This is an excerpt from The Praeter-Colonial Mind: An Intellectual Journey Through the Back Alleys of Empire by Francisco Lobo. Download the book free of charge from E-International Relations.

The world is a strange place in 2025. A generalized sense of despondency and malaise fill the very air we breathe. Many are unhappy. Not just the poor, the disenfranchised, the oppressed. Those who are on top are also not happy. It was comedian Bill Burr who pointed out that billionaires aren’t happy with a billion dollars. But there is more. Countries endowed with a massive landmass, like Russia, are not happy with their territorial allotment. They want more. They want more land, land that does not belong to them. And, perhaps strangest of all, the first economy of the world, the country with the mightiest military forces this planet has ever seen, believes it has lost its greatness. And they want it back. They want to ‘Make America Great Again’. Enter the church of MAGA, and its prophet Donald J. Trump. In this final chapter, I will explore the impact of Trump, Trumpism, and MAGA in the rest of the world – that is, humanity or the portion of the global population that, if America is always put first, will invariably come second. This chapter should be read in tandem with Chapter Two, as it is a corollary to those initial reflections on the US as the Reluctant Empire.

As we have seen throughout this study, the praeter-colonial mind is the outlook that attempts to make sense of the many legacies of colonialism in our supposedly post-colonial world, in accordance with the varied meanings of the prefix ‘praeter’ (namely ‘past, by, beyond, above, more than, in addition to, besides’). Thus, the praeter-colonial mind sees colonialism simultaneously as past and present as it is confronted with the evidence of its many legacies. It is a mind that, ultimately, attempts to step aside to gain perspective and go above and beyond colonialism for the sake of the present and the future.

Now, if MAGA was indeed the isolationist movement many of its followers believe it to be, then the praeter-colonial mind would have very little to say about it. It would merely be a domestic phenomenon with no impact on the rest of the world. Yet, MAGA’s prophet has chosen a different path. Instead of retreating to the inner citadel of the North American landmass, to ‘Fortress America’ standing in splendid isolation, Trump has embarked on a campaign to remake the international order, seeking not only a realignment of alliances but even a redrawing of borders the likes of which we have not seen since the days of the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference or the 1919 Treaty of Versailles. How the praeter-colonial mind can make sense of what is happening to the world today is the subject of this chapter. Before that, however, a few thoughts on the domestic situation in the US are needed to lay the groundwork for further praeter-colonial reflections.

Transitional Fantasies

Thomas Matthew Crooks was born in Pennsylvania on 20 September 2003. He died in his home state on 13 July 2024, at age 20. The cause of death: a sniper bullet. It was fired at him as a direct and immediate response to his own sniper bullet aimed at one man speaking to a crowd gathered in the small town of Butler. Had Crooks succeeded in his mission that day, and regardless of his own fate after, the world would be a very different place today. It would be a world without Donald Trump.

Such a world would be a much quieter place, for sure. As Senator John Kennedy, a Republican from Louisiana, remarked during an interview in April of 2025, ‘President Trump as we know exists loudly, and his loud existence has awakened Europe with respect to its economy, and its national defense’ (The Post Millennial 2025). Trump did survive that assassination attempt, and he went on to win the presidency that year. He remains his usual loud self. However, what is most deafening about this episode that confronted a quiet Gen-Zer with a loud Baby Boomer that summer day is, ironically, how little we talk about this young man whose actions could have changed the course of history. How quiet we are about Crooks.

Indeed, after the expected frenzy of the ensuing news cycle that week, the media went completely silent about him. No books, documentaries, or movies have been released about that fateful day in which a tragic existence ended. Not even the experts who are increasingly turning to study the phenomenon of the left-behind, angry young men to explain the political violence of our times have taken an interest in the ballad of Tom Crooks, a sad story indeed. This story is weaved into the general canvas of our dark times, days when not only those who have everything to be happy are unhappy, but also times when many quiet, ordinary people suddenly find themselves harboring dark feelings in their hearts. In the face of the unprecedented political blitzkrieg Trump unleashed in the US and the rest of the world during the first months of his second presidency, many a liberal humanist fantasized about Trump’s demise. If not left to a misguided implementation of the Second Amendment (‘the right to bear arms’), the demurely desired outcome could be delivered by something far more prosaic – say, a heart failure, or a brain aneurism. Sad times indeed if political difference cannot be handled other than by fantasizing about the death of another human being.

A Trump-free world would be undoubtedly less loud. But would it be all that different? Comedian and political commentator Jon Stewart has shown how, for over a decade, liberals in the US have been trying to make the case for a ‘fever dream’ theory whereby Trump, Trumpism and MAGA are but an anomaly, an exception in an otherwise well-ordered polity that can boast over two centuries of democratic government. Someday, the theory goes, the ‘fever will break’ and America will come back to its senses. But as Stewart remarks: ‘If someone’s been running a fever since the aughts, that’s not a fever. That is their default resting temperature’ (The Daily Show 2025, at 0:54). That is what Annie Karni, White House correspondent and author of Mad House, also pointed out in an interview in the middle of Trump’s first 100 days in office: ‘Most Democrats and voters have come around to the idea that MAGA is bigger than Trump. There is no reverting, there is really no evidence that anything is going back’ (The Bulwark 2025, at 13:40). Have we ever seen anything like this in US history?

A Century of Un-American Experiments

Even though Americans like to repeat the self-reassuring mantra that they live in the greatest country on earth, the fact is that they have been adrift for a while, even before Covid (Galloway 2022). They are struggling, and the solutions they have found for their malaise have not always been the best. In an attempt to explain what is happening in Trump’s America in 2025, some are looking back into US history to draw parallels and sound the alarm previous generations were not able to, before it is too late.

Amidst a climate of political persecution and witch-hunts, naturally, the days of McCarthyism in the 1950s are called into mind by some. In his latest book, Red Scare, Clay Risen introduces the following hypothesis in the Preface:

In his novel The Plague, Albert Camus writes that the “plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves,” ready to spring to life again. Something similar happened in the 1950s, which is to say also the 1960s and ‘70s and, I believe, on up through today. There is a lineage to the American hard right of today, and to understand it, we need to understand its roots in the Red Scare. It did not originate then, nor is Trumpism and the MAGA movement the same as McCarthyism and the John Birch Society. But there is a line linking them (Risen 2025, xiii).

Others have looked a little farther back to alert us as to all the many parallels the rise of fascism in Europe and the US has with our current times, most notably Rachel Maddow in her recent book Prequel. An American Fight Against Fascism (Maddow 2023). Maddow traces back the trajectory of a homebrewed variant of fascism in the 1930s and the 1940s, which was in part advanced by the original ‘America First Committee’ , a political organization that convened a rally at Madison Square Garden in new York on 23 May 1941 with the specific purpose of keeping the US out of World War II (Ibid, 217) – that is, until Pearl Harbor after which the Committee dissolved (Ibid, 247).

With the exception of the so-called ‘Silver Shirts’ (Ibid, 60), no major paramilitary forces or ‘praetorian guards’ were created back then in America, a usual development wherever fascism takes hold in order to ensure the loyalty of the armed forces to the leader. Yet, that does not mean that it can’t happen there too – Trump’s profligate use of the National Guard for domestic law-enforcement is a sobering reminder of this. Maddow ultimately concludes this thorough study by extending the following invitation to the reader: ‘If we’re willing to take the harder look at our American history with fascism, the truth is that our own history in this wild, uncertain twenty-first century has not an echo in the past but a prequel’ (Ibid, 309). Likewise, other intellectuals, including Yale professors Marci Shore, Timothy Snyder, and Jason Stanley, published an open letter in The New York Times decrying the arrival of fascism in Trump’s America, prompting them to leave the country and relocate to Canada (Shore, Snyder and Stanley 2025).

Now, without prejudice to the ‘Red Scare’ and the ‘fascist’ lines of criticism as useful lenses through which the events unfolding in the US today can be understood, I believe there........

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