The Dictatorship

Trump’s foreign policy vision is coming into focus. And it’s worse than we may have imagined.

Published

1 year ago

February 18, 2025

Trump’s foreign policy vision is coming into focus. And it’s worse than we may have imagined.

This is an adapted excerpt from the Feb. 12 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”

Donald Trump’s foreign policy vision is starting to come into focus — and it is worse and more dangerous than you may have imagined. The president and his MAGA allies appear poised to rapidly undo the American-led global, democratic order.

The unraveling began Wednesday with an announcement from Trump’s secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, that America was pulling back from defending its allies.

These institutions and orders were established precisely because of the competitive, conquering aspirations of rising empires and fascist regimes.

“We must start by recognizing that returning to Ukraine’s pre-2014 borders is an unrealistic objective,” Hegseth said during a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels on Wednesday. “Chasing this illusionary goal will only prolong the war and cause more suffering.”

“The United States does not believe that NATO membership for Ukraine is a realistic outcome of a negotiated settlement,” Hegseth added. “We’re also here today to directly and unambiguously express that stark strategic realities prevent the United States of America from being primarily focused on the security of Europe.”

On Thursday, Hegseth attempted to walk some of those comments back, telling reporters that “everything is on the table” in negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.

But part of the reason this type of rhetoric is so dangerous has to do with what NATO stands for and when it was created. These institutions and orders were established after World War II precisely because of the competitive, conquering aspirations of rising empires and fascist regimes throughout the world. NATO was formed by the U.S. 76 years ago to pledge that an attack on one member was an attack on all — what is known as Article 5. It started with 12 countries and now has 32 members.

The only time Article 5 was invoked was when all the allies joined together in one fight: when they all came to the United States’ aid after Sept. 11, 2001, and pledged their troops and materiel to the war in Afghanistan. Canadians, Italians, Danes, Spaniards, Norwegians, Estonians, Latvians and more gave their lives for the U.S.’ war on terror. Because that is how alliances work. Allies are supposed to have each other’s back. At least they were before Wednesday.

Not long after Hegseth spoke, Senate Republicans voted to confirm Tulsi Gabbard as the next director of national intelligence. Gabbard is a policy lightweight whose greatest foreign policy achievement was visiting Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, along with his top clericwho threatened suicide bombings in the United States. (Last month, Gabbard told senators she was unaware of the cleric’s threat at the time of their meeting.) She’s also been accused of siding with Russia and President Vladimir Putin over the U.S. intelligence consensus. But all that sat just fine with every Republican in the Senate except Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who joined 47 Democrats and independents in voting against Gabbard.

At almost the same moment Gabbard was being confirmed Wednesday, Trump was getting off the phone with another international leader: Putin. Trump took to social media to break the news about what he called a “highly productive” call with Putin, writingin part:

we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine. President Putin even used my very strong Campaign motto of, ‘COMMON SENSE.’ We both believe very strongly in it. We agreed to work together, very closely, including visiting each other’s Nations.

The glaring thing here is that the country on the receiving end of Russia’s aggression, Ukraine, did not seem to be looped in on developments relating to their future. Trump even dodged a reporter’s question on whether he considered Ukraine an “equal member” in the negotiation process.

We should be clear about what we’re watching: Trump is disassembling the U.S.-led international order to the benefit of the global authoritarians he envies and admires.

Politically, Trump has succeeded in selling isolationism to a lot of Americans. It is true that our leading role in the world has been largely a product of a bipartisan elite consensus and sometimes it feels pretty removed from democratic majorities, who tend to believe America gives out too much foreign aid and “polices” the world. Believe me, I’ve spent two decades critiquing the many shortcomings and downright cruelties of that same order. But however imperfect that order is, what Trump wants to replace it with is far, far worse.

The current international order was created by the U.S. and its allies to prevent the world from the unthinkable. When there were rising tensions between the victorious nuclear superpowers, institutions like NATO and the United Nations were formed in part to prevent the Cold War from becoming a nuclear holocaust.

But there’s another reason Trump is eager to jettison the old order in favor of an anarchic world in which strong countries do what they want. When you hear Putin’s claim that Ukrainians are really just misguided Russians, you can hear echoes of the Nazis’ claim that Austrians and Czechs were just Germans. What Trump is doing now is sending the message to everyone around the world that not only is territorial acquisition by force OK but the U.S. is interested in pursuing it: from Greenland to the Panama Canal to Canada as the 51st state to envisioning the Gaza Strip as an American-owned development project.

The emerging Trump doctrine appears to be that democracies are weak and soft and that we will side with autocracies over them. It’s disastrous. Not just for America’s place in the world but also for the cause of peace.

The emerging Trump doctrine appears to be that democracies are weak and soft and that we will side with autocracies over them.

The idea that the path to peace is to throw overboard democracies in favor of authoritarian regimes is a dangerous idea. And it’s the fundamental throughline of Trump’s worldview. He seems to hate our allies and to love our enemies, possibly because our enemies see the world as he does: transactional and ripe for the picking.

With loyal, morally flexible subordinates like Hegseth and Gabbard, Trump is essentially reorienting American politics as friendly to dictators and authoritarian regimes and fundamentally hostile to democracies. It is shaping up to be the most radical transformation of America’s role in the world since Franklin D. Roosevelt — and it will likely not end well.

Chris Hayes

Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes”at 8 p.m. ET Monday through Friday on BLN. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is”A Colony in a Nation” (W. W. Norton).

Allison Detzel

contributed

The Dictatorship

Newly created Polymarket accounts bet big on US-Iran ceasefire in hours before Trump’s announcement

Published

2 hours ago

April 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Newly created Polymarket accounts bet big on US-Iran ceasefire in hours before Trump’s announcement

NEW YORK (AP) — A group of new accounts on the prediction market Polymarket made highly specific, well-timed bets on whether the U.S. and Iran would reach a ceasefire on April 7, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in profits for these new customers.

These bets were made even though, in the hours before a two-week ceasefire was announced on Tuesday, President Donald Trump’s rhetoric had escalated sharply and there were few signals that a ceasefire deal was imminent. Early in the day Trump had issued a warning on social media that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not meet his demand to open the Strait of Hormuz by his 8 p.m. ET deadline.

An analysis of publicly available blockchain data from Polymarket, using the crypto analytics platform Dune, shows that at least 50 accounts, or wallets, placed substantial “Yes” bets Tuesday before Trump announced the ceasefire in a Truth Social post at around 6:30 pm ET. These were the first bets made by these particular wallets.

One of these wallets, created Tuesday around 10 am ET, placed roughly $72,000 in bets at an average price of 8.8 cents. The buy-in for each betting event ranges from $0 to $1 each, reflecting a 0% to 100% chance of what users think could happen. This Polymarket user then cashed out for a profit of $200,000.

Another, which joined the platform on April 6 and traded on this exact event, shows a win of $125,500.

Another wallet, created 12 minutes before Trump’s post, made $31,908 of “Yes” bets at 33.7 cents, and is estimated to have earned a profit of $48,500. The higher price for “Yes” at that time may have reflected the efforts late Tuesday by the government of Pakistan to get Trump to extend his deadline by two weeks.

There is also the possibility that these individual Polymarket users placed their bets expecting Trump to back down, given his habit during his second term to make bold threats only to retreat — a phenomenon his critics have derided as “Trump Always Chickens Out,” or TACO.

While some users took handsome profits, others must wait for payouts because Polymarket has labeled the April 7 Iran-U.S. ceasefire contract as “disputed,” given that Iran was still placing restrictions on ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz and missile attacks in the region continued. That dispute could take 48 hours to resolve.

Public blockchain data cannot identify who controls the new wallets. Polymarket uses proxy smart contract wallets, meaning a single user can create multiple accounts. Only Polymarket has the internal data needed to determine whether these were new users or existing users opening additional accounts.

Polymarket did not respond to a request for comment.

Rep. Blake Moore, R-Utah, who has introduced legislation to regulate prediction markets, released a statement Wednesday saying: “It’s highly unlikely that these are good-faith trades; it’s much more likely that these are insiders with access to information ahead of the public. Without some kind of restrictions, there is nothing stopping government or military officials from profiting from their positions.”

The trading pattern of newly created Polymarket accounts placing strategic, well-timed bets mirrors earlier episodes on the platform. Newly created accounts placed large wagers hours before the January capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, and made hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit. Similar clusters of accounts have also repeatedly profited from well-timed bets on military actions involving Iran.

Such bets have repeatedly raised questions from the public as well as members of Congress about whether some traders are using inside information to profit in these prediction markets. Bipartisan groups of senators as well as representatives have introduced legislation that would broaden the definition of insider trading to include prediction markets.

Even the two biggest platforms in the industry, Kalshi and Polymarket, have said they see a need to broaden the definition of insider trading on their platforms.

“This is why these markets need regulation,” said Todd Philips, a professor at Georgia State University who has written on prediction markets and the industry’s regulations. “We can’t have people trading with inside information and expect other traders are going to be OK being in these markets.”

_____

Keller reported from Albuquerque, N.M.

The Dictatorship

Trump administration looks to sanitize George Washington’s slavery history

Published

9 hours ago

April 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Trump administration looks to sanitize George Washington’s slavery history

Apr. 9, 2026, 5:39 PM EDT

The Trump administration’s fragile white ego is in focus yet again thanks to newly proposed changes for an exhibit in Philadelphia centered on George Washington and slavery.

The administration is being sued by the city over its efforts to whitewash Washington’s history of slave ownership from the President’s House Site, the nation’s first official presidential residence. The push has been put on hold by a judge who compared it to the censorship depicted in George Orwell’s book “1984.”

The attempted alteration of the exhibit came after a Trump executive order demanded a review of national parks and museums to bar any displays that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.” Last year, Trump also lobbed a puerile complaint that Smithsonian musuems focus too much on “how bad” slavery was.

And all that kvetching provides context for the changes that Trump’s administration is seeking to impose at the President’s House Site — alterations that The Philadelphia Inquirer said places the first president’s slave ownership “in a more sympathetic light.”

The Inquirer flagged government renderings showing plans for new historical panels to be installed at the site, and it seems clear that the administration’s goal is to make Washington out to be a loving patriot or conscientious objector to slavery, rather than a racist slave driver.

First, note what the Inquirer said has been removed:

The panels taken down by the Park Service in January included displays titled ‘The Dirty Business of Slavery’ and ‘Life Under Slavery,’ as well as illustrations about the Fugitive Slave Act and Ona Judge, who was enslaved by Washington and later escaped.

So the administration wants to omit detailed references to Washington’s slavery history — which Black activists fought for years to include — while also promoting a whitewashed narrative that he was a fundamentally moral man despite the whole “claiming dominion over other human beings” thing. Per the Inquirer:

For instance, on one panel titled ‘Presidents Washington and Adams on Slavery,’ the Trump administration writes that ‘Caught between his private doubts about slavery and his public responsibilities as president, George Washington navigated a nation deeply divided over slavery.’

‘Privately, George Washington often expressed discomfort with the institution and a desire to see it abolished,’ the panel continued. ‘Yet as a Virginia plantation owner, his wealth and livelihood were deeply tied to it.’

And another example:

And later in the same panel: ‘Slaves living in the President’s House experienced a greater modicum of autonomy than elsewhere in the South such as to explore the city and sometimes even attend the theater, with Washington buying the tickets.’

When a censorship regime like Trump’s sees fit to tout a slave owner’s generosity — and the “greater modicum of autonomy” he purportedly granted to those he subjected to brutal bondage and forced labor — it leaves little doubt that the fundamental goal is to sanitize history, rather than teach it thoroughly.

A White House spokesperson told the Inquirer that the administration wants to acknowledge “the full breadth of our nation’s history” and that “no piece of history should be washed away.”

But “whitewashing” truly is the most apt descriptor for a plan that includes touting George Washington as some kind of selfless, principled gift-giver while brushing past, or deliberately omitting, details about his well-documented — and extremely lucrative — history of enslaving human beings.

Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.

The Dictatorship

Thursday’s Mini-Report, 4.9.26

Published

9 hours ago

April 10, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* Crisis conditions in Lebanon: “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel vowed on Thursday to continue striking Hezbollah in Lebanon, hours after he appeared to make a concession by saying his country would start talks with the Lebanese government about trying to disarm the Iran-backed paramilitary group.”

* In related news: “More than 80 countries — which did not include the U.S. — condemned Israel’s lethal strikes on Lebanon. … Several international leaders have condemned Israel’s intensified strikes on Lebanon, which killed more than 300 people yesterday alone, according to The Associated Press, citing the country’s health ministry.”

* This wasn’t a problem before the war: “Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei vowed today to tighten control over the Strait of Hormuz and claimed victory in the ongoing war between his country and Israel and the U.S. ‘We will definitely take the management of the Strait of Hormuz to a new phase,’ Khamenei said in a series of posts on X.”

* Inflation news: “Core inflation held above the Federal Reserve’s target before the recent surge in energy prices, according to a key gauge released Thursday that offers the central bank a snapshot of conditions leading into the Iran war. The core personal consumption expenditures price index, which excludes food and energy, rose a seasonally adjusted 3% in February, the Commerce Department reported. The all-items headline inflation measure increased 2.8%.”

* The good news is, the vaccine saves lives; the bad news is, the Trump administration doesn’t want us to know that: “The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has delayed publication of a CDC report showing the covid-19 vaccine cut the likelihood of emergency department visits and hospitalizations for healthy adults last winter by about half, according to two scientists familiar with the decision.”

* Even for this White House, her remarks were weird: “First lady Melania Trump denied any ties to convicted sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell on Thursday. … ‘The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,’ the first lady began in remarks delivered from the White House. … It was not clear who or which statements or reporting she was referring to.”

* On a related note, Donald Trump told MS NOW that he didn’t know about his wife’s press statement.

* Trump’s animosity toward the NFL has reached a new stage: “The Justice Department has opened an investigation into whether the National Football League has engaged in anticompetitive tactics that harm consumers, according to people familiar with the situation.”

See you tomorrow.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”