The Rapist in the Oval Office

And the leaders in the East

I have been wracking my brains over the weekend about how to add something of use to the rhetoric surrounding Trump’s election. I was going to expand upon a Note I had written but economist

Grace Blakeley

beat me to the punch with an excellent analysis of the material factors which drove the working class to vote for Trump. I thought about writing about why “clean tech” billionaire Elon Musk joined up with Big Oil fanatic Trump, but

Emily Atkin

offers some excellent theories on the emergency podcast we recorded last week. I thought about writing about Silicon Valley’s creeping takeover of the means of communication and, ultimately, power, but Carole Cadwalladr wrote a searing piece on that very topic which she has been tracking over the past eight years.

There is so much to think about and begin preparing for. The overthrowing of Roe v Wade is part of a larger attack on American citizens’ privacy and could pave the way for States to strike down marriage rights, trans rights, contraception rights, IVF, and turn the country which allegedly values freedom above all else into a State of Surveillance in which citizens are prosecuted for transgressions (or sins.) Trump is likely to pull the USA out of the Paris Accords (again) and could even withdraw from NATO, leaving Europe immensely vulnerable to Russian aggression. We would be foolish, here, to think that such wars are in the past: one is literally on our doorstep.

America is no longer the leader of the world, but its self-destruction is causing a black hole liable to suck everyone in. If the dollar crashes—through inane economic policies like tariff warfares and tying the currency to bitcoin—economies around the world will crash with it, in a world in which the wider political, economic and natural environment was so unstable to begin with it may be impossible to recover. But from within this chaos comes opportunity, and if we can take our eyes off of the West for just a moment, we will see the leaders of the 21st century have been Eastward all along.

Nations like Russia, Israel and the UAE are engaging in physical political expansionism in a way that perhaps we thought was relegated to the 20th century. Ukraine is being slowly choked by Russia, Palestine blown up by Israel and Sudan cornered off by the UAE through its proxy forces. This isn’t just the geopolitical or economic warfare that has marked most of the conflict in recent decades, it is outright land grabs, dispossession, and even genocide. When we take into wider consideration our faltering ecosystems, depleting oil reserves and the reality that from those natural resources come financial power, it makes sense that some States are now rapidly accumulating resources—if they don’t grow, they will shrink. Authoritarian (or ideological) rule allows them to act with unabated violence where democracies cannot be seen to. It’s given them a head-start in a world whose order is rapidly coming apart.

Power accumulates through extraction, exploitation and expulsion. States seeking to shore up their power—both energy and political, although they are arguably synonymous—will have to extract, exploit and expel. Already it is being dressed up as economically pioneering: the UAE is buying 10% of Liberia’s land mass to “offset” its carbon emissions. Yet such pioneering has historically ended in the mass murder of the hosts. Power never cedes, such is its nature.

Do we think Trump won’t want to get in on this? His entire career has been a series of chaotic expansions, mostly of his own image rather than business or financial acumen. Will he and his team stop at the encroachment of their citizen’s rights? Surely the encroachment of territory is the next logical step. First they came for women’s bodies which the vast majority of civilised history saw as a natural resource to be exploited for cultural reproduction. Which bodies will they come for next? The bodies which provide free labour? The bodies which threaten their dogma? The body of the Earth itself? This is already such a fundamental part of modernity; penetrating the Earth’s crust to dig up and burn her secrets. No wonder our own could not survive in freedom for long under such a regime.

The men in the East never forgot the perceived importance of capturing these resources. It seems the men in the West are now waking up to the reality of the world they built. Privilege dictated that our energy systems were kept out of sight, so that it seemed an unending supply, on tap, wherever. This is no longer the case. While politicians still promise decarbonised and digitised economies, those supplying that digitisation are investing millions in their own sources of energy because of how much Artificial Intelligence is going to drain our supply. These same men have allied themselves with the party of public climate deniers, led by a small group who allegedly enjoy phone calls with Putin himself, the man who wrote his Masters thesis on the importance of mineral resources to economic development and strategic planning. Put the political hand-wringing aside and we can see they are all engaging in the same strategy: the capture of our energy systems, at the expense of truth.

Already, Trump’s and/or the Kremlin’s post-truth machine is in overdrive. The Washington Post—owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos who was no doubt behind its refusal to endorse either candidate this election—reported on Sunday that Trump had called Putin to discuss the war in Ukraine. But today the Kremlin denied those reports, calling the phone call “pure fiction” and taking the opportunity to rail against the quality of information published in “reputable publications”.

This is pretty rich coming from Russia HQ which created the art of sowing the infosphere with mis- and dis-information to keep their electorate confused, frightened, and thus vulnerable. When Joseph Stalin snatched power from the heroes of the November Revolution, he airbrushed photos to remove Head Bolsheviks like Trotsky or add himself into them, falsifying his leadership and importance. “Soviet disinformation” quickly grew in ambition, becoming what we know today as fake news, ensuring Russia’s influence across the entire world, destabilising political institutions, targeting sovereign states, sweeping across continents, and winning referendums and elections.

Now, it is easy to pass off the mix-up about the phone call as stupidity on the part of the Trump campaign, as the left has been so desperate to paint him as. Perhaps it was an over-zealous staffer, or simply a miscommunication. Perhaps all of those things are true. Unfortunately, the likelier reason is that Putin’s regime is once again weaponising Trump to further drive a wedge between American media and the citizens who depend on it—a wedge that Trump, too, benefits from.

This, I suppose, is the point: Power doesn’t have ideological differences. Power is power, and it moves through whatever body is growing in size, be it in ideological body, a financial body, a political body, even a physical body. There is no real difference between any of the political leaders who extract and exploit. Women would have been better off under Harris, but what about prisoners? Power always seeks to suck up others’ resources, to exploit others’ powers in its own name. This is the dance Putin and Trump are playing now. It’s the samba the USA has played with China. It’s the waltz that tore through the Middle East, military leaders hand-in-hand with US democracy, all dancing to the same tune.

On the podcast last year, George Monbiot highlighted that the civil rights of the 20th century were won off the backs of exploited peoples of colour in the Majority World. Peter Turchin echoes this idea, backed with plenty of data, in his book End Times. The regimes may be changing but the end goal is not. To fall prey to false dichotomies bypasses the forces of violence which shape the world. I think this every time I read someone complain of Americans electing “a rapist” as President—why wouldn’t they? Men rape women every day and get away with it. Women are raped every day and simply have to live with it. In this violent world, rape is a part of the social fabric. So why the outrage at electing one to the top office in the world? The top offices in the world are fundamentally built on the rape of the land. It is the bedrock of capital accumulation, land accumulation and power accumulation.

The rapist has always been in the Oval Office—now, simply, we see it with its mask off.

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Some good news! I’ve signed with

Abigail Bergstrom

to bring my book on violence to the world. Stay tuned.