CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

It’s the Epstein Files, Stupid: Using Empire to Distract from Vice

One might be forgiven for assuming that the man in the White House is a lunatic and Donald J. Trump certainly couldn’t be confused with the picture of mental health by anyone with half of a functioning brain in their skull. The man’s pathological ego appears to make him capable of literally believing his own lies with the truth standing naked in front of him, he has been credibly accused of more sex crimes than Albert Fish, and he seems to use the Executive Office as a giant hammer to throw homicidal temper tantrums with.

The last several months alone of Orange Man Mad’s second reign of terror feel a bit like an amphetamine blur of seemingly random war crimes and increasingly dictatorial outbursts. But as tempting as it might be to write all this mayhem off as pure and unadulterated lunacy, I do believe that there is a method to the madness, in fact, there is probably more than one.

Everything that Trump has been pushing at a manic pace this winter holds a place on the deep state’s to-do-list. With the American Empire’s finances and international reputation in tatters from decades of post-Cold War imperial overreach, the mandarins-at-be have been left with little option other than to refocus their war mongering endeavors on our own long neglected hemisphere with a new Monroe Doctrine while using their phalanx of nebulous forever wars on drugs and terror to consolidate their position domestically and keep an increasingly restless population in line.

All of this makes perfectly rational sense when you read the tea leaves carefully. What feels positively mad however is the pace and downright slap-dash delivery in which the Trump junta is carrying out such edicts. It feels as if Billy Burroughs took a deep hit off the opium pipe and then cut up the master plan with a big pair of scissors before haphazardly tossing the pieces together in random order. The only way to truly make sense of such harrowing disaster porn is to remember that nothing is ever truly random and attempt to read between the headlines in search of a recurring........

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