There is a woman sitting in an earth-tone living room, bathed in natural light, offering advice to a friend whose husband refuses to wash his hands. The friend is frustrated, tired of reminding a grown man about basic hygiene. The woman on the couch, however, has a different perspective. She tells her friend that it would be better for her entire family to contract the bubonic plague and die than for her to continue treating her husband like a toddler by reminding him to wash his hands (Demopoulos, 2026).

This is not a sketch from a dystopian comedy. It is a genuine piece of instruction from “Wife School,” a video masterclass led by Tilly Dillehay, a Baptist writer and pastor’s wife. For $17, Dillehay teaches women how to become the kind of wives who inspire “godly leaders.” This means smiling, remaining attentive, and above all, submitting. It means learning the “skill of zip it” when disagreements arise, asking permission to spend $300 on a chair or to join a committee. It means, quite literally, choosing the risk of pestilence over the risk of nagging (Demopoulos, 2026).

Wife School is part of a growing cottage industry of online courses sold by affable Christian women to other women, promising domestic bliss through total submission. It sits alongside the broader “tradwife” movement, where influencers churn butter in milkmaid dresses and declare that feminism is the root of all female discontent. But to dismiss this as mere nostalgia or internet cosplay is to miss the machinery whirring beneath the pastel surface.

This is a counter-revolution. When women gain autonomy, patriarchy rarely returns in the form of a blunt instrument. Instead, it returns wearing softer clothes: wellness, femininity, faith, and order. It repackages hierarchy as virtue. To understand how this mechanism works, we must look beyond the aesthetics of the kitchen into the architecture of the prison.

The Aesthetics of Submission

The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argued that we no longer live in reality, but in a “hyperreality” composed of simulacra: copies of things that either had no original or no longer have one. We consume the simulation of a thing rather than the thing itself (Baudrillard, 1981).

The tradwife movement and courses like Wife School are perfect examples of this phenomenon. These women are not actually living in the mid-twentieth century. They are modern influencers, building lucrative businesses on platforms like Instagram and TikTok, monetising the image of a past that never truly existed in the frictionless, perfectly curated way they present it. They are selling a simulacrum of tradition.

As Mariah Wellman, an assistant professor at Michigan State University who studies influencers, notes, these women are exploiting the feelings of inadequacy and instability felt by their followers. “They’re selling wife skills, sure, but what they’re really selling is stability” (Demopoulos, 2026). In an era defined by economic precarity, the burnout of the “girlboss” era, and the overwhelming complexity of modern life, the promise of a simple, ordered existence is deeply seductive.

But the simulation serves a darker purpose. By wrapping subjugation in the aesthetics of Pottery Barn catalogues and fresh blowouts, the Christian Right has managed to market misogyny as a lifestyle brand. They have realised that you cannot force women back into the kitchen with laws alone (at least, not yet) but you can sell them the kitchen as a wellness product. Submission is no longer framed as a legal or economic necessity; it is framed as the cure for the anxieties of modernity. Patriarchy has entered its influencer era.

This commodification of submission is a highly effective strategy for neutralising resistance. When oppression is packaged as a consumer choice, it becomes much harder to critique. The tradwife influencer is not a victim of patriarchy; she is its most successful salesperson. She has taken the very structures that limit women’s freedom and turned them into a lucrative personal brand. In doing so, she provides a template for other women to follow, suggesting that the path to happiness lies not in challenging the system, but in perfectly adapting to it.

This hyperreal version of the 1950s erases the actual history of that era. It ignores the widespread dissatisfaction, the reliance on tranquillisers, and the systemic exclusion of women from public life that characterised the period. Instead, it presents a sanitised, Instagram-filtered version of the past, where the only challenge is perfecting a sourdough recipe. This historical amnesia is crucial to the movement’s success. By erasing the reality of women’s past struggles, it makes the return to those conditions seem desirable.

The danger of this simulacrum is that it replaces political action with aesthetic consumption. Instead of fighting for structural changes, such as affordable childcare, equal pay, or reproductive rights, women are encouraged to retreat into a highly curated domestic sphere. The political is reduced to the personal, and the systemic failures of society are reframed as individual failings that can be cured by a $17 online course.

The Internal Guard

If Baudrillard explains the packaging, Michel Foucault explains the mechanism. In his seminal work Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the evolution of power from the spectacular, public violence of the sovereign to the subtle, pervasive control of modern institutions. At the centre of this shift is the concept of the Panopticon: a prison design where inmates can be observed at any moment by a central guard tower, but cannot see into the tower themselves (Foucault, 1975).

Because the prisoner never knows exactly when they are being watched, they must assume they are always being watched. The genius of the Panopticon is that it renders the external guard obsolete. The prisoner internalises the surveillance and begins to police their own behaviour. As Foucault writes, “He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection” (Foucault, 1975).

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Wife School is the domestic Panopticon. The teachings demand the meticulous policing of the internal self. Dillehay instructs women to track their hormonal cycles — not for family planning, but so they can monitor the “insanity” of their emotions and ensure they remain kind to their husbands. She tells them to “rewrite the headlines” in their own minds, reframing their husbands’ failures as virtues. If a husband neglects a duty, the wife must tell herself that it simply means he has time for something else (Demopoulos, 2026).

This is the creation of what Foucault called “docile bodies:” bodies that can be subjected, used, transformed, and improved through disciplinary practices. The woman is taught to monitor her tone, her facial expressions, her hormones, and her private thoughts. The husband does not need to be a tyrant, because the wife has been trained to be both the prisoner and the guard.

The ultimate victory of this system is that the subjugation is framed as a choice. Dillehay calls it “proactive submission.” By convincing women that they are choosing to shrink themselves, the system masks its own coercive nature. The soul, as Foucault observed, becomes the prison of the body.

This internalised surveillance extends beyond the immediate relationship with the husband. It encompasses the woman’s entire relationship with herself. She is taught to view her own desires, ambitions, and even her basic emotional responses with suspicion. Any feeling of frustration or resentment is not a valid response to an unequal situation, but a sign of her own spiritual failing. She must constantly monitor herself for signs of rebellion, actively suppressing any impulse that might disrupt the patriarchal order.

In this way, Wife School achieves a level of control that external force could never manage. A woman who is forced to submit may still harbour rebellious thoughts; a woman who has been trained to police her own mind will actively suppress those thoughts before they can even form. She becomes the architect of her own subjugation, constantly working to ensure that she remains a docile and compliant subject.

The brilliance of this mechanism lies in its invisibility. Because the control is internalised, it does not feel like oppression. It feels like self-improvement. The woman is not being forced to submit; she is choosing to become a “better” wife. This framing makes the system incredibly resilient, as any critique of the power structure can be easily dismissed as an attack on the woman’s personal choices and religious beliefs.

The Weaponisation of Consent

The most chilling application of this internalised surveillance occurs in the realm of bodily autonomy. The Guardian report highlights the teachings of Wife School regarding sexual obligation. Dillehay instructs her students that “a husband expects a yes” when he asks for sex, quoting Corinthians to argue that spouses should not deprive one another.

She compares sex to pizza: when it is good, it is great, and when it is bad, it is still pretty good. Therefore, wives must sometimes settle for “frozen pizza,” which is an extended metaphor that attempts to make the consumption of unwanted sex sound mundane and acceptable (Demopoulos, 2026).

When “a husband expects a yes” becomes theology, consent is no longer about mutuality. It becomes a weapon. This is where the Panopticon reaches a dark, terrifying conclusion. The woman must not only submit her body to her husband, but she must police her own mind to ensure she does so willingly, or at least without complaint. She must manufacture her own consent to avoid the sin of deprivation.

This ideology operates in a culture where, as the CDC reports, one in four women will experience physical violence by an intimate partner (Demopoulos, 2026). Yet Wife School does not address abuse. Instead, as writer Elena Trueba discovered when she took the course, women are directed to resources that argue against always believing victims and suggest that abuse sometimes stems from a victim’s “sinfulness” (Trueba, 2026; Demopoulos, 2026). The internal guard is thus reinforced: if you are suffering, it is because you have not policed yourself rigorously enough. As Dillehay herself puts it: “If you’re going to suffer, suffer as a righteous woman” (Demopoulos, 2026).

The weaponisation of consent is perhaps the most insidious aspect of this entire ideology. By framing submission as a religious duty, it removes the possibility of refusal. A woman who says no is defying God. This places an immense psychological burden on the woman, forcing her to constantly override her own instincts and desires in order to maintain her spiritual standing.

Furthermore, the trivialisation of unwanted sex — comparing it to “frozen pizza” — serves to normalise coercion. It suggests that a woman’s physical boundaries are of little consequence, and that her primary role is to serve the needs of her husband. This is a profound violation of the core principles of bodily autonomy, repackaged as a quirky, relatable metaphor. It is a bleak reminder that beneath the pastel aesthetics of the tradwife movement lies a deeply disturbing reality of control and subjugation.

This dynamic is not limited to sex. It permeates every aspect of the marital relationship. The woman is expected to constantly anticipate her husband’s needs and desires, adjusting her own behaviour to ensure his comfort and satisfaction. She must become an expert in reading his moods, managing his emotions, and smoothing over any potential conflicts. This emotional labour is entirely unacknowledged and uncompensated, yet it is essential to the functioning of the patriarchal household.

The psychological toll of this constant self-monitoring and emotional management is immense. It requires a level of hyper-vigilance that is exhausting and ultimately destructive to the woman’s sense of self. She is no longer an independent agent, but a mere extension of her husband’s will. This is the true cost of the tradwife fantasy: the systematic dismantling of the female self.

The Laboratory of Tyranny

Why does this matter beyond the walls of individual homes? Because the domestic sphere is the foundation of the political sphere. Hannah Arendt, in her analysis of totalitarianism, warned of the dangers of atomising individuals and destroying the public sphere. When the public realm is eroded, citizens retreat into the private realm, where unquestioning obedience can be normalised (Arendt, 1951). The home becomes the laboratory where authoritarian subjects are manufactured.

The creators of these courses are not operating in a political vacuum. Dillehay’s books are published by Canon Press, an imprint owned by Douglas Wilson, an extremist pastor based in Moscow, Idaho. Wilson is a self-described Christian nationalist who has openly opposed a woman’s right to vote and envisions a patriarchal theocracy (Demopoulos, 2026; Simmons, 2026). In Wilson’s ideal America, voting rights would belong solely to the male head of the household. Women in households led by a husband would have no individual political voice (Simmons, 2026).

This is the political endgame of Wife School. If you can train half the population to treat obedience as holiness — to ask permission to buy a chair, to view their own desires as sinful, to police their own thoughts for signs of rebellion — you are manufacturing the ideal authoritarian citizen. A woman who has been trained to say “yes” to every demand of her husband is a citizen who has been trained to say “yes” to the demands of the state.

The recent UNLV study on the tradwife movement confirms the hostility beneath the aesthetic. Researchers found that men who view the movement favourably do not hold “benevolent” sexist views rooted in chivalry; rather, they exhibit “overt, explicit and hostile” sexism. They resent women while simultaneously expecting them to bend to every whim (Robnett, 2026; Demopoulos, 2026).

The connection between domestic subjugation and political authoritarianism is a stated goal of the Christian nationalist movement. By establishing strict hierarchies within the home, they are laying the groundwork for a society based on similar principles. The husband is the sovereign of the household, and his authority is absolute. This model of governance is then projected outwards, creating a vision of a state where power is concentrated in the hands of a few, and unquestioning obedience is demanded of the many.

In this context, Wife School is a training ground for a new political order. It is teaching women to accept their own disenfranchisement, to view their lack of political power as a natural and necessary consequence of their gender. By normalising submission in the private sphere, it prepares the ground for the acceptance of authoritarianism in the public sphere.

This is why the tradwife movement must be understood as a deeply political phenomenon. It is not a retreat from politics; it is a different kind of politics — one exclusion, of hierarchy, and control. It seeks to dismantle the democratic institutions that have allowed women to participate in public life, and to replace them with a system based on patriarchal authority.

The danger of this movement is amplified by its alignment with broader authoritarian trends. As democratic norms erode and right-wing populism gains ground, the tradwife ideology provides a ready-made model for social organisation. It offers a vision of a society where order is maintained through strict gender roles and unquestioning obedience to authority. This is a vision that is deeply appealing to those who feel threatened by social change and long for a return to a mythical past.

The Machinery of Choice

The Christian Right understands that democracy depends on equality, and therefore, to dismantle democracy, one must first dismantle equality. They have built a sophisticated machinery to achieve this. The simulation of tradition (Baudrillard) masks the internalised surveillance (Foucault), which in turn manufactures the compliant citizens required by authoritarianism (Arendt). It is a system that commercialises female insecurity, turning misogyny into a $17 online course.

Authoritarianism does not always arrive in jackboots. Sometimes it arrives in pastel kitchens, accompanied by Bible verses and smiling women who have been taught to call their own erasure “freedom.” The question is not whether individual women “choose” submission. The question is what social, political, and theological machinery is shaping that choice, and who profits when women are taught to shrink.

This machinery is constantly evolving, adapting to new platforms and new anxieties. It uses the language of empowerment to sell subjugation, and the aesthetics of wellness to mask control. It is a highly effective system, precisely because it is so difficult to identify. It does not look like oppression; it looks like a lifestyle choice.

But we must not be fooled by the packaging. The core message of Wife School and the broader tradwife movement is one of profound inequality. It is a rejection of the fundamental principles of feminism, and a deliberate attempt to roll back the gains that women have made over the past century. It is a reminder that the fight for equality is never truly won, and that we must remain vigilant against the ever-changing forms of patriarchal control.

The ultimate goal of this movement is to change the very nature of Western society. By establishing the home as a laboratory of tyranny, they are preparing the ground for a broader political transformation. They are building a world where hierarchy is naturalised, where submission is virtue, and where the Panopticon is not a prison, but a kitchen.

The success of this movement depends on our willingness to accept its premises. It relies on our collective amnesia, and our willingness to trade freedom for the illusion of stability. But we must resist this temptation and recognise the tradwife movement for what it is: a sophisticated attempt to repackage patriarchy for a new generation. We must reject the simulacrum of tradition, dismantle the internal guard, and refuse to participate in the laboratory of tyranny. Only then can we hope to build a society based on true equality and genuine freedom.

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References

Arendt, H. (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co.

Baudrillard, J. (1981). Simulacra and Simulation. Translated by S. Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Demopoulos, A. (2026). ‘‘A husband expects a yes’: how wife schools are shaping submissive Christian women.’ The Guardian, 28 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/apr/28/wife-school-christian-women-submissive [Accessed: 28 April 2026].

Foucault, M. (1975). Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by A. Sheridan. New York: Pantheon Books.

Robnett, R. D. and Hammond, M. (2026). ‘Ambivalent Sexism Theory as a Framework for Understanding Men’s Attitudes About the #Tradwife Movement.’ Psychology of Women Quarterly. Available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/03616843261433199 [Accessed: 28 April 2026].

Simmons, T. (2026). ‘Hegseth mentor Doug Wilson’s vision for a Christian nation means married women can’t vote.’ Religion News Service, 10 April. Available at: https://religionnews.com/2026/04/10/hegseth-mentor-doug-wilsons-vision-for-a-christian-nation-means-married-women-cant-vote/ [Accessed: 28 April 2026].

The Wife School (no date). The Wife School: Biblical Wife Coaching for Women Who Want to Fix What's Out of Order in Their Marriage. Available at: https://thewifeschool.com [Accessed: 28 April 2026].

Trueba, E. (2026). I went to Wife School so you don’t have to.’ Substack, 13 February. Available at:

Unholy Alliances by Elena Trueba

I went to Wife School so you don't have to.

What did I do with my one wild and precious life this week? I spent $17 on Tilly Dillehay’s Wife School…

Read more

3 months ago · 81 likes · 19 comments · Elena Trueba

[Accessed: 28 April 2026].

On April 22, 2026, Donald Trump posted a message on Truth Social responding to a state-level redistricting referendum in Virginia. The vote had narrowly passed by 51.4 percent to 48.5 percent. The President declared the entire process illegitimate. “A RIGGED ELECTION TOOK PLACE LAST NIGHT IN THE GREAT COMMONWEALTH OF VIRGINIA!” he wrote. “All day long Republicans were winning, the Spirit was unbelievable, until the very end when, of course, there was a massive ‘Mail In Ballot Drop!’” (Al Jazeera, 2026). He called it “another Crooked Victory” and demanded the courts reverse the result.

The sitting President of the United States declared a democratic vote rigged because his side lost, and because people voted by mail. Not a presidential election; not even a congressional race. A state redistricting referendum. A procedural vote about where to draw lines on a map, and he called it a stolen election.

By pre-emptively declaring a state-level referendum fraudulent because of mail-in ballots, Trump is testing the exact language, logic, and narrative architecture he intends to deploy against the 2026 midterms. The Virginia post is the warning shot. The administration is actively constructing the machinery to steal them.

Our previous analysis published here — Wake Up Call: The Echoes of Weimar — established the historical framework: the Weimar Republic was not destroyed by a putsch but by a pseudo-legal process of coordination, Gleichschaltung, in which democratic mechanisms were turned against democracy itself. That argument was made as a warning. The evidence now suggests it was not a warning about a distant possibility, but a description of what was already beginning. This article is about what is happening.

There is one detail from history that is worth holding in mind as you read what follows. In April 1932, Hitler lost the German presidential election to Paul von Hindenburg by millions of votes. He immediately declared the result fraudulent. A German court examined the claim and ruled against him. He vowed to “attack, attack, and attack again.” The filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, watching him that night, observed that he “spoke as if he had won the election” (Ryback, 2024). Bear that in mind, and then read Trump’s Virginia post again.

Since the Weimar analysis was published, the administration has moved with deliberate speed to remove every institutional safeguard that protected the integrity of the 2020 election. The officials who held the line have been fired. The agencies that debunked fraud claims have been gutted. The legal mechanisms that blocked politically motivated prosecutions have been dismantled. And a draft executive order — seventeen pages long, circulated among Trump allies since spring 2025 — sits ready to be signed, granting the President emergency powers over the conduct of federal elections. The question this article addresses is not whether Trump will attempt to interfere with the 2026 midterms, because the evidence that he is already doing so is overwhelming and documented. The question is what that interference will look like, why he cannot afford a clean election, and what the consequences will be; not just for November 2026, but for November 2028, and for the republic itself.

As the 2026 midterms approach, the landscape has fundamentally and irreversibly changed. The current administration has spent the last year quietly and systematically executing its own Gleichschaltung. What Trump is building is not a system without elections; it is rather a system of “managed democracy,” the model perfected by Vladimir Putin and his chief ideologue, Vladislav Surkov. In a managed democracy, the regime gouges the ballot box. Elections are retained as political theatre to provide a veneer of democratic legitimacy while the outcome is predetermined long before the first vote is cast (Atlantic Council, 2024). The visual markers of democracy remain — campaign commercials, polling stations, volunteers — but the competitive nature of the system is entirely eradicated.

The Existential Risks

For Trump, the 2026 midterms are about personal, existential survival. His approval ratings have collapsed into the mid-30s, driven down by the economy, mass deportations, and the war in Iran (The Guardian, 2026). The Senate map, once thought to be a Republican lock, is now a genuine toss-up, with prediction markets placing control at a 50-51 coin flip (270toWin, 2026).

If the Democrats win the House, they gain subpoena power. That means the immediate launch of sweeping investigations into the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the conduct of the Iran war, and, most dangerously for Trump, the Epstein files.

The Epstein exposure is a uniquely personal threat. In November 2025, Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, requiring the Department of Justice to release all files related to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell within 30 days. The DOJ blew past the deadline. When they finally released approximately 3 million files in January 2026, the rollout was chaotic: nearly 100 victims’ names and nude photos were mistakenly left visible, while crucial information was redacted (Yahoo News, 2026). More importantly, 2.5 million files are still being withheld from the public.

What is being hidden? An NPR investigation found that the DOJ appears to have withheld notes from an FBI interview with a woman who accused Donald Trump of sexually abusing her when she was 13 years old (CNBC, 2026; Daily Beast, 2026). The released files are missing dozens of pages related to sexual abuse accusations involving Trump (Houston Public Media, 2026). Despite evidence detailing the abuse of more than 1,000 women and children, the DOJ has made zero arrests beyond Epstein and Maxwell themselves (NPR, 2026).

Trump’s handling of the fallout reveals his panic. On April 2, 2026, he fired Attorney General Pam Bondi, ostensibly because he was unhappy with her handling of the Epstein files and her failure to prosecute his political enemies (CNBC, 2026). He replaced her with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who promptly declared that the Epstein files “should not be a part of anything going forward” (Krishnamoorthi, 2026). Meanwhile, Trump’s allies are floating a presidential pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell.

House Oversight Republicans have spent the last year acting as Trump’s firewall, blocking Democrats from issuing subpoenas related to Epstein by holding “roundtables” instead of hearings to prevent votes on the matter (Politico, 2026). A Democratic House strips away that shield. The Department of Justice’s internal watchdog has already opened an audit into the agency’s compliance with the Transparency Act (New York Times, 2026). The pressure is mounting.

If the Democrats win the Senate as well, the threat escalates from exposure to removal. More than 85 Democrats have already called for Trump’s impeachment or removal via the 25th Amendment over his actions in Iran (NBC News, 2026). Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi has explicitly refused to rule out a third impeachment if Democrats regain control (The Grio, 2026).

Trump knows this. He has publicly warned his supporters that a strong Democratic showing will lead to his impeachment (Newsweek, 2026). He cannot afford a clean election, because a clean election, given his current standing, likely means losing the House. Losing the House means losing the shield. It is these reasons alone that make a clean election unviable for him.

Gutting the Electoral Immune System

To ensure the election is not clean, the administration had to first remove the people who kept it clean in 2020. To comprehend the scale of what has been done, one must look back to a windowless room in Washington in December 2020. Attorney General William Barr had summoned federal officials responsible for protecting American elections — experts from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and top FBI officials — to a fortified room at the Justice Department’s headquarters. Trump was obsessed with a conspiracy theory that voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan, had switched votes from him to Biden. The CISA specialists explained patiently that a clerk had made a mistake when updating ballot styles on machines, leading to a software problem. There was no fraud. Just human error, subsequently confirmed through a hand count of the ballots (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

Those CISA specialists, and the dozens of career officials like them who stood between Trump and the theft of the 2020 election, are now gone. Every single one of them. A ProPublica investigation published in April 2026 found that at least 75 career officials who played important roles in election security at the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice, and other departments have left, been fired, or been reassigned since Trump returned to power (Clark and Fifield, 2026). They have been replaced by roughly two dozen political appointees. Ten of those appointees actively worked to reverse the 2020 vote. The rest are associates of such people. The election denial movement has merged with the federal government.

The destruction of CISA is the most visible part of this purge. CISA was created by Trump in his first term to counter cyber threats in the aftermath of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 vote. After the 2020 election, it played a crucial part in puncturing the fallacies spread by Trump supporters, producing a “Rumor Control” website to rebut them. Trump swiftly fired Chris Krebs, whom he had appointed to lead CISA, after Krebs and his colleagues released a statement calling the 2020 election “the most secure in American history” (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

Upon returning to the Oval Office, Trump finished the job. Starting in February 2025, DHS leadership put employees focused on countering disinformation and helping safeguard elections on leave. The agency’s election security work was frozen entirely. Eventually, all three dozen or so CISA employees specialising in elections were fired or transferred to work in other areas (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

The destruction did not stop at CISA. The National Security Council’s election security group, which coordinated departmental responses to electoral threats, was disbanded. The Foreign Malign Influence Center — a branch of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that had stymied efforts by Russia, China, and Iran to interfere in the 2024 election — was dismantled in August 2025. Former national security officials told ProPublica that its functions had largely ceased (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

The FBI has been similarly gutted. Kash Patel, the bureau’s new director, dismantled the public corruption team, which had been deployed in previous administrations to help monitor possible criminal activity on Election Day. The Foreign Influence Task Force, which aimed to combat foreign influence in American politics, was also disbanded.

The Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, which had been responsible for ensuring the department’s inquiries were not improperly influenced by politics, was effectively destroyed. After Trump returned to power, the unit’s top staff resigned when agency leaders directed them to dismiss corruption charges against then-New York City Mayor Eric Adams. More resigned or were transferred thereafter. The 36-person section was reduced to two (Clark and Fifield, 2026). It no longer reviews politically sensitive cases.

The Civil Rights Division’s voting section, which had enforced federal laws protecting voting rights and combating racial discrimination, has been similarly undermined. Nearly all of the section’s roughly 30 career lawyers have resigned or been moved. Harmeet Dhillon, Trump’s assistant attorney general for civil rights, issued a memo declaring that the division’s mission would shift from ensuring voting rights to enforcing Trump’s executive order on elections. The administration then filled the section with conservative lawyers who are now litigating against the very lawyers they replaced. At least four of those newly appointed lawyers participated in challenging the 2020 vote or have worked with people who helped Trump try to overturn the 2020 election (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

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This is the deliberate, coordinated removal of every person and institution that said “no” in 2020. The mechanism is the goal. The institutional immune system has been systematically dismantled to ensure that when the order comes to intervene in the 2026 midterms, there will be no one left to refuse.

The Fulton County Raid: The Weimar Parallel Made Flesh

What happened in Georgia is the single most important event of the last year, because it demonstrates exactly how the machinery of theft operates when the guardrails are gone.

In late January 2026, the FBI carried out an unprecedented seizure of 2020 election materials from Fulton County, Georgia — a Democratic stronghold. The operation was orchestrated by Kurt Olsen, whom Trump had hired as his director of election security and integrity. Olsen had worked to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss in court and was later sanctioned by judges for making baseless allegations about Arizona elections (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

When the FBI’s Atlanta field office chief, Paul Brown, examined the report Olsen presented to justify the raid, his team found that Georgia’s election board had already looked into its allegations, dismissing many altogether. Brown’s team submitted an affidavit to their superiors that did not make a strong enough case to move forward. Brown was then offered a choice: retire or be moved to a new office. He retired. With Brown gone, the case moved ahead under his replacement (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

This is the Weimar parallel made flesh. The career official who says no is removed. He is replaced by someone who says yes. The raid proceeds. “They’re just moving through people until they find someone who’s willing to do exactly what they want,” said Ryan Crosswell, a former Justice Department lawyer who handled election cases for nearly five years (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

The Fulton County demonstrates the FBI can now be weaponised against local election officials who refuse to comply with the administration’s demands. It is a message to every county clerk, secretary of state, and election official in America: comply, or face the consequences. Imagine being a local election worker in Detroit or Philadelphia, knowing that the federal government is now willing to deploy the FBI to seize your equipment if the President dislikes the vote count. The machinery of theft is abstract until it touches a person. The Fulton County raid proves it will touch anyone who stands in the way.

Manufacturing the Illusion of Fraud

With the guardrails removed and the loyalists installed, the administration has spent the last year manufacturing the pretexts necessary to justify intervention. The most aggressive tool in this arsenal has been the DOJ’s unprecedented campaign to seize state voter rolls. The Justice Department has filed federal lawsuits against 29 states and the District of Columbia seeking access to sensitive voter registration data (Holtzman Vogel, 2026). The administration’s stated rationale is the detection of non-citizen voters. But the tool being used to identify them — the Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements system — has been found to be riddled with inaccuracies. DHS claimed the system had identified more than 21,000 potential non-citizens on voter rolls in the past year. But officials who checked those results in detail found vast inaccuracies. Most states eventually marked only a few to a few hundred potential non-citizens as registered to vote, and far fewer had ever actually voted (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

The tool is not fit for purpose, but that is not the point. The point is to generate numbers, doubt, and a pretext. It creates the illusion of a tainted voter pool, which can later be cited as justification for throwing out results.

Running in parallel is the SAVE America Act, which passed the House at Trump’s urging and would require voters to provide documentary proof of citizenship — such as a passport or birth certificate — when registering to vote (Votebeat, 2026). Trump himself stated that if the SAVE Act were enacted, Republicans would “never lose a race. For 50 years, we won’t lose a race” (Center for American Progress, 2026). It is an explicit admission that the policy is about partisan advantage, not election integrity.

To understand what this means in practice, consider Courtney Patterson. He is 80 years old. He was born on his family’s farm in Lenoir County, North Carolina, and was fortunate that a country doctor recorded his birth. “But many other people who grew up with me didn’t even have that,” Patterson told Capital B. Babies were delivered at home by midwives who were illiterate. On the rare occasions a doctor visited, he might leave with a ham or produce — payment from families with little cash. Documentation of births, if it existed at all, was written down in a family Bible (Tensley, 2026).

Patterson has served on the Lenoir County Board of Elections for close to 15 years. In all that time, he said, “we have never had to investigate” a single case of someone falsely claiming citizenship to vote. What he sees in the SAVE Act is something older and uglier: “It’s the same pattern,” he said, comparing it to the literacy tests and poll taxes of the Jim Crow era (Tensley, 2026).

The numbers confirm his instinct. The Brennan Center for Justice found that 21.3 million voting-age Americans do not have proof of citizenship readily available. One-fifth of Black Americans born in 1939 and 1940 were never issued birth certificates. Only one-third of Black Americans hold passports, compared to half of all American adults. The racial disparity is not incidental (Morris and Henry, 2024). As Demetria McCain of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund put it: “This isn’t an ID law. Your driver’s license isn’t going to help you. You’ve got to have something like a passport or a birth certificate.” And then she drew the direct historical line: “And guess what the poll tax was about? It was about money” (Tensley, 2026).

The SAVE Act would also destroy the infrastructure of Black civic participation. For decades, voter registration has orbited around community life: churches, fraternities, sororities, grocery stores. But proving citizenship requires formal documentation verified at a government office. “You can’t do that at a church registration drive,” McCain said. “You can’t do that in front of a grocery store” (Tensley, 2026). The legislation dismantles the communal architecture through which Black Americans have exercised their democratic rights for generations.

The Uniform at the Door

Beyond the legal machinery of disenfranchisement, the administration is also preparing a more visceral form of voter suppression: the physical deployment of federal immigration agents to American polling locations.

In March 2026, Trump abruptly ordered ICE agents to major US airports to assist the Transportation Security Administration during a DHS funding lapse. The decision surprised even senior officials within his own administration. But Steve Bannon, Trump’s former chief strategist and a figure who remains deeply embedded in the administration’s ideological orbit, was not surprised at all. On his War Room podcast, Bannon explained the real purpose: “We can use this as a test run, as a test case, to really perfect ICE’s involvement in the 2026 midterms.” He was unambiguous about the intended outcome: “ICE is going to be there in the fall of ‘26, just like they’re in airports today. So, from the War Room, suck on that!” (Knutson, 2026).

Mike Davis, a far-right lawyer assisting the administration with its effort to pack the judiciary with loyalists, endorsed the idea on the same broadcast. His justification was the same baseless claim that animates the entire voter suppression apparatus: that non-citizen voting is a widespread problem. It is not. Numerous studies and voter roll audits have found that non-citizens fraudulently voting is vanishingly rare. The claim is a pretext (Brennan Center, 2026b).

The Brennan Center for Justice has been explicit: sending ICE or any other armed federal agents to polling places is illegal. Federal law expressly bans federal officers from interfering in elections, and a separate statute — on the books since 1865 — prohibits troops and armed federal agents from being deployed anywhere an election is held. Any form of voter intimidation by federal agents is illegal under both federal and state law (Brennan Center, 2026b). The Department of Homeland Security has no role in enforcing election laws. ICE has no business being anywhere near a polling place.

But legality is not the point; the uniform at the door is, as is the patrol car parked outside a polling station in a predominantly Latino neighbourhood in Phoenix or Miami, or the ICE van idling at the end of the street where a Black church in Detroit has been running its voter registration drive for forty years. Nobody needs to be arrested. Nobody needs to be turned away. The mere presence of immigration enforcement agents at or near a polling place is enough. The chilling effect — the decision made at home, before leaving the house, that today is not worth the risk — is the intended outcome. The architecture of theft does not always require a lock. Sometimes a shadow is enough.

Markwayne Mullin, confirmed by the Senate as Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security, refused during his confirmation hearing to definitively rule out deploying ICE to polling places, saying only that it could happen in the event of a “specific threat” (Brennan Center, 2026b). The White House has similarly declined to issue a categorical assurance that it will not happen. In the absence of a clear prohibition, Bannon’s promise stands.

The Iran War as Pretext

The most dangerous pretext being manufactured, however, is an international one. Just hours after launching the war in Iran, Trump reposted a headline on Truth Social claiming: “Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump, and now faces renewed war with United States” (Waldman, 2026).

This was a deliberate signal. By explicitly linking the Iran war to election interference on the very day the bombs began falling, Trump was constructing a narrative bridge between the foreign conflict and the domestic vote. If Iran is an enemy of America, and Iran tried to interfere in elections, then any election result that weakens Trump — the man Iran supposedly fears — can be reframed as an Iranian victory. The logic is circular, but it does not need to be sound, it just needs to be loud.

Timothy Snyder, writing in Project Syndicate just days ago, laid out the threat of using crisis to manipulate elections with characteristic bluntness: “The United States is seven months away from the most consequential midterm elections in its history. Meanwhile, U.S. President Donald Trump, together with Israel, has started a war against Iran. These are the ideal conditions for a head of state to seize power in a coup” (Snyder, 2026). Snyder identifies five scenarios through which Trump could exploit the war but singles out one as the most dangerous: the exploitation of terror. A foreign enemy carrying out an attack against American civilians during wartime would provide an aspiring dictator with a pretext to declare a state of emergency and suspend elections. Snyder does not stop there. He raises the spectre of a false-flag operation, noting that “in 1999, the Russian secret services bombed apartment buildings in Moscow, triggering a chain of events that set in motion Putin’s march toward dictatorship. Chances are high that Trump, Putin’s client in the White House, has considered this approach” (Snyder, 2026).

Whether or not one considers a false-flag operation plausible, the broader point is undeniable: the Iran war is a domestic political tool (as well as a foreign policy disaster). It provides the ultimate national security rationale for executive overreach. And it creates the conditions under which an attack — real or manufactured — could be used to justify the suspension of democratic norms. As Snyder concludes: “if a terrorist attack does occur in the next seven months, Americans should be skeptical of Trump, who will undoubtedly attempt to blame his domestic opponents and discredit the midterms” (Snyder, 2026).

The Shadow of Emergency Powers

The final, most severe escalation in this architecture of theft is the preparation to use emergency powers to seize control of the electoral process itself. A 17-page draft executive order titled “Establishing Security, Integrity, and Transparency for United States Elections with Protections Against Foreign Interference” has been circulating among anti-voting groups and administration allies since spring 2025 (Democracy Docket, 2026a). The draft order would declare a national emergency to allow the President to take unprecedented control over voting. Its sweeping scope would prohibit most Americans from casting a mail ballot and would require all 211 million registered Americans to re-register in person at an election office by proving their citizenship (Center for American Progress, 2026).

The draft cites the National Emergencies Act, the Federal Information Security Modernization Act, and the Defense Production Act as its legal basis. Legal scholars note that none of these authorities delegates the president any power to change voting laws, let alone enact a wholesale takeover of federal and local elections (Center for American Progress, 2026). The US Constitution expressly gives states the power to administer federal elections.

Yet the administration’s allies are openly preparing the ground. Late last week, election deniers who tried to overturn the 2020 election met with top administration election security officials in a “summit” aimed at pushing Trump to declare a national emergency and take over the midterms (Waldman, 2026). Among the attendees were Kurt Olsen, the architect of the Fulton County raid, and Heather Honey, an election denier now in charge of election security at DHS.

Jerome Corsi, an election denier who is reportedly coordinating with the White House on the draft order, stated on a right-wing podcast in March 2026: “I think Plan A has always been an executive order from President Trump... He’s not going to allow the 2026 midterm elections to be stolen without taking some strong executive action and executive order” (Democracy Docket, 2026b).

The legal reality — that the President does not possess the constitutional authority to suspend or rewrite election laws — is almost beside the point. If the administration issues an emergency declaration aimed at seizing control of the electoral apparatus, it will force the courts, state governors, and the military to choose sides in real-time. In a system where the institutional guardrails have already been systematically dismantled, relying on the courts to swiftly and decisively halt an executive power grab is a terrifying gamble. When leaders are allowed to deny reality on this scale, atrocity often follows.

Election Night: The Machinery in Motion

So, what does this actually look like in practice? Imagine November 3, 2026.

The polls close. The early returns, heavily skewed by in-person voting, show Republicans performing well. But as the night wears on, the mail-in ballots — the very ballots Trump has spent years demonising — begin to be counted in key swing states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Arizona. The margins tighten. The Senate hangs in the balance. The House majority begins to slip away.

Before the count is even close to finished, Trump takes to Truth Social, echoing his Virginia post: “A RIGGED ELECTION IS TAKING PLACE! MASSIVE MAIL-IN BALLOT DROPS!”

But this time, the machinery activates. The DOJ, now purged of its independent career lawyers, immediately files emergency injunctions in federal courts to halt the counting of mail-in ballots, citing the “tainted” voter rolls they spent the last year manufacturing doubt about. The FBI, weaponised as seen in Fulton County, dispatches agents to election offices in Democratic strongholds, demanding to seize voting machines and ballots under the guise of investigating “foreign interference” from Iran.

And then, the executive order drops. Citing the ongoing war and the “national emergency” of foreign meddling, Trump signs the 17-page document, attempting to federalise the election process and invalidate millions of votes.

The chaos is intentional; the goal is to stop the count, create an impenetrable fog of doubt, and force the issue into a Supreme Court that he has packed, or into state legislatures where his loyalists hold power.

The Final Test

Senator Alex Padilla, a California Democrat who has led the pushback to the administration’s actions on elections, put it plainly: “Our election system withstood Trump’s attacks following the 2020 election, but this will be an even tougher test, with more election deniers in positions of power and fewer guardrails in place” (Clark and Fifield, 2026).

In 2020, there were 75 career officials across DHS, DOJ, and other departments who formed the backbone of the institutional immune system. There was a CISA that could debunk fraud claims in real time. There was a Public Integrity Section that could block politically motivated prosecutions. There was an FBI field office chief in Atlanta who could look at a politically motivated request and say no.

Every single one of those defenses has been removed. With the federal oversight mechanisms gone, the defense of the election now relies entirely on the resilience of state officials, the integrity of the remaining independent courts, and the public’s unwavering refusal to accept a pre-rigged outcome.

That is a very thin line to hold. But it is not nothing, and there is something else that the architecture of theft cannot suppress, something that the draft executive orders and the purged officials and the ICE deployments cannot reach: the fact that more and more Americans are seeing through Donald Trump.

Consider what the machinery itself reveals. Trump’s approval ratings are in freefall. The Virginia redistricting vote went against him. The Senate is a genuine toss-up. If he were truly popular — if the MAGA movement were the unstoppable force it presents itself as — none of this would be necessary. The SAVE Act would not be needed. The DOJ voter roll lawsuits would not be needed. The draft emergency executive order would not be needed. The promise of ICE agents at polling places would not be needed. The architecture of theft is the confession of a man who knows he cannot win a clean fight.

The resistance is already underway. It is being led not by institutions in Washington but by state-level officials who were elected by the same people Trump is trying to disenfranchise. It is being built in courtrooms where attorneys general are fighting the DOJ’s voter roll lawsuits. It is being sustained by the ordinary donations filling the legal defence funds preparing injunctions against the emergency orders. The institutional immune system may have been hollowed out at the federal level, but it is being rebuilt from below: in state houses, county election offices, and in the decisions of local election workers who look at a federal agent at their door and refuse to be intimidated. The people united is a formidable thing. History has shown that repeatedly.

This is not a moment for passive observation. The time to act is now. Support the state-level officials fighting the voter roll lawsuits. Fund the legal groups preparing the injunctions. Demand that local representatives publicly commit to certifying the vote, regardless of federal pressure. The architecture of theft is being built in plain sight — so is the resistance to it.

There is one final, devastating reality to confront. The 2026 midterms are not a rehearsal for something else. They are the foundation upon which everything that follows will be built. If the Republicans hold the House through suppression and manufactured doubt, they retain the committee chairs, the subpoena power, and the firewall around the Epstein files. If they hold the Senate, they retain the ability to confirm loyalists to every remaining institution — including any Supreme Court vacancy that opens before 2028. And if the emergency executive order is successfully deployed in 2026 and survives legal challenge, it does not remain a draft document circulating among election deniers. It becomes established practice. By November 2028, the courts will have ruled on it. The precedent will have been set.

And in January 2029, the man sitting in the Vice President’s chair, presiding over the certification of the Electoral College, will not be Mike Pence. Pence was a constitutionalist who believed, however reluctantly, that his role was ceremonial and legally constrained. He did the right thing in 2020, and he paid for it politically — hounded out of the movement he had served, booed at his own party’s rallies. JD Vance has given every indication that he holds no such conviction. He has been explicit that he believes Pence made the wrong call. Every piece of the architecture being built now — the purged officials, the gutted agencies, the weaponised DOJ, the ICE deployments, the emergency powers — serves two purposes simultaneously: to win in 2026, and to make 2028 irreversible. With Vance in the chair, the final act only requires a signature.

The Weimar Republic fell because its citizens believed the institutions would save them, even as those institutions were being gutted from within. Americans do not have the luxury of that illusion. The federal institutions have been inverted, their authority turned against the democratic processes they were built to protect. The defence of the republic now rests not in Washington, but in the hands of the people who are already fighting back, and in the hands of every American who understands what is at stake before the polls open in November 2026.

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References

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It takes a particular kind of intellectual dishonesty to build a political brand on the absolute moral authority of the Catholic Church, only to tell the Vicar of Christ to stay in his lane the moment he disagrees with your boss. Yet this is the position in which Vice President J.D. Vance now finds himself. When asked about Pope Leo XIV’s condemnation of the Trump administration’s war in Iran, Vance offered a polite but unmistakable dismissal. “It would be best for the Vatican to stick to matters of morality,” he said, “and let the President of the United States stick to dictating American public policy” (Vance, quoted in Luscombe 2026).

It is a statement that reveals everything about the nature of Vance’s faith. For years, Vance has positioned himself as the intellectual vanguard of the “post-liberal Catholic” movement: a political project that explicitly rejects the separation of church and state, arguing instead that Catholic social teaching should be the organising principle of American public life. But when the head of that Church actually attempts to apply its moral teaching to American public life, Vance suddenly discovers the virtues of secularism. His Catholicism, as it turns out, is not a submission to divine authority. It is instead a costume, worn to dignify the hangover of a decaying order and discarded the moment it becomes inconvenient.

The Post-Liberal Pretence

Vance converted to Catholicism in 2019, a decision he has frequently described as the culmination of a long intellectual journey away from the secular liberalism of his Yale Law School education. He aligned himself with a group of conservative Catholic thinkers — men like Patrick Deneen and Adrian Vermeule — who argue that the liberal democratic order has failed because it lacks a shared moral foundation. Their proposed solution, often termed “integralism” or “post-liberalism,” is a society ordered toward the highest good, as defined by the Catholic Church (Deneen 2018; Vermeule 2020).

In this worldview, the Church is the ultimate arbiter of moral truth, and its teachings should inform the laws and policies of the state. Vance has eagerly adopted this framework, using it to provide a veneer of intellectual seriousness to the Trump administration’s most brutal policies. He has presented himself as a man who has found the philosophical grounding that the modern Republican Party so desperately needs. Not just a politician, but a thinker; a man whose policy preferences are rooted in two millennia of Catholic tradition.

But this intellectual branding has always been a fragile construct, dependent on a highly selective reading of Catholic teaching. The Church’s social doctrine is vast and complex, encompassing a commitment to the poor, the marginalised, and the immigrant, as well as scepticism of unfettered capitalism and militarism. Vance, however, has consistently ignored the parts of Catholic teaching that conflict with the priorities of the Trump administration, focusing instead on those elements that can be twisted to support a nationalist, America First agenda.

Consider his defence of the administration’s mass deportation program. When challenged on the cruelty of tearing families apart and expelling millions of people, Vance did not rely on standard Republican talking points about border security. Instead, he invoked the concept of ordo amoris, the right ordering of love. Drawing on St. Thomas Aquinas, Vance argued that a Christian’s primary moral obligation is to those closest to them: their family, their community, and their fellow citizens. Only after these obligations are met, he suggested, can one extend compassion to strangers (NPR 2025).

It was an attempt to weaponise Catholic theology against the very migrants the Church commands its followers to welcome. But it was also a profound distortion of Aquinas, who never suggested that love for one’s neighbour should be conditional on their citizenship status, nor that the state is exempt from the demands of charity (Orr 2026). When Pope Francis — Leo’s predecessor — rebuked this view of theology, Vance simply ignored him, continuing to use the language of the Church to justify the policies of the empire.

This selective obedience is the hallmark of the cosplay Catholic. It allows Vance to claim the moral high ground while simultaneously supporting policies that are fundamentally incompatible with the teachings of the Church he claims to revere. It is a theology of convenience, designed not to challenge the powerful, but to comfort them.

The Church as Chaplain

This pattern of selective obedience has now reached its logical conclusion in the dispute over the Iran war. Pope Leo XIV has been unequivocal in his condemnation of the conflict, telling Chaldean Catholic bishops that “God does not bless any conflict” and warning against the “delusion of omnipotence” driving the American war machine (Winfield 2026). For a true post-liberal Catholic, one who believes that the Church’s moral authority supersedes the secular state, this should be a moment of profound crisis. The Vicar of Christ has declared the war immoral.

But Vance experiences no such crisis. Instead, he tells the Pope to “stick to matters of morality,” as if the decision to drop bombs on foreign cities and risk global conflagration is somehow a morally neutral administrative task. “Let the President of the United States stick to dictating American public policy,” he says, neatly severing the connection between faith and politics that his entire intellectual brand is built upon.

In doing so, Vance reveals himself to be the polite, articulate face of the same thuggish impulse that led a Pentagon official to threaten the Vatican ambassador with a return to the “Avignon Papacy” (Religion Dispatches 2026). The Pentagon’s threat was crude and historical; Vance’s dismissal is smooth and televised. But the underlying message is identical: the Church is permitted to exist only so long as it serves the interests of the American empire. When it refuses to bless the empire’s wars, it must be silenced, sidelined, or threatened into submission.

Vance’s demand that the Pope stay in his lane is a demand that the Church subordinate itself to the state. It is the exact opposite of the integralist vision he claims to champion. He does not want a state guided by the Church; he wants a Church that acts as a chaplain to the state, offering theological cover for whatever atrocities the administration decides to commit.

This is the fundamental contradiction of the post-liberal Catholic project as articulated by Vance and his allies. They claim to want a society ordered toward the highest good, but they are entirely unwilling to accept the authority of the institution that defines that good. They want the moral authority of the Church without the moral obligations. They want the aesthetic of faith without the substance. They want the power to dictate morality to others, without the burden of submitting to it themselves.

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The Choice of Submission

The ultimate absurdity of Vance’s position is illuminated by the man he has chosen to serve instead of the Pope. While Vance was telling the head of the Catholic Church to stay out of politics, his boss was busy posting AI-generated images of himself as Jesus Christ on Truth Social (CBS News 2026). Blasphemy by anyone’s standards.

Donald Trump rejects the moral authority of the Church while attempting to usurp it. He demands the kind of absolute loyalty and devotion that is traditionally reserved for the divine. When the Pope criticises him, Trump attacks the Pope’s legitimacy, claiming credit for his election and whining that the Pontiff is “weak on crime” (Trump 2026).

That is the man to whom J.D. Vance has pledged his allegiance. A man who threatens genocide before breakfast, demands that the military swear loyalty to him personally, and deletes blasphemous images of himself only when the political backlash becomes too severe.

For a genuine Catholic, the choice between the moral authority of the Pope and the demands of a man who posts himself as the Messiah should not be difficult. But Vance has made his choice. He has looked at the system that is currently dying — a system that requires constant war and the demonisation of the vulnerable to sustain itself — and decided that its hangover is worth defending, even if it means telling The Holy Father to sit down and be quiet.

At its heart, this is a question of power. Vance understands that his political future depends on his absolute loyalty to Donald Trump. If that loyalty requires him to publicly contradict the Pope, to distort Catholic theology, and to defend the indefensible, he will do so without hesitation. His faith is entirely subordinate to his ambition.

The Collapse of the Performance

Vance’s Catholicism is pure political strategy. It was adopted to provide intellectual cover for a movement that is fundamentally anti-intellectual and deeply immoral. It allowed him to present himself as a serious thinker, a man wrestling with the deep questions of political philosophy, rather than just another ambitious schmuck willing to say whatever is necessary to secure power.

But the war in Iran has forced the issue. You cannot be a post-liberal Catholic while simultaneously demanding that the Pope stay out of public policy. You cannot claim that the state must be guided by moral truth while defending a war that the Church has explicitly condemned. You cannot serve two masters.

When Vance told the Pope to “stick to matters of morality,” the performance collapsed, revealing not a devout Catholic struggling to reconcile his faith with his political duties, but a cynical operator who views the Church as just another area to be managed and manipulated.

The Trump administration’s demand for submission is absolute. It requires its servants to abandon their principles, dignity, and, ultimately, their faith. Pete Hegseth has chosen to resolve this tension by inventing a militant, crusading Christianity that blesses his desire for overwhelming violence. J.D. Vance has chosen a different path: he simply turns his faith off when the President requires it.

The tragedy of J.D. Vance is not that he is a hypocrite; politics is full of hypocrites. The tragedy is that he is a man who clearly understands the moral bankruptcy of the system he serves yet chooses to serve it anyway. He has read Aquinas. He understands the concept of the common good. He knows that the war in Iran is a moral catastrophe. But he has decided that the rewards of power are worth the price of his soul.

In the end, Vance’s cosplay Catholicism is a testament to the enduring power of the American empire to co-opt and corrupt even the most profound moral traditions. It is a reminder that when faith is reduced to a political brand, it loses its power to challenge the status quo. It becomes just another tool of the powerful, used to justify the unjustifiable and to silence those who dare to speak the truth.

Pope Leo XIV has spoken the truth. He has declared that God does not bless any conflict, and he has refused to be intimidated by the threats of the Pentagon or the insults of the President. In doing so, he has exposed the moral emptiness of the Trump administration and the intellectual bankruptcy of its defenders. J.D. Vance may tell the Pope to stay in his lane, but the Servant of the Servants of God has already spoken, and the world is listening.

The contrast between the two men could not be starker. On one side is a Pope who understands that true moral authority requires a willingness to speak truth to power, even when it is dangerous or unpopular. On the other side is a Vice President who has built his career on a carefully curated image of intellectual seriousness and religious devotion, only to abandon both the moment they become politically inconvenient.

Vance’s intellectual journey, from the secular liberalism of Yale Law School to the post-liberal Catholicism of his current political brand, has always been marked by a certain performative quality. He has adopted the language and the aesthetic of faith, but he has never truly submitted to its demands. He has used the Church as a prop, a way to signal his seriousness and his commitment to a higher moral order, while simultaneously serving an administration that is defined by its cruelty, its corruption, and its absolute disregard for the truth.

This is the essence of the cosplay Catholic. It is a faith that is entirely instrumental, a bludgeon to be used and discarded as needed. And it is a faith that is ultimately empty, devoid of the moral courage and the spiritual depth that true religion requires.

As the war in Iran continues to escalate, and the Trump administration’s rhetoric becomes increasingly unhinged, the moral ruin of Vance’s position will only become more apparent. He has tied his political fortunes to a man who demands absolute loyalty and who views any challenge to his authority as a personal insult. He has done so while claiming to represent a religious tradition that explicitly rejects the idolatry of power and the glorification of violence.

It is a contradiction that cannot be sustained. Eventually, the act will implode entirely, and Vance will be forced to confront the reality of what he has become. In the meantime, the world will continue to watch as the Vice President of the United States attempts to reconcile his carefully curated image of religious devotion with his unwavering support for an administration that is waging war in the name of God. It is a spectacle that is both tragic and absurd.

And through it all, Pope Leo XIV will continue to speak the truth. He will continue to remind the world that God does not bless any conflict, and that the true measure of a society is not its military might or its economic power, but its commitment to justice, peace, and the common good. It is a message that J.D. Vance would do well to heed, if only he were willing to listen.

But Vance has made his choice. He has chosen the empire over the Church, power over principle, and ambition over faith. He has become the very thing he once claimed to despise: a cynical operator who uses religion as a political tool; a man who invokes the name of God to justify the unjustifiable. And in doing so, he has revealed the true nature of his post-liberal Catholic project. It is not a defence of the faith; it is a betrayal of it.

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References

CBS News (2026) ‘Trump posts AI image depicting himself as Jesus Christ, drawing backlash’, CBS News, 13 April. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/trump-posts-ai-image-jesus-christ/ [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

Deneen, P. J. (2018) Why Liberalism Failed. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Luscombe, R (2026) ‘JD Vance defends Trump amid spat with Pope Leo: ‘Stick to matters of morality.’’ The Guardian, 14 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/14/jd-vance-defends-trump-pope-leo-spat [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

NPR (2025) ‘Pope rebukes Trump over migrant deportations and refutes VP Vance’s theology’, NPR, 11 February. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/g-s1-48194/pope-rebukes-trump-over-migrant-deportations-and-refutes-vp-vances-theology [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

Orr, J. (2026) ‘Neighbour-Love and Nation-State: Can Ordo Amoris Offer a Framework for Just Immigration Policy?’, William Temple Foundation, 13 January. Available at: https://williamtemplefoundation.org.uk/neighbour-love-and-nation-state-can-ordo-amoris-offer-a-framework-for-just-immigration-policy/ [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

Religion Dispatches (2026) ‘Why Would the Pentagon Allegedly Threaten the Pope’s Ambassador with an “Avignon Papacy”?’, Religion Dispatches, 10 April. Available at: https://religiondispatches.org/2026/04/10/why-would-pentagon-allegedly-threaten-popes-ambassador-avignon-papacy [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

Vermeule, A. (2020) ‘Beyond Originalism’, The Atlantic, 31 March. Available at: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/common-good-constitutionalism/609037/ (Accessed: 14 April 2026].

Winfield, N. (2026) ‘Pope Leo XIV amplifies criticism of US-Israeli war in Iran, says God does not bless any conflict’, AP News, 11 April. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-leo-chaldean-trump-mideast-iran-720eea814712d1d859875f39661d599f [Accessed: 14 April 2026].

When an empire is told “no,” it usually responds with violence. When Donald Trump is told “no,” he responds with a tantrum.

In the wake of Pope Leo XIV’s refusal to bless the administration’s war in Iran, the President of the United States took to Truth Social to air his grievances. The resulting 330-word rant is a masterpiece of narcissistic injury, a document that reveals exactly how small the man running the United States really is. But beneath the whining and the capital letters, the post reveals the central tension of this administration’s relationship with religion: the question of who, exactly, gets to speak for God.

Trump complained that Leo is “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” He grumbled about COVID-era restrictions that the Pope had nothing to do with. He whined that Leo meets with “Obama Sympathizers.” And then, in the most revealing line of the entire outburst, he attempted to claim credit for the papacy itself: “He wasn’t on any list to be Pope, and was only put there by the Church because he was an American, and they thought that would be the best way to deal with President Donald J. Trump” (Benen, 2026).

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The words were spoken in Rome, but they were aimed directly at Washington. On Palm Sunday, 29 March 2026, Pope Leo XIV presided over a prayer vigil in St. Peter’s Basilica. He did not name the American president, he did not need to, because the target of his moral outrage was unmistakable.

“Enough of the idolatry of self and money!” the Pope declared. “Enough of the display of power! Enough of war!” (Winfield, 2026a). He then turned his attention to the specific rhetorical strategy that the Trump administration has used to sanitise its violence in the Middle East. He denounced the “delusion of omnipotence” that fuels the conflict, warning that “even the holy Name of God, the God of life, is being dragged into discourses of death” (Winfield, 2026a).

Rather than a theological dispute, this is a struggle over who gets to define morality. The Trump administration, armed with the deadliest weapons in human history, is attempting to monopolise the language of righteousness to justify a war of choice. The head of the Catholic Church, an American himself, is refusing to let them have it.

The conflict between the Vatican and the White House exposes the central hypocrisy of the Trump project: its cynical, transactional use of religion as a tool of state power. When the administration demands that the Church bless its wars, and the Church refuses, the scripture runs dry. What remains is not faith, but a demand for submission so absolute that it has reportedly led the Pentagon to threaten the Vatican itself.

The Trump Project: War Framed as Destiny

To appreciate the depth of this clash, we must first understand how the Trump administration talks about violence. Instead of the language of reluctant necessity or strategic deterrence, it is the language of holy war.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the rhetoric of Defense/War Secretary Pete Hegseth. Hegseth is the ugly, militant id of the administration’s Christian nationalism. He bears a “Deus Vult” (God wills it) tattoo, a crusader slogan that he has described as a call for followers of Christ to “take up the sword in defense of their faith, their families, and their freedom” (Jones, 2026). He carries a Bible with the Jerusalem Cross and “Deus Vult” stamped on the cover (Kaylor, 2026). The tattoo and the Bible have become a uniform.

Hegseth views the military which he oversees as a spiritual force. He presides over monthly Christian worship services at the Pentagon, the first such events in the building’s history (Jones, 2026). In his book American Crusade, he explicitly links American identity to Christian violence, writing that “American Crusaders must lead the cultural fight” against Muslims, communists, and trans people (Jones, 2026).

When the war with Iran escalated, Hegseth’s rhetoric reached a fever pitch. On 25 March 2026, during a Pentagon worship service, he prayed directly for God to pour out “overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy” (Kaylor, 2026). The prayer was read from a script and had previously been delivered to bless the military operation in Venezuela in January. He then applied it to Iran. The full text is worth sitting with for a moment, because it clearly reveals the distorted theology at the heart of this administration:

“Break the teeth of the ungodly. By the blast of your anger, let the evil perish. Let their bulls go down to slaughter for their day has come, the time of their punishment. Pour out your wrath upon those who plot vain things and blow them away like chaff before the wind. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy. Preserve their lives, sharpen their resolve, and let justice be executed swiftly and without remorse that evil may be driven back and wicked souls delivered to the eternal damnation prepared for them.” (Kaylor, 2026)

This is the language of a crusade. The writer Brian Kaylor, who watched the service, noted that the prayer was the second most violent he had ever encountered, surpassed only by Mark Twain’s satirical The War Prayer, written as a critique of exactly this kind of religious bloodlust (Kaylor, 2026). The difference is that Twain was being ironic. Hegseth was not.

The prayer was accompanied by an equally explicit verbal declaration. Hegseth told the American public to pray for victory over the Iranian regime “in the name of Jesus Christ,” urging them to do so “every day, on bended knee, with your family, in your schools, in your churches” (Barrow, 2026). He has described the war as a conflict between a Christian nation and its enemies, and he has invoked his faith to cast American military power as an instrument of divine will.

Trump himself, when asked by a reporter whether he believed God approved of the war, replied: “I do, because God is good — because God is good and God wants to see people taken care of” (Barrow, 2026). The Rev. Franklin Graham, son of the iconic Baptist evangelist Billy Graham, declared that God had “raised him up for such a time as this,” and prayed for victory so that Iranians could “be set free from these Islamic lunatics” (Barrow, 2026).

Then, on 7 April 2026, Trump posted on Truth Social what may be the most nakedly genocidal statement ever made by a sitting American president. “A whole civilization will die tonight,” he wrote, “never to be brought back again” (Trump, 2026). The post was framed as a warning to Iran to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, but the language was akin to a man who had convinced himself that destruction was righteous, and that God was watching approvingly.

This is the “delusion of omnipotence” that Pope Leo XIV condemned. It is the belief that American military power is an extension of divine will, and that the annihilation of a sovereign state is a righteous act of purification. Hegseth uses God as a weapon; Leo uses God as a limit.

The Hollow Faith of J.D. Vance

If Hegseth provides the militant crusader imagery, Vice President J.D. Vance provides the intellectual hypocrisy. Vance’s highly publicised conversion to Catholicism in 2019 was celebrated by the New Right as a sign of intellectual seriousness, evidence that the MAGA movement had a philosophical depth beyond its most brutish instincts. But his faith, when tested against the demands of the Trump project, is revealed as a hollow performance, an aesthetic choice rather than a moral compass.

Vance did not simply join a parish and start going to Mass. He entered an intellectual world immersed in post-liberal Catholic thought — a movement associated with thinkers like Patrick Deneen, Sohrab Ahmari, and Adrian Vermeule, who argue that liberal democracy has failed and that the state should be guided by Catholic social teaching. This is Catholic integralism: the belief that religious values, specifically Christian ones, should guide government policies (Lecaque, 2026). It is a seductive framework for an ambitious politician, because it provides a sophisticated theological vocabulary for authoritarian politics.

The problem, which Vance has never satisfactorily resolved, is that the actual Catholic Church — including two successive popes — has consistently rejected the specific applications of this framework that the Trump administration favours. The Church’s opposition to the war in Iran, its defence of migrants, its insistence on the dignity of the poor: these are not liberal positions imported from outside the tradition. They are the tradition.

Vance has repeatedly attempted to extract moral authority from the Church to serve the state. In early 2025, he tried to use the Catholic theological concept of ordo amoris, the order of love, derived from St. Augustine and developed by St. Thomas Aquinas, to justify the administration’s draconian immigration policies and mass deportations. In a Fox News interview, he argued that Christian love requires prioritising one’s own citizens over foreigners: that the duty of love moves outward in concentric circles, from family to community to nation, and that this hierarchy justifies excluding the stranger (McKeown, 2025).

Before he was even elected Pope, Cardinal Robert Prevost — the man who would become Leo XIV — had already weighed in on this argument. On 3 February 2025, he posted on X, linking to a National Catholic Reporter editorial with the headline “JD Vance is wrong: Jesus doesn’t ask us to rank our love for others” (Pereira, 2025). He broke a period of silence on social media specifically to make this point. A man who had not posted on X since July 2023 returned to the platform to tell the Vice President of the United States that he had misread the Gospel.

The Vatican’s formal response was swift and devastating. In a February 2025 letter to US bishops, Pope Francis explicitly rebuked Vance’s interpretation. Francis wrote that the true ordo amoris is discovered by meditating on the parable of the Good Samaritan, “that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception” (McKeown, 2025). The Pope added, pointedly: “Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups” (McKeown, 2025).

Vance’s reaction to this papal reprimand was exposing. He told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, “I try not to play the politicization of the Pope game” (Politico, 2025). This is precisely what a man says when he has lost the theological argument and knows it. He does not derive his moral authority from the Church; he attempts to use the Church to launder his political ambitions. When the Vicar of Christ contradicts his political imperatives, the faith is discarded.

The pattern has continued into the Iran war. When the Pentagon meeting with the Vatican’s ambassador became public knowledge in April 2026, Vance said only that he would “look into it,” a response so deliberately vague as to be meaningless (Newsweek, 2026). He did not condemn the reported threats or defend the Pope’s right to speak freely. He offered the same studied non-answer that he always offers when his Catholicism is put to a genuine test: a shrug dressed up as prudence.

This is the question that Vance cannot answer, and that the media has been too polite to press: where does he get his moral authority from? If it comes from the Catholic Church, then he must answer to the Pope. If it does not come from the Church, then his conversion is a costume, nothing other than a way of signalling intellectual seriousness to a certain kind of conservative voter, while practising a politics that the Church explicitly condemns. The Pope chided him on immigration, the treatment of migrants, and on the war in Iran. At what point does a Catholic politician who has been repeatedly corrected by the Pope acknowledge that he is not, in any meaningful sense, following his faith? The answer, of course, is that he will not because the faith was never the point.

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Leo XIV: A Moral Counterweight

It is crucial to understand that Pope Leo XIV is not a progressive hero or a liberal ally. He is a traditionalist whose opposition to the war reflects established church teachings, not the reflexive politics of the moment. As Catholic University professor William Barbieri noted, the Church has spent five centuries helping to develop strong international norms, a tradition “rooted in Scripture and theology and philosophy” (Barrow, 2026). The Pope’s opposition to the war is not a political statement. Rather, it is the application of a moral framework that pre-dates the United States by fifteen centuries.

Leo XIV was born Robert Francis Prevost on 14 September 1955 in Chicago, Illinois. He joined the Order of Saint Augustine in 1977 and was ordained a priest in 1982. He spent more than a decade as a missionary in Peru, working in poor, rural communities far from the corridors of power. He later led the Augustinian order globally and served as Pope Francis’s Prefect for recommending bishop appointments around the world. This role that gave him a view of the global Church and its relationship with political power in every corner of the planet (Vatican News, 2025).

When the College of Cardinals elected him in May 2025, Trump welcomed the news as “a great honor for our country” (Barrow, 2026). The administration assumed, as it assumes about everything, that an American pope could be a useful American asset. But Leo’s global experience — his years in Peru, his oversight of bishops across the developing world, his first-hand knowledge of how Washington’s economic and military policies affect less powerful nations — had given him a perspective that no amount of transactional thinking could accommodate.

Leo’s power in this narrative stems precisely from his structural position. He is the head of an institution that claims universal moral authority, and he is using that authority to contradict the American empire’s claim to divine endorsement. When Trump threatened to destroy Iranian civilization, Leo called the threat “truly unacceptable” and said any attacks on civilian infrastructure violate international law (Barrow, 2026). When Hegseth prayed for overwhelming violence, Leo told Chaldean Catholic bishops gathered in Rome — senior clerics of an Aramaic-speaking Iraqi Christian church whose communities have been devastated by decades of American-backed conflict — to “proclaim clearly that God does not bless any conflict; to cry out to the world that whoever is a disciple of Christ, the Prince of Peace, never stands on the side of those who yesterday wielded the sword and today drop bombs” (Winfield, 2026b).

In his Palm Sunday message, Leo went further still, quoting the Book of Isaiah directly: “even though you make many prayers, I will not listen — your hands are full of blood” (Barrow, 2026). This is a direct theological reproach of the administration’s claim that God endorses the war. The line from Isaiah was chosen deliberately. It is a passage about rulers who perform religious rituals while committing atrocities, who believe that prayer can sanctify violence. Leo was saying, in the plainest possible terms, that Hegseth’s war prayers are an abomination.

Theology professor Natalia Imperatori-Lee of Fordham University described the moment: “Popes have critiqued unfettered capitalism before, very robustly. The popes have critiqued the Industrial Revolution, right? Things that the U.S. has been at the forefront of. But it’s never been this specific and localized” (Barrow, 2026). The fact that Leo is a native English speaker removes any ambiguity from his words. There is no translation to hide behind, no cultural distance to exploit. When Leo says, enough of war, every American Catholic — and every American — understands exactly what he means and exactly who he is addressing. This is a line-by-line refutation of the Trump project. It is a refusal to allow the language of faith to be co-opted by the machinery of war.

The Avignon Threat: The Empire Demands Submission

The administration’s response to this moral resistance reveals the true nature of its authoritarianism. It wholly disagrees with the Pope and views independent moral authority as a threat to be neutralised. In January 2026, a closed-door meeting took place at the Pentagon between US defense officials and Cardinal Christophe Pierre, the Vatican’s outgoing ambassador to Washington. The meeting occurred after Leo had delivered a major foreign policy address to diplomats accredited to the Holy See, that included what the AP described as a “strong but veiled criticism” of US military intervention (Winfield, 2026b). According to reports, an American official warned the ambassador that the United States has the military power to do whatever it wants in the world, and the Catholic Church had better take its side (Lecaque, 2026). The most intimidating detail of the meeting was the reported invocation of the “Avignon Papacy” (Lecaque, 2026).

For those unfamiliar with 14th-century history, the Avignon Papacy refers to a period when a series of French popes resided in Avignon rather than Rome, effectively serving as extensions of the French monarchy. This arrangement did not arise peacefully. It began after the King of France sent his minister, Guillaume de Nogaret, to beat Pope Boniface VIII and hold him captive in retaliation for excommunicating the king. Boniface died shortly afterwards. His successor, Benedict XI, lasted only eight months before also dying suddenly. The next pope, Clement V, was the Archbishop of Bordeaux and a personal friend of the French king. He moved the papacy to Avignon, where it remained for nearly seventy years, a period which historians sometimes call the “Babylonian Captivity” of the Church (Lecaque, 2026).

To invoke Avignon in a meeting at the Pentagon is a mafia-style threat, a reminder that empires can break popes. The implication was unmistakable: comply or face the consequences. As Thomas Lecaque, an Associate Professor of History at Grand View University, wrote in Religion Dispatches: “it’s easy to see how an invocation of Avignon is a (very) thinly-veiled threat of violence” (Lecaque, 2026). The threat was taken seriously enough that Vatican officials reportedly shelved plans for Pope Leo XIV to visit the United States later in the year for the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary (Lecaque, 2026). The first American pope was effectively told he was not welcome in his own country.

The Vatican, for its part, issued a careful statement saying that the meeting “does not correspond to the truth in any way” in the characterisation given by media reports, and that Pierre’s attendance was part of his “regular duties” (Winfield, 2026b). The US Embassy to the Holy See echoed this, calling the reports a “deliberate misrepresentation.” Both statements were notably careful: they disputed the characterisation of the meeting, not the fact of it. The meeting happened; what was said in the room remains contested.

What is not contested is the broader pattern of behaviour. This is an administration that has threatened to deport legal residents, used the apparatus of the state to intimidate judges, journalists, and political opponents, and has sent its Defense/War Secretary to pray for the eternal damnation of its enemies. The idea that it would also send a message to the Vatican that the Pope had better fall into line is not, in the context of everything else this administration has done, remotely surprising.

An American Pope vs. an American Empire

There is a profound irony in the fact that the most prominent voice challenging American militarism today belongs to the first American pope. Leo XIV, a 70-year-old from Chicago, and Donald Trump, a 79-year-old from Queens, two white boomers from the same generation who represent jarringly distinct approaches to vast power (Barrow, 2026). They grew up in the same post-war America, lived through the same upheavals of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam, and arrived at positions that could not be more opposed.

Trump came of age in the world of New York real estate, where power is measured in money and leverage, and where the only moral question is whether you won or lost. Leo came of age in the Augustinian order, and then in the barrios of Peru, where power is measured in its effect on the poor, and where the only moral question is whether you served or abandoned the vulnerable.

“They’re two white guy boomers but they could not be any more different in their life experiences, in their values, in the way they have chosen to live those values,” said theology professor Natalia Imperatori-Lee. “This is a very stark contrast, and I think an inflection point for American Christianity” (Barrow, 2026).

The clash between them exposes a fracture within the American identity itself. The United States exports power, violence, and form of capitalism that has enriched a tiny elite while immiserating billions. The Vatican, under an American pope, is attempting to export restraint. Leo understands, from his years in Peru, what it means to live in a country that is on the receiving end of Washington’s decisions. He knows what American power looks like from the outside. Trump and his advisers, as Steven Millies, a professor at Chicago’s Catholic Theological Union, observed, “think only in terms of transactional politics — who’s for us and who’s against us” (Barrow, 2026). They cannot comprehend a moral framework that exists outside of their own power demands.

The administration’s confusion about Leo is, in this sense, revealing. They assumed that an American pope would be a useful American asset, that shared nationality would translate into shared political interest. They did not understand that Leo’s Americanness is precisely what makes him such a devastating critic. He is not a foreign dignitary offering polite diplomatic concern, but a man from Chicago who reads the New York Times, plays Wordle, and follows American sports (Barrow, 2026). He understands the country’s domestic political crisis from the inside. He has chosen, with full knowledge of what he is doing, to say: this is wrong.

The Refusal That Matters

There are limits on moral authority. The Vatican does not have an army. Pope Leo XIV cannot stop the bombs from falling on Iran, force J.D. Vance to abandon his cynical politics, or make Pete Hegseth understand the blasphemy of his crusader tattoos. The (delicate) ceasefire that took hold in April 2026 was the product of negotiations, not papal intervention.

But in a political landscape dominated by cowardice and complicity, refusal matters. When the Republican Party cheers a man who posts genocidal threats on social media, and the Cabinet applauds a Defense/War Secretary who prays for the eternal damnation of America’s enemies, the Pope’s refusal to bless the war creates friction in the narrative. It makes the administration’s claim to religious authority harder to sustain and gives cover to the American Catholics — and there are millions of them — who are appalled by what is being done in their name and in the name of their faith.

The Trump project relies on the illusion of total consensus, the idea that its actions are not only necessary but righteous. By saying ‘no,’ Leo XIV shatters that illusion. He exposes the administration’s religious rhetoric as a cheap con, and its threats against the Vatican as the desperate flailing of a project that knows it has lost the moral argument.

There is also the question of what the Avignon threat reveals about the administration’s deeper ambitions. Lecaque’s analysis in Religion Dispatches is worth returning to here because the invocation of Avignon is, at its most ambitious, a fantasy of a captive church — an American papacy that would rubber-stamp the administration’s wars, bless its deportations, and provide theological cover for its authoritarianism (Lecaque, 2026). This is Catholic integralism in its most deranged form: not the Church guiding the state, but the state capturing the Church.

The fantasy is farcical, as Lecaque notes. It underestimates the depth of anti-Catholicism in American Protestantism, the independence of the College of Cardinals, and the basic structural reality that the Vatican is a sovereign state that has survived empires far more powerful than the current occupant of the White House. But the fact that someone in the Pentagon apparently thought it was worth invoking tells you something important about the administration’s relationship to power. It does not recognise limits or accept the existence of institutions that it cannot control. When it encounters one, its first instinct is to threaten it.

This is the administration that J.D. Vance serves, and the project that his Catholicism is supposed to dignify. And this is the Pope who has looked at all of it — the war prayers, the genocide threats, the Avignon fantasy — and chose not to kneel.

When a dying empire demands God’s approval for its atrocities, refusal becomes a form of resistance. The most dangerous thing in a war built on the delusion of omnipotence is a voice that resists. Not because the voice has the power to stop the bombs, but because it has the power to name what the bombs are. They are not God’s will. They are not a crusade. They are not righteous. They are what they have always been: the violence of the powerful against the powerless, dressed up in the language of the divine.

Leo XIV knows this. He has spent his life in the places where that violence lands. And the institution he leads has watched empires like this one rise and fall for two millennia — has buried their flags, forgotten their names, and kept going. It has outlasted every tyrant who tried to bend it, silence it, or capture it. In that long reckoning, Donald Trump will not merit a chapter. He will barely be a footnote: filed, forgotten, and unmourned.

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References

Barrow, B. (2026) ‘Trump and Pope Leo are at odds over Iran’, AP News, 10 April. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/trump-pope-leo-iran-war-relationship-criticism-8473f1d8b8127a77ef94ba2f4ad378fb[Accessed: 12 April 2026].

Jones, S. (2026 ‘Iran Has Become Pete Hegseth’s Holy War’, New York Magazine, 1 April. Available at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/iran-pete-hegseth-holy-war.html [Accessed: 12 April 2026].

Kaylor, B. (2026) ‘Pete Hegseth’s War Prayer’, Word & Way, 3 April. Available at: https://wordandway.org/2026/04/03/pete-hegseths-war-prayer/ [Accessed: 12 April 2026].

Lecaque, T. (2026) ‘Why Would Pentagon Allegedly Threaten Pope’s Ambassador With “Avignon Papacy”?’, Religion Dispatches, 10 April. Cited in: Newsweek (2026) ‘Avignon Papacy Explained: What Reported US Threat to Pope and Vatican Means’, Newsweek, 9 April. Available at: https://www.newsweek.com/avignon-papacy-explained-what-reported-us-threat-to-pope-and-vatican-means-11803877 [Accessed: 12 April 2026].

McKeown, J. (2025) ‘Pope Francis, Vice President JD Vance clash over “ordo amoris”’, EWTN News, 13 February. Available at: https://www.ewtnnews.com/world/us/pope-francis-vice-president-jd-vance-clash-over-ordo-amoris[Accessed: 12 April 2026].

Pereira, I. (2025) ‘Pope Leo shared posts critical of Trump, Vance’s immigration policies on social media’, ABC7 News, 9 May. Available at: https://abc7.com/post/pope-leo-views-cardinal-robert-prevost-shared-posts-critical-jd-vance-donald-trump-immigration-policies-social-media/16362584/ [Accessed: 12 April 2026].

Politico (2025) ‘Vance brushes off apparent Pope Leo XIV criticism’, Politico, 9 May. Available at: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/09/jd-vance-pope-leo-00339790 [Accessed: 12 April 2026].

Newsweek (2026 ) ‘JD Vance Reacts to Report US Official Issued Threat to Vatican Ambassador’, Newsweek, 10 April. Available at: https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-reacts-report-us-official-issued-threat-vatican-ambassador-11802350[Accessed: 12 April 2026].

Trump, D.J. (2026 ) Post on Truth Social, 7 April. Available at: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/116363336033995961 [Accessed: 12 April 2026].

Vatican News (2025) ‘Biography of Robert Francis Prevost, Pope Leo XIV’, Vatican News, 8 May. Available at: https://www.vaticannews.va/en/pope/news/2025-05/biography-of-robert-francis-prevost-pope-leo-xiv.html [Accessed: 12 April 2026].

Winfield, N. (2026a) ‘Pope Leo XIV denounces the “delusion of omnipotence” he says fuels the US-Israeli war in Iran’, AP News, 11 April. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/pope-leo-usisraeli-war-iran-7309c5df6c7312b942e0510ea65502cb [Accessed: 12 April 2026].

Winfield, N. (2026b) ‘Pope amplifies criticism of Iran war and says “God does not bless any conflict”’, AP News, 10 April. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/vatican-pope-leo-chaldean-trump-mideast-iran-720eea814712d1d859875f39661d599f [Accessed: 12 April 2026].

The Cell: A Man Dies in Manhattan, and the Cameras Miss it

On the morning of August 10, 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was found dead in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan. He was sixty-six years old. The official story was clean, almost elegant in its simplicity: a disgraced financier, facing the rest of his life in prison, has committed suicide. But whether that ending was chosen by him, or forhim, was a question upon which the official story didn’t linger. The guards had been asleep; the cameras had malfunctioned. It was a seemingly explicable official conclusion.

Almost no one believed it. Not because the American public had become a nation of conspiracy theorists, but because for the first time in a long time, the conspiracy was visible. The cameras outside his cell had malfunctioned in a way that produced a specific, inexplicable gap in the footage. The missing seconds corresponded exactly to the window in which his life ended (Reuters, 2019). The two guards assigned to check on Epstein every thirty minutes had, by their own later admission, been asleep and falsifying their logs (Department of Justice, 2019). The most high-profile prisoner in the United States of America, a man who had allegedly compromised some of the most powerful people on earth, had been left entirely alone.

In a report released in June 2023, the Department of Justice’s own Inspector General found that the Bureau of Prisons had failed Epstein through a cascade of institutional dysfunction: chronic staffing shortages, a culture of negligence, and a series of decisions that, taken together, created the conditions for his death (OIG, 2023). The report was careful, bureaucratic, and deliberately inconclusive. It said nothing about who might have wanted Epstein dead, or why. It was the sound of a system protecting itself.

But the files remained. Millions of pages of documents, flight logs, FBI interview summaries, and email correspondence sat in the vaults of the Justice Department. They were the accumulated evidence of a network so vast and so powerful that its exposure threatened not just individuals but the entire architecture of elite power in the Western world. And for years, the people who held those files did everything they could to keep them buried.

Here is the thing that the official story never wanted you to sit with too long: Jeffrey Epstein was not in that cell just because of what he had done. He was there because of what he knew others had done. He was the ledger; the proof… and as long as he was alive, the ledger could be opened.

The Network: The Blackmail Machine at the Heart of Western Power

To understand the world that Jeffrey Epstein inhabited, you have to understand something about the nature of power in the late twentieth century: it had become untethered from accountability. The old structures of democratic oversight — the press, the courts, the legislature — had been systematically gouged through the accumulated weight of a thousand small decisions made by people who believed that the rules were for other people.

Epstein was the product and prefect expression of this world. He was a man of no particular genius or talent who had somehow accumulated extraordinary wealth and extraordinary access. He moved between Palm Beach, Manhattan, the Virgin Islands, and Paris, hosting a rotating cast of the world’s most powerful men at his properties, connecting them to each other, making himself indispensable. He was, in the language of intelligence agencies, a “facilitator.”

Donald Trump had been part of this world for decades. In 2002, he told New York magazine that Epstein was “a terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side” (New York Magazine, 2002). They attended parties together at Mar-a-Lago. They shared the same social universe of Palm Beach money and Manhattan excess. When Epstein was first arrested in Florida in 2008. The man who handled the prosecution was Alexander Acosta, who would later become Trump’s Secretary of Labour. Acosta gave Epstein a non-prosecution agreement of tremendous leniency: thirteen months in a county jail, with work release, for crimes that federal investigators had documented in a fifty-three-page indictment. A deal so extraordinary that it was later ruled illegal by a federal judge (Miami Herald, 2019). The survivors were not consulted. They were not even told the deal had been made.

Then came the Biden years. The files sat in the vaults of the Justice Department, and no one came for them. The survivors waited. They gave interviews. They filed legal motions. They begged. The administration that had promised to restore decency and accountability to the American government looked at those files and quietly decided the cost of opening them was too high. No one cared enough about the survivors to bring the powerful to account. The files were too dangerous; names inside them were too important. So, the silence continued, bipartisan and absolute.

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What made the files so dangerous was names of American politicians and billionaires and the architecture of the operation itself. Documents revealed Epstein’s deep and troubling connections to Israeli intelligence. An FBI memo from the bureau’s Los Angeles field office, produced in October 2020 and released in the 2026 document dump, reported that one of its sources had come to believe Epstein “was a co-opted Mossad agent” who had been “trained as a spy” (Al Jazeera, 2026). His email correspondence showed extensive contact with Yoni Koren, a senior aide to former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and a figure connected to Israeli military intelligence, who made regular stays at Epstein’s New York residence. Barak himself appeared repeatedly throughout the files, his relationship with Epstein spanning fifteen years (Al Jazeera, 2026).

This was more than a story of a paedophile and his clients. This was the story of a blackmail operation at the heart of Western power, with tentacles reaching into the intelligence services of at least two nations. The people who had visited Epstein’s properties, flown on his planes, and attended his dinners; they were not only morally compromised, but potentially compromised in ways that could be weaponised. Someone, somewhere, had been collecting the evidence.

In this reading, Epstein was not a criminal who had been brought to justice, but a liability who had been contained. The question of who contained him, and why, and whether the containment was permanent, was one that the system had no interest in answering.

The Fever Dream: QAnon Was Wrong About Everything Except the Thing That Mattered

While the files sat in the vaults, something strange was happening to the American psyche. A nation that had lost faith in its institutions began to construct its own explanations for the rot it could feel but could not see.

In 2017, an anonymous poster known as “Q” began leaving cryptic messages on internet message boards. The core claim of what became the QAnon movement was both bonkers and terrifyingly simple: that the world was controlled by a secret cabal of Satan-worshipping elites who operated a global child sex-trafficking ring, and that Donald Trump was engaged in a secret war to destroy them (Ohio Capital Journal, 2025).

It was an utter fever dream, a conspiracy theory that absorbed every other conspiracy theory, mutating and expanding until it became a quasi-religion for millions of people who felt abandoned by the modern world. It led to violence, to the storming of a pizzeria in Washington D.C., and eventually to the halls of Congress.

But the profound, uncomfortable irony of QAnon was that its central, animating premise — that a network of untouchable elites was operating a shadow ring of exploitation — was not entirely wrong. It was a distorted, funhouse-mirror reflection of an actual reality. The Epstein network did exist. Powerful men were exploiting the vulnerable with total impunity. The conspiracy theorists were right to believe they were being lied to; they were just wrong about the details.

The ultimate irony was the figure they chose as their saviour. The QAnon faithful believed that Donald Trump was the hero who would expose the elite paedophile ring. They did not know, or chose not to see, that Trump was himself a creature of that very same world, a man who had partied with Epstein, who had flown on his planes, and who, when the time came, would do everything in his power to keep the truth buried.

There is a school of thought — taken seriously by philosophers and physicists, not just the unhinged corners of the internet — that we may be living inside a simulation. That reality as we experience it is a constructed thing, a programme running on some vast and indifferent machine. It is usually discussed in the abstract, as a thought experiment, a provocation.

But then you look at this story: a paedophile financier with ties to intelligence services on two continents dies in a federal prison cell in a gap in the surveillance footage, while the guards sleep. His files are buried through three presidencies. The man who gave him his sweetheart deal becomes a Cabinet secretary. The man who called him a “terrific guy” becomes the President. The Attorney General says the files are on her desk. The President says the files don’t exist. The First Lady holds a press conference to say she is not a victim. And then the bombs fall on Tehran.

You can see why people start to wonder. Not because the simulation theory is true, but because reality has arranged itself with such a perfect, almost literary sense of irony that the alternative — that all of this is simply what human power looks like when it is left unchecked — is somehow even harder to accept.

The Contradiction: The Hoax That Was Sitting on the Desk

Fast forward to early 2026. Donald Trump had returned to the White House, and the world had changed in ways that were difficult to fully comprehend. The economy was stuttering as tariffs were biting. But the greatest threat to Trump was not economic. It was historical.

In November 2025, under enormous public pressure, Trump had signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act. It was a populist gesture, a way of presenting himself as the man who would finally expose the “deep state.” But what followed was a masterclass in obfuscation.

The files have not been fully released. What we know is already devastating — the hundreds of mentions of Trump, the emails detailing the mechanics of a social network built on mutual complicity, the names of billionaires and princes who operated in plain sight (BBC, 2026; New York Times, 2026). But you can only guess at what is being held back. The truth is being kept in the shadows, exactly where the powerful need it to be.

The contradictions from the White House were incredible, a dizzying spectacle of denial. Trump stood on the White House lawn and claimed the files “were made up by Comey. They were made up by Obama. They were made up by Biden” (Al Jazeera, 2025). He repeatedly dismissed the demands for transparency as a “Democrat hoax” (C-SPAN, 2025).

Yet, at the exact same time, his own Attorney General, Pam Bondi, was telling Fox News that the Epstein client list was “sitting on my desk right now” (Fox News, 2025).

You cannot have a hoax sitting on your desk. You cannot have a fabricated document that you simultaneously refuse to release. But this is the world of Donald Trump, where contradictions do not cancel each other out. They simply pile up, one on top of the other, until the sheer weight of them becomes the point. The confusion is the strategy.

The political firestorm was total. The Epstein scandal, which had smouldered for years, had become a conflagration that threatened to consume the presidency.

Trump needed a way out. And here is what you have to understand about Donald Trump: when he needs a way out, he does not look for a door. He looks for a wall to knock down. He does not de-escalate or negotiate. He does not accept the consequences of his actions and manage them carefully. He reaches for the largest, loudest, most consuming thing available to him and he sets it on fire. He always has. The only question, in the early weeks of 2026, was what he would choose to burn next.

The Decision: The order given at altitude, on the way to a rally

Donald Trump was not an ideologue. He was not driven by a coherent political philosophy or a vision of the world. He was the final, bloated form of American capitalism — a man driven by a single, overwhelming imperative: survival. Everything he did, every institution he defied, and norm he shattered, was ultimately in service of the project of Donald Trump.

In the weeks before the decision to strike Iran, the walls were closing in. The Epstein files were dominating the news cycle. His approval ratings were in freefall. The tariffs he had imposed were choking the economy. And there was Benjamin Netanyahu.

The two men needed each other in ways that were almost too convenient to be accidental. Netanyahu was fighting for his political life, facing corruption charges at home, internationally isolated over Gaza, his government held together by the narrowest of parliamentary margins. He had been lobbying Trump for a decisive strike against Iran for months. He had made it clear that Israel was prepared to act with or without American involvement, but that he wanted Trump’s blessing, planes, and bombs (Washington Post, 2026). Trump — drowning in Epstein and the accumulated wreckage of his own decisions — looked at Netanyahu’s war and saw something he had been searching for: an exit from a burning building.

The New York Times reported that Trump, briefed on Netanyahu’s determination to act, had concluded that he had “no choice but to join a strike that Israel would launch” (New York Times, 2026). But the timing was not an accident of geopolitics. The decision to strike came on February 27, 2026, less than a week after the most damaging Epstein revelations had been published, and just as the pressure on Pam Bondi was reaching its breaking point.

Trump gave the order to launch Operation Epic Fury while aboard Air Force One, somewhere over the American heartland, flying to a rally in Texas. Think about that for a moment. The order that would send warplanes screaming towards Tehran, kill the Supreme Leader of Iran, and set the Middle East on fire — that order was given at altitude, in a pressurised cabin, by a man on his way to a campaign rally. There was no Oval Office address or solemn briefing of Congressional leaders. No moment of national gravity.

When Air Force One landed, Trump walked out onto the stage in Texas, bathed in the adulation of the crowd, and danced to “Y.M.C.A.” (New York Post, 2026). Rather than the behaviour of a man wrestling with the moral weight of sending his nation to war, this was the behaviour of a man who had just solved a problem.

The Spectacle: The Easter Bunny and the End of Civilisation

The strikes were called Operation Epic Fury. They were, by any measure, an act of extraordinary violence. American and Israeli warplanes struck Iranian military bases, missile storage facilities, naval assets, and government buildings. The Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, was killed.

But the reality of war is never found in the names of operations or the lists of targets. It is found in fire and ash. The strikes caused both military and civilian casualties on a scale that was, in the early days of the war, impossible to fully assess (House of Commons Library, 2026). Neighbourhoods were reduced to rubble; families torn apart. The sky over Tehran burned with the terrible light of American munitions.

The Trump administration offered a series of justifications that shifted and contradicted each other. They said Iran had posed an imminent threat to US bases and was on the verge of acquiring nuclear weapons. They also said it was a pre-emptive war of self-defence but the intelligence did not support the rhetoric. Senator Mark Warner of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who had been briefed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio before the war began, said publicly that there was “no evidence that Iran was going to launch a pre-emptive strike against the US” (Wikipedia, 2026). A Defence Intelligence Agency assessment had determined that Iran would not be capable of building ballistic missiles until 2035 (Wikipedia, 2026).

None of this mattered. The war had begun, and the logic of war — the rallying of the nation, demonisation of the enemy, and suppression of dissent — had taken over. The Epstein files were not forgotten, but they were buried under an avalanche of breaking news from the Persian Gulf.

Critics were not silent. Representative Thomas Massie and former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene both argued publicly that Trump had started the war as a distraction from the Epstein scandal (Wikipedia, 2026). A CBS News poll found that a majority of Americans believed the conflict was not going well and that the war had been launched, at least in part, for domestic political reasons (CBS News, 2026). The Concordia Monitor published a letter that asked, simply: “Is it because he wants to be a ‘war president’? Or is it because he wants to distract us?” (Concordia Monitor, 2026).

But in the immediate term, the strategy worked. The 24-hour news cycle, which had been dominated by the graphic details of the Epstein files, pivoted entirely to the war. Analysts noted that public interest in the scandal had “plummeted” following the launch of the strikes (Al Jazeera, 2026).

And then came the image that was sign America had truly lost its way. On Easter Monday, April 6, 2026, Donald Trump stood on the South Lawn of the White House for the annual Easter Egg Roll. Children played on the grass, families gathered in the spring sunshine. Beside the President, as is tradition, stood a person in a giant Easter Bunny costume. Trump turned to the assembled press and began to talk about the war: he boasted about the bombing campaign, discussed military operations, and threatened to rain destruction on a nation of ninety million people — all while standing next to a six-foot rabbit, surrounded by children hunting for eggs.

If you had written this scene in a novel, no editor would have let you keep it. It would have been cut for being too heavy-handed, absurd, and obviously symbolic. But it was real. The President of the United States, threatening to end a civilisation, flanked by the Easter Bunny. It was perhaps the clearest marker (or sign from whatever gods still watch over this experiment) that America has truly, irreversibly lost its way.

And standing beside him, smiling for the cameras, was Melania. Three days later she would take to the podium and declare that she was not Epstein’s victim. But on that Easter Monday, she stood on the deck of the ship and said nothing.

What did she see, standing there? Did she see the absurdity? Did she see the cracks? Did she watch her husband threaten to drown a civilisation while a man in a rabbit costume waved at children and wonder: is this how it ends? Did she see, in that moment, what the rest of us were only beginning to understand — that Donald Trump would use any moment, any stage, any person, any war, any bunny, to survive? And did she decide, right there on the South Lawn, that when the ship finally went down, she would not be standing next to him?

Regarding the Easter Bunny moment: earlier in this story, we asked whether we might be living in a simulation, whether reality had become so perfectly, absurdly scripted that it could not possibly be real. The Easter Bunny is the answer because any competent simulation would have removed it. Any half-decent programme constructing a plausible reality would have flagged this scene as a glitch, a moment so grotesque that it breaks the audience’s immersion in the world being built for them. No algorithm would have allowed the President to threaten genocide next to a man in a rabbit suit. The fact that it happened — that it was real, broadcast, and no one stopped it — is the proof that this is not a simulation. This is just what America has become.

The Architecture: How Power Protects Itself When the Truth Gets Too Close

How does a man who:

1. ran a blackmail operation for two decades

2. allegedly compromised some of the most powerful people on earth

3. was arrested, charged, and imprisoned in the most high-security federal system in the world

end up dead in his cell with no witnesses, footage, or answers? The answer is not complicated; it is just very dark. It tells you something about the nature of power the powerful would very much prefer you did not understand.

To understand how power functions in the modern era, you have to look past the rhetoric and the press conferences. Instead, you have to look at what the people who run the world actually do when they are threatened. Over the past half-century, they have retreated from the complexity of reality into a series of simplified, self-serving narratives. They no longer try to solve the real problems of the world — inequality, environmental destruction, democratic decay — because those problems are too hard and the solutions too threatening to their own power. Instead, they manage perception. They construct stories, create spectacles, and when the stories fail, they create wars.

The Epstein network was the dark, hidden engine of this system. It was built on the management of power through the accumulation of compromising information. The men who visited Epstein’s properties were not only indulging their appetites, but entering into a system of mutual complicity that bound them together and made them, in a very real sense, untouchable. The network was not a conspiracy in the traditional sense. It was something more banal and terrifying: a shared understanding among the powerful that certain truths would never be spoken.

The war in Iran was the violent, fiery expression of that same system trying to protect itself. When the accumulated weight of those truths threatened to break through the surface, the response was not accountability or transparency, but war. A real war, with real bombs, dropping on real people in a real city. The deaths in Tehran were the price of keeping a network of elite corruption hidden from public view.

This is the world America has built. A world in which the death of a man in a Manhattan prison cell — a man who knew too much, who had gathered too much, who had become too dangerous — can set in motion a chain of events that ends with bombs falling on a city on the other side of the world. A world in which the most powerful man on earth can order a war not because of any strategic necessity, but because he needs to change the subject.

The bombs that fell on Tehran were simultaneously destroying buildings and the truth. And if the war was a distraction — people died in Tehran, Iranian families were torn apart, American soldiers came home in flag-draped coffins, if a nuclear deal that was within reach in Geneva was destroyed, and the entire architecture of Middle Eastern stability was set on fire — and all of that was done, even in part, to stop you reading a set of documents, then you have to ask yourself: what on earth is in those documents?

The scale of what was done to hide the truth is itself a measure of the truth being hidden. A man who will start a war to change the subject is a man who cannot afford for you to read what is in those files. He will let people die in Tehran and in the Persian Gulf rather than face a Congressional subpoena because he knows those files would utterly destroy him.

We don’t know what is in the unreleased documents, but we do know this: Donald Trump has shown us, with extraordinary clarity, exactly how far he will go to keep them hidden. And the lengths he will go to, the price he is willing to make others pay, is the most terrifying thing of all. He will do anything, burn anything, destroy anything, for you not to find out. Whatever is in those files is worse than you can imagine.

The Reckoning: The Dam Will Break (It Always Does)

The spectacle of war is a temporary magic. It does not, in the end, make the underlying rot go away. The Guardianreported in March 2026 that advocates for the survivors were insisting that “24/7 coverage of US attacks will not last forever — and the spotlight will return to Epstein and his crimes” (Guardian, 2026). They were right. The files and allegations were still there. The network was still there, waiting to be fully mapped and understood.

The war itself was already unravelling. By early April, Trump had publicly stated that he did not “care” about Iran’s stock of highly enriched uranium because it was underground — directly contradicting the central justification he had offered for launching the conflict in the first place. The nuclear deal that had been within reach in Geneva, just days before the bombs fell, had been destroyed. Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile was now assessed as a greater proliferation risk than it had been before the war began.

On April 2, Trump fired Pam Bondi. The official line was that she was “transitioning” to the private sector, but the reality was clear: her handling of the Epstein files, and her impending subpoena to testify before Congress about them, had made her a liability (CNN, 2026; Al Jazeera, 2026). The woman who had said the files were on her desk was removed from the desk.

On April 7, a fragile two-week ceasefire was agreed with Iran (Guardian, 2026). The guns fell silent. The news cycle, for the first time in weeks, had a gap in it. And into that gap, on April 9, stepped Melania Trump.

The First Lady took to the podium at the White House for a rare, extraordinary address. “I am not Epstein’s victim,” she declared, denying any knowledge of his crimes and insisting he had not introduced her to her husband (Hindustan Times, 2026). “Epstein was not alone,” she said, before calling on Congress to give the survivors a public hearing. Reporters were baffled. The Guardian noted that no one could explain why she had chosen this moment to speak, or whether the President had even known she was going to do it (Guardian, 2026).

The temptation is to read this as another calculated distraction: the First Lady deployed to fill the silence left by the ceasefire, to keep the news cycle spinning so that the Epstein files could not resurface. But that feels too neat, too conspiratorial, even for this story.

The more unsettling possibility is simpler. Melania Trump has lived in that world. She has been in those rooms. She has met those people. She almost certainly knows things about those files that the public does not. And she knows, perhaps better than anyone in that White House, that the reckoning is coming. Not today. Not next week. But eventually. The files are too vast, the names too numerous, the survivors too determined. The pressure will build until something gives. And when it does, Melania Trump needed to have already placed herself on the right side of it. Her speech was not a distraction, but a lifeboat.

Every crisis exists to bury the one before it. The Epstein files were released in a flood designed to overwhelm. When the flood was not enough, the war buried the files. When the war began to unravel, Bondi was fired to silence the one person who had admitted the files were real. When the ceasefire opened a gap in the news cycle, Melania’s speech filled it. It is distractions all the way down. Each spectacle exists to obscure the spectacle that came before. This is architecture. It is what power looks like when it has abandoned any pretence of governing and exists solely to perpetuate itself.

All of this leads to a question that no one in Washington will ask out loud, but that hangs over everything like smoke: what do Russia and Israel have over Donald Trump? The Epstein files revealed a network with deep ties to Israeli intelligence. The FBI’s own documents described Epstein as a co-opted Mossad agent. His operation was, at its core, a blackmail machine designed to gather compromising material on the most powerful men in the Western world. Was Epstein their man all along? Was the network not just a criminal enterprise but an intelligence operation, and were the people it compromised not just morally exposed but strategically owned?

Then there is Moscow: the stories about the hotel room, the dossier, and the allegations that have followed Trump since before he first took office. We were told they were unverified and to move on. But the pattern of Trump’s behaviour towards Vladimir Putin has never been explained by any rational strategic calculation. The refusal to enforce sanctions; the private meetings with no American witnesses; the abandonment of Ukraine; the absence of any meaningful ceasefire, any accountability, any consequence for Russia’s invasion of a sovereign nation. None of it makes sense unless you accept the possibility that the stories were true all along.

Is Epstein the reason there is no ceasefire in Ukraine? Is he the reason there is no Russian accountability? Is the kompromat from Moscow, from the island, from the Manhattan townhouse; the reason that families mourn their dead in Tehran and Beirut? Is the foreign policy of the most powerful nation on earth being dictated not by its national interest, but by what foreign intelligence services know about the man in the Oval Office? These are the questions that the evidence demands, and the fact that no one in a position of power will ask them is, perhaps, the most damning answer of all.

The man in the Manhattan prison cell is dead and the files remain hidden. The bombs have fallen, the ceasefire is fragile and the First Lady has spoken. The world is left to reckon with what it has become: a place where truth is the most dangerous thing of all, and where the people who hold power will destroy whatever they must to keep it in the shadows.

But the truth will come. It always does. Veritas temporis filia, meaning truth is the daughter of time. You can bury it under wars and firings and press conferences and ceasefire agreements. You can distract and deny and contradict yourself until the contradictions become meaningless noise. But eventually the distractions run out and every spectacle fades. When that happens, what is left is the thing they were trying to hide all along.

Power is shaking. You can see it in their desperation and absurdity, and in the fact that the best they can offer the world is one distraction after another, each more grotesque than the last. Rather than strength, that is the behaviour of people who know that the ground beneath them is giving way.

For a conspiracy, Q could not have written it any better.

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References

Al Jazeera (2025) ‘How Donald Trump shifted on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files,’ 18 November. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/18/how-donald-trump-shifted-on-releasing-the-jeffrey-epstein-files [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Al Jazeera (2026) ‘Analyst says interest in Epstein files plummeted after war on Iran launched,’ 4 March. Available at:https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/4/analyst-says-interest-in-epstein-files-plummeted-after-war-on-iran-launched[Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Al Jazeera (2026) ‘Why did Trump fire Pam Bondi from Justice Department, who is Todd Blanche?,’ 3 April. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/3/why-did-trump-fire-pam-bondi-from-justice-department-who-is-todd-blanche [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Al Jazeera (2026) ‘What were Jeffrey Epstein’s links to Israel?,’ 9 February. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/2/9/what-were-jeffrey-epsteins-links-to-israel [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

BBC (2026) ‘Takeaways from the millions of newly released Epstein files,’ 2 February. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cevnmxyy4wjo [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

CBS News (2026) ‘Iran war, rising gas prices fuel economic concerns; most say conflict not going well,’ 22 March. Available at: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/iran-war-epstein-poll-trump-approval/ [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

CNN (2026) ‘How Pam Bondi lost her job,’ 4 April. Available at: https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/04/politics/how-pam-bondi-lost-her-job [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

C-SPAN (2025) ‘President Trump Calls Epstein File Release Efforts a “Hoax”,’ 3 September. Available at: https://www.c-span.org/clip/white-house-event/president-trump-calls-epstein-file-release-efforts-a-hoax/5170986 [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Concordia Monitor (2026) ‘Letter: War as distraction,’ 21 March. Available at: https://www.concordmonitor.com/2026/03/21/letter-war-as-distraction/ [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Department of Justice (2019) ‘Correctional Officers Charged With Falsifying Records,’ 19 November. Available at: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/correctional-officers-charged-falsifying-records-august-9th-and-10th-metropolitan[Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Department of Justice (2026) ‘Department of Justice Publishes 3.5 Million Responsive Pages in Compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act,’ 30 January. Available at: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/department-justice-publishes-35-million-responsive-pages-compliance-epstein-files [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Fox News (2025) ‘Bondi says Epstein client list ‘sitting on my desk right now’,’ 21 February. Available at: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/bondi-says-epstein-client-list-sitting-my-desk-right-now-reviewing-jfk-mlk-files[Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Guardian (2026) ‘Epstein outrage unlikely to subside despite Trump’s Iran war,’ 16 March. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/16/epstein-files-trump-iran-war [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Hindustan Times (2026) ‘Read Melania Trump’s full speech about Jeffrey Epstein ties - top quotes and revelations,’ 10 April. Available at: https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/read-melania-trumps-full-speech-about-jeffrey-epstein-ties-top-quotes-and-revelations-101775763099086.html [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

House of Commons Library (2026) ‘US/Israel-Iran conflict 2026,’ Research Briefing CBP-10521. Available at: https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10521/ [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Miami Herald (2019) ‘How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime,’ 28 November. Available at: https://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/article220097825.html [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

New York Magazine (2002) ‘Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery.’ Available at: https://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/n_7912/ [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

New York Post (2026) ‘Trump ordered Iran war, then ordered ‘hamburgers for all’ at Whataburger,’ 2 March. Available at: https://nypost.com/2026/03/02/us-news/trump-ordered-iran-war-then-ordered-hamburgers-for-all-at-wataburger/[Accessed: 10 April 2026].

New York Times (2026) ‘How Trump Decided to Go to War,’ 2 March. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/02/us/politics/trump-war-iran-israel.html [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

New York Times (2026) ‘New Epstein Files Name Elon Musk, Bill Gates and Other Prominent Figures,’ 31 January. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/us/epstein-trump-gates-musk-tisch-andrew.html [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Ohio Capital Journal (2025) ‘How QAnon entered mainstream politics – and why the silence on Epstein files matters,’ 23 July. Available at: https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2025/07/23/how-qanon-entered-mainstream-politics-and-why-the-silence-on-epstein-files-matters/ [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

NPR (2026) ‘DOJ removed, withheld Epstein files related to accusations against Trump and Maxwell,’ 24 February. Available at: https://www.npr.org/2026/02/24/nx-s1-5723968/epstein-files-trump-accusation-maxwell [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Office of the Inspector General (2023) ‘Investigation and Review of the Federal Bureau of Prisons’ Custody, Care, and Supervision of Jeffrey Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center,’ June. Available at: https://oig.justice.gov/reports/investigation-and-review-federal-bureau-prisons-custody-care-and-supervision-jeffrey[Accessed: 10 April 2026].

PBS NewsHour (2026) ‘DOJ releases Epstein files containing sexual assault allegations against Trump,’ 6 March. Available at: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/doj-releases-epstein-files-containing-sexual-assault-allegations-against-trump [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Reuters (2019) ‘FBI studies two broken cameras outside cell where Epstein died,’ 29 August. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fbi-studies-two-broken-cameras-outside-cell-where-epstein-died-source-idUSKCN1VI2M3/ [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Washington Post (2026) ‘Push from Saudis, Israel helped move Trump to attack Iran,’ 28 February. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/02/28/trump-iran-war-israel-saudi-arabia/ [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

Wikipedia (2026) ‘Rationale for the 2026 Iran war.’ Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationale_for_the_2026_Iran_war [Accessed: 10 April 2026].

On Easter Sunday, the President of the United States threatened to bomb civilian infrastructure in Iran, signing off with a mocking invocation of the Islamic sacred. Two days later, he contemplated the extinction of a civilisation, announcing to the world that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” The following day, a two-week ceasefire was announced, brokered not by American diplomats but by Pakistan.

And then, at 4:46 a.m. on April 9, Donald Trump posted this:

All U.S. Ships, Aircraft, and Military Personnel, with additional Ammunition, Weaponry, and anything else that is appropriate and necessary for the lethal prosecution and destruction of an already substantially degraded Enemy, will remain in place in, and around, Iran, until such time as the REAL AGREEMENT reached is fully complied with. If for any reason it is not, which is highly unlikely, then the “Shootin’ Starts,” bigger, and better, and stronger than anyone has ever seen before. It was agreed, a long time ago, and despite all of the fake rhetoric to the contrary - NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS and, the Strait of Hormuz WILL BE OPEN & SAFE. In the meantime our great Military is Loading Up and Resting, looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest. AMERICA IS BACK!

Read it again, but this time as a diagnostic text. It is a paragraph that contradicts itself within its own boundaries. It speaks of the “lethal prosecution and destruction” of an enemy, while simultaneously claiming the military is “Loading Up and Resting.” It threatens that the “Shootin’ Starts” if an agreement is not complied with, while simultaneously declaring that non-compliance is “highly unlikely.” It casually anticipates a “next Conquest,” a word that, under international law, explicitly denotes the illegal acquisition of territory by military force (United Nations, 1945) as though the American military were a 19th-century imperial expeditionary force rather than a modern deterrent.

But the most devastating line in the post — the line that unravels the entire architecture of American foreign policy over the last ninety-six hours — is this one: It was agreed, a long time ago, and despite all of the fake rhetoric to the contrary.

The “fake rhetoric” does not refer to his own posts. Trump never concedes that his own words are fake. The “fake rhetoric” is everything that comes from anywhere other than him: the reporting, the analysis, that Lebanon was included in the ceasefire agreement. It is worth noting that Israel intensified its assault on Lebanon during the ceasefire, killing at least 182 people in a single day (Al Jazeera, 2026), while Trump said nothing. Iran had tabled a ten-point set of demands that included an end to Israeli attacks on Lebanon and the lifting of sanctions. The “REAL AGREEMENT,” in Trump’s telling, is whatever he says it is.

But if the agreement was reached “a long time ago,” then what was the Easter Sunday post? What was the threat to end a civilisation? If a deal was already in place, then the apocalyptic rhetoric of the preceding days was not the raving of a man who had lost control. It was a performance: staged, timed, and delivered with a purpose. The timing tells us what that purpose was.

There are only three possible explanations for this post. None of them are comforting; all are catastrophic.

The Cognitive Collapse

The first explanation is the one we have been conditioned to ignore: the president no longer possesses the cognitive architecture required to hold two thoughts in sequence without contradicting himself. We have explored this at length in our previous article (Plague Island, 2026a). Fred Trump Sr. spent his final years sitting at a desk in Brooklyn, signing blank papers while his family maintained the illusion of his authority. His phone was connected only to a secretary paid to play along. The cognitive decline of the father is now mirroring itself in the son, playing out not in a private office but on the global stage, not with blank papers but with Truth Social posts that reach every intelligence agency, every trading floor, and every military command centre on earth.

But this post offers something the previous ones did not: a window into the specific mechanics of the collapse. Consider the capitalisation. “Enemy” is capitalised, but “agreement” is not. “Conquest” is capitalised, but “military” is not, except when preceded by “great,” at which point it becomes “Military.” “Loading Up and Resting” are capitalised as though they constitute a formal military operation, which they do not. This is not the selective emphasis of a strategic communicator. It is the random firing of a mind that has lost the ability to distinguish between significance and noise.

Then there is the syntax. “It was agreed, a long time ago, and despite all of the fake rhetoric to the contrary - NO NUCLEAR WEAPONS and, the Strait of Hormuz WILL BE OPEN & SAFE.” This sentence begins as a statement about an agreement, pivots into a complaint about rhetoric, and then lurches into a pair of demands separated by a comma and an ampersand. It does not parse or resolve. It is a sentence that has lost its own thread halfway through, and the man who wrote it either did not notice or could not fix it.

And then there is the word “actually.” “Looking forward, actually, to its next Conquest.” That parenthetical betrays a flicker of self-awareness, a moment in which even the author seems to recognise the absurdity of what he is claiming, and feels compelled to insist upon it. It is the verbal tic of a man who knows, somewhere beneath the bluster, that nobody believes him, including himself.

This is the linguistic equivalent of a man wandering out of his house in his pyjamas, shouting at the traffic. The difference is that this man commands the largest nuclear arsenal on earth, and the traffic is the geopolitical stability of the Middle East, and indeed, the world.

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The Market Manipulation

The second explanation is darker, and it requires us to look away from the president’s mind and toward the financial markets. If the agreement was reached “a long time ago,” and the preceding days of apocalyptic rhetoric were a calculated performance, then who profited from the panic?

Consider the pattern. The Easter Sunday post — profane, threatening, designed to terrify — was published over Easter weekend. The “whole civilization will die tonight” post arrived on a Monday evening (EST). The ceasefire was announced on Tuesday. The markets, which had been closed over the weekend while the world absorbed the threat of civilisational annihilation, opened on Monday to chaos and then surged on Tuesday when the climbdown arrived. This is not a one-off. Trump’s pattern, repeated across tariffs, trade wars, and now military conflicts, is to drop the doom when markets are closed and deliver the reprieve when they open. The weekend is for fear. Monday is for profit.

Wall Street has a name for this pattern. They call it the TACO trade: Trump Always Chickens Out. The term was coined by Robert Armstrong of the Financial Times in May 2025, after Trump’s abrupt reversal on his “Liberation Day” tariffs sent the S&P 500 plunging nearly 20 percent before rebounding sharply when the tariffs were paused (Armstrong, 2025). What began as a sardonic joke has since become a recognised trading strategy. Nine of the ten largest single-day gains in the S&P 500 during Trump’s second term have come from TACO reversals (Fortune, 2026). Retail investors poured a record $3 billion into equities during the Liberation Day selloff, correctly betting that Trump would blink. “Knowing Trump will TACO is the equivalent of me knowing I need to drink water to survive,” one trader wrote on Reddit’s SmallStreetBets forum (Fortune, 2026).

The Iran ceasefire was the latest and most lucrative TACO of all. The announcement triggered a $1.5 trillion rally across all three major indices. Oil plunged 16 percent to below $100 a barrel. The Nasdaq surged 3.55 percent. The Dow climbed 1,200 points (Fortune, 2026). For anyone who had bought the dip during the days of civilisational threats, the profits were instantaneous and enormous.

But the TACO trade, for all its cynicism, at least operates in the open. The real scandal lies beneath it. In the hours before the ceasefire was publicly announced, fifty newly created accounts on the prediction market Polymarket placed highly specific, perfectly timed bets on a US-Iran ceasefire. One wallet, created just twelve minutes before Trump’s announcement, made $31,908 in “Yes” bets, earning an estimated profit of $48,500 (Associated Press, 2026). A trio of linked accounts, identified by the on-chain analytics firm Bubblemaps, collectively netted $611,000 on ceasefire bets, and the same cluster had previously made $1.2 million betting on the timing of US and Israeli strikes on Iran in late February (Yahoo Finance, 2026). “This cluster has been betting and winning on military markets since 2024 using multiple accounts,” Bubblemaps reported. “Their track record of correctly calling surprise attacks on Iran suggests they may have access to better information than most” (Yahoo Finance, 2026).

And then there are the futures markets. According to Representative Ritchie Torres, who has formally demanded an investigation by the SEC and the CFTC, traders placed over $500 million in crude oil futures bets approximately fifteen minutes before Trump’s Truth Social post announcing the pause in strikes. Trading volume at 6:49 a.m. EST was approximately nine times the average level for that time of day (Torres, 2026). Torres called it “potentially the largest instance of insider trading in history.” He noted that similar anomalies preceded Trump’s Liberation Day tariff pause and US military action in Venezuela. He also noted that the SEC’s top enforcement official had recently resigned after clashing with agency leadership over pursuing cases with ties to the president’s circle, and that the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity Section had been reduced from thirty-six lawyers to two (Torres, 2026).

Governor Gavin Newsom was blunter. “Trump’s Washington is riddled with ethical failures and insider profiteering,” he said, signing an executive order banning political appointees from profiting on prediction markets with inside information (Yahoo Finance, 2026).

If this explanation is true, then the president’s posting is not incoherent at all. The threats of civilisational death were designed to drive the markets into a panic over the weekend; the sudden announcement of a pre-existing agreement was designed to send them surging when trading resumed. The American presidency has been reduced to a pump-and-dump scheme, operated on a weekly cycle: fear on Friday, profit on Monday. The fog is very profitable.

The Performative Toughness

The third explanation is perhaps the most pathetic: the president is simply playing soldier. Look again at the language of the post. The capitalised “Enemy.” The promise of “lethal prosecution and destruction.” The boast that the military is looking forward to its “next Conquest.” This is the vocabulary of a man who has never served in uniform, who avoided the Vietnam draft through a diagnosis of bone spurs so conveniently timed that even the podiatrist’s daughters later admitted the diagnosis was a favour to his father (Plague Island, 2026c), and who now uses the American military as a prop in his own psychodrama of masculinity.

The word “Conquest” is particularly revealing. In international law, conquest — the acquisition of territory by force — was outlawed by the UN Charter in 1945 (United Nations, 1945). No American president in modern history has used the word approvingly to describe the actions of the US military. But Trump does not care about international law, and he does not care about the historical weight of the words he uses. He cares only about how the words sound. “Conquest” sounds tough. It sounds imperial. It sounds like the kind of thing a strongman would say in a film about a strongman, which is the film Trump has been making about himself for the last fifty years.

But the performance of toughness is inherently fragile, which is why it collapses within the same paragraph. He wants to be the conqueror, but he also wants to be the peacemaker who secured the “REAL AGREEMENT.” He wants the “Shootin’” to start, but he also wants the Strait of Hormuz to be “OPEN & SAFE.” He wants to be feared, but he also wants to be loved, hence “AMERICA IS BACK!” as a sign-off, as though the preceding threats of annihilation were a marketing campaign for national renewal. He is a man trying to play every role in the movie simultaneously, and failing at all of them. As one Iranian observer put it during the ceasefire negotiations: “It’s all a theatrical show that Trump is playing. We have no belief in this ceasefire” (Al Jazeera, 2026).

The tragedy, of course, is that the feeble performance has real consequences. Real ships are deployed. Real troops are stationed in harm’s way. Real people die. Real allies are trying to formulate policy based on 4:46 a.m. posts from a man who may be demented, corrupt, or simply acting out fantasies of military glory — and who may, in fact, be all three at once.

The Fog

It does not matter which of these three explanations is true. The devastating reality is that all three are likely operating simultaneously: a cognitively declining president, surrounded by financial opportunists, performing a grotesque pantomime of military strength while the world watches in horror and the markets adjust accordingly.

When the President of the United States speaks, the world no longer listens for policy. It listens for pathology. Diplomats try to decode the contradictions. Traders scan his posts for signals. Intelligence agencies attempt to distinguish between a genuine military directive, a symptom of dementia, and a signal to short the oil markets. European defence ministers convene emergency meetings to discuss a Truth Social post written at 4:46 in the morning. The leaders of allied nations — the ones who once looked to Washington for clarity, for steadiness, for the reassurance that the most powerful country on earth was governed by someone who understood the weight of his own words — now treat every presidential utterance as a puzzle to be solved rather than a statement to be trusted.

This is what it means to conduct foreign policy in a fog. Not the fog of war, but the fog of Trump. A fog in which threats and agreements coexist in the same sentence. A fog in which the annihilation of a civilisation and the announcement of a pre-existing peace deal are separated by forty-eight hours and no explanation. A fog in which nobody — not the allies, the enemies, the markets, the military, the Cabinet, and least of all the president himself — knows what is real.

“It was agreed, a long time ago, and despite all of the fake rhetoric to the contrary,” he wrote.

He is telling us, in his own words, that everything other than his version of events is fake. But the implication is the same: if the agreement was already in place, then the threats, the rage, the promises of destruction were theatre, all performed while real people died, while real markets moved, while real allies despaired and real enemies calculated. Somewhere, a cluster of anonymous accounts collects another six hundred thousand dollars. In Lebanon, at least 182 people are dead on a day that was supposed to be covered by a ceasefire that the president now says was agreed “a long time ago.”

The fog of Trump has descended over the American republic. It is not the fog of war, which lifts when the fighting stops. It is something older and more corrosive: the fog of a nation that can no longer distinguish between what its leader says, what he means, and what he has already forgotten. Nobody knows what is going to happen when it lifts. Nobody is certain, any longer, that it will.

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References

Al Jazeera (2026) ‘Trump says US forces to stay near Iran, ready for “next conquest”’, 9 April. Available at: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/4/9/trump-says-us-forces-to-stay-near-iran-ready-for-next-conquest [Accessed: 9 April 2026].

Armstrong, R. (2025) ‘The Taco theory’, Financial Times, 2 May. Available at: https://www.ft.com/content/unhedged-taco-theory [Accessed: 9 April 2026].

Associated Press (2026) ‘Newly created Polymarket accounts bet big on US-Iran ceasefire in hours before Trump’s announcement’, 8 April. Available at: https://www.local10.com/business/2026/04/08/newly-created-polymarket-accounts-bet-big-on-us-iran-ceasefire-in-hours-before-trumps-announcement/ [Accessed: 9 April 2026].

Fortune (2026) ‘Analysts warn the TACO trade won’t last forever after an Iran ceasefire wipes out weeks of losses in markets’, 8 April. Available at: https://au.finance.yahoo.com/news/analysts-warn-taco-trade-won-183558129.html[Accessed: 9 April 2026].

Plague Island (2026c) ‘The Age of Denial: Power, Decline, and the Silence Around Trump’, 6 April. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/the-age-of-denial-power-decline-and [Accessed: 9 April 2026].

Plague Island (2026b) ‘The Death of Civility: Trump, Iran, and the Civilisation America Lost’, 8 April. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/the-death-of-civility-what-america [Accessed: 9 April 2026].

Plague Island (2026c) ‘Captain Bone Spurs and the Graves he Spits On'. 23 January. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/captain-bone-spurs-and-the-graves?utm_source=publication-search [Accessed: 9 April 2026].

Torres, R. (2026) ‘Rep. Torres Demands SEC and CFTC Investigate Suspicious Oil Futures Trade Made Ahead of Trump Iran Announcement’, Congressman Ritchie Torres, 8 April. Available at: https://ritchietorres.house.gov/posts/rep-torres-demands-sec-and-cftc-investigate-suspicious-oil-futures-trade-made-ahead-of-trump-iran-announcement [Accessed: 9 April 2026].

United Nations (1945) Charter of the United Nations. Available at: https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text[Accessed: 9 April 2026].

Yahoo Finance (2026) ‘Potential Insiders Made $600K Predicting US and Iran Ceasefire on Polymarket: Bubblemaps’, 8 April. Available at: https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/potential-insiders-made-600k-predicting-171731685.html [Accessed: 9 April 2026].

The words arrived on a Tuesday evening, casually dropped into the digital ether between a complaint about a judge and a boast about poll numbers. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” the President of the United States wrote. “I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will.” He then pivoted, in the very same breath, to celebrating “Complete and Total Regime Change” and offering a benediction: “God Bless the Great People of Iran!”

It was the second time in three days that Donald Trump had used his social media platform to threaten the annihilation of a sovereign state. On Easter Sunday, he had demanded that Iran “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell,” signing off with a mocking “Praise be to Allah.”

We have written previously about what these posts reveal about the president’s cognitive state; the profound dissonance of a man who cannot hold two thoughts in sequence without contradicting himself, and the escalating aggression that mirrors the tragic decline of his father, Fred Trump Sr. (Plague Island, 2026). But there is another question to ask, one that moves beyond the medical and into the existential. What does it mean for the world when a sitting US president can use this kind of language, seemingly without consequence?

When a leader casually contemplates the extinction of a civilisation, he is abandoning the very concept that underpins his own authority. The words “civilisation” and “civility” share the same Latin root: civis, meaning citizen. To be civilised is, at its most basic, to behave as a citizen among citizens — the recognition that other people exist, that they have rights, and that collective life requires the restraint of our darkest impulses. When the President of the United States discards that restraint, it is not Iran that is diminished. It is America.

The sociologist Norbert Elias, writing in the shadow of the Second World War, argued that civilisation is not a permanent state of grace but a fragile, ongoing process. In The Civilizing Process (1939), Elias traced how European societies gradually learned to suppress violence, refine their manners, and develop shared norms of behaviour. This process, he warned, is never complete, and it can always be reversed (Elias, 1939). What we are witnessing now, broadcast in real-time from the Oval Office, is the decivilising of the American presidency.

“Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards.” “A whole civilization will die tonight.” This is not the language of statecraft, strategy, deterrence, or even of empire. It is the language of a man for whom the restraint that defines civilisation has ceased to function; the language of the schoolyard bully, elevated to the highest office in the world and armed with the deadliest weapons in human history.

The Weaponisation of the Sacred

Consider the Easter Sunday post more carefully. It was both profane and threatening, and a deliberate act of religious mockery. “Praise be to Allah” — Alhamdulillah — is one of the most sacred phrases in Islam, spoken by 1.8 billion Muslims every day in prayer, in gratitude, and in grief. Trump appended it to a threat to bomb civilian infrastructure, on the holiest day in the Christian calendar, directed at a Muslim nation. The Council on American-Islamic Relations called it a “willingness to weaponize religious language while simultaneously denigrating Islam,” part of “a long pattern of anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies that have dehumanized Muslims at home and abroad” (Anadolu Agency, 2026).

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The First Amendment to the United States Constitution begins with a promise: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” It is the foundational guarantee of a pluralist society, the recognition that in a nation of many faiths, the state must respect them all. When the president uses the sacred language of Islam as a punchline to a threat of annihilation, he is violating the letter and soul of that amendment. He is telling 3.5 million American Muslims that their faith is a joke to him, that the words they speak in prayer are available to him as instruments of humiliation.

Imagine, for a moment, what it is to be an Iranian-American Muslim in the United States today. There are approximately 750,000 Iranian-Americans in the country, many of whom fled the very regime Trump claims to oppose (Pew Research Center, 2026b). They came to America because America promised something: that you could practise your faith freely, that your children would be safe, that the state would not mock your God. Now the President of the United States uses the name of their God as a taunt, while threatening to erase the civilisation their ancestors built. He promises to bomb the bridges their cousins cross to get to work, the power plants that keep their elderly relatives alive, and he signs off with a phrase their mothers taught them to say before meals. In Dearborn, Michigan — home to one of the largest Muslim communities in the United States, a community that helped deliver the state to Trump in 2024 — the Imams Council convened a press conference to condemn what Imam Steve Elturk called “a dangerous escalation that undermines both international stability and the moral fabric of public discourse” (Word&Way, 2026). The moral fabric of public discourse: That is another way of saying: civility and civilisation.

Seven Thousand Years and Counting

The devastating irony of Trump’s threat is that the civilisation he casually proposed to erase is one of the oldest continuous civilisations on earth. Iran — Persia — gave the world the Cyrus Cylinder in 539 BC, a document often described as the first declaration of human rights, which established religious freedom and abolished slavery in the conquered territories (United Nations, 2026). It gave the world algebra, astronomy, and the postal system. It produced poets like Rumi, Hafez, and Ferdowsi, whose works have shaped human thought for centuries. The very word “paradise” comes from the Persian pairidaeza, meaning a walled garden. Iran’s civilisation spans more than 7,000 years. The United States of America is 250 years old.

While Trump threatened that civilisation with extinction, ordinary Iranians responded with preservation. In Kermanshah and Ahvaz, citizens formed human chains around power plants. The musician Ali Ghamsari staged a sit-in at the Damavand power plant, performing on his tar — a classical Persian instrument — in an act of determined, quiet defiance. Oscar-winning filmmaker Asghar Farhadi called on artists worldwide to speak against the “destructive aggression.” As the National Iranian American Council observed: “The message emerging from within Iranian society is not one of escalation, but of preservation — an effort to maintain the basic foundations of life in the face of growing threats” (NIAC, 2026). A man with a tar, sitting beside a power plant. A president with a social media account, promising to destroy it. Which of these is the civilised act?

As Iran’s foreign ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baqaei noted in response to a previous threat from Trump to bomb the country “back to the Stone Age”: “Civilisation cannot be destroyed by bombing” (Tribune India, 2026). He is right, but perhaps not in the way he intended. The civilisation being destroyed by this rhetoric is not Iran’s. It is America’s. Not its buildings or its infrastructure, but its claim to moral authority, its soft power, its standing as a nation that other nations might wish to emulate or trust.

The Gallup World Poll now shows that global approval of China’s leadership has surpassed that of the United States with 36% versus 31%, marking one of the widest gaps in two decades. Disapproval of US leadership has hit a record high of 48%, with approval dropping by at least 10 points in 44 countries between 2024 and 2025 (Gallup, 2026). In the Middle East, the collapse is even more profound. Polling by Arab Barometer, published in Foreign Affairs, reveals that Arab publics now regard China, Iran, and Russia more favourably than the United States. Trump’s foreign policies are viewed favourably by only 12% of people in Jordan and the Palestinian territories, 14% in Tunisia, and 24% in Iraq (Jamal and Robbins, 2026). The Pew Research Center found that favourability of the United States has fallen in 15 of the 24 countries surveyed, with majorities in key allied nations — Canada, Germany, France — now viewing America unfavourably (Pew Research Center, 2025). America has not just lost the moral high ground. It has lost the room.

The Bully’s Pulpit

Theodore Roosevelt famously coined the phrase “bully pulpit” to describe the presidency’s unique power to shape public discourse and persuade the nation. In the slang of his era, “bully” meant “excellent” or “first-rate.” Trump has returned the word to its original, uglier meaning. The presidency is now, quite literally, a bully’s pulpit. He uses it not to persuade, but to bludgeon; not to elevate, but to degrade.

We have watched this escalation for years. We watched it move from “fire and fury” directed at North Korea in 2017, to the Easter Sunday profanity of 2026, to the casual promise of civilisational death just days later. Each iteration is more unhinged, more detached from the norms of statecraft, and each time, the world is forced to adjust; the Overton window shatters.

The responses to Trump’s latest threat tell their own grim story. When figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene call the rhetoric “evil and madness,” when Alex Jones describes it as “the exact definition of genocide,” and when Tucker Carlson labels it “vile on every level” (Reuters, 2026), we must recognise that something has gone catastrophically wrong. When the most extreme voices in American politics become the voices of restraint, the centre has ceased to exist. Pope Leo XIV called the threat “truly unacceptable.” The president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Archbishop Paul Coakley, said that “the threat of destroying a whole civilization and the intentional targeting of civilian infrastructure cannot be morally justified” (Word&Way, 2026). When the Pope and Alex Jones find themselves on the same side of an argument, the man they are arguing against has left the boundaries of reason entirely.

Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski called the threats “an affront to the ideals our nation has sought to uphold and promote around the world for nearly 250 years” (Reuters, 2026). But the uncomfortable truth is that this is who they are now. The Republican Party made him, protected him, and they have refused to stop him. They have chosen complicity over country, and in doing so, they have tethered America’s reputation to the whims of a man who uses the language of annihilation as a negotiating tactic.

When a White House spokeswoman can state, on the record, that “the Iranian people welcome the sound of bombs because it means their oppressors are losing” (Reuters, 2026), the insistence that the people you are bombing should be grateful for the privilege is the language of deranged empire. It is the final, grotesque abandonment of civility.

Trump said that “a whole civilization will die tonight.” He was right, but he was talking about the wrong one. The civilisation that is dying is the idea of America itself: the notion that a democratic republic, governed by laws and norms, could be a force for good in the world. That idea has been under severe strain for decades, battered by the realities of Vietnam, Iraq, Guantánamo, and Abu Ghraib. But there was always a counter-narrative, a belief that America could self-correct, that its institutions would hold, and that its foundational ideals still mattered.

Trump has broken that counter-narrative. Not because he is uniquely evil — history is replete with monsters — but because he is uniquely unchecked. The 25th Amendment exists, but it will not be invoked. Congress exists, but it will not act. The Cabinet exists, but it applauds. The party that once impeached Richard Nixon now cheers a man who threatens genocide on social media and mocks the faith of billions.

The world is not waiting for America to recover because it is already looking elsewhere. China is building infrastructure across Africa and Central Asia. The Gulf states are hedging their alliances. The European Union is accelerating its own defence capabilities. The nations that once looked to Washington for moral leadership are quietly and methodically building a world that does not require it. And in the ruins of American credibility, a man sits at a desk, typing threats into his phone, mocking the sacred, promising annihilation, and signing off with the name of someone else’s God. This is not the behaviour of a civilisation. It is the behaviour of one that has forgotten what the word means.

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References

Anadolu Agency (2026) ‘US Muslim group condemns Trump’s “inflammatory” post, calls on Congress to reconvene to end Iran war’, Anadolu Agency, 6 April. Available at: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/world/us-muslim-group-condemns-trumps-inflammatory-post-calls-on-congress-to-reconvene-to-end-iran-war/3894137 [Accessed: 8 April 2026].

Elias, N. (1939) The Civilizing Process. Basel: Haus zum Falken.

Gallup (2026) ‘China Edges Past U.S. in Global Approval Ratings’, Gallup, 2 April. Available at: https://news.gallup.com/poll/707945/china-edges-past-global-approval-ratings.aspx [Accessed: 8 April 2026].

Jamal, A. A. and Robbins, M. (2026) ‘America Has Lost the Arab World’, Foreign Affairs, 7 April. Available at: https://www.arabbarometer.org/media-news/america-has-lost-the-arab-world/ [Accessed: 8 April 2026].

NIAC (2026) ‘Iran’s Civil Society Stands to Preserve Its Civilization While Trump Threatens Its Destruction’, National Iranian American Council, 7 April. Available at: https://niacouncil.org/irans-civil-society-stands-to-preserve-its-civilization-while-trump-threatens-its-destruction/ [Accessed: 8 April 2026].

Pew Research Center (2025) ‘Global Attitudes Survey Spring 2025’, Pew Research Center. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/06/11/us-image-declines-in-many-nations-amid-low-confidence-in-trump/ [Accessed: 8 April
2026].

Pew Research Center (2026b) ‘Iranian Americans’, Pew Research Center, 6 March. Available at: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/06/key-facts-about-iranian-americans/ [Accessed: 8 April 2026].

Plague Island (2026) ‘The Age of Denial: Power, Decline, and the Silence Around Trump’, Plague Island, 6 April. Available at:

Reuters (2026) ‘Trump’s threat to Iran shocks global leaders, unnerves some Republicans’, Reuters, 7 April. Available at: https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trumps-threat-iran-shocks-global-leaders-unnerves-some-republicans-2026-04-07/ [Accessed: 8 April 2026].

Tribune India (2026 ) ‘”Civilisation cannot be destroyed by bombing”: Iran hits back at US President’s “Stone Age” threat’, The Tribune, 3 April. Available at: https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/usa-news/civilisation-cannot-be-destroyed-by-bombing-iran-hits-back-at-us-presidents-stone-age-threat/ [Accessed: 8 April 2026].

United Nations (2026) Replica of “Edict of Cyrus”. Available at: https://www.un.org/ungifts/replica-edict-cyrus[Accessed: 8 April 2026].

Word&Way (2026) ‘Faith Leaders Denounce Trump’s “Civilization Will Die” Threat’, Word&Way, 8 April. Available at: https://wordandway.org/2026/04/08/faith-leaders-denounce-trumps-civilization-will-die-threat/ [Accessed: 8 April 2026].

I was not planning to write this piece over Easter. I had intended to spend a few days away from the screen, away from the news cycle and the relentless machinery of American decline that has become the background noise of all our lives. I failed. Donald Trump made sure of that.

His Truth Social post landed in the early afternoon on Easter Sunday. You’ll have surely read it by now: the profanity, the threats, the mocking invocation of Allah directed at an Islamic nation whose infrastructure he was promising to destroy. I read it a few times, because I assumed I had misunderstood something. I had not. The President of the United States, on the holiest day in the Christian calendar, chose to threaten war crimes against Iran while sneering at the Muslim faith. “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell. Praise be to Allah.” And a very happy Easter to you too.

We have been writing about Trump for years and are well accustomed to the provocations, cruelty,

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The post arrived on Easter Sunday, a day traditionally reserved for reflection and renewal. Instead, the Commander-in-Chief of the United States armed forces used the occasion to issue a threat of global escalation, wrapped in profanity and a dissonant religious taunt. “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran,” Donald Trump wrote on Truth Social. “There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP” (Trump, 2026).

This is the President of the United States. He is the man with the nuclear codes, whose word can move aircraft carriers and flatten cities, threatening to destroy the civilian infrastructure of a sovereign nation while mocking the faith of over two billion people. On Easter Sunday. The Council on American-Islamic Relations immediately condemned the post as a “deranged mocking of Islam,” noting that his threats to attack civilian infrastructure constituted potential war crimes (Council on American-Islamic Relations, 2026). The Interfaith Alliance described it as a “profane and violent rant on Christianity’s holiest day while insulting Muslims” (Anadolu Agency, 2026). Iran’s embassy in Thailand posted on X that “POTUS swears like a teenager,” adding that “it seems the US has reached the Stone Age sooner than expected” (India Today, 2026).

The teenager comparison is more apt than perhaps intended. There is something adolescent about the post: the capitalisation, the exclamation marks, the profanity deployed for shock value, the religious provocation thrown in as a kind of verbal grenade. But teenagers do not have access to the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and they’re not directing a war in the Middle East. Teenagers do not set the terms of engagement for a conflict that could reshape the global order. The gap between the tone of the message and the gravity of the office from which it was sent is not only embarrassing; it is terrifying.

But the true horror of the moment lies not in the religious insult, nor even in the profanity. It lies in the fact that the man holding the most powerful office on earth is exhibiting the classic, observable symptoms of cognitive decline — and the entire American political apparatus has decided to look the other way.

The Shift

Over the past year, we have witnessed an observable behavioural shift in Donald Trump that goes far beyond the combative, provocative style that has defined his political career. The Trump of 2016, whatever else one might say about him, was capable of strategic calculation. He could read a room, modulate his message for different audiences, and exercise a crude but effective form of political discipline. He knew when to escalate and when to retreat. He understood, instinctively if not intellectually, the difference between provocation and self-destruction. The Trump of 2026 is a different creature entirely. The filter is gone. The calculation has been replaced by something rawer, more volatile, and far more dangerous.

The evidence is not subtle. He has been alienating traditional allies with increasingly erratic behaviour that serves no discernible strategic purpose. In recent weeks alone, he insulted the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron during a rant about NATO, prompting what the press described as a “clapback” from Macron that signalled Europe had finally reached its limit with American belligerence (iNews, 2026). He threatened to cut off “all” trade with Spain — a NATO ally — in a response so disproportionate that it baffled even sympathetic commentators. Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, expressed amazement at the degree to which Trump has been “alienating” the very allies whose cooperation he needs for his own stated foreign policy objectives (Yahoo News, 2026). Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described Trump’s address to the nation on Iran as “rambling” and “disjointed,” the speech of an “unhinged” president who had failed to justify his own war (The Guardian, 2026).

His public schedule has contracted dramatically too. The New York Times reported in late 2025 that Trump had cut his official appearances by nearly forty percent compared to his first term, with public events now rarely beginning before noon. This marks a stark contrast to the 10:30am starts that characterised his earlier presidency (The New York Times, 2025). During a seventy-five-minute Cabinet meeting in December 2025, The Washington Post counted nine separate instances in which the president appeared to fall asleep, his eyes closing for extended periods while his advisors spoke beside him. In the same meeting, Trump told his Cabinet: “I’m the only president that ever took a cognitive test,” a boast that, in context, reads like a man protesting too much (The Washington Post, 2025). When confronted with questions about his health, Trump responded threateningly, posting on Truth Social that discussing his cognitive fitness was “seditious, perhaps even treasonous” (Time, 2025).

Most tellingly, his speech patterns are deteriorating in ways that are clinically significant. Harry Segal, a senior lecturer in psychology at Cornell University, has identified Trump’s increasing tendency toward phonemic paraphasia — the swapping of parts of words for others that sound similar — as a recognised sign of early dementia (Cornell Chronicle, 2024). This is not the same as a verbal slip or a momentary lapse. Phonemic paraphasia follows a specific, identifiable neurological pattern. Segal noted that while the complaints about Biden were “more vague — citing advanced age, physical fragility and occasional mixing up of names,” with “no evidence of dementia onset, no sun-downing,” Trump’s errors are qualitatively different. They are the mistakes of a brain that is misfiring.

When a leader begins to mistake words in this way, loses his train of thought mid-sentence, confuses his political opponents with former presidents, and responds to routine questions with escalating hostility, it raises profound questions about his fitness for office. Yet these questions remain largely unasked by the people in a position to demand answers.

The Biden Mirror

Less than two years ago, the American political and media establishments engaged in a relentless, coordinated campaign to force Joe Biden from the presidential race due to concerns about his cognitive fitness. The pressure was immense; the coverage was wall-to-wall. Every stumble, every verbal slip, every moment of hesitation was amplified, analysed, and presented as evidence that the man was unfit for office. Biden, under extraordinary pressure from his own party, withdrew from the 2024 race. The system worked, his critics said. The guardrails held.

But the guardrails, it turns out, are selective. They apply to one kind of decline and not another. Biden’s decline was characterised by physical frailty, verbal stumbling, and a general slowing down — the kind of decline that reads, in the brutal visual grammar of television, as weakness. It was the decline of a man winding down: quieter, slower, more hesitant. Trump’s decline is characterised by something entirely different: aggression, disinhibition, and rage. Because his base misinterprets this aggression as strength, and his anti-establishment energy as authenticity, the decline is not recognised as decline at all. It is reframed as charisma. The angry old man is not losing his mind, but rather “telling it like it is.” The profanity is not a loss of impulse control, it is instead “straight talk.” The threats are not the ravings of a man who cannot regulate his own behaviour, they are “strength.”

This is the double standard at the heart of American political culture. One candidate was removed under intense pressure because he looked old. Another continues to govern, despite increasingly erratic and dangerous public behaviour, because he looks angry. The Republicans who held Senate hearings on Biden’s mental fitness in June 2025, who published the “Biden Autopen Presidency” report through the House Oversight Committee, who spent months demanding cognitive testing and medical transparency, have fallen entirely silent now that the same questions apply to their own man. The Guardian noted in August 2025 that “Biden was hounded for his age-related gaffes, but Trump’s increasingly strange behaviour has largely been ignored” (The Guardian, 2025).

The question must be asked: what threshold triggers concern? Who decides? And why is one form of decline disqualifying, while another is permitted to hold the levers of global destruction? Half of Americans now believe the president is suffering from cognitive decline, according to YouGov polling. Yet the political class treats this as an impolite observation rather than a constitutional crisis.

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The Potemkin Office

The Trump family, however, is not unfamiliar with this territory. They know exactly what cognitive decline looks like, because they have managed it in private while projecting stability in public. In October 1991, Fred Trump Sr., the patriarch of the family empire, was diagnosed with “mild senile dementia.” By 1992, medical records showed he could not remember his own birthday, did not know his age, and scored below the fifteenth percentile for cognitive function. After a thirty-minute delay, his recall ability was assessed as “nil” (The Washington Post, 2024). The symptoms were unmistakable and heartbreaking in equal measure: he would get out of his limousine at traffic lights and walk away. He would scream at his wife. He once wore three ties at the same time. At Donald’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples, where he served as best man, Fred had to be repeatedly reminded why he was there.

What the family did next is instructive, and it is the key to understanding what is happening in Washington today. They built what can only be described as a Potemkin office. Every morning, a chauffeur would drive Fred Sr. to his office in Brooklyn, where he would sit at the same desk he had occupied for decades. He would sign blank pieces of paper. His phone was disconnected; it rang only through to a secretary in the lobby who was paid to play along. The entire production was designed to maintain the illusion of control, because familiarity kept him calm. Without it, there was agitation, confusion, and outbursts (Mary Trump, 2020). The man believed he was still running the empire, but the empire had long since moved on without him.

While Fred Sr. was kept comfortable in his theatrical workspace, the real decisions were being made elsewhere. Donald himself attempted to have his father’s lawyer draft a codicil giving him control of the estate and tried to slide it in front of Fred “as if it had been Fred’s idea.” Fred, on a rare lucid day, called his daughter Maryanne, who discovered the scheme (The Washington Post, 2024). The patriarch died in 1999 with less than two million dollars to his name. His children sold the company for seven hundred million five years later.

The pattern is clear: a declining figurehead is not a problem for the people around him; he is an opportunity. He signs what is put in front of him. He does not ask difficult questions. He does not challenge the agenda of those who manage him. He is, in the most cynical sense, the perfect vessel.

Donald’s nephew, Fred Trump III, has watched his uncle’s deterioration with the grim recognition of someone who has seen this film before. He recently told People magazine that he observes his uncle’s decline “in parallel with the way my grandfather’s decline was,” and warned bluntly: “It runs in the family. If anyone wants to believe that dementia did not run in the Trump family, it’s just not true” (People, 2024). His aunt Maryanne Trump Barry had dementia. His cousin John Walter had dementia. Mary Trump, the president’s niece and a clinical psychologist, has said she sees the same “deer in the headlights” look in her uncle that she remembers in her grandfather. The family tree is not ambiguous.

Good Genes

Trump has long been a proponent of what he calls “racehorse theory:” the belief that superior genetics produce superior people, and the Trump bloodline is simply better stock. At a rally in Bemidji, Minnesota, in September 2020, he told a nearly all-white crowd: “You have good genes, you know that, right?” (Rolling Stone, 2020). He has repeatedly declared himself “a big believer in genes.” In October 2024, he told Hugh Hewitt that immigrants who commit murder have “bad genes” (NBC News, 2024). As recently as March 2026, at the Future Investment Initiative summit in Miami, he boasted that his son Don Jr. has “the greatest genes in history” (Irish Star, 2026).

The cruel irony of his own framework is that it does not discriminate. If traits pass through bloodlines — if greatness is hereditary, as he has spent a lifetime insisting — then so does decline. And decline, in the Trump family, is not a question of if. It is a question of when.

Dr. John Gartner, a psychologist formerly affiliated with Johns Hopkins University, has noted that Trump has taken the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) at least three times. “If you’re giving it to him three times,” Gartner observed, “that means you’re not assessing dementia. That means you’re monitoring dementia” (The Guardian, 2025). The White House has refused to answer when the cognitive tests were taken, or to release the results. The man who boasted about acing a test designed to detect cognitive impairment has taken it three times and will not tell anyone what it showed.

What Science Tells Us

We have to be clear and say we cannot diagnose a public figure from afar. But we can observe, and we can compare what we observe with what the medical literature describes, and the comparison is difficult to ignore.

Fred Trump Sr. was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease, which is primarily characterised by memory loss — the forgetting of names, dates, and familiar routines. It is the quiet form of decline: the slow erasure of a life’s accumulated knowledge. Donald Trump’s observable symptoms, however, align more closely with a different condition: the behavioural variant of Frontotemporal Dementia, known as bvFTD. According to the Mayo Clinic, the hallmarks of bvFTD include extreme changes in behaviour, increasingly inappropriate social behaviour, loss of empathy, lack of judgment, and severe loss of inhibition. Physical and verbal aggression are common, and they tend to appear earlier in the disease course than in other forms of dementia (Mayo Clinic, 2025). It is the loud form of decline: not a fading, but a coarsening.

Consider the symptoms against the evidence. Increasingly inappropriate social behaviour: threatening to destroy a nation’s civilian infrastructure while mocking its religion, on Easter Sunday. Loss of empathy: dismissing the concerns of allies, insulting foreign leaders and their spouses, showing no regard for the civilian populations his rhetoric endangers. Lack of judgment: posting profanity-laden threats on social media that undermine his own diplomatic position and hand propaganda victories to his adversaries. Severe loss of inhibition: the profanity, the aggression, the inability to modulate tone or message for context, the posting of threats that his own advisors must scramble to contextualise. Physical and verbal aggression: the escalating threats, the “crazy bastards,” the promise that nations will “be living in Hell.”

We are not making a diagnosis. Instead, we are noting a pattern of behaviour that is consistent with a well-documented neurological condition, in a man with a documented family history of dementia, who is now seventy-nine years old, who has taken cognitive tests at least three times, and whose own family members have publicly warned that “it runs in the family.” The pattern is there. The question is why nobody in power is willing to acknowledge it.

The New Potemkin Office

The answer, we suspect, is the same one that applied in Brooklyn in the 1990s. A declining figurehead is useful. The men and women surrounding Trump — figures like JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and Marco Rubio — are playing the role of the secretary in the lobby. They are managing a declining patriarch because a declining patriarch who believes he is in charge is the perfect vessel for their own agendas. They write the executive orders. They shape the policies. They build the authoritarian state while the man at the top signs whatever is put in front of him and posts unhinged threats on social media that serve as useful distractions from the machinery operating behind the curtain.

Just as Fred Sr.’s family maintained the illusion of control to keep him calm and compliant, Trump’s inner circle maintains the illusion of presidential authority to keep the base loyal and the agenda moving. The phone lines are not literally disconnected, but the effect is the same: the man in the chair believes he is running the show, and the people around him are content to let him believe it, because the alternative — a lucid, engaged, questioning president — would be far more inconvenient for their purposes. A president who asks “why are we doing this?” is a problem. A president who signs the paper and goes back to Truth Social is an absolute gift.

This is the logical extension of a pattern that the Trump family itself established decades ago. The precedent is documented. The only difference is the scale: this time, the Potemkin office is the Oval Office, and the blank papers being signed are executive orders that reshape the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

The Culture of Denial

The refusal to acknowledge the obvious is not unique to the Trump administration. It is a hallmark of authoritarian systems, where the truth is subordinated to the needs of the party and the leader’s ego. In the Soviet Union, the declining health of successive General Secretaries was treated as a state secret, their frailty hidden behind carefully managed public appearances until the moment they collapsed. The principle is the same everywhere it appears: the leader cannot be weak, because the leader’s weakness is the system’s weakness. And so, the system lies and the people around the leader lie, and the public is expected to believe the lie or at least to pretend to believe it.

America is now operating under the same principle. Trump’s supporters reinterpret his aggression as strength, his disinhibition as authenticity, his erratic behaviour as anti-establishment energy. His critics hesitate to raise cognitive concerns for fear of appearing partisan, or of “medicalising politics,” or of being accused of the same ageism that was deployed against Biden. The result is a vacuum, a space where serious questions are never properly asked, where the most powerful man on earth is permitted to exhibit behaviour that would trigger an immediate medical evaluation in any other professional context, and where the political class collectively agrees to pretend that everything is normal.

It is not normal. A man who posts “Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards” on Easter Sunday while mocking Islam is not exhibiting the behaviour of a stable leader. A man who falls asleep in Cabinet meetings, who has cut his public schedule by forty percent, who confuses names and swaps words with increasing frequency, who threatens to destroy nations in language that reads like a bar fight rather than a geopolitical strategy — this is not a man who is well. And the fact that America is taking this, that the political class is too cowardly to invoke the 25th Amendment, that the media is too afraid of appearing biased to state the obvious, is a symptom of a democratic culture in terminal decline.

Senator Bernie Sanders, to his credit, has been among the few willing to say what others will not. Following the Easter post, he described Trump as an “unhinged madman” and questioned his mental acuity, joining a growing chorus of Democratic lawmakers calling for the invocation of the 25th Amendment (Hindustan Times, 2026). But the calls remain marginal, the pressure insufficient, and the Republican Party — the party that spent two years demanding Biden’s removal on cognitive grounds — remains in a state of calculated silence.

The Risk of Looking Away

There is something unspeakably sad about dementia. It is the cruellest of thefts, not of life, but of self. It takes the person before it takes the body, leaving the face intact while hollowing out everything behind it. Anyone who has watched a parent or grandparent disappear into that fog knows the particular grief of being recognised and not recognised in the same moment, of hearing familiar words arranged in unfamiliar ways, of watching someone you love become a stranger wearing a beloved face.

Fred Trump Sr. spent his final years in that fog. He sat at his desk. He signed his name. He believed, on his better days, that he was still the man he had always been. His family let him believe it, because the alternative was worse for him, and for them. There was, in that small mercy, something human.

But there is nothing merciful about what is happening now. The man in the chair today is not signing blank papers in a Brooklyn office. He is signing executive orders in the West Wing. He is not threatening a secretary on a disconnected phone. He is threatening sovereign nations on a platform with millions of followers. The risks in this context are not to a family business, but to civilisation.

We do not claim to diagnose Donald J. Trump. But we can observe and note the pattern: the aggression, the disinhibition, the contracting schedule, the deteriorating speech, the rage that escalates where it once calculated. We can document the family history that his own relatives have made public. We can read the medical literature and recognise the overlap. And we can ask the question that the American political establishment has decided is too dangerous, too impolite, too inconvenient to ask: is the President of the United States cognitively fit to hold office?

The silence that greets that question is cowardice. It is the same cowardice that hounded Joe Biden from the race while averting its eyes from the man who replaced him. It is the cowardice of a political class that has decided a useful monster is preferable to an honest reckoning.

Decline is not a moral failing. It is the price of a long life, and it comes for all of us is we are fortunate to live that long. But when decline meets power — when the fading mind holds the nuclear codes and the rage of a deteriorating brain is cheered as authenticity — then decline is no longer a private tragedy. It is a public catastrophe. The people who could stop it, who possess the constitutional tools and the political authority to intervene, have chosen instead to do what the Trump family has always done: maintain the illusion, manage the patriarch, and hope that nobody notices the phone has been dead for years.

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References

Anadolu Agency (2026) ‘US Muslim group condemns Trump’s inflammatory post, calls on Congress to reconvene to end Iran war’, 5 April. Available at: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/americas/us-muslim-group-condemns-trumps-inflammatory-post-calls-on-congress-to-reconvene-to-end-iran-war/3893038 [Accessed: 4 April 2026].

Cornell Chronicle (2024) ‘Cornell expert says Trump’s frequent phonemic paraphasia are signs of early dementia’, 11 March. Available at: https://news.cornell.edu/media-relations/tip-sheets/cornell-expert-says-trumps-frequent-phonemic-paraphasia-are-signs-early [Accessed: 5 April 2026].

Council on American-Islamic Relations (2026) ‘CAIR Calls on Congress to Reconvene and End Iran War After Pres. Trump Posts Message Threatening New War Crimes, Mocking Islam’, 5 April. Available at: https://www.cair.com/press_releases/cair-calls-on-congress-to-reconvene-and-end-iran-war-after-pres-trump-posts-message-threatening-new-war-crimes-mocking-islam/ [Accessed: 6 April 2026].

Hindustan Times (2026) ‘Unhinged madman: Bernie Sanders, other Dems question Trump’s mental acuity after Iran post amid 25th Amendment calls’, 6 April. Available at: https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/us-news/unhinged-madman-bernie-sanders-other-dems-question-trumps-mental-acuity-after-iran-post-amid-25th-amendment-calls-101775459978383.html [Accessed: 6 April 2026].

iNews (2026) ‘The Macron clapback that shows Europe has had it with Trump’, 4 April. Available at: https://inews.co.uk/news/world/macron-clapback-shows-europe-had-it-trump-4334786 [Accessed: 5 April 2026].

Irish Star (2026) ‘Trump claims Don Jr. has “greatest genes in history” but snubs other children’, 27 March. Available at: https://www.irishstar.com/news/politics/trump-don-jr-genes-snub-36936368 [Accessed: 6 April
2026].

Mayo Clinic (2025) ‘Frontotemporal dementia - Symptoms and causes’. Available at: https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/frontotemporal-dementia/symptoms-causes/syc-20354737 [Accessed: 4 April 2026].

NBC News (2024) ‘Trump suggests
immigrants have “bad genes” in latest disparagement of migrants’, 7
October. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-suggests-immigrants-bad-genes-latest-disparagement-migrants-rcna174271 [Accessed: 6 April
2026].

People (2024 ) ‘Donald Trump’s Nephew Fred Trump III Reminds of Family’s History with Dementia’, 3 November. Available at: https://people.com/fred-trump-family-history-dementia-donald-behavior-exclusive-8738427 [Accessed: 5 April 2026].

Rolling Stone (2020) ‘What Is the Racehorse Theory? Trump Touts White Supremacy in Minnesota’, 22 September. Available at: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-white-supremacy-racehorse-theory-1064928/[Accessed: 4 April 2026].

The Guardian (2025) ‘Biden was hounded for his age-related gaffes, but Trump’s increasingly strange behaviour has largely been ignored’, 3 August. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/03/donald-trump-mental-fitness [Accessed: 6 April 2026].

The Guardian (2026) ‘Unhinged madman: US politicians react to Trump’s expletive-laden threat to Iran’, 5 April. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/apr/05/trump-iran-threats-politician-reactions [Accessed: 5 April 2026].

The New York Times (2025) ‘Trump’s Schedule Shows a President Slowing Down’, 2 December. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/us/politics/trump-schedule-appearances.html [Accessed: 4 April 2026].

The Washington Post (2024) ‘Shadowing Trump’s attacks on mental fitness — his own father’s dementia’, 20 March. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/03/20/donald-trump-dementia-father-fred-alzheimers-biden/[Accessed: 5 April 2026].

The Washington Post (2025 ) ‘Trump appears to doze during Cabinet meeting’, 2 December. Available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/12/02/donald-trump-drowsy-cabinet-meeting/ [Accessed: 6 April 2026].

Time (2025) ‘Trump Calls Reports on His Health ‘Treasonous,’’ 10 December. Available at: https://time.com/7339756/trump-age-health-cognitive-test-new-york-times-treasonous-sedition/ [Accessed 6 April 2026].

Trump, Mary L. (2020) Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Trump, D. J. (2026 ) Truth Social post, 5 April. Available at: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump [Accessed: 6 April 2026].

Yahoo News (2026) ‘Congressman Says “Jackass” Trump Has Been “Alienating” Key Allies’, 3 April. Available at: https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/congressman-says-jackass-trump-alienating-004527380.html [Accessed: 4 April 2026].

YouGov (2026) ‘Half of Americans say Donald Trump is too old to be president; 36% say he is not’, 14 January. Available at: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/53893-half-of-americans-say-donald-trump-is-too-old-to-be-president [Accessed: 6 April
2026].

Dear friends,

April has arrived carrying contradictions. American war, again, in the Middle East. Escalation in Iran. Old alliances tightening their grip. New justifications forming in real time. The familiar language of necessity returning, as it always does.

And yet, at the same moment, the calendar offers Easter: a story about humility, sacrifice, and moral courage. Which brings us, inevitably, to Donald Trump.

We would like to wish a sincere Happy Easter to those who celebrate… but not to Donald Trump.

Whatever he claims — and whatever his acolytes insist on projecting onto him — he does not embody Christianity. He exploits it.

We do not remember Jesus engraving his name in gold across towers or monetising faith.

Read more

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Notes From Plague Island

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It took Donald Trump thirty-seven days to address the American people about the war in Iran. Thirty-seven days of silence while American bombs fell on Persian cities, oil prices climbed to a two-and-a-half-year high, the Strait of Hormuz remained effectively closed and the global economy absorbed the shockwaves of a conflict that nobody in the American electorate had voted for, asked for, or been consulted about. When he finally spoke, on the evening of 2 April 2026, the silence that preceded the address seemed, in retrospect, like the more honest option.

The address was a disaster. Not in the sense of a stumbling press conference or an unguarded remark because Trump has survived a thousand of those. It was a disaster in the deeper, more revealing sense: it exposed, in real time and on national television, a president who has no coherent objective in Iran, no clear account of why the war began, no credible plan for how it ends, and no answer whatsoever for the question that is now forming in the minds of millions of Americans who voted for him on the promise that the era of endless foreign wars was over. The address raised more questions than it answered. It contradicted itself within the space of single paragraphs. In doing so, it gave the watching world a portrait of a man who stumbled into a war at the behest of a foreign government and has been improvising the justification ever since.

We have already documented the architecture of how this war began — the role of Benjamin Netanyahu, the financial leverage of the Adelson dynasty, the resignation of Joe Kent, the “out of habit” confession at the Kennedy Center (Plague Island, 2026). We do not intend to repeat that ground. What we want to examine here is what happened when Trump was finally forced to stand before his people and explain himself; what his failure to do so coherently tells us about the state of American democracy, the complicity of the opposition, and the very real possibility that the midterm elections, now less than seven months away, may never take place at all.

A Man Without a Map

The central question any president must answer when committing a nation to war is: what are we trying to achieve with the sacrifice of our US soldiers? The answer does not need to be morally satisfying. It does not even need to be honest. But it must be consistent. It must hold together from one sentence to the next, or the entire premise of democratic accountability — the idea that a leader must justify the use of public power to the public — collapses.

Trump’s address failed this test comprehensively. On the question of regime change, he managed to contradict himself within the same speech. He insisted, with characteristic bluster, that regime change was never the goal, that the United States had no interest in who governed Iran, only in the elimination of its nuclear capacity. And then, in almost the same breath, he celebrated the fact that Iran’s leadership had been “obliterated,” that the regime had effectively been destroyed, and that this was a tremendous victory (Associated Press, 2026). These two positions cannot coexist. Either regime change was the goal, which has failed because the leadership has remained largely the same, or it was not the goal, in which case celebrating it as a victory is an admission that the war produced an outcome nobody planned for. Neither interpretation reflects well on the commander-in-chief.

The nuclear question was handled with equal incoherence. Trump declared, with the confidence of a man who has never been troubled by the gap between assertion and evidence, that Iran’s nuclear sites had been “totally and completely obliterated” (Associated Press, 2026). He then, within minutes, threatened to resume bombing if Iran made any further moves toward nuclear capability. This is an illogical position: if the sites are obliterated, the threat is gone, and there is nothing to bomb. If there is still something to bomb, the sites are not obliterated, and the central claim of the address — that the mission has been accomplished — is false. The audience watching at home was left with a choice between two conclusions: either the president is lying about what the strikes achieved, or he does not understand what he is saying. Neither option inspires confidence in the stewardship of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.

Then came the ceasefire. Iran, Trump announced, had “asked for a ceasefire,” a claim that was immediately and flatly denied by Iranian officials (Forbes, 2026). He vowed that the bombing would continue until the Strait of Hormuz was reopened, a condition that has nothing to do with nuclear weapons and everything to do with the global oil supply — which is to say, everything to do with the economic interests of the energy sector that funds his political operation. In a single address, the stated objective of the war shifted from nuclear disarmament to regime change to the reopening of a shipping lane. These are three entirely different wars. The American people were being asked to support all three simultaneously, with no explanation of how they connect, no timeline for their achievement, and no acknowledgment that the goalposts had moved at all.

This is a man without a map, standing at a podium, hoping that the confidence of his delivery will substitute for the coherence of his argument. It has, after all, worked before. The question is whether it will work again.

The Bill Comes Due

While Trump was busy rewriting the objectives of the war in real time, the bill was landing on the doorsteps of the people who voted for him. The Center for American Progress estimated that by the end of March 2026, the conflict had already cost the United States $25 billion; a figure that, to put it in human terms, is enough to provide a full year of Head Start early education to every eligible child in America, with money left over (Center for American Progress, 2026). That money is gone. It has been converted into ordnance and dropped on a country that, as Joe Kent noted in his resignation letter, posed no imminent threat to the United States.

The domestic consequences are real. Gas prices have surged. The Strait of Hormuz closure has sent oil markets into chaos, and the working-class Americans who were promised relief from inflation are instead watching the cost of filling their tanks climb week by week (AP News, 2026). The K-shaped economy — where the wealthy insulate themselves while the poor absorb the shocks — is being stress-tested by a war that was launched without public consent and is being sustained without public support.

And then, on the same day as his address, Trump said the quiet part aloud. Asked about the administration’s plans for Medicaid, Medicare, and childcare support, he told reporters that it was simply “not possible” for the United States to fund these programmes while fighting wars (NBC News, 2026). This is surely the definition of insanity. The president of the United States, in the same week that he announced a $25 billion war fought at the request of Israel, told the American people that there is no money for their healthcare and no money for their children’s care. The war is funded. The people are not. This is not a budget constraint. It is a statement of political priorities, delivered with the casual indifference of a man who has never had to choose between filling a prescription and filling a tank. The message to the American working class is clear: you are on your own.

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The Promise That Was Always a Lie

The Telegraph, not a publication given to anti-war sentiment, published an account in March 2026 of the gap between Trump’s campaign promises and his conduct in office (The Telegraph, 2026). The headline was blunt: “Trump promised peace, then he started a war.” The article documented the specific, repeated, unambiguous pledges Trump made to the American electorate — that he would end the forever wars, that he would bring the troops home, that he would not sacrifice American blood for foreign interests. They were the central selling point of the “America First” platform. They were the reason millions of people who had voted Democrat in 2020 switched to Trump in 2024.

That mandate has been shredded. The man who mocked George W. Bush for the Iraq War, who spent a decade attacking the neoconservative foreign policy establishment, who built an entire political identity on the promise of non-intervention, has now launched a full-scale military assault on Iran using the exact language and logic of the neoconservatives he spent his career attacking. The irony would be almost literary if the consequences were not so devastating.

What the Telegraph’s analysis makes clear and what the address confirmed, is that “America First” was a marketing slogan. It was designed to capture the genuine, legitimate, long-standing frustration of the American working class with a foreign policy establishment that had spent thirty years sending their children to die in wars that served no discernible national interest. Trump understood that frustration, and he weaponised it. Then, the moment he was in power and the lobby came calling, he abandoned it without a second thought. The voters who believed in the promise are now paying increasing amounts for fuel for a war they were explicitly promised would never happen.

This is the defining political betrayal of the era. Not because it is surprising, but because of its scale its support of an Israeli-instigated war. The gap between the promise and the reality is so vast, documented, and undeniable, that it represents a fundamental rupture in the relationship between the administration and the people who put it in power. The question is what happens next.

The Democratic Silence and What It Means

Here is where this stops being just about Trump, but about the entire political system. While Trump was contradicting himself on national television, the bill for a foreign war was landing on the kitchen tables of working Americans, and the president was telling his own voters that there was no money for their healthcare — the Democratic Party was largely silent.

Not entirely silent. There were procedural complaints. There were demands for congressional oversight. There were carefully worded statements expressing “concern” about the lack of a clear strategy. But there was no sustained, moral, unambiguous opposition to the war itself. There was no Democratic leader willing to stand at a podium and say what the polling data makes abundantly clear: that this war is wrong, that it was launched at the behest of Israel, that it is being paid for by cutting the programmes that keep working Americans alive, and that it must end.

Why? The answer is not complicated, but it is uncomfortable. The Democratic Party is funded by the same donor class that funds the Republican Party. AIPAC, which spent over $100 million in the 2024 election cycle to shape congressional outcomes (Common Dreams, 2024), does not discriminate by party. It funds compliance, not ideology. The Democrats who might otherwise be expected to lead an anti-war movement are acutely aware of what happened to those who challenged the lobby in previous cycles: the primary challenges, the funding withdrawals, the coordinated media campaigns. The silence of the Democratic Party is the rational response of a party that has been financially captured by the same interests that captured the Republicans. They are not the opposition; they are the other wing of the same machine.

This matters enormously, because the absence of a credible opposition is a structural vulnerability in the democratic system itself. When both major parties are aligned with the interests of the donor class on the most consequential foreign policy question of the era, the electorate has no meaningful choice. The managed spectacle of two-party democracy — the illusion that voting changes something fundamental — is exposed. And when people lose faith in the ballot box, they look for other ways to express their discontent. Some of those ways are constructive, others are not.

The comparison to the British Labour Party is instructive and depressing in equal measure. Labour, which spent years positioning itself as the anti-war party, the party of the working class, the party that would challenge the power of capital, has, under Keir Starmer, become a reliable partner of the American foreign policy establishment. It has supported the war in Iran with the same hollow proceduralism that characterises the American Democrats. The centrist core on both sides of the Atlantic has made its choice, which is the donor class over the electorate, the lobby over the people, the comfort of power over the discomfort of principle. The working class, which has nowhere else to go within the existing system, is being abandoned by the very parties that were built to represent it.

The Midterms and the Authoritarian Temptation

Trump’s approval ratings are collapsing. The BBC’s analysis of the polling data in late March 2026 identified three specific warning signs: falling support among the working-class voters who were the bedrock of his coalition, rising disapproval of the war among independents, and a sharp deterioration in his economic approval numbers as gas prices climbed (BBC News, 2026). These are the kinds of numbers that, in a functioning democracy, translate into electoral defeat.

The midterms are scheduled for November 2026. On current trajectories, they represent a serious threat to Republican control of Congress. And here is the question that we think needs to be asked openly: will they happen?

We are looking at the pattern of behaviour of an administration that has already demonstrated its willingness to defy court orders, use the apparatus of the state against political opponents, to bypass Congress on matters of war and peace, and to treat democratic norms as obstacles rather than foundations. We are looking at an administration that has a war that it can use to justify emergency measures. We are looking at a president whose entire political identity is built on grievance, and the premise that the rules do not apply to him.

The suspension of elections under the pretext of a national security emergency is a tool that has been used by authoritarian governments throughout history, and it is a tool that becomes available the moment a government decides that its own survival is more important than the democratic process. The conditions for its use are being assembled, piece by piece, in plain sight. The question is not whether Trump would want to use it, but whether the institutions of American democracy — the courts, the Congress, the press, the military — are strong enough to stop him if he tries.

The silence of the Democratic Party on the war is a failure of democratic self-defence. Every day that the war continues without meaningful congressional challenge is a day that the precedent of executive war-making is strengthened. Every day that the opposition fails to mobilise public discontent into political pressure is a day that the administration’s grip on the narrative tightens. The Democrats are not just failing to oppose the war. They are, through their silence, helping to build the conditions under which the midterms might be rendered irrelevant.

The Awakening

The American people are not as passive as the political establishment would like them to be. The polling data tells a story that the mainstream press has been slow to amplify: the public is against this war, and the unease about it grows by the day. A poll conducted by the Institute for Middle East Understanding found that a majority of Americans believe the war in Iran is being fought primarily for Israel’s benefit rather than America’s (IMEU Policy Project, 2026). That is a remarkable finding. It means that the central argument of the “America First” promise has broken through into mainstream public consciousness.

The MAGA voter who filled up their tank and paid $5 a gallon for a war they never asked for by a leader who admitted he did it “out of habit” — that voter is doing the political arithmetic. The results are not flattering to the administration. The gap between the promise and the reality is now so wide that it cannot be papered over with a speech, however confident the delivery. Every contradiction, every shifting goalpost, every moment of incoherence was a reminder that the man at the podium does not have a plan, and that the people paying for his improvisation are the ones who can least afford it.

The question is whether this awakening can be translated into political action before the window closes. The Democratic Party, as we have argued, is not going to lead that translation. It is too captured, cautious, and financially compromised to serve as the vehicle for genuine anti-war sentiment. The energy will have to come from somewhere else: from the grassroots movements that are already organising, the independent media that is already asking the questions the mainstream press refuses to ask, and from the voters who are beginning to understand that the person they trusted has sold out in front of them.

The dying vision of a bloated American capitalism — that widening chasm between the predator class that profits from this war and the ordinary citizens who pay for it — is becoming impossible to ignore. The people who are forced to live within its contradictions are starting to look up. What they do next will determine whether the system survives the authoritarian temptation, or whether the November 2024 election was, in retrospect, the last meaningful US election.

Trump kept his people waiting thirty-seven days for an explanation. When he finally gave it, it was incoherent, contradictory, and insulting in its assumption that the audience would not notice. Perhaps he should have kept his big mouth shut after all; at least the silence left room for doubt. The address removed it.

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References

Associated Press (2026) ‘Read the complete transcript of Trump’s address to the nation on the Iran war’, 2 April. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-transcript-address-iran-war-b5970011fe934dde84d95d650bda56a9 [Accessed 3 April 2026].

AP News (2026) ‘Iran war jolts oil markets, sending US gas prices to a 2.5-year high’, 18 March. Available at: https://apnews.com/article/us-oil-trump-war-iran-gas-prices-edef1d6c5bf85ab64d959510fb50f0bd [Accessed 3 April 2026].

BBC News (2026) ‘Three charts that are warning signs flashing for Trump on Iran war’, 27 March. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c3w384px52no [Accessed 3 April 2026].

Center for American Progress (2026) ‘By the End of the Week, the Trump Administration’s War in Iran Will Likely Have Cost $25 Billion’, 24 March. Available at: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/by-the-end-of-the-week-the-trump-administrations-war-in-iran-will-likely-have-cost-25-billion/ [Accessed 3 April 2026].

Common Dreams (2024) ‘”Very Bad Sign for Democracy”: AIPAC Has Spent Over $100 Million’, 28 August. Available at: https://www.commondreams.org/news/aipac-100-million [Accessed 3 April 2026].

Forbes (2026) ‘Trump Says Iran Asked For A Ceasefire And Vows Bombings Will Continue Until Strait Is Reopened’, 1 April. Available at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2026/04/01/trump-says-iran-asked-for-a-ceasfire-and-vows-bombings-will-continue-until-strait-is-reopened/ [Accessed 3 April 2026].

IMEU Policy Project (2026) ‘New Poll: Most Americans Say Iran War Is for Israel’s Benefit, Not America’s’. Available at: https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/polls/iran-israel-2026 [Accessed 3 April 2026].

NBC News (2026) ‘Trump says it’s “not possible” for the U.S. to pay for Medicaid, Medicare and day care: “We’re fighting wars”’, 2 April. Available at: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-says-not-possible-us-pay-medicaid-medicare-daycare-re-fighting-w-rcna266381 [Accessed 3 April 2026].

Plague Island (2026) ‘Israel First, Paid for by American Money and Blood’, 19 March. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/israel-first-paid-for-by-american [Accessed 3 April 2026].

The Independent (2026) ‘Trump addresses nation on Iran war for first time since conflict began’, 2 April. Available at: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-iran-war-address-completion-ceasefire-b2950498.html [Accessed 3 April 2026].

The Telegraph (2026) ‘Trump promised peace, then he started a war’, 20 March. Available at: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2026/03/20/trump-promised-peace-then-he-started-war/ [Accessed 3 April 2026].

On the March 30, 2026, the Israeli Knesset passed a law that stripped away the final, thin veneer of judicial neutrality in the occupied territories. The legislation mandates execution by hanging within ninety days for Palestinians convicted of “terror” offences in military courts. There is no provision for clemency. There is no avenue for pardon. The law grants civil and criminal immunity to state officials carrying out the sentence. As the votes were tallied — 62 in favour, 48 against — the atmosphere in the legislative chamber was one of triumphant vengeance. MK Limor Son Har-Melech, who initiated the bill and whose husband was killed in a 2003 attack, stood before a cheering plenum. On the verge of tears, she shouted, “Am Yisrael Chai!” — “the people of Israel live” (+972 Magazine, 2026). Beside her, the National Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, stood wearing a pin shaped like a hangman’s noose on his lapel. He did not attempt to hide the brutality of the moment behind the sterile language of statecraft. He embraced it. “From today,” he declared, “every terrorist will know, and the whole world will know, that whoever takes a life, the State of Israel will take their life” (Al Jazeera, 2026).

It is an arresting statement, not for its severity, but for its profound and deliberate hypocrisy. Ben-Gvir’s proclamation forces us to confront a fundamental question, one that lies at the very heart of modern state power: what is terrorism, anyway?

We are taught to believe that terrorism is an objective reality; it is defined by the nature of the act — the deliberate targeting of civilians, the instillation of fear within a population, the use of violence to achieve a political objective. But the reality of the modern world, and specifically the reality of the occupied West Bank, demonstrates that terrorism is no longer defined by the blood on the ground or the terror inflicted upon the innocent. It is defined entirely by who holds the pen, and by who possesses the monopoly on state violence. The rule is simple, brutal, and universally applied by those in power: what we do is never called terrorism; only what other people do.

The new death penalty law is the ultimate codification of this principle. It lays bare a central, inescapable hypocrisy. If a Palestinian commits an act of violence, they are labelled a terrorist, dragged before a military tribunal, and sent to the gallows. If an Israeli settler burns a Palestinian village to the ground, shoots civilians in the street, and violently seizes a family home, they face no equivalent sanction. They are neither tried in military courts nor sent to the gallows. In the vast majority of cases, they are not tried at all. Instead, they are protected by the military, subsidised by the state, and permitted to keep the land they have stolen. The question of terrorism, then, is not about the act itself, but about who is permitted to commit it.

The Original Miscalculation

To understand how a state arrives at the point where its ministers wear nooses in the legislature, we must understand the foundational logic of the project itself. The death penalty law, the military courts, the settler pogroms — none of these are aberrations or sudden departures from democratic norms. They are the inevitable, escalating consequences of a project built on a single, catastrophic miscalculation: the assumption that the indigenous population would simply leave.

The Zionist project, from its inception, required the demographic transformation of the land. The establishment of the state in 1948 was achieved through the Nakba: the mass expulsion and flight of over 700,000 Palestinians, and the destruction of more than 500 of their villages. The expectation, both then and in the aftermath of the 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, was that military dominance, economic strangulation, and the steady encroachment of settlements would eventually force the remaining Palestinians to abandon their homes. They were expected to vanish into the surrounding Arab states, leaving the land clear for the taking. But they did not leave. They stayed, rebuilt, and resisted.

When a state’s foundational project requires the removal of a population that refuses to be removed, the state does not abandon the project. It escalates the violence required to sustain it. The history of the occupation is the history of that escalation. When administrative dispossession failed to clear the land, the state turned to military occupation. When military occupation met resistance, the state built a two-tiered legal system to criminalise that resistance. When the two-tiered system was not enough to break the population’s will, the state armed the settlers and granted them impunity to terrorise the villages directly.

This trajectory is a constitutional requirement. In 2018, the Knesset passed the Nation-State Law, formally codifying what had always been the operative reality: that Israel is an ethno-state. The law explicitly declared that the right to exercise national self-determination within the state is “unique to the Jewish people” (Knesset, 2018). It downgraded the status of the Arabic language and established the development of Jewish settlement as a “national value” that the state must encourage and promote. By elevating Jewish supremacy to the level of a Basic Law, the state legally mandated the permanent subjugation of its non-Jewish subjects. The ethno-state cannot, by definition, can only offer domination.

The death penalty law is simply the latest chapter in this unbroken narrative. It is the juridical expression of a state that has run out of administrative methods to make a population disappear and has decided instead to build the gallows; ethnic cleansing codified into law.

The Mechanics of the Double Standard

The March 2026 law does not operate in a vacuum; it is the capstone of a two-tiered legal reality that has governed the occupied territories for decades. This is a system designed to manufacture impunity for one demographic while guaranteeing the harshest possible punishment for another. The law itself is weaponised, transformed from a shield for the vulnerable into a sword for the powerful.

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The law explicitly targets Palestinians tried in military courts in the occupied West Bank. These courts are administrative instruments of the occupation, presided over by military officers whose primary allegiance is to the security apparatus, not to abstract notions of justice. According to human rights organisations, these military tribunals boast a conviction rate of between 96 and 99 percent for Palestinians (Amnesty International, 2026). Convictions are routinely secured based on confessions extracted under severe duress, including physical and psychological torture. Children are prosecuted in these same military courts, often dragged from their beds in the middle of the night, interrogated without a lawyer or parent present, and forced to sign confessions in Hebrew, a language they often do not understand. The system is a machine designed to process human beings into convicts with ruthless efficiency. Now, that machine has been equipped with gallows. The speed of the execution is designed to prevent any meaningful international campaign or prolonged legal appeal. It is designed to kill quickly and quietly, under the cover of law.

Conversely, Jewish Israelis living in the exact same geographic territory — the illegal settlements of the West Bank — are subject to Israeli civil law. They are tried in civilian courts, with all the robust legal protections, rights of appeal, and evidentiary standards that a modern democracy affords its citizens. They are explicitly excluded from the reach of the new death penalty law. As Amichai Cohen, a legal scholar at the Israel Democracy Institute, stated: “Jews will not be indicted under this law” (Human Rights Watch, 2026).

It is necessary to state, with profound discomfort, exactly what kind of legal architecture this is. If one searches the historical record for capital laws that explicitly designate one racial or ethnic group as subject to the death penalty while exempting another by name, the precedents are few and horrifying. Jim Crow lynching was extrajudicial; the state tolerated it, but it was not written into the penal code. Apartheid South Africa’s death penalty was catastrophically discriminatory in application, but it was nominally race-neutral in its text. To find a legal system where the racial exclusion from capital punishment is explicitly codified in the statute itself — where the law formally dictates that one ethnicity hangs and the other does not — one must look to the Nuremberg Laws of Nazi Germany. That is the historical company this legislation keeps.

The depravity of this law goes deeper than its racial exclusivity. It is not only that the state is executing Palestinians while exempting Israelis; it is that the state is executing Palestinians for exercising a right that international law explicitly guarantees them. Under United Nations General Assembly Resolution 37/43, and affirmed repeatedly since, peoples under colonial and foreign occupation have a recognised legal right to struggle for self-determination by all available means, including armed resistance. The International Committee of the Red Cross has confirmed that armed resistance to occupation is lawful under international humanitarian law, provided it is directed at military targets. The very acts the Israeli state is labelling “terrorism” and punishing with the gallows are, in many cases, acts that the international community has affirmed as the lawful exercise of the right to self-determination. Meanwhile, the settler violence, which meets every academic and legal definition of terrorism, carries no sanction whatsoever.

This is the system in practice. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel (ACRI) immediately filed a petition with the Supreme Court, correctly identifying the legislation as “discriminatory by design” (Adalah, 2026). Human Rights Watch noted that the law “entrenches discrimination and a two-tiered system of justice, both hallmarks of apartheid” (Human Rights Watch, 2026). Amnesty International’s Erika Guevara-Rosas was unsparing in her assessment: “Israel is brazenly granting itself carte blanche to execute Palestinians while stripping away the most basic fair-trial safeguards” (Amnesty International, 2026). The Palestinian Authority described the law as “a war crime against the Palestinian people,” arguing that it breaches the Fourth Geneva Convention’s protections for civilians under occupation (Al Jazeera, 2026). The state has legally codified that the exact same act of violence is a capital offence for one ethnicity and a matter for the civilian penal code — if it is prosecuted at all — for another.

But the double standard is embedded in the very language the state uses to describe violence. Israel’s 2016 Counter-Terrorism Law provides a broad and sweeping definition of a terrorist act, encompassing any offence that creates fear or terror in the public. By any objective academic or policy standard, the actions of extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank meet this definition perfectly. They deliberately destroy Palestinian property, deface mosques, slaughter livestock, and murder civilians. They do this with the express, stated goal of instilling terror in the Palestinian population to force them off their land and secure permanent Jewish sovereignty over the territory. As the Atlantic Council noted in a 2026 analysis, “Extremist Israeli settler violence readily meets both the academic and policy definitions of terrorism: the deliberate creation of fear through violence or the threat of violence in pursuit of a political objective” (Waldo, 2026).

Yet, the Israeli state categorically refuses to apply the “terrorist” label to these violent settlers. The IDF and the Shin Bet internally classify severe incidents of settler violence as “nationalistic crime” or even acknowledge them as terrorism in their own data collection. However, they refuse to designate the perpetrators themselves as terrorists. The justification offered for this refusal is a supposed “lack of organisational coherence” compared to Palestinian groups (Waldo, 2026).

This distinction is entirely arbitrary and intellectually bankrupt. The IDF’s own materials regarding Palestinian violence show no hesitation whatsoever in applying the terrorist label to lone-wolf attackers who have no formal affiliation with any armed group. When a Palestinian acts alone, they are a terrorist. When hundreds of armed settlers coordinate a massive assault on a village, burning homes and shooting residents, they are dismissed by military leadership as “anarchists” or “extremists.” The IDF Chief of Staff, Eyal Zamir, used precisely this language, “anarchists,” to describe the perpetrators of the violence, even as his own institution’s data classified their acts as terrorism (Waldo, 2026). The word “anarchist” is carefully chosen. It implies chaos, disorder, a problem of governance. It does not imply a political project or intent.

This is the sanitisation of state-sanctioned violence. By refusing to label settler violence as terrorism, the state ensures that the perpetrators are never subjected to the draconian counter-terrorism measures deployed against Palestinians. They do not face administrative detention without trial. Their family homes are not demolished by military bulldozers. They are not subjected to collective punishment. And, under the new law, they will never face the hangman. The legal system exists to define terror in a way that protects the state’s vanguard and criminalises its enemies.

The man who championed this death penalty law — Ben-Gvir himself — is the same minister who oversees the police force that has systematically refused to prosecute settlers for decades. He is both the architect of the gallows and the guardian of the impunity. This is a coherent political project, working exactly as intended. The state has created a legal fiction where the violence of the occupier is a policing issue, while the violence of the occupied is an existential threat requiring the ultimate sanction.

The Settler Pogroms: State-Sanctioned Terror and Dispossession

On the evening of March 21, 2026, during the Eid al-Fitr holiday, extremist Israeli settlers launched a massive, coordinated assault across the occupied territory. According to reports, the settlers carried out a “widespread pogrom that lasted over six hours, struck more than 14 villages, attacked dozens of Palestinians, and no one stopped them” (Time, 2026). They set homes and vehicles ablaze. They smashed windows and beat residents, sending several to the hospital with severe head wounds and gunshot injuries. The Palestinian Red Crescent reported at least three people hospitalised, including a 45-year-old man shot in the foot and a woman suffering from smoke inhalation. The IDF, which was present in the area, did not intervene for hours. When it eventually acted, it detained five Israeli civilians and confiscated some weapons. Five. In a six-hour pogrom across fourteen villages involving hundreds of armed people.

This was a calculated campaign of terror, designed to inflict maximum psychological and physical damage on a civilian population. Ayman Odeh, the leader of the Hadash-Ta’al party, described it as a “night of fire” (Time, 2026). Yair Golan, leader of the Democrats party, was even more explicit, stating: “Jewish terrorism is spreading, exploiting the war, with the backing of extremist ministers and dangerous encouragement from the prime minister and the defence minister” (Time, 2026). Even former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett felt compelled to condemn the violence, stating, “We did not establish a Jewish state so that violent gangs would operate within it” (Time, 2026). Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert went further still, calling on the International Criminal Court to issue arrest warrants for the perpetrators (Daily Sabah, 2026). Former senior security officials — military chiefs, intelligence heads, police commissioners — warned publicly that the attacks amounted to “Jewish terrorism” (Daily Sabah, 2026). Two former justice ministers accused the government of allowing “active and horrific ethnic cleansing” (Daily Sabah, 2026).

When former prime ministers and former justice ministers of Israel are using the words “ethnic cleansing” and calling for ICC arrest warrants, we are in the realm of documented atrocity. Yet the state responds not with prosecution, but with a death penalty law aimed at the victims of that atrocity.

The March 2026 pogrom was merely the latest escalation in a long, unbroken continuum of state-sanctioned violence. It echoes the horrific events of February 2023 in Huwara, where hundreds of settlers rampaged through the town, burning homes and businesses while the Israeli military stood by and watched. The IDF’s own top general in the West Bank at the time, Major General Yehuda Fuchs, called the Huwara riot a “pogrom” (Times of Israel, 2023). He used the word deliberately: a pogrom is not a riot, but an organised, state-tolerated massacre of an ethnic minority. The general knew what he was witnessing, yet the perpetrators of the Huwara pogrom walked free. No charges. No trial. No consequences. The state absorbed the violence, digested it, and allowed the perpetrators to return to their settlements as heroes.

A 2026 analysis revealed that since the start of the decade, at least 1,100 Palestinian civilians have been killed in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers and settlers. In that entire period, not a single indictment has been filed against an Israeli for the killing of a Palestinian civilian. The last time a civilian settler was prosecuted for such a killing was in 2018 (Daily Sabah, 2026). The last prosecution involving the security forces was in 2019. Since then, the killing has continued, and the silence of the justice system has been absolute.

Data collected over two decades by the Israeli human rights organisation Yesh Din confirms that this is a structural feature of the occupation, not a temporary aberration. Between 2005 and 2024, 94 percent of police investigations into ideological crimes committed by Israelis against Palestinians were closed without an indictment. Only 3 percent of investigations ever resulted in a conviction (Yesh Din, 2025). The system is so thoroughly broken that an estimated 60 to 66 percent of Palestinian victims do not even bother to file police complaints, knowing that doing so will yield no justice and will likely invite further retaliation or the revocation of their work permits (Yesh Din, 2025). The victims have learned, through bitter experience, that the police are not their protectors. The police exist to manage the occupation, not to enforce the law.

As Ziv Stahl, the executive director of Yesh Din, observed: “The Israeli law-enforcement systems, both civil and military, function less as mechanisms for justice and more as shields for perpetrators” (Daily Sabah, 2026). Michael Sfard, a prominent Israeli human rights lawyer, was equally direct, noting that “the system is programmed to manufacture impunity, not accountability” (Daily Sabah, 2026). These are the words of Israeli legal professionals who have spent decades working within the system and watching it fail, deliberately and repeatedly, to protect Palestinian lives.

The scale of the violence has accelerated dramatically in recent years, emboldened by a government that openly shares the settlers’ maximalist goals. According to IDF and Shin Bet data, extremist settlers perpetrated 867 attacks against Palestinians and Israeli security forces in the West Bank in 2025 alone, a 27 percent increase from 2024. Severe incidents of nationalistic crime — the IDF’s own euphemism for what it privately acknowledges as terrorism — increased by more than 50 percent from 2024 levels, more than doubling since 2023 (Waldo, 2026). More than 1,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israeli troops and settlers in the West Bank since October 2023 (Time, 2026). These are the IDF’s own numbers, documenting a campaign of terror that the state refuses to prosecute.

We must understand that this violence is not random, senseless, or the work of a few “bad apples.” It is a highly effective, calculated strategy of dispossession. The objective of settler terrorism is theft. It is the violent vanguard of the state’s expansionist project. The settlers terrorise, burn, kill, and then they take over the homes and the land. They use forged property deeds, archaic Ottoman land laws, and the brute force of the military to seize Palestinian property. More than 750,000 Israeli settlers now live in illegal settlements across the West Bank (Al Jazeera, 2025). Their presence is illegal under international law. The settlements violate the Fourth Geneva Convention and have been repeatedly condemned by UN Security Council resolutions. They exist because the state built them, funds them, arms them, and protects them.

The results of this strategy are devastating and measurable. It is crucial to understand that the erasure of the West Bank did not begin on October 7th. The architecture of dispossession was already fully operational, the villages were already being burned, and the land was already being stolen. But the war in Gaza provided something invaluable to the settler project: absolute narrative cover. As the world watched a genocide unfold on their screens, the global narrative narrowed so completely that the West Bank disappeared from view. The international community began treating Gaza as a separate, isolated conflict, rather than one front in the same continuous colonial struggle. The media’s cameras and the diplomatic bandwidth were entirely consumed by the destruction of the strip, providing the perfect smokescreen for the acceleration of the settler project. A report from the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights found that between November 2024 and October 2025, 36,000 Palestinians were forcibly displaced in the West Bank (Time, 2026). In the first few months of 2026 alone, nearly 700 Palestinians in nine communities were driven from their homes due to escalating settler attacks (Time, 2026). The UN Human Rights Council has explicitly condemned this as an “accelerating campaign of ethnic cleansing and annexation” (Time, 2026). The Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights stated in March 2026 that “Israel has accelerated unlawful settlement expansion and annexation of large parts of the occupied West Bank” (OHCHR, 2026). The UNRWA Commissioner General described the reality on the ground in stark terms: “large groups of settlers storm Palestinian communities, brutalise residents and torch buildings” (Time, 2026).

This is the reality against which the new death penalty law must be judged. The state has constructed a legal apparatus that guarantees the execution of Palestinians who resist the occupation, while simultaneously providing absolute, mathematically verifiable impunity to the Israeli settlers who serve as the shock troops of that same occupation. The settlers are doing the work of the state: clearing the land, expanding the borders, and terrorising the indigenous population into submission. Why would the state hang its own foot soldiers?

The Architecture of Apartheid

We do not need to rely solely on historical parallels to understand what this legal architecture represents. International law provides a precise, contemporary vocabulary for a system that subjects two different racial or ethnic groups living in the same territory to entirely different legal regimes, with the express purpose of maintaining the domination of one over the other. That word is apartheid.

For decades, the term was treated as a rhetorical provocation, a political slur rather than a legal reality. But the passage of the death penalty law, and the two-tiered justice system it crowns, strips away any remaining ambiguity. The intent to maintain domination is explicitly stated in government policy, such as the 2018 Nation-State Law. The context of systematic oppression is codified in the very architecture of the occupation: the dual legal system where Palestinians face military courts with a 99 percent conviction rate while their settler neighbours enjoy civil rights. And the inhumane acts committed to maintain this regime are visible in the daily violence of the occupation: the demolition of Palestinian homes, the state-backed settler pogroms, and now, the construction of the gallows.

Major international human rights organisations have already reached this conclusion. In 2021, Human Rights Watch issued a landmark report detailing how Israeli authorities were committing the crimes against humanity of apartheid and persecution, noting that the severity of repression in the occupied territory, including draconian military rule for Palestinians alongside rights-respecting civil law for Jewish Israelis, amounts to the systematic oppression required for apartheid (Human Rights Watch, 2021). In 2022, Amnesty International followed suit, publishing a comprehensive analysis demonstrating that Israel imposes a “cruel system of domination and crime against humanity” (Amnesty International, 2022).

But the most definitive legal judgment came in July 2024, when the International Court of Justice (ICJ) — the highest court in the world — issued a historic advisory opinion. The Court found multiple and serious international law violations by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and, for the first time, explicitly found Israel responsible for apartheid and racial segregation (Human Rights Watch, 2024). The ICJ declared the occupation itself illegal and placed responsibility on all states to end these violations.

Yet, the response of the Israeli state to the highest court in the world was not to dismantle the system of apartheid, but to fortify it. The March 2026 death penalty law is the ultimate expression of this defiance. It takes the two-tiered legal system that the ICJ condemned as apartheid and arms it with the ultimate sanction. When a state legally mandates that a Palestinian can be hanged for an act of violence, while an Israeli settler who commits the exact same act is protected by the police and tried in a civilian court (if they are tried at all) we are no longer debating the definition of apartheid. We are watching it execute its subjects.

Conclusion: The Verdict

When a state legally codifies that the exact same act of violence is a capital offence for one ethnicity and a protected, unpunished right for another, it ceases to be a justice system. It becomes an administrative tool for ethnic cleansing. The law is no longer a mechanism for resolving disputes or maintaining order; it is a weapon wielded by the powerful against the powerless. It is the architecture of apartheid, rendered in the starkest possible terms.

The death penalty law passed by the Knesset is not about deterrence. Decades of empirical evidence from around the globe have proven that capital punishment does not deter violent crime. No serious criminologist or penologist argues otherwise. The law is about establishing absolute, irreversible dominance. It is the final, brutal codification of a reality where the state decides who is human enough to deserve a trial, and who is merely an obstacle to be removed. It is a declaration that Palestinian life holds no value, while Israeli violence is inherently justified by the project it serves.

We should not be surprised by this law because it is the inevitable next step for a state built on ethnic cleansing, from the Nakba to the present day. A state that sustains itself through the continuous dispossession of an indigenous population will always, eventually, require the gallows to maintain its grip. This final step was taken with the tacit approval of the international community. The genocide in Gaza was green lit by the world. It was met with muted condemnation by Western leaders who invoke international law only when it suits them, and who continued to arm the state even as the atrocities were broadcast live. The United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom continued to supply weapons and components throughout the Gaza offensive, finding legal carve-outs to keep arming the state while Gaza burned (SIPRI, 2025; Campaign Against Arms Trade, 2025). The world demonstrated, through its silence and its shipments of artillery, that there was no red line. If killing children in their beds did not cross a line, why would the world care about the execution of those the state has already defined as “terrorists”? The label does the work. Once you are called a terrorist, the world has already decided you do not count. The death penalty law is the direct result of that complicity. It is the juridical extension of the exact same eliminationist project. It is genocide by other means. When a state learns that it can commit genocide without consequence, it does not moderate its behaviour.

If international law does not matter — if the ICJ’s rulings are dismissed, UN resolutions are treated as irrelevant, the legal right to armed resistance is punished with execution while the state’s own violence is protected by statute — then we must ask the question again: what is terrorism? It has become a political weapon; the word the coloniser uses to describe the resistance of the colonised, while reserving the language of justice for its own atrocities. The powerful state never commits terrorism. It conducts “counter-terrorism.” It conducts “security operations.” It “mows the lawn.” That is the universal alibi of state violence throughout modern history. The Nazis called their massacres of resistance fighters “anti-partisan operations” and “security measures.” The British in Kenya, the French in Algeria, the apartheid regime in South Africa — every powerful state that has committed mass atrocities against a subject population has done so under the banner of counter-terrorism and the protection of order. We write that list with extreme discomfort; Israel is the latest state to dress its lawlessness in the language of justice.

Ben-Gvir told the world that whoever takes a life, the state will take their life in return. He said this while wearing a noose; as the settlers who burn Palestinian villages and shoot Palestinian civilians continue to walk free, protected by the very legal system he oversees. He said this knowing, with absolute certainty, that the noose he was celebrating would never be placed around a settler’s neck. He said it because he knows that in the architecture of hypocrisy, the law does not apply to the architects.

But history offers a final, inescapable verdict on states built this way. The British Raj fell. French Algeria fell. Apartheid South Africa fell. The most brutal regimes in history do not last forever; they end, and they often end abruptly, eaten from the inside out by their own moral rot. A state that requires a two-tiered justice system, a permanent military occupation, the construction of the gallows, and the prosecution of a genocide to maintain its existence is projecting the profound, terminal weakness of a project that cannot survive the light of day. The noose is a desperate measure, and desperate measures are the hallmark of a regime that knows it’s time is running out.

Against this machinery of erasure stands something the state cannot legislate out of existence: the profound, unbreakable steadfastness of the Palestinian people. The gallows are built on the assumption that fear will eventually triumph over belonging, that the indigenous population will finally break and leave. But they have not left. They remain. Through decades of dispossession, through military courts and settler pogroms, through the destruction of their homes and the bombardment of their cities, they have maintained their sumud — their steadfast perseverance. They are the active, enduring agents of their own survival.

The architects of the Zionist project understood this from the very beginning, even if their modern successors pretend otherwise. Writing in 1923, Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the ideological father of the Israeli right, laid out the brutal, inescapable truth of the colonial endeavour with a clarity that today’s politicians lack. He did not deal in the sanitised language of counter-terrorism. He understood exactly what he was building, and exactly who he was building it against:

“Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement. That is what the Arabs in Palestine are doing, and what they will persist in doing as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel’.” (Jabotinsky, 1923)

Resist they did. And still are: from the river to the sea.

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References

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To begin a war of destruction, you must first destroy the truth.

We have previously examined the devastating consequences of Russia’s war on reality. We have seen the ruined cities, the stolen children, the shattered lives, and the geopolitical tremors that followed the full-scale invasion of Ukraine (Plague Island, 2026). We have documented the atrocities that inevitably occur when a state decides that a neighbouring nation does not exist. But to understand the true nature of this authoritarian threat, we must examine how that foundational lie was meticulously constructed. We must look at the blueprint to understand the architecture of the fiction that made the slaughter possible.

On July 12, 2021, exactly seven months before Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv, Vladimir Putin published a 5,000-word essay. It was titled On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians (Putin, 2021). Even the title is a weapon. The word “On” does all the heavy lifting before the reader begins. It is the language of the academic treatise — “On Liberty,” “On the Origin of Species” — a framing device that presupposes the existence of its subject. Putin does not title his essay The Case for Historical Unity or Why Russians and Ukrainians Are One People, which would at least acknowledge that an argument needs to be made. He titles it On the Historical Unity… as if the unity is already an established, settled fact, and he is merely offering reflections upon it. The conclusion is smuggled into the premise before the first sentence has been read.

At the time, the essay was dismissed by many Western observers as the rambling of an isolated autocrat with too much time on his hands during a global pandemic. It was treated as a bizarre historical excursion, a piece of amateur scholarship from a former KGB operative playing historian-in-chief. Western diplomats read it, shrugged, and filed it away as domestic political posturing. They assumed it was rhetoric designed for internal consumption, a nostalgic lament for a lost empire rather than a practical guide for future action.

This was a catastrophic failure of imagination. In retrospect, the essay was a glaring, neon-lit declaration of war. What made the failure all the more inexcusable was the context in which the essay appeared. Putin published it in July 2021, in the immediate aftermath of a massive Russian military build-up on Ukraine’s borders that spring — the largest concentration of Russian forces since 2014 — which had only recently been stood down (Dickinson, 2021). The tanks had temporarily retreated but the ideology that would send them back had just been committed to paper.

It was a weaponised narrative; a piece of imperial propaganda designed to erase a sovereign nation from the map. Crucially, it was not meant for academic debate. Just four days after its publication, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu personally ordered the essay to be added to the compulsory curriculum of the military-patriotic directorate (The Moscow Times, 2021). It was distributed to the Russian military, given to soldiers to tell them why they must kill their neighbours. When a dictator publishes an essay claiming a neighbouring country does not exist and immediately makes it mandatory reading for his armed forces, we must believe him. The destruction of truth always precedes the destruction of people. You cannot mobilise an army to annihilate a brother nation; you must first convince the army that the nation is a phantom, a mistake, a disease.

Putin’s essay is a calculated denial of Ukrainian agency and a cynical distortion of the past, engineered specifically to lay the ideological groundwork for mass slaughter and territorial theft. To read it is to step into a hall of mirrors where facts are inverted, where victims are aggressors, and where empire is disguised as brotherhood. It is a masterclass in the authoritarian use of history, where the past is something to be conquered and occupied, just like physical territory.

The Hijacking of Kievan Rus’ and the “One People” Myth

The core of Putin’s argument is a fabrication: that Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians are “one people” descending from Ancient Rus’, bound by language and Orthodox faith, and that any division between them is a tragedy orchestrated by external enemies (Putin, 2021). This is the myth of the “one people.” It sounds, to the untrained ear, like a statement of affection. It is, in fact, a denial of the right to exist. If Ukrainians are simply confused Russians, then Ukraine is not a nation. If Ukraine is not a nation, it has no right to sovereignty. If it has no right to sovereignty, its borders can be erased by force, and its people can be “liberated” from their own identity.

To sustain this myth, Putin must hijack history. He begins with Kievan Rus’, the medieval federation of principalities centred around present-day Kyiv. In Putin’s telling, this was a unified Russian ethno-state, the joint ancestral homeland that makes Kyiv the “mother of Russian cities” (Putin, 2021). He projects the modern concept of the Russian nation backward by a thousand years, claiming a continuous, unbroken lineage from the baptism of Volodymyr the Great in 988 to the modern Russian Federation.

This is a profound distortion. Kievan Rus’ was an increasingly fragmented federation of principalities, not a unified state, and certainly not a “Russian” one in any modern sense (Düben, 2020). It was a multi-ethnic, polyglot trading empire founded by Scandinavian Vikings (the Varangians) who ruled over various Slavic, Finnic, and Baltic tribes. Volodymyr the Great ruled from Kyiv centuries before Moscow was even a clearing in the forest. Moscow claiming ownership over Kyiv’s history is the equivalent of modern Romania claiming ownership of Italy because both trace their lineage to the Roman Empire, or Britain claiming the right to invade Denmark because of shared Anglo-Saxon heritage. It is a retroactive nationalism that makes a mockery of historical reality.

But Putin’s historical fiction requires more than just claiming the medieval past. It requires erasing the centuries that followed. Following the Mongol conquests in the 13th century, the political and cultural trajectories of the Eastern Slavs diverged sharply. The south-western territories of Rus’ — encompassing most of present-day Ukraine — were conquered by Poland and Lithuania in the early 14th century. For roughly four hundred years, these lands were under Polish-Lithuanian rule (Düben, 2020).

During these four centuries, the Orthodox East Slavic population of these lands developed an identity entirely distinct from that of the East Slavs remaining under Mongol and later Muscovite rule. A distinct Ukrainian language had already begun to emerge in the dying days of Kievan Rus’, contradicting Putin’s factually incorrect claim that linguistic differences appeared only around the 16th century (Düben, 2020). Following the incorporation of present-day Ukraine into Poland-Lithuania, the Ukrainian language evolved in relative isolation from the Russian language, absorbing different influences and developing its own distinct vocabulary and grammar.

Crucially, the lands of modern Ukraine were exposed to the intellectual currents of Europe — the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation — while Muscovy remained largely isolated. Ukrainian cities enjoyed Magdeburg rights, a form of European urban self-government that fostered a civic culture entirely alien to the autocratic traditions developing in Moscow. At the same time, religious divisions developed within Eastern Orthodoxy. From the mid-15th to the late 17th centuries, the Orthodox Churches in Moscow and Kyiv developed as separate entities (Düben, 2020). The Kyivan clergy, heavily influenced by the intellectual currents of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, developed a distinct theological and cultural tradition. When the concept of “Great Russia and Little Russia” was first articulated, it was a product of 17th-century Kyivan clergy seeking the protection of the Orthodox Tsar, but their vision was one of distinctiveness and equality between two peoples. Moscow absorbed the language and discarded the equality. It has been doing so ever since (Plokhy, 2017).

Ukraine has a history, a language, and a culture. It has an identity forged over centuries of distinct historical experience. It is not a subset of Russia; it is a parallel development, a different path taken by people who lived at the crossroads of empires.

Putin cannot accept this. To accept it would be to acknowledge that Ukrainians are a separate people with the right to determine their own destiny. Therefore, he must invent a conspiracy. In his essay, Putin treats genuine Ukrainian national identity as an artificial concoction. He claims it is a “disorder of the mind” invented by Poles and Austrians to weaken Russia (Düben, 2020; Plokhy, 2017). He argues that the very word “Ukraine” simply meant “periphery” or “borderland,” and that “Ukrainian” originally referred only to frontier guards (Putin, 2021).

This is deeply insulting. It is the language of the coloniser. It strips forty million people of their history and tells them that their identity is nothing more than a foreign plot. It is a narrative that systematically ignores all manifestations of the historic growth of a distinct Ukrainian nationhood, reproducing a myth of a 1000-year continuity of the Russian nation that has been popular in Russian nationalist circles since the 19th century (Düben, 2023).

The irony, of course, is that the Russian Empire itself recognised the distinctiveness of the Ukrainian identity — and viewed it as a mortal threat. When the Russian Empire eventually absorbed most of modern-day Ukraine in the late 18th century, its imperial authorities systematically persecuted expressions of Ukrainian culture. Catherine the Great dismantled the Cossack Hetmanate, erasing the last vestiges of Ukrainian autonomy. Later Tsars made continuous attempts to suppress the Ukrainian language. In 1863, the Russian Minister of the Interior issued the Valuev Circular, which banned the publication of religious and educational books in Ukrainian, declaring that a separate Ukrainian language “never existed, does not exist, and shall not exist.” This was followed by the Ems Ukaz of 1876, which banned the printing and importation of all books in Ukrainian, as well as the staging of plays and lectures in the language (Plokhy, 2017).

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Putin acknowledges these decrees in his essay, but he dismisses them as defensive responses to the Polish national movement and the intrigues of foreign powers (Putin, 2021). He cannot admit the obvious truth: that the Russian Empire treated the Ukrainian language as a matter of state security because it recognised the reality of a separate Ukrainian identity. You do not need to ban a language that does not exist. You do not need to suppress a culture that is identical to your own. The very ferocity of Russian imperial repression is the greatest proof of Ukrainian distinctiveness.

The Hypocrisy of “Stolen” Lands and the Bolshevik Blame Game

The myth of the “one people” is the foundation of the war. It is the lie that makes the killing possible. But it is only the first part of Putin’s historical fiction. To justify the dismemberment of the Ukrainian state, he must also invent a grievance about its borders. He must blame the Bolsheviks.

In the Kremlin’s telling, modern Ukraine is an accident of history, a mistake made by communists. Putin’s essay devotes significant space to a bizarre and hypocritical grievance: that the Bolsheviks “robbed” Russia by drawing arbitrary borders and giving away “primordially Russian territories” to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic (Putin, 2021).

He calls the right of Soviet republics to secede “Lenin’s most dangerous time bomb” (Putin, 2021). He claims that the south-eastern regions of Ukraine — the Donbas, the Black Sea coast — were handed over with no consideration for the ethnic make-up of the population. He concludes that “modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era” (Putin, 2021).

The idea that the borders were drawn arbitrarily is a lie. The eastern borders of Ukraine were formally drawn in 1919-1924 as the boundaries of the Ukrainian SSR. The first Soviet census in 1926, conducted shortly after these borders were finalised, clearly showed Ukrainian majorities in these south-eastern territories (Düben, 2020). The claim that these were “primordially Russian territories” is preposterous. There was no substantial Russian presence in the “historical South of Russia” prior to the 19th century. During the Polish-Lithuanian era, these territories were known as the “Wild Fields,” a sparsely populated no-man’s-land inhabited primarily by nomadic Turkic peoples and later by Ukrainian Cossacks. When settlement began in earnest in the 19th century, the ethnic make-up was highly diverse, including Ukrainians, Russians, Greeks, Bulgarians, and Germans. The cities at the centre of the current conflict, Luhansk and Donetsk, were not founded by Russian imperialists. They were founded in 1795 and 1869 by British industrialists Charles Gascoigne and John Hughes, respectively (Düben, 2020).

The preponderance of Russian speakers in certain parts of eastern and southern Ukraine today is not proof of primordial Russianness. It is the legacy of Russian imperial rule, deliberate colonisation, and the cruel consequences of Stalinist ethnic cleansing (Düben, 2023). It is the result of the Holodomor — the man-made famine of 1932-33 engineered by Joseph Stalin that killed between three and five million Ukrainians (Düben, 2020). The Holodomor was a targeted genocide designed to break the back of the Ukrainian peasantry, which Stalin viewed as the core of the Ukrainian national movement. Following the famine, the Soviet state engaged in the “Executed Renaissance,” systematically murdering a generation of Ukrainian writers, artists, and intellectuals. After the Ukrainian population of these regions was decimated by starvation and purges, the Soviet state repopulated the empty villages and industrial cities with ethnic Russians.

To use the demographic results of imperial violence and genocide as a justification for further imperial violence is the logic of a monster. It is the equivalent of a murderer claiming ownership of a house because he killed the previous occupants and moved his own family in. Putin’s narrative demands that we ignore the graves beneath the soil and focus only on the language spoken by those who were brought in to replace the dead.

This demographic engineering laid the groundwork for the pseudo-legal arguments that followed. Putin’s argument is intended to be legally useful. He echoes the twisted, mafia-style logic of his former political mentor, Anatoly Sobchak, the former mayor of St. Petersburg. Putin argues that when a republic leaves the Soviet Union, it must “take what [it] brought with [it]” and that all other territorial acquisitions are “subject to discussion” (Putin, 2021).

There is one fact that exposes the entirety of Putin’s border grievance as bad faith, and it is this: Russia signed it away. In December 1994, Russia was a co-signatory to the Budapest Memorandum, a formal international commitment in which Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom explicitly guaranteed Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine surrendering the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal — over 1,900 strategic warheads inherited from the Soviet Union (Plokhy, 2017). Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons on the basis of a solemn promise from Moscow that its borders would be respected. Putin’s Russia then annexed Crimea in 2014 and launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. The man who complains about the injustice of Soviet-era borders is the same man who signed a guarantee to respect those borders and then tore it up. The grievance is a pretext.

This is a transparent justification for violent expansionism, and the intellectual scaffolding for the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of the Donbas. It establishes a principle that borders are not fixed by international law, treaties, or the democratic will of the people who live within them but are subject to the historical grievances of the stronger power. It is a formula for endless war. If borders can be redrawn based on the perceived historical injustices of the 1920s, then no border in Europe is safe. If the map of Europe is to be redrawn according to the imperial high-water marks of the past, then the entire continent will drown in blood. The borders of Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, and Georgia — all nations that once fell under the shadow of the Russian Empire — are suddenly open to question (Dickinson, 2025). Putin himself made this chillingly clear when he remarked, “Wherever a Russian soldier sets foot is ours” (Dickinson, 2025).

The “Anti-Russia Project” and the Erasure of Agency

If Ukraine is not a real nation, and its borders are not real borders, how does Putin justify the undeniable reality of Ukrainian resistance? How does he interpret the millions of people who took to the streets in 2004 and 2014 to demand a European future? How does he articulate the army that fought the Russian invasion to a standstill? How does he explain a population that endures freezing winters and relentless bombardment rather than submit to Moscow’s rule?

He explains it by erasing Ukrainian agency entirely. He invents the “anti-Russia project.”

In the final sections of his essay, Putin descends into paranoid conspiracy. He asserts that Ukrainian sovereignty is a weapon forged by the West to destroy Russia. He claims that the 2014 Maidan revolution was a Western-backed coup utilising neo-Nazis, and that the Ukrainian government is a puppet regime forced to assimilate its own people (Putin, 2021). He frames the entire existence of an independent, democratic Ukraine as an act of aggression against Russia.

This strips forty million Ukrainians of their agency. Putin cannot fathom that a people would willingly choose democracy and the rule of law over subjugation by Moscow. He rules a population cowed into silence, a garrison state where dissent is criminalised and civil society has been crushed. He assumes all populations are directed from above. He cannot explain Ukrainian defiance, so he invents a phantom Western conspiracy to make it disappear.

The reality of the Maidan revolution was entirely different. It was not a Western plot; it was a desperate, organic uprising against a corrupt, Russian-backed autocrat, Viktor Yanukovych, who broke his promise to sign an association agreement with the European Union in favour of a Russian customs union. When Yanukovych’s security forces opened fire on unarmed protesters in the dead of winter, the movement transformed from a protest about a trade agreement into a revolution for human dignity. The people who stood behind makeshift barricades of ice and burning tires on the Maidan were fighting for the right to live in a country where the police do not shoot you for demanding a better future. They were asserting their existence as a sovereign people capable of determining their own political destiny.

To obscure this reality, Putin weaponises the legacy of the Second World War, transforming the complex tragedy of the Eastern Front into a crude binary of Soviet heroes and Ukrainian fascists. He relies heavily on the “Banderite” myth, a creation of Soviet propaganda from the 1940s that branded all Ukrainian independence fighters as Nazi collaborators (Zygar, 2024). This narrative is simplistic, historically illiterate, and demonstrably false. While some factions of the Ukrainian nationalist movement did temporarily collaborate with the Nazis in the naive and desperate hope of securing independence from Stalin’s terror, the reality was far more complex. Stepan Bandera himself, the ultimate boogeyman of Russian state media, was imprisoned by the Nazis in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp for refusing to rescind his declaration of Ukrainian independence, and his brothers were murdered in Auschwitz (Zygar, 2024). Furthermore, millions of Ukrainians fought and died in the Red Army to defeat Nazism, a colossal sacrifice that Putin conveniently ignores when he paints the entire modern nation with the brush of fascism.

There is also a grotesque irony at the heart of this accusation that must not go unnamed. Putin calls Ukraine a Nazi state. But consider the regime making the accusation: a state built on ethnic mythology and the cult of a sacred homeland; territorial expansion justified by blood-and-soil nationalism; the glorification of a strong leader above the law; the violent suppression of all internal dissent, and the elimination of political opponents. Putin’s Russia embodies the thing it claims to be fighting. The fascist calls his enemy fascist. It is the oldest trick in the authoritarian playbook, and it works precisely because the accusation is so outrageous that reasonable people struggle to believe anyone would make it in bad faith.

But Putin’s understanding of history was shaped not by archives, but by Soviet spy fiction. His worldview is heavily influenced by the novels of Yulian Semyonov, which popularised these simplistic myths of heroic Soviet agents battling treacherous Ukrainian fascists for a KGB audience in the 1970s and 80s (Zygar, 2024). Putin has taken the pulp fiction of his youth and elevated it to state ideology. Having elevated that doctrine to the level of state truth, the next step was logical and ruthless: ensure that no competing version of the past could survive.

He has moved methodically to guarantee exactly that. No alternative version of history can survive within Russia’s borders. The criminalisation of historical dissent is a legal reality. In December 2021, Russia’s Supreme Court ordered the dissolution of Memorial International, the country’s oldest and most respected human rights organisation, which had spent three decades documenting the crimes of the Soviet state and maintaining a database of victims of Stalinist repression. The court’s justification was that Memorial had violated rules on labelling itself a “foreign agent” — but the subtext was unmistakable: an organisation dedicated to the truthful documentation of Soviet history had no place in Putin’s Russia (Düben, 2023). When the state destroys the institution that keeps the records, it is the deliberate erasure of memory.

The institutionalisation of the lie extends to the next generation. In 2023, Putin mandated that all Russian high school students study history using a single, state-approved textbook written by Vladimir Medinsky, his former minister of culture and personal ghostwriter (Zygar, 2024). Medinsky is not a historian. He is a propagandist. His textbook presents the war in Ukraine as a necessary and heroic act of self-defence against Western aggression, erases Ukrainian identity entirely, and frames the entire arc of Russian history as a story of innocent victimhood and righteous resistance. Millions of Russian children are now being educated in Putin’s historical fiction as though it were fact. The blueprint is being handed to the next generation as a birthright.

The reality is that the idea of Ukrainian independence was put on the political agenda in the 20th century and has refused to leave. There were five separate attempts to declare independence in that century alone, culminating in the successful, democratic vote of 1991, where over 90% of Ukrainians — including majorities in every single region, including the Donbas and Crimea — voted for independence (Plokhy, 2017). Ukrainians have fought, bled, and died for their statehood. They are not a project. They are a people. They are a nation that has chosen its own path, and that path leads away from the authoritarian darkness of Moscow.

Conclusion: The Dictator Trapped in the Past

When we read Putin’s essay today, we are reading the obituary he wrote for the nation he intended to conquer. It is a document that reveals a revanchist dictator trapped in a mythical past, willing to burn down the present to satisfy his imperial delusions. It is important to understand that this is not a narrative handed to Putin by advisers or manufactured by a propaganda department. He wrote the essay himself, in the first person, and has spoken obsessively about Ukrainian history in interviews and speeches for years. He has been making versions of this argument since at least 2008, when he reportedly told George W. Bush at a NATO summit that Ukraine was “not even a country” (Plokhy, 2017). This is his own conviction, obsession, and historical fiction. He has built a closed loop of shared delusion, and he is feeding his own citizens into the meat grinder to make it real. He believes his own lies, and that makes him infinitely more dangerous than a cynic because a cynic can be bought, while a fanatic must be defeated.

The implications of this historical fiction extend far beyond the borders of Ukraine. Putin’s historical revisionism is not geographically limited. He sees himself as a “gatherer of historic Russian lands” (Düben, 2023). If the myth of the “one people” and the grievance of “arbitrary borders” can be used to justify the destruction of Ukraine, they can be used against others. He has already explicitly denied the historical statehood of Kazakhstan, stating in August 2014 that Kazakhs had never had a state before the collapse of the Soviet Union (Düben, 2023). In his address to the Russian nation on February 21, 2022 — three days before the full-scale invasion — he declared that “the collapse of the historical Russia known as the USSR” was on the conscience of those who had dismantled it (Putin, 2022). The Soviet Union, in Putin’s mind, was not a communist state. It was Russia. The Baltic states, Moldova, Georgia — any nation that once fell under the shadow of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union is vulnerable to this weaponised history. His vision poses an existential threat to the entire post-Soviet space and the international rules-based order (Dickinson, 2021).

The war on reality is a military strategy. Putin’s essay demonstrates that before you can annex territory, you must first annex history and before you can kill a people, you must first declare that they do not exist. The rewriting of the past is the prerequisite for the destruction of the present.

The West must understand that there is no negotiating with a man who operates within this framework. You cannot find a diplomatic compromise with a historical fiction, or split the difference between existence and non-existence. When a leader believes that a neighbouring country is a Western invention occupying stolen land, any “peace deal” that leaves him in power and in possession of conquered territory is capitulation. It is the ratification of his lie; the acceptance of the principle that history can be rewritten with artillery, and that reality is whatever the man with the most tanks says it is.

We cannot compromise with a lie of this magnitude. We can only defeat it. The defence of Ukraine is not just the defence of a territory, but the defence of truth itself. It is the assertion that history matters, that facts exist, and that the identity of a people cannot be erased by the decree of a dictator.

In July 2021, Vladimir Putin published a blueprint for annihilation, and the world looked away. We treated a declaration of war as a historical curiosity. We must never make that mistake again. The essay remains online, a digital monument to the arrogance of empire, but the nation it sought to erase is still fighting. The blueprint failed because Ukrainians refused to die for someone else’s lie.

History teaches us, with terrible consistency, that when leaders are permitted to deny what is real, atrocity follows. It followed in Ukraine. It is following elsewhere right now. Reality is not open to debate. It is built on observable facts and shared histories. The world that permits the lie is the world that inherits the atrocity. We are that world. We can choose to be a different one.

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References

Dickinson, P. (2021) ‘Putin’s new Ukraine essay reveals imperial ambitions’, Atlantic Council, 15 July. Available at: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/putins-new-ukraine-essay-reflects-imperial-ambitions/ [Accessed: 28 March 2026].

Dickinson, P. (2025) ‘Reclaiming Russia’s ‘historical lands’: How far do Putin’s imperial ambitions extend?’, Atlantic Council, 23 December. Available at: https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/reclaiming-russias-historical-lands-how-far-do-putins-imperial-ambitions-extend/ (Accessed: 28 March 2026).

Düben, B.A. (2020) ‘“There is no Ukraine”: Fact-Checking the Kremlin’s Version of Ukrainian History’, LSE International History Blog, 1 July. Available at: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lseih/2020/07/01/there-is-no-ukraine-fact-checking-the-kremlins-version-of-ukrainian-history/ [Accessed: 28 March 2026].

Düben, B.A. (2023) ‘Revising History and ‘Gathering the Russian Lands’: Vladimir Putin and Ukrainian Nationhood’, LSE Public Policy Review, 3(1), p. 4. Available at: https://ppr.lse.ac.uk/articles/10.31389/lseppr.86 [Accessed: 28 March 2026].

Plague Island (2026) ‘The War on Reality: Four Years of Ukraine’, Notes From Plague Island, 26 February. Available at: https://www.plagueisland.com/p/the-war-on-reality-four-years-of [Accessed: 28 March 2026].

Plokhy, S. (2017) Lost Kingdom: The Quest for Empire and the Making of the Russian Nation. New York: Basic Books. (Interviewed by Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021).

Putin, V. (2021) ‘Article by Vladimir Putin “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”’, President of Russia, 12 July. Available at: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181 [Accessed: 28 March 2026].

Putin, V. (2022) ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation’, President of Russia, 21 February. Available at: http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/67828 [Accessed: 29 March 2026].

The Moscow Times (2021) ‘Russian Military to Make Putin’s Ukraine Opus Compulsory – RBC’, The Moscow Times, 16 July. Available at: https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2021/07/16/russian-military-to-make-putins-ukraine-opus-compulsory-rbc-a74538 [Accessed: 28 March 2026].

Zygar, M. (2024) ‘Putin’s Myths About Ukraine, Debunked’, TIME, 10 February. Available at: https://time.com/6693504/vladimir-putin-history-myths-russia-ukraine-debunked/ [Accessed: 28 March 2026].

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