Leaving a trail of broken promises to the electorate and social carnage Donald Trump, who knows that the Grim Reaper is right behind him and already nibbling on his brain, is moving full force ahead towards the final abyss. The question is how many people he will take with him over the cliff, only his family, fellow grifters, his fanclub of tech billionaires and the band of fascist sycophants who are executing and often designing his policies, Republican politicians, the US population at large or the world. Only time will tell.
At the home front Trump is under water on every issue in every poll. His election promise to make life more affordable was effectively broken by the inflation caused by his arbitrary and frivolous tariffs, which he still maintains are being paid by foreign governments and not by American consumers. Devastating cuts to Medicaid, the abolishment of Affordable Care Act subsidies and upcoming cuts to Medicare to offset an increase of the national debt caused by tax cuts for the ultra-rich will gut the existing health care system and leave millions without health insurance and many municipalities without hospitals and emergency rooms, causing deaths that could have been prevented by more humane policies. Even Trump’s immigration policies, long the one positive holdout for him in a sea of negative national polling data, are now disapproved of by a growing majority of the electorate, thanks to the racist and misogynist violence ICE is inflicting on American cities.
The original role of ICE was border security enforcement, but since Trump has effectively closed the border ICE agents have appeared in cities with Democratic majorities like Washington DC, San Francisco, New Orleans, Chicago, Portland and Boston, occasionally ‘assisted’ by National Guard units from red states. The originally stated objective of this new ICE was the removal from the US of the criminals among undocumented immigrants, but based on the mandatory deportation numbers the White House issues it is clear that the real objective is the detention and deportation of all undocumented immigrants, in particular if they are dark-skinned and Spanish-speaking. However, the current activities of ICE in Minneapolis show that this is not a simple goal displacement process but that something more sinister is going on. Minnesota may have a few hundred thousand undocumented immigrants, but why is there hardly any ICE activity in Florida or Texas, with each well over a million of undocumented immigrants? The answer is simple: the deployment of thousands of ICE agents in Minneapolis, assisted by the National Guard and if Trump invokes the Insurrection Act by elite units of the US armed forces, is a test run for the militarization of US cities during the 2026 elections, to intimidate American voters on top of the attempted gerrymandering and obstruction of mail-in voting. Trump knows that losing the House in 2026 will be the end of his presidency and he will do anything necessary to prevent that from happening.
After showing that he doesn’t care about the affordability of Americans’ lives and consistently lying to them about tariffs and inflation Trump is adding insult to injury with the billions he and his family have grifted together by monetarizing the White House, and after having effectively destroyed a large part of the American health care system he bamboozles Americans further with a one page healthcare ‘plan’ that can never work. Frustrated by growing resistance among the population and from the lower courts against ICE and his policies in general Trump has set his sights on projects he hopes will preserve his legacy for eternity, like a giant ballroom next to what’s left of the White House after he demolished the East Wing, totally undeservedly adding his name to the Kennedy Center’s facade, building a monumental Arch in DC to celebrate his imaginary battlefield victories and making his birthday a national holiday. To secure his place among fascist dictators, imperialist authoritarians and assorted scumbags of human history Trump is now focusing on an international role, after having pontifically declared that he would end all wars and never start a new one. Blowing boats out of Caribbean waters turned out to be an overture for a military adventure in Venezuela, which in turn provides an opening for Marco Rubio and other Batista revanchists to go after Cuba. In a hallucinatory mix of imagined real estate greatness and territorial imperialism inspired by Hitler and Putin Trump has set his sights on adding Greenland to the portfolio of Louisiana and Alaska, earlier purchases by the US, risking the most insane consequence of any of his actions, an armed conflict within NATO. And to cap it off he is trying to set up a board that would secure a piece of Gaza for him, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff. Looking at this tableau of lies and crimes, pompousness and acts of mental illness, it is good to remember that Trump is constantly fleeing forward, because he is feeling the breath of exhausted and infuriated American masses in his fat neck.
Hugo Kijne
homefromabroad 