DEEP TRUMP: The conman who saved America from the Thucydides Trap

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Tucker Carlson recently confessed: “I’ll be tormented for a long time by the fact that I played a role in getting Donald Trump elected. And I want to say that I’m sorry for misleading people.” How can one not feel sorry and ashamed today for having believed in Trump? I’ll be honest: although I hold no responsibility in Trump’s election, I feel ashamed for having placed any hope in him.

The Trump phenomenon resembles a form of collective hypnosis. It has a religious dimension that makes it unique in American political history. For the believer, every failure, every scandal, every lie is proof that Trump is fighting against the Deep State, the Fake News, the Swamp, the Washington elite, the Democrats, the New World Order, the FBI, and who knows what else. The Q psy-op was particularly successful in tapping into the religious imagination of Americans who were distrustful of the government. This is well explained by Marjorie Taylor Green, who admits she “fell for that in late 2017 and 2018”:

it’s basically a cult. … What it does, it takes a layer of truth and then it twists it into a lie. … Q was very successful. It was probably one of the most successful psychological operations I’ve ever seen because it did use the layer of truth and the things that people were most passionate about and was able to use that and twist their belief to pull their full faith and trust into … an anonymous person or an anonymous entity.

This was political propaganda on a deeper level than ever experimented before. I have analyzed the methods of manipulation used by Q and other pro-Trump groups in “DARK PILL: How Satan-Worshipping Pedophiles have taken over Conspiracyland” and in “The Satanic False Flag: Dark-pilling, conspiracy cults, pied-piper operations, and Zionist spiritual warfare”.

The strangest thing, looking back, is that radical Zionists made no secret about their own quasi-religious adoration for Trump. In May 2018, commenting on Trump’s decision to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, Netanyahu himself compared him to Cyrus the Great[1] .

There is no shame in being betrayed. No one blames Jesus for having trusted Judas. But there is shame in being fooled. And the truth about Trump is not that he has betrayed his supporters in 2025; it is that he has fooled them in 2016. Those who believed he would MAGA did so despite so many red flags.

The art of being bought

The first key to unlock Trump was his prose. A man who writes books should be measured by his books, before anything else. In that case, one look at the titles was enough:
- The Art of the Deal (1987)
- How to Get Rich (2004)
- The Way to the Top (2004)
- Think like a Billionaire (2004)
- How to Build a Fortune (2006)
- Think Big and Kick Ass (2007)
- Think Like a Champion (2009).

Trump believes that everything can be bought, that society is purely transactional, and that cunning is the keys to success. He wrote in The Art of the Deal, his 1987 bestseller:

The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.”[2]

There is no trace in his books of a word of wisdom or a touch of humor. In fact, Trump has no literary or philosophical culture, and it shows.

What is also clear in Trump’s books is his narcissism. Every sentence comes down to: “I’m the best and I know everything about everything.” Trump isn’t just a salesman; he’s also the product.

Following the opening of Trump Tower in Manhattan in 1983, the massive promotion of his book The Art of the Deal turned Trump into a celebrity. Tony Schwartz, the book’s co-author—who, according to Schwartz, actually wrote the entire book (with Trump’s contribution limited to deleting the least flattering passages)—has said since 2016 that he is haunted by guilt for having helped Trump become president. Trump, he says, lies constantly without the slightest inhibition or guilt. “There is an emptiness inside Trump. There’s an absence of a soul. There’s an absence of a heart.”

The third element that helped craft Trump’s image as a billionaire hero—the equivalent of a saint in the religion of money—is the reality TV show The Apprentice, co-produced by Trump himself and airing since 2004, in which Trump essentially sells himself.

The second standard by which Trump should have been measured was his business record. Is Trump the artist of the deal and the winner he claims to be? No. The advertising is deceptive. Trump is not a self-made man, but a self-made myth.[3] While he has always claimed to have received a single million dollars from his father to start his business, a 2018 New York Times investigation revealed that “he received at least $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate empire, much of it through tax dodges in the 1990s.”

Not only did he inherit this initial fortune without lifting a finger, but he invested it in failed ventures. Trump has filed for bankruptcy six times in his career. His Taj Mahal casino filed for bankruptcy just 15 months after opening—how a casino can go bankrupt? Other bankruptcies followed in the 1990s and 2000s: the Trump Castle and Trump Plaza Hotel in 1992, then Trump Hotels & Casino Resorts in 2004, with $1.8 billion in debt, and finally Trump Entertainment Resorts in 2009 and 2014.

By the 1990s, Trump was in debt to the tune of $5 billion, including $1 billion personally—a negative billionaire. That’s when a group of bankers led by Wilbur Ross, former director of Rothschild Inc., decided to bail him out (Trump would reward Wilbur Ross with the position of Secretary of Commerce in 2016). According to remarks made by real estate attorney Alan Pomerantz on CNN in 2016, speaking on behalf of the bankers: “We made the decision that he would be worth more alive to us than dead—dead meaning in bankruptcy… We kept him alive to help us” (more on John Hankey’s investigation and the Forbes magazine article).

The Roy Cohn Method

If he is a failed casino tycoon, is Trump at least an honest one? Obviously not. Trump has been involved in more than 4,000 lawsuits. His first lawsuit dates back to 1973. Trump was accused by the federal government of racial discrimination in the leasing of buildings constructed with public funds. He hired attorney Roy Cohn, who taught him life. In the words of Greg Reese:

The unwritten rules that Roy Cohn helped instill into the character of Donald Trump are, one: Never Apologize. Never Admit Wrongdoing. Two: Always Counterattack and Hit Back Harder. Three: Use the Legal System as a Weapon. Four: Manipulate the Media. Five: Use Fear as Both Shield and Sword. And six: Build a Fortress of Loyalty and Punish Disloyalty Absolutely. Cohn’s playbook didn’t just work on business rivals and judges, it scaled to con millions of people.

The “art of the lie,” not the art of the deal, is the essence of Trump. Trump spouts enormous lies about everything and repeats his lies tirelessly. Persons close to Trump, such as his former communications director Stephanie Grisham, have reported that Trump believes that simply repeating something thousands of times makes it the truth.

Trump’s big lies are numerous. For example: “I ended eight wars” (and therefore “I deserve the Nobel Peace Prize”). In 2024, Trump declared: “I’m the only president in modern history who left office with a smaller national debt than when I came into office.” In reality, under his presidency, the debt increased by 7.8 trillion, a record 40 percent increase.[4] Lying and then calling liars those who expose his lies, is Trump’s instinctual pattern of behavior. Here is a nice example, posted April 20, 2026.

Had Trump read Mein Kampf, he would have recognized the truth of the große Lüge theorem:

in the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of a people, … in the primitive simplicity of their minds, will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one, for the reason that they themselves also lie sometimes in little things, but would be too much ashamed of making too great lies. … Therefore they are unable to believe in the possibility of the enormous impudence of the most infamous distortion in others; … for this reason alone, some part of the most impudent lie will remain and stick; a fact which all great lying artists and societies in this world know only too well and therefore villainously employ. Those who know best this truth…, however, were at all time the Jews.

One of Trump’s biggest lies is the staged event of July 13, 2024, in Butler, Pennsylvania (watch John Hankey’s film “Trump in the Crosshairs?” if you haven’t). It is such a colossal lie that no one dared to denounce it, because the very idea of such a lie seems unbearably obscene. Everyone would rather pretend to believe it than risk making such a serious accusation. Nine months later, however, the idea of a fake attack is gaining traction among the disappointed MAGA, especially since Joe Kent’s revelation on the FBI’s obstruction to the investigation (see the discussion started by Trisha Hope and shared by Marjorie Taylor Green, or this post mentioning Tim Dillon and Emerald Robinson).

The Roy Cohn method is how Trump dealt with the Epstein problem. It is no coincidence that the Q psy-op, portraying Trump as the Angel of Justice against the Satan-worshipping pedophiles (all Democrats), gained momentum just as the Epstein scandal was making its first headlines in the mainstream press. Now we know why: his name appears more than 38,000 times in the declassified documents so far. Among these documents are allegations against him of raping girls aged 13 to 15 at his golf club in California.

But there is a moral to the story: Trump fell into his own trap. He had bolstered the public rage and generated an uncontainable demand for the release of the Epstein files. Now he fiercely opposes the release, referring to the Epstein files as a “Democrat hoax.” “This will hurt my friends,” Trump reportedly told Marjorie Taylor Greene to dissuade her from joining the Democrats in a resolution calling for declassification. Taylor Greene makes yet another stunning revelation: “Trump texted me that if my son gets killed, I deserve it because I was a traitor to him.”

We should have known. As early as 2002, Trump had told New York magazine: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.” There are numerous photos of Trump with Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein, as well as a video footage of a party organized by Epstein in 1992 at Mar-a-Lago (Trump’s estate in Palm Beach), featuring young inebriated teenage girls.

Trump is a known sex offender who has faced 28 complaints of harassment or rape. He has bragged about sneaking into the dressing rooms of young girls competing in the beauty pageants he owns. And don’t forget: “When you’re a star,” he bragged, you can just “grab them by the pussy!” In an audio recording from 2006, Trump states that his minimum age limit for sleeping with a girl is twelve.

The narcissistic con artist

Trump is a con artist. He fits the profile analyzed by Maria Konnikova in The Confidence Game, where she writes: “The true con artist doesn’t force us to do anything; he makes us complicit in our own undoing. He doesn’t steal. We give.” In his interview with The New York Times published on May 2, Tucker Carlson mentions Trump’s “spellbinding” quality, that can “weaken people around him and make them more compliant and more confused. I’ve experienced it myself. You spend a day with Trump and you’re in this kind of dreamland, like smoking hash or something… and there may be a supernatural component to it.”

In 2019, George Conway wrote an article for The Atlantic making this diagnosis of malignant narcissism, backed by numerous testimonies. Rereading his article today, one is struck by the obviousness of it all—an obviousness we refused to see because it was presented to us by the Democrats, whom we deemed completely unworthy of attention. Experts define the narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) as “a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, a need for admiration, a lack of empathy, and a heightened sense of self-importance. Individuals with NPD may present to others as boastful, arrogant, or even unlikeable.”

Trump’s narcissism, probably overlapping with psychopathy, makes him the ideal proxy for his sponsors—always for sale, devoid of any moral inhibitions, and easily manipulated by flattery. Benjamin Disraeli once explained his influence on Queen Victoria with these words: “Everyone likes flattery, and when it comes to Royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”[5] So with Trump: tell him he’s the greatest man in history, and he will sign your bill. Better still, have his spiritual advisor Paula White tell him he is Jesus.

Lying takes mental energy, even for a seasoned liar like Trump, because a man who lies as he breathes must constantly recall the lies he has already told so as not to contradict himself. Aging brings with it a decline in mental energy, and Trump no longer has the vigilance needed to know when to stop. He lies out of habit. Not only has he lost mastery of the art of lying, but he has lost the ability to disguise his narcissistic pathology. In January of this year, a New York Times correspondent asked Trump if he saw any limits to the exercise of his power on a global scale. “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” On April 13, Trump posted an image of himself as Jesus on Truth Social.

Trump’s megalomaniacal narcissism is now apparent in his plans for monuments to his own glory. He has announced the construction in Washington of “the GREATEST and MOST BEAUTIFUL Triumphal Arch anywhere in the World” (three times taller than Napoleon’s in Paris). Shortly before that, he unveiled his plans for the Trump Presidential Library in Miami, a gigantic skyscraper that would also serve as a hotel, featuring Air Force One on display in the lobby and including a massive auditorium with a gigantic golden statue of Trump (see the parody here). His megalomaniacal projects also include the construction of a $400 million ballroom in the East Wing of the White House (the cost has now been upgraded to $1 billion). Add to that Trump’s decision to attach his name to the Kennedy Center’s arts complex and concert hall, renamed the Trump Kennedy Center. He has also put his name on the Palm Beach airport, the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the boulevard leading to Mar-a-Lago, and he plans to put his signature on the new U.S. currency, and his photo and signature in gold letters on U.S. passports.

Trump’s pathology is now a mainstream topic, and not just among Democrats. A former Trump lawyer, Ty Cobb, who served as a special counsel for Trump during his first term, has publicly stated that “his mental condition has deteriorated substantially” to the point where he was now unfit to serve.” The Atlantic reports the testimony of a longtime Trump associate who wished to remain anonymous: “He’s been talking recently about how he is the most powerful person to ever live. He wants to be remembered as the one who did things that other people couldn’t do, because of his sheer power and force of will.”[6] On April 17, the Washington Examiner ran the headline “Donald Trump Is Losing His Mind”:

A 79-year-old man who has long dealt in chaos is now being consumed by that chaos. His episodes are becoming more frequent, his good days further apart. What he has lost is not a sense of decency or decorum — he never had those — but any remaining sense of self-control. Everyone around him can see it. Yet, whether from ambition, cowardice, or weary acceptance, they keep looking for ways to rationalize his behavior. The tragedy is no longer Trump’s. It is now America’s.[7]

The Deep State, a shallow concept

The Trump persona some of us believed in was nothing but an image, a fiction manufactured by a powerful propaganda machine. We were sold not only a character, but a story in which he was backed by a secret group of high-level virtuous patriots ready to unleash “the storm” against the secret group of high-level pedophile globalists known as the Deep State, and conspiring to enslave us in their “New World Order.” Alexander Dugin, who seems to still be thinking along these lines, called those two groups the Deep State and “the Deeper State”.

The Deep State is a concept that has some utility as a general metaphor for the mechanisms of power in liberal democracies, but as a real entity, it remains forever elusive. It is like the Freudian unconscious, which we see only when it resurfaces into consciousness. The Deep State is such a vague concept that it lends itself to any definition. There are all kinds of “deep powers”, if you like, but they don’t constitute an entity.

And no deep power is stronger than Israel in America. Consider how the decision to bomb Iran was made last February, as explained by the New York Times in an April 7 article: “How Trump took the U.S. to War with Iran.” On February 11, a meeting was held in the White House Situation Room (a crisis room equipped with secure communications equipment, managed by the National Security Council) attended by Benjamin Netanyahu, accompanied by Israeli intelligence officers. Standing before a screen showing Mossad Director David Barnea and Israeli military officials, Netanyahu presented his case for bombing Iran with the aid of a PowerPoint presentation, demonstrating that it would bring down the Iranian regime and thus resolve instantly all the problems in the Middle East in one fell swoop, while making Trump the greatest man in history. Seated across from him were President Trump, Secretary of War Peter Hegseth, Chief of Staff Dan Caine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliff, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, as well as Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, unofficial negotiators. After Netanyahu’s presentation, Trump nodded and said, “It sounds good to me.”

The same group met again the next day, without Netanyahu but with Vice President JD Vance, who had just returned from Azerbaijan. Hegseth was on board; Ratcliff, Vance, and Rubio were skeptical; Caine was undecided and Wiles remained on the sidelines. A final meeting took place on February 26, including a few other people, such as advisor David Warrington, who discussed the legality of such an intervention. Trump concluded the meeting with these words: “I think we need to do it.” In the meantime, he had had several phone conversations with Netanyahu, who was urging him to act quickly. The next day, February 27, Trump sent the following message from Air Force One: “Operation Epic Fury is approved. No aborts. Good luck.”

Question: Given that it was the Deep State that dragged the United States into the war against Iran, identify the Deep State based on this account. Additional clue: Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi reported that, during the negotiations held on April 11 and 12 in Islamabad (Pakistan), where Kushner and Wilkoff were present, JD Vance abruptly interrupted the negotiations after receiving a call from Netanyahu.

“The first Jewish President”?

MAGA was MIGA all along, just like the neocons’ PNAC had been a Project for a New Israeli Century.

Trump betrayed his voters, but not his donors. Trump stated in December 2025 at the White House that “Miriam gave my campaign, indirectly and directly, $250 million.” Speaking before the Israeli parliament in October of that same year, he acknowledged the role of Sheldon and Miriam Adelson in shaping his foreign policy.

Since January 2025, Netanyahu has visited the White House seven times. On February 5, 2025, he presented Trump with a gold pager, commemorating the murder by booby-trapped pagers committed by Israel against members of Hezbollah or their relatives (including children) on September 23, 2024. In exchange, Trump gave him a signed and autographed photo of himself with the words: “To Bibi, a great leader.”

On September 15, 2025, Netanyahu stated at a press conference in Jerusalem, alongside Marco Rubio, that: “Donald Trump is the greatest friend that Israel has ever had in the White House.” Trump has implemented the foreign policy dictated by Netanyahu so effectively that Netanyahu had to publicly defend himself against accusations of controlling Trump: “Trump is the most independent leader I’ve ever seen. The idea that I control Trump is a lie.”

In December 2025, during a Hanukkah celebration at the White House, media personality Mark Levin, a fervent Zionist who is part of Trump’s inner circle, put his arm around Trump’s neck and introduced him to the television cameras as “The first Jewish president,” and Trump replied: “It’s true.” Was he telling the truth, for once? There is a persistent rumor that he has secretly converted to Judaism. But I do not believe that Trump is connected to Israel by moral or religious convictions. It is transactional, like everything else in Trump’s mind. When Trump calls Thomas Massie a loser, one must understand that, for him, anyone who opposes Israel is by definition a loser, because you cannot win against Israel, while with Israel you can get very rich.

Epic corruption

President Trump told the American people that he was launching a historic campaign to combat fraud. He appointed JD Vance as “anti-fraud czar.” But it is a fraud of biblical proportions that Trump and his family are scheming in plain sight. According to The New Republic, barely halfway through his second presidential term, Trump has already tripled his fortune—now estimated at $6.5 billion. Trump’s latest financial disclosure to the US Office of Government Ethics shows that Trump made more than 3,700 trades in the first three months of 2026, with companies that have dealings with his administration, for a volume between $220 million and $750 million. The list of his insider trades keeps growing every day. Meanwhile, Trump has so far pardoned—for a fee—more than 70 convicted fraudsters.

The real-estate mafia of the Trumps, the Kushners and the Witkoffs treat the destruction of Gaza as a real estate opportunity. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, they unveiled their $25 billion project for “New Gaza,” along with a construction timeline.

The New York Times reports that in February 2025, Jared Kushner used his position as an unofficial mediator to ask the Saudis to invest $5 billion in his investment firm, Affinity Partners. He reportedly approached Mohammed bin Salman (MSB) directly for this purpose. He had already secured $2 billion from the Saudis in 2022. The Senate Committee on Finance has launched an investigation into this blatant conflict of interest.

The Trump and Witkoff families have also taken advantage of their position to make shady investments in cryptocurrencies. In September 2024, two months before the election, Trump launched World Liberty Financial—a decentralized finance protocol—with his sons and the Witkoff family, selling tokens that buyers later realized were non-transferable and therefore of no real value. Chinese entrepreneur Justin Sun, who invested tens of millions of dollars in the venture, is now suing the Trump family for fraud. On January 17, 2025, three days before his inauguration, Trump organized a promotional sale of a memecoin called $Trump, attracting a slew of courtiers ready to buy his presidential favors. Of the twelve figures leading this operation, four are from the Trump family (Donald and his three sons) and three are from the Witkoff family (Steven and his two sons). They pocket $350 million in investment fees, according to the Financial Times. Two days after the launch of $Trump, Trump’s wife launches her own memecoin, $Melania. It is estimated that the Trump family has amassed over $1 billion through their various cryptocurrency ventures.

Senate and House Democrats launched an investigation on the suspicion that Trump used these operations to barter his presidential pardons with convicted fraudsters. From January to July 2025, Trump pardoned more than 1,500 people, many of them financiers who would pay him back. Joseph Schwartz, a nursing home owner sentenced to three years in prison for a $5 million fraud, was pardoned after only three months in prison in exchange for a $1 million donation to Trump’s lobbyists, while the plaintiffs against him did not receive a single cent. David Gentile, convicted of a $1.6 billion fraud, was pardoned 12 days into his 7-year sentence. Among the pardoned are also many Zionist Jews, such as Philip Esformes, Sholom Weiss, Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin, Eliyahu Weinstein, Drew “Bo” Brownstein. Trump also pardoned his former spiritual advisor, Robert Morris, sentenced to twenty years in prison for sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl, and released after only six months. Trump once mentioned the possibility of pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell.

Inevitably, the Trump family is at the forefront of war profiteering. According to Bloomberg, a few days before the attack on Iran on February 28, 2026, Donald Jr. and Eric Trump invested in a company producing armed drones, Powerus, to which the Department of Defense subsequently placed a $1.1 billion order. In April 1, just as Trump had announced that Gulf States should not count on the U.S. to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, Powerus met with officials in Abu Dhabi to showcase its products. Donald Jr. has also invested in a startup called Vulcan Elements specializing in rare-earth magnets, and has just secured a $620 million contract with the Department of Defense. We have also learned from the Financial Times that in August 2025, Trump’s sons made an investment, through a shell company, in a firm called Skyline Builders, which is likely to receive $1.6 billion from the U.S. government.

It was reported to the U.S. Congress that President Trump had launched a paid newsletter titled “Private Security Briefing,” selling confidential information related to national security to investors.

Trump is suing the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for $10 billion following the disclosure of his tax returns by a contractor (tax returns he had promised to make public during his campaign). Yet Trump controls the very government he is suing. “I’m supposed to work out a settlement with myself,” he noted wryly. No U.S. president has ever used his position to enrich himself to this extent.

But the most scandalous case of insider trading, reported even by the British BBC and the French Figaro, took place between March 22 and 24. On Saturday 22, Trump issued a 48-hour ultimatum to Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz, threatening to destroy all of its power plants. Iran immediately responded that if Trump carried out his threats, Iran would respond in kind against American infrastructures in the Gulf states. The price of oil rose and energy-related stock prices plummeted as the deadline approached. Then, on Monday at 7:04 a.m., Trump announced on Truth Social that negotiations were underway with Iran (Iran denied). Fourteen minutes earlier, “there were an unusually high number of bets on the US oil price” totaling more than $1.5 billion in profit. No investigation has determined who pulled off the stock market coup of the century.

And let us not forget the way the sons of Howard Lutnick cashed in on his unlawful tariffs predictably overturned by Supreme Court. The House of Representatives has questioned Lutnick about it.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the White House has been taken over by the most shallow, the most deranged, and the most corrupt individual.

His unintended merit, however, is to have exposed to the world the true ugly face of 21st-century America. The very fact that Trump was elected president is the clearest indication of how dysfunctional “American democracy” has become.

Trump has also made Israel’s control on U.S. foreign policy totally transparent. Think of the change from twenty years ago, when the idea that the U.S. had been dragged into war against Iraq by Israel was still confidential. Mearsheimer and Walt couldn’t even find an American publisher for The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. Today, it’s a commonly accepted fact, and that’s a good thing.

Trump’s unprovoked aggression on Iran has not only deteriorated America’s image in the world. It has also been a total failure in terms of its stated objectives, despite Trump’s bragging victory on Truth Social. Iran comes out not only with a clear moral superiority, but with an undeniable strategic victory. That’s another good thing, because that war was for Israel, and so is the defeat. Iran is our only hope to prevent the psychopathic state from achieving its goal of becoming the regional super-power.

America’s humiliating failure has ruined America’s reputation of military invincibility. Taking note of the U.S.’s incapacity to protect their own military bases, the Gulf States will reconsider their alliance.

And the most happy result of it all is that the danger of America and China falling into the Thucydides Trap, that Graham Allison considered very great ten years ago, has now receded. Xi Jinping’s reference to the Thucydides Trap in his speech on May 14 has been widely recognized as highly significant: “The whole world is watching our meeting,” he said. “The International situation is turbulent. The world is at a new crossroads: Can China and the US overcome the Thucydides Trap and create a new paradigm to meet global challenges together?”

For the anecdote, when explained what the Thucydides Trap meant after Xi’s speech, Trump posted this typically trumpish note:

Although I have zero expertise in military matters, it seems quite clear to me that, under Trump, the U.S. has wasted its capacity to stop China from becoming the world’s economic superpower, which will inevitably collapse the dollar’s gigantic Ponzi scheme. It is highly unlikely that, after the damage caused by Trump and his grotesque Secretary of War to the American military machine—and to its self-confidence—, the U.S. can ever feel tempted to confront China. It is significant that, in his interview with Fox News from China before heading back to Washington, he stated unequivocally that Taiwan is “a place” too far away for the U.S. to fight for. Japan and South Korea will soon come to terms with this new reality.

Trump is a malignant narcissist. But look at the bright side: had he really cared to Make America Great Again, he might have dragged the US into the Thucydides Trap with China. But Trump is all about Making Trump Great (and Rich), and his Israeli handlers are all about Making Greater Israel. Neither of them really care for the American empire, except as a tool for their own aggrandizement.

And so Trump may have saved the world after all.

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[1] “Jeanine Pirro’s exclusive interview with Netanyahu” on YouTube.

[2] Quoted in Thom Hartmann, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink, Berrett-Koehler, 2025.

[3] As David Cay Johnston wrote in The Making of Donald Trump, Melville House, 2016.

[4] Hartmann, The Last American President, op. cit.

[5] Stanley Weintraub, Disraeli: A Biography, Hamish Hamilton, 1993, pp. 579, 547.

[6] Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, “The Yolo Presidency,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2026.

[7] Dan Hannan, “Donald Trump is losing his mind,” Washington Examiner, April 17, 2026.