By threatening the civilization of Iran and the social cohesion of America, Trump is making the priorities of our feral elite crystal clear. Savage cuts to health care and childcare while massively increasing Pentagon spending to kill more people.

Donald Trump made a characteristically blunt statement last week, inadvertently encapsulating the reining neoliberal/neoconservative philosophy. “It’s not possible for us to take care of day care, Medicaid, Medicare, all of these individual things. They can do it on a state basis; we can’t do it on a federal basis. We have to take care of one thing: military protection,” Trump said at a private lunch at the White House.
What wild is that Trump’s own secretary of state, Marco Rubio, just pointed to this exact kind of thing as a prime example of the Iranian regime’s own villainy. “Imagine an Iran that, instead of spending their wealth, billions of dollars, supporting terrorists or weapons, had spent that money helping the people of Iran,” he told George Stephanopoulos this past Monday.
Yeah, imagine that.
Of course, Trump is lying about military protection. Trump is waging aggressive war–vicious attacks on the Iranian people with shifting rationales and increasing brutality and sadism. Unable to degrade Iran’s military capacity, Trump has shifted to making war on its factories, hospitals, universities, pharmaceutical researchers, bridges, and school children. To be fair, he’s simply following the Israeli method of warfare by bombing cities and turning civilians into red mist.
Trump’s 18 minute televised speech on April Fools’ Day merely doubled-down on all his past policies, refusing to admit that he had been disastrously wrong and instead declaring that he would continue his attacks on Iran. He also emphasized that these attacks would now heavily target Iranian civilian infrastructure, perhaps one of the first times that an American president has declared his intent to commit major war crimes in such a high-profile fashion. “A whole civilisation will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will,” the president wrote on Truth Social.

There is a deeper ideological logic at work here, which is neoliberalism. Neoliberal economics reduces human beings to units in a system, economic cogs with conditional worth. When civilians are treated as expendable targets in a war in Iran, that is not aberration. That is the neoliberal system working as designed. The attack on Iran is part of the larger capitalist class’ projects of imperial domination. As New York Times columnist, Thomas Friedman wrote—“McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas,” to point out that neoliberalism requires non-stop violence for the “market” to function properly.
Trump’s budget cuts are not just incidental to making war on Iran. They’re part of the same war that people in Trump’s income bracket are waging on Americans and Iranians alike. It’s not quite the same–bombing hospitals and schools is worse than defunding them. But while the tactics are different, the targets are strikingly similar.
Even as Trump appears to be a psychotic megalomaniac and his administration is filled with advocates of death and destruction, the so-called opposition party favors war too. The Democrats are already attacking Trump from the right, complaining that he has allowed Iran to maintain nuclear enrichment and their missile forces, while maintaining control over the Straight of Hormuz. While Trump committed electoral fraud with his record on starting wars, it’s useful to recall that he ran to the left of the Democratic candidates in 2016 and 2024 in regards to waging endless wars.

What’s clear is that both US political parties favor non-stop violence to maintain the American empire. Going further, Trump and the entire US political class has proven itself to be completely dishonest, incompetent, and corrupt. Perhaps the turning point was the end of the Cold War which allowed the neoliberals/neoconservatives to believe they could reassert their dominance over a socialist model that in the previous decades had provided an alternative. But the crackup of the Interregnum of Unreality is at hand, because Trump, in his own ham-fisted way, is destroying the neoliberal American empire in real time.
The shock is likely to be existential: Americans have been so misled for so long by their governments and media about their economic and military strength that the sudden discovery of its limits will be brutal and de-stabilizing. We are now approaching a crisis of the neoliberal ideology which has been forced on us over the last generation or two, and it will rapidly be seen that it has nothing to offer to explain, let alone address, the situation in which we will soon find ourselves.
Update: “The Trump administration’s self-congratulations for the ceasefire with Iran immediately fell apart after Israel bombed Lebanon and killed more than 250 people.
This was a breach of the ceasefire agreement which Pakistan had arranged and announced and which had included Lebanon and other areas of the conflict.
The Trump administration had been begging for a ceasefire for several days. It had been involved (archived) in formulating the message the Pakistani Prime Minister had issued. Trump himself had endorsed the 10-point condition sheet the Iranians had proposed by calling it ‘“a workable basis on which to negotiate”’
With knowledge of the imminent ceasefire members of the Trump administration had (again) waged bets on commodities and won large amounts of money.
But just a few hours after the Israeli attack the Trump administration repudiated two central points of the ceasefire. Lebanon was not included in the ceasefire, it suddenly claimed, and Iran’s 10 point sheet had been “thrown into the trash” even before Trump had endorsed it.”





























