Unholy Alliances

Hannah Arendt, born in 1906 into a German-Jewish family, escaped Nazi Germany in 1933, eventually immigrating to the United States in 1941. She held a number of academic positions at various American universities until her death in 1975. Her best-known works include: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), a study of the Nazi and Stalinist regimes that generated a wide-ranging debate on the nature and historical antecedents of the totalitarian phenomenon; and Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the trial of a major Nazi perpetrator in which she coined the term “banality of evil.” She wrote, "The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.”

Our increasingly likely End Times began in 1980 with an alliance of social conservatives—a group that included fossil fuel tycoons, Goldwater Republicans and the Southern Baptist Convention, the latter of which mobilized 50 million evangelical Christians to vote—for the first time—for Republican candidate Reagan for president. This coalition, blending neoconservative “noble lies” inspired by Leo Strauss and Milton Friedman’s neoliberal deregulation, aimed to reshape America into an anti-rational, pliable society. Fossil fuel elites and fundamentalist leaders like Jerry Falwell sought to gut public education, offshore jobs, and erode the Church-State divide, fostering a Christian nationalist culture.

In 1971, Reagan, then California governor, had told State Senator James Mills that Ezekiel’s prophecy identified Russia as “Magog,” a godless power doomed to attack Israel, signaling Christ’s imminent return. His biographer, Edmund Morris, noted Reagan’s fixation on Ezekiel as his “favorite book of prophecy,” recounting a 1988 Oval Office discussion where he linked Gog to Moscow, unsettling aides. Michael Reagan confirmed his father’s belief that he lived in the “last days” and hoped to witness the Second Coming. This apocalyptic zeal made Reagan an ideal vessel for political manipulation.

In 1980, Republican strategists, allied with fossil fuel tycoons and the Southern Baptist Convention, saw Reagan’s End Times obsession as a tool to mobilize 50 million evangelicals. By anointing him as a divinely inspired leader, they harnessed his charisma to hoodwink Christians into supporting policies that enriched elites while ignoring climate destruction. Reagan’s coalition promoted neoliberal deregulation and anti-intellectualism, gutting environmental protections and prioritizing oil profits. His administration’s denial of early climate warnings, like those from the 1970s Limits to Growth study, reflected a thanatos-driven embrace of collapse, masked as divine will, in service of greed. The irony is stark: Christians, believing they serve God, became the tools of those who would sacrifice humanity’s future for profit—in biblical terms, Mammonites.

Reagan’s tax cuts for the wealthy deepened inequality, creating economic despair among the working-class, who were lured into churches preaching biblical literalism and cultural warfare. This alliance, exploiting decisions like Engel v. Vitale (1962) and Roe v. Wade (1973), framed secularism as an existential threat, priming believers for anti-intellectualism. Reagan’s era also saw the rise of cable news and talk radio which, alongside evangelical media, amplified Christian nationalist narratives, setting the stage for the internet’s algorithmic disinformation that would later fuel Trump’s kayfabe politics.

Decades of wage stagnation and job offshoring, begun by Reagan’s policies, fueled resentment and desperation among the white working class. Progressive acquiescence to neoliberal policies, like Clinton’s trade deals and welfare cuts, deepened working-class despair, inadvertently bolstering the evangelical base’s susceptibility to Republican manipulation.

A generation later, the time was ripe for Trump to play political messiah. The New Apostolic Reformation’s Lance Wallnau cast Trump as a Cyrus-like savior in 2015, promising to restore a mythical Christian America. Ironically, Trump is arguably the most unpleasant person in American history; jealous, petty and greedy, an unforgiving narcissist; a vindictive ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic racist; a serial liar, a serial predator and proud of it; an Islamophobic, sociopathic, megalomaniacal demagoge; a capricious bully and self-serving, repulsive con artist without a shred of conscience.

On May 5, 2025, Kristen Welker asked, "Don't you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as President,” and Trump answered, “I don't know.” This after having sworn to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States when he took the oath of office in January. Trump represents an extinction-level threat to all of humanity and all life on Earth, to say nothing of the Constitutional Republic of the United States. Like autocrats throughout history who have caused mass suffering, it all goes back to their childhood family dynamics; it all comes down to psychology.

Child abuse is often the experience of too much or not enough, writes Mary Trump, Ph.D., in her 2020 book Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created The World’s Most Dangerous Man, currently the US president. The fourth of five children, Donald Trump was two when his mother was hospitalized for six months for multiple surgeries. Her absence at that critical age amplifying a regrettable lifelong lack of emotional presence in Donald’s mothering. “She was the kind of mother who used her children to comfort herself rather than comforting them. She attended to them when it was convenient for her, not when they needed her to,” writes Mary. Whereas his mother was needy and “prone to self-pity and flights of martyrdom,” Trump’s father seemed devoid of emotionality or empathy. To Trump's father, Fred, neediness of any kind meant weakness. Humiliating his children, sowing divisiveness, and bestowing money were Fred Trump's love languages. Mary Trump describes Fred as a “high-functioning sociopath” who “seemed to have no emotional needs at all. I never saw any man in my family cry or express affection for one another in any way other than the handshake that opened and closed any encounter,” she writes.

Donald Trump, with a depleted, absent mother and sociopathic father, lacked any model for empathy, vulnerability, and reciprocity. In fact, writes Mary, such qualities were dangerous in the Trump family. Empathy had no value or upside. “My uncle does not understand that he or anybody else has intrinsic worth.” Rather, what mattered in the Trump family was wielding power and making money. Of utmost importance was gaining Fred’s approval, which was capriciously given and unevenly applied.

Donald Trump chose to mimic his father: shunning neediness, suppressing most emotions, and bullying and humiliating others while taking credit for both his and others’ successes. Admitting failure or fault would have been seen as intolerable acts of weakness. This was seen in the May 5 interview, during which Trump said that the everything positive in the US economy was his doing, and everything negative was the result of his predecessor, Joe Biden—an absurd proposition that is consistent with his lifelong pattern of lying, no different than that of a toddler. Last week, after Trump’s Commerce Department released a report showing the US economy shrank in the first three months of the year—before Trump unleashed the tariff taunts—Trump took zero responsibility. “This is Biden, and you can even say the next quarter is sort of Biden,” he said during a Cabinet meeting. Meanwhile, the worries about a recession are growing. Asked if he was willing to send the economy into a recession as part of a longer-term fix, he dodged: “Look, yeah, it’s—everything’s OK. What we are—I said, this is a transition period. I think we’re going to do fantastically.” Asked if a recession was coming, he answered, “Anything can happen.”

His cascade from childhood deprivation and over-empowerment to an adulthood personality disorder that Mary Trump describes is all too familiar to therapists who work with narcissists. Her uncle, she says, meets all nine of the DSM-V characteristics of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. In addition, she writes, he may also have antisocial and dependent personality disorder traits along with possible learning disorders that can affect mood, behavior, and cognition. Hiding and denying deep feelings of early abandonment and shame can exact a terrible toll, as he has demonstrated byt his ravenous hunger for approval (to compensate for an inner emptiness) his seething rage, and his "disposal” of people, once they are no longer useful to him. His feelings of powerlessness are displaced, with the weak and vulnerable becoming targets. When humiliated, he moves into alternative realities, like drawing a fanciful projected path of a hurricane with a sharpie. He also tends to dehumanize women and men alike, reflecting his father’s view that “in life, there can only be one winner, and everybody else is a loser.”

Mary Trump places prime importance on how seeking his father’s approval motivated Donald. And she offers her interpretation of his seeming affinity for dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un. They bear “more than a passing psychological resemblance” to his father, she argues. “Every time you hear Donald talking about how something is the greatest, the best, the biggest, the most tremendous,” writes Mary, it is essentially the voice of a boy playing to an audience of one — his father — from whom he sought approval his entire life.

As Trump faces scrutiny beyond any he has ever had to face, and societal crises beyond what most of us alive will ever faced, Mary Trump suggests that her uncle is doubling down on rigid, childlike responses. “Donald today is much as he was at three years old: incapable of growing, learning, or evolving, unable to regulate his emotions, moderate his responses, or take in and synthesize information.” What's worse is that each time he violates healthy norms with little consequence, he becomes more emboldened and grandiose, and the collateral damage mounts.

The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump is a 2017 book edited by Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist, containing essays from 27 psychiatrists, psychologists, and other mental health professionals describing the "clear and present danger" that US President Donald Trump's mental health poses to the "nation and individual well being." The authors argue that Trump's mental health affects the mental health of the people of the United States and that he places the country at grave risk of involving it in a war and of undermining democracy itself due to his dangerous pathology.

Consequently, the authors claim that Trump's presidency represents an emergency which not only allows but requires psychiatrists in the United States to raise alarms. While it has been repeatedly claimed that they have broken the American Psychiatric Association's Goldwater rule – which states that it is unethical for psychiatrists to give professional opinions about public figures without examining them in person – the authors maintain that pointing out danger and calling for an evaluation is different from diagnosis. They have criticized the American Psychiatric Association for changing professional norms and standards, stating that it is dangerous to turn reasonable ethical guidelines into a gag rule under political pressure.

As The Verge reports on how the Trump administration has been dismantling every institution that protects consumers. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) described Trump’s mass deregulation as "sabotage” that is “turning the country into a grifter’s paradise. By gutting watchdogs like the CFPB, FTC, and SEC to tying regulators’ hands, Trump has opened the floodgates to scams, fraud, and grift at every level. Under Trump, the United States isn’t just the Wild West; it’s open season on working families’.”

As Stephen Geist writes, “Since the day Trump came down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his first run for POTUS, he has proven himself to be a narcissistic, self-dealing, corrupt, lying carnival clown. And now, since January 20, 2025, Trump has once again had control of the U.S. nuclear codes and, with it, the fate of all humanity. What’s so alarming is how millions of Americans have contorted their values to align with Trump’s. The worse he has gotten, and the more of a threat he has proved himself to be, the more popular he has become. This is why the second Trump presidency is an extinction-level threat to American democracy — a deliberate and quiet attempt to destroy democracy from within."

“Tuesday, April 29, 2025, marked the first 100 days of Trump’s term as POTUS #47. From launching a trade war that is decimating the economy to emboldening Vladimir Putin’s aggression to terminating tens of thousands of critical federal workers, these first 100 days have been a disaster. In 2024, during the campaign, Trump pretended his ‘Dictator on Day 1’ talk was just a joke. One hundred days in, it’s clear he was not joking.”

James Carville: “If Trump sees himself going down, he's going to try to take the whole country with him. He doesn't like our laws, he doesn't like our Constitution, he doesn't like our people, he calls them fat, he calls them poorly educated slobs, stupid. He is not loyal to the US. He does not like this country. He criticizes it all the time, has an affection for dictators, and has an affection for authoritarianism. We ought to be on high, high alert. I believe the man genuinely, fundamentally wants to hurt this country.”

Meanwhile, as Dave Pell writes, "After having made the fateful decision to give Donald Trump a second turn in the Oval Office, to most of the world, America's brand is Trump. From the inside, we see a divided country in a fight for the future (and maybe the survival) of democracy. From the outside, we're the country that elected Trump again — the Oval Office outbursts and embarrassments, the humiliating interactions with foreign leaders, the abandonment of allies, the siding with dictators, the tariffs, the threats to take over other countries, the constant lies, the authoritarian behaviors, the sending of untried people seeking asylum to foreign gulags...you may hate it all, but it's our brand now. This is us. And it's not going to be easy to undo. On the national level, our allies are already looking to make deals that don't include us. But there's also the personal level, from Canadian hockey fans booing our national anthem, to a dramatic drop in international travel to the US, to European shoppers deciding they'd rather buy products from non-American brands. The long red tie, the fake hair, the orange makeup—we're all wearing it, and it's not a good look.”

Meanwhile, on January 20, 2025—ironically, Martin Luthor King Jr. Day and the first day of Trump's second term—he released from prison hundreds of mostly white, male domestic terrorists, effectively a personal militia, whom he had incited to storm the Capitol and assault police officers on January 6, 2021. Now, 100 days into his term, he is defying the United States Supreme Court, and getting away with it. No one is getting fined, and no one is going to jail.

Meanwhile, tech billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, aware of a looming polycrisis—resource depletion, food production decline, and population collapse by 2030—prepare bunkers and space stations as an “exit strategy." Musk’s X platform amplifies MAGA disinformation, while his Department of Government Efficiency accesses sensitive data, enabling coercion. Thiel’s Palantir profiles migrants, and his neocameralist vision, inspired by Curtis Yarvin, seeks corporate governance over democracy. Their AI optimism, claiming solutions to climate and health crises, masks a speculative bubble. Supporting far-right causes, like Musk’s endorsement of Germany’s AfD and Thiel’s claim that “freedom and democracy are incompatible,” they align with autocrats like Vladimir Putin, who benefits from Trump’s weakening of NATO.

Mass surveillance via Section 702 of FISA and Big Tech’s data collection creates a panopticon stifling dissent, with DOGE’s access to biometric and financial data enabling blackmail akin to China’s Xinjiang model. Social media, particularly X, drowns out truth with bots and algorithms, amplifying disinformation. America’s mental health crisis—rising suicides, anxiety, and isolation—reflects a society failing Maslow’s basic needs, with empty homes—owned by banks and hedge funds—outnumbering the homeless, and an increasing number of people relying on GoFundMe campaigns to secure healthcare. This atomization, worsened by eroded trust, makes the public vulnerable to manipulation.

Climate tipping points are already being crossed, and cascade effects are imminent. Trump’s fossil fuel push, gutting EPA protections and dismissing climate scientists, will accelerate this crisis. Tariffs and deregulation, sold as populist, will spike inflation and tank GDP, hurting the MAGA base most. Fossil fuel depletion threatens industrial and agricultural collapse, while elites exploit shocks to consolidate wealth, as seen during the Covid pandemic. Project 2025, a Heritage Foundation blueprint, advocates a unitary executive in charge of an increasingly theocratic government.

Meanwhile, as reported in The Guardian, “a national network of American neofascist fight clubs is endorsing youth-oriented offshoots aimed at grooming the next generation of racist activists. So-called ‘active clubs’ have proliferated across the US and are a combination of fitness and mixed martial arts groups that often espouse neo-Nazi and fascist ideologies, openly taking their historical cues from the Third Reich’s obsession with machismo and European soccer hooliganism. [They are] perhaps the most dangerous form of far-right political organizing today, with links to other militant organizations, including Patriot Front, layered with ideologies promoting a US race war and using the popularity of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) as a gateway to recruiting.”

Meanwhile, over 75% of President Trump's $1.69 trillion-dollar budget is for the military (60%) and police (16%). As Yuval Noah Harari writes, “Concerns about the stability of the liberal world order mounted after Trump was first elected US president in 2016…we now have a clear picture of the post-liberal world disorder. The liberal vision of the world as a co-operative network is replaced by the vision of the world as a mosaic of fortresses. This is being realized all around us — walls are going up and drawbridges are raised. If this continues to be implemented, the short-term results will be trade wars, arms races and imperial expansion. The ultimate results will be global war, ecological collapse and out-of-control AI…We can be saddened and outraged by these developments and do our best to reverse them, but there is no longer any excuse for being surprised.”