The Trump Doctrine: “They Have It. We Want It. We Take It.”

Ron Unz
January 12, 2026

Back when I was a young child, I used to enjoy watching my Saturday morning cartoons, and they were often quite amusing.

More decades have passed than I’d like to consider and my memories are garbled, but I recall that those cartoons occasionally featured a character called something like Ugh the Cave-Man.

Ugh was always casually dressed in a one-piece leopard-skin sarong and he walked around with a gigantic club slung over one shoulder. Whenever he saw another cave-man with something that he wanted, he would smash that fellow on the head with his club and take the item. This suggested the nature of business transactions in those prehistoric times.

President Donald Trump is quite a bit older than I am, but those cartoons had already been around for many years when I watched them, so he may have done the same as a child. It’s also quite possible that his love of television cartoons remained strong even as he reached adulthood, so he might have still been watching such cartoons at the age of twenty or thirty, prior to his gradual shift to the far more sophisticated adult fare of pro-wrestling shows.

For whatever reason, it does seem that Trump’s understanding of international relations derives from the lessons that he had originally learned from old Ugh the Cave-Man.

Last week I published an article on the sudden American commando raid on Venezuela and our seizure of President Nicolas Maduro. I noted that at the press conference announcing his military triumph, Trump declared that America will now control Venezuela and that our country will “take back” the Venezuelan oil reserves, which he stated were rightfully ours.

As many experts quickly pointed out, both his historical and his legal assertions seemed very dubious. But the image that immediately came into my own mind was a scene from various television shows in which a large schoolyard bully accosts his much smaller victim, grabs him by the collar, and demands “What is my money doing in your pocket?”

Many individuals of widely disparate ideological backgrounds reacted in similar fashion.

Over the last decade, Joseph Jordan has become a well-known figure in the hard-core wing of the Alt-Right and some of its successor organizations, and he usually operated under the name “Eric Striker.” A few days ago, he published “Kidnapped by the Washington Cartel,” a blistering critique of our attack on Venezuela that opened with these paragraphs:

Washington’s snatching of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and his visibly brutalized wife, Cilia, has been widely condemned as naked criminality. Supporters of US interventionism have taken to justifying the attack under the guise of the Monroe, or “Donroe,” Doctrine, while leaders of the American left such as Bernie Sanders have largely ignored the moral implications by fixating on the legalistic aspect of the spectacle.

Practically nothing substantial has been presented to the public justifying military intervention in Venezuela. US officials have made half-hearted attempts at blowing the cobwebs off the Reagan-era Cold War boogeyman trope, but the Venezuelan state of Maduro last year spent only 18% of its GDP on public expenditures, making the US (37%) twice as “communist.” It should also be noted that Venezuela’s Communist Party has long been part of the heterogenous US-backed anti-Maduro opposition and is perceived inside the country as a front for the CIA.

Former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene had spent years as one of Trump’s fiercest MAGA loyalists and she denounced the attack on Venezuela as exactly “what many in MAGA thought they voted to end.”

Tucker Carlson is by far the biggest figure in the conservative media landscape. A few weeks ago he’d ridiculed the growing conservative calls for Maduro’s overthrow in a video that drew a couple of million views.

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In that presentation, he emphasized the surprising and little-known fact that Venezuela was probably the most socially conservative country in the entire Western hemisphere, with Maduro’s government having banned pornography, abortion, Gay Marriage, sex change operations, and usury.

Carlson noted that although all those positions were supposedly near and dear to the hearts of prominent conservative figures, they seemed to completely ignore such considerations in the case of Venezuela. Meanwhile, these same notions were totally disdained by the enormously wealthy donors who ran both the conservative movement and the Republican Party, and sometimes the mask slipped, allowing us to see that the conservative leaders they promoted actually felt much the same way.

But despite Carlson’s doubts and concerns, Trump went ahead with the attack regardless, and as Caitlin Johnstone noted, the successful raid drew huge enthusiasm not merely from the mindlessly flag-waving conservative base but from some of its prominent right-wing pundits as well:

This macho “FUCK YEAH! AMERICA! TAKE THEIR OIL!” jingoism from right wing pundits like Nick Fuentes, Matt Walsh and Tim Pool feels planned. It’s too perfectly aligned with the rebranding of the Department of Defense as the Department of War and all Hegseth’s sloganeering about having a mega badass military with FAFO lethality. It appears to be a deliberately crafted PR campaign to get the MAGA crowd fully on board with the US military interventionism which Trump had previously campaigned against.

In recent months, Nick Fuentes has become the rising star of youthful rightwing podcasters, greatly increasing his audience in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination. His cheerleading reaction to Trump’s attack on Venezuela was positively gleeful. “We will kill all of you and take your oil!”:

Faced with the difficult political aftermath of Trump’s successful attack, Carlson did his best to make lemonade from some very sour lemons.

In one of his most recent videos, he explained that Trump had attacked Venezuela without making any serious effort to justify his action by invoking higher principles of morality or human rights or international law as previous American governments had always done, and numerous other analysts have cogently emphasized that same point.

Other American presidents had camouflaged the motives for their military attacks by falsely invoking all sorts of deceptive excuses, but Trump had been refreshingly honest in explaining his reasoning. He wanted control of Venezuela’s oil and since America was much more powerful, he had just gone ahead and taken it. He supported “America First,” a doctrine that he interpreted as always acting in America’s national interests regardless of international law, so that’s exactly what he had done. Moreover, he had taken this dramatic action without requesting any Congressional approval or even bothering to notify Congress.

According to Carlson, this marked a radical, possibly permanent change in American political life. We had now shifted from being a republic, based upon laws and principles, into becoming an empire. Congress and the Courts were increasingly fading forces, playing less and less of any role in influencing our government policies, almost all of which were now concentrated in the hands of our nearly all-powerful president.

Carlson hardly delighted in this transformation, but instead he merely discussed it in neutral, descriptive fashion, as something that had taken place and was unlikely to easily be reversed.

In recent weeks, noted experts such as Prof. Jeffrey Sachs and Amb. Chas Freeman had also described this same drastic political change, though they did so with considerable lamentation. Freeman is one of our most distinguished former diplomats and in an interview a few days ago he declared that “300 years of Western effort to create rules for regulating international interactions have been thrown out,” while American society had abandoned our Constitutional order and essentially become a dictatorship in all but name.

But in his monologue, Carlson suggested that there might be an important possible benefit in Trump’s public adherence to such an extreme form of realpolitik. If Trump declared that our attack on Venezuela required no more justification than that it was in our national interests, then surely we could accord that same privilege to other great powers around the world.

For the last several years, America had led a chorus of worldwide condemnation against Russia for having allegedly violated international law by attacking Ukraine. But if we had now publicly proclaimed that such laws meant absolutely nothing to us, then surely we could accommodate Russia’s own national interests by working out an agreement with that country over Ukraine, leaving the latter as the neutral and largely demilitarized buffer state that Russia had long demanded. Our European allies might bleat that this violated the revered charter of the United Nations, but we had now firmly rejected all such lofty but irrelevant principles.

The same situation also applied with regard to China and its demands over Taiwan. We had always claimed that the sacred principles of democracy and national self-determination required us to support that latter state, but we now flatly rejected all such airy notions. China was large and powerful and Taiwan was a small country of the same nationality right next to it. So surely if we claimed the right to control distant Venezuela, we should accord China similar rights over neighboring Taiwan.

Carlson thus argued that although many regarded Trump’s proclamation of a ruthlessly self-interested American empire as a major threat to world peace, perhaps if we applied those same principles consistently, we could achieve far more peaceful and amicable relations with Russia and China.

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 Unfortunately, although silver linings are very desirable, they are often illusory. I thought that Carlson’s analysis amounted to a great deal of wishful thinking.

Trump seems psychologically incapable of putting himself in the place of others and recognizing that if America has compelling national interests, then other countries do as well. Although he might have logically granted those same principles of ruthless national self-interest to other nations aside from his own, he gave no indication that he would actually do so.

Because Venezuela was located in our own Western Hemisphere—our own “backyard”—Trump said it had absolutely no right to an independent foreign policy nor close trading relations with Russia and China. But although Venezuela is well over a thousand miles from the U.S., he seemed to believe that neither Russia nor China had any right whatsoever to demand similar privileges with regard to Ukraine or Taiwan, countries that bordered them.

Just before Trump’s strike against Maduro, our conflict with Russia drastically escalated as a huge wave of 90-odd explosive drones had attacked the personal Novgorod residence of Russian President Vladimir Putin in what seemed clearly to have been a major assassination attempt.

The CIA denied that Putin’s residence had been the target and Trump apparently accepted their statement. But the Russians said they had proved their accusation by recovering and decoding the microchips containing the geographical coordinates, and they turned over some of that hard evidence to American officials. Whether or not the Ukrainians had launched the drones, independent American intelligence experts declared that such a long-range strike almost certainly had required American targeting intelligence, proving that our country had been involved.

Meanwhile, around the same time as he attacked Venezuela, Trump announced that he would sell an additional $11 billion of advanced weaponry to Taiwan, including missiles capable of hitting Chinese cities. Adding insult to injury, Trump’s abduction of President Maduro came just hours after the latter had held extensive meetings with a high-level visiting Chinese delegation. This must have surely been a major embarrassment to the Chinese government.

Trump’s extremely erratic pattern of public statements and behavior hardly lends itself to conclusive analysis. But none of these actions suggest that he agrees that our own exclusive control over the Western Hemisphere should be balanced by similar regional concessions to other great powers.

And no sooner had the reverberations of Trump’s attack on Venezuela begun to die down, than he expanded his demands elsewhere.

Although he declared that America would control Venezuela, he never said that he would legally annex it, but other territories now fell into that category.

If someone had told me even just a year ago that we would be now be on the verge of seizing Greenland from Denmark, I would have naturally assumed that it was a ridiculous joke, something out of the Onion or the old Mad Magazine. But today it is not.

Although Trump had heavily promoted that possibility in the months after his 2025 inauguration, the issue had gradually faded away, so I’d assumed that it was gone for good. I discovered that I was mistaken.

Stephen Miller ranks as one of Trump’s top advisors and a few days after the attack on Venezuela, his wife Katie Miller Tweeted out an image of that large island covered in the American Stars-and-Stripes, headlined by the single word “SOON.”

Trump and other members of his administration have now declared their firm intent to annex Greenland, and her social media post has attracted well over 30 million Views.

Polls show that 85% of Greenlanders are opposed to American ownership, so such an annexation would be one of the most naked examples of territorial aggression in modern history, undertaken without the slightest fig leaf of moral or legal justification, and completely at odds with all our existing international rules and organizations.

Indeed, such a raw exercise of power would have been extremely rare even in the late nineteenth century heyday of European imperialism, when countries always tried to come up with some sort of plausible legal justification for their territorial aggrandizement, and the same was true for our own Gunboat Diplomacy Era of the early twentieth century. I can’t imagine Disraeli nor Palmerston nor Bismarck nor President Theodore Roosevelt ever doing anything so brazen, except perhaps with regard to lands controlled by primitive, illiterate tribes.

In sharp contrast, plucky little Denmark has spent generations as one of our most loyal and faithful European vassals, already giving us full military basing privileges on Greenland, which they have governed for hundreds of years. Denmark was also a founding member of NATO, the postwar alliance dedicated to mutual defense against exactly that sort of territorial aggression, an alliance that we ourselves had established. So by rights, an American seizure of Denmark’s Greenland territory should lead to a NATO declaration of war against our own country.

Obviously that would not happen. And for exactly that reason Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen declared that an American seizure of Greenland would mark the end of NATO.

Whether or not NATO did dissolve, such a shameless American theft of the territory from our loyal Danish ally of 85 years would prove to the entire world that Trump and his government treated their allies with just as much contempt and brutality as they did their adversaries, a lesson that the former would surely take to heart.

Our 2022 destruction of Germany’s vital Nord Stream energy pipelines had already established this in far more dramatic fashion, but our mainstream media lackeys had successfully concealed the true circumstances of that massive act of industrial terrorism, while in this case Trump’s action would be out in the open for the entire world to see.

Greenland is a barren, frozen wasteland, scarcely populated and of no economic value to anyone. So aside from demonstrating the sheer madness of the American government, its brazen theft would merely be symbolic and political. Perhaps as Frederiksen asserted, it would lead to the dissolution of NATO, but that was anyway long overdue and should have occurred decades ago at the end of the Cold War, at the same time that its Warsaw Pact counterpart was dissolved. Indeed, such a result would be one of the few positive consequences of Trump’s actions.

However, a more recent statement by Trump may signal something far more disastrous.

In an interview a few days ago with conservative broadcaster Sean Hannity, Trump declared that he would soon begin “hitting” the Mexican drug cartels responsible for fentanyl trafficking into America, apparently along the same lines as his many missile strikes on what he claimed were drug-smuggling boats off the Venezuelan coast. Indeed, since the latter actually had no connection with fentanyl imports while the Mexican cartels certainly do, such land attacks with missiles or drones should not surprise us.

While it’s hard to be sure whether Trump will follow through on such a massive violation of Mexican sovereignty, given his track record he certainly might. More than 700,000 American citizens currently reside in Mexico, mostly retirees stretching their Social Security payments and personal savings, so the likely consequences could be horrendous.

If America fires missiles into Mexico, killing quite a number of people, mostly drug-cartel members and their leaders but also some innocent bystanders, Mexican public opinion would be gigantically outraged while the drug-gangsters targeted for death might be a little peeved.

It therefore seems likely that there would be some retaliation against the Americans living in that country, perhaps with a few of them being attacked, injured, kidnapped, or even killed.

Despite the years of terrible lawless violence produced by Mexico’s drug cartels and their bloody conflicts, Americans living in that country had always been considered totally inviolate, with the drug-gangs brutally enforcing that policy for fear of provoking American retaliation. But if America were anyway attacking them with missiles, that protection might be relaxed or at least show some local cracks.

If Trump began bombarding Mexico with missiles before even a single American living there had been harmed, he would surely feel compelled to greatly escalate his strikes once Americans were attacked and dying, with the likely result being that many more Americans would be kidnapped or killed.

At some point in this escalatory spiral, Trump would probably decide that he needed to send in ground troops to protect American lives, or he might even decide to overthrow Mexico’s democratically elected government for being ineffective or insufficiently cooperative. Such American actions might then unleash a long-term guerilla war against us in that nation of 130 million, perhaps with serious consequences also involving the 40 million Mexican-Americans currently living north of the border.

All of this would have obvious echoes of Russia’s longstanding, debilitating conflict with the hostile population of neighboring Ukraine.

Given these possibilities, if Trump were secretly being paid by Russia, China, or Iran to inflict this sort of gigantic disaster upon our own country I don’t think he could be doing a better job.

Despite our nineteenth century attack on Mexico in which we seized half of its territory, that country has been considered an American friend and ally for the last few generations, so missile strikes that spiraled into a long-term military conflict on our southern border would attract massive worldwide attention. Our looming despoliation of Denmark’s Greenland territory will have similar impact, and I suspect that most world leaders know perfectly well which country actually destroyed Germany’s vital Nord Stream energy pipelines. All those harsh actions taken against our own supposed friends may have serious consequences.

America’s most important global allies are probably Japan, Germany, Britain, France, and South Korea.

Of these, South Korea has the smallest population, but its very well-trained and well-equipped military is more than twice the size of any of the others. It is also the third largest source of microchips after Taiwan and China, annually producing twice as many as the US. Many of its other industries are also world leaders, with American plans for naval expansion heavily dependent upon a leading South Korean shipbuilder. Add to that the considerable pop-cultural power of K-Pop in music and videos, and I think you could make the case that South Korea should be ranked as first among equals on that American list. But a dramatic shift may now be underway.

Although the American newspapers largely ignored it, I discovered that the South Korean president recently paid a very friendly four day visit to China, bringing with him an enormous delegation of 200 officials and business executives, surely one of the largest such contingents in his country’s history. And in an important statement, the media outlets of both countries reported that the South Korean leader fully affirmed the One China policy, under which Taiwan is regarded as a temporarily separated province of a unified China. Moreover, by a wide margin China is already South Korea’s largest trading partner.

The knowledgeable East Asian commenter who brought that story to my attention also noted the potential significance of the dresses worn by the two First Ladies:

There is likely a symbolic undertone to the dresses the respective First Ladies chose to wear. They are signalling a wish for ties to return to an earlier era.

The Chinese First Lady decided to wear something from their early Republic circa 1920s, before the Chinese Civil War.

The Korean First Lady chose to wear something even more traditional dating to centuries ago when Korea was considered a fraternal relation of China. I note that when China was conquered by the “barbarian Manchus” in 1644, the Koreans lamented, and felt that the weight/responsibility to continue the Confucian civilisation had fallen to them.

Based upon this evidence, I agreed that South Korea might be signaling that it sought to return to its traditional role as the dutiful younger brother of China, and a couple of East Asians concurred.

For decades, one of South Korea’s greatest foreign policy concerns has been the threat of war with North Korea given that its capital of Seoul is so close to the border. This has included fears that some provocative American actions might trigger that sort of disastrous conflict. In that regard, the sudden American attack against Venezuela led the nervous North Koreans to fire off a few ballistic and hypersonic missiles to dissuade America from considering any similar action against their own country or its leadership. However, the South Koreans know that if they enjoyed friendly relations with China and were under its full protection, the threat of war on the Korean Peninsula would almost entirely vanish.

It’s interesting to speculate about what other factors may have been responsible for this potentially dramatic diplomatic realignment by the South Korean government. The heavy tariffs that Trump had suddenly imposed upon that country early last year might have been a factor, as well as his outrageous, extortionist demand for an immediate payment of $350 billion from that longstanding American ally.

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Furthermore, in September I’d noted that that South Korea had been totally humiliated by a brutal ICE raid on its nationals working in America, and I’d even suggested at the time that this might have potentially important consequences:

Aside from Japan, South Korea is our most important remaining Asian ally, a major economic and technological power, but late last week our relations may have suffered a severe blow.

For the last several years, our government leaders have pressured the South Koreans to invest billions of dollars establishing new American factories, but on Friday our immigration service staged a huge raid on the Hyundai-LG plant in Georgia, arresting hundreds of its South Korean nationals as illegal immigrants, with their harsh treatment producing waves of public outrage in that country. I find it very difficult to believe that the employees of two of South Korea’s leading industrial corporations or their major subcontractors would have violated our immigration laws in any serious way, and incidents such as this may result in drastic changes in South Korean attitudes towards America.

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We should also not forget the highly provocative statements made in November by Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, declaring that her country would regard any Chinese use of force around Taiwan as “an existential threat,” apparently requiring Japanese military involvement. This led to a fierce war of words with China, and given the long history of intense hostility between Japan and South Korea, perhaps this helped further nudge that latter country in China’s direction.

Important countries with self-respecting leaders dislike being treated as lackeys or slaves, and such dissatisfaction multiplies if those doing so exhibit clear signs of megalomania and irrationality.

A few days ago, President Trump sat down for a wide-ranging, two-hour interview with several New York Times journalists. Some of his statements were really quite remarkable and were widely republished elsewhere:

And he said that he did not feel constrained by any international laws, norms, checks or balances.

Asked by my colleagues if there were any limits on his ability to use American military might, he said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

“I don’t need international law,” he added. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”

The journalists apparently did not even bother pressing him on his policy of seizing oil tankers in international waters, essentially amounting to blatant acts of piracy.

Around the same time that Trump was meeting with that group of Times journalists, he announced that he would raise his War Department budget by 50% to an astonishing $1.5 trillion dollars per year, a total considerably larger than that of every other country in the world combined.

Suppose we take into account all of Trump’s statements and actual policies and consider them as a whole. Rather than being called right-wing, he should better be characterized as “cartoonishly right-wing,” almost like an outrageous liberal satire suddenly sprung to life. As I explained in 2024, Israeli policies have sometimes been described in similar fashion.

Indeed, the Israelis continued to generate an avalanche of gripping content for those videos. Mobs of Israeli activists regularly blocked the passage of food-trucks, and within a few weeks, senior UN officials declared that more than a million Gazans were on the verge of a deadly famine. When the desperate, starving Gazans swarmed one of those few food delivery convoys allowed through, the Israeli military shot and killed more than 100 of them in the “Flour Massacre” and this was later repeated. All these horrific scenes of death and deliberate starvation were broadcast worldwide on social media, with some of the worst examples coming from the accounts of gleeful Israeli soldiers, such as their video of the corpse of a Palestinian child being eaten by a starving dog. Another image showed the remains of a bound Palestinian prisoner who had been crushed flat while still alive by an Israeli tank. According to a European human rights organization, the Israelis had regularly used bulldozers to bury alive large numbers of Palestinians. UN officials reported finding mass graves near several hospitals, with the victims found bound and stripped, shot execution-style. As Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin has pointed out, the behavior of the Israeli Jews does not seem merely evil but “cartoonishly evil,” with all their blatant crimes seeming to be based upon the script of some over-the-top propaganda-film but instead actually taking place in real life.

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One of Trump’s most powerful advisors is Stephen Miller, whose influence is far greater than that of much better known individuals such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Miller is a fervent Jewish Zionist and a week ago, he had taken the lead in boldly declaring our right to seize Greenland, doing so along with many other forceful pronouncements in a highly revealing CNN interview:

TAPPER: So let’s — the question about who is now running Venezuela is one that even members of Congress who are big Trump supporters say they’re not quite sure about. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told CNN’s Manu Raju that he doesn’t know what President Trump meant by his assertion that the U.S. is running Venezuela. And he said he needs more information. Can you tell us what the President means when he says, is acting President Delcy Rodriguez in charge? Is she running Venezuela or not?

MILLER: Well, what the President said is true. The United States of America is running Venezuela. By definition, that’s true. Jake, we live in a law, I’m sorry, we live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time. The United States —

TAPPER: But are you saying — but in terms of day-to-day operations in Venezuela, that is president, Acting President Rodriguez, right? It’s not some sort of American emissary.

MILLER: No, what I’m saying is, and we’ll keep going here, Jake. So I want to say what I’m saying, and then you’ll follow up. But what I’m saying is just one level above that, which is that, by definition, we are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.

So for them to do commerce, they need our permission. For them to be able to run an economy, they need our permission. So the United States is in charge. The United States is running the country during this transition period.

Given both Miller’s ideological positions and his agitated mannerisms, I think that many older Americans might immediately identify him with the ranting, power-mad Nazi leader Adolf Hitler, whose outrageous behavior they had seen presented in countless historical documentaries and described in their standard textbooks.

They had learned that Hitler’s manic, deranged speeches had always foreshadowed his plans for unprovoked aggression and his lunatic desire to rule the world, and they would be deeply alarmed that their own country might have now fallen into the hands of similar such individuals.

But I think that such a historical analogy is deeply unfair. It merely represents the lasting legacy of congealed wartime propaganda, which always falsely portrayed the enemy leader as a ranting madman.

More than a dozen years ago, a fully mainstream former German major general named Gerd Schultze-Rhonhof published 1939 – The War That Had Many Fathers, a revelatory 700 page volume on the circumstances leading to that European conflict. The author had been very surprised to discover that Hitler’s public speeches had regularly emphasized his desire for peace with the West along with his proposals for mutual arms control agreements and other confidence-building measures.

During the 1939 crisis that ultimately led to the outbreak of World War II, the German leader had actually offered neighboring Poland numerous concessions that none of his democratic Weimar predecessors had ever been willing to consider. But the irresponsible military dictatorship running that country had refused any negotiations and instead escalated the violent provocations against their sizeable German ethnic minority, ultimately leading to the declaration of war.

In recent years, many of Hitler’s speeches have been made available on the Internet, either with English subtitles or by using AI translations. Those who peruse these have been surprised to discover that contrary to our official historical narrative of the last eighty or ninety years, the German leader seemed far more rational and moderate than many of our own American leaders of the present day.

For example, anyone considering the text of a couple of Hitler’s most important speeches will be struck by how reasonable and sensible most of his remarks seemed to be. Indeed, his April 1939 response to the accusations of our own President Franklin Roosevelt was so remarkably logical and cogent that even such extremely hostile foreign observers as American journalist William Shirer admitted that Hitler had definitely gotten the better of many of those exchanges.

But whereas Hitler’s speeches had usually emphasized the need for negotiation and compromise, the public statements of Jewish Trump advisor Miller represent absolutely naked declarations of international aggression. Indeed, the latter are exactly what our media propaganda organs had spent generations falsely ascribing to Hitler.

I think this further indicates that most of what we know—or rather what we think we know—about the history of the Second World War and Nazi Germany actually constitutes an extreme example of Jewish media control and Jewish psychological projection.

If as Carlson and others have suggested, America had now transitioned into becoming an empire, run by an imperial form of government, the consequences would obviously be just as dramatic for our domestic as for our foreign policy, and there have already been strong and growing indications of this.

The same day as Carlson’s podcast, my morning Wall Street Journal carried a remarkable story buried on its inside pages that should have attracted far more attention than it did.

Trump had grown dissatisfied with the performance of some of our largest government defense contractors, and he therefore issued an Executive Order severely restricting all their financial activity:

An executive order posted Wednesday evening said companies “are not permitted in any way, shape, or form to pay dividends or buy back stock, until such time as they are able to produce a superior product, on time and on budget.”

Earlier Wednesday, Trump said in a Truth Social post that he would limit executive pay to $5 million, but the dollar figure wasn’t included in the executive order.

Thus, our president has now apparently claimed the right to issue Executive Orders setting the terms and conditions of all corporate dividends, buybacks, salaries, and bonuses based upon his personal will or personal whim. These are surely economic powers as sweeping as those enjoyed by any absolute monarch in human history.

An emperor naturally requires an imperial security service to enforce his rule, especially if he is deeply unpopular with well over half of his subjects.

During his 2024 campaign, one of Trump’s signature issues had been immigration and he regained the White House by promising to halt the unprecedented flood of unauthorized foreigners allowed into the country by President Joseph Biden. So no one was much surprised when he began expanding the size and role of ICE, his immigration service.

But last July right-wing provocateur Andrew Anglin published an important article noting the unprecedented expansion of ICE, and arguing that it might actually be intended to serve as a domestic version of the old Soviet NKVD:

Let’s start with just how uncomfortable I am with the cops. The Big Beautiful Bill is turning ICE into the biggest federal cop group in American history. Their budget is going to go from $10 billion to $100 billion, which surpasses the combined budgets of the FBI, DEA, ATF, Bureau of Prisons, and the Marshals Service…

This is a standing army, trained to run around the country throwing people into vans, without warrants…

If we want to get an idea of what they will do with these cops, perhaps we should recall Waco and Ruby Ridge, then imagine that sort of thing happening everywhere, all the time.

…a brand new army of fully militarized federal cops trained to drive around the country and disappear people into vans in broad daylight…

…the government will be able to keep close tabs on racists, sexists, homophobes, transphobes, and most importantly of all, antisemites…

Personally, I think these street scenes of ICE agents grabbing people are being created to desensitize people to seeing this sort of thing, and I think it is only a matter of time before these methods are used against those viewed as “dissidents” in America.

Indeed, I’ve repeatedly noted that one of the earliest high-profile ICE incidents was exactly along these lines, with the victim being a fully legal resident of America who had criticized Israel in her campus newspaper:

Late last week an astonishing event occurred in American society, and video clips of that incident quickly went viral across the Internet.

A 30-year-old Tufts doctoral student and Fulbright Scholar from Turkey was walking across her Boston-area neighborhood on the way to a holiday dinner at a friend’s house when she was suddenly seized and abducted in the early evening by six masked federal agents of the Department of Homeland Security. The terrified young woman was handcuffed and taken to a waiting car, secretly detained for the next 24 hours without access to friends, family, or lawyers, then shipped off to a holding cell in Louisiana and scheduled for immediate deportation, although a federal judge has now temporarily stayed the proceedings.

Just one of the Tweets showing a short clip of that incident has been viewed more than 4.5 million times, with a much longer YouTube video accumulating another couple of hundred thousand views.

That very disturbing scene seemed like something out of a Hollywood film chronicling the actions of a dystopian American police state, and that initial impression was only solidified once media reports explained why Rumeysa Ozturk was snatched off the streets of her home town. Her only reported transgression had been her co-authorship of an op-ed piece in the Tufts student newspaper a year earlier sharply criticizing Israel and its ongoing attacks on the civilian population of Gaza.

In his podcast, Carlson noted with alarm the determined efforts of some important members of the Trump Administration and other Republican officials to circumvent our First Amendment protections and outlaw all criticism of Jews or Israel. His guest Megyn Kelly, a conservative podcaster, strongly seconded those concerns.

The Trump Administration has been extremely vigorous in its efforts to stamp out the scourge of antisemitism, and last year Stephen Miller publicly confirmed to CNN that they were “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus, thereby allowing permanent imprisonment without charges or trial.

So just as Anglin had warned, we might one day see squads of masked, helmeted ICE agents snatch American citizens off their streets because they had posted a Tweet sharply critical of Israel. Carlson pointed out that thousands of citizens in Britain, Germany, and other European countries have already been imprisoned for hate-crime offenses along roughly those same lines.

A few days ago, a far deadlier ICE incident involving the death of a native-born American citizen reached the national headlines.

Large numbers of ICE agents had been deployed to Minneapolis, arousing strong opposition from local liberal activists, one of them being a blond 37-year-old mother of three.

For many generations, white, middle-class Americans have been raised lacking any serious fear of the police. That was certainly the case with the victim as she sat in her parked SUV on the suburban streets of her own city, serving as a legal observer responsible for providing advice to any demonstrators who might be arrested. Some video clips show her treating the nearby ICE troopers with lighthearted scorn, casually ridiculing their activities, which surely must have enraged those militarized federal officers clad in tactical gear.

The rough sequence of events is clear. She was approached by several of those masked, armed ICE agents who tried to pull her out of her vehicle, so she apparently became alarmed and decided to drive away. This in turn seems to have alarmed one of those ICE agents, who shot her three times in the head, killing her. A few moments earlier, her last words to that ICE officer had been “I ain’t mad at you, dude,” while after firing the fatal shots he can be heard to say “Fucking bitch.”

Numerous videos showing the killing are available on the Internet, with the exact circumstances and details being hotly disputed along ideological lines, not least by President Trump and his administration, who praised the shooter and branded the victim “a domestic terrorist.”

Former FoxNews host Judge Andrew Napolitano interviewed famed investigative journalist and attorney Glenn Greenwald on the controversy. Based upon their careful review of the video evidence and their legal expertise, both concluded that the killing was clearly an unjustified homicide and the ICE agent should be arrested and prosecuted. They also showed an interview with a top former police official who explained that the shooting violated the very explicit official regulations governing the use of firearms by federal agents.

Video Link

The New York Times provided an outstanding forensic video analysis of the incident that reached the same verdict:

Other seemingly knowledgeable experts seem to have come to similar conclusions:

Leaving aside the precise details of the incident, there are some very concerning aspects to the case. The FBI initially agreed to a joint investigation of the shooting with local law enforcement officials, but then decided to reject their participation.

Even more alarming was the position taken by Vice President JD Vance, who declared that ICE agents had absolute immunity from local prosecution for murder or any other sort of crime they might commit, although his claim was strongly disputed by various legal experts.

Vance is a graduate of Yale Law School and I am not. But if he were correct—or if that policy were suddenly passed into law by one of Trump’s all-powerful Executive Orders—the implications seem quite serious to me.

We have now established an enormous militarized federal police force of masked ICE agents, regularly snatching people off the streets without warrants, throwing them into unmarked vans, and then sometimes taking them away to “black sites” where they might be denied access to friends, family, or attorneys.

And we are now told that these ICE agents are completely immunized against local investigation or prosecution for any crimes they might happen to commit, whether these are beatings, torture, or even murder. So under this jurisdictional framework, the only individuals able to investigate or punish crimes by ICE would be the employees of the government officials who control ICE, an arrangement much like that of the old Soviet NKVD.

All of this seems to confirm the scenario that Anglin had so presciently sketched out six months ago.

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