Urgent: Trump-Putin Despot Alliance means good people worldwide must work together.
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In these desperate times, it is so easy to forget that we Americans are not the only people suffering under the yoke of growing authoritarianism and repression. So are Turks. And Russians. And Indians. And Palestinians. And Chinese. And Uyghurs. And Hungarians. On and on.
And their situation is worse, in some cases much worse, than ours — though we can imagine ourselves moving headlong in their direction.
I addressed the fact last week that this synchronicity is not a coincidence. Donald Trump and his foreign brethren learn from, adapt from, and support each other, when they aren’t literally providing mutual aid. Which they often are.
Consider how rightists worldwide have rallied around Marine Le Pen, criticizing a French court for deciding that her corrupt acts disqualify her as a presidential candidate. Trump immediately chimed in to say this reminded him of his own “persecution.”
Trump and Russia are racing to improve ties and undo any economic or other consequences for Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.
This raises the question of why the rest of the world is not coming together over this shared problem of autocrats helping each other divide the planet into spheres of influence.
Bottom line: While we cannot afford to stop thinking about the bad things happening in our own country, we must also look beyond it, and focus on the global nature of the threat.
Simply put, good people everywhere are our friends and natural allies. And, conversely, many enemies are not necessarily abroad, but right here at home.
It seemed, for a time, that we might be moving beyond the too-easy categories of good and evil — an either/or mindset that characterized the worldview of World War II or the Cold War days.
We hesitated to even use the “e” word. But we are learning anew about the cyclical nature of history — the law of eternal return — and realizing the usefulness, indeed the necessity, of seeing through that lens when confronting the truly malign forces of our own day.
With this in mind, it’s time to recognize and engage with our natural allies, the good guys. And at the same time, we can and must intensively study and better understand the bad guys, and what, exactly, they’re doing to succeed.
If Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Vladimir Putin, and their fellow travelers can bolster each other by harnessing media savvy, mutual endorsements, shared expertise, and material resources — including social media outreach — then shouldn’t we be doing something similar?
The bad guys mastered Cambridge Analytica-style insights into the needs and desires of the public in order to pump targeted appeals to them. In recent years, we’ve seen Russian state enterprises working this space, trying to impact the US elections and help Trump.
How can people of goodwill and talent come together to similarly utilize and share tools, techniques, and resources — with appropriate guardrails to protect individual rights and privacy? This, it seems to me, is one of our most urgent challenges.
An anti-fascist alliance needs to be marshalled against authoritarian-headed societies, while also embracing people in those societies who are resisting their autocratic leaders and fostering cooperation with our good friends in Canada, the EU, and other places where things are more politically enlightened (though at this point, it seems, no one is safe).
And, to be sure, reaching out to those seeking peace in violence-racked areas. Such as, Israelis opposed to Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right enablers, and the brave Gazans risking retribution as they protest Hamas’s rigid control of their devastated enclave. And to Russians, mostly now in exile, fighting Putin.
Deliberate Distractions?
Trump is often presented as a continuous controversy machine, and perhaps as a chaos agent. Is it instead, or also, possible that Trump and his team deliberately set up distractions?
We know that, throughout his life, Trump has used such tactics, and effectively; yet somehow, that critical piece of historical context is not offered as a kind of “viewer warning” each time some new outrage sucks the oxygen out of the air.
Not only are Trump and his fellow spinners and manipulators well aware of and inclined toward such tactics. They also have the means.
Knowing long in advance that certain pivotal events are on the calendar, they are able to time distractions and misdirections to deflect attention. Case in point: They knew that the all-important Wisconsin Supreme Court race — with potential consequences in a swing state that could in turn move a nation — might not turn out as they hoped.
Did they accordingly time certain announcements to overshadow an embarrassment like their candidate’s loss following Elon Musk’s hefty spend to influence the election?
Ana Navarro, a Never Trumper former GOP consultant and now CNN political analyst, firmly believes that this is all deliberate. She said she didn’t think it was a coincidence that Trump scheduled his “Liberation Day” tariff announcement the day after the Wisconsin Supreme Court race.
Navarro also expressed reasonable suspicion that, at the height of the Signalgate scandal, Trump tossed the “third term” bomb — which indisputably diverted the public and media spotlight from another MAGA embarrassment.
Do the Trumpists have a bag full of ever-ready tricks for such emergencies? An anonymous Victorian con artist once said, “The most important tools of the magician are diversion and timing.”
If nothing else, Trump’s “coincidental” timing is most fortunate for him.
Distraction harms us. Our collective thrall over the never-ending manufactured drama means we miss essential happenings.
Here’s the kind of thing that once would have been front and center, and is now dangerously under-reported, under-discussed, and under-responded to: The other day, China staged a mock invasion of Taiwan. Did you even hear about it?
I thought about this because I am reading Aldous Huxley’s slim but challenging 1954 book The Doors of Perception. He writes about what has been called the “reducing valve,” where we consciously and unconsciously — and necessarily — limit what gets our attention:
Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him, and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection, which is likely to be practically useful.
Huxley also fashions a turn of phrase I find most apt today: “A perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.”
Going After Musk. A Wakeup Call for Bobby K Fans
Elon Musk is not vanquished, not by a long shot, but more and more people are turning against his self-serving machinations. Well beyond the boycotts of Tesla, we now see larger anti-Musk efforts emerging.
Take for example an advertising campaign by the group 314 Action Fund, a national organization founded in 2017 that describes itself as “the only national organization working to elect Democrats with backgrounds in science and medicine at ALL levels of government — from the Senate down to local school boards.”
The other day, it announced, “We’re going after Elon Musk and launching ads in half a DOZEN states calling for his removal from the White House while exposing his dangerous cuts to medical research and healthcare for Veterans.”
Their ads are running in battleground states that together have 21 Veterans Administration (VA) medical centers.
Concerning Trump’s cult-like hold on his hardcore followers, we need to get beyond hoping that the clueless eventually “get it”; we must actively try to shake them out of their denial by reminding them of how self-destructive their foolishness is. The majority of MAGA supporters may be beyond persuasion but a small yet potentially significant group may eventually recoil from the consequences of their choice — and be open to another point of view.
Another cohort of the potentially reachable are those “natural health” cultists who were so enthralled by the telegenic Bobby Kennedy Jr. As soon as they try to access the health services they need, they will see the downside of RFK’s massive and ill-considered cuts to HHS.
And they are going to need those health services more than ever because — thanks to Kennedy’s anti-vaccine policy decisions — measles and other communicable diseases will likely come to their neighborhoods. And not just diseases, but Kennedy’s recommended quack treatments for them, like excessive doses of vitamin A for measles. Already, people are being hospitalized for vitamin A toxicity, which can result in harm to the liver. Will future victims even be able to access treatment?
In short, as people get sicker and sicker, they will be losing more and more health services. And if they lose Medicaid or Medicare, they will be unable to pay for whatever services they do access.
As for promising breakthroughs in cancer research — such as individually targeted immunotherapies — they can forget about those, again thanks to Kennedy’s ill-informed budget cuts.
Trusting in quacks, quack cures, and wellness vibes doesn’t cut it when a life is on the line. That is, usually. The parents of an unvaccinated child who died of measles apparently learned nothing: They believe their child’s death was “an act of God,” that getting measles is good for you, that it builds immunity to cancer. And they still revere Kennedy, the man who sold them on this deadly nonsense.
Media’s Significant Omissions
I’ve seen articles about how the acting Pentagon inspector general has launched a probe of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s Signal messages. Given Trump’s resistance to criticism of himself and his appointees, and his antipathy to truly independent investigations, excuse my skepticism. The media needs to remind its audience, right up front, that the job of a Trump “inspector general” is basically never to inspect Trump or his toadies.
Speaking of talking straight to the public, legacy media — even when it tries — cannot begin to capture the enormity of the chaotic madness that is the Trump presidency. Just one example that should have been highlighted but was not: the White House claim that Trump’s tariffs have been met with an ecstatically positive response.
Read the fine print in the announcements: Among those expressing approval, the White House notes, as if proving some point, are the notably independent (er, NOT!) House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), and… wait for it, the noted economist Geraldo Rivera. So it’s settled!
And speaking of ironies, the US government says its personnel in China cannot have sexual or romantic relations with Chinese for security reasons. How about also banning relations with members of Trump’s national security team, given how reckless they are with secrets?
From general incompetence and recklessness, we move to distortions and fabrications. Trump recently touted 72 ICE arrests. It turns out that half of them were already in prison. Remember his game is to sell lies, and right-wing “media” are his helpers. Ditto when watching Trump’s speech on “Liberation Day.” I gotta say, the guy is persuasive. Until you actually try to check his facts. Then all that razzle-dazzle goes poof.
Many authoritarian-inclined regimes have these qualities in common: It’s about perception management, controlling core messaging, and keeping opponents from breaking through with fact-based critiques and corrections.
Decent people everywhere need to be working together, studying how this is all done, exchanging information, comparing notes, fashioning and sharing robust solutions — including tactics that translate well across linguistic and cultural divides — and generally bucking each other up for the long game we must play.
Simply put, it’s time for good people of all stripes to be forming alliances, domestically and internationally. Many of us have friends and family in other countries. Each of us can begin, now, by starting the outreach.
