Cliff’s Note: We will return to my history/what I saw growing up among the Epstein Class, but Trump threatening to nuke Iran seemed quite worthy of our attention. And this is a similar cast of predatory characters—somehow in charge of our country.
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Donald Trump And His Predator Pals Would Burn the World to Rule the Ashes
by Cliff Schecter
Donald Trump is an agent of chaos. His billionaire pals, too, are filled with sadistic pleasure at the mere thought of hurting others, which you can see in their behavior. Take a “man” like Elon Musk—who was three years behind me at Penn. Is it possible he cut SNAP so kids starve and eliminated USAID so kids die, because deep down he knows he’s garbage? That he leveraged mommy and daddy’s Apartheid emeralds into PayPal, whose profits he used to buy someone else’s idea and create Tesla?
Which then allowed him to buy an adult man’s jaw line and some extra hair?
Definitely possible, folks.
In arguably the best movie of its genre, The Dark Knight (2008), Alfred Pennyworth tells Bruce Wayne a story about a bandit he encountered in Burma. This thief would steal their rubies and then just toss them, because, as has been said of Trump, “the cruelty was the point.” Or as Pennyworth (played brilliantly by Michael Kane) put it, "some men just want to watch the world burn."
Trump is a hybrid—he wants wealth and power, and some fire. Buried beneath that discolored, demonstrably un-svelte, colic exterior is pure rage for how daddy never loved him. If his choice is letting others be happy while he whines, fails and blubbers, or ruining it for everyone, without a second thought (or a first in his case) he’ll blow it all up to ensure we’re all just as miserable as he is while staring acrimoniously into his cracked, golden mirror each morning.
Right now, Iran is embarrassing him. He’s losing the war. And the theocratic mullahs are rubbing it in because they understand psychological warfare better than most Democrats. Exhibit A: this was posted by Iran’s Parliament Speaker Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf just the other day:
After defeating Iran 37 times in a row, this brilliant no-strategy war they started has now been downgraded from ‘regime change’ to ‘Hey! Can anyone find our pilots? Please?’ Wow. What incredible progress. Absolute geniuses.
So Trump predictably, toddler-like as always, overreacted. And now we’re potentially—though Trump will likely chicken out, Thank God—on the brink of nuclear war.
The most maddening part is as as this demented dingus drags the world to the lip of nuclear conflict, he could be stopped at any moment by a handful of Republicans. As Trump treats human civilization with the care of The Trump Taj Mahal—something to loot, bankrupt, and leave smoldering—there is only one morally coherent response: remove him from office. Full stop.
It would take two-to-three House members. You have so-called reasonable ones who’ve taken multiple oaths to this country in retiring Rep. and former Brigadier General, Don Bacon, and former FBI agent, Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick. But, nope, no courage to be found. Bacon’s only good at tweeting shit he does nothing about:
As for the Senate, do we expect frown-y Susan Collins, nepo-Lisa Murkowski or Thom Tillis—who’s great at yelling when it doesn’t matter—to do anything? Seriously, a few GOP House members and Senators, this is all over. And by “all,” I mean a helluva lot more than just the Iran crisis. But it’s mostly been this way for years, and these people clearly need a morality and courage implant and a self-importance enema.
Instead Trump, flanked by grinning cable-news action figure Pete Hegseth—if an action figures could keg stand Olde English 800—and a chorus line of defense-contractor ghouls, gets the same treatment he always gets from the coward class: handwringing, euphemisms, and another round of “well, let’s see how this plays out.”
How this plays out? We’re talking about the possibility of mushroom clouds, not whether the Fed should nudge interest rates.
And let’s talk about the real parasites in this equation—the monopolies and billionaire predators who always seem to uncover gold in the graveyard. Every war has its carrion birds: the oil profiteers, the weapons manufacturers, the hedge-fund vampires. They don’t care if Tehran, Tel Aviv, or half the global economy goes up in flames so long as the wires with the many zeroes keep coming in.
Nuclear brinkmanship to these people is just another earnings call. Human beings? Line items. Children vaporized in a conflict they helped lobby into existence? Unfortunate “collateral damage.” If evil needed a Bloomberg terminal, this is what it would look like.
The people paying the price of this war’s escalation are taxpayers, soldiers, civilians, and drivers at the pump; the people cashing checks are missile manufacturers and oil shareholders. Palantir, Peter Thiel’s spy-on-the-whole-world-data joint? Tens of billions in contracts. Satellite imagery? Elon gets to make a mint from that. The oil companies? Trump already slipped and said how it was good news for “us” that oil prices were up because we produce a lot of oil.
The padded-wall Pringle considers “us” to be the CEOs of ExxonMobil, Chevron and Shell. And Uday and Qusay Trump—i.e. the bashed brain brothers, Don Jr. and Eric—magically invested in over-priced drones just before the war. Hegseth also tried to get in on the action allegedlly insider trading defense stocks, but couldn’t even do that right.
So I’m gonna go with White Goodman on this one:
Again, this isn’t difficult, Mike Johnson, if you’re not too busy monitoring your son’s porn to do your job. If a man starts marching us toward nuclear war, you remove him. Because the people preying on what’s left of our world right now—Trump, his media enablers, the war-profiteering corporate class—would rather rule over rubble than live in a democracy they can’t fully own.
And that, in the end, is the whole rotten story of our age, of these assholes I went to high school with and grew up around, who’ve gained control of our politics, media, and corporate board rooms: the predator class would rather risk ending the world than surrender one ounce of power.
