Trump’s Strategy Is Always Terror

From Minneapolis to Iran, the regime has one move

Last week, vice president J.D. Vance and official administrative healthcare assaulter Mehmet Oz announced that the Trump regime was going to illegally freeze $259 million in Medicaid payments to Minneapolis. They claimed the goal was to force the state government to fight “fraud.” The cuts, yet another assault on a safety net that the federal government has brutally slashed, will be devastating for disabled people, including children, who rely on Medicaid.

Accusations of fraud by immigrants were also the excuse for the massive, brutal attack on the city by ICE agents, which led to widespread chaos and at least two open murders in the street. This is clearly a continuation of the assault on the state—a fact underlined by Vance’s thinly concealed mafioso threats.

“We love [the people of Minnesota],” he insisted. “So much of what is broken in MN is a lack of cooperation”—a not very subtle reference not just to state officials, but to the massive popular uprising against and resistance to the armed federal right-wing militias known as ICE and CBP. “We would encourage everybody in MN to work on the state government a little bit,” Vance added, again not subtly threatening voters to cast ballots for Repblicans in the midterms, or else.

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Also last week, Trump launched an unprovoked war of aggression on Iran. American and Israeli forces coordinated bombing strikes, targeting Iranian leaders and other sites. Among those killed were forty people at a girls’ school, including at least five students.

Citing a list of vague grievances with the Iranian regime as justification for the attack, Trump framed his murderous violence as a gift to the Iranian people, urging them to “seize control” of their “destiny.” After the bombings stop, he said, Iranians should “take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”

There are obviously many differences between Trump’s attack on Minnesota and his attack on Iran. But the similarity in tactics and rhetoric from Trump and his apparatchiks is striking. In both cases, Trump targets civilians for pain, injury, and death as a way to force concessions from government officials. In both, he claims he is on the side of the ordinary people he is brutalizing, suggesting that their government, not him is to blame. “Why are you punching yourself?” he asks in the tone of bullies everywhere.

In short, Trump’s tactics are predicated on his belief that his own disregard for human life and well-being is higher than that of the governments he targets, and that the people he immiserates are too foolish to understand who is really attacking them. He believes that he can force regime cooperation, or even regime change, by simply murdering as many people as necessary, whether via neglect or bombs.

“The use of violence against non-combatants to achieve political or ideological aims” is a textbook definition of terrorism. And terror is Trump’s one preferred, constant, predictable strategy when faced with any policy goal, domestic or foreign. Diplomacy, coordination with allies, persuasion, negotiation, investigation—all the myriad lawful, powerful tools that presidents generally use to advance their goals are useless to Trump, mostly because he lacks any interest in understanding them. For him, the best path is always to find some innocent somewhere to torture or murder in the hopes that other people will pity them and knuckle under.

This strategy is very unlikely to work. As pollster Kevin Collins notes of Iran,

ask yourself “How many Americans would Iran have to kill before the Trump administration would decide to step down”? If you answered “There is no upper limit”, congratulations, you have identified the problem.

Nor are the people of Iran—or of Minnesota for that matter—likely to blame their own government for the carnage that Trump is enthusiastically taking credit for. Violent, unprovoked assaults based on incoherent rationale are tailor made to harden resistance, not undermine it. Iran’s own murderous regime will undoubtedly emerge more popular than it has been in years or decades; Republicans are unlikely to do well in Minnesota in the midterms, to put it mildly.

These setbacks aren’t likely to deter Trump though, because the not-so-secret truth is that for him torture and murder are fun, worthwhile goals in themselves. He likes hurting people, especially if they can’t hurt him back; he enjoys watching other suffer and emphasizing that his enemies can do nothing to prevent the suffering he causes. He has, it is relevant to note, been held liable by a jury for a brutal sexual assault, and has been accused of many more. There is just a great deal of evidence that he takes pleasure in violence and pain for their own sake, and that he gathers around him people like himself who do the same.

Though the mainstream media is reluctant to say so directly, none of this is news. Nor will stating it, however clearly, have much effect on Congress or the Supreme Court, both of which are helmed by Trump’s own sadistic cultists. But it does seem important, for our own sake, to acknowledge and name the ongoing fascist terror campaign as the body count mounts, both at home and abroad. There will be no accounting unless we demand one.