takes it for granted that, inside the archives of the deep state, they have carefully preserved detailed proof of their plots to assassinate JFK, hide the visitations of aliens, and enable the satanic child abusers. Crackpot realism has a strange trust in the bureaucracy. In it, that most dully bureaucratic of words—files—becomes a magic elixir of truth.

Trump’s great tactical mistake in the Epstein story was to keep playing into this belief. In September 2024, in an interview with the podcaster Lex Fridman, he went along with the suggestion that he would release the Epstein files alongside those relating to JFK’s assassination: “Yeah, I’d certainly take a look at it. Now, Kennedy’s interesting because it’s so many years ago. They do that for danger too, because it endangers certain people, et cetera, et cetera, so Kennedy is very different from the Epstein thing but I’d be inclined to do the Epstein. I’d have no problem with it.”

He ought to have known that, because of QAnon, anticipation of the release of the Epstein files is akin more to a millenarian religious fervor than to a documentary investigation. As Ball puts it, Trump serves in the QAnon worldview as “the genius mastermind orchestrating an equally complicated counter-movement” against the satanic cabal. The Epstein files are not just records of a criminal investigation, they are an updating of the Book of Revelation. To reveal them is to open the Seventh Seal and release God’s judgment onto the earth. How can the savior simply shrug and murmur that there is no seventh seal? It says a great deal about contemporary America that Trump’s breach of faith with this apocalyptic narrative is, for much of his political base, a far bigger betrayal than taking away its health care or failing to bring down food prices.

How could Trump find a way out of this maze? There are two threads he is trying to follow. One is to offer his base a substitute conspiracy theory: the whole Epstein story is a fiction, just another malicious invention. “I know it’s a hoax. It’s started by Democrats…. It’s all been a hoax.” In this he is trying to switch the story from the first kind of conspiracy theory (the one with an objective correlative in real public events) to the second kind (his own practice of positing a conspiracy with no real-world referent). He is hoping to shift Epstein from the kind of ground where he loses his bearings onto the terrain where he feels more comfortable.

But this can’t work. Epstein can’t be turned into a product of the Democrats’ evil imagination because he is every bit as real for the MAGA people as he is for woke liberals. Perhaps, indeed, even more so: he is the tangible substance that gives credibility to their darkest visions of how the world works. In thinking that he can simply order his supporters to convert this substance into a mere shadow thrown by Democratic conspirators, he is succumbing to the dictator’s delusion that he can exert complete control over the thoughts of his subjects.

The second escape route is to offer Epstein’s consort and pander Ghislaine Maxwell, who was sentenced to twenty years in prison in 2022, a pardon. In return, she would testify that Trump had nothing to do with Epstein’s crimes and incriminate Democrats instead. The difficulty with this strategy is twofold. First, once pardoned, Maxwell would be free to say whatever she liked. Second, among the crimes for which she was sentenced was, literally, conspiracy. Using a conspirator to reassure the conspiracy-minded that there was no conspiracy that could possibly involve Trump does not seem like a winning stratagem.

On August 5 the Republican chairman of the House Oversight Committee issued subpoenas for several witnesses to appear at planning hearings into Epstein’s crimes, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he also served the Justice Department a subpoena demanding that it produce its Epstein-related files by August 19. If Trump orders the department not to comply, he becomes part of the great conspiracy. This would become a satisfyingly shocking twist in this paranoid story: the good guy was actually the archvillain all along. If he allows it to comply, he feeds the beast he is trying to kill. We know that the release of documents never stops the search for the ultimate exposure of the plot. It gives the searchers a vast new terrain of clues and anomalies to explore, a giant new web of connections to map. And if Trump tries a middle course, releasing the documents with references to himself redacted, he merely proves that he has something to hide.

Will this bring him down? Almost certainly not. But it may deprive him of his greatest asset: his immunity from scandal. It is a force field that, once breached, ceases to function. If he loses his power to decree that all evidence of his misdeeds is a hoax, the rest of his term will be soundtracked not by the sweet melancholy of “Memory” but by the more agonized strains of “Suspicious Minds.”

Donald Trump must be removed from office because he is beyond being scary as executive orders are driven by his obsession with fascism

A Show of Force by Fintan O’Toole*

Published in the New York Review of Books

Maine Writer prologue:  "Scary" has become normalized by Trumpian autocratic behavior. Thankfully, journalists like Fintan O'Toole is not letting Trump get away with fascist behavior without calling it what it is- "dangerous".  ⚠️

A man protesting against raids conducted by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement while National Guard troops stand outside the Metropolitan Detention Center, Los Angeles, June 8, 2025

What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time.

Donald Trump’s desire to militarize American politics and politicize the American military is unfinished business. Militarizing American politics means defining all those who do not conform to his version of normality as mortal enemies to be confronted as though they were hostile foreign nations. Politicizing the military means dismantling its self-image as an institution that transcends partisan divisions, is broadly representative of the US population, and owes its primary loyalty not to the president but to the Constitution. These aims are intertwined, but the first cannot be consummated until the second has been accomplished. Trump failed to do this in his first term, but he is determined not to be thwarted again.

In late May 2020, as hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets of American cities to protest the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis, Trump held a meeting of his advisers in the Oval Office. According to Bob Woodward and Robert Costa in their book Peril (2021), Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s most extreme anti-immigrant policies, advised: “Mr. President, they are burning America down. Antifa, Black Lives Matter, they’re burning it down. You have an insurrection on your hands. Barbarians are at the gate.” The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Mark Milley, responded, “Shut the fuck up, Steve.”

Citing the daily Domestic Unrest National Overview produced for him by his staff, Milley told the commander-in-chief, “They used spray paint, Mr. President. That’s not insurrection.” He pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln: “That guy up there, Lincoln, had an insurrection.” Milley insisted that the BLM protests were “not an issue for the United States military to deploy forces on the streets of America, Mr. President.” Along with other real soldiers, Milley was able to resist Trump’s demand that the 82nd Airborne Division be sent to Washington. But that was then. Now there is no one in the Oval Office to tell Miller to shut the fuck up or to explain to Trump what an insurrection is.

On June 6 federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents targeted what US district judge Charles Breyer cited as “several locations in downtown LA and its immediate surroundings” that were “known to have significant migrant populations and labor-intensive industries.” They arrested forty-four working people, including some day laborers gathered outside two Home Depot stores, and employees of an Ambiance Apparel warehouse in the Fashion District.

On June 7, by which time only around a dozen arrests had been made at protests against these roundups, Trump issued a memorandum to the secretary of defense, attorney general, and secretary of homeland security declaring that these demonstrations “constitute a form of rebellion against the authority of the Government of the United States.” He authorized his secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, to take federal control of the California National Guard and to “employ any other members of the regular Armed Forces as necessary.” By June 9, around 1,700 National Guard soldiers and seven hundred US Marines had been deployed to Los Angeles, even though both the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department had made clear that they did not require additional resources to manage the protests or suppress the outbreaks of looting and vandalism that occurred on their margins. As Breyer emphasized in his ruling that Trump’s federalization of the National Guard was “dangerous” and illegal, “There can be no debate that most protesters demonstrated peacefully.”

Trump’s deployment of troops in Los Angeles thus had no military purpose. It can best be thought of as a counterdemonstration. For Trump, those who protest against him are “paid troublemakers, agitators, and insurrectionists.” He cannot imagine large-scale dissent as anything other than a professionally organized conspiracy. The US Army, by this logic, is his own professionally organized crowd. It must be seen on the streets to demonstrate his personal power. That military presence in turn redefines peaceful protesters as enemies of the United States. They cease to be citizens exercising constitutionally protected rights to free speech and assembly and become outlaws and aliens.

Moreover, Trump’s lawyers pleaded in court that protesters need not engage in rebellion to be rebels. Breyer noted in his ruling (which was overturned on appeal) that “in a short paragraph, Defendants suggest that even if there was no rebellion that would justify federalizing the National Guard, there was still a ‘danger of a rebellion.’” The intent could hardly be clearer. So long as Trump has political opponents, their dissent alone makes the danger of rebellion timeless and ubiquitous. What Trump was trying to demonstrate in Los Angeles is that he can project his armed power into every American community at any time. This is a form of wish fulfillment that has deep roots in his psyche.

Everything in Trumpworld happens twice—the first time as performance and the second as reality. In The Art of the Deal (1987), the best seller that formed his personal creation myth, Trump, who dodged the draft for the Vietnam War because of “bone spurs,” included three photographs of himself in military uniform. The attire is that of a dashing officer in some Ruritanian operetta rather than of a soldier in the US Army. In the first two pictures, taken in 1964, to mark his high school graduation from the New York Military Academy, he is the Student Prince. We see him gloriously arrayed in a tall parade hat with a feather plume and a chin strap, a waist-length jacket with rows of brass buttons crossed by a white shoulder belt and adorned with elaborate epaulets and decals, white gloves, and a ceremonial saber. He is a toy soldier in a make-believe army.

But in the third photo he is leading a detachment of armed and uniformed young men on the streets of an American city. Trump is at the head of his prep school’s contingent, marching up Fifth Avenue in New York’s Columbus Day Parade of 1963, a year in which there were already over 16,000 US troops in Vietnam. (Remarkably, his bone spurs do not seem to have inhibited his ability to march in step.) His own caption for the photo is bizarre: “This was my first real glimpse of prime Fifth Avenue property.” He seems at once to be occupying New York and eyeing opportunities in the conquered territory.

Yet Trump came to believe that this playacting made him a real soldier. Michael D’Antonio, in his biography Never Enough: Donald Trump and the Pursuit of Success (2015), reported that Trump
insisted that he had actually known military life.

In a separate conversation he said, “I always thought I was in the military.” He said that in prep school he received more military training than most actual soldiers did, and he had been required to live under the command of men…who had been real officers and soldiers. “I felt like I was in the military in a true sense.”

Francisco Franco (1892-1975)-Francoist dictatorship

Here we may perhaps discern the origins of Trump’s extraordinary ability to eliminate the difference between performance and reality. The archetypal twentieth-century dictators—Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, Francisco Franco, Augusto Pinochet—had been or remained soldiers. Trump was a soldier “in a true sense,” by which he means presumably that a simulacrum of military masculinity is purer than the dirty reality of combat—war without tears.

Until, that is, the spectacle becomes the reality. Trump’s jokes become deadly serious, his provocative rhetoric becomes violent provocation—and his Ruritanian fantasy becomes America’s nightmare. This is what happened on January 6, 2021. Trump’s speech to his supporters before the invasion of the Capitol was that of a general firing his troops up for battle: “And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” But Trump did not then actually lead his storm troopers anywhere, and according to his apologists, “fight like hell” was not supposed to be taken literally. Trump’s fascistic militarism retained its performative quality and remained suspended between the playacting war games of his youth and the actual violence he frequently threatens, as commander-in-chief of the world’s most potent army, to unleash. It is thus entirely apt that his big moves toward military dictatorship in recent weeks have been a compound of show business and terror.

Trump’s grand triumphal-march-cum-birthday-party in Washington on June 14 was as much a pageant as a parade: a thousand of the participating troops were dressed in costumes rented from the Motion Picture Costume Company, which describes itself as “a leading supplier of civilian, military, and police wardrobe to the motion picture industry.” The versions of history being played out by the troops depended on the availability of suitable outfits. According to USA Today, “The Army eliminated the War of 1812 and Spanish-American War from the parade after running into trouble with the costuming process.”

The Washington jamboree was thus a show of force in which the show was at least as salient as the force. But the phrase had a parallel and much darker meaning on the streets of Los Angeles. That was a very different kind of costume drama: the dressing up of peaceful protest and some vandalism as a war so that, in Trump’s words, his soldiers could “liberate Los Angeles from the Migrant Invasion.” This too was make-believe, and it too was a performance. 

As California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, put it, “The federal government is taking over the California National Guard and deploying 2,000 soldiers in Los Angeles—not because there is a shortage of law enforcement, but because they want a spectacle.” This spectacle, though, was not meant to entertain. It was a war movie with real guns.

Trump’s militarism remains at the meta stage, which is to say it is still primarily about language and form. The word game he is playing is one in which “rebellion” and “insurrection” are stripped of all their past meanings so that they can be forced into any garb he chooses. This is a further aspect of the drive toward absolute power. As Humpty Dumpty replies when Alice objects to his claim that a word means “just what I choose it to mean,” “The question is, which is to be master—that’s all.” Milley’s rebuke of May 2020—pointing out that Lincoln was the president who faced a real insurrection—was a challenge to Trump’s position as master of meanings. In the second term, there is no place for such insolence.

On June 10, just after he sent the troops into Los Angeles, Trump boasted of rehabilitating the official memory of leaders of that insurrection. Addressing what was in effect a political rally at Fort Bragg, he told uniformed soldiers not only that he had given the base back its original name (it once honored the Confederate general Braxton Bragg, then was renamed Fort Liberty, and under the new dispensation is named after the World War II paratrooper Roland Bragg) but that “we are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill, and Fort Robert E. Lee.” It is another word game: officially the military heroes being honored with the latest renamings just happen to have the same surnames as famous Confederate insurrectionists. The refurbished titles of these bases are thus elaborate puns. In this linguistic burlesque it is not only names that mean whatever Trump wants them to mean. It is also the actual history of rebellion against the United States. He has dropped it into a never-never land where it is both remembered as heroic and forgotten as unspeakable—much, of course, like January 6.

Meanwhile, restoring these Confederate designations obliterates the names that replaced them in 2023, the names of women and people of color: Charity Adams, Mary Edwards Walker, Richard Cavazos, William Henry Johnson. This too has purpose. For now at least, the primary goal of Trump’s deployment of troops on the streets of Los Angeles is not the violent suppression of dissent. It is the remaking of the army itself. Trump is instructing the troops on how they must think of themselves and of the nature of the country they are pledged to defend.

Hegseth writes in his best seller The War on Warriors (2024) that he “didn’t want this Army anymore.” This army is the one that actually exists: of its 1.3 million active-duty troops, 230,000 are women, and more than 350,000 are Black. Trump appointed Hegseth to make many of these soldiers invisible. The War on Warriors is subtitled Behind the Betrayal of the Men Who Keep Us Free. It offers “to recover a true vision of the value of strong men.” These are “red-blooded American men,” men who “respect other strong, skilled, dedicated men” and not “men who are pretending to be women, or vice versa.” It follows that women and Black men who have risen up the ranks of the army are the good soldier’s nemesis: “A black or female soldier who gets promoted, primarily because of the color of their skin or the genitalia between their legs—gets people killed.”

While Hegseth pays lip service to racial equality in the army (“There is no black and white in our ranks. We are all green”), elsewhere in his book he falsely implies that Joe Biden’s appointment of the air force general Charles Q. Brown Jr. to succeed Milley as chairman of the Joint Chiefs was a diversity hire: “Was it because of his skin color? Or his skill? We’ll never know, but always doubt.” This hardly qualifies as racist dog-whistling—the pitch is too low and too brazenly loud. Trump duly fired Brown, an unmistakable overture to the much larger project.

The Trumpian reimagining of the US Army has nothing to do with fighting foreign wars. It is all about reasserting the innately white and male nature of America. According to Hegseth, the military’s “key constituency is normal men”: “Normal dudes have always fought, and won, our wars.” His vision, as he explains it, is to restore not just the value of strong men but also “the importance of normality.” The military is to be reborn as its true self: the embodiment of a nation of red-blooded American men. 

What that means for abnormal Americans of impure blood, does not have to be spelled out.

In this regard, putting troops on the streets of Los Angeles is a training exercise for the army, a form of reorientation. Soldiers are being retrained or loyalty to the president rather than the Constitution. They are meanwhile becoming accustomed to confronting that deviant and anomalous America. In Trump's (staged for television) Fort Bragg speech, Trump invited the troops to see protesters in Los Angeles as invaders: “We will not allow an American city to be invaded and conquered by a foreign enemy, and that’s what they are.” But what was happening in LA was, he claimed, even worse than an armed incursion:

Not only are these service members defending the honest citizens of California, they’re also defending our republic itself, and they are heroes, they’re in there, they’re heroes. They’re fighting for us, they’re stopping an invasion just like you’d stop an invasion. The big difference is most of the time when you stop an invasion, they’re wearing a uniform. In many ways, it’s tougher when they’re not wearing a uniform because you don’t know exactly who they are.

If the army doesn’t know exactly who “they” are, it has to be told. Trump reminded the troops that their purpose is to spread fear: “For our adversaries, there is no greater fear than the United States Army.” Its job now is to spread that fear to an ununiformed and thus unknowable mass of internal enemies. Just as Trump transforms actual rebellion into the vague but omnipresent “danger of a rebellion,” he makes the invading army invisible, amorphous, and fluid. Traditional military doctrine demands a clear understanding of the nature of the threat and the shape of the opposing forces. Contrariwise, in the Trump doctrine the threat must be as nebulous as possible, and the opposing forces must be formless. Thus only the commander-in-chief can say at any given time what they are. The enemy the army must learn to face is one that he, and he alone, can conjure.

In this Trump is offering soldiers what fascist leaders have always offered their followers: a peculiar amalgam of the thrill of transgression and the submissive surrender to absolute obedience. New lieutenants and sergeants are (for now at least) issued a document called The Army: A Primer to Our Profession of Arms. Its prohibition on any appearance of partisanship is emphatic:

The Army as an institution must be nonpartisan and appear so too. Being nonpartisan means not favoring any specific political party or group. Nonpartisanship assures the public that our Army will always serve the Constitution and our people loyally and responsively. When representing the Army or wearing the uniform, you must behave in a nonpartisan way too.

At Fort Bragg, Trump incited the uniformed soldiers arrayed behind him to boo the press and laugh at his political opponents, thus disobeying those prohibitions, while a pop-up shop on the base sold MAGA-branded clothing and jewelry and faux credit cards labeled “WHITE PRIVILEGE CARD: TRUMPS EVERYTHING.” This organized insubordination had an obvious point: soldiers must transfer their obedience from the army and the Constitution to Trump himself.

The manual makes clear to soldiers that they should not obey illegal orders:

When you believe you are being given an illegal order, you should take further action—do your homework, seek counsel, and approach your leaders for clarification. If this fails or you know that what you are being asked to do is unlawful, then it becomes your duty to disobey and to follow the law, no matter how resolute your superiors’ stance.

In this light, it actually suits Trump’s purposes if his federalization of the National Guard is understood to be illegal. His deployment of troops in Los Angeles is intended to dissolve boundaries—between domestic disputes and foreign wars, between reality and performance, and above all between a law-bound democracy and arbitrary rule. Getting soldiers used to following illegal orders and to disregarding their “duty to disobey” is a big step toward autocracy.

As his dithering over whether to bomb Iran showed, Trump has a problem: fascism bends inexorably toward war, but much of his appeal lies in his promise to end America’s foreign conflicts. Part of the solution is to mount one-off spectaculars: B-2 stealth bombers dropping 30,000-pound bunker busters. The other part is to repatriate the idea of boots on the ground. Like iPhones and pharmaceuticals, that kind of war will no longer be made abroad. It will be manufactured all over America.

Fintan O’Toole is the Advising Editor at The New York Review and a columnist for The Irish Times. His book Shakespeare Is Hard, But So Is Life was reissued last year. (July 2025)

Donald Trump's cult followers share the childish trait of believing in an imaginary friend

Tump is a convicted felon He was found guilty by a New York jury on thirty-four felony charges, the first time this has happened for a former and perhaps future president. He may have been David Pecker's real life "imaginary friend"- IOW believing his friendship with Trump could do no harm.

Like ‘Being Friends with a Hurricane’ by Fintan O’Toole
For the fixers, enablers, and vassals who surround Donald Trump, the rewards of his friendship are not worth the risks.

David Pecker, the former publisher of the National Enquirer, testified at Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York City, in April that when they spoke together, he called him “Donald.” 

While Pecker was giving his evidence, Trump also referred to him publicly by his first name. Speaking to the media outside the courtroom, he said, “Dave has been very nice, a nice guy.” 

David Pecker: The National Enquirer’s Fervor for Trump

The message to Pecker was clear: be nice to your old buddy. Trump was invoking the bond of reciprocity created by long intimacy, in this case a relationship built up over a quarter of a century. Yet as the prosecution complained before Pecker resumed his testimony, Trump’s words also carried an implicit threat: to the injunction “be nice” was appended a silent “or else”—not quite the language of genuine friendship.

The trial itself was a product of Trump’s inability to grasp the idea ofmutual obligation. It seems apt that at the heart of such an astounding moment in American history there is such a banal betrayal. Trump almost certainly wouldn’t have been prosecuted on those charges if he hadn’t been such a lousy friend. During their deliberations the jury asked to hear again portions of Pecker’s testimony that concerned an arrangement in 2016 to pay $150,000 to Karen McDougal, with whom Trump had an affair in 2006 and 2007. Pecker understood, as he told the jury, “that I would be either reimbursed by the Trump Organization or by Donald Trump.” If Trump had honored that deal and given Pecker what he was owed, Pecker would have later repeated the same maneuver to buy and suppress Stormy Daniels’s story of her brief sexual encounter with Trump. Thus Trump’s fixer, Michael Cohen, would not have had to pay Daniels $130,000 himself, and Trump’s reimbursement of Cohen would not have been recorded fraudulently as legal fees.

Donald Trump "like being friends with a hurricane"- Fintan O'Toole

Pecker told the court, “I felt that Donald Trump was my mentor. He helped me throughout my career.” He also confirmed multiple times that he understood Trump to be his friend. That relationship was the prism through which Pecker viewed the whole business of catching and killing salacious stories on Trump’s behalf. Asked whether he had formal arrangements with Trump to ensure repayment, Pecker replied, “No, they weren’t put into writing. It was just an agreement among friends.” The operation was based on personal trust.

Yet Trump stiffed him. Pecker needed to recoup the $150,000 he paid to McDougal because it was too large a sum to hide from his parent company. The failure to pay was, for him, difficult and distressing. He was repeatedly reassured by Cohen: “Don’t worry…. The Boss will take care of it.” Even bearing in mind that Trump’s real wealth has been grossly exaggerated, $150,000 was not a lot of money for him. But it was a great deal more than Pecker’s friendship was worth.

This episode tells us something much bigger about Trump. One of his favorite sayings, which he misattributes to Abraham Lincoln, is “A friend is one who has the same enemies as you have.” This is an accurate enough summation of the instrumental view of human relationships typical of autocrats. Trump’s problem, though, is that, as Pecker discovered, his friendship is little better than his enmity (or risking his hostility. Even when it is obviously in his own interest to help those who are loyal and useful, he cannot be trusted to do so.

Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy gives us the fullest sense of what it’s like to be a hanger-on in the court of a capricious narcissist. A pair of courtiers compare such a life to playing chess in the dark, on a board of jelly, with chessmen made of butter. 

Over the course of the three novels, two dazzlingly successful servants of Henry VIII, Thomas Wolsey (b. March 1473 –d. November 1530) and his protégé, Thomas Cromwell (b. 1485- d. July 1540), lose the king’s favor. They are stripped of power and then of life. This downfall, in the world Mantel conjures in such convincing detail, is inevitable. The psychopathic ruler’s ultimate expression of power is the destruction of those on whom he has relied most, the ones who have been such good servants that they have developed the temerity to imagine themselves as indispensable. In the end Cromwell is forced to reflect that “Henry has ground and ground me in the mill of his desires, and now I am fined down to dust I am no more use to him, I am powder in the wind. Princes hate those to whom they have incurred debts.”

Cardinal Wolsey former Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain

Yet Mantel’s novels also show that where there is risk, there can be reward. We understand why Wolsey and Cromwell, who are no fools, accept the hazards implicit in the task of navigating the big boss’s whims, rages, moods, and desires. The recompense is as lavish as the danger is acute. They get to build opulent palaces for themselves. They eat the best food and wear the finest clothes. They establish their own satellite courts with their own hangers-on and loyal retainers. They shine with the reflected luster of the monarch’s power and prestige. Part of what makes the novels so gripping is that the risk seems just about worth it. Ultimately it may have been a losing game, but while it lasted it gave these consummate players immense pleasure.

This is one of the things that is so peculiar about Trump’s nexus of power: the rewards are not worth the risks. He hates those to whom he has incurred debts. In her book Confidence Man, Maggie Haberman quotes an anonymous longtime friend who says that “being close to Trump was like ‘being friends with a hurricane.’” He is more a black hole than a sun king. Mantel’s Cromwell, in serving his master, imagines that “I have had my soul flattened and pressed till it’s not the thickness of paper.” Many of Trump’s servants—even if they had souls to begin with—have been so flattened and pressed by the overwhelming density of his self-regard that one has to wonder why others continue to propel themselves into his field of gravity. The typical autocrat revels in his power to give and take; Trump takes everything but gives back only grief and shame.

On April 21, 2018, Robert Costello, acting as a go-between for Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, sent an e-mail to Cohen. Less than a fortnight earlier federal agents had raided Cohen’s office and seized documents related to the $130,000 payment Cohen had made to Daniels on Trump’s behalf. The purpose of Costello’s e-mail was to reassure Cohen that he would be protected: “I spoke with Rudy. Very, very positive. You are loved…. Sleep well tonight. You have friends in high places. Bob. P.S. Some very positive comments about you from the White House.” At Trump’s trial, Costello confirmed that “‘friends in high places’ definitely refers to President Trump.” When Cohen was asked, “What did you understand Mr. Costello to mean by ‘you are loved,’ by whom?” he answered, “By President Trump.”

This is how hierarchies of autocratic power are supposed to operate. Vassals like Cohen do their master’s bidding, and in return they have friends in high places who will protect them from the consequences of their nefarious actions and reward them for their service. 

But no object of Trump’s love gets to sleep well. Cohen went on to spend thirteen and a half months behind bars and a year and a half in home confinement. He is just one of hundreds of Trump’s supporters and followers who have endured humiliation and disgrace.

Giuliani filed for bankruptcy last December, has lost his license to practice law in New York, may be about to lose his license in Washington, D.C., and faces criminal indictments in Georgia and Arizona. His old age is shadowed by the knowledge that he will die broke and dishonored. The same goes for Allen Weisselberg, the former chief financial officer of the Trump Organization and perhaps Trump’s most trusted functionary. He was sentenced in April to five months in jail after pleading guilty to two counts of perjury during his boss’s civil trial for fraud. It is his second sojourn in the notorious Rikers Island jail—he served one hundred days there in 2023 for offenses committed as Trump’s right-hand man.

Political enablers like Mark Meadows, Steve Bannon, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, George Papadopoulos, Roger Stone, Peter Navarro, and Sidney Powell have faced—or still face—various criminal charges. Even those (like Flynn, Stone, and Manafort) whom Trump pardoned had to pay large legal bills and will always bear the stamp of criminality. Lawyers who were sucked into Trump’s orbit—including Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Chesebro, Jeffrey Clark, and John Eastman—are under indictment for their parts in Trump’s schemes to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. So are dozens of people who served as fake electors. And more than 460 Trump supporters have been imprisoned for taking part in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Among the 244 people who received felony convictions connected to the invasion, the average sentence has been about three and a half years. These are catastrophic outcomes, destroying relationships, careers, and reputations. The prize for their devotion to Trump is a world of pain.

Even those who’ve avoided such disasters have to face Trump’s sadistic ingratitude toward supposed friends. To Mike Pence, Trump “was my president, and he was my friend.” That friendship did not move Trump to talk his fans out of wanting to hang Pence on January 6. Ronna Romney McDaniel served Trump with unctuous loyalty as chair of the Republican National Committee. Her obsequiousness extended to dropping, reportedly at Trump’s request, the half of her surname that linked her to her uncle (and Trump critic) Mitt Romney. Trump nonetheless dumped her in February, in part to clear the way for his daughter-in-law Lara Trump to become cochair of the RNC. 

McDaniel’s subsequent media career as a political analyst for NBC lasted less than a week before the network dispensed with her, too.

Or consider the pitiful fate of Chris Christie. He imagined himself to be not just a political ally of Trump but a close personal friend; as Christie wrote in his hilariously self-pitying memoir, Let Me Finish, “He told me he loved me.” In return, as governor of New Jersey, Christie became the first senior member of the Republican establishment to endorse Trump for the party’s presidential nomination in 2016—a gesture that marked Trump as a serious contender rather than a mere insurgent outsider. Christie then spent nearly six months leading a team of 140 people to draw up detailed plans for the transition to a putative Trump presidency. When Trump was duly elected and Christie arrived at Trump Tower with his thirty binders full of blueprints for the new administration, they were sent straight to the dumpster and Christie was informed by Bannon that “we do not want you to be in the building anymore.”

In all of this, Trump’s concept of friendship seems even emptier than that of his notoriously nasty mentor Roy Cohn.
Haberman writes of Cohn:

To the degree he followed rules, they involved a vague, menacing concept of “friendship.” In 1978, Cohn laid out to the journalist Ken Auletta how far he would go to protect those he saw as friends. “I wouldn’t lie under any circumstances. But I’d do everything I could, within the bounds of legal propriety, not to hurt someone whose friendship I had accepted,” he said.

Trump seems to have no such rule. He seems utterly indifferent to the hurt of his friends.

Even with Cohn himself Trump seemed incapable of generosity. Cohn had used all his dark arts for his protégé: “He’s been vicious to others in his protection of me,” Trump recalled, and said that if he were to sum up his personality, “I think the primary word I’d use is his loyalty.” Yet this did little to affect Trump when Cohn’s former companion Russell Eldridge was terminally ill with AIDS. Trump gave the dying man a suite in his Barbizon-Plaza Hotel but sent the bills to Cohn and tried to insist that he pay them. Knowing that Cohn himself had AIDS, Trump moved his own legal business elsewhere; Cohn was said by his secretary to be “plainly crushed.”

When his younger brother, Robert, died in 2020, Trump wrote in a statement, “He was not just my brother, he was my best friend.” At a press conference he remarked, “We’ve had a great relationship for a long time, from day one.” Yet according to Robert Trump’s obituary in The New York Times, the two men were estranged for years:

Simply being a close family member did not shield him from his brother’s rages when Donald Trump needed someone to blame. Family friends said that as Donald’s star grew, Robert struggled with working for his brother and cast himself as his brother’s polar opposite.

In her family memoir Too Much and Never Enough, Donald’s niece Mary L. Trump wrote of how he tormented Robert from the time they were children:

Donald had discovered early on how easy it was to get under Robert’s pale skin and push him past his limits; it was a game he never tired of playing. Nobody else would have bothered—Robert was so skinny and quiet that there was no sport in tormenting him—but Donald enjoyed flexing his power, even if only over his younger, smaller, and even thinner-skinned brother. Once, out of frustration and helplessness, Robert kicked a hole in their bathroom door, which got him into trouble despite the fact that Donald had driven him to it. When his mother told Donald to stop, he didn’t.

Plato, in The Republic, described the inescapable wretchedness of the tyrannical character; he can never really have a friend:

Men of his kind behave in the same sort of way in private life, before they have gained power. Their companions are parasites in every way subservient to them, and they are themselves always prepared to give way and put on the most extravagant act of friendship if it suits their purpose, though once that purpose is achieved their tune changes.

The consequences of this friendlessness, Plato noted, only worsen as the tyrannical character gains power:

His power will make him still more envious, untrustworthy, unjust, friendless, and godless, a refuge and home for every iniquity, and you can see that he’s a source of misery above all to himself, but also to his neighbours.

This condition was, in the Greek worldview, the ultimate in existential bleakness: “So tyrannical characters pass their lives without a friend in the world; they are always either master or slave, and never taste true friendship or freedom.”

Both sides of this master/slave duality apply to Trump’s practice of friendship. The first is obvious in his refusal of reciprocity: for Trump, friendship is a one-way street. The slavish aspect is evident in his extreme reluctance to repudiate any source of support, however repellent. In 2016 he was very slow to disavow the enthusiastic endorsement of the former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. As president, he was so loath to offend white supremacists, antisemites, and neo-Nazis that he called those who took part in a violent rally in Charlottesville in 2017 “very fine people.” In 2022 he had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with the white supremacist Nick Fuentes and the antisemite Kanye West. Of West he later wrote, “We got along great, he expressed no anti-Semitism, & I appreciated all of the nice things he said about me on [the Fox TV program] ‘Tucker Carlson.’ Why wouldn’t I agree to meet?”

Trump can seem almost childishly desperate to impress even when he is not currying favor with anyone he perceives to have power or fame or anyone who offers him political backing. His efforts to show off at a meeting at his Bedminster golf club in 2021 make him sound like an eager teenager trying to ingratiate himself with the in-crowd. Trump allowed the group, including the ghostwriter working on Meadows’s memoir, to see a secret contingency plan for an attack on Iran: “It’s so cool. I mean, it’s so, look…and you probably almost didn’t believe me, but now you believe me.”

Likewise Trump has always been anxious to claim celebrities as friends. Michael Jackson, Trump tweeted on his death, “was a great friend and a spectacular entertainer.” Joan Rivers “was an amazing woman and a great friend.” Trump was “taking piano lessons from my friend Elton John.” Whitney Houston “was a great friend and an amazing talent.” Andy Williams “was a friend of mine and a great guy.” Tom Brady is, whether he likes it or not, “a friend of mine, he’s a great guy.” “Do you think,” Trump asked his Twitter followers in 2013, “Putin will be going to The Miss Universe Pageant in November in Moscow – if so, will he become my new best friend?” After Trump became president, Putin had to vie for his affections with “my good friend, President Xi of China,” “my friend Kim Jong Un,” and even Queen Elizabeth II, of whom “I am a great friend and admirer.”

This habit of inventing friends was also part of Trump’s shtick in dealing with subordinates. Cliff Sims, who worked for him in the White House, noted in his memoir, Team of Vipers, that “as I got to know Trump, he’d often cite various nameless ‘friends’ whose statements or experiences fit neatly into whatever point he wanted to make.” It is an extraordinary thought: the most powerful man in the world had to fabricate friends in order to convince a relatively junior staffer of the rightness of his opinions.

What are the political implications of Trump’s friendlessness? One is that it contributes to the instability of his use of power. Trump has not been able to create a fixed cohort of political intimates. He has even alienated many of his most prominent enablers, including William Barr, James Mattis, H.R. McMaster, John Kelly, and Mick Mulvaney. Successful authoritarian (as opposed to totalitarian) rulers cultivate networks of loyalty by offering intimacy, patronage, and protection. They institutionalize their authority by recruiting and embracing individuals who in turn can sustain the support of wider groups. These friends of the regime benefit from the boss’s largesse. This is the system perfected, for example, by a politician Trump greatly admires, the Hungarian prime minister and pioneer of “illiberal democracy” Viktor Orbán. In March the US ambassador David Pressman said of Orbán’s Hungary:

All aspects of government power—from procurement, to licensing, to tourism subsidies, to concessions, to tax and audit actions, to regulatory policy—provide favorable treatment for companies owned by party leaders or their families, in-laws or old friends.

Trump, though, is not very good at this kind of personal patronage. His sleaze is primarily nepotistic and self-serving. He keeps too much of it in the family.

Yet this failure has a paradoxical quality. Trump’s faithlessness makes the faith of his acolytes all the purer. In the Republican Party’s congressional caucuses, cynical calculation still dominates: many of its members despise Trump but do his bidding either because they are afraid of him or because they need his help with their voters. But beyond the cohort of professional representative politicians there are the true believers who, unless they are stupid, must know that if they get burned on his behalf Trump will do nothing to save them. In the typical nexus of political corruption, the hanger-on has reasonable expectations of protection and advancement. Having a friend in the highest of places is a clear advantage. The wages for dirty work are good. But Trump’s love is now so plainly tainted that any calculating opportunist has to factor in the probabilities of imprisonment, bankruptcy, and disgrace. 

When the Boss is not just mad and bad but so obviously dangerous to know, serving him must be thought of as an act more of self-sacrifice than of self-interest. This may sound quite sweet, but what it really amounts to is a gradual replacement of coldly self-serving shrewdness with genuine fanaticism. The first is corrupt; the second is deadly. Those who embrace the possibility of pain for themselves are all the more willing to inflict it on others.

This is true of the inner core of Trump’s enablers, but what of the millions who love him? Friendship, for them, operates in two ways. One is their bond with one another. Meadows, in his memoir, writes of the sense of affinity among those who attend Trump rallies:

In general, I found them to be some of the kindest, most generous people I had ever met. Many of them had met one another at Trump rallies in the past. There was a kinship in the MAGA movement that is almost never reported on, and it includes people from all walks of life. In the months that I had been traveling to rallies with President Trump, I had spent time with carpenters, computer programmers, business owners, and used car salesmen, all of whom seemed like the best of friends as soon as the MAGA hats came out. I saw bartenders milling about with medical doctors, and groups of young people mixing with retirees like it was the most natural thing in the world.

This may be sugarcoated, but there is no reason to doubt its essential truth. The MAGA movement may symbolize hatred, but among its devotees it radiates good vibrations.  (A cult trait!)

And Trump, as the occasion of this overflow of amity, seems, if not exactly friendly, then certainly friend-like.

Trump also fills the need, in a harsh and confusing world, for an imaginary friend. The make-believe companion can be forgiven all slights and failures. It is striking that toward the end of his testimony at Trump’s criminal trial, David Pecker was anxious to make clear that in spite of being essentially robbed by Trump, “I have no ill will at all. And I still consider him a close—I still, even though we haven’t spoken, I still consider him a friend.” (Ironically, it was probably this evidence of continuing loyalty that made Pecker’s testimony so damaging to Trump—unlike Cohen, whose hatred for his old boss oozed from every pore, Pecker did not appear to be contaminated by enmity.)

That’s the thing with imaginary friendship—even when the friendship is patently false, the imagination can still make it feel real. Trump, as president, treated most of his voters as he’s treated Pecker. He failed to keep his promises. He didn’t repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something “beautiful,” or make the superrich pay higher taxes, or “drain the swamp” of corporate lobbyists, or become “the voice” of American workers, or eliminate the federal deficit, or bring all the coal mines back to West Virginia, or build a coast-to-coast wall and make Mexico pay for it. 

Most of his voters did not, in reality, have a friend in high places. But that has only sharpened their desire to believe that “the Boss will take care of it.” The more Trump suffers for his own crimes, the more his voters need to believe that he is suffering for them.