Trump’s Empire Reflections on the Changing Nature of U.S. Militarism BY ANTHONY DIMAGGIO

As the Trump administration recedes into memory and Joe Biden takes the reins of the warfare state, it’s important to reflect on the changing nature of American militarism over the last decade. Trump received a lot of attention for his proclamation that “we are ending the era of endless wars.” But this was more rhetoric than reality, and never received much support from his base, which appeared perfectly fine with militarism and war. As I documented during Trump’s term using national survey data, support (in hindsight) for the war in Iraq, continued support for war with Syria, and agreement that Trump should escalate the U.S. conflict with Iran, were all significantly associated with increased support for Trump. A comprehensive examination of the Trump administration’s policies demonstrates that across many issues, his presidency was significantly worse than its predecessor, despite both being defined by hyper-militarist policies. At day’s end, both presidents will be remembered for keeping the war machine humming and for the politics of limited-engagement militarism via their avoidance of long-term commitments to large concentrations of ground troops in major military conflicts. Obama’s first term was largely a continuation of the George W. Bush administration’s commitment to large numbers of “boots on the ground” in the “War on Terrorism.” Bush committed more than 160,000 troops to the Iraq war at its height in 2007, and Obama committed more than 100,000 troops to Afghanistan at the height of his escalation from 2010 to 2011. While massive troop escalations characterized Bush’s foreign policy in both of his terms, Obama moved toward a “militarist-lite” version of U.S. empire by the mid-2010s, with the war in Iraq having ended, and with Obama’s “surge” of troops in Afghanistan being reduced to the levels that Trump inherited when he assumed office. In the late Obama years, troop concentrations in Afghanistan ranged from 10,000 to 20,000 a year, where they consistently stayed throughout most of Trump’s term. So when we talk of the Obama administration, it’s important to recognize that we’re really talking about two administrations – the one that mimicked the Bush administration and its boots-on-the-ground heavy “War on Terror” during the Democrat’s first term, and the imperial-lite administration of his second term that was marked by other forms of militarism, including a heavy reliance on drone strikes, light troop deployments in conflict zones, and conventional bombing campaigns. These tactics continued to be employd during Trump’s term, amidst a modest troop reduction in Afghanistan that was instituted in 2020. On a dozen dimensions, I assess below the Trump administration’s policies in comparison to Obama’s. In each of these areas, Trump’s policies were significantly more repressive than his predecessor. It’s one of the great farces of the Trump era that so many people, including many identifying with “the left,” fell into Trump’s propagandistic rhetoric about opposing U.S. militarism. War propaganda has been a constant throughout modern American history, and is embraced by both Democratic and Republican leaders who adopt the rhetoric of peace, while waging war. And under Trump, reactionary and militarist policies were particularly pronounced. * On immigration, Trump was notoriously reactionary, with his administration defined by a draconian crackdown on legal immigration. These efforts were far more severe than anything seen under Obama. Trump’s travel ban openly and illegally discriminated against Muslims in mass, and was driven by Trump’s erroneous assumption that they represent a unique extremist and terrorist threat. Legal immigration to the U.S. was reduced by half during Trump’s term compared to under Obama. Trump’s immigration policy was based on white nationalist principles that depicted Muslim-majority countries and Latin American immigrants as an existential threat to American national security. This virulent white supremacy is beyond anything we saw during the Bush and Obama years. * On unauthorized immigration, Trump’s politcies were viciously reactionary and oppressive, via the construction of his separation wall and his catering to neofascistic supporters, and his demonizing of Mexican immigrants as “drug dealers, criminals, [and] rapists.” Trump’s policies were needlessly punitive and destructive, as he imposed a child-parent separation policy in which more than 500 kids were still without their parents more than two years after the policy was imposed. Trump utilized concentration camp-style mass detainment, marked by dangerous overcrowding, children imprisoned in cages, and the denial of basic needs such as soap, toothpaste, and medical treatment. And he horried subordinates at the Department of Homeland Security when he ordered that immigrants at the Mexican border be shot, gassed, and electrified, and that all immigration be (illegally) shut down. * In the Afghanistan war, the Trump administration was Nixonian in its policy – announcing a drawdown of troops while expanding the bombing campaign. Trump promised a withdrawal of U.S. troops, but dropped more bombs on the country – more than 7,000 strikes each year in 2018 and 2019 respectively, than even the height of bombings under Obama, which reached just over 5,000 strikes a year in 2010. Unsurprisingly, civilian casualties also reached their peak in 2018 and 2019, compared to during the Obama years, with just under 400 casualties from international air strikes in 2018, and more than 500 casualties in 2019. By comparison, under Obama there were less than 200 casualties a year in 2010 and less than 300 in 2011 at the height of his bombing campaign. * On the Israel-Palestine conflict, Trump rejected a Palestinian state within the pre-1967 Israeli-Palestinian borders. This was most apparent in the administration’s propagandistic “peace proposal,” which endorsed Israel’s illegal annexation of large portions of the West Bank, rejected Palestinian control of its borders and territory, denied territorial contiguity for a Palestinian “country,” and abandoned the longstanding international commitment to Jerusalem as a shared city that would be claimed by both countries. Trump’s rejectionism was also clear in his recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, contrary to longstanding international efforts to broker a peace agreement resulting in the city’s shared status. Trump’s brokering of bilateral diplomatic agreements between Israel and UAE, and Israel and Bahrain, was widely assessed within a larger political framework in which the Gulf monarchies normalized Arab relations with Israel, despite its longstanding repression and colonization of the Palestinian people. * With Iran, the Trump administration’s withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal (known as the “Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action”) greatly accelerated the chance of war with the U.S. The withdrawal was widely derided as a dangerous provocation against an agreement that had effectively limited Iran’s potential for developing nuclear weapons. Trump’s shredding of the agreement, coupled with the illegal assasination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani, brought the U.S. to the brink of war with Iran, and resulted in a “sharp increase” in Iran’s uranium enrichment activities, amidst fears that U.S. aggression would push the country toward developing nuclear weapons. Iran has announced that it’s willing to reengage with the U.S. under the original terms of the agreement, although that will require the Biden administration to commit to the difficult work of diplomacy and deescalating tensions between the two countries. * With the shift away from large concentrations of “boots on the ground” during Obama’s second term and Trump’s presidency, the U.S. moved toward a militarist-lite strategy that embraced drone strikes, which were illegally used against sovereign nations across the globe. The Obama administration launched a total of 186 drone strikes in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and in South Asia (Pakistan) in its first two years in office. By comparison, Trump launched 238 strikes in his first two years. Unfortunately, comprehensive data on Trump’s strikes and the deaths they produced were not available from 2019 onward, when Trump revoked a 2016 Obama-era rule requiring open reporting of these strikes and their impact. The revocation made it easier for Trump to utilize drone strikes with minimal transparency and accountability. * Trump significantly increased the risk of nuclear war with Russia, China, and North Korea. Trump’s chief strategist, the criminally charged (and now pardoned) Steve Bannon casually threatened nuclear war with China in the name of saving “face” due to China’s attempts to expand its military presence in the South China Sea. Bannon’s saber rattling was echoed by Trump in his own racist and xenophobic attacks on China, which he shamelessly derided for failing to contain the “China virus”/ “Kung flu.” Trump’s attacks on China were accompanied by a marked increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans. Trump’s provocations included his announcement that he might have to “totally destroy” North Korea, and his abandonment of the U.S.-Russia START anti-nuclear proliferation agreement, which is slated to expire in February of 2021. The treaty has been imperiled by Trump’s refusal to agree to a simple renewal, after lamenting that China is not a party to the agreement. * Trump’s efforts to deny the realities of the escalating climate crisis fueled his decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris agreement. Although Biden immediately announced his intention to re-enter the U.S. into this agreement, Trump’s withdrawal provided the U.S. with four years of freedom from working toward stabilizing and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Trump’s baseless claim that climate change is a conspiracy concocted by China to destroy the U.S. economy is part of a larger problem of American denial, even as we face the dire threat to human survival posed by a warming planet. As was recognized following Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris agreement, the U.S. refusal to lead on climate change would have deleterious consequences, undercutting the willingness of other major polluting countries to carry the load and compensate for U.S. intransigence. * On the catastrophe of Covid-19, the outgoing Trump administration has perhaps irreparably damaged the U.S. reputation throughout the world, via its embrace of the disastrous “herd immunity” approach, which idealizes mass infections and death, and was associated with an estimated 130,000 to 210,000 avoidable deaths in the first 8 months of the pandemic alone. Coupled with U.S. willful ignorance to the dangers of Covid was the Trump administration’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization, which the Lancet medical journal condemned as “unlawful” and as “threaten[ing] global and U.S. health and security.” Trump’s withdrawal from the WHO, coupled with his cruel calls for “herd immunity,” sent a signal to the rest of the world that the U.S. holds fundamental contempt for medical science at a time when the worst pandemic in a century has led to the deaths of more than 400,000 Americans and more than 2 million people across the globe. * On the corruption issue, Trump pioneered the art of clientelism with regard to the fiascos commonly known as Russiagate and Ukrainegate. I was never a true believer in the exaggerated, even propagandistic accounts of “Russiagate” – “golden shower” tape and all – and with regard to alleged Trump-Russian collusion in manipulating the 2016 election. And I didn’t buy into claims of the widely assumed and seldom documented effects of Russian attempts to manipulate the election. It’s not that Trump didn’t try to collude with Russia to manpulate the election outcome – he did – so much as he failed at said collusion, making an extended discusison of the impact of that failure a political distraction. Still, Trump will be remembered for his clientelistic corruption in electoral politics, not so much with Russiagate, but with Ukrainegate. As I argued in late-2019, the available evidence made it clear that the President consciously sought to shake down Ukraine’s President, and to exchange U.S. foreign aid for damaging information on Joe Biden and his family that Trump hoped would help him get re-elected. * In declaring the defeat of ISIS, Trump promised to end U.S. wars, and to terminate U.S. participation in the conflict in Syria. Despite promises that he would remove U.S. forces, 800 troops remained in the country from early 2020 onward. In its partial withdrawal, the U.S. enabled Turkey to invade Syria and commit ethnic cleansing against the Kurds. The Syrian people suffered through the worst of both worlds – a continued U.S. and Russian military presence in their country, coupled with the empowerment of regional neighbors who took advantage of the power vaccum of a partial U.S. withdrawal to assault the Kurds, with an estimated 200,000 being displaced. In September of 2020, Trump continued to lie about his opposition to war, claiming the U.S. was “out of Syria,” despite 500 troops remaining and another 100 being sent there to reinforce the continued campaign against ISIS. * One of the darkest stains on the Trump administration was its empowerment of Saudi Arabia to continue its scorched earth, genocidal level of violence against Yemeni civilians. Imposing a blockade on Yemen in late 2017 in their assault on the country’s Iran-allied Houthi rebels, Saudi Arabia unleashed “a never-ending nightmare” of starvation and destruction that led to the deaths of an estimated 233,000 Yemenis by December of 2020. Aside from the United States’ continued economic and military support for Saudia Arabia through this criminal siege, the Trump administration also vetoed a bipartisan resolution designed to end U.S. military involvement in the conflict. The United States’ criminal actions in Yemen demonstrate its commitment to terrorizing civilians and enabling mass murder. These are not the actions of a principled anti-imperialist, or a president committed to anti-militarism. The Trump administration’s policies represented a continuation of the militarism that has long fueled American foreign policy. Trump’s particular version of militarism was much more blunt than what we saw during the late-Obama years. Obama was a more careful and calculating caretaker of the empire, adopting a lighter version of American militarism than what we saw under Trump. As a result, Obama performed far better in confidence measures included in multi-national opinion surveys when compared to Trump, whose more brazen form of imperialism was far less popular. More effective image management aside, the U.S. empire did not substantively transform from Obama to Trump. It is true that U.S. troop concentations in Afghanistan declined from about 10,000 a year late in Obama’s second term (2015 to 2016), compared to just 2,500 troops in the country by the time Trump left office. But as with Syria, while troops may have been removed, they were never brought home, instead being repositioned throughout the Middle East. U.S. troop levels overseas have remained constant during the late Obama and Trump years, with 200,000 soldiers stationed across the globe at the end of Obama’s presidency, as well at the end of Trump’s tenure. And military spending from the end of Obama’s second term and throughout Trump’s term were generally comparable, consistently ranging from $700 to $800 billion from 2011 to 2019. By comparison, the U.S. allocated between $600 to $700 billion in military spending per year during the post-9/11 Bush years. The radicalization of U.S. foreign policy from Obama’s second term through Trump’s tenure was dramatic. The biggest shift in U.S. foreign policy in managing the empire, however, was not from Obama II to Trump, but from Obama to Obama, comparing his first and second terms. In that time, U.S. policy shifted from the blunt force of a “boots on the ground” approach including multiple wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and involving hundreds of thousands of troops, to a militarist-lite approach that relied heavily on airstrikes, conventional (Libya, Afghanistan, and Syria) and drone-based (throughout MENA and South Asia), and with relatively small concentrations of troops in the field (Afghanistan and Syria). This shift didn’t occur because of any epiphany on Obama’s part. Rather, it was due to rising anti-war sentiment in the United States, which was fueled by war burnout that emerged in the mid-to-late 2000s and that continued in the 2010s. This anti-war movement – which I broadly define to include protesters who were active in the early-to-mid 2000s and the majority of Americans by the late 2000s onward – has imposed serious limits on the ability of the U.S. government to wage war. Considering this shift, and in light of mass public opposition to drawn-out wars with significant casualties, we should expect that the militarist-lite strategy will persist under a Biden presidency. I expect Biden’s militarism to be significantly less blunt than what we saw under Trump. A number of the Trump’s most radical initiatives – including his support for white nationalism, the Muslim travel ban, and the crackdown on legal immigration – will be dramatically scaled back. The travel ban has already been rescinded, and Biden has already repudiated Trump’s white supremacy. We should also expect the xenophobic and unilateral attacks on China and Iran to recede, and the sort of brazen and corrupt clientelism of Ukrainegate is unlikely to define Biden’s presidency. Finally, the clumsy effort to dismiss climate change as a Chinese conspiracy is now a thing of the past. But make no mistake – the U.S. war machine will continue to roll on, even if it’s with a more “human” face. Anthony DiMaggio is Associate Professor of Political Science at Lehigh University. He earned his PhD from the University of Illinois, Chicago, and is the author of 9 books, including most recently: Political Power in America (SUNY Press, 2019), Rebellion in America (Routledge, 2020), and Unequal America (Routledge, 2021). He can be reached at: anthonydimaggio612@gmail.com. A digital copy of Rebellion in America can be read for free here.

The Nazification of the Republican Party BY LORETTA J. ROSS

After World War II, the Nazis who helped Hitler rise to power and murder millions of people, including at least 6 million Jews, were put on trial to send a warning to the world. Not all of them faced a judicial process, but enough were not protected by their high status, official offices, or claims of “innocence” and “patriotism.” Power through violence was the only language they spoke—not justice, not freedom—and they were held accountable. These criminals faced a tribunal at Nürnberg (Nuremberg) so momentous that the disgraced word “Nazi” is forever attached to those who participated in and enabled their horrific crimes. After the war, Germany banned Nazi flags and neo-Nazis. In fact, the only way that Nazi paraphernalia got into Germany was through smuggling from other countries such as the United States, like from Nazi propagandist Gerhard Lauck in Nebraska, the man called the “Farm Belt Führer” who served four years in a German prison for distributing banned pro-Nazi materials throughout Europe. I know this because I teach a course on White Supremacy at Smith College that focuses on anti-Semitism, anti-Black racism, and the many intersecting components of white supremacist ideology. After more than 30 years of organizing and teaching about fascism as a Black feminist activist and academic, I know the destructive influence of these noxious ideas, and I teach young people how to interpret and resist them. Global contempt for the word “Nazi” is a lesson for us today in the United States after the attempted criminal coup at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. Anyone identified as sympathetic, supportive, or financing these seditious acts that attempted to deny the peaceful transfer of power in our country should be treated with the same public condemnation that the Nazis received after World War II. This includes Nazified people in Congress, in the media, in universities, in regular jobs, and throughout society because fascism is not the fevered dream of one delusional man. Trump is a white supremacist; that he is also a deranged narcissist is really incidental. The Republicans are a morally bankrupt political party that supported a deranged president who brought this fragile, evolving democracy to the brink of extinction simply because they can’t stand the glacially slow and righteous empowerment of people of color and any limits on their power to amass an immoral amount of wealth. To paraphrase noted Black educator Vincent Harding, we are citizens of a country that has yet to be realized. The Republican brand as a legitimate political party will be forever associated with far-right ideologies, including neo-Nazis and neo-Confederates. These so-called “respectable” leaders coddled and stoked a white supremacist insurrection by Trump for the past four years. Their transactional opportunism enabled Confederate flags to be defiantly paraded in the U.S. Capitol, a shame not even achieved during the Civil War. They proved they don’t want to share a pluralistic democracy with other political parties and interests. If Republicans can’t permanently dominate this country with a demographically shrinking number of angry white people, they proved they are ready to blow it up, figuratively and literally. Now they want us to rush to forgiveness and reconciliation, and ignore that truth and accountability come first in the achievement of healing. Hitler led an insurrection against the German government in 1923 and was sentenced to five years in jail, served one, and used that leniency to commit the Holocaust. Never forget that premature forgiveness before accountability is dangerous. Fascists are violent because of who THEY are, not what WE DO–like the ordinary Germans who underestimated the Nazis and thought they were just another political party on the right. Germans who weren’t Nazis passively went about their normal affairs by denying the realities of their Jewish neighbors, all for the sake of “unity.” Republicans are no longer entitled to exist as a legitimate political party because this authoritarian backlash has been building since new Civil Rights laws were passed in 1964 and 1965 in response to white racist violence captured on TV that required the National Guard to quell. Then-President Lyndon Johnson predicted that most white people would flee the Democratic Party to join the pro-segregationist, anti-feminist, and anti-gay revanchist political movement of George Wallace, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan. Every undemocratically selected Republican president since the 1960s (by an electoral college designed to be disenfranchising) has failed to repudiate this neo-fascist wing of their party. I’m through giving Republicans the benefit of the doubt after 50 years. The term “Nazi” is not even strong enough to convey the opprobrium and disgust human rights activists feel for those who brazenly claim they are simply patriots with different opinions. From the White House, to the Congress, to the streets, they declared war on democracy. They are seditionists, co-conspirators, and neo-Nazis hiding in plain sight who chose to use whatever power, platforms, and microphones they had to overturn this system of government. Their apparent goal is an apartheid-like system in which an embattled minority of people rule over millions of people who oppose them. We must send an unmistakable signal that this will not be tolerated when a more competent neo-fascist seeks to gain permanent power in the Congress or White House in the future. I’m calling them American Nazis, who adapted the playbook of the Third Reich. Trump may be gone but Trumpism is not. As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said, they prioritized their “whiteness over democracy.” This is highlighted by their implacable attack on voting rights. Republicans who encouraged this dangerous resurrection of fascism are already trying to erase what happened or describe it as simply a “First Amendment Protest.” These apologists trying to launder their shredded reputations should be denied jobs, media opportunities, publishing contracts, and all other opportunities to spread their contempt for democracy. As philosopher Karl Popper observed in 1945, “In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance.” We must defend an open, democratic society against these forces of fascism disguised as a respectable Republican Party that encouraged a white supremacist insurrection that seeks to rule like kings above the law. They see calls for unity and civility as weakness, as all fascists do. They take advantage of an open society to undermine the incremental progress of the 20th century in race, gender, citizenship, national, and international relations. For over a century they’ve proven they can’t be trusted with military power, disrupting other democracies by fomenting wars and low-intensity conflicts around the world that have killed millions of people. They are unable to accept the complexity of a multi-cultural and multi-racial globalized world, so they stew in their resentments, and fight every effort to democratize the privileges and benefits of our world. They are at the natural demise of a political party that sought to hold onto power through a web of lies to their followers to enrich a small cabal of people. America’s tattered global reputation is at stake in this unending Civil War. Instead of denouncing the traitors in 1865, we allowed them to be rehabilitated and enshrined in monuments across the country. Will our descendants look back and see that we flinched yet again when it was time to hold insurrectionists accountable? If not, we’ll have the shortest Reconstruction in history. Our commitment to human rights, just laws, social welfare, global peace, and democratic governance is what authoritarians seek to undermine through abuse of the concept of freedom. We should call them all American Nazis and prevent them from hiding behind mealy-mouthed words because they’ve shown us who they are. Now we must believe them. Loretta J. Ross has co-written three books on reproductive justice: Undivided Rights: Women of Color Organize for Reproductive Justice; Reproductive Justice: An Introduction; and Radical Reproductive Justice: Foundations, Theory, Practice, Critique. Her current book, Calling in the Calling Out Culture, is forthcoming in 2021.

The Twilight of a Wannabe Fascist: A Timeline of Trump’s Last Year BY GARY LEUPP

2/6/2000: the Senate acquits Trump of the House impeachment charges; Trump at 42% approval; election prospects look good 3/3 (Super Tuesday): Joe Biden sweeps Democratic primaries, reversing Bernie Sanders’ gains; Biden backed by Wall Street and the Democratic National Committee blocks Sanders; the electoral choice will be between center-right Democrat Biden and Clinton-Obama normalcy, or four more years of Trump 3/13: as COVID19 becomes an issue, and awareness of Trump’s criminal irresponsibility spreads, Trump belatedly announces a national health emergency and first measures against it April: many states modify their absentee/mail-in voting procedures in response to the Coronovirus 5/25: police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis; revival of Black Lives Matter on unprecedented scale, more diverse than ever (even in virus conditions); mass media increasingly inclined to discuss “systemic racism” as a real thing and disparage the Trump forces for denying the obvious; renewed emphasis on Trump’s racism and “divisiveness” as an election issue 6/1: during BLM demonstrations in Washington D.C. Trump has troops clear Lafayette Square with tear gas so he and senior administration officials including Gen Mark Milley, chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, can walk across street from White House to St. John’s Church and he can wave a Bible 6/11: Milley apologizes about presence at 6/1 event with Trump: tells National Defense University in recorded commencement address: “I should not have been there. My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics” 7/1: Trump denounces BLM as “a symbol of hate,” further mobilizing his electoral base around white supremacy; links anti-racism to Marxism, Antifa, socialism, communism, etc. 7/7: Trump withdraws U.S. from World Health Organization after it fails “to take requested and greatly needed reforms” July: Trump begins to strongly criticize mail-in ballots (as allowing for fraud); mounting criticism of Trump’s incompetent handling of Covid crisis 8/17: Trump declares that the only way he’ll lose is if the election is “rigged” and predicts Democrats’ mail-in ballots will be used to rig it 8/24-27: Republican National Convention in Charlotte, NC: a display of fascistic idiocy, approving no new party platform but uniting in support for Trump 8/28: in response to serious concerns, Gen. Mark Milley, chair of Joint Chiefs of Staff, assures Congress U.S. military will have no role in determining outcome of U.S. election 9/17: Trump signs executive order establishing 1776 Commission to “promote patriotic education” to correct the “radicalized view of American history” which has “vilified Founders and founding” with “critical race theory” (Commission results composed by non-historians, including top Trump advisor Steven Miller, a Zionist-fascist and white supremacist, published on MLK’s birthday, 1/18/2021) 9/29: in presidential debate with Biden, Trump states: “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by. But I’ll tell you what, I’ll tell you what, somebody’s got to do something about antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.” 10/15: Trump tells Newsmax he’s “not happy” with attorney general Bill Barr when he found no criminal wrongdoing by Obama administration in connection with 2016 election 10/26: Senate confirms Amy Coney Barrett as Supreme Court justice 11/3: election occurs as usual; Biden is apparent winner 11/4: Trump declares victory; Republicans overwhelmingly agree that he won 11/6: networks (except Fox News) call election for Biden, with 51% of the vote to Trump’s 47% and with seven million more votes 11/7: Fox News calls election for Biden; Trump enraged, denounces the loyal obsequious network and and urges followers to switch to Newsmax 11/3-11/27: Trump and allies challenge results in the courts; more than 30 law cases filed against election results fail; Trump further enraged 11/12: Trump attacks Fox News (after the network noted that Trump’s claims about the election were false) in a tweet: “They forgot the Golden Goose.” (An extraordinary admission of a purely transactional mentality.) 11/17: Reuters poll shows 52% Republicans think Trump won election 12/3: Trump tweets against Supreme Court: “The Supreme Court decision on voting in Pennsylvania is a VERY dangerous one. It will allow rampant and unchecked cheating and will undermine our entire systems of laws. It will also induce violence in the streets. Something must be done!” 12/9: all states have certified Biden’s win, but Trump continues to charge “massive fraud”; 72% Republicans now think Trump won 12/12: U.S. Supreme Court rejects Texas attorney general Alan Wilson’s suit challenging election results with amicus briefs signed by 127 Republican lawmakers; Trump tweets in rage against the court he stacked: “within a flash, [the suit] is thrown out and gone, without even looking at the many reasons it was brought. A Rigged Election, fight on!” 12/12: Attorney General Bill affirms that there was no widespread voter fraud; Trump tweets: “A big disappointment!” and “IF Biden gets in, nothing will happen to Hunter or Joe. Barr will do nothing, and the new group of partisan killers coming in will quickly kill it all.” 12/15: Barr resigns 12/19: Trump tweets his base: “There will be a big protest in D.C. Jan. 9. Be there. It will be wild!” 1/2: Trump calls Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger demanding 11,780 votes be changed; Raffensperger politely and firmly refuses and records the embarrassing conversation on tape for public exposure 1/3: Trump attempts to replace Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen with his flunky Jeffrey Clark, so that he can order a Georgia recount. Rosen alerts the whole Justice Department leadership about Trump’s plans and in the face of the threat of mass resignations, Trump is forced to relent—another infuriating failure [speculative: Trump aware of some degree of coordination between forces that stormed the Capitol and certain sitting Republican lawmakers?] 1/4: Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio arrested in Washington D.C., charged with destruction of church property in an-anti BLM event in December 1/6: Vice President Mike Pence tells Trump in letter he does not have constitutional power to prevent certification of election results; earlier Trump had told him he could “be a patriot or a pussy” 1/6: Trump rallies thousands of his followers at the Ellipsis, denounces Pence for his weakness, directs crowd to walk down Pennsylvania Ave. (with him, he says, although he scurries away to the White House) and head to the Capitol to “fight like hell” to stop certification of the vote 1/6: At about 1:30 p.m. around 800 Proud Boys, Boogaloo Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, QAnon, klansmen, nazis, QAnon devotees, Bible-toting Christian crazies, active duty military and cops, retired cops, veterans, grandmas grieving for the cannibalized children, anticommunists with old South Vietnamese flags, miscellaneous curious fools break through police lines, smash open windows and storm the Capitol building killing one cop and causing five other deaths (including that of a Ashli Babbitt, a 14 year Air Force veteran and QAnon idiot who thought the coronvirus was “commie bullshit” shot dead by a cop as she tried to enter the Speaker’s Lobby through a smashed window) 1/6: Mike Pence as Trump’s most deferential of yes-men and as vice president of the United States is upset that Trump would sic a mob chanting “Hang Pence, hang Pence!” on the Capitol, and Sen. Mike McConnell is not amused by the sacking of the cathedral of bourgeois democracy; Trump invites unprecedented loathing among those who had hitherto merely feared him 1/6: within hours Trump is persuaded by White House lawyers to urge his followers to go home, puzzling some in his base; at 6:01 p.m. President Trump tweets: “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been badly & unfairly treated for so long. Go home with love & in peace. Remember this day forever!” 1/6 around 7:00 p.m.: Twitter and Facebook remove Trump posts, suspend accounts temporarily 1/6 around 8:00: Capitol police declare building secure; Congressional procedures resume, Biden victory recorded officially 1/6-7: Canadian, British, Norwegian, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Icelandic, Greek prime ministers, the German president, the president of the EU, the NATO secretary-general all express concern at the shocking event Trump has provoked 1/7: Trump is forced to denounce Capitol raid as “heinous,” insist that violence has nothing to do with “our movement,” urging “healing” and “reconciliation” and confusing many followers who thought he’d praise the patriots; he reportedly worried afterwards that he’d alienated supporters with the insincere statement 1/7: Trump deputy national security adviser Matt Pottinger resigns 1/7: Facebook suspends Trump account through end of term 1/8: Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, confers with Nancy Pelosi about nuclear command authority 1/9: Twitter suspends Trump’s account; corporate America in general shuns Trump; at least 50 major companies, including Marriott, Dow Chemical, Verizon, Blue Cross, Hallmark, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, Ford, etc. soon announce they will donate no money to the campaigns of the Republicans who voted against certifying the vote 1/9: Jake Angeli (Jacob Anthony Chansley), QAnon shaman, arrested in Arizona, appeals for pardon from Trump (but Trump does not grant) 1/12: Deutsche Bank cuts ties with Trump 1/13: 2nd impeachment of Trump, with 10 Republicans joining 1/13: it is announced there will be over 20,000 National Guardsmen deployed to defend the inauguration ceremony against domestic terrorists 1/17: widely predicted pro-Trump uprisings do not occur in state capitals 1/19: Business Insider reports Trump administration staffers are getting snubbed while hunting for new jobs 1/19: Oath Keeper leader Thomas Edward Caldwell arrested in Virginia, charged with conspiracy, illegal entry into Capitol 1/20: Trump leaves White House peacefully, leaving note for Biden; there is no disorder in the capital during the inauguration 1/20: day passes without the predicted martial law and mass arrests predicted by QAnon; disillusions some adherents;America First leader Nicholas Fuentes,writes in his Telegram channel that Trump’s response to the Capitol rampage was “very weak and flaccid” and that he is “Not the same guy that ran in 2015.” 1/20: Proud Boys post on Telegram: “Trump will go down as a total failure” 1/20: Proud Boys leader Joseph Biggs is arrested in Florida, charged with disorderly conduct at the Capitol 1/20: Morgan Lewis law firm cuts ties to Trump 1/26: all but five Republicans in Senate vote to oppose impeachment hearing, indicating Trump’s continued grip over party ********** So what happened? A wannabe fascist finished up his term, successfully maintaining his substantial base but convincingly losing the election. His crude bullying efforts to force the courts, state officials, federal officials, top law officers, the Vice President to validate his lie that the election had been stolen were repulsed at every turn. He learned he could not manipulate the Joint Chiefs of Staff at will or force Fox News to declare the election stolen. He retained his control over most of the Republicans in Congress who voted to oppose certification of the election results. That was his crowning achievement: to integrate the party into his final failed bid to cling to power, or failing that, leaving doubts about his successor’s legitimacy. But this of course has been Trump’s MO since he challenged Obama’s legitimacy, even before 2015. But Trump never pulled off the fascist coup feared and predicted by some. Trump never established or presided over a fascist party or even network. His phone call to the Georgia secretary of state was an open appeal for assistance in a coup; “Give me a break!” he pleaded. But Raffensperger refused to join the plot. And Trump’s proposal that Rosen, Barr’s successor, step down in favor of Clark backfired badly when the Justice Department leaders threatened to resign en masse. His savage betrayal of his most loyal lackey at the end only spurred Pence to not only declare Biden the victor but to attend his inauguration and congratulate Kamala Harris. Trump’s moves were anything but shrewdly calculating, activating a collective plan. They were irrational acts venting personal rage, futile attempts to bludgeon frightened subordinates to do his bidding. It urns out there are limits to a wannabe fascist’s ability to intimidate in the absence of a matrix of brownshirts. In the end Trump quietly left the White House, a defeated, frightened, financially hemorrhaging, legally challenged, internationally discredited and ridiculed, isolated and shunned figure. So much for Trump’s fascist threat. In the end there was no rational connection between his will to control and his power to command events. If the endorphin rush of the crowds, the fawning of his advisors and the pandering of Fox News truly persuaded him that the masses loved him, and the polls were all wrong, he learned in his last weeks that he could not order state and federal officials to fake election results for him. They, at least, did not love him enough. He hit up against empirical reality, challenged it, thought that by vague exhortations to “fight” he could either (1) intimidate the Senate from ratifying the election or (2) at least demonstrate his capacity to wreak havoc. If he believed he could obtain the first goal—a coup, executed by a mix of of white nationalists dressed up as soldiers with only the barest of game plans—he was indeed delusional. If he believed he could go out with a bang, impressing his fandom with his bold willingness to shatter glass (to take our country back from the radical socialists), he probably succeeded—although disillusionment with him is already setting in. “Remember this day forever!” he tweeted around 6:00 p.m. on the day of the storming. The day the people enraged by the “steal” stormed the heavens striving to find justice, failing but honorably, patriotically registering their dissent. That’s the face of Trumpian fascism as its most virulent: confused conspiracy nuts rifling through Ted Cruz’s papers on the Senate floor; a goon in full body armor roaming the Senate chamber, plastic handcuts in hand; a horned shaman bellowing a Tarzan yell from the balcony while others complain he’s making a fool of himself; a mob of hundreds chanting “Hang Pence, hang Pence;” cop-lovers ramming cops with Blue Lives Matter flag poles and crushing one officer’s head with a fire extinguisher. There’s a lot of fascism there, to be sure. But there was no coordinated fascist movement, no real plan for power seizure; no joint manifestos, no mass arrests. If Trump had insufficient political capital to suborn McConnell and Pence, Raffensperger and Rosen, he surely lacked the clout to pull off an armed coup. Instead he embarrassed and incriminated himself. Trump’s historical contribution was to draw global attention to the extent of the toxic fascistic presence in our midst. We’d always known it was there, but we didn’t realize its magnitude. About one-third of the people are so ignorant, confused, frightened, resentful, and racist; so unaware of history, or wedded to understandings of history based on biblical myth, that they cannot think critically, digesting information. They seize on emotionally appealing delusions, insisting on their “right” to believe whatever they want. They are incapable of understanding that there is only one reality. They are eminently exploitable by QAnon-type snake-oil salesmen. They are raw material for a new fascist movement but they are more couch potatoes indulging in social media fantasies than militiamen and women honing coup skills. Some are now actually positing that with the departure of Trump power has passed from the fascists into the hands of (small-d) democrats. That is to say: we had a fascist period. But now, thank God, it’s over! An alternative explanation would be that a (merely) WANNABE fascist held presidential power for four years (all the while impressing top aides as an “idiot” and “moron”). While clinging to a substantial power base he never won over the majority to his more fascistic views and policies; indeed he was voted out of power in part due to concern about what the corporate media i(n its understated way) called his “authoritarian tendencies.” While averring love for the military, virtually as a matter of principle (and just like Biden), he generated little love among the brass repulsed by his condescension and manifest ignorance of military matters. He did please the police unions (whose traditional allies include, as you know, Joe Biden). Law, order and the containment of threatening Blacks and Mexicans (inherently rapacious, and drawn to radical Marxism) were his issues. He (jokingly) proposed in pep talks before cops that cops treat the people more brutally. That he was, as a human being, a vicious Mafiosa-type thug was never in question. But so dysfunctional! So incompetent! So absolutely unable to pull it off! So lacking in reliable troops! Deserted by his lieutenants at the end! Left with the vile Stephen Miller submitting his 1776 text correcting U.S. history on Martin Luther King Day, 2021, meeting with ridicule. The wannabe fascist shrivels up inside the wannabe business tycoon, wannabe deal-maker, wannabe best-selling author, wannabe popular culture icon. Trump was a wannabe threat who sought to frighten and intimidate. He lost when he overreached. He had apparently never really studied the way the U.S. polity works. The extent of his basic ignorance (and readiness to openly express it, in his disarmingly stupid style) shocked aides. He really seemed to have no idea about the constitutional division of powers, etc.—the basic stuff. His demands for personal loyalty clashed so overtly with the law that multiple subordinates were obliged to resist. Bourgeois democracy easily withstood the lame assault. Trump’s stunningly stupid egoism suddenly appeared in sharp relief as 25,000 national Guardsmen deployed in D.C. to prevent his crazies from staging a second riot, while the vanquished wannabe retreated to his golf course resort in Florida following a subdued farewell ceremony at Andrews. What’s left now are fascist features in the liberal bourgeois state, most predating Trump; re-energized neofascist factions who have profited by the new atmosphere under Trump (but who are divided on such matters as Trump’s total support for Israel); unprecedentedly fascist rhetoric and trends within the Republican Party (likely producing a split); and the emergence of “fascism” as a category in mainstream political commentary. People in this country are coming to see that beyond the tolerated tribes of Republicans and Democrats there is a spectrum of ideologies that extend from fascism to communism—“isms” the masses only vaguely understand, in which the ruling class (committed to bipartisan moderation) is hardly inclined to educate them. Whereas “socialism”—famously ruled out by the DNC in destroying Sander’s campaign in March to rig the nomination for Biden—beckons our youth, fascism repels them. They might not be sure about what it is, exactly, but they know it’s racist, anti-democratic, xenophobic and evil. That Trump was repudiated by many as a fascist is surely a good thing. But did he ever constitute a real fascist threat to the bourgeois-democratic state? In retrospect the evidence is not strong. Trump succeeded in retaining a solid support base of about 40% of the population, and a somewhat larger percentage of voters, while spewing racist, anti-immigrant, fascistic rhetoric. He was able to rally the great majority of Republicans in Congress to support his agenda and even, at the end, abet his efforts to overturn the result of the election. He rallies them now to reject his impeachment of the grounds of incitement to riot. He has reshaped the party to serve as the vile vehicle of his own advancement and defense. But it still harbors its high-profile dissidents (like Romney, Cheney, Toomey, Sasse, Kinzinger, Murkowsky), some of whom have supported impeachment. Some sitting Republican lawmakers may have abetted the Capitol break-in. Two new House members, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, are QAnon believers. There are members who probably meet the definition of “fascist.” The threat is real. But there is no disciplined national party with a fascist agenda, nor a state apparatus so riddled by fascist infiltration that a few calls from the White House to Deep State partisans (plus a state of emergency and martial law) could finagle a second term. The column of Oath Keeper cosplayers who spearhead the Capitol break-in seem to have had a primitive plan, thwarted when they stumbled into an evacuated Senate floor. But there was no clear political statement or result of the short-lived occupation by the gang that couldn’t shoot straight, other than establishing a heroic precedent for future fascists. And disgusting the majority that continues to respect bourgeois democracy. Trump showed the world the dimensions of U.S. fascism. His election prompted the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville in 2017, in which maybe 250 neonazis marched, chanting “Jews will not replace us.” (Trump famously opined that there were “fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville, even though you might suppose that with an Orthodox Jewish son-in-law and Jewish convert daughter he’d be upset with the manifest antisemitism.) Trump inspired the worst filth to raise their heads publicly. But he did not, probably could not, effectively place himself at their head. So he retreats into his wonted solipsism, licking his wounds. The world has been so unfair! All he wanted to do was to foist himself on the planet, make Europe pay, take the oil to pay us back for war expenses, undo everything Obama did, make Iran kiss his ass, give Israel everything it ever wanted, restore America’s right to release unlimited carbon emissions, keep out Mexicans and Muslims, exclude transgendered people from the military, defend religious bigotry, and encourage fear and hatred! All he did was exercise his right of free speech to inspire the people! And so the Democrats—the radical-liberal communist Democrats whose minds are filled with anti-white hatred—rigged the election to topple him. And his own people, bade to invade the Senate floor, were unable to undo the Democrats’ shameful work. A coup plotter with no serious troops on the ground, Trump watched the unfolding of the Jan. 6 drama passively, delighted but paralyzed, refusing urgent calls. These were not the actions of a calculating fascist. We must return to the issue of malignant narcissism, emphasizing both the malign (his snarling resentment and general misanthropy) and narcissistic (his obsession with himself, lack of empathy, inability to acknowledge fault). Trump’s personality was able to encourage U.S. fascist trends but not channel them effectively as a political movement. The movement such as it was peaked on Jan. 6 with the bumbling attack on the Congress in session. The Storming of the Capitol will be the stuff of fascist ballads. But quite likely, Trump’s role in it will be recalled as a Judas-like betrayal. Trump the man will be weakened by cascading revelations about his illegal business dealings, misuse of campaign funds, sexual misdeeds, and generally loathsome character. The most brain-dead will linger in his toxic cult, capable of smashing windows and crushing cops’ heads with fire extinguishers. But they were never poised to really seize power, which remains firmly in the hands of bourgeois (small-d) democrats. The current primary challenge to the latter is less to repulse “fascism” than to retain the support of progressives (whose agenda they in fact deplore) to return to a Cold War normalcy the world has passed by. Gary Leupp is Professor of History at Tufts University, and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of Religion.

How to Do “Regime Change” Correctly: a Blueprint for the Biden Administration BY SASAN FAYA

In my college years, as a member of the Iranian Students Association, one of my political tasks was to dispatch progressive American attorneys to Iran to investigate human rights abuses by the Shah, including torture and murder of political prisoners. These trips and the subsequent reports submitted by the attorneys were often successful in reducing the pain and suffering of prisoners of conscience, since the Shah was cognizant of his image abroad. Afterall, he was a creature of the West and dependent on it. He owed his throne to the 1953 American-British backed coup and was nurtured by the Western imperial powers throughout his reign. But his dependence was also his Achilles’ heel. In a country with a long history of popular sentiment against tyrannical rule, being an appendage of foreign powers could be fatal. And hence we had the late 1970s popular uprising in Iran. The 1979 Iranian revolution ended the reign of the Shah and his human rights abuses. But the Islamic Republic that emerged was not much better than the Shah in tolerating dissent and respecting civil liberties. However, unlike the Shah the new government was not only independent of the West but was hostile to it. Indeed, soon after the revolution some foreign firms, including American firms, were nationalized in Iran. Then came the attack on the “nest of spies” (the American Embassy) and the detention of its occupants. What followed was more than four decades of attempts by Western imperial powers, headed by the US, to overthrow the new “regime” in Iran. I put regime in quotation marks since, according to the same imperial powers, any government that is unfriendly to the West is simply a regime and any friendly colonialist or despot, even if it dismembers a journalist, is a government or even a “kingdom.” Attempts to overthrow the Islamic Republic have mostly relied on sanctions, both unilateral and multilateral. But they have also used such methods as murder, assassination, sabotage, invasion of territorial integrity of the country, threats of war, etc. The reason given for these attempts have varied over the years. Among many, the US has condemned Iran for nationalizing US industries, hostage taking, destabilizing Afghanistan, harboring Al-Qaeda, lacking democracy, being ruled by unelected individuals, violating human rights, developing weapons of mass destruction, wanting to wipe Israel off the map, supporting the Syrian “regime,” threatening its neighbors, developing long-range missiles, supporting Houthi “rebels,” destabilizing the Middle East, etc. The Carter Administration used the issues of hostage taking and nationalization of US industries as reasons for sanctioning Iran. Interestingly, the issue of violation of human rights, which was continuously used to destabilize the Soviet Union, was hardly ever raised against Iran. Carter and his associates, particularly Zbigniew Brzezinski, came up with the clever idea that a war between Iran and Iraq will be useful in releasing the hostages and, ultimately, overthrowing both the Iranian and Iraqi “regimes.” So, they gave Saddam Hussein the greenlight to go ahead with his invasion of Iran. The eight-year war that ensued killed, by some estimates, a million people. The Reagan Administration sanctioned Iran and accused it of destabilizing the region. They flirted with Saddam Hussein and closed their eyes to his use of chemical weapons against Iranians and his own Kurdish population. They engaged Iranian boats in the Persian Gulf and even shot down “accidentally” an Iranian civilian airliner with 290 people on board. Yet, they tried to sell arms to Iran with the help of the Israelis in the so-called Iran-Contra scandal. All along they gave false information to both Iraq and Iran to bleed each other to death. Ultimately, they hoped, the two “regimes” would be replaced with US-Israel friendly governments. The Clinton Administration’s policy toward Iran mostly followed the scripts written by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and its think tank affiliate the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). The clever Israeli surrogates came up with three main reasons to sanction Iran: Iran’s support for international terrorism (by which they meant any group hostile to Israel), opposition to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process (which was abandoned by Israel and the US), and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction (which meant nothing at the time). The administration, with the help of allies of Israel in the US Congress, imposed the toughest sanctions on Iran with the hope of bringing about “regime change.” The Bush Administration, which was heavily dominated by Israel’s operatives called “neoconservatives,” included Iran in the “axis of evil” and hoped to “rollback” the Islamic Republic once the takeover of Iraq was finished. They threw everything but the kitchen sink at Iran; accusing it of support for “terrorist” groups opposed to Israel, pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, destabilizing Afghanistan, harboring Al-Qaeda, lacking democracy, being ruled by unelected individuals, violating human rights, not protecting the rights of women, not being forward-looking and modern, etc. They levied sanctions after sanctions on Iran, including three UN sanctions. They threatened the country with war and, indeed, considered military actions against it at the request of Israel. The Obama Administration was no better than the previous ones when it came to Iran. Actually, it was worse in its first four years. As Barak Obama states in his 2020 book, when he first took office, he thought that the problem with the Iran policy “was that the existing sanctions were too weak to have much of an impact”! He therefore let his WINEP gang devise the policy of “tough diplomacy.” The policy consisted mostly of “crippling,” “paralyzing” or “lethal” sanctions. Among these sanctions was the fourth UN sanctions that the Bush Administration was unable to pass. The sanctions passed against Iran during the first term of the Obama Administration were the harshest since the Clinton era. With the help of Israel, Obama also carried out a campaign of assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists, sabotaging Iranian nuclear facilities and trying to stir up ethnic tensions. Yet, in the end, Obama realized that “regime change” in Iran is not easy and pursuing the policy of tough diplomacy could eventually lead to a war with uncertain outcomes. Hence, in his second term in office, he pushed for a nuclear agreement with Iran known as the JCPOA (Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action). The agreement only lifted nuclear related sanctions on Iran. All other sanctions remained intact. The JCPOA was opposed by Israel and its many supporters in the US Congress. Hence it was a shaky and unstable agreement. The farcical Administration of Donald Trump overthrew the JCPOA at the stroke of a pen. The wild and insane gang in the White House, led by craziest Israeli surrogates calling themselves The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, waged a “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran with the hope of a “regime change.” This included not only bringing back all the old sanctions but levying new ones. This was sanctioning Iran on steroids. Announcements of sanctions against Iran became almost a weekly event. Sometimes the same individuals and entities that had been sanctioned were sanctioned again. Among those sanctioned were the “supreme leader” of Iran, the foreign minister, and the entire Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The wild beasts in the White House even tried, and failed, to bring back the old UN sanctions using some bizarre and twisted argument. Maximum pressure also meant threatening Iran with military attacks and creating conditions for armed conflict, including flying drones close to, or over, Iran. It also included tanker skirmishes in the Persian Gulf, such as chasing Iranian oil tankers and trying to capture them, as well as assassinating the Iranian General Qasem Soleimani and assisting Israelis to murder another Iranian nuclear scientist. So far none of the attempts by the US to overthrow the Iranian “regime” has worked. One US government after another has come and gone without realizing the dream of overthrowing the Islamic Republic. Why? Because in a country such as Iran, with a long history of nationalism, it is hard to overthrow an independently minded government, however despotic that government might be. It was this sense of nationalism that caused the downfall of the Shah. From the perspectives of many Iranians, if there is a strongman ruling Iran, it should at least not be the US’s strongman. The Islamic Republic understands this reality. That is why maintaining the concept of “enemy” is so important to them. Everything terrible that happens in the country is the fault of the enemy, weather true or not. Yes, much of economic troubles in Iran are the result of sanctions, but not all, as even some politicians in Iran occasionally admit. Mismanagement, corruption, ineptness, ignorance, backwardness, internal feuding, have all contributed, along with brutal sanctions, to the faltering economy. So, President Biden, here is a simple blueprint for achieving your goals, including a “regime change”: Lift the sanctions. Stop imprisoning Iranians on flimsy charges of violating these sanctions. Stop assassinating Iranians. Stop sabotaging Iranian nuclear and non-nuclear facilities. Stop threatening Iran. Stop sending B52s, warships, and drones to the Persian Gulf. Stop interfering in Iran’s internal affairs. Stop even condemning the Islamic Republic for violating human rights. Afterall, as one of the greatest purveyors of violence around the world, the US is in no position to talk about human rights. Your condemnations ring hollow. In short, leave the Islamic Republic to its own devices! Also, call off your hound dogs in the Middle East, the Saudis, the Emiratis, and in particular, the Israelis. Tell them that they are on their own. Better yet, let them know that they should reform their own brutal regimes. Tell them that they should not occupy lands that belong to others, or threaten their neighbors, or wage wars, or dismember a journalist. If you do these, you will have a much better chance of achieving your stated and unstated goals. Without enemies at the gate, the Islamic Republic will have no use for highly enriched uranium or massive amount of low enriched uranium. It will have no use for long range-missiles. It will have no reason to act belligerently in the Persian Gulf. Above all, without enemies, the Islamic Republic will have no one to blame for when it comes to social and economic woes in Iran. It will have to become fully accountable to its own citizens for whatever ill the society faces. It will have to respect civil rights and liberties. Otherwise, it will face the wrath of a population that has always fought against tyrannical rule. Sasan Fayazmanesh will be a panelist, along with Richard Falk, in an online discussion of Iran Policy in the Biden Era. Register here. Sasan Fayazmanesh is Professor Emeritus of Economics at California State University, Fresno, and is the author of Containing Iran: Obama’s Policy of “Tough Diplomacy.” He can be reached at: sasan.fayazmanesh@gmail.com.

Thirty-One Flavors of Fascism BY PAUL STREET

“Leftists” I know have had their undies tied up in a nasty knot bunch over other leftists’ use of the F-word – fascism – to describe Trump and his backers. Fascism, seriously? Yes, absolutely, provided we have a reasonable definition. In his incisive 2009 book The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, David Neiwert rightly observed that “Fascism is not a single, readily identifiable principle but rather a political pathology best understood (as in psychology) as a constellation of traits. Taken individually,” Neiwert wrote, “many of these traits seem innocuous enough, even readily familiar, a part of the traditional American hurry-burly. A few of them …are present throughout the political spectrum. Only when taken together does the constellation become clear, and then it is fated to take on a life of its own.” What comprises this collection of characteristics? Here are my top 29 traits of fascism, cobbled together with no claim to originality in concept or phrasing: +1. Obsessive anti-liberalism co-joined with obsessive antisocialism/anti-communism and anti-conservatism but with an understanding that fascists are willing to engage in alliance with other sectors, especially on the conservative side. +2. A sense of grave national and social crisis that cannot to effectively met with traditional solutions from liberals and conservatives. +3. Fairy-tale and vengeful notions of a glorious national past that was betrayed – “stabbed in the back” – by evil liberal and Left elites linked to a sense of the decline of the nation and/or a once properly dominant ethnic or religious group’s power under the destructive impact of class struggle, radicalism, liberal individualism, multi-culturalism, and outside/alien influences. +4. A quest for national re-birth linked to “palingenetic ultra-nationalism,” meaning, in historian Roger Griffin’s words, a drive “to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing in on a heightened sense of national belonging or national identity.” +5. The passionate belief that one’s formerly and properly dominant national, ethnic, and/or religious group is being unfairly victimized. +6. A fierce attachment to one’s national, ethnic, and/or religious group coupled with the belief that any action without legal or moral limits is justified to eliminate perceived threats to the group’s enemies, both internal and external. +7. Chronic “Us and Them” scapegoating of demonized Others accused of causing great harm. +8. The dehumanization of racial, ethnic, religious, and cultural Others and political enemies, intimately related to the willingness to abandon past legal and moral norms when it comes to eliminating the threat(s) these demonized Others and enemies are said to pose. +9. The “right” of the supposedly good and “chosen” people to dominate the supposedly bad Others without since the “right” is conferred by Darwinian and moral superiority. +10. A fierce and fervent anti-socialism and opposition to Leftists, linked to incessant fearmongering about the real or alleged threat of socialist, communist, and/or left anarchist revolution. +11. An obsession with the alleged evil of liberals, combined with a false conflation of liberals and “the Left” and the charge that liberals are too weak to stop Left radicals from “taking over the country. +12. Fear, suspicion, and hatred of large, cosmopolitan cities, seen as fetid hotbeds of demonized Others: racial and ethnic minorities, intellectuals, liberals, leftists, intellectuals, feminists, labor activists, civil and human rights movements, “sexual deviants,” and race-mixers. +13. A predilection for bizarre, offensive, and dangerous conspiracy theories such as the notion that the Jewish Elders of Zion and George Soros are secretly controlling world events. +14. Relentless attacks on intellectuals, expertise, and reasoned public discourse. +15. A relentless cultural and propaganda war on truth: constant assaults on the public’s capacity to perceive reality. +16. Demonization and shaming of the previously normal bourgeois free press as an “enemy of the [chosen] people” combined with the cultivation of separate propagandistic anti-truth news and commentary avenues to reach the fascist base above and beyond “liberal” and “radical Left” media. +17. The promotion and glorification of traditional social and political hierarchy beneath revolutionary and transformative claims. +18. Hyper-masculinist patriarchy attached to “traditional” oppressive gender roles, the degradation of women, and attacks on women’s rights. +19. Unceasing attacks on the rule of law while upholding the police and military state in the name of law and order: chronic lawlessness in the name of law and order. +20. Rejection of constitutional and parliamentary checks and balances and aspirations for the introduction of a one-party state. +21. A Social Darwinian fixation on extreme binaries including triumph vs. defeat, thriving vs, failing, strength vs. weakness, and “greatness” vs. inferiority. +22. Contempt for the old, disabled, and infirm, seen as “weak” and worthy of premature death along with nonwhites. +23. Promotion of a cult of personality reflecting the perceived necessity of a natural, always male Leader who alone is seen as capable of redeeming the greatness of the betrayed and victimized Nation/chosen people. +24. Belief in the superiority of instinct and will over reason and intellectual deliberation and in the preeminence of the Leader’s instincts and will over that of others and over abstract reason. +25. Constant propaganda to mask objectionable authoritarian, racist, militarist, nativist, and sexist goals with widely accepted ideals like democracy (“the will of the people”) and social cohesion. +26. Glorification of the military, hyper-militarism, and the exaltation of violence. +27. Embrace of violence against political enemies and critics. +28. Performative pomp, theatrical gatherings, recurrent menacing hate rallies, and an attachment to grandiose spectacles meant to promote a sense of greatness for the Nation and/or the favored and supposedly victimized racial, ethnic, national, and/or religious group. +29. Emotionally potent and extreme statements (the “greatest ever,” the “worst ever,” “amazing,” “horrible” and so on) in defense of the favored/chosen nation/group and in denunciation of demonized Others and “enemies of the people.” +30. The recurrent purging of those considered disloyal to the Leader and his party. +31. A false populist posture that obscures service to and alliance with capitalist elites and capitalism. “The Left” Can Distinguish Itself from Fascists Trump and many millions of his backers – including but not limited to the fascists who stormed the Capitol in a brazen if failed Trump-instigated effort to cancel the certification of a presidential election and spark a coup three weeks ago – check(ed)-off all 31 of these boxes, as I will show in my next book This Happened Here. (There is not time or space to provide the evidence for this claim here, but my guess is that many readers easily noted numerous examples as they went through the list). “Leftists” might want to reflect on this list before they leap to protect Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, Stephen Miller, and other far-right hate mongers’ supposed “free speech right” to reach multiple tens of millions of American and world citizens via Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and You Tube, and before they rush to defend the fascist minions who breached the Capitol complex and forced Congresspersons to flee for their lives under the banner of Trump’s Big Fascist Steal Lie – on the theory that the repression of the far right will only turn back on the portside. This is not a political tendency – fascism – that anyone on the Left should ever want to see shielded in any way in the world’s most powerful country (or anywhere else). Fascism spells ruin for all humanity. Anyone still saying “It Can’t Happen Here” after the Trump presidency needs to be laughed off the stage. Do leftists seriously believe they are incapable of defending themselves against whatever repression they may face in connection with the repression that government and media and Internet companies impose on fascists from Trump on down? This list (and/or more abbreviated versions of it) could help portsiders more clearly distinguish their movements from those of the white-nationalist far right. In responding to blowback repression, it is important for leftists to be ready to make the case for how our movement(s) are different from, indeed militantly opposed to, fascism as well as to the capitalist, racist, sexist, eco-cidal, and imperialist order that gives rise to fascism. Already, the New York Times and other major “liberal” corporate media outlets are dropping whatever partial and halting references they were willing to make (accurately if belatedly) to the “F-word” during the final year and post-election climax of the criminal Trump-Pence administration. They are warning against “populism,” “extremism,” “radicalization,” “anti-establishment anger,” and “terrorism” without the slightest specificity about the fascist menace. They make no distinctions between the egalitarian, loving, and solidaristic real populism of the Left and the racist, sexist, nationalist, nativist, authoritarian, hateful, and eco-cidal fake populism of the far right. They falsely conflate the beautiful and liberationist anger, “extremism,” and “radicalism” of the Left with the ugly and oppressive anger, “extremism,” and “radicalism” of the far right. They falsely conflate the just burning of a racist police precinct that hatched a vicious white lyncher (Derek Chauvin) with a murderous fascist assault (the Attack on the Capitol) that was based on the belief that nonwhite votes don’t count. Comrades, learn how to distinguish your movements for social justice, democracy, and environmental sustainability from fascist white nationalism. Keep my list handy for that task. Be ready at all times to recognize and spit out any of these 31 flavors; don’t swallow. Meanwhile, if you are one of those lefties I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, hang on for my next CounterPunch essay, titled “The Anatomy of Fascism-Denial: 31 Flavors of Anti-Antifascism.” You’ll really enjoy that one. Paul Street’s new book is The Hollow Resistance: Obama, Trump, and Politics of Appeasement.

Protesting Indian farmers locked in stand-off with police near capital

GHAZIABAD, India (Reuters) - Hundreds of Indian farmers protesting against agricultural reforms and refusing to disperse were locked in a stand-off with riot police on Thursday on the outskirts of the capital, New Delhi. Angry at what they see as laws that benefit large private buyers at the expense of growers, tens of thousands of farmers have been camped peacefully at sites on the outskirts of Delhi for more than two months. But a procession of tractors on Tuesday turned violent when some protesters deviated from pre-agreed routes, tearing down barricades and clashing with police who responded with tear gas. Some reached as far as Delhi’s historic Red Fort, where they scaled the ramparts and hoisted flags. The violence left one dead and hundreds injured. Several hundred police arrived at the Ghazipur protest site to the east of the capital, where hundreds of protesters remain. More than two dozen people also gathered nearby, chanting slogans against the farmers, according to a Reuters witness. Rakesh Chauhan, information officer for Ghaziabad district where the protest is taking place, told Reuters the protesters had been ordered to move by Thursday evening. But after meeting with police and government officials, farm leaders had refused. “We will not empty this protest site,” said Rakesh Tikait, one of the farm leaders. “I will take a bullet here if I have to.” Agriculture employs about half India’s population of 1.3 billion and unrest among an estimated 150 million landowning farmers is one of the biggest challenges to the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi since coming to power in 2014. Protests at other locations around Delhi have not yet been ordered to end. (This story has been refiled to fix misspelling of “Hundreds”, in first paragraph) Reporting by Devjyot Ghoshal in Ghaziabad and Saurabh Sharma in Lucknow; Writing by Alasdair Pal; Editing by Nick Macfie Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

Israeli Forces Demolish Mosque in Masafer Yatta

Israeli forces Wednesday demolished a mosque in the Bedouin community of Azwadeen, east of Yatta city, south of Hebron, according to the Palestinian news agency WAFA. Coordinator of the Protection and Steadfastness Committees, Fuad al-‘Amour, told WAFA that Israeli forces escorted bulldozers into Khirbet Umm Qassa in the Bedouin community of Azwadeen, in what is called the Eastern Slope, where the heavy machinery tore down the mosque, reducing it to rubble. The demolition was carried out less than two weeks after soldiers posted demolition notices against the mosque and a local school, which serves 50 students from three marginalized communities, purportedly for being built without licenses. Meanwhile, soldiers seized a tin-sheet health unit in Khirbet al-Rakiz hamlet in Masafer Yatta. Masafer Yatta is a collection of almost 19 hamlets that rely heavily on animal husbandry as the main source of livelihood. Located in Area C of the West Bank, under full Israeli administrative and military control, the area has been subjected to repeated Israeli violations by settlers and soldiers targeting their main source of living – livestock. It has been designated as a closed Israeli military zone for training since the 1980s and accordingly referred to as Firing Zone 918. Israeli violations against the area include demolition of animal barns, homes and residential structures. Issuance of construction permits by Israel to local Palestinians in the area is non-existent.

‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years – ex-KGB spy

The KGB ‘played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality’, Yuri Shvets, a key source for a new book, tells the Guardian David Smith in Washington Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian. Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war. Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. “This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia. Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB. Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue. According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB. Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics. The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery. “This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.” Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”. The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset. “It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.” Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives. Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.” He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.” Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.” “Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”

Homegrown Fascists BY EVE OTTENBERG

Donald Trump’s seditious incitement to insurrection on January 6 was the political equivalent of date rape. Just as a sexual abuser attempts to see how far he can force things, Trump tested the limits of how much violence he could get away with. (And how much threatened violence – who can doubt that the mob would have killed Mike Pence or Nancy Pelosi if they got their hands on them?) So Congress gave Trump the answer: it impeached him, a second time, on January 13. Now, with the benefit of post-inaugural perspective – over 20,000 National Guard troops and a massive lockdown in Washington, D.C. to prevent another violent assault – Trump’s last days look even more garishly atrocious, while congress’ response promises to be inadequate. The fascist-in-chief may be gone, but the job of controlling the violent bands of rightists he unleashed looks like it will be botched. Four days after the pandemonium at the capitol, Rep. James Clyburn told reporters that the House would wait until 100 days into a Biden administration to send impeachment to the senate. This was a lousy idea. By then, the Republicans would all be in opposition, with memories of being terrorized by a murderous mob no longer fresh. President-elect Biden apparently recognized this and asked Sen. Mitch McConnell to put an impeachment trial on a parallel track with approval of his cabinet. This shows understanding that the crime, the ransacking of the capitol, demands an urgent response, in part because of its uniqueness. Trump’s storm troopers trampled what’s left of democracy in the U.S., and he incited them. It was planned, organized over social media, and the intent was to lynch Pence, as the rioters can be heard chanting on video, and presumably to manhandle or kill as much of the congressional leadership as they could capture, and also, to prevent the legitimate confirmation of Biden’s electoral win. Ideally Pence would have invoked the twenty-fifth amendment. He didn’t. He still cowers in Trump’s long fascist shadow. But if the House dilly dallies over sending impeachment to the senate and if the senate fails to convict, congress too will be submerged in that shadow. Worse, if the justice department doesn’t pursue right-wing terrorist militias and fascists embedded in police departments, that shadow will loom over the entire country. Trump is not the only malefactor here. The 147 Republican representatives and six senators who voted to overturn Biden’s legal electors deserve censure at least. Some deserve expulsion. Glock-carrying, GOP Rep. Lauren Boebert, who tweeted Pelosi’s location to the mob, may be guilty of conspiring in an attempted murder of the House speaker. But she may not be alone. According to the Washington Post on January 14, Democrats demanded an investigation into whether Republican congressmen, allegedly including Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs and Paul Gosar, gave the rioters a reconnaissance tour of the capitol the day before the assault, on January 5. If such a tour occurred, it would amount to conspiracy to plan an insurrection. If that doesn’t merit expulsion from congress, nothing does. Clearly there was premeditation. The proof? Democratic representative and progressive “squad” member Ayanna Pressley’s panic button in her office had been ripped out, as one of her terrified staffers discovered when she tried to call for help during the riot. Not just the button – the whole panel it was attached to. And then of course there were those capitol police officers, one taking selfies with the rioters, another standing aside to abet their trespass. They were only the most obvious police sympathizers with the insurrectionists. True, many police did their job and one, Brian Sicknick, was murdered for it by the mob. So this was a homegrown, attempted fascist putsch. That is obvious to anyone with a brain. But that didn’t stop the addled Russophobes in the Democratic House from announcing that they would investigate “foreign influence” on the attack on the capitol. If these congresspeople can’t recognize the frank, made-in-America fascism in front of their noses, we’re sunk. They should ditch this idiotic investigation into supposed foreign influence at once and open one into the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters and the Boogaloo Bois. Again, Biden’s justice department better start probing state and local police – because they are apparently riddled with rightist terrorists. Meanwhile, other Trump crimes continue unabated and unaddressed. Roughly 400,000 American covid dead – tens if not hundreds of thousands more than would have died had Trump done his job, starting in February 2020, when the pandemic struck. Trump’s criminal sanctions against Cuba, Venezuela, Syria and Iran continue killing innocent people, though there’s little likelihood he’ll ever be called to account for that – just as Obama, Bush and Clinton will likely never face justice for THEIR crimes overseas. Indeed we’ll be lucky, and I’ll be amazed, if Biden summons the courage and decency to end Trump’s sanctions, any of them. There’s also Trump’s designation of Yemen as terrorist – exacerbating the famine and Saudi bombing campaign, making them even more deadly, indeed genocidal, by preventing food and medicine from reaching desperate inhabitants. Unfortunately, Biden’s secretary of state to-be, Anthony Blinken, has already walked back anti-war expectations, indicating that the U.S. will merely “review” Trump’s terrorist designation, not immediately revoke it. And then there was Trump’s federal execution killing spree in his last presidential days – all perfectly legal of course, which tells you all you need to know about U.S. criminal law. Clearly, after his nonpareil performance January 6, Trump should never be allowed to hold office in the U.S. again. But that depends on the Senate convicting him. And whether the senate has the will is an open question. Remember, many GOP senators are squarely in a camp whose goals align pretty much with those of Benito Mussolini. They may be less concerned about Trump inciting a fascist coup than with whether they can hang onto some portion of his Cro-Magnon base. Should Biden “reach across the aisle” to those clinging to that Neolithic base? Surely he inclines toward doing so. Just as surely, that is a mistake. He won his election with a record majority of the popular vote – seven million votes more than Trump. A big part of his job is to respond to the needs of HIS base. But he already called for “unity” and “healing,” with people who, had they won, would turn up their noses at unity and would hector us and him that “elections have consequences.” Nonetheless, with much of the 74 million Trump voters, some unity is possible: they may well appreciate Biden’s economic package. But how do you unify with fascists? And there is no doubt that Trump’s base includes fascists. The answer? You don’t unify with fascists, you root them out, as the many Allied dead from World War II could tell you, having done it once and paid for it in blood. And this extirpation is a job mainly for the GOP to do – if it cares to. Biden can help: his justice department already has all the tools it needs – no, we definitely don’t need new anti-terrorism or hate-crime laws and especially no new anti-protest laws of the type GOP congressmen are already introducing, targeting, of course, people who had nothing to do with the capitol insurrection, namely Black Lives Matter. Instead, the Biden justice department should designate the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers and other such groups as terrorist organizations. (Canada has already thus designated the Proud Boys). Biden’s expected attorney general, Merrick Garland, could crack down on the roaming rightist bands and fascist militias that swarmed out of the woodwork over the past four years, aided, abetted and encouraged by Trump. Those violent insurrectionists will not vanish with Trump’s disgrace and departure. They must be dealt with. They are not part of a “healing” process. They are our own, homegrown fascists. And whether Biden likes it or not, they have zero interest in healing. Eve Ottenberg is a novelist and journalist. Her latest book is Birdbrain. She can be reached at her website.

The Fall of Trump BY JOHN FEFFER

In classical dramas, tragic figures are driven to their doom by some inexorable flaw in their character. For Donald Trump, that tragic flaw has been unbounded narcissism. For four years as president, Trump could focus on only one thing: himself. He preferred to be in front of cheering crowds than behind the desk in the Oval Office actually doing work. He cared only about his appearance, his reputation, his legacy. Trump pursued various foreign policy initiatives – such as meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un or pushing for a peace deal in the Middle East – only to get a Nobel Prize not because he genuinely cared about the lives of the people in other countries. If Trump had shown even minimal compassion for all the Americans whose lives were disrupted by COVID-19, he might have won re-election in November. If he had campaigned for the two Republican senators in the Georgia run-off election in January – instead of focusing on his own conspiracy theories about his “stolen victory” – the Republicans might not have lost control of the Senate. And if he hadn’t given into the temptation of urging his followers to march on the U.S. Capitol and demand a reversal of the presidential election results, Trump wouldn’t have been impeached for a second time and also face near-certain economic ruin when he leaves office. It’s often been said that Donald Trump, as a businessman, is interested in the bottom line. He worked hard over the years to become a billionaire. He took pride in his global brand. As president, he was expected to burnish that brand so that he would come out the other end even wealthier and more powerful. But in the end, Donald Trump cared more about himself than about his business. The following incident serves as an illustration of that point. One of Trump’s old friends Tom Barrack called the president after the November election. Stop talking about election fraud and just smooth the transition for the incoming Biden administration, Barrack recommended. Trump was unpersuaded. Do it for the sake of your business, Barrack urged. Trump ignored him. In his efforts to hang onto power, Trump ran up enormous legal fees and suffered one embarrassing loss in court after another. In desperation, the president likely committed election fraud when he called Georgia state officials to pressure them into changing the results of the November election. Finally, on January 6, Trump engaged in anti-constitutional actions by inciting a mob to insurrection. This last act has inspired even close Republican allies to break with the president. “If inciting to insurrection isn’t” an impeachable offense, former New Jersey governor and Trump ally Chris Christie said, “then I don’t really know what is.” Trump has been impeached for a second time but he might be able to run out the clock to avoid a trial in the Senate. Or the vote to convict might not garner sufficient support, since passage requires a supermajority of two-thirds of senators present. But he will still exit the White Office on January 20 with a diminished base. According to a poll after January, more than 40% of Trump voters believe he has “betrayed the values and interests of the Republican Party.” He also faces the potential loss of his economic empire. Even before January 6, the Trump Organization faced significant problems, because of the president’s debts and the impact of COVID-19 on his hotel and hospitality businesses. As soon as he leaves office, creditors will begin calling in their loans, which amount to more than a billion dollars. After January 6, Trump faces even more serious problems. Banks have cancelled his accounts and declared that they won’t do business with him. Corporate clients like the PGA of America have pulled out of using Trump golf courses. Shopify stopped hosting TrumpStore.com. More concerning to Trump perhaps has been his rapid deplatforming. Twitter and Facebook suspended his accounts. YouTube blocked him. Trump officials who tried to give their accounts to the president were suspended as well. Nor has Trump set up accounts on alternative platforms, like right-wing favorites Parler and Gab, reportedly on the advice of son-in-law Jared Kushner. Without a public voice, Trump will be a much-diminished personality. Without a thriving business, he won’t be able to buy media attention. Until January 6, Trump was a credible threat to run again for the presidency in 2024. He did, after all, get the second largest number of votes in a presidential election in U.S. history. Those 74 million American could be counted on to sustain Trump’s political ambitions. Now, even if a Senate conviction doesn’t bar him permanently from public office, Trump will have a hard time staying in the public eye much less run for office. And figures like Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Josh Hawley (R-MO), who went to bat for Trump in the Senate to challenge the results of the Electoral College on January 6, face a donation boycott from major businesses that will compromise their own presidential ambitions. Thanks to his monstrous ego, Trump has suffered the fate of a tragic figure. Trumpism, however, will live on. Those 74 million Americans are going to be looking around for a Trump substitute, someone like Tom Cotton (R-AR), who broke with Trump to certify the Electoral College results. Cotton can be counted on to offer Trumpism without Trump in 2024. As for Trump himself, he will continue to nurse his grievances about a “stolen election” until the end of his days. Too many Americans will encourage his narcissism by believing in his nonsense. But as of this week, Trump’s ego will no longer warp U.S. foreign and domestic policy. John Feffer is the director of Foreign Policy In Focus, where this article originally appeared.

‘Utterly deplorable’: Egypt’s ‘abusive’ prisons denounced

Amnesty International decried Egyptian prison conditions on Monday, 10 years after the Arab Spring revolution began in the country. Thousands continue to be held for months or years under often inhumane conditions in overcrowded prisons, according to a report published by the human rights watchdog. Prisoners are kept in dark, poorly ventilated cells with little or no fresh air and unsanitary conditions with little access to water and toilets and receive unhealthy food, it said. Inadequate healthcare makes prisoners suffer unnecessarily and in some cases may have resulted in death, Amnesty alleged. Contact with relatives is greatly reduced or completely denied, and there is no uniform strategy in the fight against the coronavirus in prisons, the report noted. “Prison officials show utter disregard for the lives and wellbeing of prisoners crammed into the country’s overcrowded prisons and largely ignore their health needs,” said Philip Luther, Amnesty’s Middle East and North Africa director, in a statement. “It is deplorable that the Egyptian authorities are seeking to intimidate and torment human rights defenders, politicians, activists and other actual or perceived opponents by denying them healthcare. When the denial causes severe pain or suffering and is a deliberate act for the purpose of punishment, it constitutes torture.” Amnesty documented the detention experiences of 67 individuals, 10 of whom died in custody and two shortly after their release in 2019 or 2020. Carried out primarily between February 2020 and November 2020, the research focused on 16 prisons. “There is evidence that prison authorities – in some cases citing instructions from the National Security Agency (NSA) – target certain prisoners to punish them for their perceived opposition to or criticism of the government,” Luther said. Reprisals included being held in prolonged and indefinite solitary confinement in abusive conditions for more than 20 hours a day. The UN estimates that 114,000 people are currently held in prisons in Egypt. The report said security officials continue to deny “prisoner of conscience” Zyad el-Elaimy, a former parliamentarian and one of the leading figures in January 25, 2011 protests, from receiving crucial medical attention for his health issues. Al Jazeera journalist Mahmoud Hussein is one of those who remains in prison in Egypt. Hussein was arrested in December 2016 and has spent more than four years in prison under arbitrary detention by Egyptian authorities. No formal charges have been announced and he has not received a trial. Amnesty said it communicated its findings to Egyptian authorities in December 2020 but received no response. The Egyptian government has rejected reports of bad prison conditions and accusations that torture occurs. The state news site Al-Ahram has referred to what it called “negative rumours”. Last week, the interior ministry released a video from the notorious Torah prison in Cairo showing inmates being treated with the latest medical standards or reading, painting and baking.

'Vaccination apartheid': Gaza struggling with Covid-19 infections while Israel rolls out jab

In the intensive care unit of the European Gaza Hospital lie 50 critically ill Covid-19 patients. Their doctors are not confident that the available medical supplies will be sufficient to keep them alive in the next few weeks. With the hospital's capacities dwindling due to the rising numbers of coronavirus cases, and the already fragile healthcare system, the chances of survival for Covid-19 patients with chronic diseases in the Gaza Strip remain slim. As of Monday 25 January, the total number of Covid-19 cases in the blockaded enclave stands at 49,834, of whom 508 died. While the number of cases remains relatively moderate compared to other areas around the world, it is still considered “overwhelming” in Gaza, with the lack of medical supplies in hospitals and the absence of vaccines that have already been rolled out in most countries. 'While we are supposed to be given priority, given the harsh humanitarian conditions and the collapsing healthcare system, we are not even on the map of vaccination' - Khaled Zain, Gaza resident “At the beginning of the pandemic, when the coronavirus first appeared in Gaza, we used to receive all the cases at hospitals for treatment and follow-ups," Dr Youssef Aqqad, head of the European Gaza Hospital, told Middle East Eye. "But then we realised that the numbers were rapidly rising while the hospital capacities were very limited. “So, we started to receive only critical cases, like those with chronic diseases or severe respiratory problems. “We are struggling to avoid reaching a point where the healthcare system would collapse. But the sooner we get the vaccine, the easier it will be for us to manage the growing numbers of infections,” he added. According to Aqqad, the Palestinian Ministry of Health in Gaza was “informed by international actors that the vaccine would be available in Gaza during the first quarter of 2021”. ‘Vaccination apartheid’ While the Gazan health ministry struggles to get the vaccine with the help of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other international bodies, human rights groups believe that it is Israel’s responsibility to provide the vaccine for the blockaded enclave. “While Israel has already vaccinated more than 20 percent of its citizens, including Jewish settlers in the West Bank, it has not committed to vaccinating Palestinians living in the same occupied territory under its military rule,” Human Rights Watch said. The watchdog argued that it is Israel’s obligation under international humanitarian law, as an occupying power, to ensure medical supplies, including to combat the spread of pandemics in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Covid-19: Palestinians left in limbo as Israel vaccinates Read More » But Israeli authorities claimed that the “Palestinians are responsible for their own healthcare, under the 1990s Oslo peace accords”. International and Palestinian activists took to Twitter to condemn Israel's move, using the hashtag "IsraeliVaccinationApartheid". “While Israel celebrates a record-setting vaccination drive, millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control will receive no vaccine. To Israel, Palestinian lives don’t matter,” Sama tweeted. “It hurts to know that you are a second-class population,” Khaled Zain, a resident of Gaza, told MEE. “I mean, we come right after our occupiers. While we are supposed to be given priority, given the harsh humanitarian conditions and the collapsing healthcare system, we are not even on the map of vaccination. “To be honest, I did not even expect that the vaccine would be available in Gaza before the next year, after the pandemic is over. We are used to getting things long after the world does, it is like another planet here [in Gaza],” Zain added. Before the outbreak of the pandemic, Gaza’s hospital system was suffering from critical shortages of supplies, including drugs and medical equipment. ‘Not our legal obligation’ Zain, 34, says that he is not optimistic that the vaccine will be available soon, while his elderly mother, who caught the virus, “is threatened with death at any moment”. “My mother is 70 years old. She suffers from heart problems. So even before she tested positive for the coronavirus, we were worried that if she has a heart attack or needs urgent surgery, the hospitals would not be able to provide her with the adequate treatment,” he said. “Now that the hospitals are overwhelmed with the rising numbers of [coronavirus] cases, and the vaccine is still not available - and who even knows when it will enter Gaza - I am not optimistic that my mother will get the chance to be vaccinated. More people are dying, and my mother is already in a critical condition.” 'Israel’s obligation [is] first and foremost to its citizens … but it is our interest to make sure that Palestinians get the vaccine, that we don’t have Covid-19 spreading' - Yuli Edelstein, Israeli minister of health Israel’s Minister of Health Yuli Edelstein said in an interview with the BBC on Sunday that “Israel’s obligation [is] first and foremost to its citizens. “It is our interest, not our legal obligation, but it is our interest to make sure that Palestinians get the vaccine, that we don’t have Covid-19 spreading,” he added. Under the fourth Geneva Convention, Israel is required, as an occupying power, to provide the Palestinian population, including that in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, with the necessary measures to curb the spread of the virus. Article 56 states that an occupier should take the “prophylactic measures necessary to combat the spread of contagious diseases and epidemics”. But Edelstein argued that “first of all we can also look into the so-called Oslo agreements, where it says loud and clear that Palestinians have to take care of their own health”. Zain said: “If it is our government’s responsibility to provide us with the vaccine, then it should be always allowed to take charge of our healthcare, not just during the pandemic. "We are always obliged to get Israel's permission to travel for medical treatment or to get medical supplies into the Strip. Why is it only now that we have to be responsible for our own health?"