“MAGA loves [intervening in Venezuela]. MAGA loves what I’m doing. MAGA loves everything I do. MAGA is me. MAGA loves everything I do, and I love everything I do, too.”
—Trump on NBC News
Today’s post is about the hegemonic worldview and its motivations, plus a bonus feature about the sicko-phant who feeds Trump good news.
But first, a campaign ad for one of my favorite anti-Trump political candidates, Chicago’s Kat Abughazaleh (sort of rhymes with rugelach). She’s running for Congress in the 9th district, hoping to succeed liberal Jan Schakowsky, who’s retiring after 27 years of fairly meritorious service. Click to see the ad on Blue Sky, where she has 305K followers.
Our first ad of 2026! Because politics stuck in 2006 won’t meet the moment.
It’s time to stand up to ICE, white supremacists, and the billionaire oligarchy.
The year 1984 came and went without a global war or suppression of dissent as George Orwell predicted. But now we have a leader who calls himself a peacemaker and starts wars, and directs the government to de-legitimatize dissent. He also seems intent, it has become apparent, on carving up the planet into three spheres of influence similar to Orwell’s Eurasia, Eastasia, and Oceania.
At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
—George Orwell, 1984, part 1, ch 3
Trump (let me call him Pomp, if you will) has asserted his belief in Orwell’s geopolitical entities and their imperialistic aspirations. If I had to guess, his tripartate worldview had its genesis when he desperately courted Russian banks to escape the financial pickle he had put himself in by continually overreaching. Putin took notice and assembled a dossier on Pomp, and may have filmed his escapades in Moscow to have something on him. Then he tried to manipulate the 2020 election in Pomp’s favor to show good faith. Next, when they met privately in Helsinki, my hunch is Putin gave Pomp an offer he couldn’t refuse; unless he wanted bad publicity, Pomp should shut up about Putin’s Eurasian aspirations and stick to his own hemisphere. He might even have offered to cede Venezuela and Cuba if the US let him take Ukraine and whatever East European nations he fancies. Similarly, let Xi have Taiwan, hold sway across East and Central Asia, and continue to colonize Africa. Oh, and franchise Israel to run that pesky Middle East and we’ll all get along nice and fine.
This is the path that Pomp believes will lead to world peace. He has criticized foreign wars but failed to stop any. Now he thinks that divvying up the world can be done for fun and profit, without collateral damage, as if getting access to crappy Venezuelan oil will end competition for its resources and netting Greenland would make him a bigger fish. Flush with success in decapitating Venezuela’s body politic, he is now primed to absorb the rest of North America to bring peace in our time, not that its fellow nations are at odds with one another.
Major media outlets are falling all over themselves to congratulate him for the lightning rendition of Nicolás Maduro Moros and his wife from their quarters to a Brooklyn jail. They are being tried in Federal Court for drug trafficking and possession of automatic weapons. No apparent concern for crimes against humanity.
Of course, the narco charges are basically bogus as many have noted, with Pomp admitting as much. Here’s one of his tweets shared by JD Vance; almost a hundred thousand X accounts (most of them droids, hopefully) endorsed the plan:
So Maduro’s crime was hogging his country’s resources, not drug-running. He may well have profited from transshipping cocaine from Colombia and may have exiled if not infiltrated members of prison gang Tren de Aragua into the US, but that was the extent of his meddling with us while we embargoed his economy.
Venezuela, which is larger than California, ranks 82nd in Gross Domestic Product ($82,767B, per IMF). Taiwan, almost as large and prosperous as Switzerland, ranks 21st with a GDP ten times larger than that. Xi must be saying, “keep that shitty crude oil. Thanks to developing alternative energy resources we won’t be needing it,” while coveting Taiwan’s robust semiconductor industry. Such is the art of the deal. And as I wrote last week, most of Pomp’s business deals have gone sour, including six casinos.
Speaking of casinos, both Don and Don Jr have positioned themselves in the nominally regulated prediction markets, notably Kalshi and Polymarket. Predictions markets, in which people bet on the likelihood and outcomes of events (often using cryptocurrency), are like sports betting and similarly, well-connected players profit from inside information. In 2024, Biden’s DOJ sued banned Polymarket, the dominant online prediction market, for allegedly letting U.S. users access the site. Now, with Don & son on board, Pomp’s DOJ dropped the case last July and Polymarket is back. Bitget wrote:
On October 28, Trump Media & Technology Group announced the launch of a prediction market product called “Truth Predict” on its social platform Truth Social. The company CEO stated in a press release that this platform aims to get more people involved in information judgment or prediction, allowing people not just to voice opinions, but to validate their judgments by placing bets.
This marks the Trump family’s third major move in the prediction market sector.
As early as January 2025, Donald Trump Jr. joined the regulated prediction platform Kalshi as a strategic advisor.
In August of the same year, his venture capital firm 1789 Capital led a new round of financing for Kalshi’s main competitor—crypto prediction market Polymarket. The latter is a platform that once received investment from ICE, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, and was valued at up to 9 billions USD. After the deal, Donald Trump Jr. also joined its advisory board.
A single family holding key positions in three core companies within the same track is highly unconventional in traditional venture capital logic.
But Pomp’s get-rich-quick schemes are anything but conventional investments. Whisper upcoming policy decisions to your stooges in prediction markets and you can make a killing. The anonymous bettor who wagered $30K on Polymarket on “Maduro out by January 31st” would have taken in $437K. But Polymarket shorted the winner by weirdly cancelling the whole bet, asserting that the US had not “invaded” Venezuela, even though the the conditions listed in the bet did not use that word. But if they thought the the conditions hadn’t been met, why didn’t they simply pay off the losers? Funny thing, Don Jr is on the Polymarket Board.
In Pomp’s conception of a new world order, America abandons its European and Pacific allies to China and Russia respectively and busies itself taking over the Americas. Enough bucks there to go ’round his circle a zillion times. That’s all he wants beyond fawning approval.
Bonus Feature
The frequently profane Pomp critic Jeff Tiedrich begrudgingly admired a team of NYT reporters who spent a couple of hours with Pomp last week for exposing his lie that the Minneapolis woman, Renee Good, whom an ICE agent shot dead was a domestic terrorist who tried to run the agent over. They made him view a slo-mo video of the incident and asked him what he’d seen. “Well,” he mumbled, “I — the way I look at it … ” You might want to know who is holding that laptop.
That young lady is Natalie Harp, and she’s been traipsing around with Pomp for some time, whispering affirmations in his ear and feeding him conspiracy theories. She shows him approving social media posts and loony alternative realities. He thinks of the One America News anchor and beauty queen “like a daughter,” and you know what that means. Tiedrich asks,
is Natalie Harp the reason Donny imagines he saw Renee Good running over one of his beloved masked ICE thugs?
Good question.
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