Trump's Theater of the Absurd
A discussion with OSINT researcher extraordinaire Gal Suburban about the election, the aftermath of the election, and threats to our national security.
“Life makes most sense at the height of nonsense.”
—Witkacy
The calendar has flipped to November. All of the October Surprises have come and gone. The most consequential presidential election since 1860 is four days away—although, in this anxious and angry-making election cycle, time is as fluid and formless as that Salvador Dali clock.
Just ten days ago, the Atlantic published Jeffrey Goldberg’s in-depth examination of all the times and all the ways that Donald Trump has slighted, disrespected, insulted, and flat-out misunderstood the military. The biggest media takeaway from that article was Trump’s obsession with recruiting not the kind of generals Hitler had, but the kind of generals Trump mistakenly believes Hitler had. Hitler!
Five days after that, as if to prove Goldberg’s point about the Adolf Hitler fetish, Trump held a fascist rally at Madison Square Garden—the site of a notorious American Nazi rally in 1939. This is a candidate who openly speaks about being a dictator, and who has promised, as one of his key policy proposals, to deport millions and millions of U.S. residents he thinks are illegal immigrants; there are 11 million illegal immigrants living in the United States, and he wants to deport 25 million. If that official policy of mass deportation sounds familiar, it’s because that’s what the Nazis did in Poland. That didn’t end well. There’s a reason Auschwitz is located in Poland.
Alas, the media has already tired of the Trump/Hitler parallels. Why discuss the ominous plans the sadistic rapist and his sicko minions have for one in 13 U.S. residents when we can decry President Biden’s imprudent use of the word garbage to describe people who are manifestly, unimpeachably trash? Meanwhile, in another parallel to 1930s Europe, Trump has been putting on a Witkacy play. How else to describe Donald’s garbageman act but that it is something out of Polish absurdist theater from the Interwar period?
We are approaching Peak Weird.
And so, to impose some order on the Trumpian chaos, I invited Gal Suburban, the open source intelligence researcher ne plus ultra, back to the PREVAIL podcast. No one keeps closer tabs on what the MAGA weirdos are up to. We talked about what to expect on Election Day—and, more ominously, what schemes may come in the weeks after the election is decided.
Here are three takeaways from our discussion:
1. Democracy has a Russia problem, and the election is about national security.
In 2018, I wrote a book detailing all the known connections between Trump’s inner circle and the Kremlin. In 2019, the Mueller Report confirmed all the stuff I wrote in my book. In 2020, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence reiterated and expanded on what Mueller had found. So, yeah: Donald has been a tool of Moscow for decades now, and we are lucky we survived four years of a Putin puppet in the White House. (The 300,000 who died of covid unnecessarily because of Trump’s gross negligence weren’t as lucky and didn’t survive, but no one in the media talks about that.)
Incredibly, the bonds between Trump and Putin have only grown stronger and more overt in 2024. Per Bob Woodward, the two have talked on the phone at least seven times since the former left office. Chaos agent Elon Musk, whom the Wall Street Journal tells us communicates frequently with the Russian strongman, is Trump’s unofficial campaign manager and ersatz running mate. The three men have formed a Human Centipede, where Kremlin bullshit flows from Putin, to Musk, to Trump.
I asked Gal: What is Musk doing? Why is he risking so much to help Trump?
“I think he’s kind of like a juvenile that lives in a meme world. He’s like the walking embodiment of a meme,” she says. “He is a meme.”
Like Trump, Gal points out, Musk is easily flattered, easily influenced, and therefore easily manipulated. “I think it’s incredibly dangerous, obviously, that he would have a security clearance and access to information and not, you know, respect those types of relationships with the government in a way that would be helpful to the United States and not helpful to like a foreign country.”
She continues: “Once VP Harris is Madam President, she needs to act on that and take a look at what we’re dealing with and how to move forward without these kinds of potential threats, internally, to our national security. Because frankly, this election to me isn’t about culture wars or party politics. And as much as it is about abortion, it’s honestly about national security in a lot of ways—in the biggest way, I think. So that’s what I’m voting for: national security.”
When was the last time anyone covering the Trump campaign mentioned all those top secret documents he stole? You know, the documents that have to do with our nuclear capabilities and so forth? Isn’t that more important that trash collection or French fry distribution?
2. Maria Butina is back, and up to no good.
A few years back, Maria Butina was a big story. She infiltrated the NRA, had a relationship with the Republican operative Paul Erickson (who was sentenced to seven years in prison for wire fraud and money laundering but was pardoned by Trump) and an affair with former Overstock.com CEO and insurrection propagandist Patrick Byrne (who fled the country a few weeks ago), and after spending some time in prison, went back to Russia and entered politics and news broadcasting.
“Maria Butina had come back to Twitter after a very long hiatus,” Gal reports. “I had remembered that Butina had done a special on Russian television about Elon Musk. And when I went back to look at it—it was back in April 2023—and she went through this whole thing. It was about 20 minutes long. And, you know, she just kind of said the quiet part out loud where it almost felt like I was listening to her direct influencers and direct operators to target Elon Musk for influence operations.”
She continues:
It was almost like a briefing—like she was giving an intelligence briefing on what you need to know about Elon Musk, what’s important to us as the Russian government to focus on when it comes to Elon Musk. In particular, she talked about his relationship with the Pentagon. One of the commentators on there was talking about [how it] would be so great if we had somebody inside the Pentagon on our side, basically.
And so I feel like there, when you see Elon’s rhetoric escalating, for me, over a year and a half ago, you have Russian state TV kind of giving this Intel briefing, and then you see that escalation in pro-Russian rhetoric. And I can’t help but assume that it’s not a coincidence, right, that he’s, you know, having these conversations with Putin.
And at one point, Butina says, you know, “[Musk] has the Starlink and that is something that’s affecting us in our war. And in the beginning”—she even says this in April 2023—“in the beginning, he had agreed he was going to turn it off. But then people at the Pentagon I guess convinced him otherwise, essentially.”
And so to me, that is acknowledging that even Maria Butina knows that those conversations were being had within Russian intelligence or with Putin or the Kremlin—that they were trying to get Elon to turn those those satellites off in order for them to wage a more brutal war on a sovereign nation.
More absurdist Polish theater: Butina is now spearheading a quixotic push to convince American men who hate our woke, godless, soy-boy culture to defect to Russia. There is, apparently, a neighborhood outside of Moscow set aside for English-speaking, Putin-loving expats. What is the purpose of this?
“Well, it’s multi-pronged, I think,” Gal tells me. “I think it’s just a way to delegitimize democracy, make Russia seem like a stronger, more powerful, and mostly more Christian nation, right? But also, they have lost over 600,000 Russians in their illegal invasion of Ukraine. And they need bodies.”
3. MAGA wants to cause chaos on Election Day and after—but the movement isn’t as mighty as it might seem.
Like third-rate James Bond villains, MAGA chaos agents feel the need to monologue about their brilliance, their motives, and their plans. Gal keeps tabs on them.
“I also listen to a lot of Twitter spaces,” she says. “They plan in the open. So it’s just a matter of listening and hearing some of the consistency and messaging….I’m not as concerned about violence at the polling locations. It’s more of an illusion, let’s say, to people who might be watching or consuming media.”
She continues:
But I think what they want is disruption and chaos or the appearance of it, right? So they’re kind of encouraging their voters to get a mail-in ballot and then bring it to the polling place, and then confront poll workers and kind of just cause little stirs and cause little distractions. And I think they’ve got multiple websites that they want their base to report instances of fraud or irregularities that [they] see at the polling stations. So essentially that’s just going to be a database only used to inflate the numbers, right? They’re going to say, “We received 10,000 reports of issues at the polling things.” They’re not going to verify any of them or need to. They just need the numbers, to make a claim that this is happening. So I see a lot of that, where you’re going to have individuals who cause little ruckuses here and there at the polling locations.
And then what Mike Flynn, his little tiny sidekick Ivan Raiklin, and many others are doing is, they’re actually reaching out to sheriffs. So they’re big on this “constitutional sheriff” concept… One of the things that I heard in a lot of these spaces was, “Okay, if you get to the polling location, and you see something that’s happening, call the local sheriff and tell the sheriff you want to report identity theft.” It’s very weird. I don’t know why they’re choosing that…
So there’s some of that, but then their main goal is—honestly, it’s just almost a replay of 2020, where they are looking to, you know, stack state legislatures with loyalists who would be willing to deny certification of the count, who might be willing to send an alternate slate of electors. And I think their main goal, frankly, is for them to succeed at not having either candidate reach 270 electoral votes, which would ultimately kick the election into a contingent election—meaning it goes to the House, and you have a Republican majority who could then select Trump regardless of the outcome. And I think that that is their main focus: to try and either get one of the swing states or any state really to decertify their election or send those alternate slates of electors so that Kamala Harris does not reach 270. I think that’s the plan.
If Gal knows this, one hopes the FBI does, too.
One thing we’ve learned this election cycle is that there is a segment of the population that is fine with fascism, that plays nice with Nazis. Some people will always think in those terms. Others are radicalized by the rhetoric, because they don’t like the way things are going in the country.
The hyperinflation crisis in Weimar Germany—and hyperinflation isn’t eggs being a little more expensive now than they were four years ago; it’s a society-destroying disaster—paved the way for Hitler. In the United States, we see aggrieved white men mad at losing the power they’ve heretofore exclusively enjoyed. The MAGA messaging is that it’s a zero-sum game: if women win, men must lose. If Black men have more power, white men have less. That’s not true, but the propaganda has radicalized any number of young men.
“We have a lot of healing and lot of housekeeping to do when Madam President takes office,” Gal says. “We don’t need to Steve Bannon everything and deconstruct the administrative state, but we do need to take a look at, you know, the things that are reasonable to be upset about that create that antigovernment sentiment that allows for people to fall into these radicalization paths.
“And I think when we can work toward more transparency, more public communication, and just making life better for people. I like [Harris’s] messaging on the middle class, you know, and wages and things like that, because the less people in a country suffer, the less they’re susceptible to strongmen and authoritarians like Trump, like Vance and these other people, and the stronger they are unified to push back against it, if it should rear its ugly face again—which it will, because there’s always going to be people who rise up and try and capture power without earning it.”
One of those authoritarians was last seen driving around in a garbage truck with his name emblazoned on it—a loud and stupid cosplayer, devoid of empathy, being chauffeured around by a blue-collar guy who will not benefit one iota from his concept-of-plans, going in circles, round and round and round to nowhere, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing: MAGA theater of the absurd.
LISTEN TO THE PODCAST
S8 E8: The 270+ Election Day Special: Our Democracy Has a Russia Problem (with Gal Suburban)
It’s been just over 100 days since Kamala Harris officially replaced Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, but it feels like an eternity. With just four days until the most consequential presidential election since 1860, Greg Olear talks to OSINT researcher ne plus ultra Gal Suburban about what to expect on Election Day—and, more ominously, what schemes may come in the weeks after the election is decided.
Among the topics discussed: Elon Musk, Mike Flynn, JD Vance, Maria Butina, and more. Plus: a MAGA voting PSA.
Follow Gal Suburban:
https://x.com/5GW_HotTakes
Subscribe to The Five 8:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0BRnRwe7yDZXIaF-QZfvhA
Check out ROUGH BEAST, Greg’s new book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D47CMX17
ROUGH BEAST is now available as an audiobook:
https://www.audible.com/pd/Rough-Beast-Audiobook/B0D8K41S3T
Photo credit: Witkacy. “Fantasy/Fairy-tale,” 1922, National Museum, Warsaw.
Perhaps I have on my rose colored glasses, but I think that while Republicans will do a first round of bullshit lawsuits and mount minor stop the steal demonstrations over the next couple of weeks, lawyers value their law licenses and Republicans fear incarceration enough that they will not persist in the face of court losses and a firm response from Biden. And you're right Greg, MAGA is much louder than its real power can support.
From here, it looks like the media just buried the most important Oct. news story of all. Every Trump voter I hear is voting for him because they're convinced he'll improve their personal financial situation. But on "page 99" of recent news, Musk said that we'll "all have to suffer" for awhile, while he, in his new govt post, "fixes" govt waste. I take that to mean firing govt workers, terminating social security/Medicare/Medicaid, and all assistance programs, etc., while no doubt increasing funding to his space program, etc. I told my MAGA-indoctrinated friend about Musk's "suffer" remark. She said, "But there'll be no income tax." She's approaching retirement age. Very short sighted. And the amount most people would save in taxes wouldn't make up for what they'll have to pay in insanely higher prices once Trump institutes his tarrifs. And, bottom line, of course, dictators don't want us common folk to have money. But that story about Musk saying that we'll all have to suffer -- that's the horse's mouth negating any prospect of personal financial improvement, the most popular reason for voting for Trump. It should be a headline blasted across all media. It's hidden on page 99.