His violent, alcoholic, unfaithful head of the Defense Department keeps violating the Constitution as well as both domestic and international laws about warfare. His wholly captured Department of Justice â now run by his personal lawyer â is demanding voting information from swing state after swing state and refuses to say why.
And the Republicans on the Supreme Court, the New York Times just told us, have invented a âshadow docketâ to amplify the power of Trump and his billionaires while ignoring stare decisis and the Constitution itself.
Thereâs a question I keep coming back to as I read news like this seemingly each and every day of this bizarre reality show: what if this isnât just âTrump chaosâ?
What if itâs all part of a deep and evil plan? What if Trumpâs billionaire âEpstein Classâ donors really believe they can âplate their sin with gold and remain forever hurtless,â to paraphrase Shakespeare, and eventually, when the bill comes due, walk away and blame it all on Trump?
After all, they may be thinking, heâs 80 this year. Demographic tables suggest he wonât be around that long. JD Vance is certainly thinking about it.
Turns out there might be something to that little conspiracy theory:
Singaporeâs Foreign Minister Dr. Vivian Balakrishnan put it plainly last month when he told Reuters that the 80-year era of American-underwritten global peace and prosperity is âsimply over.â
The rules-based international order built on the UN Charter, NATO, multilateralism, and the principle of sovereign equality â the very order that turned Singapore from a country with a per-capita GDP of $500 in 1965 into one touching $90,000 per family today â has ended, he said.
Not because it failed, but because the country that helped make it possible â America â has, in Balakrishnanâs careful diplomatic language, become âa revisionist powerâ under Trump and his rightwing billionaire-corrupted GOP.
In other words, Donald Trump isnât just abandoning the world order America built after World War II: heâs actively replacing it with something else, something designed by and for autocrats and billionaires, and heâs doing it in close collaboration with some of the richest men and the most brutal dictators on the planet.
As a horrified world watched, Trump aligned himself (and thus America) with an international axis of oligarchs and corrupt strongmen that includes Russiaâs Vladimir Putin, Israelâs Netanyahu, Saudi Arabiaâs Mohammed bin Salman, North Koreaâs Kim, and Chinaâs Xi Jinping, among other lessers.
And because Trump is the president of the United States, that alignment doesnât just represent his personal changes and loyalty on the world stage. It means America itself has been enlisted in the project of dismantling democratic governance across the planet.
Follow the benefits and the project gets very clear very, very fast.
According to the Washington Post, Trump launched the strikes on Iran at the urging of MBS and Israelâs Benjamin Netanyahu, despite U.S. intelligence assessments that Iran posed no imminent threat to America, and wouldnât for at least another decade.
But Netanyahu has been trying to get an American president to attack Iran for decades and failed every time, until finally both Trump and Jared decided they wanted more billions from Saudi Arabia, who wanted us to strike Iran, too.
Why would Trump do what every other past American president has refused to do? It might have something to do with the Saudi Public Investment Fund controlled by MBS investing $2 billion in the private equity firm of his son-in-law Jared Kushner before the war started, and that Kushner has collected more than $110 million from the Saudi government since 2021, according to a bipartisan Senate and House report released March 19th. Heâs also in the process of rustling up another five or $6 billion from the region.
And the New York Times reported that Saudi dictator MBS saw an âhistoric opportunityâ to remake the Middle East with himself in charge, and he has been actively pushing Trump to do his dirty work and use American troops to seize Iranâs energy infrastructure and drive out the Iranian government entirely. Heâs even reportedly assured Trump the spike in oil prices will be temporary, a claim most economists flatly reject and is now absurd given that the Straight Hormuz is shut.
Meanwhile, the Iran war has been a windfall for Trumpâs partner, Vladimir Putin, whoâd previously been in deep trouble. Despite reports that Russia has been aiding Iran in killing American soldiers, the Trump regime dropped sanctions on Russian oil already at sea, pouring as much as $10 billion a month into Putinâs desperately cash-strapped war-ravaged economy.
Even more shocking, Trump reposted Russian propaganda slashing Ukraine, and four pro-Putin Russian lawmakers were hosted by Republicans in Washington for their first visit since theyâd become pariahs because of Russiaâs brutal, bloody full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
On Ukraine, the picture is equally damning. According to Ukrainian President Zelenskyy, Trumpâs toadies told Ukraine that we wonât guarantee that countryâs security unless Ukraine surrenders its own land in Donbas to Russia, which is precisely what Putin launched the war to seize.
Thatâs the same region that was at the center of the 2016 scandal, when Russian operatives told Trumpâs then-campaign manager and former Putin agent Paul Manafort that Russia would help Trumpâs presidential campaign if heâd look the other way on Putinâs ambitions in the region.
Now Trump is poised to deliver it. The Washington Post reports Whisky Peteâs Pentagon is diverting weapons meant for Ukraine to the Middle East, and has already told Congress it plans to redirect at least $750 million in NATO-provided Ukraine funding to restock American weapons burned through in Iran instead.
This is what Trumpâs â and the other corrupt, morbidly rich autocratic world leaders â New World Order looks like as itâs being assembled in real time, and itâs a new world being ordered primarily to serve the interests of the worldâs morbidly rich.
Iâve been writing about and warning about the billionaire capture of American democracy for years. This isnât a theory anymore. And itâs not a particularly well-hidden conspiracy. Much of it is right out in the open, in fact.
According to Americans for Tax Fairness, just ~100 billionaire families poured a record-breaking $2.6 billion into the 2024 federal elections, representing one of every six dollars spent altogether.
Thatâs a 160-fold increase in billionaire political spending since the Supreme Courtâs corrupt Citizens United decision in 2010. Trump himself received over $450 million from ~150 billionaire families, according to the same analysis, three times what Kamala Harris received.
Elon Musk alone spent over $278 million to put Trump back into the White House and get himself an opportunity to reshape our government in a way that stopped investigations into his companies and instead directed billions in government contracts to them.
And now those ~150 families have their 13 fellow billionaires sitting inside Trumpâs cabinet, the richest cabinet in American history, with our first billionaire president overseeing the systematic dismantling of every institution that once protected ordinary people from the predations of obscene wealth.
Itâs not complicated once you see it as a whole.
Trump isnât just cozying up to Putin and the others out of personal admiration or some inexplicable ideological affinity, though those both often appear to be real enough.
He, Putin, MBS, and Netanyahu are all engaged in the same project that the lickspittles in his administration seem to have signed onto: replacing the democratic, rules-based world order â in which governments are accountable to their citizens and wealth is constrained by law â with a brutal and oligarchic one, in which massive wealth answers to nothing and no one, media is captured, and rulers brook no opposition.
A world where billionaires can park their money anywhere, buy any government, terrify the general population, and only rarely worry about some pesky democratic election changing the rules on them.
Our Founders explicitly worried out loud about exactly this. They structured the Constitution specifically to prevent a president from, for example, making war for private gain or at the behest of foreign powers. They gave Congress the sole power to declare war precisely because they wanted the American people to weigh in on and debate whether to dedicate their childrenâs lives and their money to a conflict.
Trump didnât just bypass that; he bragged about destroying it. At a Republican fundraising dinner, he openly acknowledged that he wasnât calling his unauthorized bombing of Iran leading to the deaths of 13 American service members a âwarâ because, as he put it, âyou are supposed to get approval [for a war].â Thatâs a confession, not a gaffe.
The cost of this unauthorized, billionaire-fueled autocrat-promoted military adventure is now at least $1 billion a day and thousands of lives, with the administration reportedly planning to ask Congress for $200 billion more and the automatic draft beginning this December. Thatâs the same Republican-controlled Congress that just slashed money for Medicaid, education, food assistance, and heating fuel for poor families.
And itâs not like Americans support his war-mongering. Trumpâs approval rating has dropped to 32%, and just 25% of Americans are happy with how heâs handling the cost of living.
The hopeful news is that Americaâs beaten the rightwing oligarchs before. FDR called them âeconomic royalistsâ and built a nationwide movement powerful enough to take them on and push them out of politics. America broke up the robber barons in the Progressive Era. We can do it again.
But first we have to call this what it is: not a difference of political opinion, not a culture war distraction, but a deliberate, well-funded, internationally coordinated assault bent on destroying American (and, ultimately, worldwide) democracy itself.
The billionaires and ideologues behind this arenât confused. They know exactly what theyâre tearing down and what kind of oligarchy theyâre trying to build up to replace our democracy. The crisis is whether enough of us see it clearly enough to stop them before their project is complete.
Spread the word. Share the story. Call your members of Congress today â you can find their contact information here â and demand they use their constitutional authority to stop Trumpâs unauthorized war being fought at the behest of foreign autocrats and domestic billionaires.
Demand they tax the rich appropriately, reclaim the power the founders carefully and intentionally gave them, get dark money out of politics, and begin to restore the American government that Trump and Musk so viciously destroyed.
Democracy canât defend itself. Thatâs our job.
