The speed of American democracy failure seems apropos for the man who repeatedly went bankrupt faster than anyone in history, and the playbook feels familiar.

Once he established that norms don’t constrain him, and he fatigued the accountability systems, the violations naturally escalated and expanded rapidly. “Grab’em by the pussy” was his subtext, yet actual campaign slogan.

Financial corruption → legal system weaponization → extrajudicial killings → unauthorized military action. Each step tests whether anyone can stop Trump from groping, grabbing and raping like he’s some kind of Epstein pervert.

For years I’ve had lawyers, true experts in democracy far more intelligent than me, tell me that an information warfare history perspective doesn’t account for the complex control frameworks of American government.

That to me has always sounded like the horse manure industry will somehow pivot to diesel emissions investigations. I predict the opposite. Indeed, we see clearly now how all these vaulted democratic “accountability mechanisms” that handled the Watergate-era crimes (at best) aren’t doing much today:

• Investigative journalism exposing hidden wrongdoing
• Congressional oversight responding to discrete violations
• Public outrage mobilizing around clear transgressions
• Courts adjudicating specific legal violations

Exactly none of them scale into Steve Bannon’s explicit “flood the zone with shit” warfare strategy of simultaneous transparent corruption across dozens of vectors. A militant planned and distributed denial-of-service attack on democratic accountability itself is in full swing. And there’s a bizarre lack of response to the accelerated velocity, volume and variety (Big Data Three Vs) of breaches.

I suppose it’s kind of like being told by lawyers in the 1960s that foreign assassinations of state leaders by America would never happen at home, because of accountability, right before JFK and MLK were shot dead. So many Americans assassinated, so little accountability. Mondlane was American, right?

By the by, America still won’t release the files on who assassinated the UN Secretary General Hammarskjold in 1961.

Does anyone in America care about why the assassinations weren’t prevented? They even hit the UN leader. I mean does anyone even remember an “Ace of Spades” was found on the wreckage of his passenger plane after it was shot down?

America seemingly now borrows directly from Russian information warfare doctrine: the goal isn’t to convince people of some alternative truth, it’s to just curate rapid confusion and exhaustion that drives people to disengage entirely while being unable to leave or even look away. Physical presence, complicity, comes without the usual mental clarity that should tell people to fight or flee. First they came for A, and we did nothing…

Apathy becomes acceptance

Scandals are being operated now by Trump like his true currency: infinite supply creates dangerous hyperinflation for intentional destabilization of legacy systems. Watergate unfolded as an accountability mechanism as it was so singular and digestible. The public and institutions could focus their investigative resources, media attention, and political capital on one clear violation. The GOP spent decades picking apart what went wrong and how to avoid being caught again. Then came the racist bankruptcy con artist king Donald and his wrecking balls.

And that’s how being an historian suddenly puts me in a better position of describing and predicting moves in… what amounts to an information civil war:

• Attention fragmentation: Human cognition can’t process details of 42 simultaneous scandals. Each new outrage displaces the previous one from the news cycle before accountability mechanisms can engage. By the time Congress schedules a hearing on the calendar, there are twelve new more pressing crises.
• Normalization through repetition: The first pardon for a crypto billionaire would have been shocking. The fifteenth financial conflict of interest barely registers. You’re essentially boiling the frog but at TikTok and Zoom velocity of doom scrolling.
• Weaponized uncertainty: With so many claims flying, the average person can’t distinguish between:
  • Actual corruption (Qatar plane, UAE chip deal).
  • Hyperbolic partisan attacks
  • Outright disinformation

  So they default to tribal affiliation for filtering. “My side good, their side exaggerating.”

• Exhaustion as strategy: This isn’t accidental. Making resistance exhausting is tactical. Activists, journalists, investigators, prosecutors—everyone operates with finite energy. Keep them racing from fire to fire and they can’t extinguish any single blaze completely. I haven’t met a single person, not even in Austria, who understands that the Nazis lit over 100 buildings on fire in Vienna for 1938 Kristallnacht. That’s a ground-based bombing run impossible to fight, long before the threat of VBIED and… Tesla.

Trump’s privilege has always been failing faster and more completely than institutional responses are willing to track. Six bankruptcies that would have destroyed normal businesspeople became proof of his “comeback” narrative because the legal and financial systems couldn’t process the velocity of fraud, opposite of survival. He gamed lag time between action and consequence, externalizing the suffering to his followers.

Now he’s showing how it can be done at constitutional scale, as if the corrupt liar Andrew Jackson is back in office, rounding up and killing Americans through false resource scarcity.

Lawyers live within a playing field that has law and order formalism, which makes sense if law and order can be enforced. They believe written rules and institutional architecture provide the field its protection, like engineering believes their code bugs are just delayed patches, rather than active exploits destroying the entire game.

Historians of information warfare, let alone hackers, however see how institutions are just people following norms, and norms have repeatedly collapsed under sustained attacks/pressure. Game over comes quick when the rules are unenforceable. The Constitution doesn’t enforce itself, and so a huge gap between written law and actual enforcement seems like where Trump’s authoritarian takeover happens regardless of law.

The Andrew Jackson tell

Jackson explicitly defied Supreme Court rulings (“John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it”) and weaponized presidential power for ethnic cleansing (Trail of Tears).

The institutions existed, the laws were clear, but nobody stopped him commiting genocide. The formal architecture was irrelevant because America lacked the political will to enforce it.

Trump likely studied this, unlikely from history books, as he infamously was a child of a convicted Klansman. He understands Jackson’s adherents in the KKK have always celebrated moving fast to break things and maintainimg popular support within a tight coalition of secret militant groups. Unaccountable privilege for them was unlocked when enforcement mechanisms melted instead of congealed.

Remember Trump boasting “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” That reminded me of a blistering broadside during Jackson’s 1828 campaign to be president, which tells voters he is unfit for the office. It stresses how six men realized an error, returned voluntarily to camp, and offered to resume their service yet were murdered by Jackson instead. He is said to have “illegally and wantonly shed the blood of his countrymen and fellow soldiers” by ordering executions 21 Feb 1815 after a kangaroo military trial in which they were convicted for leaving camp, despite return. There are six engravings of coffins (two rows of three), with memorials to each of the soldiers murdered by Jackson, giving details of their lives and deaths: Edward Lindsey, Henry Lewis, David Morrow, Jacob Webb, John Harris, and David Hunt.

The formalist lawyer keeps talking about how intended behavior of the system will eventually form, like a bicycle rebalancing itself. The information warfare analyst in me instead describes actual behavior under attack conditions, pattern detection and prediction, like how to prepare and respond when a bicycle race competitor brandishes a pump to jam in your spokes and throw you into a ditch.

These are two completely different assessment skills. Lawyers saying attacks will be “judged harshly for cheating” aren’t very useful for those who actually want to keep riding in the race and avoid crashing, fatally.

Americans need to look immediately for how best to block the GOP taking any more big swings at democracy. “Preparedness” is literally what this was called in America just before WWI.

Think about an effective response to the parallel system setup by the GOP for their sustained, deliberate, high-velocity bad faith political moves destroying the country even faster than Trump ruined the people who invested in his business scams.

Democratic Institution	GOP Replacement	Purpose
Independent judiciary	Federalist Society	Capture courts
Professional journalism	Fox/OAN/Newsmax	Control information
Campaign finance limits	Citizens United	Legalize corruption
Electoral accountability	Gerrymandering	Lock in minority rule
Academic expertise	Heritage/Cato/AEI	Corrupt platforms and manufacture alternate “facts”

Trump is the first president operating entirely within this post-Watergate parallel system that was setup to ruin democracy; build a unitary executive with unaccountable power that Nixon (and Ford) could only dream about. The GOP doesn’t need or want the legacy institutions to work—they built a system of replacements that will never check the annointed King Donald.

Each step, lawyers say to me “watch and see, he will cross a line soon.” And after each step, when no line enforcement comes, the Overton window shift leaves those lawyers grasping for the next chapter in their Maginot-like playbook for “the walls of yesterday“.

France could have counter-attacked, could have rushed in and crushed Rommel’s ill-concieved, weak and overstretched logistics. But why, why did they not? Alas, the historian in me can’t help seeing the patterns…

The French had superior forces but got outmaneuvered because they were fighting the last war.

Trump’s operation is very vulnerable (he’s overextended, rife with squabbling, logistically weak, reliant on bluff), yet the institutional response is paralyzed by outdated doctrine. American institutions have superior resources (courts, Congress, media, public support in many areas) yet are thinking Watergate-style accountability, unprepared for the information war that I have warned about here since at least 2012.

This isn’t just about Trump’s bankrupt authoritarianism, it’s a social media putsch towards territorial ethnonationalism and theological hate, known since the late 1800s as “America First”.

By the time Trump’s constant disregard for law and order reaches predictable parallels with Nazi concentration camps, Nazi extrajudicial executions of civilians, Nazi racist Christian Crusade rhetoric, and ACTS 17 “lebensraum“, people still seem confused and apathetic about mounting an effective resistance to the diabolical offspring of Nazis.

Are you one of those confused people, or are you now able to understand?

Two articles side-by-side reveal Trump’s foreign policy as a Christian Crusade—thinly-disguised territorial sovereignty projects using racialized intervention frameworks that those tracking extremist ideology should immediately recognize. The boundaries theology I’ve been exposing lately in Thiel’s network (e.g. ACTS 17) isn’t just abstract philosophy, as operational military and immigration policy are being rapidly implemented.

This is important documentation of ideology-to-policy pipelines that most analysts still unfortunately miss. These aren’t isolated policies—they’re components of a coherent ideological project.

The obvious pattern:

Nigeria: Trump threatens military invasion (“guns-a-blazing”) over alleged Christian persecution, despite the reality being far more complex—attacks target both Christians and Muslims, with Muslims actually comprising the majority of victims in the affected regions. This is disinformation 101. Trump is very strategically and literally erasing any victims who aren’t Christian. His false oversimplification serves to also erase Nigeria’s roughly equal Christian-Muslim split (220 million people) and complex drivers of violence: resource conflicts, Boko Haram extremism, ethnic clashes, and secessionist movements. It’s a bogus good/bad god/devil narrative likely erected to pre-excuse war crimes.

South Africa: The administration is prioritizing white Afrikaners for refugee admission while slashing total refugee numbers to 7,500—down from 125,000 under Biden. This is a 94% reduction in humanitarian protection that redirects America’s refugee program into a white immigration pipeline. This follows Trump’s executive order inverting reality to cut aid over alleged “unjust racial discrimination” against Afrikaners—a claim that is an obvious strategic lie, given whites (7.3% of population) control 72% of farmland while Black Africans (81.4% of population) own just 4%. Trump inverts “persecution” language to protect racist whites unjustly accumulating wealth, while framing accountability for racism as discrimination against whites. It’s the same bogus narrative structure as Rhodesia’s “they’re taking our farms” propaganda that whites used to setup a racist violent dictatorship as their protection from victimhood.

Taken together, Trump is openly stating white minority rule is justified through false manufactured victimhood narratives. He is using the main stage, just like Hitler after 1933, to position whites as victims in order to justify militant expansion of their unjust advantages. Peter Thiel’s boundaries theology (his father’s Nazism) has become operational through military threats and immigration policy.

Weaponization of “religious freedom”:

This isn’t new. Trump’s appointed “Ambassador for Religious Freedom” Sam Brownback in 2019 declared:

…there is no nation on the earth that pushes human rights of religious freedom any more than the United States.

Yet, when he was asked to explain this in terms of Trump’s Muslim ban, Brownback called it “an immigration issue.” Yeah, this was typical of Brownback, not even trying to hide “religious freedom” now meant only Christian and white.

When asked about Egyptian authorities closing 14 Coptic Christian churches, he bizarrely praised it as Christians who “would rather have the current situation.” Empty rhetoric.

When challenged about UAE restrictions on press freedom, he deflected by trying to bring up a Pope’s visit.

Trump defiles “religious freedom”, seeing it as nothing more than a weapon. It gets used to enable authoritarian regimes for political aims, and against any nation that resists American interference. Nigeria and South Africa fit this exact template—religious freedom rhetoric deployed not to protect persecuted people at all, but cruelly to revert American foreign policy as antiquated crusader rhetoric (normalizing racist war crimes).

Kansas Konnections

It is worth noting that Brownback emerged from the same Kansas domestic terrorism watch list (John Birch – Cleon Skousen) as another appointee of Trump: Mike Pompeo.

…at the “Kansas God and Country Rally with U.S. Congressman Mike Pompeo” he says being a “Christian warrior” means “we shot abortionists and called it justifiable”, and multiculturalism or diversity of views are intolerable because “worshiping other gods”.

Both of these extremist political appointments by Trump in his last term systematically had worked to replace evidence-based policy with “Christian” militant faith-based assertions.

Pompeo in 2020, for example, said he could justify the Soleimani assassination with secret squirrel knowledge of “imminent attacks” while simultaneously admitting “we don’t know when, we don’t know where.” He scaffolded an anti-science framework of faith out in the open, to normalize “Christian Warrior” acts of violent rage targeting Islam with an “invisible empire” of secret police (e.g. KKK).

Don’t forget Pompeo’s infamous 2014 DARK Act already had established him explicitly denying Americans the right to know anything about potential harms (from GMO foods)—preempting state-level science-based labeling requirements.

So his anti-science 2020 “imminent but unknowable” doctrine six years later destroyed the technical term of imminence (measurable time and place), within a long term American disinformation war.

Trump’s baseless Nigeria threats fall into this much older and broader pattern than many are probably willing to admit. It now serves double-duty because Muslims being persecuted are purposefully being erased, while America also repeats early 1900s Presidential propaganda (e.g. Birth of a Nation) about white Christians being the only people in need of “guns-a-blazing” protection.

The Brownback-Pompeo evangelical “end times” framework is entering a new escalation, however. Trump’s broad militant anti-Islamic threats—where “imminent” now means “we get happy pulling triggers”—is unmoored from “we know of a specific threat”. Any evidence that contradicts this narrative by American white supremacists will simply be erased, like so many murders of African leaders by Nixon’s pre-Church Committee CIA.

The “Christian Warrior” extremist:

Those who study American history should recognize the many domestic hate group platform signals, as they are expanded into foreign policy. “Christian warrior” training materials illustrated long ago how religious narratives are a proxy in white supremacist iconography of law enforcement and religious authority.

Both Trump policies follow a “Cleon Skousen” playbook, weaponizing “religious freedom” and “persecution” narratives to justify interventions, which do nothing more than reinforce colonial-era racial hierarchies.

Trump’s belligerent “Department of War” rebranding (rather than Defense) invokes pre-1947 framing of conquest, instead of security. His Skousen-like “guns-a-blazing” rhetoric specifically echoes gunboat diplomacy and the Banana Wars era when US intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean was justified under racist paternalism. It’s simply white supremacist militancy that Trump is directly invoking.

• Selective victimology: Christians in Nigeria warrant military invasion threats; Muslims facing the same violence are invisible. White Afrikaners warrant preferential refugee status; Black South Africans facing actual structural disadvantage don’t exist in the calculus.
• Sovereignty denial: Nigeria’s sovereignty can be violated based on a mischaracterized internal security situation. South Africa’s post-apartheid land reform efforts are framed as justifying punitive measures. This conditional sovereignty mirrors the charter cities ideology Peter Thiel has been promoting so heavily lately—Black and Brown people are allowed sovereignty only when they comply with white/Christian rules and priorities.
• The ACTS 17 framework: Both cases fit the boundaries theology pattern I’ve identified spreading in Peter Thiel’s racist billionaire gospel club—asserting a divine/natural order where “Christian” (e.g. whites-only) populations have special status and claims that transcend national sovereignty.

This is the inversion and opposite of humanitarian policy. Domestic extremist frameworks become foreign policy when power is captured.

America First was a nativist slogan of hate groups in the late 1800s that restarted the KKK in 1915, which the America First Committee modernized to expand Nazism.

Today it is abusing humanitarian language to advance a radicalized racist geopolitical project that treats foreign government sovereignty as conditional, while positioning ONLY white/Christian populations for privileged claims to militant protection and movement.

The connection between Trump’s “America First” rhetoric and white supremacist ideology was immediately called out by me in January 2017. This is where we started:

And here is where we are now:

Just a few months ago this average Arkansas guy was praising Hitler, and Trump, as if they were all in the same camp.

…December 2024… he stated that he would “take a bullet for” the president, adding that Trump, 79, doesn’t “make many mistakes and when he does he’ll figure it out and he’ll fix it and I trust him.”

[…]

Outside of fighting, Mitchell is also known for being a proud farmer in Arkansas and for his comments describing Adolf Hitler as a “good guy.”

“I really do think before Hitler got on meth, he was a guy I’d go fishing with,” Mitchell said on the ArkanSanity Podcast in January. “He [Hitler] fought for his country,” he added.

A good guy? What exactly was “good” about Hitler “kicking out the greedy Jews” before 1938 as opposed to after? This framing isn’t just ahistorical ignorance; it’s revealing what is actually admired. It’s apparently normal in Arkansas to say out loud “love that guy Hitler, hate that Jews and gays survived and he didn’t”.

The “Hitler was fine until drugs” narrative is historically nonsensical and morally bankrupt. Hitler’s antisemitism, violent authoritarianism, and territorial ambitions were fully formed in the early 1920s. The Beer Hall Putsch was 1923. Mein Kampf, praising the racism of Henry Ford, was published in 1925. The methodical legal destruction of Weimar democracy was in 1933-1934, the Nuremberg Laws were 1935 and Kristallnacht was 1938… all before documented substance abuse started.

The false “drug cause” narrative serves a specific purpose: it lets “drug war” adherents admire Hitler’s core antisemitic project—the persecution and expulsion of Jews—while falsely externalizing industrial genocide as a drug-induced deviation. This totally fake compartmentalization allows praise for exactly what Hitler set out to do from the beginning, yet blame to be pushed onto substances as “unfortunate excess” in achieving goals.

The Arkansas context matters because it’s not idiosyncratic. This is a regional political culture with deep roots in Lost Cause mythology, where you can venerate Confederate leaders, celebrate “heritage,” and react with fury when called racist.

The same mental infrastructure applies to Hitler: admire the aesthetics of power, the mythology of national revival, the “fighting for his people” narrative, while externalizing the genocide as either propaganda, an unfortunate excess, or a drug-induced deviation from his “true” character. Hitler was an Austrian who took over Germany and murdered millions of his own people. He fought for himself at everyone else’s expense.

We’ve just established this average Arkansas guy praises Hitler and claims that drugs excuse genocide. Now watch what actually breaks his Trump support… Epstein files. Seriously.

“The first thing for me was he didn’t release the Epstein files—they’re even acting like they didn’t exist,” the 31-year-old said [he’s] “not with Donald Trump no more.”

“I don’t support him, I don’t like him, I think he’s a corrupted leader, and it took me a while to come to that conclusion, but I finally am coming to it.”

Still likes Hitler. Suddenly hates Trump. What’s revealing here is the transactional, personality-driven nature of American politics. Hollywood good/bad framing, as documented by “The Act of Killing“, is a dangerous god/devil binary of disinformation that short-circuits actual understanding.

There’s no engagement with ideology, policy, or governance. Hitler becomes “a guy I’d go fishing with” based on totally fraudulent vibes (people who grow up in Arkansas will praise Hitler, make anti-Semitic statements and even decorate their homes with swastikas, yet say they are deeply offended if you dare to accuse them of being Nazis).

There’s a specific strain of white identity politics of America where overtly praising Hitler can coexist with angry offense at being called a Nazi, because in that framing, “Nazi” means a BAD person to them, and they separate that from being a “patriot” who believes in Hitler’s ideology (racist genocide).

They’ve carved out rhetorical space where you can admire Hitler’s “nationalism,” his “fighting for his country,” his “strength,” and even his diet and his preference for roads with no curves, while treating the Holocaust as either exaggerated, incidental, or the result of him “going bad” on drugs.

It’s a Holocaust inversion common in Arkansas mixed with American exceptionalism: we could have that kind of genocidal obsessed strong leader without those genocidal consequences.

Trump thus gets all their support until one specific grievance—the Epstein files—becomes the sudden breaking point. Not family separation, not January 6th, not fraud convictions, not bankruptcy, not the documented pattern of sexual misconduct, not illegal detention, not racism, not ignorance, not authoritarian rhetoric about terminating the Constitution. But this one thing.

This pattern—where support for authoritarian figures is based on parasocial identification rather than principled analysis—makes democratic accountability almost impossible.

Treating politics like drinking buddy tests means vetting based on whether they’ve “gone bad” on a random moral issue, not engaging with what makes authoritarianism dangerous: the systematic concentration of power, the elimination of institutional constraints, and the targeting of vulnerable populations.

The Epstein angle is particularly telling. It suggests he believed Trump would release the files, that this was somehow a litmus test for anti-establishment credibility. But why would someone with Trump’s documented history in those circles, with his public statements about Epstein and young women, with his own allegations—why would that person be the one to expose it? The cognitive dissonance required is extraordinary. Trump lies about everything, hurts everyone, but this… this?

This is the danger of the “good guy gone bad” narrative. It prevents people from recognizing authoritarian projects even as they’re the ones building it.

The hollowness at the core of personality-cult politics is terrifying.

There’s no there, there.

No analysis of how power works, how wealth concentrates, how institutions get captured, how rights get stripped away systematically.

It’s all just vibes, grievances, and the perpetual search for a strong father figure who’ll hurt the “right” people.

This makes the personality cult people complicit in building what they claim to oppose. They’re not recognizing the authoritarian project because they’re helping construct it, while falsely painting themselves as the rebels.

What makes the “Hitler fought for his country” line so historically illiterate is that Hitler was Austrian, took over Germany through a combination of violence and institutional capture, and then destroyed Germany. He didn’t fight for Germany—he fought for a racist imperial vanity project that considered actual Germans expendable. Millions of Germans died because of his decisions. The country was partitioned for half a century. If “fighting for your country” means leaving it occupied, divided, and devastated, then the definition is meaningless.

The Arkansas Lost Cause infrastructure makes the stupidity possible because it’s already normalized this exact cognitive move: venerate leaders who destroyed their own society (the Confederacy lasted four years and left the South devastated), claim they were fighting for “their people” (they were fighting to preserve slavery), externalize the atrocities (slavery wasn’t that bad, or it would have ended anyway, or the North was worse), and react with rage when called out for supporting a violent racist genocidal platform.

It’s the same playbook: Arkansans romanticize the aesthetics, deny the ideology, and externalize all the consequences of their hate-based fantasy.

German public news (DW) recently profiled the expansive Nazi enclaves in Arkansas adorned with swastikas—a regional infrastructure normalizing extreme hate so much that praising Hitler in public offices and on podcasts becomes unremarkable rather than career-ending.