Pyongyang-on-the-Potomac

Giant Trump posters, a four-hour loyalty meeting, and an Exxon deal that calls itself “peace.”

Good morning! Nearly a century ago, Marine General Smedley Butler blew the whistle on his own career. “I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914,” he wrote. “Looking back on it, I feel I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.” Butler admitted the U.S. military was little more than hired muscle for oilmen and bankers.

Flash forward to 2025, and the racket hardly bothers with uniforms anymore. ExxonMobil executives don’t need Marines to storm Tampico; they’ve got Treasury licenses to cozy up to Igor Sechin, Putin’s oil consigliere, and a White House eager to frame it all as “peace.” The Wall Street Journal reports Exxon is plotting a return to Sakhalin-1, the multibillion-dollar project it abandoned in 2022 after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Back then, Exxon denounced the Kremlin’s expropriation of its stake as theft. Today, it’s tiptoeing back with Neil Chapman of Exxon meeting Sechin in Doha, Darren Woods whispering in Trump’s ear, and Putin dangling decrees that let foreign firms reenter seized assets provided they deliver parts, lobby for sanctions relief, and politely ignore the war still grinding on.

Butler’s ghost would recognize this hustle in a heartbeat. Trump dresses it up as breaking Russia from China. Exxon calls it “recouping losses.” Putin sells it as an “opportunity” for American firms. Ukraine, the supposed beneficiary of all this peacemaking, gets nothing but the bill. Once again, war becomes a racket, and peace a balance sheet.

And while Exxon strikes its bargain abroad, parades as a two-bit despot on the home stage. The nation’s capital is now draped with giant banners of his mug-shot-like face, Saddam’s Baghdad meets Pyongyang on the Potomac. The National Guard, once tasked with protecting democracy, now spends its days picking up trash or standing idle for the cameras in Trump’s crime-emergency theater. Inside, a four-hour cabinet meeting descended into parody, with officials thanking “dear leader” for saving college football, resurrecting law enforcement, and generally being the best boss since FDR. One even suggested he deserved a Nobel Prize. The groveling was so absurd it could have embarrassed Kim Jong-un’s ministers.

Trump himself looked less the strongman than the cadaver. His right hand, bruised and blotched for months, now resembled a Rorschach test gone wrong, some swore they saw Epstein’s face blooming in the discoloration like Jesus on a pancake. That apparition was imaginary, but the cover-up is real. Trump’s DOJ continues stonewalling on the Epstein files, even as lawsuits now target the secrecy directly. This week, the Democracy Defenders Fund filed the first federal case demanding disclosure of Trump’s Epstein contacts, invoking the Freedom of Information Act after the administration ignored formal requests. It’s the opening legal salvo in what could become a siege against the DOJ’s stone wall, prying loose the very records Trump most fears.

The courts, at least, are still capable of recoil. In D.C., a federal grand jury refused three times to indict a woman for allegedly scraping an FBI agent’s hand during an arrest. Magistrates are dismissing cases built on “the most illegal searches I’ve seen in my life.” Judge Zia Faruqui, himself a former prosecutor, warned defendants: “We don’t have a secret police.” Tell that to Jeanine Pirro, who insists prosecutors must file the stiffest possible charges, only to have jurors laugh them back out.

Elsewhere, Trump’s attacks on the rule of law are equally ham-fisted. His DOJ just tried suing the entire Maryland bench for slowing deportations, only to be slapped down by a Trump-appointed judge. He’s fired Fed governor Lisa Cook on spurious charges, now facing a lawsuit that could blow up his control of the central bank. He’s demanding executions in D.C. despite capital punishment being abolished there decades ago. He’s covering up Epstein’s ties while letting Bill Gates slip into the Oval Office for secret talks that bore real fruit: shortly afterward, Gates announced he was pulling funding from groups supported through the Arabella network, a fiscal sponsor that underwrites a range of progressive and pro-democracy organizations. In other words, the same billionaire who once co-chaired the “Giving Pledge” is now yanking resources away from the infrastructure of the American left, right after a cozy meeting with a president openly hostile to it.

And John Bolton, of all people, has reemerged to declare Trump’s Ukraine policy incoherent and collapsing. When even the mustachioed warmonger who sold us the Iraq war calls your foreign policy a shambles, you’ve truly gone off the rails.

The through-line is simple: Butler was right, and he’s still right. War is a racket, and now so is peace. Exxon writes foreign policy while Trump drapes the capital in his own face. The DOJ prosecutes phantom assaults while real corruption festers. Judges, jurors, and even Bolton are resisting, but the stage set remains: corporate carve-ups abroad, authoritarian theater at home, and a president decomposing in plain view.

Once, Americans mocked dictators for this sort of thing, the propaganda portraits, the cabinet groveling, the oil-for-peace scams. Now it’s our daily news feed. Smedley Butler would not be surprised.

Last Friday I joined Esty Dinur’s program to talk through this exact collision of corporate power, authoritarian kitsch, and the courts finally baring a little fang. If you and your favorite doomscrolling neighbor want to hear the full conversation click here.