America, This Is Not Normal, But It Is Exactly What He Promised

Trump’s fantasy economy, racist bile, war-crime denials, and shadow diplomacy expose the true architecture of his regime.

Good morning! Donald Trump began the week insisting that “great economic numbers” had just come out, numbers so great, in fact, that they exist only in the rarefied air between his ears. There were no reports, no releases, no indicators, no data of any kind. In Trump’s mind, perhaps the unemployment rate had personally thanked him for his service, or the stock market had called to say it missed him. Meanwhile, back here in the reality-based community, the only market numbers actually moving yesterday were the ones on the crypto exchanges, and they were moving down, fast. Bitcoin plunged thousands of dollars in hours, Ethereum slid into a trough, and a cascade of margin calls vaporized positions like incense on a space heater. If Trump saw those numbers, he either mistook them for “deep state sabotage” or simply decided they belonged to a different universe.

As far as those of us living on Earth can tell, the only truly “great numbers” this week are the number of times Trump repeated the word “great” during the opening thirty seconds of his airplane ramble, and even that failed to crack double digits. The markets are tanking, inflation fears are rising, and investors are sprinting for the exits, but the president continues to speak as though he alone can see the shimmering alternate economy where analytics sparkle, GDP glows, and everything is up and to the right, forever, because he says so.

What did break into the double digits, thousands of them, was Trump’s sudden insistence that 27,000 people died last month in Ukraine, a figure he presented with the confidence of a man whose relationship to facts has been legally separated since 2015. He followed this with a stirring humanitarian plea to “save souls,” which lasted all of seven seconds before collapsing into a tirade about Ukraine’s “little corruption problem,” Venezuela’s “millions” of criminal migrants, and Trump’s unwavering conviction that asylum seekers from Somalia are personally responsible for Minneapolis, the U.S. Constitution, and possibly gravity itself.

As if the universe wanted to underline the moral freefall of this administration, Trump celebrated Thanksgiving by posting one of the most grotesquely racist screeds he has ever produced, which is saying something for a man whose vocabulary consists almost entirely of dehumanization, self-pity, and the word “many.”

His message, a thousand-word fusion of nativist hysteria and white grievance theology, portrayed immigrants as parasites, Muslims as contaminants, Somalis as invading hordes, Minnesota as a failed state, and Ilhan Omar as a hijab-wrapped existential threat to civilization. He tossed a slur at Governor Tim Walz for good measure, because cruelty is now so deeply baked into Trump’s public communication that it barely counts as punctuation.

This wasn’t even demagoguery in the traditional sense. It is racist incitement, deployed with intent and crafted to land like a fist in the chest of every American who still believes that character matters.

And yes, he absolutely thinks this appeals to his base. Because it does. The real haunting question is why his base is so, well, base.

It’s tempting to say they’re simply ignorant, or bigoted, or terminally online, but the truth is far more revealing and far more dangerous. Trump’s followers respond to this language because it gives them something they crave: the permission to feel superior in a world that has increasingly asked them to share it with people they were taught to view as lesser. For decades, right-wing media has spoon-fed them a steady diet of fear and resentment, a narrative where immigrants steal, Muslims plot, cities rot, and “real Americans” are victims of a conspiracy that began sometime after Eisenhower but before Beyoncé.

Trump didn’t invent this worldview, but he has stripped it of euphemism. To his base, racism is not a moral failing, it is a form of agency, a way to reassert dominance in a society they believe has stopped deferring to them. Trump tells them their anger is patriotism and their cruelty is courage. He hands them an identity built on grievance and calls it love of country. He gives them people to hate so they don’t have to examine the emptiness of their own lives. And they reward him for it by calling his ugliest impulses “truth.”

The tragedy, the national one, is that this racism is no longer a fringe rant echoing in some corner of the internet. It is the voice of the President of the United States, amplified by an administration increasingly comfortable governing through fear, division, and the casual suggestion that millions of Americans do not belong here and never have. More than any policy failure, this tells us exactly how far we’ve fallen.

While the president was stuffing the White House press cabin with lies like a goose destined for foie gras, a much darker story was emerging from Kyiv. It turns out that Putin’s inner circle, not the B-team oligarchs, but the Praetorian Guard: Timchenko, Kovalchuk, Arkady and Boris Rotenberg, has been holding secret meetings with U.S. businessmen, most of them curiously connected to one Donald J. Trump. These covert conversations reportedly involved mining concessions, rare-earth extraction, Arctic LNG projects, Sea of Okhotsk gas fields, and even reviving Nord Stream, because nothing says “stability” like bringing back the pipeline Putin used as leverage over Europe while invading his neighbors.

The emissaries of Russian kleptocracy apparently believe they are negotiating the post-war order, not with diplomats, but with American billionaires and Trump campaign donors. Gentry Beach, Trump Jr.’s college pal and occasional bagman, is reportedly sniffing around Arctic LNG-2. Another Trump donor has asked permission to bid on Nord Stream 2. Exxon executives have already held secret talks with Igor Sechin, Putin’s pet oil tsar. At this point, the only entity not at the table is the Ukrainian government, which is inconveniently still fighting the actual war.

It would all sound too corrupt, too brazen, too on-the-nose, except this is exactly the architecture independent journalists have been shouting about for more than a year. Diagramming the shadow network beneath Trump’s foreign policy: a privatized diplomatic pipeline where oligarchs, donors, and private equity barons negotiate outcomes while the official government is left smiling blankly into the camera. Allison Gill called it an invisible alliance of offshore financiers, compromised intermediaries, intelligence-adjacent fixers, and Trump loyalists looking to monetize international crises. And here we are, watching that architecture take physical form, right down to the sanctioned billionaires auditioning American partners for their next Siberian mining venture.

Back in the hemisphere Trump occasionally remembers we live in, we have the metastasizing scandal of the “narco-boat” strikes, perhaps the most consequential story of his entire administration, and the one now peeling away the Pentagon’s remaining layers of institutional rot. The Washington Post first revealed that a SEAL Team 6 missile strike on a suspected drug boat in the Caribbean left two survivors clinging to the wreckage. Instead of capturing them, or God forbid, following maritime law, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley allegedly ordered a second strike to finish them off. It was an illegal kill, a war crime, and a moral abomination, and according to Pentagon sources, the order traced back to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and his directive that there be “no survivors.”

And just when it seemed the scandal couldn’t get any darker, new reporting now confirms that Bradley didn’t merely follow an unlawful order, he a justification to carry it out. Officials speaking to the Post say Bradley concocted the claim that the injured men floating in the water were “legitimate targets” because they might call other traffickers to rescue them. A rationale that absurd, that legally hollow, could only have been fabricated to satisfy Hegseth’s now-infamous verbal command to “kill everybody.” This wasn’t a split-second battlefield decision. This was premeditated murder dressed up in pseudo-legal camouflage. Bradley didn’t just obey; he built the scaffolding to make the war crime operational. And Hegseth, who spent 48 hours bragging about the lethality of these “kinetic strikes” before suddenly denying he gave the order at all, now hides behind Bradley like a man who knows exactly what he did and is praying someone else takes the fall. At this point, the chain of command isn’t compromised, it’s complicit.

Hegseth, Fox News’s favorite bar-stool general, initially responded with swagger: “We’ve only begun killing narco-terrorists.” But then, as congressional oversight loomed into view, his tone shifted abruptly from “Rambo on cocaine” to “middle manager discovering HR is on Line 2”. He now denies giving the order at all. It is, he insists, “fake news,” an attempt to discredit “our warriors”, a phrase that always means “the people I’m currently blaming for my decisions.”

Adam Kinzinger released a video that lays out the stakes with remarkable clarity. The “kill everybody” directive, if issued, is not a close call. It’s illegal. It’s immoral. It’s the exact kind of unlawful order that officers are trained to refuse. Kinzinger warns that this scandal could become the Watergate of the Trump era: the moment when unlawful command decisions, fear-based obedience, and political pressure converge into a lethal cocktail. But even Kinzinger hasn’t caught up to the latest phase: the cover-up. Hegseth is now throwing Admiral Bradley and the operators under the bus, insisting they acted alone, despite having just spent 48 hours bragging that killing everyone in sight is his patriotic duty.

Morale at the Pentagon must be hovering somewhere between nausea and despair. My own son once wore that uniform, and I know the weight he carried. The men who carried out that second strike will carry it for the rest of their lives, while the man who may have ordered it hides behind them like a child squeezing behind an older sibling when the lights go out. Hegseth’s cowardice is not a footnote to this scandal; it is the scandal.

And hovering over all of this, the racism, the war-crime denials, the oligarch side deals, is the thing Gill warned us about when she dug into the Epstein files. She documented the ocean of black ink the DOJ poured onto those documents, the thousands of overtime hours spent sanitizing a dead man’s paperwork, the bizarre surges of redaction activity that synced up with Trump’s political needs like some grotesque bureaucratic tide chart. Gill showed us that this administration doesn’t just lie, it curates reality, scrubbing, shielding, and suffocating anything that might expose the network of billionaires, fixers, intelligence cut-outs, and assorted predators orbiting Trump’s gravitational pull. We didn’t just witness obstruction; we watched the federal government perform cleanup duty for a criminal ecosystem. And now, seeing Russian oligarchs quietly auditioning Trump donors for mining concessions, watching Pete Hegseth deny an unlawful order while hiding behind the troops he hung out to dry, the pattern is unmistakable: in Trump’s America, truth is redacted, power is privatized, and corruption is the whole point.

And woven through all of this is the unshakable pattern Gill has been documenting: the steady replacement of institutions with loyalty networks, the collapse of legal constraints under the pressure of Trump’s personal needs, and the rise of a shadow state where foreign adversaries negotiate directly with Trump’s donors, where national defense is performed by traumatized operators taking orders from frightened political appointees, where congressional oversight is met with denials that collapse in real time, and where the president himself speaks in a slurry of invented numbers, imaginary economics, and hostile stereotypes.

This is the government Trump runs now: a government that sells sanctions relief to billionaires, demands loyalty oaths from military commanders, orders illegal strikes and then denies them, and tries to negotiate the end of a European war through offshore mining deals led by his son’s fraternity brother.

As we wrap up a holiday week that somehow managed to combine racist tirades, war-crime cover-ups, oligarch backchannels, and imaginary “great economic numbers,” it’s worth noting one more tectonic shift beneath the surface: Trump’s grip on the manosphere, the online testosterone terrarium that helped boost him into office, is starting to crack.

For years, this ecosystem of podcasters, influencers, and professional grievance merchants functioned as Trump’s emotional amplifier. Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Aiden Ross, the whole constellation of headphone-clad gurus selling vulnerability as virility, they humanized Trump for millions of young men who felt seen, soothed, or simply entertained by the spectacle. They gave him their platforms, their mystique, and in some cases, their vote for the first time in their lives.

But now, reality has arrived like a no-knock raid. The shiny promise, “day one, mass deportations!”, has morphed into viral footage of ICE agents dragging people out of hardware stores and workplaces. The swaggering strongman fantasy has become military troops on American streets. And those same online disciples who once treated Trump like an honorary member of their fraternity of wounded masculinity are suddenly looking around and realizing: this isn’t funny anymore.

Theo Von is furious that immigration officials used his footage in a propaganda video. Aiden Ross, who once gifted Trump a Tesla like a golden idol, is backing away. Even their own fans are beginning to understand what happens when a parasocial relationship becomes an actual political one: the consequences get real, and someone gets hurt.

To be clear: Trump still has his loyal industrial-scale propagandists, Bannon, Tucker, Benny Johnson, the men who don’t merely defend him but metabolize him into content. But when the “relatable” voices start peeling off, the ones young men actually trust, it signals something deeper than annoyance. Not code red, but no longer a mosquito bite either. More like a rash, creeping under the shirt, spreading.

Politics in 2025 doesn’t run on policy or principle. It runs on algorithms, vibes, and parasitic celebrity worship. And the moment those influencers shift, even slightly, the current changes with them. Democrats and Republicans can feel it. Trump can definitely feel it, which is why he keeps yelling louder.

The irony is that he built his movement on emotion, and emotion is fickle. Today’s devotion can be tomorrow’s 45-minute podcast about “accountability.” The manosphere that carried him upward can just as easily watch him fall, not because they suddenly grew a conscience, but because they don’t like being associated with a government that raids Home Depot like it’s Fallujah.

And so the week ends with this: a president losing the loyalty of the men who made him look human, a military scandal cracking open like a rotten hull, oligarchs circling sanctions like vultures over carrion, and an increasingly isolated strongman shouting racist nonsense into the void and calling it leadership.

We are living in the punchline of a joke the rest of the world stopped laughing at months ago.