Index: Trump's Ominous Plans for the Second Term

Going through the PREVAIL archives to determine what the future has in store.

It’s only been a week since Election Day, and not even a week, as I type this, since the final electoral map came into grim focus. We are now faced with questions we hoped were unthinkable: What will a second trump Term look like? What horrors does he and his team of vengeful sadists seek to visit upon the American people? Will these nefarious plans succeed?

Prognostications range from full-on dystopia (“After the genocidal mass deportation plan and the elimination of the FDA are implemented on Day One, the food supply dries up and people starve; the dollar collapses and is replaced by crypto; jackboots round up anyone criticizing the Administration, jailing some and executing others; women lose the right to vote; Ukraine collapses, the EU breaks apart, and Gaza is leveled; the U.S. descends into a neo-feudalist state run by PayPal mafiosos who model it after the apartheid of their native South Africa; the new regime 25ths Trump and installs JD Vance as American dictator for life, and he celebrates by making sweet love to one of the couches in the Oval Office.”) to complete and total denial (“Chill out, nothing bad will happen, we’ll get ‘em in the midterms!”)

The actual result, it’s safe to say, will wind up somewhere in the middle of these two extremes. But the truth is, no one knows what’s going to happen. No one, not even some AI-generated Hegelian dialectical combination of Nate Silver and Allan Lichtman, can predict the future.

What we can do is review the plans Trump and the neo-reactionary (NRx) thought leaders who are his closest advisors have openly shared with us. To that end, I have gone through the PREVAIL archives—as of this week, there are five full years’ worth!—and highlighted the pieces that are useful in sorting this out, grouping them by broad subject:

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American Fascism

A good place to start is with a piece from December 29, 2023, presciently titled “This Is What American Fascism Will Look Like.” This was a summation of a PREVAIL podcast interview with Brynn Tannehill, the author of a suddenly-very-topical book called American Fascism:

Donald Trump is a fascist. He’s an authoritarian. He’s a despot. He’s a wannabe dictator. He’s the Mussolini of Queens, an American Hitler.

At this point, no serious commentator doubts this. The neocon dignitary Robert Kagan said as much in a Washington Post op-ed a month ago: “Let’s stop the wishful thinking and face the stark reality: There is a clear path to dictatorship in the United States, and it is getting shorter every day.”

The Godwin who developed Godwin’s Law—that is, that “as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one”—said that it was appropriate to compare Trump to Hitler: “[W]hen people draw parallels between Donald Trump’s 2024 candidacy and Hitler’s progression from fringe figure to Great Dictator, we aren’t joking. Those of us who hope to preserve our democratic institutions need to underscore the resemblance before we enter the twilight of American democracy.”

These are not just labels intended to insult the presumptive GOP presidential candidate. These are not words thrown around casually. Trump really is all of those things. Unfortunately, enough voters don’t have the imagination, or the knowledge of history, to understand what this would mean, in practical terms. What would an American dictatorship look like?

In the very short term, it would look like Hungary, where another corpulent Putin puppet with ties to the Russian mob, Viktor Orbán, has set up an “illiberal democracy,” with himself as permanent Prime Minister. Voting rights—fairness at the ballot box—will be the first casualty. The rightwing minority will rule, literally. Like a vampire summoned through the window, once Trump is back in the White House, there will be no getting rid of him. Term limits will apply as little as any other law he doesn’t approve of. Then the country will be reconstituted in Russia’s image.

“Hungary is an intermediate stop to Russia,” says the senior defense analyst Brynn Tannehill, author of American Fascism and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “Hungary is the same as Russia, just ten years behind in terms of the autocratic movement.”

In the U.S., there will be no big surprises. The GOP’s despotic vision has been laid out in a horrific Heritage Foundation document, Project 2025, that would make Sir Oswald Mosely tumesce. Trump has his lieutenants in place this time around—dudes like Stephen Miller, Mike Davis, Kash Patel, and Michael Anton, who are as capable as they are authoritarian.

“Where we are right now is that Donald Trump wants to set himself up as a dictator,” Tannehill says. “They have laid it out very, very clearly in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership. I’ve tweeted about it, I’ve written about it. They are being more and more manifestly authoritarian with a goal of reshaping the United States in ways that would render us unrecognizable in terms of foreign policy, in terms of domestic policy, in terms of making abortion and birth control and healthcare for trans people completely unavailable, illegal. To make it possible for Red States to reach out and grab people they don’t like from Blue States to prosecute them.”

. . . .

“We are looking at a government that is going to elevate one particular brand of Christianity above all others and make it a singular force in both law and public policy,” Tannehill says. “These are things that should be unacceptable and are going to certainly set off protests, but what we’re also seeing is, Trump is talking about invoking the Insurrection Act, clearing out military leadership and replacing it with people who are loyal or at least won’t say no. He’s talked about using the military to shoot protestors, in the past, in 2020. He’s talked openly in the past about admiring how China handled Tiananmen Square. We’re heading for something ugly and brutal.”

And quick. Trump has talked about installing himself as dictator on Day One, and when given the opportunity to walk those comments back, by Sean Hannity and others, doubled down. These intentions cannot be laughed off, or brushed aside as “Trump being Trump.” “Being Trump,” at this point, is perilously close to being Hitler.

“I know I sound crazy,” Tannehill says, “but this is—we’ve seen this historically. They’ve declared their intention to do this. We see them lining up to do all of this. We see them saying they’re going to do this. It’s—this is just taking the next step and saying, okay, if they do the thing that they say they’re going to do, what is going to be the response.”

Yeah, Tannehill doesn’t sound so crazy now, does she?

In March of 2021, two months removed from the insurrection, I wrote a piece called—wait for it—“The Enemy Within,” in which I lamented the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party:

While it is true that the besieging of the Capitol on January 6—the worst attack on our democracy since Booth shot Lincoln—was carried out by the radical MAGA faction of the GOP, too many so-called establishment Republicans have come out as opposed to democracy. When Liz Cheney, the House Representative from Wyoming, voted to impeach Donald John Trump for inciting a fucking insurrection, the GOP in her home state voted to censure her. Liz Cheney is not some tree-hugging moderate; she’s Dick Cheney’s daughter, for Pete’s sake.

Back in December, the Texas State AG, who has been under indictment for five years, filed a (batshit) lawsuit seeking to overturn the election. One hundred twenty six GOP members of the House signed their names to that despotic document, including Minority Leader and Green Eggs and Ham enthusiast Kevin McCarthy, sleazebag ne plus ultra Steve Scalise, child molester abettor Jim Jordan, Roger Stone superfan Matt Gaetz, and Stephen Seagal wannabe Dan Crenshaw. These traitors all knew Trump had lost—he is a stupid, selfish asshole who sat on his tiny hands while hundreds of thousands of Americans died on his watch; of course he lost—but they continued to disseminate the “Big Lie” that the election was stolen.

That the January 6 certification of electoral votes is largely ceremonial was known to Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, graduates of Yale and Harvard, respectively. This did not stop those two slithery, seditious Senators from urging on the insurrectionists, and making a big stink in the Senate chamber, giving the besiegers more time to do their thing. In the House, the antidemocratic forces were more brazen, less polished, and, in some cases, packing heat. Reps. Mo Brooks, Andy Biggs, and Paul Gosar were named by “Stop the Steal” operative Ali Alexander as helping him plan the January 6 event. Rep. Lauren Boebert gave a tour of the Capitol right before the besieging, and on the 6th, live-tweeted the location of Speaker Pelosi. Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Madison “Dr. Strangelove as a Young Man” Cawthorn copped to being armed in the building, a violation of D.C. law. The aforementioned are our lawmakers, but they are all on the side of the insurrectionists.

The coup failed, of course. The will of the people was not overturned. Trump left the White House, and he did not return on March 4, as Q prophesized. Joe Biden, who legitimately trounced him at the polls, is the president, and he’s accomplished more in 50 days than Trump did in four years.

But the soft coup continues. Republican are trying their unlevel best to stay in power. The antediluvian construction of the Senate, where the 578,759 residents of Wyoming have the same number of Senators as 39.5 million Californians, is a baked-in advantage. So is the filibuster, which, as currently constituted, prevents almost anything from coming to a vote unless 60 Senators agree. At the state level, I’ve lost track of how many statehouses have proposed voter restriction laws, designed to disenfranchise minorities. And the Supreme Court, with its six Federalist Society seats, is poised to side with the authoritarians, just as Leonard Leo and his Opus Dei crew want.

In his inaugural address, Ronald Reagan could not have been more wrong. Far from being the problem, government is the only force big enough, strong enough, and smart enough to root out the enemies of our democracy—in Moscow, in Riyadh, in Beijing, in Tehran…and right here at home.

The government, alas, did no such thing. Merrick Garland, who I had high hopes for when I wrote that piece, has been a total dud, to say the least. The MAGA takeover of the GOP is now complete. The Republican Party was we knew it is dead and gone. We now wait to determine what that means.

Earlier this year, I interviewed Robbie Harris, a strategic communications and behavior change subject matter expert who has worked in Iraq, Syria, Africa, and Central America. I asked her, “What’s something that people don’t think about when they take for granted in our democracy that would fall and make everybody really mad?”

Speaking quickly, without pausing or stumbling at all over her words, Harris explains how the fall of democracy would

affect your daily life, your ability to get, walk outside of your house, get in your car, drive down the street and pick up your McDonald’s, your Chick-fil-A, your Starbucks, whatever it is you want in the morning with nobody harassing you, not having to go through armed checkpoints, not having to pay off someone at a checkpoint, not wondering if they’re going to shoot your daughter, your son, and knowing that you will get there and be able to purchase what you want and come home safely. Having football games with the local teams that your kids play with, having baseball games, your kids being able to go to college, go on trips to go look at colleges, your kids even being able to go to school, your daughter being able to walk down the street in the midst of not having a safe society and a stable society: those things aren’t happening.

I’ve lived in places where they don’t….I’ve been stopped at checkpoints and had guns pointed at me. People ask me who I am and where I’m going. And…it’s a 16-year-old kid with his finger on the trigger. Not—I mean, say “boo,” and he might shoot you, because he’s not trained, right? So do you really want militias running your intersections? I don’t think so.

This is the future a majority of American voters wanted.

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Abortion Rights

In the first big blow against women’s healthcare three years ago, the Supreme Court held that doctors were not allowed to use some of the medically necessary tools at their disposal to save the life of the mother if it meant endangering the life of the unborn child. This was back in December of 2021, and I covered it in “Bad Medicine: The War on Women Gets Medieval”:

The decidedly less lurid truth is that abortion is a medical procedure—you get one at a clinic, not a church—and many abortions are performed to save the life of the mother. Denying pregnant women access to abortion is no different, fundamentally, than denying women with breast cancer access to chemotherapy. Thanks to the odd ruling in Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson, and those five hardline Leonard Leo acolytes occupying the Supreme Court, pregnant women in Texas are effectively denied that right—for now, and probably for good.

Some individuals in the fascistic “pro-life” bubble are so indoctrinated in the movement’s cynical propaganda, and so sure of their own moral and intellectual superiority, that they are completely divorced from reality. Alexandra DeSanctis Marr, a visiting fellow at the Ethics & Public Policy Center and a writer at the National Review who covers abortion, a week ago tweeted, “Abortion is never medically necessary to save a woman’s life.” Could a maternal-aged human possessed of ovaries, uterus, and Fallopian tubes, who writes about abortion for a living, really not know that this statement is complete horseshit? Did DeSanctis Marr dispatch this communiqué for propaganda purposes, to push back on Sotomayor’s “life of a woman” quote? Is she yet another rightwing provocateur, trolling the other side? Or is she just daft?

I don’t know, but DeSanctis Marr’s use of the word “never” means that a single, solitary example of abortion saving a woman’s life invalidates her assertion. Jennifer Gunter, an OB/GYN and a columnist for the New York Times, countered with: “Maybe you should consult an expert. I’ve personally saved lives doing abortion. But you could also ask Savita Halappanavar’s family as she died because she was denied an abortion.”

The example Gunter cites is, sadly, accurate. Halappanavar did indeed die because she was denied medical treatment, on account of Ireland’s medieval (and since lifted) ban on all abortions. . .

The replies to Dr. Gunter’s tweet are full of examples of women whose lives were saved by the procedure. I personally know women who would have died if they didn’t have abortions. So do you—even if you don’t realize it. (Just because it isn’t talked about at dinner parties doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, fellas). The simple truth is that without the abortion option, women are denied access to the full complement of medical treatments that can potentially save their lives. All the more reason that the decision to terminate a pregnancy should be made by the pregnant woman and her doctor—not some state legislator with a Y chromosome.

It pleases “pro-life” ideologues to think that abortion is a simple, neat, black-and-white issue. It’s not. The real world is messy. There are as many reasons to have an abortion as there are women who get one. Furthermore, even a cursory study of any country that has had strict bans on abortion show that these bans are harmful to women—as Savita Halappanavar found out in Ireland, and hundreds if not thousands of others learned in Romania and elsewhere (including in this country, during the dark “coat hanger in a back alley” days).

Again: the Supreme Court has denied pregnant women a potentially life-saving medical treatment. This is like if SCOTUS denied men who suffer from erectile dysfunction access to Viagra and Cialis—except that a guy’s life is not in danger if he can’t get it up. It’s more like the Court preventing a syphilitic from having an injection of Benzathine penicillin G: We know this will save you, but we can’t allow it because Jesus. Sucks to be you.

The United States is supposed to be a progressive country, the land of the free. Whole Women’s Health v. Jackson hurtles us back to the Dark Ages. Whatever the so-called “pro-life” propaganda claims, bans on abortion are not morally good; they are barbaric. Lives are not being saved by banning abortion; to the contrary, women in Texas will die because of it. Not that Kavanaugh, Thomas, Alito, Barrett, or Gorsuch give a rat’s zygote.

I was, sadly, right about women in Texas dying. And with Dobbs, it’s only gotten worse. Women are dying in all the Red States because doctors are afraid to give them medically necessary abortions. And the Leonard Leo faction of the Supreme Court wants to criminalize abortion at the federal level. As I write in a May 2024 piece, “Blastocysts Are People, Too”:

But we’re at the point in the conservative counter-reformation at which definitive answers to these philosophical queries are urgently indicated. As explained at CROW, Jenny Cohn’s Substack, earlier this week, Donald Trump’s new “let the states decide” position on abortion rights is a ploy. The real plan being cooked up by the Leonard Leo crew is to have the Supreme Court rule “that a fetus qualifies as a ‘person’ under the due process and equal protection clauses of the 14th Amendment,” which would make federal law the rightwing fairy tale that any abortion is equivalent to murder.

“Fetal personhood,” as this ridiculous notion is ridiculously called, has been around at least since Roe v. Wade, when the concept was argued by the State of Texas. The Supreme Court wisely shot it down:

There are anti-abortion people who think that the constitution requires a state to prohibit abortion. They say that the Equal Protection Clause requires that you treat a helpless human being that’s still in the womb the way you treat other human beings. I think that’s wrong. I think when the Constitution says that persons are entitled to equal protection of the laws, I think it clearly means walking-around persons.

The woke hippie jurist who wrote that paragraph was none other than Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas’s mentor and patron saint of the conservative legal movement. He thought it was flat-out wrong. So did Harry Blackmun, who concluded that the term “person” had “application only post-natally.” There are many gripes one can have about the legal basis for Roe, but “fetal personhood” is not one of them; both sides agreed that it was bunk.

But that’s not good enough for Leonard Leo and his extremist brethren. Robert “Robby” George, a professor at Princeton and a Leo chum, writing with Josh Craddock, an attorney and FEDSOC phenom, argue in a Federalist Society op-ed that “[i]t is Congress’s constitutional prerogative—indeed, its solemn obligation—to secure the equal-protection rights of our tiny brothers and sisters at the dawn of their lives.” (It’s months before sunrise and not “dawn,” because it’s dark in there, but you get the idea.)

. . . .

However fringe and dangerous, this is the sort of argument reactionary attorneys will be making before a reactionary Supreme Court in the years to come. In a potential second Trump term, expect “fetal personhood” to become the law of the land.

Blastocysts are people, too!

The result of this will be a lot of unnecessary suffering and death, as women’s freedom of movement is curtailed. This is what a majority of American voters asked for.

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“Vice”

“Vice” is the archaic, rightwing weirdo blanket term for LGBTQ people and also pornography; the hateful reptilian brains of MAGA Republicans are incapable of making a distinction between the two. I’ve written extensively about this, including in “What the History of Abortion Can Teach Us About Project 2025,” a piece about my discussion in July of this year with the novelist and historian Jessica Cale, host of the “Dirty Sexy History” podcast:

Judge Potter Stewart famously said, of obscenity, “I know it when I see it.” Anthony Comstock, the anti-vice crusader of the late 19th century, was not as perspicacious. That sad dude thought everything was pornographic: paintings by Titian, kissing scenes in novels, diagrams in medical textbooks.

Kevin Roberts, the radical Catholic weirdo who heads the Heritage Foundation, wrote in his introduction to Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership that pornography is “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology and sexualization of children,” which, like, I don’t know what his browser history looks like, but that’s not something most of us get off on.

All joking aside, this broad application of the “pornography” label is very dangerous.

Cale says, “They’re talking about, like, they want to outlaw porn and they want to arrest anybody who is producing it. Now, I mean, this is very concerning because obviously, you know, like, you shouldn’t do that. There’s nothing wrong with sex work and porn isn’t, you know, in and of itself wrong, [provided that] the people involved are consenting adults….If you don’t want your kids looking at it, don’t let your kids look at it.”

She continues:

But the Comstock Act tried to criminalize this kind of obscene material. And like today, there was some debate over what is obscene. So with these people talking about outlying porn now, [it] seems to apply really, really broadly across the board. They are applying it to not only actual—what we would think of as Pornhub stuff, but they’re talking about romance novels. They’re talking about any kind of book that contains scenes where people are kissing. They’re talking about gay and transgender identities as being inherently pornographic. And that’s crazy. I mean, it’s obviously not fair. It’s not porn.

You know, your existence is not inherently sexual, but they’re really kind of pitching it that way, right? Like drag shows are pornographic, they think. And if you’ve ever been to a drag show, you know it’s not. I mean, it’s just a bunch of people wearing wonderful dresses, singing Dolly Parton songs. There’s nothing pornographic about it. It’s fine, you know?

But so the Comstock Act, as they are trying to outlaw porn being sent through the mail and these kind of, you know, “dirty pictures,” right? Anthony Comstock was on this crusade against this stuff. And the problem with it, though, is that he could not identify porn. So he would kind of think that everything was porn. So at one point, he arrested publisher D.M. Bennett for possessing a book on the propagation of marsupials, because he thought that that was pornographic. He couldn’t tell the difference between hardcore porn and, like, a medical text.

These prudish crusaders are marked, then and now, by an inability to distinguish the obscene from the workaday. Comstock couldn’t tell an explicit photograph of two people screwing from a medical diagram; Kevin Roberts can’t tell his ass from his elbow.

(For more on this, see also “Anthony Comstock: The 19th Century Weirdo the 21st Century Weirdos Are Channeling,” my recent discussion with Amy Sohn, author of The Man Who Hated Women: Sex, Censorship & Civil Liberties in the Gilded Age.)

Sex workers, incidentally, provide a recession-proof boon to the economy; the industry generates some $15 billion a year. Morality arguments aside, it’s financially stupid to just shutter it overnight. Which brings us to. . .

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The Economy

The enforcement of the NRx policy on abortion is going to be cripplingly expensive, and if there’s one thing these hateful oligarchs have in common, it’s that they are all cheap fucks. Who will pay for all of this? I cover it in “Alitocracy: The Grim Economics of Forced Birth” (July 19, 2022):

One of the key characters in Colson Whitehead’s novel The Underground Railroad is a slavecatcher named Ridgeway. His job is to chase after runaway slaves—even to states where slavery is illegal—and return them to their rightful owners.

“The other patrollers were boys and men of bad character,” Whitehead writes; “the work attracted a type. In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.”

Whatever Ridgeway believed about the nature and ethics of the slave trade was irrelevant. In the mid-19th century, there was an economic element at play. Runaway slaves cost their owners money in lost labor. Whatever was spent to engage the services of Ridgeway, who was paid in full only when the job was compete, was worth it to the bottom line. The math held up. That’s why the Fugitive Slave Act—the so-called “Bloodhound Bill”—begat a cottage industry.

And this is where the odious ruling in Dobbs differs from the odious ruling in Dred Scott. In the latter case, where the Taney Court ruled that the rights guaranteed in the Constitution did not apply to Black Americans, there were economic reasons to maintain the disgraceful status quo. There were powerful financial incentives for fugitive slaves to be retrieved—horrible, heinous, and unethical, obviously, but nevertheless legitimate in the abominable antebellum South.

There is no such economic underpinning to Dobbs. On the contrary, enforcement of the draconian forced-birth laws popping up across the country, if left unchecked, will be a massive and unnecessary financial drain. And Republicans, as a general rule, don’t like to pony up for anything.

Who’s going to pay for a modern-day Ridgeway to hunt down a pregnant tween rape victim traveling from, say, New Orleans to New Jersey to access medical care? The states that have enacted these misogynist laws are rightfully called “red,” because their budgets tend to be in the red. They take more from the federal government than they put in. Are Mississippi and Alabama, who already spend so little, really going to allocate precious financial resources for this?

Every law enforcement officer policing forced birth is one less LEO investigating actual crime. Cops who write speeding tickets, annoying as they can be, at least generate revenue for their communities. Forced birth enforcement generates nothing of monetary value. It just adds more to the “debits” column.

Then there’s the medical stuff. Do states really want all of their doctors to be prosecuted, or lose their licenses, because Alitocratic Republicans don’t understand biology? Where is the economic value in that? Are state prosecutors going to eschew more worthy cases to throw the book at an OB/GYN who gave a pregnant teenager medical treatment? And what will those states do when doctors, so critical to local economies and local healthcare networks, pack up and leave town? Will Ginni Thomas set up a chain of leeching centers?

As far as the bottom line is concerned, abortion, as a healthcare option, is inexpensive. (Not to the teenager who might raise her eyebrows at what Planned Parenthood charges, of course—it costs way more than you think—but relatively speaking.) Hospital bills for pregnant women forced to give birth despite major medical red flags, on the other hand, will be onerous. Families will start going bankrupt. Providers will be sued for malpractice—also a big expense, in terms of both money and the potential brain-drain of doctors leaving for blue states. Women will die in childbirth, depriving their existing kids of a mother.

Men who provided the sperm for the forced-birth babies? They are on the hook for child support for the next 18 years—assuming there is enough law enforcement left to make them pay it. Although if we’ve learned nothing from the Roberts Court, it’s that they want to make it as easy for irresponsible men as possible.

Unwanted babies will be sent to the already-overtaxed foster care system. “We will adopt your baby” is a fun slogan at some Christian rally, but less of a certainty when the sticker shock kicks in. Adoption is cripplingly expensive. And the red states don’t want gay couples to adopt—even though that is the logical, practical, and cost-effective solution to the unwanted baby glut—because [checks notes] Jehovah smote Sodom and Gomorrah (but not, tellingly, Lot, even after he got drunk and raped his daughters).

Let’s say the teenage couple decides to keep the baby the fifteen-year-old girl was forced to have, rather than send it to an orphanage. Can we really expect them to be model parents? My teenage son claims not to be able to operate a vacuum cleaner; one of his coevals is going to be a good dad? Maybe—but chances are, Child Protective Services will need a huge injection of cash into its annual budget. Where is this cash coming from? That paragon of family planning, Elon Musk?

Finally, there is the environmental cost. Climatologists are indistinguishable from dystopian writers of science fiction these days. Like, we’re running out of potable water. Northern Europe might have severely curtailed growing seasons in the next decade or three. The Western states are soon going to be fighting, really fighting, over water rights to the Colorado River. The situation is dire. Why on God’s green earth would a responsible government insist on producing unwanted humans?

The modern-day Republican Party wants two things: tax cuts for the rich, and the rest of us to fuck off and die. The fallout from Dobbs is ultimately going to be so expensive that these two platform planks will no longer be able to coexist. And the GOP are notoriously cheap fucks.

Is forced birth worth the hefty price tag? The Alitocrats will have to decide.

As for the replacement of the dollar with some sort of crypto currency, that seems like bad science fiction to me. I talked about this in “Profits of Doom” in October of 2021, when Jack Dorsey and some of his tech-bro buddies predicted that the nation would soon fall prey to hyperinflation:

Generally speaking, hyperinflation occurs when a government’s central bank floods the market with paper money—as in Weimar Germany in 1923, Hungary in 1946, Yugoslavia in 1993, and Zimbabwe in 2008. It’s pretty to think that you can print as much cash as it takes to buy whatever you want, but real-world economics are not that simple. When the supply of money drastically expands, investors quickly catch on, and the value of the currency plummets. Banks shutter their windows. Life savings vanish overnight. Fixed incomes become meaningless. Even the transport of money becomes an arduous process. In Germany in 1923, wheelbarrows were used to carry the necessary banknotes to the store to buy a loaf of bread—but the shelves were usually empty (actually empty, not fake empty, like the anti-Biden MAGA memes of 2021 purport to show). Food riots erupt. The economy falls apart, and the social order begins to collapse with it.

That’s what hyperinflation heralds, and Jack Dorsey says it’s coming. Which is quite a bold prediction, because in the history of the United States, this has never happened. Not even close. Even during the Continental currency crisis of 1779, the inflation rate for the year was just over 30 percent—scary bad, for sure, but not hyperinflation. . . .

Hyperinflation is painful for everyone, without exception, but who it really screws is the mega-wealthy. Specifically, creditors. My $250,000 mortgage is not so onerous if the dollar I borrowed ten years ago is now worth a fraction of a penny. So here’s who would move heaven and earth to avoid hyperinflation: the U.S. government, because duh; China, because they hold so much of our debt; big banks, because their job is to make loans; venture capitalists, same reason. I’m not even sure organized crime wants hyperinflation, because it means their dragon’s hoard of cash isn’t worth as much in real terms.

The United States, China, the global banking system, VC, organized crime: That is a fuck-ton of power, and it would be used to stave off actual hyperinflation—not the five and a quarter percent Jack Dorsey is clutching his pearls about.

Narrator’s voice: Hyperinflation did not come.

I added this about crypto:

Finally, the notion that crypto will save us from hyperinflation is LMAO ROFL. If the global financial system collapsed, do we really believe the coin of the realm would be one that required both parties to have a computer, and electricity, and internet access, and was too complicated for most Americans to use? In Weimar Germany in 1923, wealthy people bought grand pianos, because they knew objects like that would always have value, and could be sold when the panic ended. Does Dorsey really think people in his fantastical hyperinflationary dystopia will look to NFTs of his first tweet for currency? Because, um, they will not. That shit is tulip mania. If you’re really afraid of hyperinflation, you buy gold, not bitcoin.

Don’t believe the hype—or the prophesies of doom. The only thing being hyperinflated here is Dorsey’s enthusiasm for crypto.

But as the Westphalian order breaks apart, if it breaks apart, Dorsey may yet get his wish.

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Foreign Affairs

Since the end of the Second World War, the West has enjoyed the peace and prosperity brought about by the Pax Americana. Here is how that happened, as I discussed in an October, 2020 piece, “Pax Americana in Peril”:

In 1947, Great Britain and France signed the Treaty of Dunkirk, establishing a formal alliance in the event of an attack by Germany or the Soviet Union. A year later, the alliance expanded to include Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. These initial pacts formed the basis for the North Atlantic Treaty of April 4, 1949, that brought Portugal, Italy, Norway, Denmark, and Iceland into the alliance, as well as Canada and, crucially, the United States. Thus was NATO formed. By 1952, West Germany, Greece, and Turkey had joined. Between NATO and the Marshall Plan, in which the U.S. invested enormous capital in war-torn nations to get them back on their feet economically—thus avoiding the great financial disorder that was a major cause for the rise of Hitler—the fortunes of the member nations were joined so tightly that internecine war was all but unthinkable.

This is not to say there has been no violence. There have been plenty of uprisings, revolutions, insurgencies, terrorist attacks, and proxy wars these last 75 years. NATO itself has sent troops hither and yon. Even so, the alliance has held.

Not only have none of the member nations fought one another, but Western Europe did not march on the Eastern bloc countries (or vice versa). The West did not want to screw around with its economic growth, while the East was rightly terrified of the military alliance on its Western front. World War III never materialized.

There are many reasons for this. The governments of Western Europe were all democracies—even the ones that still had kings and queens. Thus the citizens of those countries had little incentive to topple their government. In the glory days of communication, diplomacy was at its zenith. Trade was as easy as it had ever been—a boon to commerce. The interdependence of the various national economies meant that there was enormous incentive to keep up the alliance. If the Germans invaded Belgium again, it would mean economic disaster for all of Europe. And, finally, and most importantly, the United States was such a mighty juggernaut—far and away the most powerful nation that ever graced the planet—that no one dared fuck with us.

Add it all up, and you get three quarters of a century and counting of Pax Americana.

I cannot overstate what a historical anomaly this is. The history of Europe is a history of war. Nazi tanks rolled into Poland during the lifetime of millions of human beings who are still with us; plenty of people remember firsthand the bombing of London, the Dutch Hongerwinter, the atrocities of Auschwitz and Dachau. It was just over a century ago that the assassination of one pampered royal set off a clusterfuck of entangling alliances, the causality of which schoolkids (and historians!) still struggle to understand. The Napoleonic Wars upended all of Europe, causing massive hardship. Some historians call the Seven Years’ War of 1756-63 “World War Zero” because of its global scope; Churchill described it as the first world war. Most Americans have never heard of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), but it remains the most devastating conflict in European history in terms of percentage of the population lost; entire villages in Central Europe literally went to the dogs. Heck, France and England once fought a war that went on for a hundred years!

The last time this much of Europe enjoyed this much peace and prosperity for this long was during the apex of the Roman Empire, specifically the reign of the pacifist emperor Antoninus Pius. He died in Anno Domini 161. That was 18 and a half centuries ago.

Trump’s allies in Russia and the other BRICS nations hate this. They want to break up NATO and sic the Western countries against one another. Fun times!

That piece ends on an ominous note:

The Fall of Rome, and the end of the Pax Romana, ushered in the Dark Ages. It took almost a millennium—until the Renaissance—for Europe to begin to recover what was lost, and another 500 years to arrive at the next period of peace. The United States will fall too, someday. The Pax Americana will end. For the good of humanity, and the very planet earth, we must do whatever we can to make it endure a little while longer.

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There is a lot more in the PREVAIL archives about what Trump plans to do. I haven’t talked about vaccines and potential pandemics, voting rights, anti-trans hate, the looming showdown between the federal government and the states, and a lot more.

As I wrote in the introduction to Rough Beast, published in May 2024, “The United States is slouching towards dictatorship. Party of Lincoln, you say? If Trump wins, the fallen at Gettysburg will have died in vain; a government of the people, by the people, and for the people will perish from the earth.”

I very much hope that I was wrong.

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Photo credit: Elvert Barnes. FUCK TRUMP! graffiti sprayed on bridge wall over Jones Falls Expressway near Penn Station on St. Paul between East Oliver Street and East Mount Royal Avenue in Baltimore, Maryland on Saturday evening, 16 March 2019 by Elvert Barnes Photography.