Señor, señor Can you tell me where we’re headin’? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon? Seems like I been down this way before Is there any truth in that, señor?
This story does not relate to Bob Dylan’s cryptic and nihilistic Señor (Tales of Yankee Power), from Street Legal (1978). As for the meaning of his song, well, that’s pretty hard to fathom. A cowboy fever dream, perhaps; one of those strange illusions you channel in the early morning between sleeping and waking, more about mood than meaning.
Rather, these tales refer to the United States’ troubled and troublesome historical and contemporary relationship with its Central and Latin American neighbours – and particularly, to its current crusade against Venezuela’s autocratic president Nicolás Maduro. And it is less about Venezuela than about the US itself – an empire in all but name struggling to recover its own reflection in the shifting mirror of history. The restless ghost of Manifest Destiny is still pacing the corridors of the West Wing and the State Department. The “tales of Yankee power” keep repeating because the empire cannot imagine itself without them. Each show of force, each threat of “covert operations” is a reassurance ritual, a way of proving that the old muscles still work. But as with all empires in decline, the performance reveals more fragility than strength. The Monroe Doctrine once kept others out; the Neo-Monroe Doctrine may exist only to convince America that it is still in.
In That Howling Infinite has walked this road before in a 2017 post also entitled Tales of Yankee Power, a feature on American songwriter Jackson Browne‘s1986 album Lives in the Balance. At the time critics reckoned that its contemporary content, the USA’s bloody meddling in Central America, limited its appeal and long-term significance. And yet, here in the early twentieth first century, where the wars of the Arab Dissolution dragged the world into its vortex, and Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine ended seventy five years of Pax Europa, the Great Power politics and proxy wars that taxed intellectual and actual imaginations in that seemingly distant decade jump back into the frame like some dystopian jack in the box. As Mark Twain noted, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme”.
Eight years after the original Tales of Yankee Power, the story hasn’t ended – it’s simply changed key. The Uncle Sam is still abroad, still restless, still convinced the hemisphere cannot manage without his supervision. Only the script has been updated: what was once called the Monroe Doctrine is now “neo”; what was once the “war on communism” is now the “war on drugs”. But the music is familiar – and derivative: in this sad world, whenever Uncle Sam (or Comrade Ivan for that matter) plays his hand, something wicked this ways comes. As Canadian songwriter Bruce Cockburn, who also condemned the North’s intervention in the politics of the South once sang, “Little spots on the horizon into gunboats grow … Whatever’s coming, there’s no place else to go, waiting for the moon to show”.
Donald Trump’s Neo-Monroe Doctrine
Yanqui wake up
Don’t you see what you’re doing
Trying to be the Pharoah of the West bringing nothing but ruin
Better start swimming
Before you begin to drown
All those petty tyrants in your pocket gonna weigh you down
Bruce Cockburn, Yanqui Go Home (1984)
Which brings us to American journalist John Masko’s insightful analysis of Trump’s Latin American policy in a recent Unherd article. It is sharp and well-informed, particularly his framing of the “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” as the ideological scaffolding for Washington’s renewed interest in its southern backyard. Yet, like most American commentators, he skips over a crucial subplot – namely, the role of the United States itself in creating the very chaos it now claims to correct. Venezuela’s “descent into shambles,” as he calls it, did not occur in a geopolitical vacuum. Sanctions, economic strangulation, and decades of covert interference were not incidental background noise but deliberate acts of policy – the slow throttling of a regime that refused to align with the hegemon’s economic and political script. Without that context, the narrative too easily morphs into a morality play about Latin American incompetence, when in truth, it’s an old imperial story of cause, consequence, and selective amnesia.
Masko’s central thesis – that Trump has revived the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine – is persuasive. In Trump’s mind, security begins at home and radiates outward; when weak or corrupt neighbours threaten that security, they must be coerced or replaced. The author rightly traces this logic back to Roosevelt’s 1904 declaration that the US would “police” the Western Hemisphere, supposedly without territorial ambition but with the clear intent of monopolising intervention. From Cuba to the Dominican Republic, Guatemala to Chile, the Corollary became the moral fig leaf for American coups, invasions, and corporate extractions. Trump, Masko argues, sees himself as restoring that prerogative – a hemispheric sheriff cleaning up the neighbourhood after decades of liberal hand-wringing.
There is, however, a deeper irony in Masko’s framing. He presents Trump’s military buildup around Venezuela – F-35s in Puerto Rico, B-52s off the coast, CIA “covert” operations loudly proclaimed on television – as a return to historical normalcy, a reassertion of superpower swagger. But this conveniently ignores that America never really stopped intervening. From Plan Colombia to the Contra wars, from IMF leverage to trade sanctions, the methods simply evolved. The empire modernised; the mission never changed.
Masko paints Venezuela as a nation hollowed out by corruption, its military loyal only through fear and patronage, its once-mighty oil industry captured by criminal syndicates and foreign proxies. He’s not wrong — but he omits the pressure points that made reform or recovery almost impossible: the freezing of foreign assets, oil export bans, and a sanctions regime designed to collapse the economy under the banner of “democracy promotion.” The result is a country starving under siege, then blamed for its own starvation. It is the oldest of imperial tricks: break it, then call it broken.
The author is also curiously incurious about the demand side of America’s perpetual Latin drug war. He notes Trump’s pretext of “narco-trafficking” but fails to mention that the real market for those drugs lies not in Caracas or Bogotá, but in Chicago and Miami. As long as there is insatiable appetite and profit north of the Rio Grande, cartels will thrive no matter how many “suspect vessels” are blown out of the Caribbean. America’s own prohibitionary puritanism – the same logic that gave birth to Al Capone – continues to nourish the problem it claims to fight.
Masko’s analysis of Trump’s strategy does capture one key insight: the re-militarisation of hemispheric policy as a form of domestic theatre. Trump’s “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is less about Venezuela per se and more about a symbolic restoration of dominance. It is the same playbook that guided the 1989 invasion of Panama, when Noriega — once Washington’s man in the canal zone – became inconvenient and was duly removed under the banner of anti-narcotics and democracy. The echo is unmistakable. Venezuela today serves as both scapegoat and proving ground: a chance for Trump to replay history, cast himself as the avenger of American sovereignty, and perhaps even seize a few oil fields in the process – though that, as always, is to be disavowed in polite company.
What Masko misses, perhaps by design, is the wider economic and ideological dimension. To call this merely an attempt to “seize Venezuelan oil” is too simple – Trump’s doctrine is more performative than acquisitive. It is about reasserting that the Western Hemisphere remains, in practice if not in name, America’s exclusive zone of influence, a region where Chinese investment and Russian advisors are not just economic competitors but existential affronts. In that sense, the “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is less a new foreign policy than a nostalgic hallucination: the dream of a hemisphere restored to its “natural order,” where Washington’s word is law and the rest are junior partners or failed states.
And yet, the danger lies precisely in that nostalgia. Venezuela’s collapse – accelerated by sanctions and corruption alike – has left it a tinderbox of criminal fiefdoms and shattered institutions. Push too hard and you get not regime change but fragmentation. The military Masko describes as Maduro’s bulwark could just as easily splinter, leaving behind a patchwork of armed enclaves and foreign proxies – a Caribbean Libya with oil rigs.
Trump, Masko concludes, is signalling not just to Caracas but to the continent: the Roosevelt Corollary is back. America will once again “help its friends and hamper its foes.” Perhaps so. But the hemisphere has changed; the hegemon’s writ is no longer automatic. China, once a distant abstraction, now bankrolls half the region’s infrastructure. Russia, Iran, and Turkey are present in the margins. The Monroe Doctrine may have been written to keep Europeans out of America’s backyard, but the world has since moved into the neighbourhood.
What emerges, finally, from Masko’s piece is a portrait not of a coherent strategy but of imperial muscle memory – the reflex to intervene dressed up as rediscovered purpose. Trump’s “Neo-Monroe Doctrine” is at once a geopolitical manoeuvre and a campaign slogan: Make Latin America Great Again, or at least make it obedient again. The tragedy, as always, is that ordinary Venezuelans – impoverished, exiled, and exhausted – will pay the price for another American morality play performed for domestic applause.
Trump is coming for Venezuela
…John Masko, Unherd 24 October
America’s foreign policy appears to have been turned upside down. In the Middle East and Far East, which have consumed most of America’s defence planning energy over the last few decades, trade wars and diplomatic negotiations have replaced shows of military power. Meanwhile, the US is stockpiling both materiel and manpower off the shores of South America to a degree unseen in many decades.
As of this week, the US had positioned 10 F-35 fighter jets in Puerto Rico, along with three MQ-9 reaper drones. More than 4,500 Marines and sailors have taken up residence at US Southern Command in Miami, Florida. Last week, President Trump publicly announced that he was authorising CIA covert operations in Venezuela, and a group of B-52 bombers flew near Venezuela’s coast. More than five suspected drug ships, some originating in Venezuela, have been interdicted and destroyed by US forces over recent weeks.
To many in the foreign policy establishment, Trump’s fixation on squeezing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro has been an enigma. He has justified the buildup on the grounds that Maduro’s regime harbours drug producers and distributors. But when Maduro has tried to satisfy Trump — even accepting planeloads of deported Venezuelan nationals from America — Trump has rebuffed him and redoubled US pressure. Perplexed analysts are asking: what exactly is Trump trying to achieve, if nothing Maduro can offer will please him? Where can this lead except to war or a humiliating walk-back?
This reveals a fundamental misunderstanding between the Trump administration and the foreign policy establishment. Rather than focusing on the near-term risks of war in Venezuela, Trump is asking a higher-order question: What is the point of being a superpower if you can’t stop your neighbours from sneaking deadly drugs and unapproved migrants across your borders?
In Trump’s understanding, security begins at home, and then extends to the near-abroad. When weak or corrupt leaders nearby threaten the stability of the US, they must be either forced to change their behaviour, or they must be replaced. This has not been US policy for several decades, but for most of the 20th century, it was. The name of this policy was the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. What Trump is signalling in Venezuela is that the Roosevelt Corollary is back.
President Theodore Roosevelt announced the Corollary in 1904 in his Annual Address to Congress. Since the presidency of James Monroe a century earlier, it had been American policy to oppose any new colonisation or subjugation of lands in the Western Hemisphere by European powers. Monroe’s policy did not, however, provide a road map for when European countries sent ships into America’s backyard to collect debts or fight wars, as occurred during the British, Italian and German blockade of Venezuela in 1902. Determined to keep European warships out of America’s near-abroad, Roosevelt declared that US policy would be to have a monopoly over policing power in the Western seas. He further declared that it was no longer the sole purpose of the Monroe Doctrine to keep Europe out of our near-abroad; the doctrine would also now be used to protect American interests more generally. He explained: “It is always possible that wrong actions toward this nation or toward citizens of this nation… may result in our having to take action to protect our rights; but such action will not be taken with a view to territorial aggression, and it will be taken at all only with extreme reluctance.”
During the ensuing decades, the Roosevelt Corollary was periodically called upon to reestablish order in Latin American war zones and to prevent the accession of regimes dedicated to, in Roosevelt’s words, “wronging” the US. The Corollary underlay the brief US occupation of Cuba, from 1906-1909, after the Spanish-American War, two occupations of the chronically unstable Dominican Republic, and support for the Contras against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. It also inspired the CIA-supported overthrows of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz following his nationalisation of United Fruit Company lands, and of Chilean President Salvador Allende as he led that country’s mining-based economy into ruin. It was also behind America’s futile efforts — through an embargo, assassination attempts, and the failed Bay of Pigs invasion — to topple Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro.
America’s failure to overthrow Castro, coupled with the relative untouchability of many Soviet-allied Latin regimes during the Cold War period, caused the Roosevelt Corollary to fall into disuse. The liberal internationalist order that followed the Cold War further discouraged the use of hard power to overthrow regimes hostile to American interests. But in 2025, the Trump Administration seems determined to bring it back.
Within the Roosevelt Corollary (or, as I’ve been told it’s referred to within the administration, “Neo-Monroe Doctrine”) framework, some of Trump’s harder-to-figure foreign policy actions begin to make more sense. One of these is the appointment of Cuban-American Florida Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State, which was perplexing alongside Trump’s more provocative foreign policy nominations of Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard. But when one considers Rubio’s knowledge of Latin America and his hawkish record on Latin American dictators in the context of the Roosevelt Corollary agenda, he fits perfectly.
Then there are Trump’s recent actions toward Argentina and Colombia, both of which would have seemed peculiarly drastic in past administrations, but represent a return to a Rooseveltian approach to doing business. For Argentine President Javier Milei, a libertarian friend of the US who faces a fiscal crunch at home, Trump recently structured a $40 billion loan package and floated a huge purchase of Argentine beef, much to the chagrin of American cattle ranchers. Colombian socialist President Gustavo Petro, on the other hand, faced a cutoff of all American aid (Colombia has received $14 billion in aid since 2000) due to his failure to address Colombian drug trafficking. In a Rooseveltian world, the President wields plenty of carrots and a big stick.
“What Trump is signalling in Venezuela is that the Roosevelt Corollary is back.”
In order to understand how Trump’s Roosevelt Corollary framework applies to Venezuela, we must first consider the state of the country today. Maduro’s Venezuela is a shambles by every possible metric: aside from its ruler’s personal security. Owing to a combination of mismanagement and corruption, Venezuela, once the wealthiest nation in Latin America, is now an economic basket case. Its economy is projected to contract by 3% this year, and inflation is at 682%. Venezuelan oil exports — the foundation of its economy — have declined by two thirds since 2012. As living standards and safety across the country have plummeted, nearly 30% of Venezuelans have left over the last 10 years, mostly for neighbouring Colombia, but many for the US (both legally and illegally).
Even with a hostile third of the country now gone, Maduro still received fewer votes for president than opposition candidate Edmundo González in last year’s election. While international organisations urged him to accept defeat, he declared victory and began a third term in office. Opposition leader María Corina Machado, whose exit polling efforts demonstrated that Maduro’s reelection was rigged, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her efforts to fight the regime.
Yet while Maduro may be the world’s least legitimate leader, his position within Venezuela is still secure. As centuries of Latin American history have shown, military loyalty is the single most important requisite for regime security in the region. And while Maduro may have little else, he has that. As the Wall Street Journal has shown, Maduro has successfully “surrounded himself with a fortress of lieutenants whose fortunes and future are tied to his”. He has done this by imprisoning or exiling the disloyal, while encouraging the loyal to accept patronage jobs in state-run companies or payoffs from drug-traffickers to allow their shipments to pass. The result is a military that is just as fearful for the personal ramifications of regime failure as Maduro is himself. And in case Maduro’s reign of blackmail were to fail, there are Cuban counterintelligence officials and other paid spies installed in the ranks to detect any hint of insurrection. According to Edward Rodríguez, a defected former Venezuelan army colonel, snitching is richly rewarded with “jobs, money, cars and even homes” in a country where much of the population cannot consistently afford food.
With the government preoccupied by personal security and self-enrichment, it will surprise few that much of the official territory of Venezuela (precisely how much is unknown) is no longer under government control. Much of western Venezuela is controlled by Colombian drug-running and human-trafficking organisations like the National Liberation Army. And much of southern Venezuela is given over to feuding megabandas or organised crime rings — most infamously the gang Tren de Aragua, recently designated a foreign terrorist organisation by the US. The megabandashave outposts in Venezuela’s major cities, and all around the world, including in the US. One reason for Venezuela’s declining exports is that large parts of its major extractive industries — particularly mining — have been taken over by criminal enterprises whose activities occur off the books. These organisations control territory in the Orinoco Mining Arc in Venezuela’s southeast, where many of their mines are located.
Since Trump’s pressure campaign, Maduro has pumped out propaganda to recruit a citizen militia that can bolster the country’s depleted military. According to the Wall Street Journal, “on state television, radio and social media, announcers are telling Venezuelans that the U.S. is a rapacious Nazi-like state that wants to dig its claws into the country’s oil wealth but that the Venezuelan military, the National Bolivarian Armed Forces, are positioning to repel any invasion”. Maduro’s army currently numbers about 125,000 — a combination of military regulars and new recruits, so many of whom are above typical military age that they have been dubbed a “Dad’s Army” in the British press. According to recent reporting, the army is underfed, under-resourced, and has suffered from a significant brain-drain due to Maduro’s loyalty tests. Maduro reportedly also plans, in the event of invasion, on having the support of Colombia’s National Liberation Army — the least it can do for Caracas’ salutary neglect of its drug and human smuggling (whether before or after he delivers to Trump his proof that there’s no drug trafficking in Venezuela, one can only guess).
For the US, this all adds up to a puzzle: the Maduro regime’s continued existence directly hurts American interests, but the regime has hollowed out Venezuelan society and institutions to such a degree that regime change will probably result in further chaos, and very possibly a civil war — outcomes that also hurt American interests.
Trump has likely still concluded that regime change would help the US, but that to be effective, the muscle behind it will need to come from inside Venezuela itself. His military buildup is therefore an effort to pressure fence-sitters inside Venezuela’s military and underground political opposition (a group that still includes Machado herself) to provide that muscle. Perhaps if military brass begins to see that the Maduro regime’s days are numbered, their calculus on how best to preserve their own lives and careers will shift. There is also an outside chance that a skirmish with US forces, and a glimpse of the untenability of his position, might convince Maduro to resign or flee.
For the time being, direct covert action against Maduro’s person seems to be off the table. Ironically, we know this because of Trump’s highly irregular decision to broadcast his authorisation of CIA covert action to the world — meaning it would no longer be, well, covert. Trump’s threat of covert action, rather, functions as a nuclear bomb of psychological warfare, ensuring that every night for the foreseeable future, Maduro dreams of exploding cigars. Far more likely is covert action that assists in forming and resourcing opposition parties or militias, as the US has done in past Latin American revolutions. Conventional military strikes on Venezuela are possible but would need to be provoked. Conventional forces could also be deployed in ungoverned spaces against drug-traffickers, further underlining the impotence of the Maduro regime.
Where the Trump-Maduro standoff goes from here is hard to know. But the reasoning behind the buildup is abundantly clear, and it goes far beyond Venezuela’s drug distribution or human trafficking. It is a signal to the world, and to Latin America in particular, that American policy toward the Americas has changed. More precisely, it’s changed back from a policy of salutary neglect to an active posture in which American interests are stridently defended. As in the days of the Roosevelt Corollary, America will help its friends and hamper its foes. If a Latin American regime harms American interests, and regime change will improve the situation, America will not hesitate to affect its overthrow.
Venezuela resonates particularly with the original purpose of the Monroe Doctrine, which was to preclude European incursion into American waters. Venezuela is a long-term strategic partner of China, which relies heavily on Venezuelan oil and offers economic and political support to Venezuela internationally. Even as Venezuela has descended into ruin over the last few years, it has continued to serve as a beachhead for Chinese influence in America’s backyard. Just as President Monroe’s original doctrine intended to keep hostile foreign interference far away from American waters, President Trump’s updated Monroe Doctrine can do the same for America’s 21st-century threats.
Trump is likely gambling on the fact that Maduro’s fall would be universally popular. The rest of the world has watched in horror over the last several decades as Maduro and predecessor Hugo Chávez plunged their country into poverty and chaos. This means that if US pressure results in Maduro’s overthrow, Trump’s new Roosevelt Corollary will start out in the win column in the court of international public opinion. Whether the US stays in that column as it addresses challenges in Colombia, Peru and Argentina, only time will tell.
John Masko is a journalist based in Boston, specialising in business and international politics.
Danger angel
Comes screaming through the clouds
She’s coming for your soul, child
She’s gonna take you down
Larkin Poe
Once in a while, In That Howling Infinite is attracted to “out there” larger than life identities, and, like mainstream and social media, gives them much more oxygen than they deserve. MAGA activist and provocateur Laura Loomer is one of those. Avatar and avenging angel, she is both symptom and symbol – the female face of Donald Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by entitlement, envy, and zeal. shes turned grievance into influence, outrage into profession, loyalty into performance art. Some see her as comic relief; others, as proof that moral panic now pays. Either way, she’s the perfect child of her time – restless, theatrical, and forever online. Equal parts scandal, spectacle, and self-made legend, she’s the Right’s answer to the Left’s cancel culture: a one-woman inquisition armed with a smartphone and an inexhaustible sense of grievance.
We republish below Unherd editor and reporter James Billot’s article tracing the rise of this “hit woman” of MAGA politics, the scalps she has lifted, and the theatre of fear and fandom she inhabits. It’s an entertaining but nonetheless disturbing portrait of ambition, vanity, and the politics of outrage. Billot paints her as a digital Torquemada: part gossip columnist, part bounty hunter, part true believer.
As for the title of this piece, there is indeed a Ballad of Laura Loomer. It follows the précis.
Précis: A hit job on a ‘hit woman’
Danger angel Won’t listen to your prayers She’ll drink your holy water Slip into your nightmares There’s nothing you can give her That she hasn’t already got While you might think you’ve caught her You’ve blown your only shot, look out Danger Angel!
Loomer has made herself indispensable to Donald Trump not through proximity or power, but through her peculiar genius for weaponised outrage – the art of turning suspicion into spectacle. Her method is almost monastic in its discipline. For 16 hours a day, she trawls social media for ideological impurity – anyone in government who displays insufficient loyalty to the Great Leader. The sins are various: vaccine sympathy, a whiff of neoconservatism, a stray Black Lives Matter post. The punishment is swift. She “Loomers” them – posting their misdeeds to her 1.8 million followers, tipping off the White House, and waiting for the axe to fall. According to her, dozens have been purged at her prompting: an FDA vaccine chief, an NSA lawyer, a West Point academic, defence and security staffers, and even senior Trump appointees who thought they were untouchable. It’s research as blood sport.
Billot’s portrait is gleefully surgical: the self-declared “most banned woman in the world” living in a Florida rental with four rescue dogs and a livestream habit, railing against the “Big Tech” cabal that simultaneously victimises and enriches her. She’s banned by Uber, Lyft, Twitter (then reinstated by Musk), PayPal, GoFundMe, Facebook, Venmo, and Clubhouse. Each ban becomes a badge of honour, another stripe on her martyr’s uniform. She wears persecution like perfume — and sells the bottle for $29.99 on her website.
Loomer’s life is powered by thwarted ambition. She missed out on Dartmouth, lost two congressional races, and has been repeatedly blocked from a White House role. Yet each rejection feeds her legend. Her career began in the Project Veritas circus — dressing in a burqa to “expose” voter fraud — and evolved into a full-blown performance art of paranoia. She disrupted a Trump-themed Julius Caesar production in 2017, screamed about “violence against Donald Trump”, and became a Fox News darling overnight. She has accused Casey DeSantis of faking cancer, called Islam a “cancer on humanity”, and suggested that Parkland and 9/11 were staged. Apology, for Loomer, is treason.
She calls herself an “investigative journalist”, but the investigations are really moral witch trials – improvised, viral, and frighteningly effective. She boasts that cabinet secretaries call her in panic to explain themselves before her next blast. Even those who despise her respect her reach. Her Rumble show – part soapbox, part sermon brings in $15,000 a month and features the MAGA trinity of sponsors: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold. It is populism as home shopping channel.
What emerges from Billot’s piece is a grotesque yet compelling portrait: a woman who believes fear is the measure of respect; who seeks validation from a man who will never truly give it; who builds empires of influence on foundations of resentment. She is both symptom and symbol — the female face of Trump’s politics of vengeance, fuelled by a cocktail of entitlement, envy, and zeal.
The article is, yes, a hit piece – but on a hit woman who has built her fame on delivering them. It is difficult not to admire, in a perverse way, her ferocious will, her talent for narrative manipulation, her intuitive understanding of the algorithmic age: how outrage, once properly branded, can become a career. And yet, one senses that when the spotlight shifts, she will be alone again — another pawn discarded once her usefulness fades. Like all propagandists, she lives by the flame she feeds, and it will consume her soon enough.
Step outside Billot’s irony and the picture of Laura becomes at once less cartoonish and more troubling.Academic analyses of the post-2016 MAGA media sphere – by researchers at George Washington University’s Programme on Extremism, the Oxford Internet Institute, and the Pew Research Centre – suggest that Loomer is neither a fringe eccentric nor an isolated provocateur but a structural feature of the ecosystem itself: an entrepreneur of grievance, feeding and fed by a self-sustaining outrage economy.Her claim to be “the most banned woman in the world” is the cornerstone of what political scientists call the martyrdom loop- censorship begets notoriety, notoriety begets income, income sustains further provocation.Studies by the Knight Foundation and NewGuard show that de-platforming frequently increases engagement among core followers; the sense of persecution becomes the product.She is thus less an aberration than a prototype: the logical child of a system that monetises moral panic.
Her success, such as it is, also mirrors the logic of the platforms themselves.Engagement-based algorithms on X, Rumble, and Truth Social reward moral extremity; the next post must out-outrage the last.Her “hits” against officials accused of ideological impurity exemplify what information-ethics researchers call punitive virality – online denunciation with real-world consequences.When civil-service careers collapse under these pile-ons, activism becomes indistinguishable from intimidation.Even conservative outlets such as the Washington Examiner have begun to note the irony: this is cancel culture re-engineered by its own supposed opponents, a revolution now devouring itself.
Sociologically, Loomer’s self-reinvention – cosmetic transformation, performative devotion to Trump, ritual declarations of loyalty – fits a broader pattern noted by scholars of the American right: women in hyper-masculinist movements often claim power by policing the boundaries of belief more fiercely than their male counterparts.She embodies that paradox of agency and subjugation, the inquisitor disguised as devotee.Feminist media critics see in her a parody of empowerment—the female enforcer of patriarchal purity tests, punishing deviation with theatrical zeal.
Factually, her record is less about fabrication than inflation.Independent checks by Reuters, AP Fact Check, and the ADL show consistent distortion and exaggeration, but rarely outright invention.Yet every correction, every ban, every supposed silencing, only reinforces her narrative of persecution.Communication theorists have observed this since the early Trump years: to her audience, refutation is proof that she must be right.Counter-speech becomes confirmation bias, feeding the myth of suppressed truth.
Politically, she operates in the zone that historian Timothy Snyder calls sadopopulism, a political strategy where leaders inflict pain on their followers to maintain power, combining sadism (pleasure from inflicting pain) and populism (claiming to represent the common people) in a way that manipulates and controls the populace through fear, anxiety, and division – there is always an “other” to look down on and pillory. In this way ,Snyder argues in his video (see below), America can be governed without policy and with pain.
Economically, she exemplifies the gigification of politics: a freelance inquisitor in the attention marketplace, thriving precisely because trust in institutions has collapsed. Psychologically, she is a practitioner of narcissistic moralism – the conviction that outrage itself is virtue. To dismiss her as a comic sideshow, as Billot half-invites us to do, is to miss the larger point: Loomer is not exceptional but emblematic. She is the distilled essence of a system that confuses virality with validity, noise with news, emotion with evidence. She is dangerous not for what she believes but for how effectively she has turned belief into business.Remove her and another will appear, promising to keep everyone on their toes – another entrepreneur in the endless market of grievance that now passes for public life.
The above commentary was composed in collaboration with ChatGPT
Laura Loomer – American activist and provocateur – rose from the fringes of the internet to become MAGA’s self-appointed scourge, a zealot in the age of algorithms.Armed with outrage, she turned “opposition research” into ritual sacrifice, serving her King with names from the digital pyre.But every court has its fool, every prophet her reflection; and when the storm subsides, only the glow of the screen remains.This ballad is her mirror – half elegy, half exorcism, part lampoon, part lament, a hymn for the saint of spite.
She was born again in the wild news feed Where the truth and thunder rhyme With a restless greed and an aching need To be trending one more time
“Fear’s the only faith I keep” she said “And respect is just for the weak” So she chased down the treasons fathoms deep In the wastelands of the Woke
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
She courted the King with her venomous tongue Fed him names from her digital pyre He smiled and winked and the faithful sung And the fearful fled her fire
But kingdoms built on shifting sands Fade away like snow in June She mistook his fickle favour For promises carved in runes
Sing a song for Laura Loomer In the glow of her laptop’s light In the name of all unholy Raise a glass to the saint of spite
Her dogs keep guard in the Florida rain Her livestream hums in a world of blame Each post is a rosary bead of pain And each follower whispers her name
“I’m cancelled for telling the truth” she said Though that truth was over blown It rests with the ghosts of the posts that she made And the crown she thought she’d owned
So raise a glass to the saints of spite Who confuse the glare for grace For they’re the children of the night And are locked its wild embrace
Trump’s muckraker-in-chief wants to be feared
James Billot, Unherd, 11 October 2026
The famous Italian-American crime boss Frank Costello once said, “I’m a man who believes in the law. But I also believe in a little intimidation.” It’s a sentiment that Laura Loomer, MAGA’s most notorious activist-journalist, embraces with gusto. “It’s good to be feared because you have to keep people on their toes,” she says. “You’re not going to command respect otherwise.”
No one is feared more in MAGA world than Laura Loomer. She is Donald Trump’s unofficial muckraker-in-chief, a human-sized security wand who scans for political impurities in the government workforce. As she describes it, her job as an “investigative journalist” is to root out anyone disloyal to the President, be they bureaucrats, judges, or even cabinet secretaries.
Loomer does this by spending 16 hours a day, seven days a week, researching targets on the Internet. When she finds an incriminating piece of information — BLM support, vaccine promotion, or, worst of all, neoconservatism — she will push out the news to her 1.8 million X followers. She then presents it to the President, either in person or through his staff, and days later, that person is out of a job. They have been, as she modestly puts it, “Loomered”.
Once a Right-wing internet provocateur confined to the dark corners of the internet, Loomer now wields extraordinary influence in the White House. With near-unfettered access to the President — an informal adviser whose online crusades can make or break staff careers — she proudly declares that she has claimed over “four dozen” federal employee “scalps”, and expects “hundreds” more. These might be a “good metric” for success, but there is a more important measure in her eyes: validation from Trump, her peers, and the public.
Loomer’s life, though, has been characterised by disappointment: missing out on a spot at Dartmouth University (her father’s alma mater), narrowly losing a Congressional seat twice, and most recently being passed over for a White House job. Each loss has fuelled an enduring sense of injustice — that somehow the world owes her for her misfortune.
When I speak to her, she is seething with indignation. “I am the most underappreciated and undervalued journalist in America today,” Loomer tells me. “I don’t get the respect I deserve.” It is an interesting assumption from someone who has spent the better part of a decade stretching the bounds of what can be called “journalism”. Back in her college days, Loomer worked for Project Veritas, an activist group that uses sting recordings, stunts and entrapment to create bad publicity for its targets. On the day of the 2016 presidential election, Loomer arrived at a polling station dressed in a burqa and demanded a ballot under the name Huma Abedin. Her ballot was rejected, but the lesson stuck: outrage got attention.
Nine years on, her taste for controversy is undiluted. She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong. In September this year, shortly after a gunman killed four churchgoers in Michigan, Loomer claimed, “hate against Christians is widespread in places like Michigan because the entire state is being taken over by Muslims who refuse to assimilate”. The shooter later turned out to be a Trump-supporting Republican, yet Loomer stayed silent. And weeks before Charlie Kirk’s assassination, she labelled him a “charlatan” — a charge she stands by to this day.
Trump remains a fan, describing her as “a free spirit” and a “patriot”. She boasts that the pair of them chatted just a couple of weeks ago, but when I ask for details, she affects coyness, claiming she “doesn’t want to get into specifics”. This is the President after all. “I never ask him for anything,” says Loomer, “which is probably why he likes me so much.”
“She has seized on national tragedies to advance her own political agenda and rarely, if ever, apologises when she is in the wrong.”
Loomer’s devotion to the President is total. Her work, her weight (she lost 25 pounds to look “presentable” for him), and even her Mar-a-Lago face is shaped for Trump-appeal. But it took years of relentless campaigning, cheerleading, and provocative stunts for him to even notice her. In one memorable — and eerily prescient — example, Loomer disrupted a New York City production of Julius Caesar in 2017, in which Trump was reimagined as the titular character during his first term. Onstage, she screamed: “This is violence against Donald Trump! Stop the normalisation of political violence against the Right! This is unacceptable!” While Trump never publicly acknowledged the incident, it would be hard to imagine that he did not notice the subsequent widespread Fox News coverage.
Loomer revelled in the controversy that these stunts generated, and as her profile grew, so too did her notoriety. In 2017, she was banned by Uber and Lyft for complaining about a lack of “non-Muslim” drivers. Then, in 2018, Twitter banned her for attacking Ilhan Omar as “anti Jewish”, claiming that she was a member of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed” and “women are abused”. The bans kept coming, but she only grew louder and more provocative. By 2021, she had been barred from at least eight platforms — Uber, Lyft, Twitter, PayPal, GoFundMe, Venmo, Facebook, and Clubhouse — for hate speech and disinformation.
“I don’t know anybody else, aside from President Trump, who has been subjected to the level of deplatforming that I’ve been subjected to,” Loomer tells me with something akin to pride. She says this is why she failed to win her two Florida Congressional races in 2020 and 2022, despite Trump’s endorsement in the latter. “I was the first candidate in federal history that was completely denied all access to social media… I would have been the youngest woman ever elected to the United States Congress in US history had I not been silenced by Big Tech.” And the outrage-generation business clearly has benefits. On her website, where you can buy “Donald Trump did nothing wrong!” and “Forever Trump” T-shirts, a $30 book is on sale called Loomered: How I became the most banned woman in the world. Free speech martyrdom seems to have a few financial perks.
Her irritation has only deepened after the Supreme Court threw out her appeal this week against Big Tech over her bans — a case so weak that both X and Meta waived their right to respond (Elon Musk reinstated her in 2022). And she is indignant about her “stolen potential”. While she languished in Palo Alto purgatory, other Right-wing podcasters made their riches. “As a woman, you’re in your prime time in your twenties and thirties, so I wasn’t able to amass a fortune and build a media empire,” she says. “What’s so special about Ben Shapiro? He’s not breaking stories. He’s just commenting on the news. He’s Jewish, I’m Jewish. He’s conservative, I’m conservative. And yet, he has a company that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.”
But nor was Ben Shapiro going around calling himself a “proud Islamophobe” and stating that Islam is a “cancer on humanity”. He wasn’t dressing up in Burqas to vote in presidential elections either. But Loomer breezes past these awkward facts. “I carry this resentment against Big Tech with me on a daily basis,” she says. “’I’ve had professional opportunities stolen from me, I’ve also had social opportunities stolen from me.”
Despite these bans, she still records a twice-weekly Rumble show that brings in around $15,000 a month. It is filmed in the spare bedroom of her Florida Panhandle rental apartment that she shares with her boyfriend and four rescue dogs. Each show runs for around three hours and features extensive, unscripted monologues on the “EXPLOSION” of Islamic terror in Britain, along with interviews with RFK’s so-called “Tylenol whisperer” and Camp Lejeune widows. They are part crusade, part carnival and part confessional; the only breaks come in the form of MAGA’s holy trinity of ads: hair loss, erectile dysfunction, and gold.
Her broadcasts are filled with a litany of familiar gripes. She is angry that she’s not a millionaire; angry that her work is overlooked; and angry that other journalists are deemed more respectable. “I know a lot of people who don’t even have anywhere near the following that I have — people who are kind of a joke — who have been given access to Air Force One,” she says. “It makes no sense.”
All the while, Loomer swims in a river of bitterness and entitlement. Her home is the command centre for what she describes as “opposition research”, where tips pour in about Biden holdovers, closet Leftists, and anyone she considers disloyal to the President. It is a craft she learnt from Roger Stone, her mentor and a longtime GOP operative who was sentenced to 40 months in federal prison during the Russiagate investigation in 2020. The 73-year-old made his name as the “original political hitman” by unearthing damaging (and sometimes fake) information about his political opponents. It turned him into an invaluable resource for not only Trump, but his Republican predecessors too.
Loomer’s approach to politics bears all the hallmarks of Stone’s skullduggery. She has weaponised opposition research and public pressure into tools which topple officials. During one particularly productive week over the summer, she claimed three “scalps”: the Trump administration ousted FDA vaccine chief Dr. Vinay Prasad, dismissed NSA General Counsel April Falcon Doss, and revoked Jen Easterly’s appointment as chair of West Point’s social sciences department — each decision coming shortly after her public attacks.
Loomer has also shown no hesitation in taking on even the most prominent figures in Trump’s cabinet. After attacking Pam “Blondi” for her handling of the Epstein files in July, a month later, she turned her sights on RFK Jr., claiming that he was plotting a 2028 presidential run. He denied the allegations, but what happened next was classic Loomerism: the pair made amends, with RFK meeting Loomer and announcing a plan to phase out animal testing — a cause close to her heart.
“Cabinet secretaries all try to have cordial relations with me because they’re scared of getting blown up,” she says when I ask whether she maintains contact with the administration. “So there’ve been a couple of times that I’ve had them call me and say, ‘Hey, I just want to explain what happened here’ because they’re worried about the backlash.” Are they frightened of her? “Well, my receipts are bulletproof,” she says. Was it the same with RKF? “We had a few conversations,” Loomer cryptically replies.
She will even criticise the President on rare occasions. Earlier this year, Loomer attacked Trump’s decision to accept a $400 million Qatari jet for Air Force One, calling it a “stain” on the presidency. And more recently, she threatened to pull her 2026 midterm vote when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the US had approved the establishment of a Qatari Emiri Air Force facility in Idaho. “I cannot in good conscience make any excuses for the harboring of jihadis,” she posted. “This is where I draw the line.” “America could have been so great,” she followed up. “Now we will be a Muslim country. This must be what hell feels like.”
Given this power, why then, I ask, has she not been given a White House role, let alone a press pass? She claims that Trump has offered her a job four times, but White House staff have quietly blocked it on each occasion. “It’s professional jealousy,” she says. “President Trump’s staff who don’t like the fact he likes me… They just get high on their own power and don’t let me in.” She is, she insists, the victim of small-minded gatekeeping — a misunderstood ally whose loyalty is undervalued by the petty bureaucrats who feel threatened by her power. In Loomer’s eyes, she is utterly blameless.
But there is a danger here. As she recklessly burns through the administration, tying herself so closely to the fate and fortune of one man, with no formal role or official recognition, what, then, happens when he goes? She is left with no allies, no job, no platforms, no car rides — just scorched earth. For the first time, Loomer sounds uncertain. She pauses; introspection doesn’t come naturally. “By the time Trump’s out of office, I’ll be 36 years old. And by then, I’m going to have to start thinking about other things in life. So who knows whether I’ll be doing this forever.” And then she adds, with a straight face, “the Right-wing ecosystem has also become very toxic”.
Loomer, arguably more than anyone else in this sphere, has helped stoke that toxicity. Haranguing politicians with bullhorns, filming people without their knowledge or consent, and attempting to cancel public figures online represent the Right at its worst. These are gutter politics — and that’s before we flick through the long charge sheet of particularly “provocative” statements, including that the 2018 Parkland and Santa Fe high school shootings involved crisis actors; that Casey DeSantis, wife of then presidential candidate Ron DeSantis, exaggerated her breast cancer to boost her husband’s campaign; and that 9/11 was an “inside job”.
Our conversation revealed a woman who is a cocktail of festering resentment and entitlement, who will use any new connection for her own ends. She is the classic Trump pawn: deployed for as long as she is useful, and then discarded. The President will throw her a morsel of camaraderie from time to time, but it’ll never be more than that. She’s driven by this toxic frustration. It came as no real surprise when, a day after our conversation, she texted me a photo of “independent journalists” at the White House from Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt’s account. “No invite for me though.”
Loomer will inevitably be cast out — though she doesn’t seem to know it. “I don’t aggregate news, I create the news,” she says proudly. “The President has said that he sees my content and I’m pretty much followed by every single main White House staffer and cabinet member on X.” Her content extends far beyond X, but the poison that she helped to inject now courses through America’s body politic.
Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after, And the poetry he invented was easy to understand; He knew human folly like the back of his hand, And was greatly interested in armies and fleets; When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter, And when he cried the little children died in the streets.
W H Auden, Epitaph On A Tyrant (1939)
The English poet W. H. Auden spent some time in Berlin during the early 1930s – the last years of the Weimar Republic prior to the Nazi ascendency –Some commentators suggest that Auden actually wrote Epitaph on a Tyrant in Berlin. But It was published in 1939, the year that the Second World War broke out – and Auden had departed the city before the end of Weimar in 1933. But he was full aware of where the world was heading – during the mid-thirties, he’d briefly journeyed to Republican Spain in the midst of the Civil War and to Kuomintang China during its war with Japan – see In That Howling Infinite’s Journey to a war – Wystan and Christopher’s excellent adventure.
The poem has been interpreted as a very brief study in tyranny, but few could doubt whom Auden had in mind. In this very short poem, Auden turns a familiar phrase from the New Testament in upon itself evoking and then evicting ‘But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven’ (Matthew 19:14). There is nothing Christlike about this tyrant: he will not suffer the little children to come unto him. The little children, instead, will be the ones to suffer. he also inverts a specific phrase by the nineteenth-century writer John Lothrop Motley, in The Rise of the Dutch Republic (1859), citing a report of 1584 about the death of the Dutch ruler William the Silent: ‘As long as he lived, he was the guiding star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets.’
I recalled the poem, one of the very first of Auden’s poems I encountered nearly sixty years ago, as I was reading the essay republished below written by the most erudite economist and academic Henry Ergas on the occasion of the centenary of the publication on 16 August 1925, of Mein Kampf (lit. ‘My Struggle‘), Nazi Party founder and leader Adolf Hitler‘s combined autobiographical reflections and political manifesto, encompassing an uncompromising ideological programme of antisemitism, racial supremacy, and expansionist ambitions.
A century later, the impact of Mein Kampf on the world remains both undeniable and deeply troubling. Initially dismissed by some as the ramblings of a failed revolutionary, the book became the ideological blueprint for the Nazi regime, legitimising policies that culminated in the Holocaust and a world war that claimed tens of millions of lives. Beyond the destruction of the mid-twentieth century, Mein Kampf has endured as a symbol of hate literature, resurfacing periodically in extremist movements, political propaganda, and debates over free speech and censorship. Its centenary compels reflection not only on the book’s historical role in shaping one of the darkest chapters of human history, but also on the persistence of the prejudices and authoritarian impulses it so virulently expressed.
Mein Kampf‘s bitter harvest
The Second World War began on 2nd September 1939 with Germany’s sudden and unprovoked invasion of Poland on 2nd September, and Britain and France’s declaration of war on Germany the day after. On 17 September, the Soviet Union invaded the country from the east in accordance with the Treaty of Non-aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, ,forever known as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.a neutrality pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union signed in Moscow on August 23, 1939, by foreign ministers Joachim von Ribbentrop and Vyacheslav Molotov, respectively.
Japan formally entered the war on September 22, 1940 with the invasion of French Indochina, having been at war with China since 1931, and officially formed an alliance with Germany and Italy five days later. The United Kingdom declared war on the Empire of Japan on 8 December 1941, following the Japanese attacks on British Malaya, Singapore and Hong Kong on the previous day, as well as in response to the bombing of the American fleet at Pearl Harbour on December 7. The United States to enter World War II the following day.
World War II ended in Europe on May 8, 1945, with Germany’s unconditional surrender, known as Victory in Europe Day (V-E Day). The war in the Asia Pacific concluded on September 2, 1945, with Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri, designated Victory over Japan Day (V-J Day). This followed the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan
The Nazis, with a little help from their allies and collaborators, murdered (there is no other word) an estimated six million Jews and 11 million others In camps and jails, reprisals and roundups, on the streets of cities, towns and villages, in fields and in forests, and in prison cells and torture chambers. And in the fog of war, the dearth of accurate records, and the vagaries of historical memory, the actual number is doubtless higher – much higher.
The term ‘Holocaust’ generally refers to the systematic and industrialized mass murder of the Jewish people in German-occupied Europe – called the Shoah or ‘catastrophe’ by Jews. But the Nazis also murdered unimaginable numbers of non-Jewish people considered subhuman – Untermenschen (the Nazis had a way with words!) – or undesirable.
Non-Jewish victims of Nazism included Slavs who occupied the Reich’s ostensible lebensraum – living space, or more bluntly, land grab (Russians – some seven million – Poles, another two – Ukrainians, Serbs and others in Eastern Europe caught in the Wehrmacht mincer; Roma (gypsies); homosexuals; the mentally or physically disabled, and mentally ill; Soviet POWs who died in their tens of thousands; Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox Christians who defied the regime; Jehovah’s Witnesses and Freemasons; Muslims; Spanish Republicans who had fled to France after the civil war; people of colour, especially the Afro-German Mischlinge, called “Rhineland Bastards” by Hitler and the Nazi regime; leftists, including communists, trade unionists, social democrats, socialists, and anarchists; capitalists, even, who antagonized the regime; and indeed every minority or dissident not considered Aryan (‘herrenvolk’ or part of the “master race”); French, Belgians, Luxemburgers, Dutch, Danes, Norwegians, Albanians, Yugoslavs, Albanians, and, after 1943, Italians, men, women and young people alike, involved with the resistance movements or simply caught up in reprisals; and anyone else who opposed or disagreed with the Nazi regime. See below, Ina Friedman’s The Other Victims of the Nazis and also, Wikipedia’s Victims of the Holocaust
Worldwide, over seventy million souls perished during World War II. We’ll never know just how many …
A picture-illustration showing Adolf Hitler in Munich in 1932 and his book, Mein Kampf. During WWII Hitler wore a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, highlighting his affinity with the ‘grunts’ on the line. Picture: Heinrich Hoffmann/Archive Photos/Getty Images
When Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf (My Struggle) was published exactly 100 years ago, the reviews were scathing. The reader, proclaimed the Frankfurter Zeitung, could draw from the book one conclusion and one conclusion only: that Hitler was finished. The influential Neue Zurcher Zeitung was no kinder, lambasting “the sterile rumination of an agitator who is incapable of rational thought and has lost his grip on reality”. As for Karl Kraus, the great Austrian essayist and critic, he famously dismissed it, quipping: “When I think of Hitler, nothing comes to mind.”
But while the book that would become known as “the Nazi bible” was hardly an immediate bestseller, it was far from being a dismal flop. By the end of 1925, nearly 10,000 copies had been sold, necessitating a second print run, and monthly sales seemed to be trending up. Even more consequentially, Mein Kampf, with its comprehensive elaboration of the Nazi world view, proved instrumental in consolidating Hitler’s until then tenuous position as the leader of the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers’ Party) or NSDAP. Both Hitler and Max Amann, who ran the Nazis’ publishing house, had good reason to be pleased.
After all, the initial circumstances of the book’s production were scarcely promising. When Hitler arrived at Landsberg prison in November 1923, following the failure of a farcically mismanaged putsch, he was assessed by the staff psychologist as “hysterical” and suicidal. However, having determined to end it all by embarking on a hunger strike, he sat down to write his valedictory statement – and with the full support of the prison’s director, a Nazi sympathiser who was happy to accommodate his every need, the project soon expanded, until the writing came to consume Hitler’s days.
Once Emil Georg, a director of the powerful Deutsche Bank and generous funder of the NSDAP, provided the aspiring writer with a top-of-the-line Remington typewriter, a writing table and all the stationery he required, Hitler’s new career as an author – the profession he proudly declared on his 1925 tax return – was well and truly under way.
The difficulty, however, was that Hitler wrote very much as he spoke. Page after page required substantial editing, if not complete revision. Some of it was undertaken by Rudolf Hess, who had a university degree, and Ernst Hanfstaengl, a German-American Harvard graduate. But many of the most difficult sections were eventually worked over by the unlikely duo of a music critic, Josef Stolzing-Cerny, and Bernhard Stempfle, a priest.
The greatest tensions arose in settling the title. Hitler, with his habitual grandiloquence, had called it Four and a Half Years of Battling Lies, Stupidity and Betrayal. Convinced that title would doom it to failure, Amann adamantly insisted on, and seems to have devised, a shorter alternative. Thus was Mein Kampf, the name that would go down in history, born.
Mein Kampf’s singular lack of focus proved to
be a strength.
Viewed superficially, the text, despite its editors’ best efforts, seems inchoate, veering across a bewildering range of grievances, pseudo-historical accounts and exhortations. Yet its singular lack of focus proved to be a strength. It meant there was something in it for each of the social groups the Nazis were attempting to mobilise, with every one of those groups finding the real or imagined harms that afflicted it covered in its pages. And whenever they were discussed, each group’s darkest nightmares were portrayed in striking, often lurid terms.
Hitler himself explained his approach in the book’s discussion of propaganda.
“Most people,” Hitler said, “are neither professors nor university graduates. They find abstract ideas hard to understand. As a result, any successful propaganda must limit itself to a very few points and to stereotypical formulations that appeal to instincts and feelings, making those abstract ideas vividly comprehensible.”
That is exactly what Mein Kampf set out to do – and it did so by hammering three basic themes: that the Germans were victims; that the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews; and that only a fight to the death against “world Jewry” could bring Germany’s redemption and return it to the pre-eminence that was its birthright and historic destiny.
What gave the book its resonance was that each of those themes was well and truly in the air. Nowhere was that clearer than in respect of victimhood.
Thus, the end of World War I had not been viewed in Germany as a military defeat. Rather, the widespread perception, vigorously propagated by General Erich Ludendorff, was that had the German army, which retained undisputed mastery over its home soil, not been “sabotaged” by liberals, freemasons, social democrats and communists, it would have held out, forcing the Allies to a settlement.
Key themes in Mein Kampf was that the Germans were victims and the culprit for the wrongs they had suffered were the Jews.
The capitulation was, in other words, the result of a “stab in the back” that treacherously delivered the nation to the harsh, grotesquely unjust, treatment eventually meted out at Versailles by the war’s victors.
Closely associated with the resulting sense of unfairness, and of an undeserved defeat, was the smouldering resentment felt by returning soldiers.
World War I had ushered in the glorification of the rank and file, expressed in countries such as France, Britain and Australia by the erection of national memorials for the Unknown Soldier. Here was a figure that represented both the individual and the mass: sanctified by the nation, the Unknown Soldier also stood for the multitudes sent out to die and too quickly forgotten.
That was the case almost everywhere – but not in the newly established Weimar Republic. Unlike its counterparts, the republic erected no national monument, created no worthy memorial: the ghosts of the dead were left unburied.
Moreover, unable to deal with the trauma of the war, the republic accorded veterans no special status: even when their wounds made them entirely disabled, they were entitled only to the paltry benefits accorded to others suffering from similar levels of disability.
With the country’s new leaders abandoning those who had borne so many risks and so much pain on Germany’s behalf, an unbridgeable cleavage opened up between “those who had been there” – with all of their rage and frustration, fury and disillusionment – and those who had not. It is therefore no accident that both for innumerable forgotten soldiers and for the families who had lost their sons and fathers, Hitler, who had lived through the carnage, came to symbolise the unknown soldier of World War I.
Nor is it an accident that during World War II he always donned a simple uniform rather than the elaborate costume of a supreme commander, thereby highlighting his unshakeable affinity with the “grunts” on the line.
Hitler, chancellor of Germany in 1933, is welcomed by supporters at Nuremberg. Picture: Hulton Archive/Getty Images
The last, but perhaps most broadly felt, source of the sense of victimhood was the devastation wreaked by the “great inflation”.
The immediate effect of the price hikes, which began in 1921, accelerated in late 1922 and became a hyperinflation (that is, one involving monthly price increases of more than 50 per cent) in 1923 was to obliterate the savings of skilled workers, pensioners and the middle class. No less important, however, it also shattered those groups’ social standing which, in a society still geared to honour and respectability, relied on the ability to conspicuously maintain a dignified lifestyle appropriate for one’s status. Instead, for the first time in their lives, previously comfortable professionals, foremen and highly trained workers were reduced to a struggle of all against all, as they vainly attempted to sell once prized, often hard-earned assets that had suddenly – and mysteriously – become utterly valueless.
And as well as leaving a legacy of trauma, that experience created an enduring sense of unpredictability, casting the new republic as incapable of maintaining intact even the elementary foundations of daily life.
Stefan Zweig was therefore not exaggerating when he wrote, in his The World of Yesterday, that “nothing ever embittered the German people so much, nothing made them so furious with hate as the inflation. For the war, murderous as it was, had yet yielded hours of jubilation, with ringing of bells and fanfares of victory. And, being an incurably militaristic nation, Germany felt lifted in her pride by her temporary victories. But the inflation served only to make it feel soiled, cheated, and humiliated. A whole, scarred, generation could never forget or forgive.”
But where there are victims there must be victimisers – and Hitler delivered those too. Towering among them were the Jews.
Mein Kampf’s obsession with Jews is readily demonstrated: including cognate terms, such as Jewry, the 466 references to Jews in the book outnumber those to every other substantive term, including race (mentioned 323 times), Germany (306), war (305) and Marxism, which gets a paltry 194 – still ahead of national socialism and national socialists which, taken together, are referenced only 65 times.
It is certainly true that there is, in those obsessive references, virtually nothing original. Hitler’s tirades largely reassemble the anti-Semitic tropes that had emerged in the late 19th century and that were widely disseminated in a notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
But Hitler’s formulation, while substantively irrational, was arguably more logical than most in the way it combined and superimposed elements from conventional anti-Semitism, pseudo-biology and social Darwinism.
Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial … from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. Hitler with Nazi officials in Munich in the summer of 1939, just before the start of WWII.
Thus, relying on a loose biological metaphor, it defined Jews as a parasite – but as one that had deliberate agency and that consciously (and collectively) sought to infect its victims, notably the “purer”, more advanced “races”.
Second, it asserted that the resulting infection was not only fatal to its victims but ultimately to their entire “race”.
Third, it projected on to that account the image of a Darwinian struggle that had been fought across recorded history’s entire course, between Jews on the one hand and the superior races on the other: a struggle that could end only with the extinction of the Jews or their adversaries.
And finally, it argued that, unless anti-Semites learnt to display the same degree of ruthlessness, the same insistence on ethnic loyalty, the same stealth and the same forms of manipulation of media and the public sphere, the Jews stood every chance of triumphing because they entirely lacked ethical standards, were exceptionally cunning, ambitious, aggressive and vindictive and – last but not least – had a natural bond to each other, combined with a murderous hatred of others.
The resulting portrayal of Jews was as terrifying as it was bizarre. Jews, it seemed, were chameleons, who were both subhuman yet extraordinarily capable, both fanatical Bolsheviks and natural capitalists, both physically repulsive yet immensely able to seduce and “infect” innocent Aryan maidens.
Moreover, they could shift effortlessly and surreptitiously from any one of those myriad shapes into any another, choosing whatever form was most likely to succeed in destroying their opponent.
As the great German philosopher Ernst Cassirer later recalled, he and his other Jewish friends found those claims “so absurd, so ridiculous, and so crazy, that we had trouble taking them seriously”. But others did not have any difficulty in doing so.
Many forces were at work. Some resulted from the war years. For example, the terrible food shortages caused by the British blockade (which was lifted only two years after the war ended) had resulted in spiralling prices for basics on the black market – with the finger being readily, although entirely incorrectly, pointed at alleged hoarding by Jews.
And more indirectly, but no less potently, the horrific second wave of the 1919 influenza pandemic, in which 400,000 Germans died, had given enormous prominence to notions of infection and contagion. As careful statistical studies subsequently showed, that prominence had enduring effects, as the Nazis secured significantly greater electoral support in the worst affected areas than in those where the death toll was lower.
But by far the greatest factor was the profound disruption of the post-war years, when everything Germans had taken as solid melted into thin air, leaving a pervasive feeling of bewilderment.
For all of its myriad flaws, the Kaiserreich, as the German Empire was known, had exuded a stability that made the future predictable. Now, with one seemingly incomprehensible event piling up on top of another, the desperate search to make sense of the world triggered an equally desperate search for someone to blame.
That was precisely what Hitler’s vast Jewish conspiracy offered. Mein Kampf, Heinrich Himmler pithily noted, was “a book that explains everything”. If it was so effective, Hannah Arendt later reflected, it was because its playing on tropes and stereotypes that were relatively familiar could, at least superficially, “fulfil this longing for a completely consistent, comprehensible, and predictable world without seriously conflicting with common sense”. All of a sudden, things fell into place – with consequences for Europe’s Jews that would forever sully Germany’s name.
Sign erected by British forces at the entrance to the Bergen-Belsen camp. Picture: Imperial War Museum
Bodies being flung into a mass grave at Belsen. Picture from the book Children’s House of Belsen, by camp survivor Hetty Verolme
If those horrendous consequences eventuated, it was because Mein Kampf did not only identify an alleged disease; it also set out a path to national redemption. In that respect, too, its main points were entirely unoriginal.
However, what was relatively new, and especially important, was the unadulterated celebration of death and violence in which they were couched.
Whether Hitler called for Jews to be massacred is a matter of interpretation. What is beyond any doubt is that he came as close to it as one possibly could. The Jews, he claimed, would “accentuate the struggle to the point of the hated adversary’s bloody extermination”. As that happened, it would be absolutely impossible to defeat them “without spilling their blood”. And when it came to that, their opponents, locked “in a titanic struggle”, would have to “send to Lucifer” – that is, to hell – “those who had mounted an assault on the skies”: that is, the Jews.
There would be, in the process, countless victims; but the Aryans who perished would be martyrs, “acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator”, and like Hitler himself “fighting for the work of the Lord”.
As with so much of Mein Kampf, the sheer violence of those calls, and of the text more generally, fell on fertile ground, again especially among veterans.
If those veterans had one thing in common it was the experience of “total war”, characterised by the ever-growing porousness of the boundaries between soldiers and civilians both as combatants and as targets of destruction.
Once they got to the front, it did not take long for ordinary soldiers to discard the fantasies of splendid bayonet charges across fields of flowers. Instead, burrowed underground in trenches filled with slime and excrement, rats and rotting body parts, what many learnt was that life was war, and war was life.
And at least for some, the sacrifice and devotion of their comrades also taught that violence brought out the best qualities in man.
Winifred Williams, a Welsh woman who became a friend and supporter, provided the paper on which Hitler wrote Mein Kampf while he was in jail.
Rendering that habituation to violence even more extreme was the experience of the 5 per cent or so of German soldiers who volunteered for Freikorps (Free Corps) units that fought, from 1918 to 1923, against the wave of revolutionary movements throughout central and eastern Europe.
Particularly in the Baltic states, those struggles were brutally uncompromising, with mass executions not only of adversaries but also of entire villages of helpless Jews. It was in those struggles that many ingredients of Nazism were forged – its symbols, like the death’s head and the swastika; its core staff, who later largely comprised the leading personnel first of the Nazi’s paramilitary units and then of the SS; and the unbridled anti-Semitic savagery of its killing squads. To all those who lived through those struggles, Mein Kampf seemed to perfectly capture their world view.
But Mein Kampf’s promise of redemption was crucial, too. Yes, Germany experienced the aftermath of World War I as an unmitigated disaster. Yet, from the midst of despair, a new notion of German glory and greatness began to emerge. When the war finally ended, the survivors could not but feel an urge to endow it with meaning – with the hope that the countless deaths would be redeemed by creating a better future, not only for themselves but also for the nation, a future shorn of the causes of everything that had gone wrong.
And no one, in the chaos and misery of post-World War I Germany, painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler.
Death and destruction follow delirium as surely as dust and ashes follow fire. Two long decades, punctuated by Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, separated, almost precisely, the publication of Mein Kampf from the “Zero Hour”, as it became widely known, on May 7, 1945, when Germany, reduced to rubble, surrendered and officially ceased to exist. The vision – or hallucinations – Hitler had produced in Landsberg’s ja
Death and destruction follow delirium as surely as dust and ashes follow fire. Two long decades, punctuated by Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, separated, almost precisely, the publication of Mein Kampf from the “Zero Hour”, as it became widely known, on May 7, 1945, when Germany, reduced to rubble, surrendered and officially ceased to exist. The vision – or hallucinations – Hitler had produced in Landsberg’s jail ensured that the 20th century’s fields of glory would be sown with the corpses of innocent victims and the distorted fragments of shattered ideals.
Between those dates, the book’s fortunes closely tracked those of its author. After the crash of 1929, and the onset of the Depression, sales boomed; and once the Nazi regime was in place it became ubiquitous. A second volume had appeared in December 1926; it was added to the 400 pages of the first in 1930.
To cope with the length, the combined book was printed on extremely fine paper, exactly like a bible. Soon after that, an ever-wider range of formats – going from cheap paperback versions to extremely luxurious versions bound in leather – was offered to readers.
The regime recommended that municipalities give a good quality copy to newly married couples as they stepped out of the wedding ceremony; estimates vary but it seems two million couples benefited (if that is the right word). The book also became the standard prize in schools, workplaces and party organisations, bestowed on recipients with all the pomp the Fuhrer’s great work demanded. Altogether, by the “Zero Hour”, 12.5 million copies had found their way into the hands of potential readers – yielding Hitler copyright payments, partly deposited in a Swiss bank account, that made him an extremely wealthy man.
How many Germans actually read it is hard to say; the answers given to immediate post-war surveys were understandably evasive. What seems likely, however, is that its influence came less from the scrupulous consumption of the “Nazi bible” than from short excerpts, read out at meetings and over the radio or printed near the mastheads of major papers, as well as from the million or so copies of “reader’s digest”-like variants sold during the Reich’s golden years.
In the chaos and misery of post-WWI Germany, no one painted the path to that national salvation as starkly, and as effectively, as Hitler
But its greatest impact was almost certainly indirect. Regardless of what ordinary Germans may or may not have done, abundant evidence shows it was carefully studied and frequently consulted by the Nazi leadership. The regime’s core principle, the so-called Fuhrerprinzip, specified that “what the Fuhrer says is law”: but what the Fuhrer had actually said, and even more so, what he wanted, was almost always hopelessly unclear – yet entire careers depended on guessing it accurately.
As a result, the everyday life of the Nazi hierarchy’s upper echelons was consumed in a competition to “work towards the Fuhrer”, as Hitler’s great biographer, Ian Kershaw, called it: that is, in trying to anticipate the Fuhrer’s will and show that no one could be more ruthless or determined in putting it into effect. It was in that process that Mein Kampf was absolutely fundamental, invariably referred to and systematically used.
And it was through that process that Hitler’s words made depravity the highest form of morality, atrocity the surest sign of heroism, and genocide the key to redemption.
Outside Germany, very few grasped that those horrors would unfold. Winston Churchill, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle and David Ben-Gurion were among those few, carefully annotating early versions and gasping at the book’s implications.
But their warnings were ignored because Mein Kampf was plainly the work of a madman. As the British Labour Party’s leading intellectual, Harold Laski, said, when he was asked why he dismissed it, rational men and women “could not bring themselves to contemplate such a world”, much less believe that “any child of the twentieth century” would regard it as a realistic possibility.
But the Nazi art of politics, as Joseph Goebbels concisely defined it, consisted precisely in making the impossible possible and the absolutely inconceivable a practical reality. That art did not disappear with Nazism’s demise, nor did the murderous anti-Semitism whose seeds Hitler sowed a century ago.
As we mark Mein Kampf’s grim anniversary, we must, this time, take them seriously.
… Robeson’s extraordinary career intersects with some of modernity’s worst traumas: slavery, colonialism, the Cold War, Fascism. Stalinism. These are wounds covered over and forgotten, but never fully healed. Not surprisingly, the paths Robeson walked remain full of ghosts, whose whispers we can hear if we stop to listen. They talk to the past, but they also speak to the future.
Jeff Sparrow, No Way But This. In Search of Paul Robeson (2017)
I read Jeff Sparrow’s excellent biography of the celebrated American singer and political activist Paul Robeson several years ago. I was reminded of it very recently with the publication of a book about Robeson’s visit to Australia in November 1960, a twenty-concert tour in nine cities. I have republished a review below, together with an article by Sparrow about his book, and a review of the book by commentator and literary critic Peter Craven. the featured picture is of Robeson singing for the workers constructing the Sydney Opera House.
I have always loved Paul Robeson’s songs and admired his courage and resilience in the face of prejudice and adversity. Duriung his colourful and controversial career (see the articles below), he travelled the world, including Australia and New Zealand and also, Britain. He visited England many times – it was there that my mother met him. She was working in a maternity hospital in Birmingham when he visited and sang for the doctors, nurses, helpers and patients. My mother was pregnant at the time – and, such was his charisma, that is why my name is Paul.
Paul Robeson was a 20th-century icon. He was the most famous African American of his time, and in his time, was called the most famous American in the world. His is a story of political ardour, heritage, and trauma.
The son of a former slave, he found worldwide fame as a singer and an actor, travelling from Hollywood in the USA to the West End of London, to Europe and also Communist Russia. In the sixties, he visited Australia and is long remembered for the occasion he sang the song Old Man River for the workers building the famous Sydney Opera House.
He became famous both for his cultural accomplishments and for his political activism as an educated and articulate black man in a white man’s racist world.
Educated at Rutgers College and Columbia University, he was a star athlete in his youth. His political activities began with his involvement with unemployed workers and anti-imperialist students whom he met in Britain and continued with support for the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War and his opposition to fascism.
A respected performer, he was also a champion of social justice and equality. But he would go on to lose everything for the sake of his principles.
In the United States he became active in the civil rights movement and other social justice campaigns. His sympathies for the Soviet Union and for communism, and his criticism of the United States government and its foreign policies, caused him to be blacklisted as a communist during the McCarthy era when American politics were dominated by a wave of hatred, suspicion and racism that was very much like we see today,
Paul Robeson, the son of a slave, was a gifted linguist. He studied and spoke six languages, and sang songs from all over the world in their original language.
But his most famous song was from an American musical show from 1927 – Show Boat, by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein – called Old Man River. The song contrasted the struggles and hardships of African Americans during and after the years of slavery, with the endless, uncaring flow of the Mississippi River. It is sung the point of view of a black stevedore on a showboat, and is the most famous song from the show.
It is a paradox that a song written by Jewish Americans from the Jewish villages of Eastern Europe, the targets of prejudice and pogrom, should voice the cries of America’s down-trodden people.
When the song was first heard, America was a divided country and people of colour were segregated, abused and murdered. The plot of the musical was indeed about race, although it pulled its punches with the romantic message that love is colour-blind
It reflected America’s split personality – the land of the free, but the home of the heartless. Robeson sung the words as they were written, but later in his career, as he became more and more famous, he changed them to suit his own opinions, feelings, sentiments, and politics. So, when he sang to the workers in Sydney, Australia, his song was not one of slavery but one of resistance.
The Big Voice of the Left … Paul Robeson Resounds to this Day
Mahir Ali The Australian November 9, 2010
FIFTY years ago today, more than a decade before it was officially inaugurated, the Sydney Opera House hosted its first performance by an internationally renowned entertainer when Paul Robeson, in the midst of what turned out to be his final concert tour, sang to the construction workers during their lunch break.
Alfred Rankin, who was at the construction site on November 9, 1960, recalls this “giant of a man” enthralling the workers with his a cappella renditions of two of his signature songs, Ol’ Man River and Joe Hill.
“After he finished singing, the men climbed down from the scaffolding, gathered around him and presented him with a hard hat bearing his name,” Paul Robeson Jr writes in his biography of his father, The Undiscovered Robeson. “One of the men took off a work glove and asked Paul to sign it. The idea caught on and the men lined up. Paul stayed until he had signed a glove for each one of them.”
Workers had the best seats when Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House, 9 November 1960
The visit, Rankin tells The Australian, was organised by the Building Workers Industrial Union of Australia and the Australian Peace Council’s Bill Morrow, a former Labor senator from Tasmania.
In a chapter on Robeson’s visit in the book Passionate Histories: Myth, Memory and Indigenous Australia, which will be launched in Sydney tomorrow, Ann Curthoys quotes the performer as saying on the day after his visit to the Opera House site: “I could see, you know, we had some differences here and there. But we hummed some songs together, and they all came up afterwards and just wanted to shake my hand and they had me sign gloves. These were tough guys and it was a very moving experience.”
In 1998, on the centenary of Robeson’s birth, former NSW minister John Aquilina told state parliament his father had been working as a carpenter at the Opera House site on November 9, 1960: “Dad told us that all the workers – carpenters, concreters and labourers – sang along and that the huge, burly men on the working site were reduced to tears by his presence and his inspiration.”
Curthoys, the Manning Clark professor of history at the Australian National University, who plans to write a book about the Robeson visit, also cites a contemporary report in The Daily Telegraph as saying that the American performer “talked to more than 250 workmen in their lunch hour, telling them they were working on a project they would be proud of one day”. [Curthoy’s book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand, was published at last in 2025]
According to biographer Martin Duberman, Robeson wasn’t particularly enthusiastic about the offer of a tour of Australia and New Zealand from music entrepreneur D. D. O’Connor, but the idea of earning $US100,000 for a series of 20 concerts, plus extra fees for television appearances and the like, proved irresistible.
Robeson had once been one of the highest paid entertainers in the world, but from 1950 onwards he effectively had been deprived of the opportunity of earning a living. A combination of pressure from the US government and right-wing extremists meant American concert halls were closed to him, and the US State Department’s refusal to renew his passport meant he was unable to accept invitations for engagements in Europe and elsewhere. Robeson never stopped singing but was able to do so only at African-American churches and other relatively small venues. His annual income dwindled from more than $US100,000 to about $US6000.
At the time, Robeson was arguably one of the world’s best known African Americans. As a scholar at Rutgers University, he had endured all manner of taunts and physical intimidation to excel academically and as a formidable presence on the football field: alone among his Rutgers contemporaries, he was selected twice for the All-American side.
Alongside his athletic prowess, which was also displayed on the baseball field and the basketball court, he was beginning to find his voice as a bass baritone. When a degree in law from Columbia University failed to help him make much headway in the legal profession, he decided to opt for the world of entertainment, and made his mark on the stage and screen as a singer and actor.
An extended sojourn in London offered relief from the racism in his homeland and established his reputation as an entertainer, not least through leading roles in the musical Show Boat and in Othello opposite Peggy Ashcroft’s Desdemona.
(He reprised the role in a record Broadway run for a Shakespearean role in 1943 and again at Stratford-upon-Avon in 1959)
Robeson returned to the US as a star in 1939 and endeared himself to his compatriots with a cantata titled Ballad for Americans.
In the interim, he had been thoroughly politicised, not least through encounters in London with leaders of colonial liberation movements such as Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah and India’s Jawaharlal Nehru.
He had sung for republicans in Spain and visited the Soviet Union at the invitation of filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein.
Robeson’s refusal to reconsider his political affiliations once World War II gave way to the Cold War made him persona non grata in his homeland: his infatuation with the Soviet Union did not perceptibly pale in the face of horrific revelations about Stalinist excesses, partly because he looked on Jim Crow as his pre-eminent foe. It is therefore hardly surprising that exposure in Australia to Aboriginal woes stirred his passion.
On the day after his appearance at the Opera House site, at the initiative of Aboriginal activist and Robeson fan Faith Bandler he watched a documentary about Aborigines in the Warburton Ranges during which his sorrow turned to anger, and he vowed to return to Australia in the near future to fight for their rights. He made similar promises to the Māori in New Zealand.
But the years of persecution had taken their toll physically and psychologically: Robeson’s health broke down in 1961 and, on returning to the US in 1963, he lived the remainder of his life as a virtual recluse. He died in 1976, long after many of his once radical aspirations for African Americans had been co-opted into the civil rights mainstream. His political views remained unchanged.
It’s no wonder that, as writer and broadcaster Phillip Adams recalls, Robeson’s tour was like “a second coming” to “aspiring young lefties” in Australia.
Duberman cites Aboriginal activist Lloyd L. Davies’s poignant recollection of Robeson’s arrival in Perth on the last leg of his tour, when he made a beeline for “a group of local Aborigines shyly hanging back”.
“When he reached them, he literally gathered the nearest half dozen in his great arms.”
Davies heard one of the little girls say, almost in wonder, “Mum, he likes us.”
She would have been less surprised had she been aware of the Robeson statement that serves as his epitaph: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative.”
Left for Good – Peter Craven on Paul Robeson
The Weekend Australian. March 11 2017
What on earth impelled Jeff Sparrow, the Melbourne-based former editor of Overland and left-wing intellectual, to write a book about Paul Robeson, the great African American singer and actor?
Well, he tells us: as a young man he was transporting the libraries of a lot of old communists to a bookshop and was intrigued by how many of the books were by or about Robeson.
All of which provokes apprehension, because politics is a funny place to start with
Robeson, even if it is where you end or nearly end. Robeson was one of the greatest singers of the 20th century. When I was a little boy in the 1950s, my father used to play that velvet bottomlessly deep voice singing not only Ol’ Man River — though that was Robeson’s signature tune and his early recording of it is one of the greatest vocal performances of all time — but all manner of traditional songs. Not just the great negro spirituals (as they were known to a bygone age; Sparrow calls them slave songs) such as Go Down, Moses, but Shenandoah, No, John, No and Passing By, as well as the racketing lazy I Still Suits Me.
My mother, who was known as Sylvie and loathed her full name, which was Sylvia, said the only time she could stand it was when Robeson sang it (“Sylvia’s hair is like the night … such a face as drifts through dreams, such is Sylvia to the sight”). He had the diction of a god and the English language in his mouth sounded like a princely birthright no one could deny.
It was that which made theatre critic Kenneth Tynan say the noise Robeson made when he opened his mouth was too close to perfect for an actor. It did not stop him from doing Eugene O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun’ Got Wings or The Emperor Jones, nor an Othello in London in 1930 with Peggy Ashcroft as his Desdemona and with Sybil Thorndike as Emilia.
Robeson later did Othello in the 1940s in America with Jose Ferrer as Iago and with Uta Hagen (who created Martha in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) as his Desdemona. He toured the country; he toured the south, which was almost inconceivable. When he was told someone had said the play had nothing to do with racial prejudice, Robeson said, “Let him play it in Memphis.”
Southern white audiences were docile until Robeson’s Othello kissed Hagen’s Desdemona: then they rioted. Robeson also made a point, at his concerts and stage shows, of insisting the audience not be segregated. James Earl Jones. who would play Robeson on the New York stage, says in his short book about Othello, “I believe Paul Robeson’s Othello is the landmark performance of the 20th century.”
Robeson would play the Moor again in 1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon. By that time, though, he had fallen foul of 1950s America. He had been called before the McCarthyist House Un-American Activities Committee. You can hear a dramatisation of his testimony with Earl Jones as Robeson, which includes an immemorial reverberation of his famous words when senator Francis E. Walter asked him why he didn’t just quit the US and live in Russia.
“Because my father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?”
It’s funny how it was the real communists such as Bertolt Brecht and Robeson who handled the committee best. Still, in an extraordinary act of illiberalism, they took away his US passport and it took two years for the Supreme Court to declare in 1958 in a 5-4 decision that the secretary of state was not empowered to withdraw the passport of any American citizen on the basis of political belief.
When Paul Robeson sang at the Sydney Opera House
It was this that allowed Robeson to do his Othello in Peter Hall’s great centenary Stratford celebration along with Charles Laughton’s Lear and Laurence Olivier’s Coriolanus. It also allowed him to come to Australia. Very early on Sparrow tells the story of watching the clip of Robeson singing Ol’ Man River to construction workers in Sydney with the Opera House still a dream in the process of meeting impediments. The version Robeson sings is his own bolshie rewrite (“I must keep fightin’/ Until I’m dyin’ ”).
Well, fight he did and bolshie he was. I remember when I was a child my father telling me Robeson was a brilliant man, that he had won a sporting scholarship for American football (to Rutgers, in fact), that he’d gone on to receive a law degree (from Columbia, no less) and that he was so smart he had taught himself Russian.
But the sad bit was, according to my father, that he’d become a communist. Understandably so, my father thought, because of how the Americans treated the blacks. My father’s own radical impulses as a schoolboy had been encouraged, as Robeson’s were on a grander scale, by World War II where Uncle Joe Stalin was our ally in the war against Hitler’s fascism.
But this was the Cold War now, and a lot of people thought, with good reason, that it was behind the Iron Curtain that today’s fascists were to be found. Even if others such as the great German novelist Thomas Mann and Robeson thought they were encroaching on Capitol Hill.
Sparrow’s book No Way But This is circumscribed at every point by his primary interest in Robeson as a political figure of the Left rather than as a performer and artist.
It’s an understandable trap to fall into because Robeson was an eloquent, intelligent man of the Left and his status was also for a while there — as Sparrow rightly says — as the most famous black American on Earth. So his radicalism is both pointed and poignant.
His father, who became a Methodist minister, was born a slave and was later cruelly brought down in the world. But, unlike the old Wobblies whose bookcases he transported, Sparrow is not inward with what made Robeson famous in the first place and it shows.
No Way But This is a great title (“no way but this / killing myself, to die upon a kiss” is what Othello says when he’s dying over the body of Desdemona, whom he has killed) but Sparrow’s search for Robeson is not a great book.
As the subtitle suggests, it is a quest book but Sparrow is a bit like the Maeterlinck character cited in Joyce’s Ulysses who ends up meeting himself (whether in his Socrates or his Judas aspect) on his own doorstep. Sparrow goes to somewhere in the US associated with Robeson and meets a black-deaths-in-custody activist full of radical fervour. She introduces him to an old African-American who was in Attica jail for years. There is much reflection on the thousands of black people who were slaves on the plantations and the disproportionate number of them now in US prisons.
Yes, the figures are disquieting. No, they are not aspects of the same phenomenon even though ultimately there will be historical connections of a kind.
And so it goes. But this is a quest book that turns into a kind of travelogue in which Sparrow goes around the world meeting people who might illuminate Robeson for him but don’t do much for the reader except confirm the suspicion that the author’s range of acquaintance ought to be broader or that he should listen to people for a bit more rather than seek confirmation of his own predilections.
There are also mistakes. Sparrow seems to know nothing about the people with whom Robeson did Othello. There’s no mention of Thorndike, and when Ashcroft comes up as someone he had an affair with, Sparrow refers to the greatest actress of the Olivier generation as “a beautiful glamorous star”. Never mind that she was an actress of such stature, Judi Dench said when she played Cleopatra she could only follow Ashcroft’s phrasing by way of homage.
Sparrow also says “American actor Edmund Kean started using paler make-up for the role, a shift that corresponded with the legitimisation of plantation slavery”. Kean, who was the greatest actor of the later romantic period, was English, not American. His Othello would, I think, be more or less contemporary with William Wilberforce lobbying to have slavery made illegal. Sparrow seems to be confusing Kean with Edwin Booth, the mid-century Othello who happens to have been the brother of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Abraham Lincoln. But it’s still hard to see where the plantations fit in.
A few pages later — and it’s not important though it’s indicative — we hear of the rumour that Robeson was “romancing Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma”. Well, whatever she was called in the early 1930s, it wasn’t Countess Mountbatten of Burma because her husband, Louis Mountbatten, the supreme allied commander in Southeast Asia during World War II, didn’t get the title until after the Japanese surrendered to him — guess where?
Such slips are worth belabouring only because they make you doubt Sparrow’s reliability generally. It’s worth adding, however, that his chapter about the prison house that the Soviet Union turned itself into is his most impressive. And the story of the last few years of Robeson’s life, afflicted with depression, subject to a lot of shock treatment, with recurrent suicide attempts, is deeply sad.
He felt towards the end that he had failed his people. He just didn’t know what to do. It was the melancholy talking as melancholy will.
It’s better to remember the Robeson who snapped back at someone who asked if he would join the civil rights movement: “I’ve been a part of the civil rights movement all my life.”
It’s to Sparrow’s credit that he’s fallen in love with the ghost of Robeson even if it’s only the spectral outline of that power and that glory he gives us.
Peter Craven is a cultural and literary critic
The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and NZ
Australians of a certain age know all about Paul Robeson’s magnificent voice. They know, too, that on a warm November day more than 60 years ago, the bass-baritone sang to 250 construction workers on the Sydney Opera House building site as the workers sat on scaffolding and stacks of timber and ate their lunch. Fewer know of Robeson’s Pro-Communist and pro-Soviet views and of how those beliefs damaged his career at home and abroad. And that’s not so surprising – as historian Ann Curthoys points out, the Cold War suppression of Robeson’s career and memory has been very effective.
Recovering the story of a man who was once the most famous African-American in the world and his equally impressive wife, Eslanda, is the task Curthoys, who grew up in an Australian communist family in the 1950s and 60s, sets herself in a new book, The Last Tour: Paul and Eslanda Robeson’s visit to Australia and New Zealand.
It follows the couple’s tour – a mix of his concerts and their public talks and media interviews – to Australia and New Zealand over October, November and December 1960. Curthoys goes further, using the seven-week tour by this celebrated singer to explore the social and political changes just beginning in post-War Australia. Her interest is “the slow transition from the Cold War era of the late 1940s and 50s, to the 60s era of the New Left, new social movements and the demand for Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys is 79 now, but when Robeson toured she was 15 and living in Newcastle, a city the singer did not visit. Her mother, Barbara Curthoys, a well-known activist and feminist, was a fan of the singer but the trip passed the teenager by.
It was only decades later, as she researched her 2002 book on the 1965 Aboriginal Freedom Ride through regional NSW, that Curthoys connected with the story. As a university student she had taken part in the ride and moved from communism to the New Left. When she approached the subject as a historian, she realised that for some riders, their attendance at Robeson’s concerts five years earlier had been a defining moment in their “understanding of racial discrimination and Aboriginal rights”.
Curthoys has had a long career in research and teaching at the Australian National University and the University of Technology, Sydney. She’s part of a remarkable family, and not just parents Barbara and Geoffrey, who was a lecturer in chemistry at Newcastle University. Her sister Jean is a leading feminist philosopher and her husband, John Docker, has written several books on cultural history, popular culture and the history of ideas.
Curthoys began researching The Last Tour in 2007, but put it aside for another project on Indigenous Australians before resuming work on it during the Covid-19 lockdowns. Post-Robeson, she has worked with two scholars on a forthcoming book on the history of domestic violence in Australia.
The tour, she says, was really several tours rolled into one with the Robesons covering many bases – from music to Cold War politics to feminism to Aboriginal rights. It was a conservative era: Robert Menzies’ Liberals ruled federally and five of the six Australian states had conservative governments. Robeson’s presence went unremarked by governments but for fans of his music – and his ideals – the tour was a significant event that was well covered by the press, even those opposed to his views on the Soviet Union.
For some fans, it was a music tour – 20 concerts in nine cities in Australia and New Zealand, at which Robeson sang his show-stoppers, including Deep River, Go Down, Moses; We Are Climbing Jacob’s Ladder, and the song with which he is always identified, Ol’ Man River. The 62-year-old with the extraordinary voice also delivered “recitations” – a monologue from Shakespeare’s Othello, an anti-segregationist poem Freedom Train, and William Blake’s anthem, Jerusalem.
What a thrill for Australian audiences, some of whom had followed the handsome, 1.9m singer and actor since the 1920s. Even in an age of limited communications, Robeson was well-known here through films; records and radio. Curthoys notes that one indicator of his fame was the way promising Aboriginal singers in the 1930s were dubbed “Australia’s Paul Robeson”.
He was famous – and controversial. Unlike many other supporters of communist ideas, Robeson refused to break from the Soviets after the invasion of Hungary in 1958 and continued to defend Moscow. The “anti-communist repression and hysteria” that gripped the US in the McCarthy era had a profound effect on his life and career, Curthoys writes. He was cited in 1947 by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as “supporting the Communist Party and its front organisations”.
A 1949 US tour was destroyed “after mass cancelling of bookings by venue managers either vehemently opposed to his politics or afraid in such a hostile climate of being classed as communist sympathisers themselves”. Then in 1950, he lost his passport. Over the years, he would “become for communists an emblem of defiance in the face of adversity, and one of the communist world’s most prominent speakers for peace,” Curthoys writes.
Unable to travel until his passport was restored in 1958, Robeson was steadfast in his support for communist ideals. That commitment was evident in Australia when the “peace tour” – built around a series of public meetings – was as important to the singer as the popular concerts where he reached a different audience. Curthoys details a related strand – the “workers’ tour”, which involved seven informal concert performances to groups of railway workers, waterside workers and those at work on the Opera House on that November day.
She says the events revealed much about the “the nature of class in Australia and New Zealand” at a time when “strong and confident trade unions” were interested in “broad cultural concerns”. Over several weeks Robeson attracted people who loved his music alongside those who loved his politics. Far from being shunned for his pro-Soviet views, Curthoys suggests, there was support from two different audiences – music people and “left-wing people who were either pro-Soviet or not”.
Even so, the Cold War anxieties over the Soviets meant a positive reception was not necessarily assured when Paul and Eslanda flew into Sydney at midday on October 12, 1960. They were greeted by several hundred fans carrying peace banners but they faced pointed questions about the Soviet Union at the 20-minute press conference at the airport.
Robeson refused to condemn the suppression of the Hungarian uprising and media reports suggested a torrid exchange. Curthoys reviewed a tape of the press conference and says while the questioning was “a little aggressive”, the event was not as bad as reported in the media. Indeed it was “fairly friendly” albeit for a “bad patch” when Robeson refused to budge on Hungary.
That tape and others, along with newspapers and Trades Hall documentation, yielded rich material but so too did the ASIO files on the couple. At the Palace Hotel in Perth on December 2 an ASIO operative appeared to be among those at a reception organised by the communist-influenced Peace Council. Among guests were the writer (and well-known communist) Katharine Susannah Prichard and “two women by the name of Durack, who were writers and/or artists”.
Curthoys sees Robeson as a “very courageous, very intelligent, intellectual person, very thoughtful about music, about folk music, about people”, but says his commitment to the Soviet Union was a costly mistake. He had embraced Moscow when he and Eslanda visited in 1934 at the invitation of Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein. Later, Robeson, a fluent Russian speaker, would say it was in the Soviet Union that he felt for the first time he was treated “not through the prism of race but simply as a human being”. Curthoys writes: “The excitement and validation he received during this visit would create a loyalty that later events would not dislodge and the public expression of which would damage him politically, commercially and professionally.”
The couple made several trips to the Soviet Union and accepted its political system completely. Curthoys notes: “They made no public comments about Stalin’s forced collectivisation policies that were in place during the 1930s and led to famine and the loss of millions of lives.” In Sydney Robeson was careful, but on November 5 he celebrated the forthcoming anniversary of the Russian Revolution at the Waterside Workers Federation in Sussex Street. Two days later, during his first public concert in the city, he paid tribute to the Soviet Union as “a new society”.
The Soviet Union had been a great influence but so too was the Spanish Civil War, which Curthoys says helped define his view of the political responsibilities of the artist.
“Increasingly famous as a public speaker, on 24 June, 1937, he made a huge impression at a mass rally at the Albert Hall in London sponsored by prominent figures such as WH Auden, EM Forster, Sean O’Casey, HG Wells and Virginia Woolf, held to raise financial aid for Basque child refugees from the war. In what became his most well-known and influential speech, he stressed how important it was for artists and scientists and others to take a political stand: ‘Every artist, every scientist, every writer must decide NOW where he stands. He has no alternative. There is no standing above the conflict on Olympian heights.’”
After World War II, Robeson was deeply involved in radical and anti-racism politics in the US but in 1947, as the Cold War worsened, he had had enough. He announced he intended to abandon the theatre and concert stage for two years to speak out against race hatred and prejudice. In fact he stopped stage acting for 12 years but continued to perform as a singer, often in support of political causes.
It was another 13 years before Australian audiences heard that glorious voice “live”. Australians, it seemed were primed for Paul. The tour may have been ignored by governments but during her research, Curthoys was “overwhelmed” by people “ready to assist, donating old programs, photographs, pamphlets, records, cassette tapes, invitations and other documents”.
Today, much of the Robeson image is defined by his Opera House performance on November 9 – high culture delivered, without condescension, to a building crew by a champion of the workers. Robeson, in a heavy coat, despite the warm weather, sang “from a rough concrete stage”. A PR expert could not have dreamt up a a better way to “democratise” an opera house than having the “first concert” delivered in its half- built shell. Curthoys shows how the event, no matter how memorialised now, was a small part of a tour that proved a financial and political success for the Robesons, who left Australia on December 4.
A few months later, depressed and exhausted, Robeson tried to commit suicide in Moscow. Over the next three years he was treated but could no longer perform or engage in public speaking. Curthoys notes that though his affairs with other women had strained their marriage, he and Eslanda had a common political vision and were together until her death in 1965. Robeson died on January 23, 1976 at the age of 77.
Helen Trinca’s latest book is Looking for Elizabeth: The Life of
Elizabeth Harrower (Black Inc.)
Twas in another lifetime, one of toil and blood When blackness was a virtue the road was full of mud
B Dylan, Shelter from the Storm
It is fifty years since the end of the 21 yearlong Vietnam War, the great war of my generation. Our friends Marianne Harris, partner of acclaimed photographer the late Tim Page and photo-journalist Ben Bohane have been in Cambodia and Vietnam along with many photographers and journalists who covered the conflict on all sides of the lines.
In reality, the conflict in Indochina began in 1946 when British forces handed the former French colony back to France, and the nationalist Viet Minh forced the French to surrender and withdraw in 1954. The Americans call it the Vietnam War but to the Vietnamese, it is The American War because it was the USA that came, saw and failed to conquer. No one really knows how many people perished. Civilian deaths range from 1.3 to 4.5 million, of which over 80% were Vietnamese and 7% Cambodian. American soldiers dead numbered 58,220 and wounded,153,303. The number of Vietnamese and Cambodian wounded is inestimable. An account of the war from Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey is republished after the following poem.
On this anniversary, one which has been almost ignored in mainstream media, we remember all those lives lost, and the devastation inflicted on countries that were once “faraway places with strange sounding names”, as the old song goes.
A silent wall shouting for peace
The anniversary reminded me of an almost forgotten book that was published in the US back in mid ‘eighties as one of an excellent series entitled “A Day In The Life of … “ which chronicled in pictures the lives of ordinary people in major cities around the world. Uniquely, one of these was dedicated exclusively a monument, The Wall, the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial in Washington DC – two black granite walls completed in 1982 engraved with the names of American service members who died or remain missing as a result of their service in Vietnam and Southeast Asia during the war. The book is poignant gallery of images and messages left at the memorial by loved ones and comrades, the emotional debris of that almost forgotten war that although long gone, reaches out through history with an admonishing finger: “Shadows in search of a name for victims we’ve left far behind”.
One of many anonymous notes left on the memorial pierced my heart and inspired the following poem and song:
“I shut my eyes and wouldn’t listen when they came with morning and told me that you had slipped away. I closed my mind against my thoughts, not wanting t believe you’d gone. Not dragged off, captured in the bright day’s savage madness, not overwhelmed by the dark blind angers of night, but here within the sight and sound and smell of the sea, and salty spray on gentle winds so near”.
When I read it, I thought immediately of the 19th century English poet Matthew Arnold’s On Dover Beach: “We are here as on a darkling plain, swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight, where ignorant armies clash by night”.
Shadows in Search of a Name
Echoes of honour and shame,
Phantoms of glory and fame,
Shadows in search of a name
For victims we’ve left far behind.
And all is not quite as it seems
In the dark corridors of his dreams,
In the silence of his senses,
The violence of his mind.
Storms that thunder and rain,
Lights that waver and wane,
Winds that howl out in pain,
Visions from a great height.
Time for the turmoil to cease,
A silent wall shouting for peace –
From the bright day’s savage madness,
Blind angers of night
You are the ice in my veins,
You are the age in my bones.
You are the flames in my heart
Raging out of control.
You are the blood on my hands,
You are the lies on my tongue.
You are the cries in my ears
And the eyes of my soul.
Echoes of honour and shame,
Phantoms of glory and fame.
Shadows in search of a name
For victims we’ve left far behind.
A ship is waiting for us at the dock America has trouble to be stopped We must stop Communism in that land Or freedom will start slipping through our hands. I hope and pray someday the world will learn That fires we don’t put out, will bigger burn We must save freedom now, at any cost Or someday, our own freedom will be lost.
Johnny Wright, Hello Vietnam
The Twentieth Century’s “Thirty Years War” was waged in South East Asia initially by the colonialist France, and then by neo-imperialist America. France’s war ended in defeat and ignominy for French arms and prestige, and a partition that was but a prelude to America’s Vietnam quagmire.
in his masterful documentary, The Vietnam War, acclaimed filmmaker Ken Burns narrator intoned: “America’s involvement in Vietnam began in secrecy. It ended, thirty years later, in failure, witnessed by the entire world. It was begun in good faith, by decent people, out of fateful misunderstandings, American overconfidence, and Cold War miscalculation. And it was prolonged because it seemed easier to muddle through than admit that it had been caused by tragic decisions, made by five American Presidents, belonging to both political parties”.
America’s War has since been defined as chaos without compass. It was inevitable that acclaimed historian Barbara Tuchman would chose it as one of her vignettes in The March of Folly, her celebrated study of débacles through the ages characterised by what would appear to be a single-minded determination amounting to tunnel vision that is akin to stupidity.
As Tuchman saw it, exceptionalism and manifest destiny are historically proven folly. Self-belief in American power and righteousness has historically created delusions of grandeur, obstinate attachment to unserviceable goals, stubbornness, and an inability to learn from past mistakes or even admitting error – a wooden-headedness that often sees the US persisting on erroneous paths that lead to loss of blood, treasure, reputation and moral standing.
Why did the US’ experience of backing the wrong horse in China in the forties not provide an analogy and warning in Vietnam in the fifties? Why did the experience in Vietnam not inform the it with respect to Iran right up to the fall of the Shah in 1978? And why hadn’t it learned anything when it stumbled into Salvador in the eighties? And then, of course, we arrive in the 21st century with no-exit, never-ending wars in Afghanistan and Middle East that end in retreat and betrayal with the ‘freedom-loving’ USA still backing the wrong horses by supporting autocrats and tyrants against their own people.
But, back to Vietnam …
As historian Per Yule noted in The Long Shadow: Australia’s Vietnam Veterans Since The War, the Vietnam War was based on an assortment of unproven assumptions and half truths. It wrongly identified a dictatorship as a democracy a civil war as an international conflict. Our armed forces were sent to fight in support of a corrupt military regime which received solid support only from the catholic minority and the small landowning class. Few willingly fought for the regime.
Many in the US military reckoned that if given a free hand by the administration of President Johnson, they could have prevailed against North Vietnam – by destroying it utterly with overwhelming firepower. But the US had backed the wrong side and no amount of support could make the South Vietnamese fight and die hard enough for their corrupt, incompetent, puppet government. We hear a similar rationale with regard to the the Afghan army’s rapid collapse and the US’ shambolic withdrawal from Afghanistan
The US wanted to convince the North Vietnamese that they couldn’t win on the battlefield. The North Vietnamese wanted to convince the American people that the cost in blood and treasure was too high. Both sides continued to believe that they could improve their positions through escalation and both continued to focus on military rather than political means to end the conflict. And so we were left with an almost certainly unwinnable strategy of bombing the enemy to the negotiating table when that enemy shows no willingness to negotiate under duress. The bombing campaign, code name Rolling Thunder, was described by a commentator in Ken Burns’ documentary The Vietnam War as “the dumbest campaign ever designed by a human being”.
The many names for a war lost before it began
All we need is a little determination; Men, follow me, I’ll lead on. We’re waist deep in the big muddy And the big fool says to push on.
Pete Seeger, Waist Deep in the Big Muddy
Vietnam has been called the pointless war and the needless war. In a scene in Apocalypse Now Redux, Francis Ford Coppola’s recut of his seventies epic, Having denounced his country’s folly in being surrounded and defeated in the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, which precipitated the end of French colonial rule and the beginning of US involvement in Indochina, expatriate patriarch Hubert de Marais declares to his American guests: “You are fighting for the biggest nothing in history”.
It was certainly a costly war. The butchers bill was horrendous. No one really knows how many people perished. Civilian deaths range from 1.3 to 4.5 million.of which over 80% were Vietnamese and 7% Cambodian. American soldiers dead numbered 58,220 and wounded,153,303. The number of Vietnamese and Cambodian wounded is inestimable.
As for the American forces, it most certainly “the poor man’s war” – most who were perished or were maimed were not rich folks, and a disproportionate number were black. Amd the more who died, the more were sent to replace them. And like here in Australia, thecdraft caught mainly the poor and unconnected. Even as soldiers started going home, actual or attempted murder by enlisted men of their superiors increased alarmingly.
As to the monetary cost: an estimated $1 trillion in today’s dollars. But that is doubtlessly an understatement – what about the rebuilding, the rehabilitation, the recompense? Vietnam was the most heavily bombed country in history. More than 6.1 million tons of bombs were dropped, compared to 2.1 million tons in WW2. U.S. planes dumped 20 million gallons of herbicides to defoliate VietCong hiding places. It decimated 5 million acres of frostbite and 500,000 acres of farmland.
It has been called “the helicopter war” because choppers were the primary mode of ground combat and transport, and also “the television war – it’s triumphs (few) and tragedies (many) were beamed Into American homes nightly, fuelling the public’s confusion and unease about this Asian war, and eventually, the anger that forced the US government to eventually withdraw over half a million soldiers, marines, airmen and sailors and abandoning South Vietnam’s puppet government, its demoralised and abandoned army, and its unfortunate, battered and bloodied people to the tender mercies of the hardline and heartless ideologues in Hanoi.
Vietnam was also, notoriously, a pharmaceutical war. In its final year’s, as raw and reluctant draftees made up an increasing proportion of the US forces, indiscipline and substance abuse transformed, in the words of one professional soldier, an officer, a fine army into a rotten one. Alcohol, marijuana, acid, coke, heroin, and a cornucopia of pills were freely available on base, on leave in Saigon, and often, in the field, and many soldiers actually made it a business. The press too were sucked into the machinery.
And, it was a promiscuous war. So far away from home and loved ones, like warriors in all wars since time immoral, US solders took comfort and solace where they could find it. Historians, memoirists, veterans of both the French and American wars in Indochina write and talk of the beauty of the Vietnamese women. Economic deprivation and social dislocation create a flesh market supplying lonely, frightened strangers in a strange land.
It was chemical warfare – not the mustard gas of older wars, and the Zyklon B of the Nazi death camps, nor the recent wars in the Middle East, in the first Gulf War, between Iraq and Iran, and in Syria – but the broad-acre use of chemical defoliants designed to deny the enemy of jungle and forest concealment that left behind a bitter harvest, a legacy of disease, deformity and death that ricochets to this day.
And, in the United States, it was a war that divided a nation. The protest movement emerged during 1965. It grew and grew, and by the Moratorium of October 1969, it became the largest outpouring of public dissent in American history. The moratorium movement was massive and unprecedented – and peaceful. Nationwide, hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people across the US were marching. The children of politicians and officials and soldiers were also marching. They were marching not about winning or losing the war but demanding an end to the war.
It was a journalists war too, and the photographers’ War. The military had a relaxed and tolerant attitude towards the press that would seem profligate and foolhardy in today’s tightly managed and manipulated combat media. Journalists and photographers would be permitted and indeed invited along on patrols and sweeps, carrier landings, on helicopter “dust offs” (a euphemism for evacuating the wounded and the dead), and the controversial “search and destroy” operations that destroyed so many fields, villages and lives. Needless to say, the coopted fourth estate were often in harm’s way. They were taught how to use weapons and often actually did use them in self defence and, sometimes in anger. And like the officers and men with whom they worked, many were wounded and slain. More than two hundred would die covering the fighting in South East Asia.
And English photojournalist Tim Page, who ran away from boring ‘sixties Britain to the exotic East at the age of seventeen, taking the ‘overland’ route that decades later would be called ‘the Hippie Trail’, washed up in the war of our generation, and left it critically injured and indeed clinically dead in a medivac chopper.
The Vietnam War’s echoes reverberate to this day. In the United States, it has taken more than 50 years for such a traumatic defeat to fade. The deepest scars, inevitably, belong to those who suffered most. Author and Vietnam veteran Philip Caputo in the preface to his memoir A Rumor of War wrote:
“I came home from the war with the curious feeling that I had grown older than my father, who was then 51,” writes. “A man saw the heights and depths of human behaviour in Vietnam, all manner of violence and horrors so grotesque that they evoked more fascination than disgust. Once I had seen pigs eating napalm-charred corpses – a memorable sight, pigs eating roast people.”
The scars on Vietnam itself were much deeper and long lasting – on its politics, still a authoritarian communist regime; its people – millions died, were wounded or suffered long term psychological and genetic damage; and its environment – the effects of broad-acre defoliants and the damage and debris of war.
If I ruled the world
Every day would be the first day of Spring
Every heart would have a new song to sing
And we’d sing of the joy every morning would bring
If I ruled the world
Every man would be as free as a bird
Every voice would be a voice to be heard
Take my word, we would treasure each day that occurred
My world would be a beautiful place
Where we would weave such wonderful dreams
My world would wear a smile on its face
Like the man in the moon has when the moon beams
Leslie Bricusse and Cyril Ornadel
On his inauguration on January 20 2025, US President Donald Trump declared to the American people, “My fellow citizens, the golden age of America begins right now.”
Pundits and partisans right across the political spectrum, both at home and overseas, agree that Donald John Trump’s second presidential term is probably the most consequential since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That is perhaps the only thing that they can agree on.
After 100 days in office, he is in command, testing the limits of executive power, resetting political and cultural perceptions and expectations, and reframing America’s role in the worked. But it would seem to many that having arguably declared war on America and the world, he is veering out of control.
There is almost no part of American society which has not felt the blizzard of change from the day he was sworn in. In a stand-over style that is more mob boss than head of state, he has forged a new American imperialism to project what he perceives as US interests, secure strategic assets and rebuild American economic self-sufficiency. The global trading system that has been in place for 75 years has been crippled, if not destroyed, and economists and stock markets surmise that the US economy is on the verge of crashing. America is no longer the leader of the free world because the world is no longer following America, but rather, is taking evasive action. Trump has united the people of most countries around the world around their political leadership, and yet he has not united America and Americans.
In a recent opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald, Bruce Wolpe, a senior fellow at the University of Sydney’s United States Studies Centre and former Congressional staffer, wrote a concise overview of Trump’s tumultuous first 100 Days. I have borrowed from it to write the following précis.
Trump is not governing by legislating but by an unprecedented exercise of executive power. He has signed fewer bills into law than any recent modern president while his 100 executive orders have triggered a tidal wave of new policies to change what the government can and cannot do. His political style of is marked by decrees coupled with complete domination of the airwaves for several hours each day, from greeting world leaders in the Oval Office to his televised cabinet meetings. For Trump, it is all streaming, all the time.as he remarked in the prime-time public takedown of the Ukrainian president in the Ovak Office, this it makes for “good television”.
On foreign policy, Trump promised groundbreaking early success on the world stage. But he has to date failed to end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, come close to a nuclear deal with Iran , or settling the dozens of trade wars he launched against his allies. Instead, there are constant reversals in tactics and rhetoric. He has decoupled America from the wider world with ramifications which will be felt for many years, if not decades. He has treated allies like adversaries, withdrawn America from numerous global institutions and treaties, erected daunting tariff barriers on all US trading partners and slashed US foreign aid and the State Department, terminating foreign aid, vaccines and food programme. The cumulative effect has been to gravely weaken America’s ability to wield soft power at a time when China and Russia are rushing to fill the vacuum.
Aided and abetted by billionaire Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, Trump unleashed Project 2025’s sledgehammer to the bureaucracy with overriding acts of Congress to dismantle agencies and programmes, mass firings, loyalty oaths, and the seizure of databases. And, as he promised on the campaign trail, Trump is exacting vengeance on his enemies. He has called on judges who have ruled against him to be impeached. He has blacklisted law firms that worked with Democrats, or else shook them down for millions of dollars of free work. In a speech at the Department of Justice, Trump said his enemies were “scum”, that the cases brought against him were “bullshit”, that the judges who ruled against him were corrupt, his prosecutors were deranged, and that those who came after him should be imprisoned. In a war against the nation’s most prestigious universities, he is demanding their leftist woke elitism be expunged, or else research dollars and tax-free status will be eliminated. Meanwhile, he continues to target the media as the enemy of the people. The Associated Press has been excluded from presidential events; the Voice of America has been shut down; and Trump has asked the regulator to cancel the broadcast license of CBS whilst moving to defund public media’s NPR and PBS.
The Democrats in Washington meanwhile are adrift and effectively leaderless. With control of the House and the Senate, Trump dominates everything in the capital. The force, speed and scope of his administration’s actions are so intense that the Democrats cannot respond effectively. Its not as if everyone has been taken by surprise. If they had been paying attention, this is exactly what Trump and his team said they would do. It is the scale of this revolution that has put everyone into a spin. It is a time of everything happening everywhere all at once – in accordance with the MAGA mantra of “move fast and break things”.
But, say optimists, the pushback is coming. Every weekend, people are flooding the streets in cities across the country. That movement is growing. If all that Trump and his administration have let loose comes into full force but does not deliver the American miracle he promised – with recession, inflation, and chaos taking hold across the land – the midterm elections next year could be a turning point. The Democrats are in striking distance of retaking control of Congress. If so, Trump’s power may be checked and his golden age may be stillborn. And yet, nothing about Trump is certain. His approval ratings might now be at a historical low, but he has been wrongly written off many times before.
So, how did it come to this?
As the authors of the long but excellent opinion piece in The Atlantic published below explains, Donald Trump’s Second Coming began four years ago and took meticulous planning.
That’s right, it’s come to this Yes, it’s come to this And wasn’t it a long way down? Wasn’t it a strange way down?
L Cohen, Dress Rehearsal Rag
Postscript: a bad case of imperial purple …
The story goes that Roman Emperor and stoic “philosopher king” Marcus Aurelius engaged a slave to follow him as he walked around Rome; his only job, whenever his master was praised, was to whisper in his ear, “Remember, you are just a man, you are just a man”. Washington, meanwhile, is starting to resemble some of the more excruciating scenes from the BBC’s iconic sword and sandals series I Claudius.
‘Brazen transaction mixed with humbling obeisance is hardly unknown in Washington … In Trump’s Washington, the imperative has never been plainer: if you want to get ahead or stay out of trouble, praise the President as much as he praises himself … The gestures of servility come from all over. At a Cabinet meeting not long ago, Trump’s secretaries took turns: “Your vision is a turning point and inflection point in American history” (Brooke Rollins, Agriculture); “You were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority—Americans want you to be President” (Pam Bondi, Attorney General); “What you’re doing now is a great service to our country, but ultimately to the world” (Marco Rubio, State) … At a hearing of the House Committee on Natural Resources, where a dozen or so members were discussing the Gulf of America Act of 2025, sponsored by Marjorie Taylor Greene. Democrat congressman Jared Huffman said: “This is remarkable new stuff in this committee, just bootlicking sycophancy of the highest order,” he said. (Not long after the hearing, Huffman suggested an amendment to rename Earth “Planet Trump”.’
Illustration by Dale Stephanos. Source: Ethan Miller / Getty.
Before we begin, a primer on the science of arranging an interview with a sitting American president:
In ordinary times, reporters seeking an on-the-record encounter with the commander in chief first write an elaborate proposal. The proposal details the goals of the interview, the broad areas of concern, and the many reasons the president must, for his own good, talk to these particular reporters and not other, perfectly adequate but still lesser reporters. This pitch is then sent to White House officials. If the universe bends favorably, negotiations ensue. If the staff feel reasonably confident that the interview will somehow help their cause, they will ask the president—with trepidation, at times—to sit for the interview. Sometimes, the president will agree.
Such is what happened recently to us. We went through this process in the course of reporting the story you are reading. We made our pitch, which went like this: President Donald Trump, by virtue of winning a second term and so dramatically reshaping the country and the world, can now be considered the most consequential American leader of the 21st century, and we want to describe, in detail, how this came to be. Just four years ago, after the violent insurrection he fomented, Trump appeared to be finished. Social-media companies had banned or suspended him, and he had been repudiated by corporate donors. Republicans had denounced him, and the country was moving on to the fresh start of Joe Biden’s presidency. Then came further blows—the indictments, the civil judgments, and the endless disavowals by people who once worked for him.
And yet, here we are, months into a second Trump term. We wanted to hear, in his own words, how he’d pulled off one of the most remarkable comebacks in political history, and what lessons, if any, he’d internalized along the way.
Trump agreed to see us. We were tentatively promised a meeting and a photo shoot—likely in the Oval Office, though possibly the Lincoln Bedroom. But then, as is so often the case with this White House, everything went sideways.
The week our interview was supposed to occur, Trump posted a vituperative message on Truth Social, attacking us by name. “Ashley Parker is not capable of doing a fair and unbiased interview. She is a Radical Left Lunatic, and has been as terrible as is possible for as long as I have known her,” he wrote. “To this date, she doesn’t even know that I won the Presidency THREE times.” (That last sentence is true—Ashley Parker does not know that Trump won the presidency three times.) “Likewise, Michael Scherer has never written a fair story about me, only negative, and virtually always LIES.”
Apparently, as word of our meeting spread through Trump’s inner circle, someone had reminded him of some of the things we (specifically Ashley) had said and written that he didn’t like. We still don’t know who it was—but we immediately understood the consequences: no photo shoot, no tour of the newly redecorated Oval Office or the Lincoln Bedroom, and definitely no interview.
But we’ve both covered Trump long enough to know that his first word is rarely his final one. So at 10:45 on a Saturday morning in late March, we called him on his cellphone. (Don’t ask how we got his number. All we can say is that the White House staff have imperfect control over Trump’s personal communication devices.) The president was at the country club he owns in Bedminster, New Jersey. The number that flashed on his screen was an unfamiliar one, but he answered anyway. “Who’s calling?” he asked.
Despite his attacks on us a few days earlier, the president, evidently feeling buoyed by a week of successes, was eager to talk about his accomplishments. As we spoke, the sounds of another conversation, perhaps from a television, hummed in the background.
The president seemed exhilarated by everything he had managed to do in the first two months of his second term: He had begun a purge of diversity efforts from the federal government; granted clemency to nearly 1,600 supporterswho had participated in the invasion of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, including those caught beating police officers on camera; and signed 98 executive orders and counting (26 of them on his first day in office). He had fired independent regulators; gutted entire agencies; laid off great swaths of the federal workforce; and invoked 18th-century wartime powers to use against a criminal gang from Venezuela. He had adjusted tariffs like a DJ spinning knobs in the booth, upsetting the rhythms of global trade and inducing vertigo in the financial markets. He had raged at the leader of Ukraine, a democratic ally repelling an imperialist invasion, for not being “thankful”—and praised the leader of the invading country, Russia, as “very smart,” reversing in an instant 80 years of U.S. foreign-policy doctrine, and prompting the countries of NATO to prepare for their own defense, without the protective umbrella of American power, for the first time since 1945.
Donald Trump after being sworn in as president for his second term in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol (Shawn Thew / Reuters)
He had empowered one of his top political donors, Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, to slice away at the federal government and take control of its operating systems. He had disemboweled ethics and anti-corruption architecture installed after Watergate, and had declared that he, not the attorney general, was the nation’s chief law-enforcement officer. He had revoked Secret Service protection and security clearances from political opponents, including some facing Iranian death threats for carrying out actions Trump himself had ordered in his first term. He had announced plans to pave over part of the Rose Garden, and he had redecorated the Oval Office—gold trim and gold trophies and gold frames to go with an array of past presidential portraits, making the room look like a Palm Beach approximation of an 18th-century royal court.
Old foes were pleading for his grace. Meta—whose founder, Mark Zuckerberg, had become an enthusiastic supplicant—had paid $25 million to settle a civil lawsuit with Trump that many experts believed was meritless. Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post, announced that he was banning his opinion writers from holding certain opinions—and then joined Trump for dinner the same night at the White House.
“He’s 100 percent. He’s been great,” the president told us, referring to Bezos. “Zuckerberg’s been great.”
We asked Trump why he thought the billionaire class was prostrating itself before him.
“It’s just a higher level of respect. I don’t know,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now.”
“I mean, you saw yesterday with the law firm,” he said. He was referring to Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison, one of the nation’s most prestigious firms, whose leader had come to the Oval Office days earlier to beg for relief from an executive order that could have crippled its business. Trump had issued the order at least partially because a former partner at the firm had in 2021 gone to work for the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, where he was part of an investigation of the Trump Organization’s business practices. Also that week, an Ivy League institution, threatened with the cancellation of $400 million in federal funding, had agreed to overhaul its Middle Eastern–studies programs at the Trump administration’s request, while also acceding to other significant demands. “You saw yesterday with Columbia University. What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” Trump asked us.
Yes—all of it was shocking, much of it without precedent. Legal scholars were drawing comparisons to Franklin D. Roosevelt and the early stages of the New Deal, when Congress had allowed FDR to demolish norms and greatly expand the powers of the presidency.
As ever, Trump was on the hunt for a deal. If he liked the story we wrote, he said, he might even speak with us again.
“Tell the people at The Atlantic, if they’d write good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” he said. Perhaps the magazine can risk forgoing hotness, he suggested, because it is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, which buffers it, he implied, from commercial imperatives. But that doesn’t guarantee anything, he warned. “You know at some point, they give up,” he said, referring to media owners generally and—we suspected—Bezos specifically. “At some point they say, No más, no más.” He laughed quietly.
Media owners weren’t the only ones on his mind. He also seemed to be referring to law firms, universities, broadcast networks, tech titans, artists, research scientists, military commanders, civil servants, moderate Republicans—all the people and institutions he expected to eventually, inevitably, submit to his will.
We asked the president if his second term felt different from his first. He said it did. “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys,” he said. “And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
For weeks, we’d been hearing from both inside and outside the White House that the president was having more fun than he’d had in his first term. “The first time, the first weeks, it was just ‘Let’s blow this place up,’ ” Brian Ballard, a lobbyist and an ally of the president’s, had told us. “This time, he’s blowing it up with a twinkle in his eye.”
When we put this observation to Trump over the phone, he agreed. “I’m having a lot of fun, considering what I do,” he said. “You know, what I do is such serious stuff.”
EXILE
that trump now finds himself once again in a position to blow things up is astonishing, considering the depth of his fall. So much has happened so fast that the improbability of his comeback gets obscured. Perhaps no one in American history has had a political resurrection as remarkable as Donald Trump’s.
In the waning days of his first term, his approval rating stood at a pallid 34 percent. A few weeks earlier, he had watched on television while an insurrection he incited overran the Capitol; polls showed that a clear majority of Americans believed he bore responsibility for the attack. The House of Representatives had just impeached him for the second time—making him the only president to ever achieve that ignominy. And although the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds majority required for conviction, seven Republican senators voted to convict—the most members of a president’s own party to vote for an impeachment conviction in history.
Twitter and Facebook, his favorite social-media platforms, had banned or effectively silenced him, along with Instagram and YouTube. To try to reestablish direct connection with his followers, he would launch a blog, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.” But it gained little traction and was abandoned within weeks.
Major corporations announced that they were cutting off political contributions to officials who had supported Trump’s election lies. Deutsche Bank and Signature Bank decided to stop doing business with Trump and his companies. Perhaps most painful to the president, the PGA of America yanked its scheduled 2022 championship tournament from Trump’s Bedminster golf course. Former members of his own Cabinet and staff—people he had hired—would declare him, or had already declared him, “a moron” (Rex Tillerson, secretary of state), “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine” (James Mattis, secretary of defense), “the most flawed person I have ever met” (John Kelly, chief of staff), and “a laughing fool” (John Bolton, national security adviser). And now longtime allies were abandoning him. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House minority leader, had discussed pushing Trump to resign from office. On the evening of the insurrection, Senator Lindsey Graham, a compass reliably magnetized toward wherever power in the Republican Party lies, pointed away from Trump for the first time in four years. “Count me out,” Graham had declared on the Senate floor. “Enough is enough.” Rupert Murdoch, then the chairman of Fox Corporation, sent an email to a former Fox Broadcasting executive in which he declared, “We want to make Trump a non person.” Coming from Murdoch himself, the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon told us recently, “that’s a papal bull.”
On the morning of Joe Biden’s inauguration, Trump was a dozen miles southeast of the festivities, at Joint Base Andrews, preparing to depart for Florida. (Trump was the first president since Andrew Johnson, in 1869, to boycott the swearing-in of his successor.) Standing before a modest crowd, his dark overcoat a meager bulwark against the cold, the soon-to-be-former president cut a diminished figure.
Just before boarding Air Force One for the final time, to head to Mar-a-Lago, Trump spoke to those gathered to bid him farewell. “We will be back in some form,” he said, a notably modest framing from such a formerly oversize figure.
Few believed him. It didn’t even sound like he believed it himself. The Trump era was over.
Almost as soon as Trump arrived at his gilded Elba, he began plotting his return. He missed the press pool—the gaggle of reporters that tails every president—and once tried to summon it, only to be told that no such pool still existed. But it would turn out that the lack of attention in those first months—and the lack of access to social-media platforms—was a blessing. Enforced obscurity gave him the time and clarity he needed to plan his comeback.
To understand how Trump rose from the political dead, and how he set himself up to wield power in his second term, we spoke with dozens of top advisers, senior aides, allies, adversaries, and confidants. Many who talked with us did so only on the condition of anonymity, in order to be more candid or to avoid angering the president. The story they told us revealed that Trump’s time in the political wilderness is crucial to understanding the way he’s exercising power now.
He had been in Palm Beach a week when an opportunity presented itself. Trump heard that Kevin McCarthy would be in South Florida for fundraisers. Though the two men had clashed after the Capitol riot, Trump invited McCarthy to Mar-a-Lago. Even before the meeting happened, news of it leaked to The New York Times, shaking the political universe: Were Republican leaders, who had seemed so intent on purging Trump, embracing him again? When Trump and McCarthy met in person, the former president asked the minority leader who had tipped off the Times.
Donald Trump departed Washington in 2021 a pariah, twice impeached, abandoned by former allies, and banned or suspended from his favorite social-media platforms. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Noam Galai / Getty; Alex Edelman / AFP / Getty; Sepia Times / Universal Images Group / Getty.)
“I know who leaked it—you did,” McCarthy replied, multiple people briefed on the exchange told us.
“It’s good for both of us,” Trump shot back.
Both men were right. McCarthy had already concluded that the path back to Republican control of the House in the 2022 midterms—and his own path to the speakership—required a unified party, one that included Trump and his MAGA base. After the meeting, each man separately released the same photo: the two of them grinning amid the ostentatious splendor of Mar-a-Lago. Trump had taken his first step toward political redemption.
It is a truism that Trump has never felt governed by the traditional rules of politics. And he has always been convinced of his own genius, his pure gut instincts. But never more so than today. The past four years have turned him into a Nietzschean cliché. Banishment, multiple indictments, a 34-count felony conviction, repeated brushes with assassins—all have combined to convince him that he is impervious to challenges that would destroy others. Those years also strengthened in him the salesman’s instinct that he can bend reality to his will—turn facts into “fake news,” make the inconceivable not just conceivable but actual, transform the Gulf of Mexico into the Gulf of America, make people believe what he’s selling in defiance of what they see with their own eyes. This is the core lesson that Trump and his acolytes internalized from the 2020 election and January 6. The real-estate mogul who branded buildings with his name everywhere from Turkey to Uruguay, who sold the “world’s greatest steaks” and the “finest” wine and “fantastic” mattresses, had mastered the alchemy of perception. Reality, to Trump, is fungible. While reporting on Trump over the past four years, we were repeatedly struck that, in failing to drive a stake directly through his heart, all of the would-be vampire slayers—Democrats, Never Trumpers, Republican-primary opponents, prosecutors, judges, media critics—only strengthened him. Which brings us to a second lesson: Trump and his team realized that they could behave with near impunity by embracing controversies and scandals that would have taken down just about any other president—as long as they showed no weakness.
Even now, Trump—who described himself to us as “a very positive thinker”—struggles to admit that his return to power was a comeback. To concede that he’d had to come back would be to admit that he had fallen in the first place.
Early in our reporting for this article, we asked the Trump loyalist and former Breitbart News editor Raheem Kassam to explain how the president had been able to bend the country, and the world, to his will. Over a meal of oysters brûlées, duck confit, and fries cooked in beef tallow at Butterworth’s, the new MAGA haunt on Capitol Hill, he responded crudely, if vividly. “He didn’t bend them to his will,” Kassam said. “He bent them over.”
When we spoke with Trump in late March, his approval ratings seemed steady, his political base apparently unshakable. Institution after institution was submitting to him—“obeying in advance,” as the historian of authoritarianism Timothy Snyder has put it. Trump was carrying out his agenda with surprisingly little resistance, even from Democrats. But in the days and weeks that followed, the patina of infallibility began to crack. At the instigation of Elon Musk’s DOGE team, critical workers had been getting fired—and then hired back. An embarrassing (and possibly illegal) operations-security snafu, in which the editor of this magazine was included on a Signal group chat that discussed imminent attack plans on Houthi targets in Yemen, made the administration look incompetent, in a fashion reminiscent of the clown-car chaos of Trump 1.0. The president’s tariff rollout was shambolic, tanking the stock market and causing even some loyalists to question him publicly. His approval rating on the economy, long a buttress of his polling support, went negative. Was this what happens when a feeling of indomitability curdles into hubris? Or was this just the next setback for Trump—some combination of Houdini and Lazarus—to recover from?
he had almost been destroyed before. After a real-estate downturn in the early 1990s, Trump found himself on the brink of financial ruin. His near bankruptcy and recovery led to his 1997 book, The Art of the Comeback. For his political advisers in exile, this book became essential reading.
The first pages list Trump’s “Top Ten Comeback Tips.” When we met one of his advisers recently, this person recounted from memory some of the rules on the list. “Rule 1 is: Play golf,” this adviser told us. “Rule 9 is: Get even.” (Rule 10, “Always have a prenuptial agreement,” seemed less applicable to politics.)
To stage a comeback, Trump would need the right staff. He had realized, in his exile, that at nearly every turn in his first term, someone on his own team—Reince Priebus, John Kelly, James Mattis, Bill Barr, Gary Cohn—had blocked him. He needed smart people who would figure out how to let him do everything that he wanted to do, in whatever way he wanted to do it. His first key hire was a political operative who had impressed the former president with her retrospective analysis of the 2020 election. Biden had won the election that year by flipping back into the Democratic column five key states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (along with a lone congressional district in Nebraska). One of the few bright spots for Trump in 2020 had been Florida, where he had increased his winning margin from 2016. What, Trump began asking his allies after the election, had he done right in Florida that he hadn’t done in the rest of the country?
The answer, in large part, boiled down to Susie Wiles, who had run Trump’s 2016 and 2020 campaigns in the state. Wiles, the daughter of the legendary NFL announcer Pat Summerall, is an experienced campaign operative (she was a scheduler for Ronald Reagan’s 1980 presidential campaign), who over the past three decades had developed deep Florida ties. After every campaign she runs, Wiles writes an “after action” report, documenting what worked and what didn’t. Over dinner with Trump on the patio at Mar-a-Lago in early 2021, she delivered “the Florida memo.” Soon after, he hired her to run his political operation, which eventually became his 2024 campaign.
Wiles saw that one thing that had held Trump back in 2020 was that he had not finished taking over the Republican Party during his first term. Part of Trump’s leverage had been his ability to endorse in Republican primaries—influence he was eager to reprise. “When I endorse somebody, they win,” Trump told us on the phone. “But even when I endorse them in the general election, mostly they win. It’s important.” (Now when Trump calls to pressure a fellow Republican about an issue or a vote, they are almost always grateful for his past support, or feel that they owe their seat to him.)
The Wiles process for evaluating potential endorsees—which she undertook with James Blair, now a deputy chief of staff in the White House, and Brian Jack, now a congressman representing Georgia—involved researching how they had spoken about Trump in the past. “The basic thing was their loyalty and their political viability,” one adviser told us. “So we were looking for things like: So, what did they say on J6? What did they say during the Access Hollywood tapes? What is their voting record with us?” Trump was building a coalition of loyalists, something he hadn’t sufficiently done during the first term.
Wiles had plenty of experience managing men with big personalities. But colleagues say a key reason she’s been successful working with Trump (she is now his White House chief of staff) is that she never tries to manage him. She does not imagine that she can control him, as some former top advisers attempted, and she tends not to offer advice unless specifically asked. Her primary role, as she sees it, is to set up processes to help ensure Trump’s success, and then to execute his directives, whatever they may be.
At first, Trump’s banishment from the big social-media platforms, along with mainstream media outlets’ reluctance—including Fox News’s—to give him much coverage, seemed potentially devastating. But Trump turned to the far-right platforms and activists still welcoming him. Taylor Budowich—now a White House deputy chief of staff—worked with MAGA influencers to evade the Twitter and Facebook bans: They would print out pro-Trump social-media posts; Budowich would have Trump sign the paper with his Sharpie, and then mail the signed post back to the influencer; almost invariably, the influencer would then post the signed missive, flexing their access and building their audience—while simultaneously amplifying Trump’s voice. At the same time, a video ecosystem grew up around Trump, with streaming platforms such as Right Side Broadcasting Network stepping in to cover his events when cable networks would not.
“Him being banned gave rise to people like me, because the president’s supporters followed me to find out what he was saying,” one MAGA influencer told us. “It backfired on the tech people who deplatformed him, because it platformed all of us.”
Trump, meanwhile, continued to promote the lie that he’d won the 2020 election, and that January 6 was just an ordinary Wednesday. Normal political logic suggested that this was a bad strategy. But his shamelessness, as ever, remained a strength. By repeating something frequently enough, he could slowly make it feel true, at least for his supporters.
Not long ago, we sat in Steve Bannon’s Capitol Hill rowhouse, where he records his War Room podcast, pressing him on Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, and his denial of what transpired on January 6. “Our reality is that we won” and that January 6 was a “fedsurrection,” Bannon said, referring to the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had incited the crowd on the Ellipse that day.
But this reality, we pointed out to Bannon, is simply not true.
“Now, here’s the interesting thing,” Bannon said. “Who’s won that argument? I think we have.”
“BE READY!”
the first televised hearing of the House select committee on January 6 was scheduled for the beginning of June 2022, and it was sure to be a spectacle that reminded viewers of the horror of the insurrection and emphasized the former president’s culpability. Trump’s team at Mar-a-Lago was desperate to distract attention from the hearing. At one point, someone proposed a brazen gambit: Trump could announce his 2024 bid for the presidency just minutes before the hearing gaveled in.
Trump’s response was telling. “I’m not ready for this,” he said. “We’re not ready for this right now.”
“That was the first moment of, like, ‘Okay, he’s not just thinking about it; he’s seriously thinking about how he wants to do it,’ ” one of his advisers told us. “He’s not going to just use it as a stunt to make a moment. He wants to win.”
Before long, Trump began emphasizing behind the scenes that he was serious. “Be ready,” he would repeat to people who had served with him the first time around. “Be ready! Be ready! We’re coming back! Be ready!”
Still, when Trump did launch his campaign, in November 2022, it did not get off to an auspicious start. Even his most fiercely supportive advisers concede that the announcement, in the form of an hour-long speech at Mar-a-Lago, was a dud.
Surprisingly few political reporters from major outlets were in attendance; it was as though the mainstream media still didn’t believe that Trump could be a viable candidate again. Worse, some members of Trump’s own family hadn’t bothered to show up. As the speech dragged on, even Fox News cut away, switching to what Bannon called “a C-level panel,” before returning for the final few minutes.
The campaign struggled to gain traction. Trump’s longtime pollster Tony Fabrizio told us that even months later, into early 2023, getting donors to attend the first big super-PAC event “was like pulling teeth.” And although Trump was now a declared presidential candidate, his team said it was still having trouble getting him booked even on shows such as Fox & Friends.
The first turning point, several advisers told us, came in February 2023. A Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous chemicals derailed in East Palestine, Ohio, near the Pennsylvania border, spewing toxic material. Sitting in the West Palm Beach campaign headquarters one day, Trump’s team watched Joe Biden’s press secretary struggle to answer a question about the president’s plans for outreach to East Palestine. Soon after, Susie Wiles received a call from Trump’s oldest son, Don Jr., saying that his father ought to just show up there himself. When Wiles brought the suggestion to Trump, in the living room of Mar-a-Lago, his response was unequivocal: “That’s a great idea,” he enthused. “When can we go?”
Trump’s visit to East Palestine—and the footage of him buying McDonald’s for the first responders—had a potent effect. “It just reminded everyone that people still like this guy,” one adviser told us. “He’s still a draw.” Nearly two years later, Trump’s visit continued to resonate. “People are living their lives and they don’t delve that easily into policy,” a woman across the border in the swing state of Pennsylvania told our colleague George Packer before the election last fall. “All they know is that Trump was here buying everyone McDonald’s” and that Biden hadn’t visited for more than a year.
The halting start to the campaign kept Trump off the radar, giving his team time to plan. Former Trump advisers had used their years out of power to set up their own groups—America First Legal, America First Policy Institute, Center for Renewing America—to prepare for a second Trump administration.
“The people who were the true believers knew Trump was going to run again and win,” Caroline Wren, a former top Trump fundraiser, told us, adding that Trump’s policy loyalists “sat there and prepared executive orders for four years.”
The time out of the spotlight also allowed the team to build a new election strategy. By now, Trump had alienated a significant share of the voting public, and he was polling lower among some demographic groups than in previous elections. The conventional wisdom was that the criminal investigations and legal proceedings then under way would only increase that alienation. His campaign directors decided that the best tactic was to turn this problem into a strength. Chris LaCivita, who was a co–campaign manager alongside Susie Wiles and a military veteran wounded in the Gulf War in 1991, took to exhorting younger staffers with a Marine slogan: “Embrace the suck.”
The impulse to let Trump be Trump, so contrary to the instincts of much of the first-term staff, was laid out in a memo that James Blair and Tim Saler, the campaign’s lead data expert, sent to Wiles in early 2024. This became known around the campaign as the “gender memo.” “Instead of saying, ‘Look, we did two points worse with white suburban women between 2016 and 2020’ and ‘How do we get those points back?,’ what if we did it the other way?” an adviser familiar with the memo told us. “What if we said, ‘We gained eight points with non-college-educated men. What if we won them by 12?’ ”
During his brief political exile, Trump hired the campaign operative Susie Wiles. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: ablokhin / Getty; Tom Brenner / The Washington Post / Getty; ZUMA Press / Alamy.)
The strategy had the benefit of letting Trump be the version of himself that appealed to those men. In a moment when the Democratic Party often felt like an amalgamation of East Coast elitists, niggling scolds, and far-left activists, Trump appeared to offer judgment-free populism to a populace sick of being judged.
Trump’s own view, we were told, was more self-referential: “Why would I distance myself from my people? They love me.”
“IT MADE ME STRONGER”
on friday, may 31, 2024, the day after Trump was convicted of 34 felony charges in a New York City courtroom, the treasurer at Make America Great Again Inc., the main super PAC supporting the former president, called his boss, Taylor Budowich, with good news. A large wire transfer was incoming—a record $15 million. The call set off an internal scramble, because the bank needed the donor’s name to approve the transfer, and nobody knew who it was.
Shortly thereafter, the treasurer called back. “I’m so sorry,” he told Budowich. “I misheard him. It’s not $15 million—it’s $50 million.”
“Don’t be sorry!” Budowich said. (The donation was eventually traced to Timothy Mellon, an heir to the Mellon banking fortune.)
The Democrats assumed that Trump’s legal issues would politically neuter him. “A convicted felon is now seeking the office of the presidency,” Biden would say. But all the scandals and controversies that would have sunk a different candidate became background static. “The thing about the court cases is there were too many of them, and this is one of Trump’s superpowers—he never just breaks the law a little bit; he does it all over the place,” Sarah Longwell, a formerly Republican, anti-MAGA political strategist who regularly conducts focus groups, told us. “And as a result, there were so many court cases that it was just white noise to voters. They couldn’t tell them apart.”
The Democratic base remained outraged. Trump’s base continued to believe his claims that all the criminal investigations and January 6 hearings constituted a “witch hunt.” But for the sliver of voters who would actually decide the election, the Democratic argument that Trump was a threat to democracy was too far removed from their more urgent concerns about grocery prices. As time passed and Trump continued to rewrite history to turn insurrectionists into “patriots,” the events of January 6 receded into abstraction for many of these voters.
“If you said, ‘What’s J6?,’ it’s like, ‘What is that? Bingo? Are you playing Battleship?’ ” the adviser familiar with the gender memo told us, describing what the campaign’s voter research had found.
Trump’s felony conviction actually proved to be a boon. This did not surprise his advisers. A year earlier, in the spring of 2023, when Trump had been indicted over hush-money payments to a porn star, his support in Republican-primary polls jumped 10 points within a month, to more than 50 percent—a level it would never drop below again. In the first three months of 2023, MAGA Inc. had reported raising only about $600,000; in the three months following the indictment, the group took in nearly $13 million. “Democrats just played right into our hands,” Fabrizio, the Trump pollster, told us.
For Trump’s base, the cases were energizing, and they put his Republican-primary opponents in the difficult position of having to defend Trump against “lawfare” or risk being seen as supporting the Democrats’ position. So even while campaigning against him for the nomination, they were in effect campaigning for him.
During his 2016 campaign, Trump had ignored the traditional fundraising circuit, which increased donor skepticism of him. But during his time in the wilderness, he began to enjoy raising money. He asked advisers to schedule more call time for him with top donors. He wrote personal notes, and he regularly invited wealthy supporters and potential donors to dine with him at Mar-a-Lago. He judged generosity not by the size of the check, his allies told us, but by the size of the check relative to the donor’s net worth. He liked pressuring donors to bet on him—and watching them squirm if they hedged. Sometimes he was blunt, invoking the specter of a President Kamala Harris taking their wealth.
(“If I’m not president, you’re fucked,” he would tell a roomful of oil executives at Mar-a-Lago after the election. “Look at your profit-and-loss statements. You realize what would have happened to you if she was president? What’s wrong with you?”)
The Supreme Court decision in July 2024 regarding a legal challenge to the federal prosecution of Trump for interfering in the 2020 election gave Trump and his allies further momentum. Trump v. United States addressed the question of legal liability for a president, but Trump’s allies focused on how the Court described the presidency itself, suggesting that all the powers of the executive branch were imbued in the personage. “Unlike anyone else,” the Court wrote, “the President is a branch of government.” That the prosecution of Trump both revivified his candidacy and then gave him more executive power in his second term remains a stinging irony for Democrats.
When we talked with Trump, we asked him if he thought the criminal prosecutions had made him stronger. “Shockingly, yes,” he said. “Normally, it would knock you out. You wouldn’t even live for the next day. You know, you’d announce your resignation, and you’d go back and ‘fight for your name,’ like everybody says—you know, ‘fight for your name, go back to your family.’ ”
He paused. “Yeah, it made me stronger, made me a lot stronger.”
In the final months of the campaign, Democratic strategists working for Vice President Harris focused on seven swing states. Trump, by contrast, told aides that he wanted to put resources into picking up voters even in states he was already certain to win.
“We don’t want anyone to know—it’s a surprise—but I think we might win the popular vote,” Trump would say to his advisers. “We have got to run up the score.”
During breaks between events, his team would place calls to groups of voters in red states and put him on the line. “This is your favorite president, Donald Trump,” he’d say, before launching into brief remarks. They would make calls from the motorcade, from the campaign plane, as many as 10 a day. In this way, working around the old mass media, Trump reached thousands of voters directly.
“If there was someone in America in some state, still awake, Donald Trump would find a way to get to them,” Chris LaCivita told us.
In 2016, Trump had been so frustrated about losing the popular vote to Hillary Clinton that he’d falsely asserted, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” Eight years later, he didn’t have to pretend. As Election Night gave way to dawn in Palm Beach, Trump basked in the comprehensiveness of his victory—all seven swing states, and a strong showing in the popular-vote tally, which he ultimately won. Several aides got calls from him around 4 a.m. “You won’t believe it,” Trump crowed, according to one. “I’ve already had 20 world leaders call me. They all want to kiss my ass.”
Some time later, Trump addressed a gathering of supporters in the living room at Mar-a-Lago. During his first term people would say, “Yeah, he won, but he doesn’t have a mandate, ” Trump told the crowd. “Now they can’t say it anymore.”
THE TRANSITION
people who worked with Trump in his first term used to play a parlor game of sorts. What would happen, they wondered, if they, the human guardrails, weren’t there to correct the president’s errors, to explain to him all the things he did not know or understand, to talk him out of or slow-walk his most destructive impulses?
During his first term, he faced resistance and obstruction from all over the government: from the courts and from the Democrats, but also from Republicans in the House and Senate, who at times treated him like a floundering student. The contempt was mutual. “Paul Ryan was a stupid person,” Trump told us in March, referring to the former Republican speaker of the House. “And Mitch, Mitch wasn’t much better,” Trump said of Mitch McConnell, the former Senate Republican leader and, lately, the epicenter of GOP resistance to Trump, such as it is. But some of the most crucial pushback came from within the executive branch. At times, his chief of staff and his White House counsel declined to carry out his orders. Trump had been apoplectic when “his” Justice Department, under Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein, opened an independent-counsel investigation into whether the Russians had influenced the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign had colluded with them.
This time would be different, because he’d learned from experience. “When I did it before, I never did it, you know?” he told us. “I didn’t know people in Washington.”
On January 15, at 8 p.m., five days before the inauguration, Trump sent out an incendiary post on Truth Social. In it, he described the sorts of people his incoming administration would not be hiring—a list that included anyone who had ever worked for, in his words, “Americans for No Prosperity (headed by Charles Koch), ‘Dumb as a Rock’ John Bolton, ‘Birdbrain’ Nikki Haley, Mike Pence, disloyal Warmongerers Dick Cheney, and his Psycho daughter, Liz,” and anyone “suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome.” For those staffing Trump’s second term, the missive was doctrine: This time, loyalty would be absolute.
In 2016, few experienced Republicans had been involved in Trump’s campaign, so the pool of presumptive loyalists to draw from was small. His incoming team also used key transition picks—Cabinet secretaries, West Wing advisers—to reassure a still-skeptical Republican Party that Trump was one of them. This produced a dysfunctional dichotomy in which Reince Priebus, a mild-mannered traditional Republican from Wisconsin, and Steve Bannon, a revolutionary hell-bent on dismantling the administrative state, shared top billing in the West Wing. The competing camps—the MAGA fire-breathers, the establishment swamp creatures, “Javanka” and the globalists—leaked relentlessly to the media and tried to knife one another. A miasma of chaos surrounded Trump, and impaired the administration’s ability to carry out its policy agenda.
But by 2024, Trump had effectively consumed the party, and he had no need to recruit traditional Republicans, if any even remained. Cliff Sims, who during Trump’s first term had served as a communications aide in the White House before going to work for the director of national intelligence, helped the transition team manage hiring for the second term. The formula for staffing the administration wasn’t hard this time, Sims told us: “Don’t hire anyone who wasn’t committed to the agenda last time.”
“I knew that Stephen Miller would ultimately run the policy operation, with immigration as a top priority,” Sims told us, referring to Trump’s senior domestic-policy adviser, who is, famously, an immigration hard-liner. “So I just asked him, ‘Who do you want? Who should prepare DHS? Who should prepare ICE? Who are the rock stars from your team? Let’s get them all rolling.’ ” Same, too, with trade. Sims called Jamieson Greer, who had served as the chief of staff to the U.S. trade representative in Trump’s first term before taking over the role himself this time around. He asked Greer who Trump’s pro-tariff “killers on trade” were. “And he’s like, ‘I’ve been sitting here hoping someone would call about this; I’ve already got a list ready,’ ” Sims told us.
Because the transition hiring for the second term harvested a uniformly loyalist crop of staffers, getting things done the way Trump wants became easier. In the first term, executive orders designed by the MAGA faction were sometimes rushed through without proper legal vetting, in an attempt to prevent a warring faction from killing the directive, someone familiar with this process told us—which made them vulnerable to court challenges. This time around, the process for generating the orders is more disciplined.
Trump’s aides and advisers also now understood the hydraulics of the government better. They’d learned, for instance, that immigration policy was not contained solely within the Department of Homeland Security, and that to curb the flow of immigrants across the southern border, they also needed to install loyalists in crucial roles at the Department of Health and Human Services. When it came to the Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs at the State Department, they now knew they needed MAGA diehards in key roles. This kind of knowledge would now be applied to thousands of hires across dozens of agencies.
When his cabinet nominees hit trouble in the Senate, Trump and his team were determined to test their new power. “It was ‘You’ll eat your breakfast and you’ll like it,’ ” a veteran Republican operative told us. The first major test came during the former Fox News host Pete Hegseth’s quest for confirmation as defense secretary.
Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa, a Republican, was skeptical about Hegseth’s qualifications. Ernst is the first female combat veteran to serve in the Senate; Hegseth had previously said that women should not serve in combat roles. Ernst is also a sexual-assault survivor; Hegseth has been accused of sexual assault and other misconduct, including alcohol abuse. (Hegseth has denied the accusations.) But when Ernst publicly signaled that she might not be able to support the nomination, Trump’s allies leaped into action. On private text chains, they talked about how failing to win confirmation for Hegseth was untenable. The consensus was clear: Because Matt Gaetz had already had to withdraw as Trump’s pick for attorney general, if they lost another major nominee, there would be blood in the water. Even the most controversial—Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Kash Patel—needed to be muscled through.
Trump and his team saw the confirmation of their most controversial Cabinet nominees—Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard—as a chance to flex their power over the Republican Party. (Photo-illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Rebecca Noble / Getty; Anna Moneymaker / Getty; Philip Yabut / Getty; Print Collector / Getty.)
They decided to make an example of Ernst, as a warning to other senators about what to expect if they stepped out of line. An op‑ed implicitly excoriating her appeared on Breitbart News ; Bannon and the gang on his War Room podcast hammered her relentlessly; and the powerful young conservative activist Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point USA team threatened to send resources to Iowa to oppose her reelection in 2026. Ernst’s effort to “end Pete Hegseth,” Kirk posted on X in early December, “is a direct attempt to undermine the President and his voters. Pete Hegseth is the redline. If you vote against him, primaries will ensue.”
Trump’s team knew that once the most prominent MAGA figures began their onslaught, second-tier influencers would follow. Ernst called around to Trump allies, begging them to stop the attacks. But they wouldn’t relent; she voted to confirm Hegseth.
Bill Cassidy, a Republican senator and physician from Louisiana, also briefly found himself in the hot seat as he struggled with his confirmation vote on Kennedy, a vaccine critic who has misstated scientific findings, to lead the nation’s top health agency. (Cassidy was also viewed as a problem by Trump supporters because he’d voted to convict the president for his role in the January 6 insurrection.)
Cassidy ultimately supported Kennedy’s nomination, though he maintained that the vote had nothing to do with his own reelection prospects in 2026. Afterward, in the course of general conversations about the midterms, Cassidy’s team sought Trump’s support in his upcoming GOP primary. Trump told an aide to relay to Cassidy: “I’ll think about it.” (A Trump adviser told us that, for the moment, the president and Cassidy have reached “an uneasy détente.”)
Business leaders fell more quickly in line. After the election, they descended on Mar-a-Lago.
At dinner with Silicon Valley moguls, Trump would sometimes play “Justice for All”—a song by the J6 Prison Choir that features men imprisoned for their actions on January 6 singing “The Star-Spangled Banner,” interspersed with Trump reciting the Pledge of Allegiance. One Trump adviser gleefully recounted how confused the tech billionaires appeared when “Justice for All” started, looking around for cues before inevitably rising and putting their hands over their hearts.
“The troll is strong,” the adviser told us.
The Thursday before the inauguration, a friend of Trump’s was sitting with him at Mar-a-Lago when the once and future president held up his phone to show off his recent-call log.
“Look who called in the past hour,” Trump boasted, then scrolled through a list that included Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Tiger Woods. Apart from Woods, all were former Trump critics who, eight years earlier, had tried to keep their distance.
SHOCK AND AWE
the start of a new presidency is a famously harried and jury-rigged affair. But Trump and his team had spent his time out of office preparing for his return. Longwell, the anti-MAGA strategist, told us—echoing something our colleague David Frum had warned about four years ago—that watching Trump’s second-term team attack the federal bureaucracy was like watching “the velociraptors who have figured out how to work the doorknobs.” Day one of the second term, the product of weeks of meticulous planning, was all about—in the Trump team’s words—“shock and awe.” “We did all the immigration and border executive orders,” an adviser told us. “If we just left it at that, all the stories would have been about what bad people we are—we’re kicking people out of this country. But then right after he signed those border executive orders, bam: the J6 pardons.” The adviser explained that, along with Trump’s multiple speeches that day and inaugural balls that evening, this meant “the media had to choose what to cover. It’s either the J6 pardons or the immigration executive orders.” This convulsion of activity, the adviser told us, was all “planned”—designed to overwhelm.
“We have everyone kind of in the barrel, like everyone’s on the spin cycle, just getting whipped around, and that’s advantageous for us,” another adviser told us.
In his first term, Trump had floated the idea of buying Greenland—speaking of it almost offhandedly as a potentially intriguing if unusual real-estate acquisition. But now, even before taking office again, he had suggested that Canada should be America’s 51st state, threatened to reclaim the Panama Canal, and vowed to gain control of Greenland—“one way or the other,” as he would later put it. He followed this during his inaugural address by invoking “manifest destiny,” the 19th-century idea that the United States has a divinely ordained right to control North America.
He added that many of the things that, in his first term, Trump had floated as provocations or trollings or idle musings are now things the president realizes he can actually do. “These are all doable,” Bannon told us. “When you’ve come back from such long odds, you clearly feel, ‘I can do anything.’ ”
In his first term, Trump and his team had not done certain things—fired key bureaucrats, upended certain alliances, overhauled various initiatives—because, as one former adviser told us, “we thought they were red-hot.
“And then you touch it,” the former adviser continued, “and you realize it’s actually not that hot.” This may be the key insight of Trump’s second term. The first time around, aides were constantly warning him that the stove was too hot. This time, no one is even telling him not to touch the stove.
Tradition holds that artists honored with lifetime-achievement awards at the Kennedy Center meet with the sitting president. During Trump’s first term, some of the most prominent artists refused to do so. He, in turn, didn’t attend a single performance there.
“I didn’t really get to go the first time, because I was always getting impeached or some bullshit, and I could never enjoy a show,” Trump said, according to an adviser familiar with the comments. But as planning for the second inauguration got under way, someone mentioned the possibility of holding an event there, impelling Trump to muse aloud about naming himself chairman of the Kennedy Center, a position that had long been held by the philanthropist and Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein. Trump ordered, “Call David Rubenstein and tell him he’s fired.”
Overnight, Trump’s cultural remit went from queuing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the Kennedy Center, one of the nation’s premier arts institutions. (Chip Somodevilla / Getty)
Some of Trump’s advisers have learned to operate by an unofficial rule: They make sure to do things after he says them twice. This is a necessary and important rule because, as one adviser explained, “he says a lot of shit.” So the second time Trump mentioned wanting to take over the Kennedy Center, his aides got to work, and in early February, Trump fired most of the board and named himself chairman. His cultural remit had gone overnight from entertaining his aides by playing oldies on his iPad on the patio of Mar-a-Lago to being chairman of the board of one of the nation’s premier arts institutions.
One of the most chaotic departures from convention has been Elon Musk’s prominent role in the administration. The disruption Musk has unleashed through DOGE, putting swaths of government “into the wood chipper,” as he described it, has tended to obscure the fact that the richest man in the world, who is one of Trump’s biggest financial donors, is attending Cabinet meetings while continuing to run his private businesses, which benefit from billions of dollars in federal contracts. The conflicts of interest here run fathoms deep. But Trump has confidently normalized all of it, even going so far as to conduct an infomercial for Tesla on the White House grounds.
In previous presidencies, Musk’s role in the administration would have been a scandal that dominated the media and congressional hearings for months. In Trump’s second term, this—by design—gets drowned out by everything else.
So, too, does Trump’s complete departure from convention regarding the Justice Department, which has historically had some independence from the president. In April, Trump ordered the DOJ to investigate Chris Krebs, who in Trump’s first term ran the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which declared the 2020 election secure and Biden the legitimate winner. Trump, in short, wanted to prosecute Krebs for accepting reality. He has also made clear that he wants the attorney general to protect his supporters, including Musk, whose Tesla dealerships and charging stations have been targeted by vandals. “When I see things going on like what they’re doing to Elon, that’s terrible,” Trump told us. “That’s a terrible thing. That’s terrorism.”
Trump boasted to us of Musk’s private business successes as if they were his own. One of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, had just helped to retrieve astronauts who had been marooned for months on the International Space Station. “They don’t come out of there at some point, you know, the bones start to break down,” Trump said.
Trump marveled at the media’s coverage of the splashdown. “They said, ‘And the rocket’s coming down in the Gulf of America.’ They didn’t make a big deal. They didn’t say Trump named it,” he told us. “It was like it was old hat. And it’s been the Gulf of Mexico for hundreds of years, literally hundreds of years. The Gulf of Mexico, before our country was formed. It’s been a long time. And that’s good.”
“THAT IS NOT WHAT THEY SIGNED UP FOR”
for all of trump’s success in dominating the political sphere, Democrats have grown more optimistic that his political fortunes may be changing. Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, who gave the Democratic rebuttal to Trump’s address to Congress in early March, told us that some of her constituents say their votes for Trump were born of despair. “They’ll say to me, ‘Look, it’s like I’m a Stage 4 cancer patient. My life has been getting worse, from my grandfather to my father, from my father to me, and my kids are going to do worse than me, so I need experimental chemo. Trump is my experimental chemo. It may hurt like hell. It may not work at all. But I’m at the end of my rope, and I’ll try anything.’ ”
We asked her whether now, several months into the second Trump administration, her constituents think the chemo is working. “I can’t tell you how many Trump voters have said to me, like, ‘Look, I voted for him to make the economy work. I did not vote for all of this craziness, and I certainly didn’t vote, for instance, for cuts to the VA,’ ” Slotkin said. “That is not what they signed up for.”
But in nearly every conversation we had with various Trump advisers, they told us that delivering on what people had voted for was in fact essential to holding the House and the Senate in the 2026 midterms. Trump himself has his eyes on a larger, long-term political realignment. “It’s a much different party,” he told us. “I got 38 percent of the male Black vote. Nobody knew that was possible. That’s a lot. I got 56 percent of Hispanics. How about that one? Every county along the Texas border is Hispanic. I won every one of them.” Though every single number he cited was wrong, the general thrust of his observation was correct.
Delivering on Trump’s campaign promises, his advisers told us, was the key not only to securing his legacy but to transforming the MAGA base into Republican voters for decades to come. (This project—persuading MAGA supporters to vote for Republicans even when Trump is not on the ballot—is a “central theme” of this presidency, one adviser repeatedly told us.) During the campaign and then the transition, Trump’s aides kept a shared document that meticulously cataloged and updated his promises for what he would do on day one, as well as what he’d promised to do more generally. The advisers we spoke with said that voters had absolutely known what they were asking for when they pulled the lever for Trump—and Trump’s team was determined to deliver.
But this is where the now nationally ingrained tendency to take Trump seriously but not literally may have created a disconnect between what Trump’s supporters thought they were voting for and what they are now getting, even among his most committed base. Over the years, Trump said many things that never came to fruition. Or he spoke with such hyperbole that everyone substantially discounted the reality of what he was ostensibly committing to. Or the policy implications of what he said would get obscured in the cloud of his ruminations about shark attacks and electrocutions and Hannibal Lecter—allowing voters to focus on what they liked and to ignore the riskier, more worrisome aspects of his promises. So although it’s true that Trump is delivering on commitments to impose tariffs, cut government waste, and aggressively deport immigrants, many of his voters are only now beginning to realize the effect these policies will have on their daily lives.
Several months into his second chance, the blitzkrieg of the early days continues—but it seems to be meeting more substantial resistance. Federal courts are once again blocking—or at least trying to block—Trump plans that flout the Constitution or stretch legal reasoning. The repeated rollouts and rollbacks and re-rollouts of his tariff measures have pushed the world toward an economic breaking point. (Even in the best-case scenario, any renaissance of the U.S. industrial base remains a long way off.) The Federal Reserve recently adjusted short-term-inflation projections higher, and GDP projections are getting lower. Financial analysts say the odds of a recession have risen significantly. The stock market just had its worst quarter in three years. When we talked with him in March, Trump had told us that Vladimir Putin “is going to be fine” in the Ukraine peace negotiations—but Putin has thwarted Trump’s promise of a quick deal. (“I’m trying to save a lot of lives in the world,” Trump told us. “You know, Ukraine and Russia—it’s not our lives, but it could end up in a Third World War.”)
The Signalgate fiasco appalled even a majority of Republicans. (Here Trump has so far stuck to his second-term policy of conceding essentially nothing, of never admitting weakness or a lie. To date, no one has been fired over Signalgate—though advisers we spoke with privately predicted that National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, who inadvertently added The Atlantic’s editor in chief to the attack-planning chain, would exit the administration by the end of the year, if not much sooner.) Mass anti-Trump protests, notably absent during the first two months of this term, have become more frequent, including in red states.
Even as Trump continually seeks to expand his presidential powers, he at times seems to acknowledge that they have limits. In our March conversation, he seemed frustrated at the notion that a court might try to curb his ability to deport anyone he wanted, however he wanted. Yet when we asked if he would go so far as to actively disregard a judicial order, his answer suggested that he understood the Constitution would not allow that. “I think the judge is horrible,” he said, referring to James Boasberg, the federal-district-court judge who had tried to stop deportations of Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador. But Trump then referenced the Supreme Court’s more congenial opinion in Trump v. United States, which had given him immunity from criminal prosecution for anything he does as part of his core “official” duties as president. “But I’ve had a lot of horrible judges, and I won on appeal, right? I got immunity on appeal,” he said. He told us that the Court is “going to do what’s right” when reviewing his expansive use of executive power, and he spoke with uncharacteristic charity about the Court’s Democratic appointees. “I see them at the State of the Union, things that I do, and I think they’re very good people,” he said.
When questioned, Trump has sought to evade direct responsibility for individual deportations by his administration, legal challenges to which are wending their way through the courts.
“You know, I’m not involved in that. I have many people, many layers of people that do that,” Trump told us when we asked if he was worried that he may have mistakenly deported innocent people. “I would say they are all extremely tough, dangerous people. I would say that. And, don’t forget, they came in the country illegally.”
Trump’s advisers argue that, overall, the shock-and-awe approach is working. “Think about everything that’s happened immediately on immigration,” Cliff Sims told us. “Oh, we’re just going to ship gang members to a prison in El Salvador? ‘Sure.’ We’re going to send Tom Homan”—Trump’s border czar—“to kick down the door of every criminal illegally in the country? ‘Have at it.’ It is the ultimate example of the ruthless efficiency of Trump 2.0.”
We asked Trump about the portraits on the walls of the Oval Office. Who, we wondered, had a legacy that he himself might like to have? “Ronald Reagan, I like in terms of style. But he was not good on trade—terrible on trade,” Trump replied. We pointed out that Reagan was also far more welcoming of immigrants. “Well, the toughest one in immigration was Eisenhower, believe it or not,” Trump said. “He was tough, and he just didn’t want people to come in illegally, like, you know, me. Well, I’m great on trade.”
Trump has also started talking publicly about running for a third term, which the Twenty-Second Amendment clearly prohibits. This started as joking comments with advisers—before making them, he would sometimes teasingly instruct the sober-minded Wiles, “Susie, close your ears”—but now seems to have become more serious. MAGA acolytes outside the administration have said they’ve been investigating ways of getting around the Twenty-Second Amendment, and an adviser acknowledged that if Trump thought a third term could somehow be made feasible, he would likely consider it.
We asked Trump about a rumor we’d heard that he had tasked his Justice Department with looking into the legality of his running again in 2028. He said he hadn’t, but then seemed to leave open the possibility. Was this the rare democratic norm he was unwilling to shatter? “That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it?” he mused, laughing. “Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter.” He noted, twice, that his supporters regularly shout for him to seek a third term, but concluded, “It’s not something that I’m looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do.” But not, it appears, a hard thing to profit from: The Trump Organization is now selling “Trump 2028” hats.
As a final question during our conversation in March, we asked the president whether he had concerns that his successor will follow his precedent and directly steer the powers of the presidency against his opponents, something he had accused Biden of doing against him. Wasn’t he laying the groundwork for an endless cycle of tit-for-tat retribution?
“Oh, I don’t know. I’ve already gone through it,” the president told us. “I got indicted five different times by five different scumbags, and they’re all looking for jobs now, so it’s one of those things. Who would have thought, right? It’s been pretty amazing.”
Three weeks after our initial phone call, the political complexion of the moment seemed to have shifted rather dramatically, and we wondered if that had changed Trump’s thinking. So we called the president’s cellphone, hoping to ask some follow-up questions. He didn’t answer. We left a voicemail.
That night, Saturday, April 12, Trump traveled from Mar-a-Lago to Miami to watch the mixed-martial-arts spectacle of UFC 314. He entered the arena like a conquering general, surrounded by a coterie of Cabinet secretaries and other high-level advisers and officials. The cheers from the adoring fans were uproarious. After some of the fights, the winner would rush to the side of the ring where Trump was sitting, to demonstrate fealty.
When the fights were over, well after midnight, Trump’s motorcade headed back to Air Force One, at the Miami airport. The next morning, one of us awoke to find that, at 1:28 a.m., the president had called, just as the pool report showed he was getting back in his motorcade. He hadn’t left a message. Had he been calling to ask if we’d seen what had transpired—the display of obeisance from these gladiators, and from his base? Or was this merely a late-night pocket dial? His team declined to clarify.
We made another appeal for an in-person interview. Later that day, an aide told us Trump was denying our request. But the rejection came with a message from the president—a message, Trump specified, only for Michael, not Ashley, with whom he was still annoyed. If the article we were working on really told the remarkable story of how he had come back from the political dead, “maybe The Atlantic will survive after all.” As is often the case with Trump, his business advice could also be interpreted as a kind of a threat.
The president had one last message for us. “What can be said?” Trump had instructed his aide to tell us. “I won the election in a landslide, and there isn’t anyone who can say anything about that. What can they write about?”
We thought we’d finished our story. But for Trump, negotiation is a perpetual state, and nine days later, he reversed himself again. We were asked to report to the Oval Office on the afternoon of April 24 for the interview we had first requested two months earlier. Trump also invited the editor in chief of this magazine, Jeffrey Goldberg, whom he had recently attacked as a “total sleazebag,” to join the meeting. Then, hours before we arrived, the president announced the interview to the world.
“I am doing this interview out of curiosity,” he wrote on Truth Social, “and as a competition with myself, just to see if it’s possible for The Atlantic to be ‘truthful.’ ” Goldberg, he added falsely, was a writer of “many fictional stories about me.” (Several White House aides, upon reading the message, joked about playing a prank on National Security Adviser Michael Waltz, the official who had accidentally added Goldberg to the Signal chat. “Tell Waltz to go into the Oval,” they dared one another, “but don’t tell him who’s in there.”)
“This will be very, very interesting,” Trump said, by way of greeting us as we approached the Resolute Desk. “You think Biden would do this? I don’t think so.”
In private, Trump often plays against the bombastic persona he projects in larger settings—at rallies, on television, on social media. He was launching a charm offensive, directed mainly at Goldberg. There was none of the name-calling or hostility he regularly levels at our magazine. He boasted about the 24-karat gold leaf he’d had imported from Palm Beach to decorate the Oval Office. “The question is: Do I do a chandelier?” he asked. “Beautiful crystal chandelier, top of the line.”
“I am in the first group, believe it or not,” he said. (This was indeed difficult to believe, we interjected.) “But a lot of people that are in the administration aren’t. They feel that I was really badly treated.” In our presence, he seemed inclined to outsource his retributive id to others. But soon after we left the Oval Office, Trump sought to exact further political revenge on his foes by directing the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the main Democratic fundraising platform.
When we mentioned the turmoil at the Pentagon, including recent reporting that Pete Hegseth had installed a makeup room in the building, the president smiled. “I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Hegseth. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.” Trump also said that Waltz was “fine” despite being “beat up” by accidentally adding Goldberg to the Signal chat. What had Trump told his staff after the controversy? “Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?”
He spoke of his opposition with earnest befuddlement, if not actual pity. “I think that the Democrats have lost their confidence in the truest sense,” he said. “I don’t think they know what they’re doing. I think they have no leader. You know, if you ask me now, I know a lot about the Democrat Party, right? I can’t tell you who their leader is. I can’t tell you that I see anybody on the horizon.”
Trump pushed back on the notion, popular among some Wall Street analysts, that financial turmoil—plummeting markets, the threat of a recession, a weakened dollar—would cause him to roll back his tariff policies. “It always affects you a little bit,” he said, but there’s no red line, no “certain number” at which he would feel compelled to change course.
We asked about the concern that his administration was pushing the country toward authoritarianism, where politicians use the power of their office to punish their enemies for speaking their minds, as Trump was attempting to do to Chris Krebs, Harvard, law firms, universities, and news outlets. He did not answer the question directly, but instead talked about how he’d been wronged.
We pressed further, again bringing up his efforts to deport undocumented immigrants without due process. What would happen, we asked, if his administration accidentally got the wrong person—a legal resident, or even an American citizen? “Let me tell you that nothing will ever be perfect in this world,” he said.
Near the end of the interview, we asked Trump why, given that he’s now definitively won a second term, he can’t just let go of the claim that he won the 2020 election.
The president told us it would “be easier” for him to just accept our assertion. But he couldn’t. “I’m a very honest person, and I believe it with all my heart,” he said. “And I believe it with fact—you know, more important than heart. I believe it with fact.”
“I’d like to say that that is reality,” Trump said. “Probably I do create some things, but I didn’t create that.”
Never mind that the votes had been counted, the court cases concluded. He was still trying to shift perceptions, make a sale, bend the world to his will.
This article appears in the June 2025 print edition with the headline “Donald Trump Is Enjoying This.”
Trump presides over the death of the old conservatism. The Trumpian paradox is that Trump himself, elected off the back of a powerful conservative movement, is not an authentic conservative. Paul Kelly.
From time to time, In That Howling Infinite republishes articles by News Ltd commentators that I believe are worth sharing with those who cannot scale the News paywall – and those who, out of misguided principle, refuse to read articles by its more erudite and eloquent contributors. This, by The Australian’s editor at large Paul Kelly, is one of those. Regarding what many commentators see as the demise of traditional American conservatism and the advent of a right wing ‘enlightenment’, he writes:
“Trump won in 2024 on, among other things, conservative votes. Yet the conundrum of his presidency is that Trump is reinvigorating conservatism but trashing it at the same time. What will be left of the conservative remnant when he finishes? Trump’s brand of governance is unique, a blend of executive intervention, American nationalism, trade protectionism, contempt for democratic checks and balances, and retreat from US global leadership. None of his successors will replicate this model because it belongs to Trump’s personality. Have no doubt, Trump will permanently change America, but what stays and what goes cannot remotely be guessed at this stage, nor how US conservatism will emerge”.
This is In That Howling Infinite’s second post regarding the present and future ramifications of Donald Trump’s second presidency. We recently published Trumps second coming … a new American Revolution? It noted:
“America made its choice – most, for quite understandable reasons that have little to do with populism, racism, fascism or in fact any of the other “isms’ that are tossed about like confetti at a wedding – and must live with it. The march to the “right side of history” has turned out just to be to the right …
Commentators and author Troy Branston wrote in The Australian, on 9th November 2024: “It’ll be a wild four years with Trump back in power. He remains a despicable and disgusting man devoid of integrity and ethical values, is boorish, moronic, and unstable, and I fear, by a narrow margin, Americans have made the wrong decision. But it a decision that they must live with we must accept”.
We published a similar piece exactly six years ago at the commencement of Trump’s first term: The Ricochet of Trump’s Counter-revolution. Back then, we were unsure what the next three years would bring. This time around, we probably have a good idea, and it’s likely to be a wild ride for America and also the world.
Donald Trump is the ultimate transformational leader. He has been characterised as a conservative, a populist and a libertarian, but he transcends any philosophical brand. Trump is unique, a charismatic autocrat whose political essence lies in his idiosyncratic personality.
Trump presides over a political phenomenon – the cultural right is ascendant yet divided and agitated. Trump has a dominant political personality, rather than an ideology, but his personality inspires followers and generates hatred. Trump cannot unite America because his core method is divide and rule.
His path to power involved the hijacking of the Republican Party – once seen as the embodiment of conservative values, free-market capitalism, personal liberty and US global leadership. But Trump has devoured the Republican Party along with the honoured rituals that it championed.
Trump presides over the death of the old conservatism. The Trumpian paradox is that Trump himself, elected off the back of a powerful conservative movement, is not an authentic conservative.
He has empowered the combined forces of the New Right and the national conservative movement yet in his first three months of office Trump has assailed the core institutions of the American state: the judiciary, the federal bureaucracy, the intelligence agencies, individual liberties, and the foreign policy and economic settlements of the past two generations.
Historian and economist Niall Ferguson, who cheered Trump’s win, recently wrote in The Free Press that few Trump supporters grasped they were voting not just for lower inflation and higher border security “but for a radical project to turn back the economic clock”, with their hero aiming “to reverse at least four decades of American economic history”.
Ferguson said ordinary Americans elected Trump to punish the Democrats for 9 per cent inflation at its 2022 peak and millions of illegal border crossers. While they may not necessarily believe Trump’s claim of a new “golden age” they expect things to get better. But the Trump administration says it is doing things “the hard way”, and delivering “cheap goods” is not such a priority.
The President has now moved into negative territory on the approval/disapproval ratings.
Trump won in 2024 on, among other things, conservative votes. Yet the conundrum of his presidency is that Trump is reinvigorating conservatism but trashing it at the same time. What will be left of the conservative remnant when he finishes?
Trump’s brand of governance is unique, a blend of executive intervention, American nationalism, trade protectionism, contempt for democratic checks and balances, and retreat from US global leadership. None of his successors will replicate this model because it belongs to Trump’s personality. Have no doubt, Trump will permanently change America, but what stays and what goes cannot remotely be guessed at this stage, nor how US conservatism will emerge.
None of this is to deny the impact he will have – cutting federal spending, red and green tape, punishing the curse of identity politics, even perhaps restoring integrity to the education system and reviving a sense of pride and belief in the American dream.
There is a justification for Trump – as a necessary and powerful corrective mechanism for the arrogant over-reach of the progressive establishment in its control of public and private institutions and its attack on the foundations of liberalism. Trump is the figurehead for a cultural transformation driven by an American right that turned traditional conservatism to a radical counter-revolutionary movement. Trump did not create this movement but he has seized control of it through his charismatic appeal.
The extent of the transformation is best grasped in the comparison between Trump and Ronald Reagan, once seen as the best recent reflection of the American conservative presidency.
Reagan’s recent and best biographer, Max Boot, writes: “There were many obvious differences between Trump and Reagan, both in their policies and style. Reagan was pro-immigration, pro-free trade, pro-democracy and pro-NATO. He was also a consummate gentleman who never indulged in name-calling or acerbic putdowns. He was, moreover, a staunch believer in American democracy who would never have dreamed of instigating an insurrection to prevent a lawfully elected candidate from taking office.”
Ronald Reagan AFP
Reagan made Americans feel good about themselves – and, for better or worse, he was a two-term successful governing president while shifting the country decisively to the right.
Will Trump be a successful governing president? The jury is out but the omens aren’t encouraging. Interviewed by the author at an early stage of Trump’s first presidency, John Howard, issuing a warning, said: “It’s misleading the political landscape for conservative commentators in Australia to see Donald Trump as the embodiment of modern conservatism. Trump is not my idea of a conservative. Trump is no Reagan or Thatcher and they are the two most conservative lodestars in my lived political experience.”
Both Howard and Tony Abbott have a deeply conventional view of conservatism compared with the Trump project. Abbott previously said the conservative instinct “is to repair rather than to replace, it’s to leave well enough alone, it’s to fix only what needs to be fixing, it draws inspiration from the past and wants the future to be a better version of what we know and love”.
There are shades of Trump in this, but you need to look hard. Howard and Abbott had an orthodox interpretation of conservatism drawn heavily from Edmund Burke, who saw society as a partnership and espoused evolutionary change, backing the American Revolution but opposing the French Revolution.
But in the US this view was de-constructed pre-Trump by a new class of activists and apostles demanding a more radical conservatism. Indeed, Boot wrote: “If Reagan had been alive in 2016, he undoubtedly would have been derided by most Republicans as a RINO (Republican in Name Only) like the two Bushes, John McCain and Mitt Romney” – an accurate yet extraordinary situation.
Since Reagan there has been a mounting belief among US conservatives that they had lost their country; that even Reagan made too many compromises and look what happened! The view took hold that nearly all institutions were controlled by secular progressives hostile to notions of family, faith, nation and educational integrity.
Trump became the instrument of restoration. People with a grievance against the system flocked to him – from the displaced industrial worker to the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, forming an astonishing alliance to smash whatever they hated. And there was plenty of that.
Trump is a conqueror able to puncture and even dismantle an established progressive order – but he manifestly cannot create a replacement order.
Even in his first three months, this is the singular insight. It’s because his presidency is about himself and his colossal ego. Trump is not a builder. He lacks the institutional and policy capacity to strengthen America’s economic base; witness his misunderstanding about how high tariffs work given they will lift prices, penalise consumers and misdirect resources.
A former president of the American Enterprise Institute and self-declared “old establishment conservative” who shifted to the radical side, Christopher DeMuth, writing in 2021, outlined what drove the conservative reinvention: “Have you noticed that almost every progressive initiative subverts the American nation, as if by design?
Donald Trump’s presidency is about himself … and his colossal ego. Picture. AFP
“Explicitly so in opening national borders, disabling immigration controls and transferring sovereignty to international bureaucracies. But it also works from within – elevating group identity above citizenship; fomenting racial, ethnic and religious divisions; disparaging common culture and the common man; throwing away energy independence; defaming our national history as a story of unmitigated injustice; hobbling our national future with gargantuan debts that will constrain our capacity for action.”
So, the conservatives became the radicals.
Many became activists.
Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo, a leader in the fight against critical race theory in US institutions, outlined his manifesto for counter-revolution in January 2024: “The world of 18th and 19th-century liberalism is gone and conservatives must live with the world as it is – a status quo that requires not conservation but reform, and even revolt. For 50 years establishment conservatives have been retreating from the great political tradition of the West – republican self-government, shared moral standards and the pursuit of eudaimonia, or human flourishing – in favour of half-measures and cheap substitutes.
“The chief vectors for the transmission of values – the public school, the public university and the state – are not marketplaces at all. They are government-run monopolies. Conservatives can no longer be content to serve as the caretakers of their enemies’ institutions, or as gadflies who adopt the posture of the ‘heterodox’ while signalling to their left-wing counterparts that they have no desire to disrupt the established hegemony. We must recruit, recapture and replace existing leadership. We must produce knowledge and culture at a sufficient scale and standard to shift the balance of ideological power. Conservative thought has to move out of the ghetto and into the mainstream.
“My conviction is that ends will ultimately triumph over means; men will die for truth, liberty and happiness, but will not die for efficiency, diversity and inclusion.”
But will they die for Trumpian excesses?
Offering an alternative view, New York Times columnist David Brooks, a sympathiser with Burkean conservatism, warned in 2022 in The Atlantic that Trumpian Republicanism “plunders, degrades and erodes institutions for the sake of personal aggrandisement”. Brooks said, by contrast, the profound insight of conservatism “is that it’s impossible to build a healthy society on the principle of self-interest”.
In February, Brooks spoke to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London – an organisation pledged to the revival of Western civilisational principles – saying of Trump, JD Vance and Musk: “They’re anti-left, they don’t have a positive, conservative vision for society, they just want to destroy the institutions that the left now dominates. I’m telling you as someone on the front row to what’s happening, do not hitch your wagon to that star.
President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk. AFP
“Elite narcissism causes them to eviscerate every belief system they touch. Conservatives believe in constitutional government – Donald Trump says ‘I can fix this.’ Conservatives believe in moral norms – they’re destroying moral norms. The other belief system that they are destroying is Judeo-Christian faith – based on service to the poor, to the immigrant, and service to the stranger.”
Brooks highlighted the refrain: that Trump is not a conservative and it is folly for conservatives to claim him. In the end, they will be damaged.
Further evidence emerged this week when US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts rebuked Trump – though not by name – after the President called for the impeachment of a federal judge who had ruled against the administration deporting to El Salvador nearly 300 alleged Venezuelan gang members.
An angry Trump called the judge a “Radical Left Lunatic”, pointed out the judge hadn’t won the election and nor did he win all seven swing states and should be impeached.
Roberts noted that “for more than two centuries” impeachment was not “an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision”. Trump’s immigration tsar, Tom Homan, said: “We’re not stopping. I don’t care what the judges think.”
The Wall Street Journal asked in its editorial: “Are we already arriving at a constitutional impasse when the administration thinks it can ignore court orders?” It said: “What the administration can’t do is defy a court order without being lawless itself.”
Yet there is evidence Trump wants a showdown of sorts with the judiciary given a succession of court decisions that have restrained implementation of his executive decisions.
The messages from much of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement is that they want the executive to defy the courts. Trump’s line of attack – that Boasberg didn’t win an election – is revealing because it implies the executive has a legitimacy the judiciary lacks, rather than the two arms being co-equal branches in a separation of power.
Trump didn’t accept Joe Biden’s democratic election by the people; now the issue is whether he will accept decisions by the judiciary. These, obviously, are deep violations of conservative principles.
At the same time Trump and Musk in their campaign through the Department of Government Efficiency to dismantle the “deep state” and generate huge savings are guaranteed to provoke an electoral revolt, let alone make savings on the basis of efficiency.
In The Wall Street Journal, Peggy Noonan, summarised the epic lack of judgment on display. Noonan said: “Everyone knows DOGE will make mistakes, but that isn’t the point. You have to be a fool to think there won’t be dreadful mistakes with broad repercussions. To take on seemingly all parts of government at the same time is to unsettle and confuse the entire government at the same moment. That is dangerous. It was a mistake to announce going in that they’d find $2 trillion in savings.”
They can’t – or, if they do to keep face and honour their target, the issue will finish on the streets and Trump can kiss goodbye to ratings.
Governments around the world – led by Canada but also including Australia – are left with no option but to criticise or attack Trump’s tariff policy. He is bent upon penalising nations – whether friends or potential foes – as he acts on the conviction that America has been ripped off for decades by virtually everybody else. The steel and aluminium decisions have little direct impact on Australia. The issue is: what next? Might Trump damage our beef and pharmaceutical trade? Will he listen to US pharmaceutical company hostility to our Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme? Will Trump listen to Musk’s demands and declare against Australia’s laws to rein in Big Tech through our ban on the use of social media by children under 16 and our proposed News Media Bargaining Incentive scheme to force digital companies to pay for the news they use?
This week, Jim Chalmers went hard against Trump’s tariff policies. The Treasurer said the decision not to exempt Australia was “disappointing, unnecessary, senseless and wrong”. Australia deserved better “as a long-term partner and ally”. Chalmers criticised Trump’s global policies – not by name – saying the rules underpinning “global economic engagement for more than 40 years are being rewritten”.
Australia’s attitude towards Trump – both the political response and public opinion – will move to resentment and anger if Australia faces more retaliation. Understand what is happening: Trump’s obsessive and flawed view of tariffs is damaging global trade, won’t deliver the gains he predicts for America and, on the way through, is punishing countries such as Australia.
Why would people in Australia support him?
How the Trumpian paradox plays out defies prediction. The movement that helped to put Trump into the White House was an authentic counter-revolution with deep roots in American culture. This is what makes Trump a complex historical figure. He is ignorant of history yet he sees himself as leading a historical revolution.
It is a revolution where Trump has scant interest in the limits to his power – executive power – within America’s constitutional democracy. It is a revolution that defies the basic principles of conservatism although it is given legitimacy by much of the conservative movement. US conservatives face tough political and moral choices ahead – whether to back a leader who has empowered them but thrashes the essence of conservatism.
“America is in a mess. We need someone to clean it up. And his name is …”
So run the opening titles of Tim Robbin’s’ 1992 satire Bob Roberts. In a dark case of life imitating art, the story of a Wall Street millionaire who begins his political career as a reactionary folk singer foreshadows the rise of a uniquely American autocrat who channels the pain and anger of millions who feel that they’ve been left behind. The eponymous Bob Roberts is portrayed as a rightwing Bob Dylan, right down to a parody of the famous Subterranean Homesick Blues story boards to the iconoclastic song Times are a’changin’ … Back. Read a 2020 retrospective of this prescient film HERE. [From In That Howling Infinite‘s Deconstructing Donald – translating Trumpspeak]
Fast track to the present day as second coming began with a barnstorming inaugural address:
“ … the United States will once again consider itself a growing nation, one that increases our wealth, expands our territory, builds our cities, raises our expectations and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons [and] will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the Stars and Stripes on the planet Mars”.
In a pugnacious declaration of American exceptionalism and, dare we say it, Magafest Destiny, he said: “Nothing will stand in our way because we are Americans, the future is ours, and our Golden Age has just begun.”
His first press conference followed shortly afterwards as he signed off on a plethora of executive orders and bantered with the assembled Fourth Estate. Apart from his customary vindictiveness, grievance-driven musings and hyperbole, he was clearly in good humour, folksy even. We were, against our better instincts, bemused, amused, entertained even.
Whatever comes next – and the hectic events of the last fortnight have provided many clues. Along with the name “Gulf of Mexico”, it’s out with the old and in with the new. Tech billionaire Elon Musk has moved into the White House as the new power behind the throne; the purge of public servants and the deportation of illegal migrants have begun; foreign aid is suspended; and “woke” programmes and pronouns are cactus. Panama and Greenland are on the president’s shopping list, and the trade wars are now on: “This will be the golden age of America,” Trump posted on his Truth Social account. “Will there be some pain? Yes, maybe (and maybe not!) But we will make America great again, and it will all be worth the price that must be paid.”
America made its choice – most, for quite understandable reasons that have little to do with populism, racism, fascism or in fact any of the other “isms’ that are tossed about like confetti at a wedding – and must live with it.
Meanwhile there’s predictable faux panic on the left, in Australia and elsewhere, as armchair and keyboard warriors whinge from the sidelines with the same old discussions, the same old articles, serviced by the same bias-confirming algorithms, denigrate and demean America and Americans, and endeavour to tar our own ostensibly “trumpian” conservatives with the same tired brush. Countless social media memes and comments about American stupidity illustrate how out of touch, self-righteous, arrogant and morally “superior” many of the so-called “left” have become. But while they may derive some vicarious satisfaction from their predictable put-downs, they are just pissing in the wind.
America made its choice – most, for quite understandable reasons that have little to do with populism, racism, fascism or in fact any of the other “isms’ that are tossed about like confetti at a wedding – and must live with it. The march to the “right side of history” has turned out just to be to the right. And there’s nothing we can about it. As a Facebook friend commented recently, ” … it’s like watching the Titanic sail away knowing it’s going to sink, but the details of where and when are unknown. But it keeps our old brains active”.
It’s not that people are unaware of Trump’s faults. They harbour no illusions that he will behave any better this time around. They know he will never change; he is erratic, unhinged and foments chaos; he is arrogant, has no sense of history, and is completely transactional. He never apologises, recants or retreats. He never expresses regret for his actions. When under attack for scandalous behaviour or abuse of power, Trump has one playbook: deny, denounce, discredit, defame.
Even dyed-in-the-wool conservatives acknowledge this. Former Australian attorney general George Brandis wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald on 18 November:
“… the sheer weirdness of Donald Trump himself: narcissistic, vulgar, bombastic, mendacious, idiosyncratic, outrageous; while at the same time flamboyant, mesmerising and on occasions very funny. He broke every rule, told every lie, did the unthinkable, said the unsayable and still came up … (you complete the pun). The epic unconventionality of Trump’s campaign dramatised a result that would probably have been the same had the Republican candidate been less unorthodox. For that reason, the outcome is fertile ground for over-interpretation and exaggeration”.
Commentators and author Troy Branston wrote in The Australian, on 9th November 2024: “It’ll be a wild four years with Trump back in power. He remains a despicable and disgusting man devoid of integrity and ethical values, is boorish, moronic, and unstable, and I fear, by a narrow margin, Americans have made the wrong decision. But it a decision that they must live with we must accept”.
We are on the threshold of a consequential four years. Like it or not, we are in interesting times.
From time to time, I republish articles by News Ltd commentators that I believe are worth sharing with those who cannot scale the News paywall – and those who, out of misguided principle, refuse to read articles by its more erudite and eloquent contributors. This, by The Australian’s Greg Sheridan, is one of those.
We published a similar piece exactly six years ago at the commencement of Trump’s first term:The Ricochet of Trump’s Counter-revolution. Back then, we were unsure what the next three years would bring. This time around, we probably have a good idea, and it’s likely to be a wild ride for America and also the world.
I find it hard to tell you, ’cause I find it hard to take
When people run in circles, it’s a very very mad world
Trump remakes America with a revolution in common sense
Greg Sheridan, The Australian 25 January 2025
Boom. Boom. Boom. The second presidency of Donald Trump burst like a clap of thunder across the whole American nation, across the whole world.
Here is the Donald in unimagined glory, the victor of all he surveys, not just embarking on the latest unbelievable chapter in a completely unbelievable American life, from reality TV to the White House, via porn star dalliances, assassin’s bullets and politicised felony convictions that voters rightly ignored, but promising the very reinvention, the historic renewal, of America itself.
It’s a scene with biblical resonance.
But is Trump a modern Moses leading his people into the promised land? Or is he the Apocalypse? It’s too early to tell, but the blizzard of activity in Trump’s first few days demonstrates he is changing America, probably fundamentally. As with all things Trump, there will be good and bad, courageous and cringeworthy, inspiring and implausible.
The dangers are manifold: that Trump goes too far; that his administration is ill-disciplined if not incoherent; that the opposition in the courts and Democrat-controlled states frustrates his program; that he ignores the law; that he confuses personal profit with public policy; that America’s adversaries, wise to Trump this time, less intimidated by his bluster, refuse him the deals he wants, the deals he needs; that the meanness inherent in parts of Trump’s program becomes exaggerated or dominant; that he encompasses some monumental blunder.
But the promise is also manifold: that Trump unleashes the entrepreneurial spirits of the American economy; that the US military streaks ahead of the rest, providing unassailable deterrence; that the US sets up a huge lead in artificial intelligence and other areas of hi-tech; that America leads the West out of the debilitating ideologies of self-hatred and identity politics that grip the Western academy; that race is delegitimised as a central feature of Western politics and culture; that inflation is slayed; that bureaucracy is tamed, government spending reduced; that deregulation liberates business and slashes costs.
The frisson of danger that always accompanies Trump is palpable. It’s tied up not only with Trump’s personality but with his essential modus operandi. Everything is psycho-drama. Everything is a deal. So everything is unpredictable. Positions that seem solid, change in a minute, sacrificed as leverage in a deal. Strategic unpredictability can be an asset in negotiation, but as former diplomat Peter Varghese has argued, strategic unpredictability can easily become strategic unreliability.
To take one relatively minor example, Trump’s Vice-President, JD Vance, a few days before the inauguration, said any of the January 6, 2021, rioters who had attacked police wouldn’t be pardoned. Then Trump pardoned them anyway, saying they’d been in jail long enough. Vance surely had spoken to Trump before he made his public comments. Trump presumably was undecided until the last minute, characteristically. He certainly wasn’t fussed about embarrassing Vance.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and his wife Jeanette AFP
Still, stepping back from the sheer volume and speed of action in the first days, you can see that Trump’s election, notwithstanding the new/old President’s many foibles, represents a characteristic American response to perceived decline and stagnation. The old left liberal orthodoxy that was strangling America, its economy and its society, just as it’s strangling Europe and even Australia, just wasn’t working. Everyone could see that except left-liberal ideologues. Crime. Homelessness. Skyrocketing energy prices. Uncontrolled illegal immigration. These things were a mess.
No nation suffers paradigm paralysis less willingly than the US. If things really aren’t working, its voters have a visceral reaction: throw the bums out! And if the next lot don’t work, throw them out too.
Often the US has looked permanently crippled by its internal difficulties – after the civil war in the 19th century, or the savage internal polarisation over Vietnam in the 1960s, or the stagflation of the ’70s. But every time, America comes roaring back.
Is it roaring back now? America certainly has profound social problems – drug abuse, especially fentanyl, gun violence, homelessness, inner-city crime, obesity. Ruinous inflation. But never forget the incredible American achievement.
Psychologist Jordan Peterson claimed recently that by the end of 2024, the poorest US state, Mississippi, was richer than the richest province of social democratic Canada, after a decade of enlightened left-liberal incompetence and ideological posturing from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The poorest American state enjoys a higher per capita income than Britain or France. The US is about $US30,000 ($47,700) richer per head than Canada, about twice as rich per capita as the EU. Even when America is doing poorly, it’s doing better than almost everybody else. Nonetheless, America has dangerously lost much of its manufacturing industry. In today’s militarily fraught environment, that’s dangerous.
A homeless encampment in San Francisco. Getty Images
But the modern world was still made in America – from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, from Pulitzer prizes to nation-shifting podcasts, from the internet to space travel. So while left-liberal formulas are failing, Trump inherits an America still possessed of profound strengths. Nonetheless, he’s going to change its direction and, if he can, its character. He’s attacking every issue with frightening energy.
His first week was political shock and awe: dozens of presidential executive orders; two states of emergency, energy and the southern border; two big international withdrawals, from the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organisation; a string of important appointments; a half-trillion-dollar AI investment announcement; the establishment of a new agency, the Department of Government Efficiency, to slash government spending; and the greatest repudiation of racial preferences by abolishing every program of the federal US government implementing or promoting diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Trump gave us real actions in a dizzy range of policy areas. These include: the economy, including tariffs, energy policy, climate change, tax cuts, deregulation; foreign policy, including China, Russia, Israel and the Middle East; immigration, especially the southern border; and every aspect of identity politics, to promote “a colourblind society based on merit”.
It’s a cultural revolution, perhaps as Tesla boss and Trump bestie Elon Musk, head of DOGE, claimed, “a fork in the road of human civilisation”.
There will be plenty of resistance, even if Democrats rightly feel like idiots at the moment, demoralised at their loss, stunned at the people’s rejection, humiliated that the majority did not regard Trump in anything like the lurid light that Democrats had painted for eight years.
Nonetheless, although Trump’s victory was clear, it was relatively narrow. Trump got 77.3 million votes to Kamala Harris’s 75 million. That’s good but not landslide territory. He won 49.8 per cent of a relatively low turnout to Harris’s 48.3 per cent. Trump didn’t win a majority of the popular vote as George W. Bush did in 2004.
The result was, in the prescient phrase of former Trump campaign manager and adviser Kellyanne Conway, a “narrow landslide”.
Trump won all the battleground states, but narrowly. If Harris had won Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, she would be president. She lost those states respectively by 120,000, 80,000 and 29,000. So if just 115,000 votes in three key states, out of a total of more than 155 million votes cast, had gone the other way, the Trump revolution would be just one of the ghostly ifs of history.
None of this diminishes Trump’s victory. Given everything thrown against him, it was a magnificent triumph. But America is still a 50-50 nation. Trump will need to score successes that affect people’s lives to cement his political revolution. Just as conservatives were energised by Joe Biden’s appalling presidency, radical activists will be motivated to oppose Trump. Though not just yet, perhaps.
What do Trump’s early actions tell us about how he’ll govern? Stylistically, they’re revealing. This will be a personalised presidency where all big policy issues are deals, supervised by the President.
Some specific policies are clear. Trump will secure US borders. The American people want that. He says he will deport people who are in the US illegally. That’s more than 12 million people. He can’t physically deport that many. But he can deport a lot if he wants to.
Barack Obama, liberal hero, deported hundreds of thousands of people every year. That’s what it means to enter the US illegally. You don’t have the right to be there. If Trump concentrates on illegal immigrants who have committed serious crimes, and the more than a million who have been ordered to be deported but have not actually been removed, that’s likely to maintain strong support.
US Customs and Border Protection officers. AFP
For the moment, Trump has stopped all refugee arrivals. That surely must be temporary. Attempting to end automatic citizenship for babies born in the US appears unconstitutional. The constitutional amendment was first introduced to allow slaves and ex-slaves to become citizens. That will be fought legally.
Energy policy is clear. Trump withdrew from the Paris Agreement, ended federal mandates for electric vehicles and reversed every one of Biden’s multitudinous executive orders restricting fossil fuel exploration and exploitation. During the election, Harris did not campaign on climate change at all. This issue could be gone for the left.
Most politicians try to sniff the breeze. Some politicians make the weather. Trump is doing this, perhaps literally and figuratively, on climate change and energy. His administration will promote the use of every source of energy – oil, gas, coal, nuclear, wind, solar – everything altogether all at once. There will be a lot of legal battles but the direction is clear. And the US taxpayer won’t contribute a dime to green energy funds.
There are only a couple of nations formally outside the Paris Agreement. But Trump’s action demolishes global climate plans as they exist and demonstrates the extreme folly of the Albanese government bankrupting our economy to pursue the fantasy chimera of net zero.
Most developed nations have substantially deindustrialised because of crazy net-zero targets and the consequent spiralling costs of energy. This week’s Spectator magazine contains a mournful essay outlining the process in Britain. A recently returned European diplomat observes to me that climate action and green energy policies have damaged German industry more than the Royal Air Force did in World War II.
Trump won’t let this happen in America. Further, the big greenhouse gas emitters, whose emissions are growing most strongly, are not developed economies but nations such as China, India, Indonesia and so on. These nations are part of the Paris accords but don’t face any serious burdens under them. They use every source of energy they can.
The US Mexico border at El Paso, Texas. AFP
With the US effectively joining them, it’s the failing economies of Europe, and not much better performing Australia, that look out of touch with reality and committed to self-destruction. Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton are both right to say Australia can’t exit Paris like the US has done. This would be to become a target. It should instead do what so many do: stay notionally in Paris but maintain the economy anyway with traditional energy sources. And it should embrace nuclear.
Trump wants to cut taxes and attract foreign investment into the US. None of this foreign investment will hesitate for a nano-second because of ethical concerns about climate. Trump will face his greatest opposition in the courts, from some Democrat states such as California; and, if Republicans lose congress in two years, from congress as well.
On tariffs, Trump is still a mystery. He says punitive tariffs may begin against Canada and Mexico in a week or two. He’s unhappy that they let too many people, and too much fentanyl, cross into the US. Such tariffs would devastate Mexico and Canada. The slight delay seems to be an invitation to their governments to make him an offer he can’t refuse.
He has delayed the giant tariffs he was planning on China even further. Though Trump said he would impose such tariffs, it’s clear they were always essentially a bargaining ploy. He’s open to deals.
Trump offered actions and indications of direction on the Middle East, Russia and China. The actions are unified by Trump’s deal-making and by his America first predilections, but they can’t be connected by coherent policy otherwise.
On the Middle East, he forced a welcome ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. If Hamas comes back to dominate Gaza, Trump will likely back Israel if it decides it must resume military action.
Trump and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin in 2018. AFP
On Russia, Trump wants a deal. However bad it is in principle, in that Ukraine should not have had to give up any territory, in reality the shape of the deal is obvious. Russia gets to keep the Ukrainian territory it has already conquered and Ukraine gets genuine security guarantees – if not NATO membership, perhaps the presence of British and French troops on its soil.
Trump began by hectoring Russia’s Vladimir Putin, saying he was destroying Russia and waging a ridiculous war. He threatened more sanctions if Putin didn’t make a deal. That seems a hollow threat but Trump’s deals typically begin with a lot of bluster. Trump wants this deal very badly.
On China, Trump has sent mixed and confusing signals. His decision to save TikTok is extremely perplexing. Congress passed legislation to force TikTok to sever its connection with its Chinese owner, ByteDance, or cease operations in the US. Trump has delayed enforcement of this law, and that in itself seems highly dubious legally. Trump also says he would accept a deal in which the US, whether government or private companies, owned 50 per cent of TikTok. But that would still be in breach of the law, which Trump himself called for way back in 2020, and would not stop China from harvesting all the user data from TikTok.
As a result of Trump’s stay of execution, TikTok has been lavishing praise on him. That’s pretty dubious from every point of view.
Trump has appointed genuine and profound China hawks such as new Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Elbridge Colby, the new Under Secretary of Defence for Policy at the Pentagon. But he also has appointed business-as-usual types to Treasury. Similarly, he has talked of wanting to visit China soon, which would seem unlikely if he’s levying punishing tariffs. The best you can say is that China policy is a movable feast, likely to harden over the course of Trump’s presidency, as it did during his first term.
Trump wants to renovate, modernise and expand American power. He’s greatly drawn to tariffs and economic sanctions as his “hard” power tools of choice. He’s pro-business, pro-hi tech, pro-patriotic and in alliance with many good forces in US society. And of course, he has his dark side and his share of very bad hangers-on.
History has often used much worse men than this to conduct necessary national renovations. Trump is planning to reinvent himself and reinvent America. The world awaits the reinvention.
Countless left-wing memes about American stupidity illustrate how out of touch, self righteous, arrogant and morally “superior” many of the so-called “left” have become – unlike the Democrats whom New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd said were “finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke” after having embraced a self-defeating world view of “hyper-political correctness, condescension and cancellation”.
The Democrats. – and indeed, our Labor party – would ignore the outcome of the presidential election at their peril. The people, for better or worse, have spoken, and it’s a pointless exercise for the Democrats to live in a fantasy world of denial, not accepting their own responsibility in the loss. The Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher wrote on 12 November:“ It’s also extremely condescending and arrogant to assume you know better and anyone who didn’t agree must be an idiot. In that light, I’d suggest Trump didn’t win this. The Democrats lost it in a spectacular fashion, and if you can lose it to the likes of Trump, something is majorly wrong on the left side of politics”.
There are lessons aplenty for Australian politics. The Coalition wants to spend the months leading up to next year’s election talking about migration driving up household bills. It has no actual plan for decreasing immigration or reducing inflation, but voters don’t care. They don’t do nuance. They’re disatisfied with the status quo and disappointed in the government. They’ll just want to punish the mob in charge. Sure, they’ll be burning down the house, and they’ll be in the house when it burns down (two song references there!) but they won’t care. The question will be “are you better off today than you were four years ago?” And, like in America, for a great many, the answer will be a big “no!”
Waleed Ali’s recent article on why Trump won concurs with the above: “Last week, a historically unpopular government, presiding over a period of high inflation that saw food prices especially explode, got thrown out of office. There is quite simply nothing extraordinary about that”. Former Liberal attorney general and high commissioner to the UK George Brandis wrote similar in the Herald on 18 November:“… the sheer weirdness of Donald Trump himself: narcissistic, vulgar, bombastic, mendacious, idiosyncratic, outrageous; while at the same time flamboyant, mesmerizing and on occasions very funny. He broke every rule, told every lie, did the unthinkable, said the unsayable and still came up … (you complete the pun). The epic unconventionality of Trump’s campaign dramatised a result that would probably have been the same had the Republican candidate been less unorthodox. For that reason, the outcome is fertile ground for over-interpretation and exaggeration”.
On a different but not dissimilar tack, John Carroll, Professor Emeritus of Sociology at La Trobe University wrote in The Australian:
“The resounding Trump victory confirms the cardinal law: politics is about power. In times of peace and prosperity, such as we in Australia have enjoyed for almost 80 years, it is easy to forget, and continue along in the hopeful illusion that life is good, people are intrinsically nice, and problems can be solved amicably …
… One of the appeals of Donald Trump to the United States electorate – I suspect his main appeal – has been that, in his bluster and braggadocio, he flexes power muscles and seems to show he is unafraid to mobilise power for his own ends. There is an intuitive understanding across middle and lower-middle America that progressive posturing and feel-good speeches will not steer the ship of state safely through turbulent waters. In contrast, Trump policy appears clear, direct, and down-to-earth – booming economy, secure borders, and resolved international conflict. When 70 per cent of Americans feel worse off than they were four years ago, they want strength in leadership and focus on their everyday interests.
…The Trump persona – aggressive, confrontational, and petulant, not to mention pathologically narcissistic – also seems to have appealed to marginalised social strata. Those living in poorer states, young black and Latino males, recent immigrants, and the old city working classes resenting their decline, all seem to have been drawn to his maverick contempt for the trendy issues of the time. His character may be suspect – indeed he is widely disliked – but he appears powerful, practical, and not of the coterie elite. In politics, power eclipses niceness”.
I republish below an opinion piece by The Australian’s editor at large Paul Kelly. It is to my mind one if the best articles I have read to date regarding the outcome of the American elections and how this may impact Australian politics. It is particularly interesting insofar as Kelly pushes back against the conservative narrative prevalent in the Murdoch media and among more extreme right wing commentators, politicians and culture warriors. Regarding Australian politics, he writes:
“If Trump succeeds he will further undermine the shaky policy framework of the Labor Party. The optics will be: Trump’s strength versus Albanese’s weakness. In this situation, the pro-Trump media and conservative drum-beaters in this country – in effect the Trump Appeasement Syndrome lobby – will demand the Peter Dutton-led Coalition follow their messiah while they will use Trump’s success to undermine Albanese. Destroying former prime minister Kevin Rudd as ambassador to the US is just the first step”.
“So what’s driving the campaign to target Rudd”, asked Hartcher on 16 November. “The Murdoch media, in short. Some other commentators have been drawn into it, too, useful idiots for the Murdoch effort. Ostensibly they demand that Rudd go because he was critical of Trump, but in reality, “this is revenge”, as Malcolm Turnbull explained this week. “This is a campaign that News Corp kicked off, and they are running a vendetta,” he told my colleague Matthew Knott. Revenge for what? Rudd founded a movement called Australians for a Murdoch Royal Commission. Murdoch’s empire was “a cancer on our democracy”, he said. A royal commission would examine the level of concentration in Australian media ownership and the conduct of the Murdoch group in particular”.
“But the Murdoch media is not monolithic”, Hartcher continues.”Its éminence grise is Paul Kelly. Kelly has the stature to make his own judgment. The campaign to remove Rudd as “a ritual sacrifice before Trump has even said anything” is “part of Trump Appeasement Syndrome”. “This shows a contempt for Australian sovereignty and a craven weakness before Trump,” Kelly wrote this week. “For any Americans wasting their time following this saga, we must look a sad, pathetic little country.”
Trump and his cabinet picks Robert F Kennedy Jr and Elon Musk
Donald Trump’s revolution leaves Albanese exposed
Paul Kelly, The Australian, 16 November 2024
The Trump Revolution is coming and, like all revolutions, its outcome will fluctuate between a glorious remaking of the existing order or a spectacular overreach and fall – maybe even a contradictory mix of both – with Anthony Albanese and Australia in front-row seats for the drama.
[In the same issue as this article, national affairs editor Joe Kelly summed up this revolution: “Trump’s sweeping “day one agenda” includes dismantling the deep state, pursuing mass deportations, imposing across-the-board tariffs, scrapping the “Green New Scam”, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement, rolling back environmental regulations, ending the Ukraine conflict, unpicking pro-transgender policies, pardoning January 6 offenders, and rolling back the Biden health and education agendas. This is a blueprint to overhaul the country. Leading thinkers are already focused on which items are set in stone and which could merely be attempts to enhance Trump’s negotiating position. While Trump is a familiar political figure, this exercise reveals his policy agenda has still generated widespread uncertainty. Paradoxically, no one knows how the experiment will turn out or even exactly what it is – a recipe for a populist catastrophe, or a profound new American reinvention”.]
From the Trump appointments so far, the big “America First” play is on. The sharemarket has been excited, the bond market is wary, Big Tech is king, Beijing should be worried. President Trump Mark II is more resolute and revolutionary than Trump Mark I.
His hunger for change seems ferocious; his willingness to take risks is more pronounced. He is assembling a tribe of Trump loyalists to punch through the disintegrating Democratic scaffold. Trump demands loyalty and prioritises vindication.
Two lights are flashing – danger and opportunity. Some people will make a stack of money and others will be cast into painful obscurity.
Trump is going to remind everyone of the extent of power vested in the office of US president when pushed to the limit.
Consider the Elon Musk appointment. Surely this can’t be true. The world’s richest man, heading social-media platform X, hanging out at Mar-a-Lago, almost part of the Trump family, will now co-lead a Department of Government Efficiency – sitting outside the federal government – and while keeping all his existing corporate positions, he will pursue his pledge to cut US agency budgets by $US2 trillion ($3 trillion), or about one-third.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk will now co-lead a Department of Government Efficiency. Picture: AFP
Of course, it is true – only in America. Think about this marriage: Trump’s America meets the Big Tech oligarchs. This is a serious moment for US capitalism, great for innovation, bad for integrity. Trump likens Musk’s brief to “the Manhattan Project of our time”. How many struggling Americans are going to be punished in the process? Australian officials, long familiar with our experience of external budget audits (think Tony Shepherd in 2013), know Musk’s promise is impossible in delivery terms. It can’t be done, short of a massive anti-Trump electoral revolt from the public.
At this time, however, such quibbles don’t matter. Nothing seems impossible in the exaggerated hype of Trump’s vindication. A tariff of 60 per cent on China’s imports? Sure. Cutting a third off federal agency budgets? No problem. Licensing the king of Big Tech, loaded with conflict-of-interest federal contracts, to stage a shooting gallery across the entire federal bureaucracy? Great idea. It’s called purging the deep state.
Change on the scale Trump wants generates both high excitement and high risk. Nobody can be sure of the consequences because these things have never been tried before and we don’t know where the line will be drawn between impression and reality. How long before Trump and Musk fall out?
Trump’s appointments show his priority to purge the “deep state” institutions of justice and intelligence. Given his history, these seem non-negotiable personal passions for Trump. He appointed former Democrat, now Trump loyalist, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national security despite, or perhaps because of, her sustained support for Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
He appointed a professional provocateur, Republican congressman Matt Gaetz, as attorney-general with Gaetz, already at political war with the Justice Department he is supposed to run, praised by Trump, who said Gaetz will end “the partisan weaponisation of our justice system”. That means a purge.
Trump has appointed Republican congressman Matt Gaetz as attorney-general. AFP
The wilful naivety of Trump’s apologists in this country looks embarrassing given Trump’s resolve to impose his will on the intelligence community, justice and the FBI. Gabbard’s appointment is highly dubious and Gaetz’s should be overruled, with The Wall Street Journal saying it would “undermine confidence in the law” and would be used for “political revenge”.
Trump’s mind seems a cross between powerful insights into the flaws of the Obama-Biden-Harris age and the vindictive fantasies of all rebels pulling down the established order.
But Trump’s experiment will resonate far beyond America. Markets seem alert to the inflationary consequences of his fiscal policy. The combination of Trump and our tight labour market will further weaken Anthony Albanese’s hope of an interest-rate cut before the election.
But the big picture consequences are far larger. At a time when most Western democracies are burdened by disillusion, poor economic and social outcomes and leadership that lacks either conviction or courage, Trump arrives as a giant on the stage of history.
He mocks the orthodox governing model. Much of Trump’s appeal is because he presents as a change agent against leaders running a failed status quo, witness the dismissed Biden-Harris team. More than 70 per cent of Americans felt their country was going in the wrong direction.
Trump’s win is the antithesis of Albanese’s victory in 2022 when Albanese ran on reassurance, incrementalism and “safe change”. Trump consigns “safe change” to the dustbin of history. He will steamroll Albanese’s “safe change” into the gutter. Trump’s American political strategy is the complete opposite of Albanese’s Australian strategy.
Of course, America is not Australia; we are different countries and in different moods. Yet the stakes for Australia cannot be denied – the more Trump succeeds, the more Labor’s policies will look feeble, ineffective and missing the big picture.
At almost every point in his agenda, Trump is diametrically opposed to Labor’s framework.
Consider the list: Trump wants savage public-sector cuts, a reduction in federal bureaucratic numbers, a purging of regulation, cutting the corporate tax rate to 15 per cent (half that of Australia), extending income tax cuts, imposing punitive tariffs on China where Australia is just restoring trade normality, repudiating free trade by resurrecting across-the-board tariffs, more support for oil and gas, walking out of the Paris Agreement on climate, dismantling environmental obstacles to development, cracking down on immigration, launching a domestic war on all forms of identity politics, boosting US defence spending and disdaining global institutions.
It is folly to think Trump won’t be influenced by the chasm between himself and Albanese. It’s good he told Albanese on the phone that Australia was the “perfect friendship”. Let’s cut to reality – if Trump has initial success in fuelling the animal spirits of the US economy, the governance model for Western democracy will be shaken to its foundations. Parties of the radical right will gain fresh traction everywhere.
It is folly to think Trump won’t be influenced by the chasm between himself and Albanese. AFP
If Trump succeeds he will further undermine the shaky policy framework of the Labor Party. The optics will be: Trump’s strength versus Albanese’s weakness. In this situation, the pro-Trump media and conservative drum-beaters in this country – in effect the Trump Appeasement Syndrome lobby – will demand the Peter Dutton-led Coalition follow their messiah while they will use Trump’s success to undermine Albanese. Destroying Kevin Rudd as ambassador is just the first step.
Of course, it might not evolve this way. It might be the precise opposite. You never know with Trump. He may overreach from the start, prioritising vengeance, smash too many institutional norms and, drunk on hubris, alienate even his own voters.
But last week Trump sent another message of profound significance for Australia – he is riding with the China hawks. This means Trump will expect Albanese to muscle up and toughen up against China. Forget the idea of Trump going cool on Australia – he likes us, he’ll go hot on Australia and expect more action from us to reinforce his China hawks.
This is surely the coming message from the appointment of Senator Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and Congressman Mike Waltz as his National Security Adviser.
Waltz, in a jointly written essay for The Economist, said the US must wind up the Ukraine conflict and direct its assets towards confronting and deterrence of China. Rubio warns China is “far more dangerous” than the old Soviet Union and poses the central threat of the 21st century. They will drive deeper US rivalry with China.
Rubio supports AUKUS. That’s the good news – but under Trump the US support for AUKUS means more action and commitment from Australia against China. That’s the transactional deal, got it?
China’s President Xi Jinping. AFP
How does this fit with Albanese’s “stabilisation” agenda with China? Answer: not comfortably. History tells us that Australian domestic support for the US alliance falls when there’s a US president we don’t like, witness the fall in popular backing for the alliance under George W. Bush. Now we will likely have in Trump a US president who expects us to get more hawkish on China while domestic support for that Trump-induced option will plummet.
It’s better for Australia that Trump rides with the China hawks, not the China doves. But you cannot miss the problem. Paul Keating sees it and fell upon the remarkable political monitor poll in The Sydney Morning Herald showing that 57 per cent said Australia should avoid taking sides in any war between the US and China, with only 16 per cent disagreeing. Extraordinary stuff.
Keating said this repudiated Albanese’s “lock-in” military arrangement with the US, the AUKUS agreement and the assumption Australia is tied to the US in any conflict.
Trump’s China policy looks ominous for Labor – his tariff strategy will weaken our trade with China while his overall “get tough” strategy will intensify anti-Trump sentiments within the public in Australia and ignite a debate within Labor, with protests the party is too accommodating of Trump’s anti-China stand. It will be dangerous and unpredictable.
The broader political takeout from Trump’s victory is the failure of Democratic Party progressivism – economic and cultural. This is a mammoth event. Of course, direct political lessons cannot be simply transposed from America to Australia. These are very different countries. Yet it would be unwise to assume there is no connection point for Australia from this epic US election.
Here are three propositions – that US progressives are no longer the party of the working class or the non-college educated; that US progressivism contains the seeds of its own destruction, witness the Trump counter-revolution; and that the deepest faith of the progressives – that Trump is a threat to democracy – didn’t work because the progressives constitute their own threat to democracy.
Let’s consider the first proposition – in effect, the voter realignment. Australian pollster Kos Samaras wrote post-election that low-income, working-class voters were heading right-wing. This realignment would reshape politics including in Australia and was tied to the changing nature of left-wing politics with its new priorities around climate change, social justice, urban fashions and housing.
Analysis by the Financial Times shows that in the US poorer and less-educated voters think Republicans best represent them, with the Democrats now the party of high-income and college-educated voters.
Trump won a majority of households with incomes of less than $100,000 while the Democrats won more support from the top third of the income bracket. Education is a sharp line of division – nearly two-thirds of voters without a college degree supported Trump.
Samaras warns the realignment in Australia deepens the divide between urban and rural voters and between professional and low-income voters, “creating fertile ground for conservative and populist leaders”. Is the urban professional class slowly suffocating Labor? Obviously, Dutton will be exploiting this divide at the coming poll.
On the second proposition, most progressives and elites in Australia are in denial, unable to admit what is happening, despite the defeat of the voice referendum at home and the evidence in the American election – many people voted for Trump on cultural grounds, pointing to a counter-revolution.
There are numerous pro-Trump commentators hailing the moment. Many exaggerate, yet the trend is manifest. Writing in the Financial Times, respected analyst John B Judis said Democrats must dissociate themselves from support for “gender-affirming care”, their opposition to strong borders, their backing of equal outcomes rather than equal opportunity on racial issues, their indifference to the plight of working-class men, just dismissing Trump supporters as racists and sexists, and their focus on imminent planetary apocalypse to justify draconian climate action.
He said the priorities of many voters who deserted the Democrats are decent jobs, safe streets and a proper safety net. But Judis warns even action on these fronts will fail politically “if Democrats don’t sever their identification with cultural radicalism”.
Labor hasn’t gone as far as the Democrats – but it is largely and proudly a progressive party now, and this risk is potent. Most progressive leadership elites in Australia don’t understand the consequences of the cultural positions they champion. Their cultural ignorance is astonishing and dangerous. They need to read the long masterclass provided in July this year by David Brooks in The New York Times.
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Brooks said that with the demise of religion, US public life became secular in recent decades with “science and reason” becoming the methods by which the nation could be held together. It is now obvious that this answer, championed by the elites, has failed. “By the 21st century, it became clear that Americans were no longer just disagreeing with one another,” Brooks said. “They didn’t even perceive the same reality.”
Was there anything to fill this moral void? As usual, the left produced an answer – identity politics. Brooks said: “This story provides a moral landscape – there are those bad guys over there and us good guys over here. The story provides a sense of belonging. It provides social recognition.” It is orientated around proper esteem for and inclusion of different identity groups.
The problem, however, is the incompatibility of identity politics with the liberal principle of equality – that regardless of identity we are bonded by a common humanity. This is the foundation stone of our liberal democracy. Undermine this principle and our society is undermined. As Brooks says, “the problem with this form of all-explaining identity politics is that it undermines democracy”.
Trump’s voters don’t offer such sophisticated reasoning for their vote. But their visceral distrust of how they are being treated says this is what they feel in their bones. It is reinforced by numerous examples across their lives, telling them they don’t really count.
The more progressives in Australia push this ideology, the more they guarantee a backlash. Dutton knows this – he just needs to judge how far it has gone in Australia and how much to advance the counter-revolution.
This leads directly to the third proposition. The Democrats were consumed by the idea of Trump as a threat to democracy. Ultimately, this was the Harris campaign – and the argument was correct. Watching Trump’s backers in this country trying to pretend black was white was pitiful intellectual dishonesty. Trump refused to concede he lost in 2020 – of course he was a threat to democracy.
But what the Democrats didn’t get was the point brilliantly made by political scientist Yascha Mounk – some exit polls suggested that people felt Harris was a greater threat to democracy than Trump. “This hints at the fundamental fact of the past decade,” Mounk said. “A fact that elite discourse still has not fully confronted: citizens’ trust in mainstream institutions has been absolutely shattered. Corporations and the military, universities and the courts, all used to enjoy a certain modicum of residual trust. That trust is now gone. It is unlikely to return any time soon.”
It is gone because of the left’s march through the institutions, the story in both America and Australia. Progressive activists took charge, while established leaders were weak and ignorant. When people look across the landscape – universities, bureaucracies, cultural bodies, corporates, government departments – they see progressive values, great and small, shoved in their faces. It’s not the democracy they voted for
Most folk who are into history like to draw parallels and identify patterns in the past that reflect upon the present. As I do also, albeit in a more ambivalent way. Cleaving to Mark (Twain, that is). am fascinated more by the rhymes than the repetitions. Five years ago, i wrote Messing with the Mullahs – America’s phoney war? Events in the Middle East since October 7 2023, not least tit-for-tat aerial exchanges on we have seen in recent months between Israel and Iran, and the potential return of the unreformed and unchained prodigal son on January 6th 2025 render it relevant still. How long will it be before the war drums start beating on the Potomac and the Iran hawks circle over Washington DC seeking the restored king’s feckless and fickle ear? As they say, fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
Back then, I wrote:
“The story of the Iranian Revolution is a complex, multidimensional one, and it is difficult for its events and essence to be compressed into brief opinion pieces of any political flavour, no matter how even-handed they endeavour to be.
The revolution began slowly in late 1977 when demonstrations against Shah Reza Pahlevi, developed into a campaign of civil resistance by both secular and religious groups. These intensified through 1978, culminating In strikes and demonstrations that paralyzed the country. Millennia of monarchy in Iran ended in January 1979 when the Shah and his family fled into exile. By April, exiled cleric and longtime dissident Ayatollah Khomeini returned home to a rapturous welcome. Activist fighters and rebel soldiers overwhelmed troops loyal to the Shah, and Iran voted by national referendum to become an Islamic republic on April 1st, 1979. A new constitution saw Khomeini became Supreme Leader in December 1979.
The success and continuing durability of the Iranian Revolution derived from many sources, and many are not touched upon by commentators and pundits.
One can’t ignore the nature of the monarchy that preceded it – modernist on the one hand, and brutally repressive on the other; nor the unwavering and hypocritical support (including infrastructure, weapons, and intelligence) provided to it by western “democracies” since Britain and the US placed Reza Shah Pahlevi on the throne in 1953.
Nor should we ignore the nature of the unprecedented regime and state that was established forty years ago – a brutal, theocratic, patriarchal, quasi-totalitarian system that endeavours to control all aspects of its citizens’ lives, its rule enforced by loyal militias like the ruthless Basij and by the Revolutionary Guard, a military-industrial complex more powerful than the regular army.
The support and succour that the US gave to the deposed Shah and his family and entourage, and later, to the opponents of the revolution, served to unite the population around a dogmatic, cruel and vengeful regime, which, in the manner of revolutions past and present, “devoured its children”, harrying, jailing, exiling and slaughtering foes and onetime allies alike. One of the ironies of the early days of the revolution was its heterodox complexion – a loose and unstable alliance between factions of the left, right and divine. History is replete with examples of how a revolution besieged within and without by enemies actual and imagined mobilizes it people for its support, strength and survival.”
This brief outline summarises the events of 1979 and the decades which followed. It does not elaborate in any detail on the reasons for the downfall of the Shah and the durability of the regime that succeeded him. An impressive essay in the Jewish cultural e-zine Mosaic endeavours to do just that, providing as it does, insights into the history of modern Iranian history that few people today would be familiar with.
In it, the author suggests that “the most impressive of our experts persist in downplaying or ignoring the Islamic Republic of Iran’s driving forces can lead to misunderstandings of current affairs that are far from academic. Both nuclear negotiations and the sanctions, for instance, are premised on the assumption that Tehran is eager above all else to improve its country’s economy. While Ayatollah Khamenei and his minions doubtless care about trade and finances, they care much more about advancing their religious ideology across the Middle East, and like most religious believers, feel that spiritual concerns must ultimately trump material ones. It’s even possible that some might find the idea of suffering material hardships to achieve ideological goals appealing …
… If I’m right that Iranians didn’t rise up en masse because of the rising costs of onions or because they wanted to drive nicer cars, but because they were passionately opposed to secularization and American influence, then the U.S. cannot make peace with Iran even if the nuclear deal succeeds. The Islamic regime doesn’t oppose America because it supports Israel or Saudi Arabia, but because it represents Western secularism. Unless mass-conversion to Islam is in America’s future, that’s not something that’s likely to go away …
… One hopes that the loss of Afghanistan will finally hammer home the truth that the loss of Iran (in 1979) so signally failed to do: it’s religion, stupid.”
With a new nuclear deal on the way, attention is again turning to Iran. Four recent books, plus the deal itself, suggest that America and Europe are blind to the regime’s motivating spirit.
A portrait of the late Ayatollah Khomeini projected on the Azadi (Freedom) Monument in western Tehran on the 43rd anniversary of Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution in February 2022. Morteza Nikoubazl/NurPhoto via Getty Images.
There is a well-known Persian children’s game in which a parent recites limerick-like poems while engaging in horseplay. One version, popular in the mid-20th century, had the father of the household seat himself on a carpet in the living room with one of his progeny standing to his right and the other to his left. The father would declaim:
There once was a cat (yek gorbeh bud)
Poor and miserable (bichareh bud)
A dog came and bit him in the belly (delash-o sag gaz gerefte bud)
(At this point the first child charges across the room and dives headlong into his father’s stomach.)
Next came a bear from behind and nearly killed the cat (khers az poshtesh taghriban koshtesh)
(The second son now bounds over and leaps onto his father’s back.)
But that cat, he rose, and he roared, and . . . turned himself into a lion! (gorbeh beh shir avaz shodeh bud)
(This being the signal for the father to get up and hurl his offspring this way and that onto the soft furniture.)
More than just child’s play, this post-dinner diversion harbored an obvious historical-ideological meaning—a meaning as relevant today as it was 130 years ago. Anyone looking at a map of modern Iran will perceive the lineaments of what the country’s inhabitants call “the sleeping cat.” This cat—the Iranian state—was indeed in miserable shape domestically and geopolitically by the reign of Naser al-Din Shah (1848-1897). What little authority this Qajar king still possessed over his realm was retained by a method that a 20th-century Iranian intellectual would dub “positive equilibrium”: the sovereign survived by parceling out large swaths of Persian territory and granting irresponsibly generous economic concessions to local potentates and foreign powers so that each would defend the capital and environs against the encroachments of his counterparts. Of the many forces that Naser al-Din Shah had to “buy off” in this manner, none was more menacing than Russia, the bear that jumped onto the cat’s back, or more influential than Britain, the (bull)dog that bit the cat’s belly.
Before ousting the last Qajar ruler in a bloodless coup, the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1979), Reza Shah, had risen through the ranks to become commander of the only serious military force in the country, the Cossack Brigade, created with Russian assistance decades earlier by that same Naser al-Din Shah. While in this post, Reza is said to have engaged every morning in a ritual reading of the newspaper, his face waxing redder with each account of Iranian failure or humiliation until finally, in a fit of rage, he would stand up and rip the tabloid to shreds. Soon, this determined corporal would rewrite the headlines that had so dismayed him, and do much to turn the sleeping cat into a rising lion.
Assisted by a cadre of military comrades and nationalist intellectuals, the new monarch set about pacifying the countryside, developing infrastructure, implementing reforms in fields like education, sanitation, technology, agriculture, and women’s rights, and in general shoving Iran, kicking and screaming, into the 20th century. He even gave his subjects three days to come up with last names for purposes of taxation, conscription, and general modernization (hitherto everyone had been known as “so-and-so son or daughter of so-and-so” or by a nickname reflecting his profession, town of origin, or infirmity). For all that Reza Shah has been depicted in post-revolutionary Khomeinist retrospect as the epitome of an incorrigible Westernizer, it cannot be denied that he raised Iran from a trampled and torn-apart virtual protectorate and a conspicuous consumer of European goods to the status of an essentially independent and self-respecting polity boasting border integrity and assiduously cultivating import-substitution industry. That the method employed to achieve all this progress was despotic was a price that even many liberal Iranian thinkers of the time were willing to pay.
Ousted by the allies in 1941 on the pretext of harboring Nazi sympathies—sympathies partially tied to the “Aryan Thesis” that made Germans and Persians ethnolinguistic cousins and that was all the rage in both countries at the time—Reza Shah was replaced by his twenty-one-year-old son Mohammad Reza Shah. In awe of his father, and having spent his teenage years in Switzerland at an elite boarding school, the new king was prepped to take up where the dynasty’s founder had left off. His career, and his overthrow in 1979 by the Islamist movement that now rules Iran, is at the center of four books published in the past decade which I will consider here. These books offer much in the way of fresh insights and original research, correcting some of the misconceptions that plague commentary about the country. And yet, for all their merits, they fail to grasp fully why the shah fell, what motivated the revolutionaries, and by extension, what motivates the current regime. For if we want to be able to make sense of the revolutionary ideologues who now rule Iran, we have to understand the political and cultural order they rebelled against, and why they rose up against it.
By looking at what these four works get right and, more importantly, what they get wrong, we can also better understand why so many Western experts and policymakers so consistently misread the Islamic Republic, its sensitivities, its hierarchies of honor and shame, holy and profane, just and unjust—and why academics are so ill-equipped to figure out a society that doesn’t conform to their own ideas of secular rationalism. With the U.S. about to conclude a second nuclear deal with the Islamic Republic, if press reports are to be believed, it’s worth considering how this regime came to be, and what makes it tick.
I. The Last Shah
As the Council on Foreign Relations scholar Ray Takeyh has shown better than any previous author in The Last Shah, Mohammad Reza’s reign began with an impressive geostrategic victory: with a little help from astute advisors at home and a determined postwar American administration, the fledgling Iranian sovereign induced no less a megalomaniacal expansionist than Joseph Stalin, at the zenith of his power, to pull his troops out of the northwestern province of Azarbayjan (not to be confused with the neighboring Soviet Republic of the same name), where they had supported local socialist secessionist movements. The cold war had begun, and Tehran was poised to reap the benefits.
Mohammad Reza’s next major challenge came from within, in the person of the charismatic prime minister Mohammad-e Mosaddeq (in office 1951-3), perceived ever since in popular imagination—and in much scholarship—as Iran’s fatefully foregone hope for true democracy.
Takeyh sets the record straight, demonstrating more effectively than any writer to date that Mosaddeq was, to the contrary, a highly unstable personality with dangerous dictatorial tendencies. (He also quashes once and for all the myth that the CIA and MI6 were primarily responsible for the 1953 coup that removed him.) The shah, argues this author, though no friend of democracy himself, was ultimately better for Iran than the prime minister. Indeed, Mohammad Reza eventually realized the very dream that Mosaddeq had failed so badly to achieve: not just oil independence, but oil hegemony for Iran. (Remember when we switched the limousine-like sedans we used to drive for the cramped, sardine-cans-on-wheels that we squeeze into today? That was because of the shah.)
Surrounding himself instead with one-dimensional, sycophantic technocrats, the shah soon became the lonely autocrat, a one-man-show.
The second Pahlavi sovereign got so good at his job, Takeyh maintains, that he felt he could dispense with the independent aristocratic elite whose corruption, bickering, and jostling for advantage threw a spoke into his rapidly rotating wheel of progress—even though it was just these aristocrats who had been the agents of his success, and had saved his throne on more than one occasion. Surrounding himself instead with one-dimensional, sycophantic technocrats, he soon became the lonely autocrat, a one-man-show. When the Middle East-wide, and worldwide, revolutionary fever of the second half of the 20th century finally caught up with him in 1979—another significant connection Takeyh makes—Iran’s ruler faced it bereft of the crucial assistance he needed to weather the storm.
II. The Fall of Heaven
The inability to delegate and insistence upon ruling instead of merely reigning that Takeyh perceives as a shortcoming, Andrew Scott Cooper sees as a strength: Mohammad Reza’s hands-on approach to monarchy got things done for his country. To Cooper, the shah is something very different from the corrupt autocrat of most histories, whose disastrous mistakes supposedly smothered democracy and brought about the revolution. Indeed, in The Fall of Heaven, Cooper’s 2016 history of the decline and fall of the Pahlavi dynasty, there is little that has traditionally been held against this despot that isn’t deftly turned into a virtue, or at worst a well-intentioned miscalculation. The abolition of the multiparty system in 1975, itself largely nominal by that time, and the inauguration in its place of the single Rastakhiz (“Resurrection”) party to which all citizens were obligated to pledge allegiance, is presented as a (botched) stepping-stone toward democracy—a claim doubly audacious since, as Takeyh had shown, Rastakhiz’s own leaders admitted that it was a bad joke from day one. Cooper does not scruple to attribute the refusal of Iran’s Westernizing monarch to rule constitutionally to “his skeptical attitude to the 1906 constitution, which he regarded as a European invention imposed on Iran by former colonial powers.” The shah’s innumerable affairs with married women and regular visits to Paris prostitutes were evidence of his “boundless energy,” and usefully cleared his head to attend to matters of state. Even the king’s leisurely helicopter rides (and those of his siblings) over a capital city choked to a stand-still by some of the worst traffic jams in history are depicted by this creative and sometimes credulous author as his majesty’s noble attempt to help alleviate that same congestion.
These impressive feats of legerdemain aside, however, Cooper is no cheap apologist. The Fall of Heaven is a stunning achievement, and will go down in literary-scholarly history as the book that did more to rehabilitate the Pahlavi family’s reputation than any volume published before or since the revolution. Cooper accomplishes this formidable task—punching a corridor through decades of pervasive and unrelenting vilification—primarily by amassing, organizing, analyzing, and presenting in vivid color an unprecedented amount of detail surrounding the final years of the monarchy. On top of play-by-play accounts of the political ins-and-outs, the economic ups-and-downs, the burgeoning unrest and the frantic diplomatic maneuverings, Cooper can tell us for any given date of 1978 what pop song topped the charts, which jewels Queen Farah Diba was wearing, whose child was killed in a hit-and-run accident, what TV series garnered the highest ratings, whether the king had indigestion (and what he took for it), which night-club was the hottest in town, and what the weather and pollution levels were like. Who knew, for instance, that on November 5, 1978, as the Khomeinist tidal wave crested and began to break over the Land of the Lion and the Sun, Fiddler on the Roof was playing to a full house at the Goldis movie theater in Tehran?
Cooper’s broad and meticulous sweep allows him to put a human face to Iranian society on the eve of what may plausibly be called the first genuinely popular revolution in modern times.
Such an accumulation of detail may seem frivolous; it is anything but. Cooper’s broad and meticulous sweep allows him to put a human face to Iranian society on the eve of what may plausibly be called the first genuinely popular revolution in modern times. It also allows him to put a human face to the royal couple—Mohammad Reza and his wife Farah Diba—painting them convincingly as benevolent, idealistic, patriotic, hard-working, fragile but fortitudinous, beleaguered but long-suffering, intelligent and generally likeable. Finally, this author’s wide grasp facilitates the assembly of an incomparably variegated collage of factors that, so he maintains, together contributed to the uprising of 1979. Beyond the usual suspects—a regime that educated the hell out of its subjects but denied them political participation; rapidly rising but no less rapidly disappointed economic expectations; the alienation and radicalization accompanying mass urbanization—Cooper adduces: a milk shortage, an egg shortage, a power outage, a cholera outbreak, a heatwave, a UFO sighting, an earthquake, a tax increase, the kidnapping and murder of a young boy, drought (on the one hand), unseasonably heavy rains (on the other), “a slew of disaster movies” that “emphasized failure of leadership, loss of control, and public panic,” the fact that according to the Asian zodiac 1978 was the Year of the Horse when people are prone to ”let loose” and “ignore the consequences of their actions,” and, to top it off, a plague of locusts.
The present writer admits to entertaining doubts about the “coalescence of causes” approach to historical convulsions. I remain convinced that people make history, and on the rare occasions when the particular person typing these lines does anything at all important, I tend to feel like I do it for one reason. Extrapolating to the relevant macrocosm, I’m basically with Ruhollah Khomeini, who famously remarked that “the Iranian people did not make the Islamic revolution to lower the price of watermelons” but rather did so “for the sake of throwing off the foreign yoke and restoring their kidnapped culture and creed.” (That’s two reasons, but they are closely related). Nevertheless, it cannot be denied that the human will, independent and focused though it may be, is nourished, guided, and battered this way and that by the context surrounding it, and for this reason Cooper’s litany is highly enlightening. Ironically, the only one of our four authors who is not Iranian digs more deeply into daily Iranian reality than any of his colleagues.
III. Moods of Self-Assurance and Insecurity
Louis XIV’s famous quip, L’etat c’est moi (“the state—is me”), rarely rang as true as it did in Iran of the 1960s and 70s. Flush with eleven-figure oil revenues and spoiled rotten by U.S. support that had gone from conditional to unconditional, Mohammad Reza neutered the government apparatuses, military command structures, and traditional pillars of the Persian state—court, bazaar, and mosque—that he saw as so many obstacles to his imperious charge in the direction of the “Great Civilization.” The king became the only game in town, his picture on the wall of every home and business, his decisions the only ones that mattered. Thus, an intimate biography of the man on the throne is essential to an understanding of the state of the Iranian nation in the decades immediately prior to the Khomeinist debacle. In his 2012 The Shah, Abbas Milani—a Stanford political scientist and Hoover Institution fellow—provides us with the best example of such a biography.
Milani chronicles the initially reluctant sovereign’s rise to power with an apposite mixture of objectivity, sympathy, and drama. He masterfully interweaves the personal and political, offering probing analyses of Mohammad Reza’s ambitions and inhibitions, phantoms and phobias, worldviews and prejudices. He covers more widely and perceptively than any earlier scholar the experiences and influences of the prince’s formative years, and arrays before the reader the alternating moods of self-assurance and insecurity, tenaciousness and irresolution, optimism and depression that helped make his reign something akin to a non-stop roller-coaster ride. Milani aptly points out that “many of [the shah’s] weaknesses as a leader were his virtues as a human being,” referring, inter alia, to this embattled ruler’s unwillingness to spill gallons of his countrymen’s blood in order to stay in power.
The king made use of authoritarian methods to propel Iranian society forward—which set that society on a direct collision course with those same authoritarian methods.
No work details and dissects to the same degree the myriad challenges facing this well-meaning monarch on the foreign and domestic scenes (not the least of which was the rampant corruption of his own family), challenges which—by exploiting the cold war, dispersing petrodollars, repressing Communists and clergymen, and generally playing his cards right—he faced down successfully for almost four decades. His inability to face down the final challenge Milani ascribes to a paradox: the king had made use of authoritarian methods to propel Iranian society forward in the direction of literacy, industry, professionalism, research, technology, consumerism, capitalism, nationalism, intellectualism, secularism, and individualism—all of which set that society on a direct collision course with those same authoritarian methods. (Or as Takeyh puts it, the shah “built the modern middle class, but refused to grant it a voice in national affairs.”) Indeed, Milani asserts, monarchy itself as an institution, and the squelching of political participation it inevitably entails, was fast becoming an anachronism by the mid-20th century, especially in the countries that Mohammad Reza held up to his subjects as models, and to whose universities he sent thousands of college students.
IV. Reasons for Ruination
Whereas from Milani we learn about the general from the particular—about the situation in the country from the personality of its ruler—the Yale historian Abbas Amanat, in Iran: A Modern History(2012), takes the reader on an oceanic voyage in the opposite direction. One of the many advantages of this impressively ambitious magnum opus is the historical depth and topical breadth it brings to bear on the issues that have preoccupied us so far, and that preoccupy all who think about contemporary Iran: Mohammad Reza’s record as leader, and the reasons for his ruination.
Amanat, one of the premier Iranologists of our time, whose vast and diverse erudition is matched only by the humanity that permeates his texts, is uniquely qualified to construct the stage upon which the 20th-century showdown between Pahlavism and Khomeinism would be played out. By the time we reach the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah—some 500 pages into the book—we have been exposed repeatedly to an interlocking network of patterns and trends that have functioned as the matrix of Iranian history for centuries, sometimes millennia. Many of these are couched in terms of dichotomies: centripetal versus centrifugal forces, tribal versus sedentary existence, antinomian heterodoxy versus a state-supported clerical establishment, Persian versus Arab, Turk versus Persian, Russian versus British, religion versus nationalism, tyranny versus just rule.
Amanat tackles the tenure of the “King of Kings, Light of the Aryans” (Mohammad Reza’s self-chosen moniker) with all these tensions in mind, while simultaneously illuminating the political, economic, social, and especially cultural mise en scene of the period. We do not get the shah as a willful individual, as a volatile jumble of psychological traits, as with Milani, but the shah as one actor among hundreds of others, in what sometimes feels like a non-fiction Persian version of War and Peace. The dense tangle of processes that eventually led to the fall of the monarchy cannot be easily untangled here, but it should be said that unlike Tolstoy, Amanat does not present the tragic denouement of 1979 as the inevitable result of an amalgam of impersonal forces. The hundreds of authors, artists, ambassadors, academics, activists, and agitators, together with no few vendors, workers, thugs, and other ordinary Iranians who contributed to this momentous event are more often than not introduced by name, their dreams and activities fleshed out, and these many human threads woven together into a kaleidoscopic revolutionary tapestry.
Amanat’s presentation is painfully balanced: he rakes the post-revolutionary regime over the coals for its many human-rights violations, but criticizes the Western supporters of Iraq during its war with Iran in the same breath, and no less fiercely. He takes Mohammad Reza to task for curtailing liberty and stifling creativity, but overall—as with Takeyh, Cooper, and Milani—appreciates much of what the ill-fated Pahlavi sovereign did for Iran, depicting him as a driven reformer with high ideals who transformed his country so profoundly that even the Islamists could not turn back the clock.
Certainly, one must be careful not to overdo such revisionist rehabilitation. It is one thing to debunk Amnesty International’s ridiculous claim— popularized with most effect by Reza Barahani’s powerful but unreliable 1977 Crowned Cannibals—that over 100,000 political prisoners were tortured in the shah’s jails. It is quite another to claim—as does Ervand Abrahamian, the highly regarded scholar who literally wrote the book on the subject—that torture as a method of repression virtually disappeared from the Iranian scene under the Pahlavis, re-emerging with a vengeance only with the onset of the Islamic Republic. The shah was a more benevolent dictator than the image conjured up for the West by the various shrill (and ungrateful) Iranian Students Associations that regularly marred his visits to Europe and the United States; but no small number of atrocities were carried out in his name and with his knowledge. Even Cooper, the Pahlavis’ biggest fan, saddles the king with the ultimate responsibility for decades of state-sponsored prisoner abuse, including not a few extrajudicial murders.
Women in today’s Iran may have to cover their hair, but they vote like maniacs and there are more of them in the universities and in a whole slew of prestigious professions than their male counterparts.
Still, to read these four authors, Iran’s final monarch did far more good than harm. He took a particularly ignorant populace (tellingly, Jewish academicians concluded that even Persian Jews were less knowledgeable than their co-religionists anywhere on the planet) and increased their literacy level sevenfold in less than two decades. He used the endless supply of black gold that percolated up through the Khuzestan flats not just to purchase tanker-loads of state-of-the-art weaponry (useless, in the event, as they had been for his father), but also to build schools, roads, hospitals, clinics, orphanages, universities, vocational colleges, sports centers, airports, sea-ports, factories, research laboratories, parks, zoos, commercial centers, chemical plants, railroads, theaters, galleries, and museums by the thousands. He divvied up latifundia all over the country, compensating the owners fairly and doling out hundreds of thousands of acres to the peasantry. (The fact that these peasants often preferred migration to shantytowns on the edge of big cities to farming their newly acquired plots was a worldwide problem, and not Mohammad Reza’s fault). He protected minorities—Jews, Bahais, Sunni Muslims—and, though a dyed-in-the-wool chauvinist himself, energetically promoted women’s causes. The last achievement was one that Khomeinism could not roll back: women in today’s Iran may have to cover their hair, but they vote like maniacs and there are more of them in the universities and in a whole slew of prestigious professions than their male counterparts.
The king made Iran into a respected player on the international scene, encouraging and inspiring other third-world countries by example, to say nothing of financing their development projects. Though easily irritated by independent thinking among his subordinates, he tolerated more societal dissent than is generally acknowledged, and his “liberalization program” of the late 1970s, as Takeyh points out, actually saw that tolerance increase just before things got really hairy. When the revolutionary tsunami finally hit, thousands of oppositionist intellectuals and activists were of sound enough body and mind to surf on it all the way to victory.
V. Economy or Religion?
So why did the tsunami hit at all? Why, in the end, did the country choose Islamist rule instead? If so many impressive accomplishments can be laid at Mohammad Reza’s door—and they indubitably can—then why did his people, whom he had benefited so greatly, give him the heave-ho in such a peremptory and humiliating fashion? For many, the answer revolves around the bottom line. Despite the dazzling economic success story that was Pahlavi Iran—between 1957 and 1977 the standard of living among the Persian populace rose no less than 500 percent—many Middle East specialists persist in seeking the underlying causes of the Khomeinist revolution in economic woes of one sort or another. Scores of analysts have proffered such confident assertions as the following, from the pen of the astute student of Islamism Nazih Ayubi, drawing on the no-less-astute Iran expert Fred Halliday:
“The revolution was the outcome of a complex and painful process of rapid and uneven economic development. The main reason why it occurred was that “conflicts generated in capitalist development intersected with resilient institutions and popular attitudes which resisted the transformation process.” (Political Islam: Religion and Politics in the Arab World, p. 387)
Takeyh himself opens his study with a question, “Why did Iran have a revolution in 1979?,” and an answer: “The immediate causes can be easily summarized: the economic recession of the mid-1970s had halted the shah’s development projects and created expectations that the state could not meet.” (This is the well-known but discredited “J-curve” theory, which states that an economic boom followed by a sudden downturn tends to cause revolution and unrest.) To his credit, Takeyh contradicts his own assessment at the very end of the book: “The economic recession of the mid-1970s is sometimes casually blamed for the revolution, but the Iranian people were frustrated with the shah’s dictatorship even when the economy was performing well.”
The main problem with such claims is that the various processes they blame for engendering discontent and consequent unrest in Iran—including “inflationary pressures,” “rising expectations,” and the catch-all urbanization and its manifold consequences—were in no way unique to Iran, and were in many if not most cases more moderate versions of simultaneous developments in other third-world polities where no comparable revolutions ensued. One of Amanat’s arguments, for instance, is not only questionable in itself, but could be applied just as well to any other country in the developing world:
”Since the beginning of the Pahlavi era, the Iranian population had improved in every generation physically, hygienically, and medically, from the frail, malnourished, and diseased population at the turn of the 20th century . . . to a relatively healthy, sanitary, and better nourished people in the last quarter of the century. The need for greater quantities and greater varieties of food, home appliances, electronics, and cars thus was bound to become a burden for a government anxious to keep its population economically content. “(p. 655)
None of this holds water. The citizens of Iran did not bare their chests to the bullets of the largest and best-equipped army in the region, overthrow their sovereign, and put an end to a millennia-old monarchical tradition, all for the lack of a toaster oven. The Washington Post had it right way back in 1978: “Rarely would contemporary history appear to provide such an example of a people’s ingratitude towards a leader who has brought about an economic miracle of similar proportions.”
The citizens of Iran did not bare their chests to the bullets of the largest and best-equipped army in the region all for the lack of a toaster oven.
Though no amount of counterargument will eliminate the widespread post-facto imagining of Iranian economic distress (which somehow went unnoticed before the revolution), if we seek to isolate the sui-generis ingredients that went into making the Khomeinist upheaval of 1979, we must look elsewhere. Admittedly, this additionally rules out factors like irritation on the part of the educated classes at the lack of opportunities for political participation: such irritation, too, existed in spades in other countries, and although secular democracy-seekers had kept the embers of Iranian dissidence glowing for years, it was not they who ignited the conflagration. The central motivations for the mass revolutionary action of 1978-9 must be sought in factors more specific to Iran, or at least more unique to the situation in the country at the time.
Where shall we look? Here our masters all fall short. Ask the average Joe who was compos mentis 40 years ago why the Iranians rose up against their ruler. (Mind you, not your average Iranian Joe: Persian-speakers are conspiracy freaks of a caliber beyond anything one finds in the West, and they are convinced to a man that the U. S. was behind the whole thing. Even the shah thought so.) Anyone who paid attention at the time—and who was not an academic and could therefore think straight—was cognizant of the simple truth that the king got canned because he had spat on his people’s most hallowed traditions. He and his coterie of “Westoxified” sophisticates had mocked their rituals, stripped their women, insulted their clergymen, blasphemed their god, replaced their sacred paragons with pagan nymphomaniacs, gotten drunk on their solemn holidays, razed their mosques (sometimes building banks and stadiums in their place), and made common cause with heretics and infidels—all in the name of progress.
We should pause to admit that Milani, Cooper, and others don’t see it this way: they make much of what they claim was the second Pahlavi sovereign’s backpedaling of his father’s harsh secularizing policies, pointing to everything from the son’s oath of office, which included appeals to Allah and commitments to promote Shiism; the widely publicized visit paid by the new monarch to the hospitalized Grand Ayatollah Borujerdi, head of the seminary system in the holy city of Qom; mystical experiences in which Mohammad Reza claimed to have received blessings from this or that imam; his habit of carrying a mini-Quran into his breast pocket; and a significant increase in the number of new places of worship, and a partial easing of the restrictions on the veil, under his reign.
While there is truth to all of this, the broader picture tells a different story. Oaths of office and hospital visits are recognized by the genuinely pious for just what they are: lip service. While assertions of dream visitations by saintly figures can be a feather in the turban of a respected theologian, in the case of non-observant ignoramuses like Mohammad Reza Shah—who once boasted to a gathering of Muslim divines that “I say my prayers every night before bed,” a decidedly non-Muslim comment—such claims merely point to the claimant’s abject irreligiosity. And, one might add, the irreligiosity of those who record and build theories upon such empty gestures.
More importantly, while the father’s anti-clericalism and march toward modernization may have been gruffer, under the son these tendencies matured and expanded relentlessly, to a large extent due to Iran’s exponentially proliferating contacts with Europe and even more so the United States. There were, albeit, more mosques built during this period, but the mushrooming cinemas were the up-and-coming place to be. The veil, it is true, could now be worn, but it was scorned by refined society, and more and more women preferred bouffant hairdos and mini-skirts. As uncomfortable and un-moored as traditional members of Iranian society began to feel in the 1930s, they would feel so to a far greater extent in the 1960s, and if they did not, that was because they had grown accustomed to the direction the country had been taking for decades, not because that direction had changed or been reversed.
The few supposedly regressive features that characterized the reign of the second Pahlavi monarch in connection with religion were offset ten times over by the juggernaut of modernization that was the hallmark of the era. And while traditionalism would on occasion receive disingenuous royal support as a counterweight to radicalism, the shah and his governments were, if anything, more inclined toward socialism than Shiism. Above all, as all our authors readily admit, their lodestar was always the West. In the eyes of the vast conservative sector of Iranian society, Pahlavism was hedonism, plain and simple. In the eyes of the increasing number of students who subscribed to the lay theoretician Ali Shari’ati’s militant neo-Shiiism—young people for whom faith had become cool again, and for whom the imperative of the hour was “the return to ourselves”—Pahlavism was the contemptible, traitorous antithesis of religio-cultural authenticity.
Political Islam has been eulogized by untold analysts almost since its birth, the classic example being Olivier Roy’s 1992 L’échec de l’islam politique (“The Failure of Political Islam”), a book that, given all that has transpired since its publication, should long ago have been renamed “My Failure as a Middle East Expert.” Incurable rationalist-materialists that so many Western thinkers are, it is extremely difficult for them to credit the power of the spiritual or theological, and they accordingly search high and low for alternate motivations, especially economic ones, to explain the behavior of individuals and collectives. Such an approach both informs, and is informed by, schools of thought like Marxism and realpolitik, as well as no few social sciences. Immune to religious passions themselves, scholars and journalists simply can’t accept that these passions can motivate tens of thousands of people.
If there is one deficiency common to the four undeniably outstanding studies we have been reviewing, it is that whereas Ayatollah Khomeini and company were sure that they had risen in revolt because Westernization in Iran had gone too far, our authors are all convinced that the revolution occurred because Westernization had not gone far enough. A related argument has been advanced by the prominent postmodernist scholar Ali Mirsepassi in his 2019 Iran’s Quiet Revolution. Mirsepassi notes correctly that intellectuals close to the Pahlavi court, and the sovereign himself, sometimes coopted the anti-“Westoxification” discourse of leftists and Islamists in order to take the wind out of their sails and, at the same time, delegitimize democracy as a foreign implant. He then maintains, based on this paradox, that it was the Pahlavi rejection rather than the Pahlavi adoption of modernity that led to the dynasty’s destruction, a theory as creative and counterintuitive as it is utterly spurious.
Islam as the central propelling factor in the resistance movement to the shah receives extremely short shrift from Takeyh, Cooper, Milani, and even Amanat. The last scholar’s profound knowledge of Shiism is matched only by his dislike for it: for instance, he calls the premier intellectual pursuit of the ayatollahs in their seminaries “tedious” on no less than four separate occasions in his massive tome. The revolutionaries aver in no uncertain terms that they did it for Islam; but our four authors, and scores of their colleagues, claim to know better.
Certainly, there were other modernizing rulers in other Middle Eastern countries who antagonized their Muslim constituents, both before and after the Iranian revolution. Taking Islam seriously as a motivating and enabling factor means, however, familiarizing ourselves with this confession’s considerable inner diversity. Iranian Islam has been Shiite Islam for over 500 years, and Shiism is a revolutionary vehicle like no other. Thanks to the circumstances of its evolution, the slogan “Fight the Powers that Be” is virtually encoded on its DNA. Moreover, Shiite clerics are comparatively independent of temporal rulers, while enjoying the wall-to-wall obedience of their flocks. Not for nothing did Khomeinism succeed so spectacularly where other Islamist movements had succeeded only partially or failed: the creed on which it is based provided both the impetus and the instrument for its triumph.
VI. Missing the Point
That the most impressive of our experts persist in downplaying or ignoring the Islamic Republic of Iran’s driving forces can lead to misunderstandings of current affairs that are far from academic. Both nuclear negotiations and the sanctions, for instance, are premised on the assumption that Tehran is eager above all else to improve its country’s economy. While Ayatollah Khamenei and his minions doubtless care about trade and finances, they care much more about advancing their religious ideology across the Middle East, and like most religious believers, feel that spiritual concerns must ultimately trump material ones. It’s even possible that some might find the idea of suffering material hardships to achieve ideological goals appealing.
Likewise, President Obama’s negotiations with Iran sought to recognize the country’s “equities” in the Middle East, with the ultimate aim of creating a balance among Iranian, Saudi, and Israeli spheres of influence. Again, Tehran may not be immune to such realpolitik considerations. But ultimately the Islamic Republic is engaged militarily in Yemen, Iraq, and Lebanon to advance the Islamic Revolution. The idea that well-meaning Western diplomats can simply sit Iranian diplomats down with their Saudi, Emirati, and Yemeni counterparts and work out a compromise based on mutual interests completely ignores the theological aspect of Khomeinist foreign policy.
Both nuclear negotiations and the sanctions are premised on the assumption that Tehran is eager above all else to improve its country’s economy.
And all this is even more true when it comes to Israel. Economics and power politics simply fail to explain the conflict between the two countries, which share no borders and had cordial relations under the shah. While Shiism historically contains ample anti-Semitic currents, it is not indelibly anti-Semitic—but Khomeinism is. And it views Jewish sovereignty in the Middle East as an unacceptable offense, which must be eradicated at almost any cost.
But Israel is only the Little Satan. The Great Satan is America, the main driver of “Westoxification.” If I’m right that Iranians didn’t rise up en masse because of the rising costs of onions or because they wanted to drive nicer cars, but because they were passionately opposed to secularization and American influence, then the U.S. cannot make peace with Iran even if the nuclear deal succeeds. The Islamic regime doesn’t oppose America because it supports Israel or Saudi Arabia, but because it represents Western secularism. Unless mass-conversion to Islam is in America’s future, that’s not something that’s likely to go away.
Only several months have elapsed since the richest and most powerful country in the world, having spent $300 million per day for twenty consecutive years on the restoration of the various branches of the national economy and on the creation of a 300,000-strong national army, was sent ignominiously packing with its tail between its legs by a bunch of ill-equipped local amateurs wearing turbans, robes, and sandals. One hopes that the loss of Afghanistan will finally hammer home the truth that the loss of Iran so signally failed to do: it’s religion, stupid
Ze’ev Maghen is chair of the department of Arab and Islamic studies at Bar-Ilan University. His latest book is Reading the Ayatollahs: The Worldview of Iran’s Religio-Political Elite. He is also the author of John Lennon and the Jews: A Philosophical Rampage.
In That Howling Infinite 
Boom. Boom. Boom. The second presidency of Donald Trump burst like a clap of thunder across the whole American nation, across the whole world.