The President Formerly Known as Hitler

April 24, 2017 in News by RBN Staff



Photo by Jim Mattis | CC BY 2.0


So the President formerly known as Hitler has apparently pulled his head out of his ass and gotten with the global capitalist program. The ruling classes couldn’t be more relieved, as it was beginning to look like they were going to have to carry on with their totally ridiculous “Manchurian President” propaganda indefinitely, or deal with Trump in some harsher way, which, given the paranoid mood in the country and the heavily-armed nature of a lot of his supporters, was going to get a little tricky.

Luckily, however, H. R. McMaster, James Mattis, and the rest of the permanent members of the global capitalist war machine (better known as the United States military), as well as his bleeding heart daughter, Ivanka, were able to talk some sense into Trump, and convince him to employ about sixty cruise missiles to pointlessly obliterate a Syrian airstrip, and then drop a $314 million Massive Ordnance Air Blast bomb on a few dozen “terrorists” in some caves in Afghanistan. The fact that these air strikes had virtually zero military value was beside the point. The global capitalist ruling classes needed Trump to demonstrate that he is ready and willing to continue the wholesale restructuring of the Middle East that they’ve been carrying out since the end of the Cold War, and bomb whatever they tell him to bomb, and, basically, do what the fuck he’s told when it comes to geopolitical matters. Trump, who was probably tired of losing, and being referred to as Bannon’s puppet, and being accused of treason, and so on, and who never really gave two shits about the suckers he conned into voting for him anyway, had one of those Road to Damascus experiences and gave the Pentagon boys carte blanche.

The display of overwhelming force that followed, at 08:40 EST, April 6, 2017, signaled the start of the Trumpian reign. CNN talking head Fareed Zakaria put it this way the following evening, “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States last night … for the first time really as president, he talked about international norms, international rules, about America’s role in enforcing justice in the world.”

This was approximately 24 hours after CNN and the other totally objective members of the mainstream media had had a chance to calm down a little, and to clean up after the orgy of obsequious cheerleading they had indulged in the previous evening. For most of the spastic talking heads who are paid to repeat whatever some producer whispers into their earpieces around the clock while making weird faces, the footage of those turgid Tomahawk missiles rising angrily out of their silos on their way to violently penetrate the enemy and explode in shuddering spasms of global corporatist power was literally orgasmic. Pent-up editorialists instantly pumped out geysers of overwhelming approval. MSNBC’s Brian Williams lost it and started raving on camera about “the beauty of our fearsome armaments,” and quoting Leonard Cohen, and so on. The Washington Post immediately brought in Robert Kagan to froth at the mouth about “rebalancing Syria in America’s favor.” And it wasn’t just the US press and the corporate-owned US political establishment. The rest of the global capitalist empire (Germany, France, the United Kingdom, the European Council, Spain, Italy, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, et al.) were quick to cheer Trump’s transformation into a grown-up, moderate, more or less rational, or at least obedient, globalist puppet.

Now, I owe Trump an apology at this point, because his sudden conversion to the Globalist faith proves that he is not the total ass hat I’ve accused him of being for twenty five years, or at least that he is not suicidal. Prior to his soul-searching talk with Ivanka, and his chat with the generals, and to viewing the photos of those “beautiful babies” gassed by Assad in a last-ditch attempt to force the USA to invade his country and hang him to death, he (i.e., Trump, not Assad) was on the verge of a massive heart attack, or a stroke, or other medical event, or just accidentally getting shot in the head by some mentally unstable, three-named gunman. Or maybe The New York Times‘ guest loony, the increasingly Strangelovian Louise Mensch, was going to uncover a grainy VHS tape of Trump and Putin in their BDSM-wear signing a pact to destroy America in the urine of a Muscovite prostitute … or whatever.

The point is, Trump was playing with fire, having misunderstood his job description. For a while there it seemed he actually believed he was going to defy the will of all those “global elites” he’d been railing against (and, no, I’m not referring to “the Jews,” I’m referring to the global capitalist establishment and the armies they employ to keep them in power). This, of course, was never going to happen. The global capitalist ruling classes can put up with a lot from a US president (who is the most powerful man in the world, after all), but there are a few lines one does not cross, and some fundamental responsibilities they need to know are going to get handled. Playing neo-nationalist grab-ass (or selling the world some Hope and Change crap) is all fine and good when you are out on the hustings, but as Obama noted on his way out of town, “reality has a way of asserting itself.” Or, as corporatist puppet Chuck Schumer put it,”you take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.” I don’t mean to be overly dramatic, but we’re talking about the US military, CIA, NSA, and the rest of the military industrial complex. These are people who have no problem murdering entire families by day and going home and playing with their kids at night. Did anyone really think they were going to allow some word-salad-babbling billionaire to screw around with their long-term objectives because he happened to win a presidential election?

In any event, the danger has passed. Trump, having assumed the mantle of Commander in Chief of Global Capitalism’s worldwide arbitrary killing machine (and with Cohn and the usual Goldman Sachs guys making sure he doesn’t go nuts and start screwing around with their ongoing efforts to transform the planet into one big happy, neo-feudalist theme park prison), can relax and focus on improving his golf swing. Whatever mess he makes of the country (i.e., the United States of America, the nominally sovereign nation state that most Americans believe they live in) will be tolerated by the global capitalist establishment, as they couldn’t care less about actual Americans, or Brits, or Greeks, or Syrians, or whoever. We’re all just a bunch of canon fodder, and servants, and deplorables, and losers, to them.

If it’s any consolation, at least we’ll be able to get back to “normality,” finally. Yes, it will likely take a few weeks for liberals to fully recover from the shock of the cancellation of Holocaust Redux and the Imminent Invasion of the Putin-Nazis, but my prediction is, by sometime this Summer, we’ll have returned to more or less business as usual. That is, of course, unless Putin the Evil hacks the upcoming French elections … in which case, you know, End of Democracy, and Holocaust II, et cetera, again. Stay tuned to the corporate media for moment-by-moment updates on that.

C. J. Hopkins is an award-winning American playwright and satirist based in Berlin. His plays are published by Bloomsbury Publishing (UK) and Broadway Play Publishing (US). His debut novel, ZONE 23, will be published in April by Snoggsworthy, Swaine & Cormorant. He can reached at, or at


(Reprinted from Counterpunch by permission of author or representative)