Meinung: Amerika, das Raubtier: Trump will der Welt zeigen, dass er sich nehmen kann, was er will

As the ridiculousness south of the border continues, I always check in with this guy — Stephen Marche.

He wrote a book called „The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future“ which is about what the next US civil war might look like. Kind of a weird combination of fiction and non fiction.

He’s not the type to be diplomatic with his words or careful with his phrasing. He’ll just say whatever he’s thinking. A lot of people have called him alarmist, and what he says is definitely alarming. But as time goes on, and the situation South the border gets worse, his analysis and predictions on American politics get less and less fantastical.

I also highly recommend people watch or listen to the many podcasts and interviews that he is involved in — both as an interviewer and interviewee. They always turn out interesting because, like I said, he speaks in no uncertain terms and is very casual and explicit about his opinions. But he always seems to get the person on the other side of the conversation at least somewhat in agreement. Except for Janice Stein. Highly recommend that one.

Some excerpts:

>The President has always said that men like him have a right to „grab ‚em by the pussy.“ The American people elected Donald Trump knowing that he had been found responsible for rape in the case of E. Jean Carroll. Since then, rape as a way of life, as an approach to the world, has extended to U.S. institutions generally. Some right-wing U.S. intellectuals are calling it „coercive diplomacy.“ The plan to annex Greenland by military force, a plan which has apparently been shelved, for the moment, operates perfectly on the logic of rape. Before the threats, the U.S. could have had any Greenland security guarantees they liked from Denmark, simply because they are both a part of NATO. Mr. Trump and the American government want to take Greenland, not despite but because it is against their will. Denmark’s refusal, their sense of violation, is what gets Mr. Trump and his people off

>In my book The Next Civil War, I outlined America’s political order as a system in the middle of radical decay, overwhelmed by toxic levels of inequality, hyperpartisanship, the decline of trust in institutions and the rise of political violence. American leadership has taken the form of a rotten old man, mentally and physically collapsing on display for the whole world to see. The past year has been the definitive proof of the essential unreliability of the U.S. Constitutional order itself. The systems of American life are completely incapable of restraining or restricting their own decline. Anyone who relies on them as a source of security or even as a means of predicting the future behaviour of American institutions, including the behaviour of its military, is simply deluded.

>Mr. Trump’s response to Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech in Davos was a quiet recognition of this obvious reality. Canada can see it, and Europe increasingly is incapable of hiding from it anymore. The Greenland fiasco is instructing them that the stakes of the current collapse of the international order are vastly higher than the price of a wheel of Stilton or a bottle of Champagne in Beverly Hills. Certain political realities, like sovereignty, transcend markets. It is better to be poor and free than a rich slave. Their foreign policy, embodied in the National Security Strategy, is explicitly a call for total American impunity. What’s more, the flurry of American kinetic actions taken around the world has one goal: It exists to distract the world from the Epstein files.

>The fact that Donald Trump has pulled back after Europe threatened to use their anti-coercion instrument shows the path forward. The only way to deal with rapists is to put a gun to their head. The United States is the greatest threat to freedom and democracy in the world today. Preserving freedom and democracy is worth paying any price. It is not subject to deals.

Not sure I agree with it all.

I slightly disagree, maybe just on priority. I think he wants to show MAGA he can take what he wants. He probably cares nothing for the rest of the world any more than he cares for Democrats etc.

All the sabre rattling is for domestic MAGA.