F**king Mondays: Mad Little Napoleon, JD Vance the Bully, and Zelensky Leads the Resistance
Another insane week of the never ending Trump saga.
Welcome to the latest edition of F**king Mondays, the ultimate column to start your week! In the round up today:
JD Vance goes to Europe
A seismic change is happening in international relations as the new Trump administration withdraws from international agreements, torches alliances, and threatens friendly nations with annexation.
The US has already withdrawn from the World Health Organization, abandoned the Paris Climate Accord, threatened to annex Canada and Greenland, and taken a pro-Putin view towards the war in Ukraine.
Trump also sent a belligerent JD Vance to Munich last week to mock and bully European allies in a bizarre display of geopolitical posturing. Here is how the Guardian characterized Vance’s speech in Germany:
The US vice-president, JD Vance, has launched a brutal ideological assault on Europe, accusing its leaders of suppressing free speech, failing to halt illegal migration and running in fear from voters’ true beliefs.
In a chastising speech on Friday that openly questioned whether current European values warranted defence by the US, he painted a picture of European politics infected by media censorship, cancelled elections and political correctness.
Arguing that the true threat to Europe stemmed not from external actors such as Russia or China, but Europe’s own internal retreat from some of its “most fundamental values”, he repeatedly questioned whether the US and Europe any longer had a shared agenda. “What I worry about is the threat from within,” Vance said.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, the vice-president had been expected to address the critical question of the Ukraine war and security differences between Washington and Europe. Instead, he widely skated over these to give a lecture on what he claimed was the continent’s failure to listen to the populist concerns of voters.
Vance said of Donald Trump’s re-election: “There is a new sheriff in town.” He said: “Democracy will not survive if their people’s concerns are deemed invalid or even worse not worth being considered.”
Vance’s spiteful performance has sent Europe into a tailspin of worry and despair as they grapple with an entirely new political reality. Europeans have not been invited to talks with Russia over the future of Ukraine, and they now understand that Trump’s commitment to NATO could evaporate quickly. Without US support, NATO’s power to combat Russian aggression would be severely diminished and Europeans worry Putin would continue his expansionist ambitions unchecked.
The destruction of America’s carefully built, enormously productive alliance with Europe is yet another example of Trump’s extraordinary shortsightedness. While Trump might be able to extract more favorable trade deals from Europe in the short term, it will cause lasting resentment and create long term distrust. If the US is not regarded as a reliable ally, Europe will form alliances with other super powers that could in time threaten US hegemony and diminish its global influence.
Trump of course does not care about long term relationships and has no interest in maintaining the international order that has kept the peace in Europe for 80 years. Instead Trump wants to carve the world up into spheres of influence run by strong men. What could go wrong?
Zelensky is not backing down
Volodymyr Zelensky is not only a highly resilient leader, he is an extremely savvy one too. As Trump threatens to abandon Europe and “negotiate” with Russia by handing them everything they want before official talks have begun, Zelensky is formulating a new strategy for his country’s survival. Reported the BBC:
Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky has called for the creation of an "army of Europe" amid rising concern the US may no longer come to the continent's aid.
Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, he said US Vice-President JD Vance had made it clear the old relationship between Europe and America was "ending" and the continent "needs to adjust to that".
He also said Ukraine would "never accept deals made behind our backs without our involvement" after Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin agreed to start peace talks.
Europe it seems is taking Zelensky’s advice. Emmanuel Macron immediately called an emergency meeting for European leaders after the debacle in Munich, and there are signs that they will take security matters into their own hands. Polish prime minister Donald Tusk tweeted this on Saturday:
While there is a surge of far right populism in Europe, memories of World War II and the Cold War still linger. Support for Ukraine is high and countries bordering Russia are under no illusion about Putin’s ambitions. New militaries are of course expensive to fund, but Europeans are well aware that the alternative would be far more costly.
Trump’s road to autocracy
If you had any doubts about Donald Trump’s authoritarian ambitions, consider this tweet he sent out over the weekend:
The Napoleon Bonaparte-inspired statement was also pinned top of his Truth Social feed and is likely a reference to his standoff with the courts over his executive orders.
Historians like Hannah Arendt, Timothy Snyder, and Umberto Eco have written extensively about the stages countries go through before emerging as a fascist autocracy. In general they go something like this:
Exploitation of a crisis: Fascists use economic, social, or political crises, to generate fear and instability to gain a cult like following.
The undermining of democratic norms: Fascists discrediting democratic institutions, delegitimize the press, judiciary, and legislature. Their leader is presented as the only solution to the crisis.
Cult of personality: The leader is portrayed a messianic figure and the embodiment of the nation. The leader demands personal loyalty above all institutions and the law.
The demonization of opponents and minorities: Fascists blame society’s problems on immigrants, ethnic minorities, opposition parties etc to create an official enemy to unite their supporters.
Glorification of nationalism and militarism: Fascists promote extreme patriotism, national superiority. There are constant threats of militaristic expansion or actions against other nations.
Media control: Fascists discredit independent media institutions, spread propaganda, and invest heavily in state-controlled narratives on their own or aligned media channels.
Moving towards authoritarian control: Fascists move quickly to expand executive power, hire loyalists, and destroy checks and balances.
Suppressing opposition and using political violence: Fascists use police, military, or paramilitary forces to crack down on protests, opposition groups, and marginalized communities.
Rigging or eliminating elections – Fascist manipulate voting systems, restrict access to polls, or often just end democratic elections to maintain power indefinitely.
Trump has very publicly engaged in most of these steps already, so denying his dictatorial ambitions is, to paraphrase George Orwell, refusing to see what is in front of one’s nose. Most worryingly his cult isn’t just ignoring Trump’s move towards authoritarianism, they are actively encouraging it:
Fascism and autocracy doesn’t happen overnight. It’s a process that plays out over time, at first slowly, then rapidly. Much of the public won’t see or understand the process, and by the time they do, it will be too late to stop.
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What if their (Trump, Musk and his oligarchic sycophants) actual goal , rather than "Making America Great Again", is to literally crash US and global markets? Then, like vulture capitalists swooping in and buying up troubled corporations to sell them off for scrap, or resurrect them to higher values, they can capture those entities on the cheap. The gyre of billionaires around this administration likely have trillions of disposable cash at hand.
But like the old cartoon depicting two vultures on a wire waiting for some critter to die, one says, "screw it, I'm going to kill something...."
What a perfect opportunity for these gazillionaires to incite a major market crash, executing the greatest pump-and-dump scheme ever, scooping up what's left after the calamity for pennies on the dollar.
European here. We aren’t in « worry and despair » at JD Vance, we’re angry. Not least because the little shit openly supports a German neo-Nazi in the forthcoming elections. But we knew this could happen from about last summer, and certainly after November. The Paris summit didn’t happen at the last minute. It’ll take time to put our defence ducks in a row (we trusted Biden and the Democrats: our bad), but if you look at the figures, many of us, UK included, have upped our defence spending since 2014, some massively, and those that haven’t (Spain, Italy, Belgium especially) are being put on the spot. Germany is openly talking about pivoting to increased industrial capacity underwritten by more flexible debt rules (and if you know the Germans on debt, you’ll understand how revolutionary that is). Sweden is going all out, industrially and in terms of defence, abandoning long-standing neutrality. Poland spends more than 4% of its GDP (and climbing) on defence and is building heavy capacity along its Eastern border. France, the only European country with independent nuclear deterrent, is advocating for more of it in Europe. French and UK armies have been training together for years. We have a good foundation if we can resist the Putin-Musk-Trump anti-law, anti-democracy propaganda.