BRUNO BERTEZ

20 Mai

The Sad Defeat of Massie and the Inevitable Victory of Reality over Trump

Thomas Massie’s defeat last night came as no surprise.

It only confirms my diagnosis: we can no longer count on men, voters, or institutions to stop Trump. Trumpism is not a foreign body in the American system — it is its most raw, cynical, and faithful expression.

Trump is the distorted, perverse emanation of an America that has lost its counterweights. A system now entirely enslaved to the fetish of money, where self-aggrandizement and the frantic pursuit of immediate gain have replaced any sense of reality.

To stop Trump, there is only Trump himself.

Because, without realizing it, he is destroying the very foundations of American power.Since 1945, the United States has lived off a colossal rent: monetary, military, cultural, and technological dominance. That rent was declining, but it remained exploitable thanks to a broad consensus, accumulated credibility, and decades of “soft” investments.

Trump — like much of the American elite and electorate — has chosen immediate plunder over patient stewardship. He is burning the capital of trust, monetizing the family jewels, and shattering the accommodations that allowed a failing system to limp along.He is betting the entire farm — bet the farm — in a wasteful flight forward.

None of his grand promises have yet delivered the expected results.He behaves like the con man who, after patiently building a reputation for reliability, suddenly decides to cash in everything at once.

His apparent strength is also his fatal flaw: The Art of the Deal.

Trump genuinely believes he is a negotiation genius. He thinks that defeating his opponents means defeating Reality itself. That is a fatal mistake.You can manipulate paper oil, twist arms, and force agreements. None of that changes the physical reality of actual oil in the ground.

You can inflate financial bubbles and valuations. That does not abolish material scarcities, physical limits, or the inertia of the world.

The Artificial Intelligence he brandishes like a totem will not be impressed by tweets or arm-twisting. It answers to physics, energy, data, real complexity, and history.

Trump has failed to understand that American supremacy was never self-generated. It rested on a soft exploitation of the rest of the world, on unpaid labor, on the permanent draining of surplus value created elsewhere.

Like many American capitalists, he believes he actually produces the wealth he merely extracts. He lives in a magical world where one can dispense with the very realities one exploits.It is this illusion that will bring him down — not political rivals, not voters, not even judges.

Reality will eventually impose its law: energy constraints, geopolitical resistance, technological limits, financial tensions.

Market revulsion will be only one symptom among many.

Trumpism is not the cure for America’s disease. It is the most acute and most honest form of that disease. And that is precisely why it will shatter against the thickness of the world.