Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair

Well, it’s official dearest motherfuckers, America has become the world’s largest third world dictatorship. If the first two months of 2026 don’t prove this to you with flying colors than I’m terrified to ask what will. Since Christmas, Donald Trump has been swinging the Executive Office high above his head like some sick orange Gogo Yubari with a White House shaped meteor hammer, decapitating everything in sight.

He has kidnapped another nation’s strongman and held what’s left of his regime hostage for their entire oil industry like some God sized Baby Face Nelson. He has bluntly demanded that Europe hand over Greenland like a lunchroom dessert and threatened to just run it over with his bike if they refuse.

He has also turned an entire department of the federal government into his own private paramilitario that raids American cities like masked Mongol hordes and leaves poorly trained, twenty-year old trolls to police the streets with machine guns and videogame sadism.

With each one of these blatantly desperate stunts Donald Trump seems to be pushing the envelope of acceptable statecraft just a little further, testing both America’s and the world’s tolerance for increasingly obscene violations of international and constitutional law while pushing us all a little closer to Brave New World territory each and every time he gets away with it, and he just keeps getting away with it.

The problem is that every institution of power hypothetically capable of reigning in this unhinged imbecile was designed by the very system he finds himself in charge of for the express purpose of making that system unaccountable to any power above capital and now, a rogue section of capital in this country has recklessly decided to bet the house during apocalyptic times on the whims of said unhinged imbecile who also happens to possess a ferociously ignorant and populist-flavored cult of personality.

And thus, your favorite humble contrarian muckraker finds herself in the uncomfortable position of conferring with the Never Trumpers and Always Demers, that one Donald J. Trump is indeed the reincarnation of Adolf Hitler, and we are all very seriously fucked. It’s not as if I didn’t see this coming. I have been ranting for years about the inevitable collapse of Pax Americana’s New Rome. Any system of power massive enough to govern the globe from the barrel of an ICBM is inherently unsustainable and naked despotism has historically been the last resort of collapsing empires.

I just didn’t see it all coming down so quickly and I definitely didn’t see a verbally incontinent, reality television rapist being the Sith lord capable of steering Helter Skelter into the sun… but here we are now, entertain us…

Having belched that barrage of........

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