Welcome back to Lucid, and hello to all new subscribers. It is always a pleasure to speak with Wajahat Ali, publisher of The Left Hook. We talked about geopolitics, the hypocrisy of Trump’s anti-Communism for domestic purposes while at he adulates Communist dictator Xi Jinping, the lawless culture of ICE, and much more.
For those who like to read, an edited transcript is below.
Wajahat Ali: Donald Trump is at the UN saying that he will have to potentially annihilate Iran. Now imagine, Ruth, you are a country, any country, with your back against the wall, and a country with nuclear weapons says we’re going to annihilate you, and now you feel like you have an existential threat. How would you respond?
Ruth Ben-Ghiat: And he does it at the UN, and right before he is meeting with human rights abuser Xi Jinping. When Trump says things, there are multiple audiences. One of the main audiences is Putin, always, as well as other autocrats whose favor he’s trying to curry, Xi included.
We all know that Trump has no filter, and he’s crossed some threshold of being even more unpopular than before. And what happens with these leaders is they’re fighting against recognizing the reality that they’ve made countless errors and that people hate them, and instead, that fuels them to become more megalomaniac and live in their own fantasy world. And so he says, I’m going to annihilate, I can do it. And that’s all he’s got now.
There’s a reason that no American president has ever attacked Iran, because Iran has been a historic enemy of the States and has plotted many, many terrorist attacks that have been dismantled when the FBI and other services protected democracy. And now Trump keeps provoking them, like he wants the whole world to burn down because he’s becoming more and more hated.
Waj: There’s this movie that came out a couple of years ago, Kenneth Branagh is a Russian oligarch. And in this movie, he has access to a technology in which time collapses. Right. So forward time and backwards time, he can make them both merge.
And if they merge at the same time, the manner and universe and time will collapse. So he decides, I’m going to do that. I’ve used it to make money, but I’m going to do that because I’m dying of cancer. And if I die, the world should die. So the whole plot of the movie is you have this insane megalomaniac, a Russian oligarch who has decided the whole world should end because he’s about to end. And so they have to capture the technology and kill him before he does it.
I’ve thought about this a lot because to me, it seems like Donald Trump knows he’s dying. I don’t know if he’s going to last, just his health. And he’s decided, much like the broligarchs, they know climate change is real.
They know devastation is upon us instead of using their wealth and their resources to save humanity. They’re like, we’re going to bunker down. You’re all going to die like Dr. Strangelove. Then we’re going to take our penis shaped space rockets. Then we’re going to go live on Mars, which is the dumbest idea on earth. And then we’re going to live forever augmented by AI. This is my read on it, Ruth, but you’re the expert.
Ruth: Yes, there’s definitely been a move to hugely augment the grift. And I see this globally.
If you look around, sure, there are some exceptions like Bukele, who’s young, and a couple of others, but these guys are not getting any younger, this cohort. And even in China, people are increasingly restless. I think all the time about the 2022 protests, 79 universities had them. There are a lot of protests that we just don’t hear about because China doesn’t want us to hear about them.
It’s like all these guys are doing the most harm possible, making the most money, the most corruption, because they know that the world is changing and we’re living in a historic moment of a renaissance of protest all over the world. The world is changing and these guys are grabbing everything they can while they can.
And this is happening at an accelerated rate in the United States. The pace at which things have happened in the US, the destruction, the corruption, the malfeasance, it doesn’t resemble the early years of even Putin or Erdogan or the others. It’s hugely accelerated.
So they’re just trying to get everything they can and consolidate as much power as they can. But they haven’t succeeded to realize Trump’s fantasy of dictatorship before he became too unpopular. And that’s the dilemma they’re in now. That’s why he’s getting so aggressive.
Waj: You just saw Donald Trump today at the UN, CNN’s Kaitlan Collins was there. Trump had kicked out CNN, Politico and MSNOW because he didn’t like the fact that they had negative coverage about him. And he said, I’m surprised CNN is here covering me. And Kaitlan’s like, the United Nations allowed us in, sir. We saw solidarity for the first time ever, corporate media grew, like, I wouldn’t say a spine, but like part of part of a spine. And now as of yesterday, PBS, NPR, and everyone is saying like, we’re not even going to cover him. We’re not going to, uh, have his audio.
Ruth: That’s right. This is very, very important. And I, I actually was surprised that Fox joined it. I also want to mention that Murdoch owns The Wall Street Journal. They have been hitting Trump hard on corruption.
Waj: And the economy, because that’s what they’re interested in, but they’re, they’re doing all kinds of critical stuff.
Ruth: Trump’s becoming more paranoid, which is something that I talk about in Strongmen, that the longer they’re in power and the worse they do, the more they are paranoid. So the White House is now his safe space, but he wants these safe spaces all over Washington. And so the “Trump Arch” is about grandiosity, but he announced there’s also going to be a military observation deck. I’ve been studying bad people for too long. And I thought, oh, how interesting. A military observation deck where you could put people who could shoot at protesters.
Now we’re seeing that he’s also claiming it’s for national security. There’s a very real desire to have a bunker. The ballroom is his ego and it’s the way he’s going to get donations from donors and stuff. But the ballroom was always an excuse for the bunker underneath. And the way he talks about it is highly revealing. He says, there’s going to be a military hospital. And so it’s his fears that he’s talking about out loud.
Waj: I’ve been following this. That ballroom is going to cost a hundred million, 200 million, 300, 400 million. First he says you’re not going to pay for it. Then he says you’re going to pay for it. Oh, and it’s 1 billion. My bad. I’m going to use taxpayer dollars. Oops. I already have used taxpayer dollars. It’s not a ballroom. It’s a bunker. It’s not a bunker. It’s a military complex.
I’m not making any of this up folks. And then people are like, cool, cool. Just destroying the people’s house to create a $1 billion military complex, even though right across you have the Pentagon.
Ruth: You know, when you have people like Trump in office, you are paying for your own repression because your tax dollars are used to fund ICE and fund all the people who repress you. So you pay for your own repression in an autocracy. It’s a kind of a basic thing that is kind of shocking, but that’s what happens.
Waj: That’s why I love Ruth because she lays it all out and I just wait and I can then jump in because as you were, right before you were saying this, I brought up this clip to share with you, or rather this: The attorney for the 28 year old DoorDash driver who was shot by an ICE agent in Austin, Texas, says his client is facing paralysis after being transferred from the hospital into ICE custody as a bullet remains lodged in his back. He has lost movement on the entire left side of his body.
And the latest reveals that ICE has taken him to detention after shooting him, paralyzing the left side of his body, rather than taking him to the hospital. He has received no pain medication and had to sleep on the floor. And yet we still have both Republicans and Democrats that say we should keep funding ICE.
**Ruth: **You get these state agencies that become like paramilitaries and they are training them to be brutal. You have to get the right people in those agencies, meaning the wrong people, so that lawlessness happens. Disregard for human life is built in to the mission and the way that you do your job. We all know the stories where a lot of people recruited by ICE already had criminal records.
And now they are trying to push through a population re-engineering scheme to transform our multiracial, multi-faith democracy into a white Christian male dominated ethnostate through mass deportation. And this was always Bannon’s fever dream and Miller’s and it goes back to Great Replacement Theory.
And they are using the resources of the U S now to fund all these far-right parties in Europe, which also support White Christian ethnostates, and the far right in Latin America.
**Waj: **So it’s Chile, Argentina, El Salvador, etc. The rise of the AFD in Germany, where they publicly thank Elon Musk, who has promoted the conspiracies and the neo-Nazi conspiracies through Twitter, including re-migration, a neo-Nazi white supremacist term only used in those circles that has now gone mainstream because it has been tweeted out at least three times by the Trump administration, which calls for an ethnic cleansing of the West of Brown and Black people. We now know that Donald Trump openly says repeatedly that Black and Brown people come from shithole countries, which is what he said in the first Trump administration.
Regarding Elon Musk, did you see his pro-eugenicist tweet against the Jews two weeks ago, where he’s talking about Jewish genetics, they’re eugenicists, they’re racists, they want to create a new order for techno fascists and broligarchs before, of course, they abscond with everything and go to Mars.
So Trump is meeting with Xi Jinping. Why is Trump meeting with Xi after constantly demonizing China? Well, US corporations desperately want access to the massive Chinese market. The White House invited corporate executives like Bezos, Altman, Dell, etc., to join the dinner with Trump and Xi in Washington.
I mean, why the hell are these broligarchs meeting Trump and the authoritarian dictator of Xi in the White House, Ruth?
Ruth: That’s how oligarchy works. There’s a lot of contradictory messaging going on around China because the GOP has its anti-Communism rhetoric and a programs to investigate Chinese infiltration of U.S. universities.
But Trump admires Xi, as well as the leader of North Korea, another communist dictator. Trump is never going to be anti-China. He wants to do as many deals as possible. He wants the level of power that Xi has. And he admires him and adulates him for that reason. So he will also never stand in the way of Chinese imperialist aggression in Taiwan.
**Waj: **I thought he was anti-Communist. I thought he was anti-war. I thought he was going to release the Epstein files. I thought he was going to reduce inflation. I thought he was going to drain the swamp.
**Ruth: **Mussolini said he was going to drain the swamp, in fact he invented the term, and we all know how that worked out.
