The Right's Rollercoaster to Hell Part III

The summary: Trump is focused on flexing his muscle, punishing perceived enemies, and rewarding friends, without a long-term strategy. The overall result will greatly weaken the US both politically and economically, to the point that it will lose much of its power and another coalition of states will step forward to try and rescue and reorganize global capitalism. Before that happens, these changes will greatly increase the poverty experienced by people in the US and closely allied or dependent countries. These changes will also increase the frequency or intensity of regional wars. In fact, we are already seeing these effects.

Want to know why, and see the research? Keep reading!

After the storming of the Capitol on January 6, 2020, Democrats and progressives wrung their hands and called it an attempted coup. They had good political reasons for doing this: it’s an effective strategy for getting people to the polls and voting against their opponents. I have a harder time understanding why radicals were calling it a coup attempt, and why they were predicting an imminent fascist takeover already in 2016. In most cases, these radicals weren’t building up an armed movement irl, off the internet, capable of stopping a military takeover, nor were they preparing safehouses and underground railroads to help people on the Kill List escape to Canada and México, which is what anarchists do if we have reason to believe in an imminent far Right uprising (check out Ready for Revolution, Durruti in the Spanish Revolution, Repression and Resistance in Franco’s Spain and a whole lot more sources if you read Spanish or Italian). Unsurprisingly, I’m not aware of anyone rectifying and modifying their theoretical framework after events proved them premature, at best, and at worst, unaware of the realities of the current century.

(Now, in 2025, a lot more people are being highly practical, at least, but there’s still a lot of unhelpfully alarmist rhetoric.)

Back in 2020, John Bolton disagreed “with the premise that Trump attempted a coup, which he said requires cunning and elaborate planning.” John Bolton, former assistant attorney general, State Department apparatchik, ambassador, PNAC conspirator, and National Security Adviser—basically a total scumbag—would know. In his own words, “As somebody who has helped plan coup d’état, not here but other places, it takes a lot of work, and that’s not what [Trump] did.”

“That’s not the way Donald Trump does