Reprinted with permission from Truthdig
Donald Trump famously hates stupid wars and claims to have set the record for ending wars in a presidential term. It’s not the worst idea to wonder if he’s starting the former so he can keep resetting the latter. If you’re already a great fake businessman, you might as well be a great fake statesman. Smarter people than Trump would realize that, having come this far, you might as well fake the war too. In this respect, we bear witness to the rare instance of Iran, Greenland and Minnesota all having the same defense policy.
The administration’s policy on the other hand, is the continuation of the GOP by other means. There are claims, and there are outcomes, connected only by wishes or threats. Whether the enemy is Cuba, Minneapolis or a transgender person, the war is the purpose of the war. Its prizes are nihilism and hatred at best. No greater project awaits an armistice. There are only enemies, victories and different enemies. There is no strategy, because realizing the ostensible macro purpose of each war, besides having it, requires committing to an absurd and criminal totality, because their own rhetorical stakes have demonstrated that nothing less than an American Iran, an American Cuba, a transgender-free nation or a Minnesota with only the correct voters will be acceptable. Carried to their conclusions, you can do one of two things: exterminate the enemy or the treasury and destroy yourself as a nation.
To hear SecWar Pete Hegseth state it, war is a thing that happens when our warfighters — whose day job Hegseth seems to understand as “gym” in the way that Ken in the Barbie movie thinks his job is “beach” — impose inherently superior American war fighter masculinity on beta war losers. On the other hand, a non-idiot would tell you that war is what happens when a state has exhausted all other possibilities of achieving necessary goals, then targets its aggression exclusively toward achieving them. This process is torn apart when operated by the Republican Party.
The fundamental proposition of the GOP is that elites should possess everything they don’t have already, except obligations to other people. Unfortunately, that polls very poorly with other people. As such, any number of polite fictions, red herrings and compassionate rephrasings are constructed like a duck blind between a basic political philosophy and those it exploits. These evasions become incoherent when applied to the brutal meat-hook reality of a war — or, indeed to when the Republican Party tries to do anything — because you can’t generate outcomes aligned with your goals if your strategy begins as sales pitch, is designed in obfuscation and deliberately rooted in futility.
There are only enemies, victories and different enemies.
Put simply, even if they knew what they were doing — either in terms of competence in execution or even the strategy they think they’re using — the Trump administration cannot win whatever wars they tease in Cuba, Greenland, Iran, Minnesota or Venezuela. Imposing meaningful American control of any of the above states would require taxes, rationing, government management of production and countless old little league photos of newly dead white boys on the news. It took two years of the most popular president to date making the moral case for intervention and thousands dead in a sneak attack to sell Americans on that kind of sacrifice over 80 years ago. Our capacity for it has not been enhanced by the intervening generations. To the future honored dead, we do not yet feel we even owe them a why.
Imposing MAGA dominance on the hearts and minds of Minnesota won’t be any easier than establishing “Batista II” in Havana or forging an Iran that American imaginations can’t frighten themselves with. Imagine telling a generation reared on Iraq War movies teeming with trauma and the paranoia of invisible enemies that they get to go live-fire cosplay all of them at once — only this time the insurgents among them look like half of their fantasy league. Imagine putting them in the Hurt Locker for a couple months in the Twin Cities, trying to starve out the resisters, because Donald Trump is stamping out fraud and abuse, a hysterical perversion of a war whose hypocrisy would be overstated even in avant-garde theater and American military history.
The federal government already can’t go into rebellion against the few United States insisting on a legal system. Even targeting fraudsters as a cover does more to question whether Trump is merely eliminating his competition than it does ennoble America’s mission in America. Establishing Minnesota’s compliance with the Republican Party (whatever that means), this combination of impossible aims and impossible means, remains as much an open-ended fantasy as Cuba the 51st state. It can have no real benchmarks and thus no real end, especially not if you don’t want one. It ends when it costs too much. Whether that’s when we run out of a need for excuses, or run out of money, or run out of Iranians or Bad Minnesotans, or when enough people say “no” is a matter of priorities.
The prevailing wisdom thus far is that Trump is operating a protection racket disguised as a foreign policy — and, in a twist, as a domestic foreign policy. That’s certainly part of it, as is the fascist need to obscure its incompetency by feeding its followers an illusion of constant action meeting an illusion of constant, variegated threats. The tempting term for the hegemony he seems to wish to impose is something like “vassalage,” because it sounds like government instead of extortion. But vassalage was a reciprocally binding contract, which both sides were entitled to rescind in response to the other’s broken faith, and it represents a degree of accountability that Trump’s career of lawfare says does not apply to him.
In his gut, Trump is the preteen bully on the playground — more big bones and huskiness than muscle — who gets his snack freebies at recess by rearing back an arm, cocking a fist and letting everyone’s imagination do the work for him. He has neither the first clue what to do if swinging becomes necessary, nor the slightest desire to find out, because it might hurt. He hasn’t thought for a second about how he would maintain dominance day after day. The menacing fist exists to express the hate he thinks he’s entitled to unleash and to generate the fear that he is owed. But the work ends there. Snacks are treats he gets as a reward for being his worst self, and it’s hard to tell which is more satisfying, but this is also all that there is.
In his gut, Trump is the preteen bully on the playground.
Which, in a way, makes the Republican Party’s war on the existence of transgender Americans — one Trump himself seems only barely opportunistically interested in — their most successful to date. Much like whatever Participation Ribbentrop Marco Rubio thinks he’s doing in Latin America or whatever Trump thinks he’s doing against immigrants, Iran or the Mercator Projection in Greenland, the war on trans people can be relied on to yield victories and remain just out of reach because it has neither a strategy nor an end. Another victory was scored Feb. 26, when Kansas criminalized, overnight, the act of driving while transgender, instantly invalidating the #1 ID that people need to function in America.
President Donald Trump holds a Cabinet meeting, Thursday, April 10, 2025, in the Cabinet Room. (Official White House Photo by Molly Roberts). Public domain. Via Picryl .
The latest senseless cruelty will get American conservatives to a world without transgender people as much as multiplying by zero will. They will mark this victory in public by invoking whatever screwheaded argument got more queer-bashing past the finish line. In private, they will celebrate every trans person who self-disappears — into the closet or to somewhere else. They will perhaps pretend even to themselves that they don’t celebrate every suicide that comes and every social murder, giving thanks for the cover given by a media that is already terrified to lay active blame and already struggles to convey passive processes. It is the perfect vision of how Trump makes war: making a big show and then hoping his victims do the work for him. It’s vitally important to happen, and if push comes to shove, someone else should really take care of it.
Of the many forces sustaining Trumpism all this time, one of the strongest and most enduring is that everything is too stupid and humiliating to be real. The sheer effrontery of such a clownish machine is enough to keep the horror of what it does in abeyance until it starts to roll over the bodies. But a war conducted long enough, even if only for its own sake, eventually runs out of suspended disbelief. First to go are the lies of tactical expediency, then eventually the Big Lies undergirding the whole enterprise.
After the repetition of the war’s pretexts has created space for the possible, after the easier lies are spent, after Trump the Scamp and his greedy feints at war stop paying off, the only thing left is the original cause, the long-awaited victims. All that is left then is the demented demand for the impossible and the criminal, one that must be met by total measures, and for which there is a waiting library of techniques of colonialism and repression and deprivation and, ultimately, extermination. When each runs out of lies to destroy, what is left is only ourselves, and what is lost of America in their application is total too.
Via Truthdig
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