Trump Declares War on the United States

Do these guys look happy to be here? Because I don’t think they look happy.

Check out a review of Dictator From Day One in French, where it is rendered as Dictateur Depuis le Premier Jour.

If you haven’t read the book already, get it here.

Also see a long and interesting conversation I had with Michael Liebowitz.

Thanks to those of you who have contributed positive reviews at Amazon. As for the negative reviews—I’ve been warning that Trump is trying to use the killing of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to clamp down on opposition by describing all criticism of him as incitement of violence. It’s something I have been hearing from Trump supporters, and you can see it in my only one-star review, which denounces my “dangerous book.” I think you might find it grimly amusing.

This book comes directly from the philosophy of Marx. It is based on lies for the sole purposes of agitation and propaganda. False, hate speech that gives permission structures to violence against anyone who doesn’t agree with the Democratic Party’s American Marxism…the kind of hate speech that got Charlie Kirk (and others) murdered.

It is fascinating to see just how quickly conservatives are warming up to the concept of “hate speech.” If there’s one rule about freedom of speech, it’s that everybody loves controls on speech—but only when they believe they will get to wield those controls.

But look, if describing this as a “dangerous book” isn’t a good advertisement, I don’t know what is. So buy it now.

Unfortunately, the story of Donald Trump attempting to create a dictatorship—as “dangerous” as it is to tell—keeps getting more relevant.

In my book, I comment that he seems to be using the list of charges against George III in the Declaration of Independenceas a to-do list. I mention especially these four:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

To those, we can now add this one: “He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.”

That is the upshot of Trump’s words and his administration’s actions in the past week or so: a declaration of war against America’s cities—and its citizens.

Notes from a Decadent Empire

Trump’s speech last week was to a highly unusual meeting of all the top officers of the United States armed forces at the Marine Corps base in Quantico, Virginia. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called the meeting at short notice and, ominously, with no explanation of what it was about. There was fevered speculation that it was going to be a purge of the armed forces. Perhaps, following Hitler’s precedent, the generals and admirals would have to take an oath of personal loyalty to Trump.

It turned out to be something far more prosaic and frankly kind of lame: Hegseth called them all there for a self-important speech about how he is terminating all alleged forms of “wokeness” in the US armed forces. Needless to say, the military’s top leaders were not excited about being called away from their actually important duties for this. Here’s a typical review:

“It‘s a waste of time for a lot of people who emphatically had better things they could and should be doing,” said a former senior defense official. “It’s also an inexcusable strategic risk to concentrate so many leaders in the operational chain of command in the same publicly known time and place, to convey an inane message of little merit.”

The upshot of Hegseth’s speech is exactly what we would expect from Secretary of Defense Cuffy Meigs. As readers of Atlas Shrugged will remember, Meigs was Ayn Rand’s embodiment of the brute materialist, and that seems fitting for Hegseth, whose speech was entirely about how we’re going to restore the “warrior ethos” by, er, requiring every soldier to be clean shaven, increasing physical fitness standards, and not having any fat generals. His basic premise is that wars are won by the side that can do more pushups—as opposed to anything having to do with strategy or logistics or all that stuff the smartypants types like to talk about. Which are, in fact, how we actually win wars.

Only a day or so before Hegseth’s speech, Donald Trump announced that he would also be speaking at this event. He just couldn’t resist a chance to appear important before a large audience.

His speech did not seem to have been written out or planned in any way. The transcript is here, but I think this passage will give you a sense for the bizarre and rambling character that we have come to associate with Trump.

We were not respected with Biden. They looked at him falling down stairs every day. Every day, the guy’s falling down stairs.

I said, it’s not our president. We can’t have it. I’m very careful. You know, when I walk downstairs for—like I’m on stairs like these stairs, I’m very—I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record, just try not to fall because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen and it became a part of their legacy.

We don’t want that, need to walk nice and easy. You don’t have to set any record, be cool. Be cool when you walk down but don’t—don’t bop down the stairs. So, one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as the president, but he would bop down those stairs—I’ve never seen, da da da da da da, bop, bop, bop, he’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on. I said, great, I don’t want to do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are going to happen, and it only takes once.

How can you tell your country has a problem with gerontocracy? When your president devotes a whole section of a major speech to his fear of walking down stairs. It puts that whole thing with the UN escalators in perspective.

If you really want to punish yourself for something, you can watch that segment here, because the manner in which he delivers those lines makes it even more surreal.

I find this little rant quite revealing about Trump’s personal psychology. He is a man filled to the brim with personal insecurities and absolutely obsessed with how he looks and what other people will think of him. Speaking of Ayn Rand characters, she spent much of The Fountainhead exploring the personality of the “second-hander” who can only grasp his own existence through the eyes of others—but she would never have dared to write a monologue as over-the-top as this.

Keep looking for this everywhere in what Trump says. It’s sprinkled throughout this speech, for example, when he refers to the generals as looking as if they came from “Central Casting.” It’s a common figure of speech he likes to use, which is also kind of an old-timey reference. (Central Casting is a real company, founded in 1925, but its heyday was a long time ago.)

That’s Donald Trump in a nutshell: an insecure old man obsessed with outward appearances, with his idea of what makes for an impressive appearance formed 50 to 70 years ago. That’s reflected in another mini-rant, where he muses about naval strategy based on his youthful impressions of a World War II documentary first aired from 1952 to 1953, when Trump was seven years old. Give me the boy at seven, and I will give you the man.

I think we should maybe start thinking about battleships, by the way. You know, we have—Secretary of the Navy came to me—because I look at the [USS] Iowa out in California and I look at different ships in the old pictures. I used to watch “Victory at Sea.” I love “Victory at Sea.” Look at these admirals. It’s got to be your all time—in black and white.

And I look at those ships, they came with the destroyers alongside of them and man, nothing was going to stop—there were 20 deep, and they were in a straight line, and there was nothing going to stop them. And we actually talk about, you know, those ships. Some people would say, no, that’s old technology. I don’t know.

I don’t think it’s old technology when you look at those guns, but it’s something we’re actually considering, the concept of battleship, nice six-inch sides, solid steel, not aluminum, aluminum that melts if it looks at a missile coming at it. It starts melting as the missile is about two miles away. Now those ships, they don’t make them that way anymore.

But you look at it, and—your secretary likes it, and I’m sort of open to it. And bullets are a lot less expensive than missiles, a lot of—a lot of reasons. I should take a vote, but I’m afraid to take that vote because I may get voted out on that one. But I tell you, it’s something we’re seriously considering.

They were powers. They were big powers. They were just about as mean and scary as you could be, and so we’re looking at that.

All the admirals of the United States Navy were gathered at Quantico to hear this great wisdom from their commander-in-chief. I should also note that this came right before Trump talked about the importance of leadership being based on merit.

This speech was rambling and hastily thrown together, a last-minute whim on the part of the president. And despite his impromptu riff about battleships, it did not seem that he intended to make any major announcement about the strategy or purpose of the US military.

And yet Trump did so nevertheless.

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The “War From Within”

The announcement came in the form of Trump’s warning to the US military that “our inner cities” are “a big part of war now.”