Things Fall Apart
Gangster rule take hold at home and abroad
August 2025 will live in infamy of the darkest months in American history—and there’s still a week to go.
It’s a month that saw President Donald Trump try his best to accede to gangster rule overseas at the same time he started to impose it at home. Just as Trump met with his idol, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, in Alaska, federal officers and National Guard troops occupied the nation’s capital on the flimsiest of pretexts. As has become clear over the past few weeks, the road to dictatorship is paved with lies, delusions, and contempt for observable reality.
Take the Alaska summit: Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin, visibly giddy to meet with the Russian dictator he so admires for the first time and strike a deal to end the war in Ukraine on terms exceptionally favorable to the Kremlin. Indeed, Trump’s personal affection for Putin goes well beyond mere reverence; he’s smitten with him and can’t help but show it. The world witnessed the appalling spectacle of an aggressive and murderous dictator receiving the warmest of all possible welcomes on American soil as his military continued to down missiles, drones, and bombs on Ukrainian towns and cities. Merely by holding the summit itself, Trump gifted the Kremlin an easy diplomatic victory and received nothing in return.
Worse still, Trump abandoned his own call for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine and effectively endorsed Putin’s own plan to absorb Ukrainian territory—including land his military doesn’t even occupy—for an empty Kremlin promise not to invade again. Only Putin’s own unwillingness to give up on his ultimate goal of subordinating Ukraine and eliminating it as a sovereign nation prevented Trump from agreeing to a dishonorable carve-up in Alaska. So alarmed were America’s European allies that they joined Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy en masse when he traveled to the White House for a post-summit conference with Trump.
That meeting yielded vague and uncertain promises of security guarantees for Ukraine, promises that Trump went on to undermine in an effort to pressure Kyiv to accept the Kremlin’s terms. Moreover, the administration’s actions—including placing restrictions on Ukraine’s use of American-provided intelligence and hardware to strike inside Russia—make plain that it still sees Kyiv as the party that needs to be coerced by the United States, not Moscow. Trump himself has reiterated that he sees the world through the eyes of a gangster, essentially telling Fox News hosts that Ukraine started the war by resisting a larger and supposedly more powerful Russia’s demands to forfeit its territory and sovereignty.
Even those dubious promises of security guarantees manage to express Trump’s gangster principles. Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent floated the idea that the United States would add a ten percent mark-up to weapons it will sell to European nations to provide to Ukraine in order to cover the costs of potential “air cover” for said guarantees. Whether or not this extortion scheme actually comes to fruition, it certainly reflects Trump’s own repeatedly asserted view of America’s alliances as a protection racket.
Perhaps the only saving grace of the Alaska summit will be Trump’s determination to reveal his own impotence on the global stage. He has given himself no cards to play here, making one threat after another against Putin that he predictably refuses to carry out—leaving himself with zero credibility moving forward. Much the same goes for any pledges and commitments he might make to Ukraine or anyone else. Put another way, there’s no reason for anyone to take Trump seriously as a diplomat—even if America’s allies and Ukraine feel they must entertain his delusions for obvious reasons.
Hardly a surprise, then, that Trump’s delusional diplomacy benefits no one so much as the Kremlin.
Matters are far worse at home, where Trump has used a non-existent crime wave as an obvious pretext to occupy the nation’s capital, intimidate its residents, and threaten other largely Democratic cities. It’s a move that’s as absurd and disproportionate to the alleged problem as it is dangerous to both American democracy and the physical safety of residents of the greater Washington, DC area. ICE and other agencies function as de facto secret police, hiding behind masks as they randomly snatch residents off the streets and set up checkpoints as if they’ve been deployed to Baghdad in the summer of 2006. That Republican-run state governors have sent National Guard troops to DC to participate in the crackdown only makes its partisan nature transparent. Trump has promised to impose this police state on other cities across the country, likely starting with active-duty troops on the streets of Chicago or Baltimore.
Meanwhile, Trump—or more precisely, his appointees—used the power of the state to go after his perceived political opponents and erstwhile allies. John Bolton, one of Trump’s first term national security advisers, saw the FBI raid his home after Trump fulminated against his troublesome former aide. Similarly, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Housing Financing Agency has made frivolous criminal mortgage fraud referrals for Trump foes like California Sen. Adam Schiff, New York state Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook; Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed a partisan flunkey to investigate these baseless charges.
Trump has also threatened to prosecute former president Barack Obama based on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s attempt to rewrite the history of Russian intervention in support of Trump’s 2016 campaign. Add Trump’s removal of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the wake of a subpar economic data report to his administration’s ongoing purge of national security institutions and his shakedowns of major national media outlets like CBS and universities like Columbia, and it’s apparent that the United States has begun a steep descent into a delusional, gangster-style dictatorship.
Gangster regimes have never been terribly rational; indeed, classical fascism set itself in direct opposition to reason. The Trump administration’s headlong flight from reality shouldn’t be surprising, no matter how shocking and dangerous we might find it. Trump and his administration will only retreat further into delusion as their policies take effect, with tariffs driving up costs at the same time public services erode and his own popularity nosedives.
As for the rest of us, it’s time to brace ourselves for the hard path ahead and take comfort in small pleasures while we still can. Founded on self-deception and run like an extortion racket, Trump’s gangster regime will inevitably fail—it’s only a question of long it will take and how much damage will be done before it does.