The Resistance YouTube channel is competing with the Marsh Family in England in producing some of the best protest songs of the last couple of years. Like this one: (1)
The bizarre show the Trump White House has staged since the beginning of the Trump 2.0 Administration is distracting and scary. To the Trump cult followers, it’s interesting because he’s “owning the libs.” They enjoy the sadistic shows that masked ICE goons are putting on attacking and kidnapping Latinos. His narcissistic self-indulgence and bizarre, norm-breaking behavior is entertaining to people who admire his willingness to ignore dignity and decency because they wish they cut loose all the time like that. The lawless thugs who are signing up to be ICE agents actually do get to directly indulge some of their criminal sadism themselves.
Various actual experts on authoritarianism have been explaining that this type of dishonesty – telling obvious lies and making grossly absurd claims which your cult followers are expected to pretend they believe – is a common feature of dictatorial and wannabe-dictatorial regimes.
The ugly show provokes different and even conflicting reactions among those not devoted to the cult. Some look at the incompetence and absurdity and hope earnestly that most people will see that rejecting it as unacceptable. Something like that assumption is behind the corporate Democrats’ approach to opposing Trump, because it seems so obvious that Trump will lose the next election – with the optimistic assumptions that the President who told the assembled generals of the armed forces he intended to use them militarily against “the enemy within” will not really be able to nullify elections.
Something like that assumption was behind Joe Biden’s assurances that “the fever will break” and that Republicans in Congress would be ready to go back to Biden’s imagined Golden Age when Republicans and Democrats cheerfully cooperated to do constructive things. It didn’t happen.
The Democratic establishment embodied by Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries is making a similar assumption for the 2026 elections: Democrats should keep their heads low and wait confidently for Trump’s failures and past voting patterns will deliver big wins for the Democrats in 2026. This assumption is also compatible with their desire not to irritate billionaire donors to the party, of course.
But politics and government matter, even though a certain cynicism about politics and politicians is understandable enough. Especially in the era of neoliberal economics which we are unfortunately still living through.
There’s a new film which just went up on Netflix called A House of Dynamite, which is about nuclear war, or at least the possible beginning of it.
The film is a real cliffhanger and very well done. I found myself thinking all the way through it, that this is a real reminder that we need competent and committed professional running government. Most dramatically in national security but in every other aspect as well, including emergency management and health. The idea that such a thing is possible if we let TechBro billionaires high or ketamine or on their own dictatorial fantasies run things is as delusional as the idea that Donald Trump stops one war per week, or whatever that crackpot claim has become today.
Longtime arms control advocate Joe Cirincione recently discussed the film, picking up on its treatment of interceptor missiles to counter nuclear missiles. Trump’s occasional reference to an Iron Dome to protect the US against nuclear attack is a reference to the concept of a “Star Wars” anti-missile system, a project that dates back to the Reagan Administration which has been run as one of the biggest boondoggle projects in history:
At best, in highly scripted tests, the interceptors have only hit their targets in half the tests (11 out of 20 attempts). When worried Secretary of Defense Reid Baker (played masterfully by Jared Harris of Chernobyl and Foundation fame) is told of those odds (slight exaggerated in the film to a 61 percent chance of success), he exclaims, “So, it’s a fucking coin toss?! That’s what 50 billion dollars buys us?”
We have actually sunk $63 billion into the Ft. Greeley system, [known] as the Ground-based Missile Defense system (GMD). It is part of the $453 billion that the Congress has spent on failed national missile defense systems since Ronald Reagan launched his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) in 1983. The best contractors, the best scientists, a fire house of money and…nothing has worked. [my emphasis] (2)
The basic problem with the concept of the nuclear anti-missile shield in the case of nuclear exchanges between the US and Russia or the US and China is that in order to prevent damage several orders of magnitude worse then conventional bombing campaigns could ever achieve is that the effectiveness of the missile shields would need to be very close to 100% effective. And measures that could be used to reduce the ability to knock missiles out of the air are far cheaper than the ABM missiles themselves would be.
It’s important not to get distracted by the bizarreness of the Trump clown show. It’s also important for people not to panic at every thread issued by Trump or Stephen Miller or Gestapo Barbie Kristi Noem. But it’s also important to take seriously that the most powerful country in the world is now:
... led by a man who can’t distinguish his imagination from the Treasury ledger, and a press corps too numbed or career-minded to pull him back to Earth. The cognitive decline, the narcissism, the financial grift: all of it merges into one sustained act of national gaslighting. And the longer journalists treat it as normal, the more that alternate universe consumes the real one. (3)
Democracy and the rule of law are dead yet in the United States. But they are more endangered than they’ve been at any time since the Civil War.
It has become common to the refer the US and its Constitutional government as the American Experiment, a phrase that implies something hopeful, forward-looking, and open-ended but whose success has to continually be established in the face of developing challenges. But like any phrase that becomes a popular patriotic trope, it can also function as an excuse. We could also describe making an arsonist the head of the city fire department as an “experiment.”
But calling it a Hail Mary Gamble would be more descriptive.
So we really do need to pay attention to what government officials with big responsibilities are actually doing.
Notes:
(1) It’s Not Your House – A Country Gospel Roast of Donald Trump. The Resistance YouTube channel 10/25/2025. <https://youtu.be/pzeoN98S4Wo?si=wb8VV8fkX4lCXWOu> (Accessed: 2025-26-10).
(2) A House of Dynamite: Go see Kathryn Bigelow's new political thriller. Strategy & History 10/18/2025. <https://joecirincione.substack.com/p/a-house-of-dynamite> (Accessed: 2025-26-10).
(3) Geddry, Mary (2025): The Trump Whisperer. Geddry Substack 10/23/2025. <https://marygeddry.com/p/the-trump-whisperer> (Accessed: 2025-26-10).
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