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Trump Has Changed And TDS With Him
When Trump did win his second term there were many people, including here, who were a bit in panic. Other characterized that as a ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ (TDS).
I had preferred Trump over the blabbering incompetent person the Democrats had put up as their candidate. I did not like Trump’s policies but I also thought that he would do just minor damage just like during his first term in office.
At first it looked like I had been right. The Alaska meeting with President Putin went reasonably well. The war in Ukraine seemed to move towards some sane outcome. His domestic policies were a bit wild but not far off from the expected trajectory.
Things have been going downward since. Something has definitely changed. But why and how this derangement happened is yet unknown.
The late December CIA attack on Putin’s residence in the Novgorod region, which includes strategic command facilities, has broken the rules that have governed relations between nuclear powers over many decades. Those relations have now deteriorated beyond fixing.
The attack on Venezuela was likewise beyond any reasonability. There is little chance that the U.S. will ever get what it wants from the country without on the ground intervention. But any commitment of troops to Caracas would end in disaster.
The administration defense of ICE goons, who clearly broke all rules of policing when they killed an innocent women, is also beyond all reasonability. There are certainly ways to explain the incident but they decided to smear the obvious victim.
That such behavior has become and will stay the norm for the Trump administration can be concluded from two recent interviews.
The first was on January 5 at CNN with Trump aide Stephen Miller:
TAPPER: So let’s — the question about who is now running Venezuela is one that even members of Congress who are big Trump supporters say they’re not quite sure about. Senate Majority Leader John Thune told CNN’s Manu Raju that he doesn’t know what President Trump meant by his assertion that the U.S. is running Venezuela. And he said he needs more information. Can you tell us what the President means when he says, is acting President Delcy Rodriguez in charge? Is she running Venezuela or not?
MILLER: Well, what the President said is true. The United States of America is running Venezuela. By definition, that’s true. Jake, we live in a law, I’m sorry, we live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time. The United States —
TAPPER: But are you saying — but in terms of day-to-day operations in Venezuela, that is president, Acting President Rodriguez, right? It’s not some sort of American emissary.
MILLER: No, what I’m saying is, and we’ll keep going here, Jake. So I want to say what I’m saying, and then you’ll follow up. But what I’m saying is just one level above that, which is that, by definition, we are in charge because we have the United States military stationed outside the country. We set the terms and conditions. We have a complete embargo on all of their oil and their ability to do commerce.
So for them to do commerce, they need our permission. For them to be able to run an economy, they need our permission. So the United States is in charge. The United States is running the country during this transition period.
Miller really seems to believe that this is how the world works. It isn’t.
The second interview, on January 7, was by the NY Times with Trump himself:
Trump Lays Out a Vision of Power Restrained Only by ‘My Own Morality’ (archived)
The relevant excerpt of craziness:
Asked in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times if there were any limits on his global powers, Mr. Trump said: “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
“I don’t need international law,” he added. “I’m not looking to hurt people.”
When pressed further about whether his administration needed to abide by international law, Mr. Trump said, “I do.” But he made clear he would be the arbiter when such constraints applied to the United States.
“It depends what your definition of international law is,” he said.
Mr. Trump’s assessment of his own freedom to use any instrument of military, economic or political power to cement American supremacy was the most blunt acknowledgment yet of his worldview. At its core is the concept that national strength, rather than laws, treaties and conventions, should be the deciding factor as powers collide.
Trump’s take on domestic limits exposes a similar might-makes-right vision:
On the domestic front, Mr. Trump suggested that judges only have power to restrict his domestic policy agenda — from the deployment of the National Guard to the imposition of tariffs — “under certain circumstances.”
But he was already considering workarounds. He raised the possibility that if his tariffs issued under emergency authorities were struck down by the Supreme Court, he could repackage them as licensing fees. And Mr. Trump, who said he was elected to restore law and order, reiterated that he was willing to invoke the Insurrection Act and deploy the military inside the United States and federalize some National Guard units if he felt it was important to do so.
So far, he said, “I haven’t really felt the need to do it.”
TDS has changed its meaning. Trump is deranged and its not just a syndrome. I have yet to make up my mind of what is most likely to follow from this.
Is the U.S. sliding down the path towards full fascism? Or is this all pure bluster that will end as soon as it experience a serious bulwark?
Trump appears to be personally innumerate and functionally illiterate, yet he seems to possess a surprisingly reliable political instinct. That instinct, however, appears to operate at a distance from policy detail. He grasps outcomes and power relations intuitively, while remaining detached from the concrete mechanisms designed to achieve them.
This matters in cases such as María Corina Machado. It is difficult to deny that she is widely feared or disliked by large segments of the Venezuelan population within Venezuela itself. Nor is it implausible to observe that her public posture appears profoundly disconnected from the social and historical realities of the country she seeks to govern—for example, her fervent alignment with Israel, a contemporary symbol of colonial domination, while aspiring to lead a nation whose population is largely descended from historically enslaved Afro(-mixed) peoples. This dissonance does not require sophisticated intelligence-agency psychologizing to register; it is visible at the level of basic political perception.
Trump, Vance, and similar figures likely recognize this incongruity without difficulty. By contrast, mainstream Western media present Machado as a sober patriot, a humanitarian, even a serious political thinker. This is the same media ecosystem that previously insisted—against obvious evidence—that Biden was not cognitively impaired during his campaign. The pattern is familiar: narratives are maintained long after their plausibility has collapsed. When Trump and Vance say that Machado would not be accepted by Venezuelan majorities, they are likely being descriptively accurate. When the MSM claims broad Venezuelan enthusiasm for her, it is not.
The more interesting question, then, is why European elites support her so consistently. Is the disconnect genuinely invisible to them? Or is it precisely the point? The same question applies, mutatis mutandis, to Zelensky. Figures like Machado and Zelensky are attractive to European leadership because they are highly controllable while enabling a performance of moral seriousness and politically correct benevolence. They allow European elites to cloak power politics in the language of norms, humanitarianism, and international law, even as those norms constrain more flexible deployments of U.S. strategic power. In this sense, both figures function as useful globalist abstractions—politically cynical, and in some respects alienated from the populations they claim to embody.
Trump, Vance, and their circle, by contrast, seek to discard what they see as entangling globalist law and normativity altogether. For them, this rejection is itself a form of truth, echoing a Schmittian view of politics as grounded in decision and power rather than procedural morality. Yet there is serious reason to doubt whether Trump, Vance, or Miller fully comprehend the deeper structure they are confronting. They may not grasp that they themselves are instruments of the same imperial system they believe they are disrupting—a system whose defining characteristics are opacity, misdirection, and the recycling of apparent antagonists.
When the present period of geopolitical schism subsides, sacrifices will almost certainly be required. By then, Greenland may already have been absorbed, and Cuba or other Latin American states subjected to renewed aggression. In this sense, Trump and his cohort function as the “bad cops” of an empire that periodically reshuffles its faces while preserving its underlying logic. Until now, this group has largely enjoyed immunity, both political and legal. The open question is whether Trump’s personal oligarchic accumulation will survive him, or whether his heirs will ultimately be forced to liquidate their holdings, which will then be absorbed by more disciplined and capable oligarchic actors—leaving Trump’s descendants politically and economically neutered, and erased from any enduring historical significance.
The likelihood of this outcome hardly requires prophecy. Trump, Miller, and Vance have publicly embraced rhetoric marked by racial, ethnic, misogynistic, and proto-fascistic animus, appealing openly to instinct and resentment. In doing so, they mirror the very pathologies they claim to recognize in figures like Machado or in Ukrainian ultranationalist formations—groups whose populations they have, with bitter irony, helped consign to an ongoing machinery of militarized attrition and destruction.
Posted by: Ludovic | Jan 10 2026 2:00 utc | 379
Garland Nixon interviewed Harley Schlanger again today.
Harley discusses his view of the influence UK has had and still has on US foreign policy, mostly hidden from view. He mentions the NYTs interview toward the beginning of the interview.
(I would just add to the context that there are purportedly between 30 and 50 trillion $$$ stowed away by the Brits in their 14 unregulated tax havens. Info from Alex Krainer)
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Nixon Garland – Harley Schlanger
January 9, 2026
PERFIDIOUS ALBION EPISODE II – BRITISH ORGANIZE SHIFT TO VENEZUELA/RUSSIAN TANKERS/DEFENSE$ INCREASE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2Noa0cOxmk
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Excerpt:
…So after the Cuban missile crisis, there
(20:12)
were people who were the real hardline hawks who said, “We can’t trust
Kennedy. He’s going to stab us in the back in Vietnam just as he did in Cuba.”
And this is where if you read the various testimonies of the evidence
of who is involved on the ground with the assassination, a lot of Cuban names pop up.
And this was the the so-called Cuban network that later showed up in Watergate for Nixon. And this is Marco Rubio’s crowd.
Now, what I find interesting about this is that here you have Trump who said he’s going to derail the deep state. He’s going to dig them out. And in fact, he was in a fight with them in his first term, the whole first term.
He too often made the mistake of thinking it was the Democrats that
were the ones who were the problems.
The Democrats were problematic, but they were operating on what?
The British line. Russiagate came from London and it came from GCHQ, Robert Hanigan, the equivalent of the national security count or advisor in in the United States. Hanigan in the summer of 2015 said that they were picking up indications that the Russians were going to do something to help Trump win.
And who did he go talk to eventually about
it? He didn’t go to the NSA, which would have been the natural place to go. He went to John Brennan and that’s where the whole Russiagate was launched.
Trump, I’m sure, was not clear on this when he was in his first term. By now, he should be because of all the evidence that’s come out on the British role. Christopher Steel, Richard Dearlove from MI6 and so on.
But what does he do? He he still has a soft spot for the British monarchy, which we saw on his trip to London last summer.
So, he’s being undermined by the very people that he said he was going to fight.
And the other part of this garland which I find really compelling is when the drone attack was carried out against Putin’s compound. The Russians found one intact drone and pieces of others and put together based on the tracking and and everything else, put together a definitive report that showed this was directed by Western forces, probably MI6
and the CIA.
And that’s what Putin said, that there was an assassination attempt against him run by Washington and London. Well, John Ratcliffe, the CIA director, went to Trump and said, “That’s nonsense. There’s no such evidence. Uh, it wasn’t an assassination attempt. They were trying to hit some other sites and so on.”
Now, this brings us back again to the first term, 2018, the Helsinki summit between Putin and Trump. This was famous.
I’m sure many people remember it because Trump was asked, “Do you trust
Putin?” after they had talked and with Putin at the stand with him,
he said, “I trust him more than I do the CIA, more than I do my own intelligence agencies.”
Well, now what’s going on? All of a sudden, Trump seems to have found that the CIA is reliable.
I think this is part of the operation inside his administration.
And the most important figure in that is Marco Rubio, who himself is a lightweight. You know, he doesn’t represent much, but where did he get his his start? He was part of a a well-funded operation from one of the Zionist billionaires, Paul Singer, who backed him in 2015.
And so you you see again the the tracks the the various layers that are involved in the British operation to control American policy.
And this brings us back to the real issue here.
The Brits do not want normalization of relations between the US and Russia. That’s their main goal. That’s their red line as it were as they say.
And their intention is, as I said, in the City of London
The House of Lords put out a report in December 2018 saying
if Trump is reelected, it will be the end of the special relationship.
They made it clear that they have to mobilize to shut down any attempt to break the special relationship.
And that’s what we’re up against.
The British see the control of American intelligence and American foreign policy and defense policy as the key to keeping them as a player in the world financial system.
Posted by: suzan | Jan 10 2026 3:30 utc | 388
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