I have already posted a comment this morning suggesting that Trump is a Russian agent.
He is more than that though. He is intent on destruction. This is Musk's modus operandi, which Trump has empowered. His aim is to take any structure and deny it resources until it breaks, and then, of he thinks it necessary, plug a few of the remaining gaps. This is because he thinks as a result that profit (which he equates with money, although it is not) is maximised, and nothing else matters to him.
George Monbiot has successfully related that idea to Trump's relationship with the planet in an article in The Guardian today, saying in his opening paragraphs:
In thinking about the war being waged against life on Earth by Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their minions, I keep bumping into a horrible suspicion. Could it be that this is not just about delivering the world to oligarchs and corporations – not just about wringing as much profit from living systems as they can? Could it be that they want to see the destruction of the habitable planet?
We know that Trump's overriding purpose is power. We have seen that no amount of power appears to satisfy his craving. So let's consider power's ultimate destination. It is to become not only an emperor, but the last of the emperors: to close the chapter on civilisation. It is to scratch your name indelibly upon a geological epoch. Look on my works, ye vermin, and despair.
The article is well worth reading. George concludes:
Where there is no love, there can be only destruction. Smash the planet then transcend it; leave your indelible mark on Earth while reigning triumphant in the heavens: this, I believe, is a deep, unspoken urge that helps explain Trump's programmes. But even if, through some grim miracle, the planet wreckers succeeded, they would soon discover that no technological wonderland, no space station or Martian city, compares to what we have.
This is the only planet in the universe to which we are adapted. Things we seldom think about – 1 bar of atmospheric pressure at the Earth's surface; the magnetosphere, which, with the atmosphere, shields us from cosmic radiation and solar proton bombardment; ambient oxygen; 9.8 m/s2 of gravity; an average surface temperature of 15C – create, alongside the living systems that feed, water and shelter us, a place that would sound like paradise to anyone removed from it. This is our heaven, and there can be no other.
Those paragraphs are particularly well written. They also happen to be right.
We have to hope we can survive this. There is no guarantee that we will.
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it is a cult of the Glorious leader. Not to be questioned and any critic to be attacked and silenced. One must display conspicuous loyalty. There are no shortage of people in the US, and not just there, to trade their integrity for access to power and favour from the Glorious Leader.
@ Ian Stevenson
“Monsters exist, but they are too few in number to be truly dangerous. More dangerous are the common men, the functionaries ready to believe and to act without asking questions.”
Primo Levi.
When we compare to World War 2, one key difference is that Germany had been struggling under vast economic reparations. It was a wounded bear.
The US and by extension Trump have a significantly greater share of world power.
However, if there’s anything that gives hope, it’s that around half of Americans don’t want it and some will at least show progress on such an agenda. Also, Europe knows where Appeasement goes, and while it is tolerating idle talk about annexing other countries, if it actually tried to seize Canada or elsewhere by force, the US might expect a swifter alignment against that than against Germany in history. The hope would have to be that it would be enough.
I have the the great good fortune to work as a gardener and am constantly amazed at the beauty and diversity of what I see unfolding each week, the miraculous renewal at this time of year and the accompanying wildlife – I was joined by a great spotted woodpecker yesterday…..it is my sanity amidst all this chaos and I find it hard to understand the desire to destroy it.
I suspect that some people are so far removed from this kind of environment they simply don’t even recognise it.
Looking at what is happening all around I am reminded of “The Lorax”, a brilliant parable of the capitalist exploitation of nature by Dr Seus first puplished in 1972….so simple and so true, and so much more powerful than an academic treatise – recommended reading!!
Thanks
Certainly the far right rabid evangelicals a core constituent of Trumps (et born again JD Vance?) salivate in soon meeting their maker.
How evangelicals influence US foreign policy in the Middle East | EP2 | Witness Documentary Al Jazeera English
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_iQhbcOgfqw
Well written and frightening piece of writing by George Monbiot. How did we end up here?
I thought we would have learned from our past mistakes and hopefully we have in some ways but it seems we are taking huge steps in the wrong direction. There is a restlessness so pervasive today but in these times Richard people with courage rise up. I think of a quote from Anne Frank 1944, a thirteen year old girl who wrote “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death.”
Thanks
Yes, superb article from Monbiot.
In similar vein – and also superb – is a lengthy segment by Lawrence O’Donnell on Trump’s tarriffs (those on auto parts and cars ‘paused’ within 24 hours) pointing out, amongst other things that they are actually illegal under the US constitution.
But best of all, he has several clips of Justin Trudeau’s speech against the tariffs – of which you had a short clip yesterday. As O’Donnell says at one point, wouldn’t you like a leader like that, – which applies in spades here in the UK.
Anyway, here it is. Watch the Trudeau clips in particular and marvel at how awful they make Starmer look.
https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-canada-s-trudeau-humiliates-cowardly-trump-who-backs-down-on-tariffs-again-233613381755
Thanks, Ivan.
George Monbiot is so very good – an original thinker, who does also draw on research when relevant.
Even before we get to the potential catastrophism of Trump/Musk , the ‘techbros’ Musk Theil, Zuckerberg, Bezos Ellison etc seem to have signed up to the ‘post democracy’ global corporate model – as Monbiot puts it ‘ delivering the world to oligarchs and corporations’. That is a least understandable – as being in their profit-making / tax evading interests.
Maybe both Trump and Musk have whatever mental condition it is , that wants not to leave behind any legacy other than destruction. A sort of Hitlerian – ‘if I’ve got to go , Germany has to be destroyed with me’. I have experience of such people in real life.
Its terrifying that whatever skills Musk has in terms of original thinking and problem solving , and the wealth to implement things, he doesn’t devote them to speeding up the transition from fossil fuels to renewables – accepting the science – , but instead talking absolute rubbish about our escape to Mars planet B. In a science fiction novel it just wouldn’t be believed.
Richard ‘s ‘ hope we can survive’ indeed.
If only there was a way of getting people to understand the fragility – in particular how razor -thin the liveable atmosphere is – a 5km skin around a 6400 km radius planet. Somehow when we look up to the sky we feel it is big – sort of infinite – comforting, – dangerous illusion.
A speculation:
If someone, the man in the street for example, starts to behave outside the norms for a human being, it can get to the point where they are considered by the medical profession, to be psychotic. They would, in all probability, end up in a safe place – the funny farm, if for no other reason than to protect both themselves and others.
Based on what we see publicly, which is all we have to base any thoughts, the article by George Monbiot does seem to be pointing towards a group of individuals who have some form of collective mental issue. The US system has checks and balances which are obviously under attack. I believe that only Congress has the power to unseat a President. But could it remove both President and VP simultaneously as it might need to? Assuming it could, it suggests to me that this could only happen with certainty of outcome after the mid-terms.
I am sure that the current administration has worked out by now that it cannot actually allow those mid-terms to happen. I just don’t know enough about the US political system to even guess at how it would all unfold, but that is where the battle royal will occur, I would guess within the next 18 months. All the rest is just the build up, in military terms, they are preparing the battlefield.
So, I have to wonder whether events in the in the interim could force the Democrats and Republicans who are not fully behind Trump might be sufficient to precipitate impeachment prior to the mid-terms? You have to hope so. But this raises a query, ‘has Trump already secured himself against impeachment with his actions so far?’
I just don’t know.
How should the rest of the world prepare, as it seems, if George is right, we need to.
Congress censured the Member who protested against Trump today for being very rude.
Trump, meanwhile, is killing people.
From what I’ve read, Trump is planning to invoke ‘martial law’, which would apparently give him the right to suspend elections. My suspicion is that he would use the very push-back he’s orchestrated against Zelensky not holding an election (‘he’s at war’) to justify this move. Therefore he needs to generate war at home. Everything he’s doing would certainly be consistent with that goal. I presume ’suspending’ elections would leave incumbents in place indefinitely, though their power would doubtless be restricted. Given the moral fibre being shown on both sides, one wonders if they’d do much effective resisting. Or if there’s much effective resisting they could do. Once Trump ‘holds all the cards’, we’ve seen what he does demonstrated publicly in his treatment of Ukraine & Zelinsky. Victory alone is not enough. He must have complete humiliation & submission. A good proportion of US politicians & judiciary have already l caved in to his tyranny, seemingly. Trump & his Co-conspirators have planned this well, & were allowed to do so by Biden’s fecklessness & refusal to see evil when it was staring right at him. A fecklessness & blindness shared by many in Europe, not least our own Boris Johnson, who apparently wrote & had (briefly) published in the Daily Mail an article declaring that Trump would ‘never withdraw support from Ukraine’…12 hours before Trump withdrew support from Ukraine…the article was withdrawn….
I recently came across this on Substack.
https://open.substack.com/pub/mikebrock/p/the-plot-against-america?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1w1c61
It’s a long but deep dive into the techno-fascist ideology behind everything Trump’s doing. I don’t believe Trump is in control, he’s being used as a front man by some much more dangerous lunatics – Bannon, Vance and Musk among them.
Thanks
Again, tinfoil hat time here, but I often wonder if the people who disregard climate change don’t care specifically because of where, and who, they believe it will affect the most. It’s the equatorial regions that will bear the brunt, according to much of the research, with all those poor countries full of people who are decidedly not of white European descent. I believe, in my most conspiratorial moments, that Trump, Putin, and other climate change denying politicians, organisations and world leaders do indeed believe in climate change, but see only opportunity. Look at Trump’s ambitions towards Canada and Greenland, mostly empty territory that will become viable as the world heats up, and provide displaced Americans with a place to go, land to farm, new minerals to exploit, as the southern states become uninhabitable. It will also leave a ravaged and barren region to act as barrier between them and their southern neighbours.
Look at the rise of the European Right Wing, and their obsession with immigration. Europe’s borders are more fortified than The US border with Mexico. Is this really about securing Europe against displace climate refugees?
Russia don’t care about climate change. Obviously they are reliant on exporting fossil fuels, but does Putin think a warmer world will benefit Russia. They are expanding operations into the Arctic, and warmer seas will finally give them viable Northern ports. Siberia is mostly empty and is ripe for Russians to settle in when the world heats up. That’s unless China has ambitions on expansion North.
Trump may claim climate change is a hoax, but the US military does not and has prepared contingencies for it in their forward planning. Trump will have been briefed. Putin knows, as all world leaders know what will likely happen. My worry is that they just don’t care, and it is more than vested interest in fossil fuels that is causing this lack of regard.
Then again, it’s more likely that I am as much of a crackpot as all the other conspiracy theory peddling loons on the internet. It’s just hard not to try and pick out patterns in all the chaos.
Yesterday I attended 2 talks, both of which covered periods of tyranny. One was about Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle (1623 – 1673) and covered the period in England from 1629 to 1640 when King Charles I ruled as an autocratic absolute monarch without recourse to Parliament and which became known as the Eleven Years’ Tyranny. The second talk was by the author Kate Mosse, based around her writing the ‘Labyrinth’ series (which I admit not to have read) and the area in southwest France around Carcassonne, in the middle ages as the local population struggled against the tyranny of Pope Innocent III.
Early February 2025 Keir Starmer’s top legal adviser (Attorney General Richard Hermer) branded Donald Trump an “orange tyrant” and accused him of running a government of “chaos and hatred.” He also stated that Trump was “such a coward” and an “autocratic populist.” The coward description fitting with Ivan’s msnbc link above.
I also draw attention to the following:
BRIA 26 1 Plato and Aristotle on Tyranny and the Rule of Law
CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS FOUNDATION
Bill of Rights in Action
FALL 2010 (Volume 26, No. 1)
To summarise, two of the many political subjects that Plato and and Aristotle wrote about were tyranny and the rule of law, and that tyranny occurs when absolute power is granted to a ruler. The Constitutional Rights Foundation goes on to say that in a tyrannical government, the ruler becomes corrupt and uses his power to further his own interests instead of working for the common good – and further states that the rule of law is the principle that no one is exempt from the law, even those who are in a position of power. The rule of law can serve as a safeguard against tyranny, because just laws ensure that rulers do not become corrupt.
Is Trump a tyrant and/or a Russian agent? What about Vance, and of course Musk – maybe not being Russian agents but they care only about power and wealth and appear intent on their own power rather than the common good. I certainly agree with George Monbiot’s writings on the subject.
I suggest we all watch the film Just Look up( or some such title) which in a simplistic way shows what can happen to the world when no one listens to warning signs.
It is very good