Trump and the Furies of Empire

Another war, and we are plunged into the latest iteration of the violent, incomprehensible chaos that seems to define our times. Bombs drop, missiles fly, innocent civilians die; markets gyrate and the prices of energy, food, and materials spike. A tenuous ceasefire holds briefly, or maybe not? Back home we stare at the unfolding madness on our little screens and argue with each other about what it all means. We post memes, share half-baked theories, and wallow in our electronic echo chambers as we pile new worries on top of widespread unease about AI, inflation, political polarization, ICE raids, environmental deterioration, chemicals in our food and water, and the flagrant erosion of social norms.

The U.S. war against Iran, commenced in February, once again reminds us that at the center of the mad swirl — at the locus of modern anxieties, bewilderments, hopes, hatreds, and divisions — is one particular figure. The contemporary mind is haunted, harassed, and entranced by a specter: the orange skin, the dyed golden hair, the red baseball cap, the baggy suit and shiny elongated tongue of a tie. The planet-sized ego. The wild, incoherent, often contradictory verbiage. The gambles that pay off, and those that don’t. The dizzying roller-coaster ride on which this man has taken the whole world in his unnerving quest to “Make America Great Again.”

That ubiquitous name: Trump!

In the divided modern mind, Trump is “the man who can save Western civilization,” as Hungary’s Viktor Orban has said, or he is the man who “will tear our democracy down,” as former President Obama has warned.

“God raised up Trump,” claims Franklin Graham, son of evangelical icon Billy Graham. Or if you prefer, “Trump is the perfect person to take us to the apocalypse,” as Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard told The New Yorker in 2016. Either way, Trump’s symbolic power is evident. And perhaps that kind of symbolism is the best way — maybe the only way — to truly understand the place that Trump occupies in our collective consciousness.

But what is he a symbol of? What might he represent?

In considering Trump’s name for his Iran war — “Epic Fury” — we might recall that the Furies of Greek mythology were the relentless goddesses of vengeance who pursued and tormented those guilty of sins such as murder, anger, greed, and jealousy. They were personified curses, like ghosts of the victims, haunting the offenders, driving them mad, causing fear, paranoia, and suffering.

What if the Furies came for America? What does the karma of an entire nation look like in anthropomorphic form?

If Trump is ushering us toward some sort of critical defining moment, perhaps even an apocalypse as so many seem to believe, it’s worth remembering that the definition of an apocalypse is a revealing of previously hidden truths. If we look at President Trump through a symbolic lens, what previously hidden truths are being revealed about America? What does his particular character tell us about our collective character?

Trump, in his crude way, is forcing us to confront the false stories we have told ourselves about who we are. We like to soothe ourselves with pretty talk about “democracy,” but Trump, as he balances the world on the knife-edge of war, is compelling us — or giving us an opportunity — to grapple with an unseemly truth that has been quite obvious for a long time to anyone willing to face it: we don’t really live in a democracy. We live in an oligarchic, militaristic global empire that operates largely beyond the control of “the People” our Constitution puts in charge.

That empire, in its full global dimensions, grew out of the military-industrial complex that arose after World War Two. In the ensuing decades, the American Empire killed and ousted foreign democratic leaders around the world — and these are well-established historical facts — like Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, and Salvador Allende in Chile. Since the Second World War, the U.S. has directly overthrown over a dozen foreign governments (and initiated dozens more regime-change efforts and interventions in foreign elections), including the 1953 Iran coup, which planted the seeds for Iran’s hatred and mistrust of us, and arguably led to the current war. Through all that, the American people and their politicians carried on with their somnambulant, self-soothing rhetoric about democracy. We are bringing democracy and freedom to the world, the TV told us, and we nodded along. Then came the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK; Vietnam, Nicaragua, Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza. Still we focused on money, cars, houses, pop culture, professional sports, consumerism — the American Dream — and lulled ourselves with fanciful stories about democracy.

But now Trump is here with his wild antics, a Jack Nicholson chopping through the bathroom door with an axe — Here’s Johnny! — to confront us with the startling fact that he has the power to do just about anything he wants. The national-security state that grew up in America after World War Two is not beholden to our vaunted, world-renowned American democracy; it does not obey the will of the People; it does not bow to international laws; it does what it wants. At a whim, an imperial President sitting atop a vast global arsenal of high-tech weaponry can decide that “a whole civilization will die tonight.”

Many had hoped that Trump would end the “forever wars” and tame the “deep state” as he promised on the campaign trail. “We will turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars,” he pledged. But no, Trump is now proving that on his own, a president can sweep the world into violence and profound disruption with one ill-considered move of his hand. Henry Kissinger, one of the 20th-century architects of the American Empire, said in a 2018 interview, “Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time…to force it to give up its old pretenses.”

The political left and segments of the right, nevertheless, still want to believe that Trump himself is the cause of our problems, rather than a symptom — or a symbol — of problems that have been building in our national security state and our imperial mode of life for a long time. Democrats complain, for instance, about Trump’s brazen corruption, using the office of the presidency to amass billions of dollars for himself and friends and family. But this is hardly new: most Americans have long viewed Congress as corrupt and beholden to special interests. Liberal critics also forget that Presidents Obama and Clinton converted the prestige of the presidency into personal fortunes in excess of $100M each following their terms in office, giving high-paid speeches to Wall Street banks and partnering with media companies. That sort of profiteering was once beyond the pale for an American president. When Harry Truman left office in 1953, he was practically destitute. He hopped in a convertible with his wife and drove across the country. He struggled for money, but he refused to use the prestige of the presidency for profit. “I have never felt that I should make money out of public service,” he said. How far removed are we today from that sentiment? The change didn’t happen all at once when Trump took office.

In our evolution from Truman to Trump, we can see how the rise of the national security state and the imperial presidency has distorted democracy and our national life. When Truman and his wife were driving across the country like road-tripping teenagers with no Secret Service protection and not even the security of a pension, the secretive intelligence agency of the new post-war empire was only six years old. The CIA had been established in 1947 during Truman’s term, less than six months before a confidential State Department policy planning memo written by the influential George Kennan expressly stated the overarching goal of postwar U.S. foreign policy: “We have about 50% of the world’s wealth but only 6.3% of its population…Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity.” It’s no wonder, then, that the newly formed CIA engineered foreign coups, even against democratic governments, to advance the economic interests of big corporations like the United Fruit Company and U.S. oil companies operating abroad. Truman regretted how the shadowy intelligence agency he signed into existence had wriggled free of democratic control and was operating beyond the reach of lawful scrutiny, and he even later wrote an op-ed about it, one month after President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Truman, the ex-President who had dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, feared that in the CIA he had created a monster unaccountable to the People. He left office shortly before Eisenhower greenlit the CIA-engineered 1953 coup in Iran to secure that nation’s oil resources for western interests, from which a fairly straight line can be drawn to today’s Operation Epic Fury. By the end of his term in 1960, Eisenhower, too, was warning us about “unwarranted influence . . . by the military-industrial complex.”

The metastasization of the unaccountable military-industrial complex is why Trump has not, and probably cannot, “expel the warmongers from our national security state,” as he promised during the 2024 campaign. It’s no coincidence that the rise of the military-industrial complex over the last 70 years has coincided not only with endless wars but also with the spread of a mercenary ethos that has normalized greed, the corporate takeover of politics through legalized bribery (see the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision), and the total collapse of the old-fashioned idea that a president shouldn’t profit from the presidency. So we should not be shocked that these pernicious trends have culminated in yet another Middle Eastern war while Trump and those close to him casually rake in billions from “Trump coins” and other self-dealing schemes from the Oval Office. There’s a certain honesty to his brazenness, which is part of his popular charm, because it strips away the hypocrisy. It can be quite entertaining, even satisfying in a way, to watch Trump skewer conventional liberal pieties in his uniquely irreverent, wise-cracking manner. Trump didn’t corrupt the presidency nor turn it into a lawless office on his own; rather, he took the corruption and lawlessness that had been creeping in for decades and did what he does best — made it bigger, bolder, more in-your-face.

Trump’s bloodthirsty threats to wipe out a “civilization” and bomb it “back to the Stone Age” did not come out of nowhere, but rather represent the next leap in a progression of imperial, lawless warmaking that has been going on for longer than we care to recall. George W. Bush misled us into the Iraq War, which resulted in perhaps 650,000 Iraqi deaths (by some estimates up to a million), with elaborate lies about Weapons of Mass Destruction. Liberals later lapped up President Obama’s superficial rhetoric about Hope and Change even as he rained down remote-controlled death across the Middle East, ordering approximately 540 drone strikes that killed thousands. When Trump first took office in January 2017, he “inherit[ed] a targeted killing program,” wrote the Council on Foreign Relations. In the single year before Trump took office, Obama dropped 26,000 bombs on Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen, without express Congressional authorization. His Vice President Biden, in his single presidential term, then got us entangled in the horrific violence of Ukraine and Gaza.

Still, many Americans wonder what happened to the “kinder, gentler America,” as President George Bush Sr., a former CIA Director, talked about in the early 90s, a line mocked by singer Neil Young in Rockin’ in the Free World as a “kinder gentler machine gun hand.” Trump is here to keep it real and smash smug self-deceptions: the guns of Empire aren’t kind and gentle. “We negotiate with bombs!” says Secretary of War Pete Hegseth.

It is not only in matters of war that Trump is giving us an opportunity to confront harsh realities about America, and to examine illusions about who we are. Trump’s presidency is revealing the limits of our late imperial mode in many different spheres of our national life.

Immigration, a central flashpoint in Trump’s presidency and a key to his populist appeal, is a prime example. To quote my friend Teddy Macker, “an imperium of violent, resource-stealing rapacity tectonically disrupts the lives of the people…in the regions it plunders. And the disrupted people often migrate en masse to the imperium, hoping to be saved by its riches and seeming security.” Rather than grapple with the systemic causes of immigration in an imperial state, MAGA demagogues scapegoat immigrants for America’s decline. In Trump’s ICE raids, however, cheering supporters are forced to witness the ugly cruelty of empire: masked goons roughing up poor mothers, fathers, and children. We can all see that cruelty to immigrants does not bring back the prosperity that defined earlier stages of imperial grandeur.

Progressives and liberals, too, are running up against their own illusions about immigration. They protest ICE’s abuses, but no longer protest the rapacious globalized economic system that led to the illegal importation of millions of immigrants from exploited lands across the Global South to provide cheap labor. Today’s protestors have forgotten the 90s anti-globalization protests against the NAFTA and WTO rules that undercut the wages and living standards of American workers, and the multinational corporate outsourcing of blue-collar jobs to China and other cheap-labor destinations. Progressive protestors now scream racist! at ICE agents, but fail to appreciate that the cruelty now being visited upon immigrant laborers is downstream of the pain inflicted on American blue-collar workers by globalization. And the Trump “resistance” is loath to admit that he was elected largely because he spoke directly to the pain and rage of working men and women whose American Dream vanished in the haze of the borderless globalized corporate economy. How much easier it was to bury one’s head in the sand and enjoy cheap imported phones and video games and another pair of athletic shoes. But we all can now see with our own eyes, in our own cities and neighborhoods, the ravages of a global economic empire that most Americans have numbly and passively participated in.

Some of Trump’s conservative and populist supporters are upset that he is not living up to various campaign promises, and they are starting to see that Trump may not be what they thought. They are also starting to see that perhaps America may not be what they thought. Trump-supporting conservative Christians have said they believe the path to national restoration is to forcefully affirm our identity as a Christian nation. But some, like Tucker Carlson, who was a major Trump backer until recently, are starting to notice that it is rather hard to reconcile Christ’s teachings of love and charity with messages such as Trump’s profane Easter morning tirade: “Open the F***ing Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell!” Perhaps others are noticing that Trump and many conservative nationalists seem to have little respect for Christ’s fundamental teachings, such as “love thy neighbor,” and “the love of money is the root of all evil.” Christians should perhaps ask themselves whether there is any politician, or human being anywhere on Earth, who embodies the love of money more than the gold-haired, gold-decored Donald J. Trump.

Many could also ask themselves how we can be a Christian nation when no other country on Earth has ever devoted itself more thoroughly and lovingly to money. Recall that our government’s expressly stated goal in the aftermath of World War Two was to retain, by any means necessary, 50% of the world’s wealth for 6.3% of the population (the percentages are not quite as skewed today but are still lopsided, more like 4% of the population and 25-30% of the wealth). Since then we’ve even institutionalized our avarice, tying all our public policies to one primary purpose: expansion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). It’s been almost 60 years since Robert F. Kennedy famously warned us that GDP measures everything except “that which makes life worthwhile.” He was assassinated a few months later, and no American politician today speaks in those terms, as if the assassin’s bullets silenced insights that are crucial to understanding and healing ourselves. Most politicians just keep serving up the same insipid rhetoric that has been stale for decades. Except for Trump. He doesn’t feed us pablum about the sacredness of our democracy. “We have to run it [America] like a business,” Trump says. “We will make America rich again.” An attractive sales pitch, maybe, but hardly Christian, and certainly not a message that appeals to our full human potential.

Trump is also revealing hidden truths that undermine the belief, precious to so many people, that our imperial mode of life, based on the accumulation of money, with its incessant need for perpetual growth of GDP, can ever be “sustainable.” Environmentalists on the left are appalled by his ruthless onslaught against the environment: obliterating climate change rules and regulations, cutting protections for public lands and endangered species, deregulating pesticides and toxic chemical pollution, and ramping up oil and gas production. Nevertheless, Trump is giving environmentalists a chance to face contradictions to which they have remained blind for decades. Long ago, they accepted a false, fraudulent bargain. It goes like this: raise money from big corporations and wealthy donors, set aside some public lands, save a few charismatic species, hold fancy international conferences about climate change, and pass some corporate tax credits for solar panels and wind turbines. And in exchange? Ignore the obvious central fact of life in our global industrial empire: that it must constantly grow. A constantly growing industrial economy inevitably and with mathematical certainty leads to ecological overshoot which overwhelms the short-term savings that come from the half measures that environmentalists tricked themselves into believing were “saving the planet.” A changing climate is only one symptom of our global ecological crisis. Solar panels and wind turbines add to the total energy driving the expansion of the nature-devouring economy. “Clean” energy is absorbed into the exploding energy demands of AI data centers. Increasing efficiency leads to more total consumption of energy and materials, and thus more destruction of nature, not less (due to a principle called Jevons Paradox discovered all the way back in 1865).

Sadly, many of the natural treasures that generations of conservationists worked hard to save will now be fed into the maw of the perpetually expanding industrial machine. Trump is allowing us to see that when we set aside reserves and wilderness areas, the constantly expanding, resource-hungry industrial economy ends up growing around them until the industrial machine pollutes, degrades, or outright seizes those resources, too. That’s why places like the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), which was fiercely protected by environmentalists for six decades, finally fell to oil and gas drilling under Trump with hardly a whimper. Over that 60-year period U.S. GDP rose from about $4-5 trillion to $22-23 trillion while global GDP rose from around $10-12 trillion to $100-110 trillion, building up enormous, irresistible, and still-rising demand for energy and natural resources wherever they can be found (whether in the Alaskan wilderness, Greenland, or Iran). The Trump administration has now set its grim sights on mining minerals in some of the last remaining pristine parts of the globe, the deep seas, an imminent ecological disaster that the U.S. Department of Energy claims is “necessary” to meet skyrocketing demand for “high technology devices, national defense applications, and green energy-related industries.” Read that again: the already beset oceans of our water planet will be further sacrificed for more tech, military weapons, and “green” energy.

Empire’s biggest fairytale of all may be that we can have infinite growth of GDP — more, more, more of everything forever — on a finite planet. Virtually everyone tried to bury their heads in the sand and pretend that we could find some clever way around this inconvenient fact. Trump is here to burst our illusions. Despite all the nice-sounding talk about “sustainability,” the growing global industrial economy runs on ever-increasing supplies of energy and materials, including oil and LNG and petrochemicals — a fact we are now appreciating as the closure of the Strait of Hormuz triggers inflation and economic havoc. These are elemental truths. Trump is merely exposing them. One could say Trump is the reality check that environmentalists have long needed, because he unveils the hypocrisy and unreality of “sustainability” within a paradigm predicated on limitlessness. Trump, one could even say, is the ruthless, fake-tanned Fury of our growth-based economy, the ghost of our ecological sins, here to exact revenge for our selfish fantasy that we can have our cake and eat it, too — that we can “save the planet” while also abetting a system that destroys it.

The MAGA conservatives and populists who cheer when Trump gleefully pokes holes in Democratic orthodoxies about “windmills” and climate change, however, will not get off any easier. The demoralized MAHA movement that threw its weight behind Trump, thinking that we could “Make America Great Again” and “Make America Healthy Again” at the same time, is being forced to face facts. As Trump leads the U.S. economy and its major industries (Big Chemical, Big Oil, Big Ag) on a deregulatory spree in pursuit of growth at all costs, our own health is being sacrificed…just as we have always sacrificed the health of forests, rivers, oceans, and animals to the economy. It is no coincidence that as GDP has soared over the last half century, the physical health of Americans has declined alongside wildlife populations that have plummeted by an average of 70%, while billions of pounds of pesticides are dumped on agricultural soils, 27 million acres are deforested each year worldwide, and rivers and oceans are increasingly polluted, emptied of life, and filled with plastic. Trump said that he wants to make Americans healthier, but his primary goal is growth — more money — not the physical health of the population or the biological health of planet Earth. That’s why he turned over regulation of toxic chemicals to chemical industry insiders, and signed an executive order protecting Big Ag’s controversial pesticide glyphosate, angering the MAHA movement which believes glyphosate is a dangerous carcinogen. “You’re going to have so much money you won’t know what to do with it” — that is Trump’s essential promise to the American people, not health or anything else. Few care to do the math: more growth means not only more money but also more pollution and more deforestation and more plastic in the ocean and more toxins in our food and water, which means more cancer and disease and pills and surgeries for our rapidly growing $5.3 trillion healthcare industry (sickness is Big Business). Ecological economist Herman Daly gave us a relevant term taken originally from the 19th-century writer John Ruskin: incessant GDP growth produces not only wealth but also its opposite, “illth,” e.g. illness, corruption, pollution. Both “illth” and wealth accumulate simultaneously. Trump is granting us a chance to open our eyes and confront the painful reality that our lifestyles based on the non-negotiable need for perpetual growth at all costs are neither sustainable nor compatible long-term with physical health. They never were, and never can be.

The inherent flaws in our concept of GDP include the inability of growth to deliver a constantly rising standard of living for each new generation — the core of the American Dream — creating an “affordability crisis,” which has exacerbated the intense angst and frustration we all feel, and which spurred the American people to take a chance on Trump. But such existential frustration is about much more than money; it’s about what gives our lives meaning and purpose. Compare RFK’s eloquent 1968 speech critiquing GDP’s failure to measure what makes life “worthwhile” with the simple-minded and purely pecuniary idea of a “decent life” expressed by the guru of market economics, Milton Friedman, ten years later at the dawn of the neoliberal era. “The only way in which you can be sure that people are going to have the opportunity to live a decent life,” he claimed, “is to promote the economic growth that makes it possible to have better medical care, better housing, better food, better clothing, better everything.” Nearly five decades later, we have had massive economic growth. The U.S. economy has grown 225% since 1978, global GDP is up about 350%, corporate profits have roughly tripled, and we have more billionaires than ever. But do we have “better everything?” Are we healthier and happier than ever? No, mega GDP growth did not drive commensurate improvements in overall well-being as Friedman predicted. On the contrary, the affordability crisis is squeezing practically everyone but the richest. We also have a chronic health crisis, a mental health crisis (accompanied by “deaths of despair”), an ecological crisis, and a governance crisis to boot. Growth at all costs, the organizing principle of our empire, delivered incredible wealth in some quarters but also mass miseries, creating an opening for a strongman who promises to make us great again. He too, however, is constrained by the same flawed conception of the American Dream, and so his manic efforts to restore our lost “greatness” are compounding our problems.

We shouldn’t be shocked by any of this, but we are. The knee-jerk reaction is to blame, or praise, Trump himself. But to hate Trump or love him is to miss the point that, in him, the vital characteristics of empire are laid bare.

The Trump haters, the “No Kings” protesters, want to go back to the false safety of old illusions. They want an Empire without an Emperor.

They long for the “kindler, gentler Machine gun hand.”

They want the national security state to put back on the friendly Obama mask. Hide behind the soothing rhetoric of “our democracy.” Crawl back into the hypocritical belief that our imperial mode of life can be made “sustainable.”

For the Trump haters, and the Trump lovers, too, the beginning of wisdom would be to go into a silent room, lock the door, look in the mirror, and say the magic words: I am part of the problem.

But how hard it is to face our own true selves, our own identities as citizens of the flailing American Empire. “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them,” wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in The Gulag Archipelago. “But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”

“Few would deny that there’s a palpable and growing fear and anger in our country,” Franciscan priest Richard Rohr wrote recently. “A time of national introspection must begin with self-introspection. Without our own inner searching, any of our quests for solutions and policy fixes will be based in shifting sands. I suspect that we get the leaders who mirror what we have become as a nation. They are our shadow self for all to see.”

No one wants to destroy a piece of his own heart, but those who are feeling up to it now have an opportunity to confront unpleasant truths, the ones that were previously hidden, about the parts of ourselves that are on the wrong side of the good-evil dividing line, and maybe even try to do something about them. Trump is here to reveal these truths. The bodies we’ve buried won’t stay in the ground forever. We have to do a true accounting of ourselves. We must face who we are. The Furies of Empire demand it, and they won’t let us off the hook so easily.

Image Credit: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, “Orestes Pursued by the Furies” (1862)