When people from abroad ask me what’s going on with Trump’s second term, I tell them that he is unlike other US presidents who were strongly influenced by special interests and big money. Instead, he is a charismatic cadaver which big moneyed and special interests have harvested, sometimes complementing each other but other times clashing with a base drive for power at the root of the corpse. 

The Trump cadaver appears particularly conflicted in its peace rhetoric and its policies of militarism and war. His longtime campaign speeches of wanting to stop wars, to be the “peace candidate” and his more recent infantile desire and arm-twisting to receive the Nobel Peace Prize stands in stark contrast to his record as president. During his first term, he amplified Obama’s drone war, dropped a MOAB on Afghanistan in 2017, launched strikes on Syria and had the top IRGC commander Qasem Soleimani assassinated just after New Year’s in 2020. Minus the assassination, this was well within the norm for late 20th and early 21st century imperial presidency; suffice to say that first term Trump was not a peace president. 

In his second term, Trump became a full-blown authoritarian war hawk while still claiming to be anti-war and an enabler of peace.

Before the 2024 election, powerful interests, the military industrial complex, the Israeli lobby, business interests, the tech monopolists all made plans to harvest inside Trump should he get elected.

Before the 2024 election, powerful interests, the military industrial complex, the Israeli lobby, business interests, the tech monopolists all made plans to harvest inside Trump should he get elected.

This array of special interests realized that they could make use of this blundering cadaver to ensure their ends were met. These special interests were extremely successful.

Project 2025 came into being with the goal of tearing away the social safety net for Americans in its target of the “administrative state.” Trump claimed he had no idea about this project during the campaign but once in office, he instituted its policies and hired its authors. This project complemented the extremist right’s anti-immigrant agenda led by Stephen Miller. The results have been ugly: while food stamps have been cut and US citizens and residents from abroad were being gunned down in the streets, the military got half a trillion more dollars annually. ICE, the private paramilitary, received eight times what it has historically at just over $80 billion. 

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Some of the more absurd behavior that we’ve seen over the past year speaks to the forces within the Trump cadaver fighting it out within him.

The creation of a Board of Peace for administering Gaza is antithetical to peace and justice. Its main goal is to serve the ultra-elite in constructing luxury resorts and likely allow only the most obeisant Gazans to remain as servants to the wealthy.

The creation of a Board of Peace for administering Gaza is antithetical to peace and justice. Its main goal is to serve the ultra-elite in constructing luxury resorts and likely allow only the most obeisant Gazans to remain as servants to the wealthy.

The Trump cadaver endlessly complained about not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize and then overthrew and kidnapped the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, to essentially loot the country’s oil. Trump’s ceaseless rhetoric against the neocons but then fulfilling their wet dreams by attacking their nuclear facilities with Israel in 2025 summer. Now, again with Israel, Trump has attacked Iran for no clear reason other than to ensure Israeli regional hegemony and that no country opposes the policies of US empire. In this sense, cadaver Trump has become not just a wannabe dictator of the US, but a wannabe dictator of the world. Clearly, after catering to some anti-war populist campaign rhetoric, the military industrial complex and pro-Israeli interests took the cadaver by the reins.

As of this writing, there have been 555 Iranians killed, including 180 from a girls’ school – a likely war crime. Europe’s most powerful countries, Germany, France and Great Britain, issued a statement in response to the conflict. Rather than condemning the aggression of an out-of-control empire that no longer chooses to rationalise its mass violence, it condemned the Iranians for responding to the onslaught of Israeli and US attacks. As if Iran should just sit on its knees and get pummeled. It seems as if Trump’s threats of tariffs and taking over Greenland have turned these European leaders into puppets. It calls to mind the “protesters” calling for the shah of Iran to be reinstituted. As if the solution of Iran’s independence and intransigence to the US world order is to have another puppet rule Iran, just like the last one, Reza Pahlavi. It was this last shah who was likely responsible for more deaths of Iranian protesters than recent Iranian government crackdowns.

Today the empire no longer tries to rationalise its wars or pretends to adhere to international law. It is rather an empire gone mad: a strange mix of Vikings-era looting and rampage with might-is-right 19th century European colonialism, which Rubio cleverly paid homage to at the Munich security conference. 

There are no adults in the room to constrain cadaver Trump and his policies of internal and external mass violence, piracy and war. The leading Democrats in Congress have offered tepid criticism of the latest Iran War only on procedural grounds. That leaves it up to the people, progressives and burgeoning anti-war sentiment on the right, to put an end to these US-generated foreign bloodbaths. And to prevent the continuous rise of inclinations of mass destruction within the Trump cadaver once and for all. 

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