The Brooklyn Rail

The American people are split on some of Trump’s domestic policies, but they are not at all split on Trump’s policy toward Putin’s Russia and Ukraine. In an NBC poll taken March 7–11, the question was Where do your sympathies lie in the war between Russia and Ukraine? And the answer was: Ukraine, 61%, Russia 2%. What are your feelings toward Russia? Positive, 6%, Negative 68%. And toward Putin? Positive 3%, Negative 84%. Support for Ukraine and the Ukrainian people in the US is enormous and growing. Support for Putin is nearly non-existent. If public sympathy is everything, how much longer will Trump be able to fly in the face of it as he turns the US status in the world upside down to support Putin’s invasion of Ukraine?

Trump’s sympathies are on display for all to see. On March 18, Trump spent almost two hours on the phone with Putin, talking about Ukraine (after Putin kept Trump waiting and publicly mocked him). There was no representative from Ukraine included on this call. The call was not recorded and no notes were kept. But right after the call, Trump advocated that the US give up NATO command, something we have maintained since President Eisenhower. Putin doesn’t want Ukraine in NATO, and Trump has already conceded that, but now Putin doesn’t want the US in NATO, and Trump may end up going along with that, as well, to placate Putin.

It is clear to everyone besides Trump and his minions that Putin has no desire for peace. He loves war and needs war to maintain his position domestically, in the same way that Netanyahu needs the war on Gaza. They both love and need war. Since Trump has already given up nearly everything Ukraine would have negotiated for, there is really no hope for a secure peace in Ukraine as long as Trump is in power. With Putin, the only way to peace is through strengthening the Ukrainians.

Why is Trump so willing to go against the American people on this? As Timothy Snyder has said, Trump is acting like Vladimir Putin and Elon Musk are his only real constituents. But Putin and Musk can’t keep him in power if the American people don’t want him to be, and his siding with Putin over Ukraine may be the edge of the wedge.

Thousands of Ukrainian children have been abducted from their parents and taken to Russia since the war began. It has now come to light that Trump’s State Department has stopped funding the tracking of these children and the records of these children may have been deleted when President Trump signed an executive order in January halting almost all foreign aid spending. The information on the abducted children was to be shared with Europol and the International Criminal Court, to secure their return. Ukrainian officials say 20,000 Ukrainian children have been abducted. In 2023, a Russian official boasted that Russia had taken 700,000 children from conflict zones in Ukraine to Russia.¹

A federal judge found that Trump disobeyed his court order to stop the planes carrying alleged Venezuelan gang members from the US to prison in El Salvador under the authority of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 and that this was an extrajudicial rendition. Trump called the federal judge who made the order a “Radical Left Lunatic,” and said he should be impeached. Chief Justice of the Supreme Court John Roberts immediately responded to that, saying impeachment is not the way to deal with a judge who makes a decision you don’t like, and that, for the last 200 years, the appellate review process has worked just fine. Another US District judge found that Musk’s role in dismantling USAID likely violated the Constitution in multiple ways. And on March 20, yet another federal judge ordered Elon Musk and DOGE to delete their huge haul of personal information on Americans that they took from the Social Security Administration. This cache includes Social Security numbers, medical records, mental health records, hospitalization records, drivers’ license numbers, bank and credit card information, tax information, income history, work history, birth and marriage certificates, and home and work addresses. A constitutional crisis is lining up on a number of fronts.

Barely two months into the regime, Americans are increasingly showing signs of crisis fatigue. The daily, sometimes hourly onslaught of bad news and disinformation gushing out of the White House, and the real-life effects of Trump’s policy shifts, make it hard to maintain any kind of equilibrium. Will Social Security checks be delayed? Will tariff-driven price increases continue and lead to recession or worse? Will medical research continue? Will vaccines be available in the future? Will we go to war with Canada?

It’s the anaesthetic imperative, to be detached from reality. I’m not sure when Special K kicked in as a regular thing for Elon Musk, but it fits the gamer-boy profile. As Ezra Klein said to Kara Swisher, “He’s the smartest fifteen-year-old boy in the world.” Swisher knows Musk well. The way he takes slights and plots revenge is very much like Trump. Their fathers were both sick tyrants who were incapable of showing love for their sons. Both Trump and Musk are cosplaying a silly version of “being a man,” with a lot of, as Swisher says, “little-dick energy.”

It now appears that the thing with Trump and Musk could go on for some time. Trump has always needed a fixer and an enforcer (Roy Cohn, Michael Cohen, now Elon), to do his dirty work for him, and as long as Elon wants to do that, he’ll have a place with Trump. And now that Tesla’s tanking has become more public, where else does he need to be?

Musk believes that civilization is at an end and we need to get off of this planet. Many of the other billionaire tech bros share this view and are obsessed with life extension by any means and interplanetary travel. And they’ve concluded that democracy is a bad idea. They don’t have a vision of something to replace it with, exactly, but they know they want to burn it down now. It’s a kind of techno-authoritarian AI millenarianism.

Musk was one of the first ones to raise alarms about AI. At first, he said AI would probably treat us like housecats. Now, he talks about super highways running over us like ants and anthills and he recently told the clueless Ted Cruz that the likelihood of AI overlords enslaving humans is 20% likely in less than 10 years.

Software entrepreneur Curtis Yarvin is one of the prophets of this anti-democratic movement toward a techno-fascist authoritarianism modeled on Silicon Valley start-ups. He describes himself as a “Carlylean,” as in Thomas Carlyle, who thought democracy would destroy itself in the 19^th century. “I’m a Carlylean more or less the way a Marxist is a Marxist. My worship of Thomas Carlyle, the Victorian Jesus, is no adolescent passion—but the conscious choice of a mature adult. I will always be a Carlylean, just the way a Marxist will always be a Marxist.”

Yarvin’s Carlyle is extremely selective. It is the Carlyle of parts of Heroes and Hero-Worship and his History of Frederick the Great (that Joseph Goebbels read to Hitler in the bunker in 1945).

Yarvin’s philosophy has been the perfect vehicle for the new Musk Trumpism because it is based in social resentment and megalomaniacal belief in one’s personal superiority. And it relies on technology to finally rise above “the (despicable, disposable) People” below.

Yarvin, like Trump, has nothing but contempt for “the People:” “The basic problem of Tory democracy,” Yarvin wrote,“ is that the masses suck.” And he sees things in black and white terms politically: “Right represents peace, order and security; left represents war, anarchy and crime.” In the end, Yarvin believes, the Right must take over control of the government and institute a non-democratic state led by elite titans of industry . . . like Elon Musk!