It's also the current home of Jim Kingman, a Texan lawyer who was invited to the commonwealth in 2023 to act as special prosecutor in a baroque corruption scandal featuring former ex-Governor Ralph Torres, who had been acquitted along party lines in impeachment proceedings in the islands’ senate the year before.

A LESSON FROM SAIPAN

And for Kingman, it’s been basically downhill from there. His attempts to investigate, subpoena or prosecute have been frustrated at every turn by a local elite that’s decided it doesn’t really want him to make any progress. “Where are the feds? Where is the oversight? Where are the ethics committees? Where is the bar? What are we even doing out here?” he asked in a fed-up Facebook post, a year into the corruption trial, with almost no progress made.

With the change in government in Washington, DC, Kingman is clearly concerned about the future of his mission on the islands, and has given an interview to a local journalist who also described the sheer extent of obstruction that Kingman has faced. It’s a bitter read, but it has a defiant tone, a commitment to fighting corruption, that leaves an optimistic aftertaste.

“One promise that I can make is that I won’t quit,” Kingman said. “I can’t promise the desired results in a process I don’t have control over. There is a fundamental change that needs to happen to set up a more sustainable government and that will have to come from the people here. The forces that I have been facing have made it clear that these changes will not be received from an outsider.”

Kingman is just doing his job as a lawyer, but the reason I single him out is that he’s looking pretty unusual among American lawyers at the moment. Faced with hostile politicians, Kingman is choosing to fight. Far better paid, better networked and more powerful lawyers than him are choosing to take a different route and roll over when threatened. 

I’m glad Kingman is sticking to his principles, and wish him luck. If anyone hasn’t read about what Pakistani lawyers did over a decade ago to preserve judicial independence in the face of an interfering autocrat, I highly recommend this piece. Faced with far tougher circumstances than those confronting New York’s white-shoe firms, Pakistan’s lawyers and judges took their struggle to the streets and found that most people are sympathetic to the idea of an independent judiciary that can act as a constraint on a dictatorial, power-hungry executive.

SLOW PROGRESS

Of course, lawyers can take to the streets. But the authorities’ chronic neglect of offices that investigate and prosecute corruption and financial crime has critically hampered their effectiveness. 

The U.K. non-profit “Spotlight on Corruption” has produced a really useful dashboard to track how the British authorities have fared in their efforts against financial crime. Long story short – it’s been pretty bad. If anyone needed proof that underfunding investigative agencies for years and years was an ineffective way to tackle complex criminality, then here it is.

And more evidence has been provided by Transparency International UK’s Ben Cowdock who has produced a fascinating summary of the progress the British authorities are making in reforming its corporate registry. Long story short – it’s not going very quickly. 

With an assessment by the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) on the horizon, the “pressure is on to get Companies House reform right,” Cowdock notes. The FATF sets international standards for tackling money laundering and runs mutual assessments of its members on a regular timetable, and the UK is due to be assessed in December 2027. Before that, however, in February 2026, will be the assessment of the United States and there could be fireworks.

MADE EVEN SLOWER

Donald Trump has just pardoned a corporation for the first time. He decided to cancel the judgement against the founders of a crypto trading company that was fined $100 million last year. Authorities said the fine reflected the expectation that the digital assets industry “takes seriously its responsibilities in the regulated financial industry and its duties to develop and adhere to a culture of compliance.” But Trump appears to have given up on enforcing corporate transparency, which is a central pillar of the FATF’s approach to tackling illicit finance.

“What the getaway car is to a bank heist, the anonymous company often is to a fraud scheme,” said Transparency International U.S. in this useful factsheet of cases in which American shell companies have enabled fraud and financial crime. The Trump administration’s response to this has been to not only do nothing, but to stop what was already being done. There has not yet been a time when the American government has so egregiously flouted the FATF’s core principles. And the U.S. was central to crafting FATF back in the late 1980s, so we are drifting into uncharted and rocky waters. It's hard to imagine the FATF approving of what’s happening, and harder to imagine this White House reacting well to being criticised, so you’d hope the FATF is preparing for the fallout. 

If it is, however, it’s not showing any sign of being ready for battle. Its most recent publication is almost aggressively dull. And the latest public pronouncement from its president suggests that, while she might have some thoughts about the arrangement of the deckchairs, she’s not got much to say about the iceberg up ahead.

I am personally not a huge fan of the FATF, which has been very good at producing documents and very bad at stopping money laundering. In fact, I sometimes wonder if money laundering experts aren’t the modern day equivalent of the self-perpetuating lawyers lampooned by Charles Dickens in “Bleak House”. “The one great principle of the English law is,” Dickens wrote, “to make business for itself.” Still, we might find we’ll miss the FATF if it’s gone. 

AND FINALLY, WHAT IS A KLEPTOCRACY?

I was in Oxford last Thursday to chair an event for Professor John Heathershaw and Tom Mayne, two of the authors of Indulging Kleptocracy, a book about how British professionals have helped foreign thieves and crooks to steal, keep, protect and spend their fortunes. The week before I was in Washington and had lunch with Jodi Vittori, professor at Georgetown University, and author of this recent piece in Foreign Policy headlined “Is America a kleptocracy?”.

These are noted experts on kleptocracy, with lots of very interesting things to say, but they have different definitions of what the word means. In the U.K., Heathershaw and Mayne use it to describe the multinational networks that allow corrupt officials to steal money from places like Nigeria or Kazakhstan, launder it offshore, and spend it in London, the French Riviera or Miami. In the United States, however, Vittori and Casey Michel use it to describe a system of government (like a corrupt version of autocracy, democracy or any other -cracy).

I think these two definitions are the sign of something quite interesting. The United States has so much diversity in terms of how wealth is treated between individual states that crooks and thieves are able to build a kleptocracy within just one country. And the task just became easier, with a specialized team at the Justice Department investigating kleptocrats’ deals and assets now deemed unnecessary by the Trump administration. Not entirely surprisingly, the team’s investigations had irritated some of Trump’s closest advisors and allies.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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Crypto people complained bitterly under the Biden administration that regulators were treating them unfairly, by restricting their ability to do business. Many observers pointed out that crypto people were being regulated exactly the same way as everyone else, and that the reason they were struggling was that their product only makes money if it can break the rules, but the crypto people didn’t agree and responded by spending over $119 million on political donations before the 2024 elections.

MONEY WELL SPENT

The lobbying has paid off. Victorious (and well-funded) Republicans have responded to the crypto industry with a degree of enthusiasm that is positively overwhelming. Supposedly dead under the Biden administration, crypto has been brought back to rude health. “I'm so excited for all of us,” said House Majority Whip Tom Emmer. “This has been a long road to get here. We are on the precipice of actually making this happen. And guess what? That's only the beginning.”

He said Congressmen and senators were determined to get a bill onto President Trump’s desk by August that would regulate the stablecoin industry, thus providing the kind of legal certainty that would allow these “digital dollars” to explode even more dramatically than they already have. A lot of this will be overseen by the Office for the Comptroller of the Currency, which has already moved to scrap the cautious approach of the old days (i.e. last year).

“I’m creating a bright future for banks in America to use digital assets. Financial inclusion is the civil rights issue of our generation,” Rodney Hood, Acting Comptroller of the Currency, told a side session at the conference. “I have removed the sword of Damocles that was hanging over the head of the financial services industry.”

Millions of people lack bank accounts in the United States, and they are overwhelmingly the poorest members of society. Governments have failed to do enough to make sure everyone has access to financial services. And if crypto really could help vulnerable people access banking, then I’d be all for it, but I fear – certainly on the evidence of what I saw last week – it won’t.

Perhaps the most alarming discussion was that concerning World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s own crypto firm. Donald Trump Jr., beamed in by videolink, appeared to be seated on what looked like a white throne. He loomed over the stage like a permatanned deity in an inadequately-buttoned shirt. He explained that he’d only realised the power of crypto after his father had come out as a Republican and the family had all been cancelled. “You put that little R next to your name,” he said, explaining the need for crypto. “And I sort of realized very quickly just how much discrimination there is in the ordinary financial markets.”

The other three founders of the firm, which was created last year, all took to the stage in person. Zachary Witkoff – the son of President Trump’s special envoy tasked with helping to negotiate a ceasefire in Ukraine – spells blockchain wrong on his LinkedIn bio, and got the dress code wrong by wearing a suit and neglecting to grow a beard. Zachary Folkman, who once ran a company called ‘Date Hotter Girls’, wore a bomber jacket and facial hair, which matched the mood more precisely. Chase Herro was the most hirsute and casual of the lot, in joggers and a white baseball cap, and he explained that they would be targeting ordinary Americans, with the aim of getting them to use crypto to buy ham sandwiches from a bodega, as well as aiming to transform the cross-border payments system with their own stablecoin – USD1. 

The idea that these four nepo man-babies would be given the keys to any kind of financial institution was alarming, but the prospect of them doing so under permissive new regulations and an administration headed by one of their dads, was terrifying. “So one of our biggest goals is to kind of bring everybody back together and realize that this is a free market and, like, let the free market dictate who survives and who doesn't, and who thrives and who doesn't,” said Herro. Trump’s sons, incidentally, have also just invested heavily in a bitcoin mining company. 

WELCOME BACK, ALL IS FORGIVEN

The pace at the conference was frenetic, and every other session seemed to have Congressmen and/or senators explaining how cryptocurrencies would do their bit to make America prosperous and grand. Even three Democrats held a side session called “keeping crypto non-partisan”. No one was listening, though, partly because all the lawyers were talking to each other in the hallway but mainly because the Republican chairs of the Senate and the House banking committees were on the main stage at the same time explaining how America would remain the world’s crypto capital. 

Crypto is Trump’s project now, and no one cares what the Democrats have to say. If you want to see how much the industry has embraced the president’s talking points, check out this comically politicized advert from the blockchain company Solana, home of the $Trump memecoin. Even on X, the backlash was so fierce that Solana had to delete it.

What does this mean for the rest of the world though? American politicians seem to have decided that cryptocurrencies – and, particularly, dollar-denominated stablecoins – are good for America, that they bring business to the country, and help find customers for the Treasury’s debt. Anything that gets in the way of crypto therefore is bad for America. With great power comes great opportunity, as Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben might have said if only he’d had more donations from a pro-crypto SuperPAC.

Bo Hines, the hatchet-faced head of Trump’s council of crypto advisers, said his message to any crypto people working offshore was: “welcome home”. 

As for Tom Emmer, even the prosecution of the founders of Tornado Cash – the software that, prosecutors say, allowed criminals including North Korean hackers to hide $1 billion of stolen wealth – was governmental overreach. “We need all that innovation, all those risk takers and creators in this country, that's what is the definition of success. From that you'll get that economic growth,” Emmer said.

There is a terrible irony that cryptocurrencies – an idea much of whose popularity stemmed from the public anger sparked by the deregulation and greed that caused the great financial crisis of 2007-2008 – are becoming a new nexus for deregulation and greed. And I worry about what the backlash will bring when this too collapses. And I worry about all the bad behaviour that will be enabled before the collapse happens.

As Corey Frayer, who served in the Securities and Exchange Commission under Joe Biden, once said: “Crypto is a machine where fraud and money laundering go in one side, and political donations come out the other end.” 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post A crypto government for a crypto nation appeared first on Coda Story.

These seemingly eccentric obsessions with exotic animals reveal a fundamental truth about how power itself works. The zebra collection isn't merely decorative – it's emblematic of a system where the arbitrary whims of the powerful become reality, where resources that could serve many are instead directed toward personal indulgence. Orbán admires Ivanishvili's Georgian Dream party, which has steered the country away from EU integration. Trump openly praises Orbán. These men create a web of mutual admiration, exchanging not just tactics but symbols and sometimes even PR consultants – as we learned when Israeli media revealed that Benjamin Netanyahu’s advisers had orchestrated a covert campaign to counter negative discourse around Qatar. Those same advisers were also tasked with cleaning up Serbian president Aleksandar Vučić's public image.

Years ago as a BBC correspondent in Central Asia, I remember staring with bemusement at a massive golden statue in Turkmenistan of the former president, Saparmurat Niyazov, the self-styled ‘Turkmenbashi’, the ‘father of all Turkmen’. The statue rotated to always face the sun. We journalists used to dismiss it as the eccentricity of a dictator in a little-known corner of the world. These weren't mere quirks, though, but  early warning signs of an authoritarian pattern that would spread globally.

Last weekend, we gathered voices who have witnessed authoritarianism's rise across continents for our event "The Playbook." Their unanimous observation: the patterns emerging in America mirror what they've already witnessed elsewhere.

Nobel laureate Maria Ressa, who has faced multiple criminal charges and arrest warrants in the Philippines for her journalism, described her own sense of déjà vu watching events unfold in the United States. Democracy dies not in one blow but through "death by a thousand cuts"—media capture, then academic institutions, then NGOs, until the entire society bleeds out, Ressa warned.

Bill Browder, the architect of the Magnitsky Act that holds Russian leaders to account for human rights violations – which he lobbied for after his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky was murdered in Russian custody – mapped how Vladimir Putin perfected symbolic terrorization through selective targeting. He saw this pattern being repeated in the U.S.: "This attack on law firms, as an example, going after Covington & Burling, Perkins Coie, and Paul Weiss... what's the message to every law firm in America? Don't go after the government." He pointed to judges facing impeachment threats and green card holders being threatened with deportation as classic examples of the Putin playbook unfolding in America – striking fear into entire sectors through selective prosecution.

Many audience questions focused on resistance strategies, with particular frustration directed at the Democratic Party's seeming inability to mount an effective opposition. "Why are they so quiet about this?" Armando Iannucci asked, voicing a common concern about the lack of a coordinated response.

Yet Browder managed to see a bright side in America's chaotic, decentralized resistance: "The Putin model is to find the leader of the opposition and then destroy them," he noted. "But if you don't have a leader and resistance comes from everywhere, there's no way to stop it." He pointed to student-led protests in Serbia and Georgia, where grassroots movements without central leadership proved remarkably resilient.

Few know more about resistance than anti-apartheid era South African activist Kumi Naidoo, who served as head of both Greenpeace and Amnesty International. While he offered practical resistance strategies, Naidoo also emphasized something crucial: "We have demonized people who do not agree with us," he cautioned. "We cannot move forward in this moment where we find ourselves unless we consciously build bridges to the people that are not with us." This doesn't mean compromising on principles, but rather understanding the genuine concerns that drive people to support authoritarian figures.

"The worst disease in the world that we face,” Naidoo said, “is not HIV/AIDS or cancer or influenza—it's a disease we can call affluenza." This pathological obsession with wealth accumulation creates the perfect environment for would-be dictators, as ordinary people mistakenly see oligarchs not as threats to democracy but as aspirational figures. The zebra-collecting billionaire becomes someone to admire rather than fear.

Every speaker at our event expressed a haunting familiarity with America's unfolding crisis – they've all seen this movie before, even though no one, right now, can possibly predict how it ends. Iannucci, creator of “The Death of Stalin” and “Veep – so, someone who has, literally, written the script – said the current reality might put him out of the job. How do you parody something already so absurd? 

“Trump,” he said, “is a self-basting satirist in that he is his own entertainment." Still, Iannucci underscored why humor remains vital in dark times: "Dictators and autocrats hate jokes because laughter is spontaneous, and they hate the idea of a spontaneous reaction that they have no control over."

Far from mere entertainment, Iannucci argued that storytelling itself becomes essential resistance. He challenged us to move beyond speaking only to those who already agree with us: "We must tell authentic stories which are rooted in reality. And understand that to stand a chance to get through this moment we're in, we have to invest equally on the objective side as well as the subjective side."

As authoritarians build their global networks of mutual admiration, from private zoos to public policy, the countering networks of resistance become all the more crucial.

Maria Ressa's powerful assertion that "when it is a battle for facts, journalism becomes activism" particularly resonated with me. As a journalist, I've been trained in objectivity and balance. Yet we now face a moment where the foundations of free thought that my profession relies on are themselves under direct assault. This isn't about choosing political sides – it's about recognizing when factual reality itself is being deliberately undermined as a strategy of control.

I also found myself enthusiastically agreeing with Kumi Naidoo who emphasized that we must genuinely listen to those who support authoritarian figures, not to validate harmful policies but to understand the legitimate grievances that fuel support for them. From Manila to Moscow to Washington, the pattern is clear but not inevitable. The script is familiar, but we still have time to write a different ending – one where free thought and factual discourse prevail over manipulation and fear.

If you would like to become part of conversations like this one, we have news: we have just launched a brand new membership program connecting journalists, artists, thinkers and changemakers across borders. Join today to receive the recording of this event and access to future gatherings where we'll continue connecting dots others miss.

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As we navigate the whiplash-inducing headlines emerging daily from Trump's Washington, I often find myself thinking of Oksana Baulina, who joined our team in 2019 to produce a documentary series about Stalin's Gulag survivors. By then, Russia's state media was actively rehabilitating Stalin's image, recasting the Soviet dictator as an "efficient manager" who had made necessary sacrifices for the motherland. We felt an urgent need to preserve the testimonies of the few remaining survivors—men and women in their eighties and nineties whose first-hand accounts could counter this historical revisionism.

It was no longer safe for me to travel to Moscow to work with Oksana on developing the project, so we met in neighboring Georgia, in Tbilisi, my hometown. She arrived dressed every bit as the fashion magazine editor she had once been at Russian Vogue before pivoting to become an opposition activist and journalist.

Over wine one evening, she described the constant cat-and-mouse game she had experienced working with Alexei Navalny's anti-corruption foundation. She talked about how Navalny's team had to constantly reinvent itself, adapting to each new restriction the Kremlin devised. When the authorities blocked their websites, they migrated to YouTube and social media. When officials raided their offices, they decentralized operations. When the government froze their bank accounts, they found alternative funding methods. The space for dissent was shrinking daily, she explained, and with each new constraint, they needed to innovate, come up with fresh tactics to continue exposing corruption in Russia and holding Putin accountable.

"The walls are closing in," she told me, "and most people don't even notice until they're trapped."

Her words have acquired an unsettling resonance as I watch the American political landscape transform. When I draw these parallels to my American friends, I often see a familiar resistance in their eyes. Some will say comparing America to authoritarian states is alarmist, that the differences between these societies are too vast. "These are apples and oranges," they'll argue. But the anatomy of repression—the methods used by the powerful to dismantle democratic institutions—remains remarkably similar across time and borders.

There's a reason why those who've lived under authoritarian systems recognize the warning signs so clearly. For Americans, this trajectory feels unimaginable – a departure from everything they know. But for people like Oksana, those who've witnessed democracy crumble, it's more like going back to the future – a painfully familiar pattern returning in new forms.

Recently, a friend in Georgia received a summons that captured the essence of life in an authoritarian state: show up to a state commission hearing and risk becoming a target, or don't show up and face jail time. A decade ago, this would have been unthinkable in Georgia, a country that once exemplified the possibilities of post-Soviet democratic transformation. But that's the thing about authoritarianism—it advances by turning the unthinkable into the inevitable.

Authoritarianism often takes a precise, technical approach to dismantling democracy. It's not always about sudden, violent takeovers. Usually, democratic backsliding is a careful process of erosion, where each small step makes the once outrageous appear normal. What makes this process particularly insidious is how it subverts democracy's own tools – elections, parliaments, courts, and media – turning them against the very systems they were designed to uphold.

Since Coda's inception, we've been tracking the changing landscape of power: the expanding geography of authoritarianism, the abuse of technology, the rise of oligarchy, and the weaponization of historical narratives. Our unique editorial approach identifies "currents" – the patterns bubbling beneath the daily headlines – allowing us to detect emerging trends before they become apparent. Through this lens, we've observed that while authoritarian regimes deploy varied tactics, three essential elements of the playbook repeat themselves with remarkable consistency across different contexts and continents.

The first move is always the manipulation of memory and nostalgia. Vladimir Putin understood this better than most. His regime didn't just recast Stalin from tyrant to "efficient manager" – it undermined organizations like Memorial that documented Soviet crimes by branding them as "foreign agents" before shutting them down entirely.

For Oksana, like many others on our team, the Gulag documentary project was deeply personal. Her family had directly experienced political repression under Soviet rule. For the Russian-language version, she chose a different title than "Generation Gulag." She called it: "The Repressions Don't End."

This same pattern is visible in the United States, where the "Make America Great Again" movement taps into a yearning for an imagined past—one in which power structures went unquestioned and concepts like racial equity didn't "complicate" the natural order. This isn't just a political slogan; it's a carefully crafted narrative that creates social conditions that make challenging the mythical past dangerous. 

We've seen this play out in Viktor Orbán's Hungary, where school textbooks have been rewritten to glorify the country's imperial past and minimize its complicity in the Holocaust. In India, where Narendra Modi's government has systematically reshaped history education to center Hindu nationalist narratives and diminish Muslim contributions. And in Florida, where educational restrictions on teaching African American studies and racial history follow the same playbook – controlling how societies understand their past to make it easier to reshape their future. 

But rewriting the past is merely the first act. The next phase is to transform this nostalgia into a weapon that redefines loyalty to the nation. Once the mythical golden age is established, questioning it becomes not just disagreement but betrayal. In Russia, this meant that anyone who questioned the revered myths about Soviet glory suddenly became suspect – a potential traitor or foreign agent.

As Oksana traveled across Russia filming interviews with Gulag survivors, many said how distraught they were to see that at the end of their lives, the narratives they thought had been discredited were gaining traction again. The perpetrators of the crimes against them – their executioners, their prison guards – were being glorified once more in state media and official histories.

It's the ultimate form of injustice, echoing what many of my Black American friends tell me they feel today as they watch decades of hard-won progress toward equity being reversed. After fighting so hard to dismantle statues of Confederate generals and slave owners, they now witness white supremacist narratives being rehabilitated and those who challenge them branded as unpatriotic.

Of course, these aren't direct comparisons. Each country follows its own path. Perhaps America's market economy will prove resilient against authoritarian capture. Perhaps its institutions will withstand the assault better than their counterparts elsewhere. Perhaps the federalized system will provide firewalls that weren't available in more centralized states.

But, thinking back to countless conversations with friends who lived through authoritarian transitions, I'm reminded of how gradually the water heats around us all. Each small capitulation, each moment of silence stems from a perfectly reasonable thought: "Surely it won't affect me personally."

Among the 35 victims of Stalin’s Gulags that Oksana interviewed was Irina Verblovskaya. It was a love story that landed Irina in jail "I never thought they would come for me," she told Oksana, her voice steady but her eyes still showing the pain of decades-old wounds. She never thought she was political enough to be noticed. 

American friends often ask me what to do, how to respond once these patterns of repression become evident. I hesitate to answer with certainty. The cases I know most intimately are cases of failure. Nearly everything my dissident parents fought for in Georgia has been reversed in my lifetime. Yet paradoxically, their fight continues to inspire – precisely because it never truly ended. In Tbilisi today, people have stood in the freezing cold for more than a hundred nights, protesting laws that mirror authoritarian Russian legislation.

After years covering wars and political crises, I've noticed that soldiers on the ground often understand which way a battle is turning before the generals do. A taxi driver frequently has a better grasp of city dynamics than the mayor. My first rule is to always listen to people in the thick of it, to pay attention to those who may be at the margins of power but who are the first to feel its effects. Our failure is rarely in lacking prophets, but in refusing to heed their warnings.

Who are America's prophets today? They're the people routinely dismissed as alarmists – constitutional scholars warning about judicial capture, civil rights leaders identifying voter suppression patterns, journalists documenting the normalization of extremist rhetoric, and immigrants who recognize repressions they became familiar with in the countries they fled. Their warnings aren't political hyperbole – they're based on rigorous research, reporting and lived experience. And just as they are the first to detect the warning signs, they're often the first people to be targeted when the final act of the play unfolds.

The last, game-winning tactic from the authoritarian playbook is the criminalization of dissent. This process begins with words – the increasing use of terms like "enemy of the state", “threat to national security”, or "treason" to describe one’s political opponents. See how these labels proliferate in the far-right media. Note how disagreement is increasingly framed as betrayal. To anyone who has lived through authoritarianism, this language isn't merely rhetoric – it's preparation. Project 2025's blueprint for reshaping the Justice Department follows this pattern – creating systems where political loyalty supersedes institutional independence. 

The mechanisms may have evolved but the fundamental approach remains unchanged. In Russia, no one embodied this three-act progression more clearly than Alexei Navalny. In 2014, he was still able to mobilize hundreds of thousands in Moscow's streets against Putin and the Kremlin’s corruption. His warnings about Russia's growing authoritarianism were largely dismissed in the West as exaggerated. Yet the noose tightened around him – first arrests, then poisoning, imprisonment, and eventually death. He posed too great a threat, and the system couldn't tolerate his existence.

That night in Tbilisi in 2019, Oksana talked a lot about what it was like to work with Navalny's team, to mobilize Russians against Putin. We argued about whether or not Navalny was racist. For all his bravery fighting corruption, Navalny had made derogatory remarks about people from Central Asia and the Caucasus, calling Georgians "rodents" that should be "exterminated." Like her, I had grown up with the Soviet collapse as the backdrop of my youth—we were the same age—but my experiences came from a Georgian movement that fought not just the Soviet system but Russian colonialism too.

Our wine-fueled argument eventually settled into a consensus that Western liberal democracy, for all its flaws, remained the best system available—the fairest and freest option we knew. It's only now that I recognize my own slight condescension toward her because she was proudly an activist. After years working in Western media, I had been almost vaccinated against the idea of being an activist myself—journalism had to be pure, objective, detached.

I was wrong. Oksana understood something I didn't yet grasp: in environments where truth itself is under assault, journalism inevitably becomes a form of resistance. For her, this wasn't theoretical—it was daily reality. The boundary I so carefully maintained was a luxury she couldn't afford, and it is now one I no longer believe in.

The Final Warning

A year later, after we filmed about 30 interviews with survivors of Stalin’s purges all across Russia, Oksana went back to show a few of them the result of our work. We have a video of Oksana visiting Olga Shirokaya, a 96-year-old Gulag survivor who had been arrested when she was 27. They sit down on Olga’s couch to watch the film, Olga's eyes widen as she sees her own story reimagined through animation. 

"I feel like I can breathe again," she tells Oksana, her voice trembling. "I didn't think in such a short piece you could so truthfully find the essence of all the things I told you."

I'm haunted by that footage now. Oksana sits there, bright and elegant, while this survivor of Stalin's terror watches her own testimony. By then, Navalny was already in prison. The full scale invasion of Ukraine  was just weeks away. Did Oksana sense what was coming? Did she know she was documenting not just Olga's past, but her own future?

When Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Oksana left Russia. She went to Kyiv to report on the war for an independent Russian outlet – her final act of resistance. On March 23, almost exactly a month since the war had begun, while documenting civilian damage from Russian bombing, Oksana was killed in a Russian missile strike. She was 42.

"The Repressions Don't End" wasn't just the title she chose for the Russian version of our documentary project. It was how she understood history's patterns – patterns that would claim her own life.

We've seen this movie before across different contexts and continents. The script is familiar, the plot mostly predictable. But we don't yet know how it ends – especially in a country with America's democratic traditions, constitutional safeguards, and decentralized power structures.

And so, when friends ask me "what do we do," I tell them: Look to those who've been there before. Democracy isn't saved through grand gestures, but through thousands of small acts of courage. Through showing up, speaking up, and refusing to turn away from what is happening before our eyes. Through recognizing that the authoritarian playbook works precisely because each small tactic seems too minor to resist. 

We've seen this movie before. But we're not just a passive audience—we're also actors. And we still have the power to change the ending.

All illustrations and videos in this article are from Coda Story's Generation Gulag

The post How Democracies Die: The Script for a Three-Act Play appeared first on Coda Story.

Having spent most of my life watching Putin's Russia take shape, I recognize familiar patterns in American politics today. There is a theory, expressed only half in jest, among some who analyze Donald Trump—as he undermines traditional alliances and creates havoc within the federal government—that he must be a Russian asset. I understand what they mean. Trump consistently parrots Putin talking points, and Russian state media celebrates Trump with unusual enthusiasm. As American presidents, whether left or right, are rarely cheered in Russia, one might suspect some kind of collaboration.

But there is a simpler explanation: Trump and Putin are remarkably similar men who naturally understand each other. No conspiracy required—Trump would feel right at home in Moscow.

This isn't to suggest moral equivalence. Trump, after all, has not waged a genocidal war claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. He aspires to dictatorship but hasn't succeeded in achieving it—yet. He hasn't killed his political opponents or nationalized major companies to enrich his friends. Given America's robust institutions, he is unlikely to ever have the opportunity to do these things. In any case, he likely doesn't harbor such aims—he seems much more jovial than Putin.

Still, the parallels between them are unmistakable:

Both men emerged in the moral ambiguity that followed World War II's short-lived moral clarity. They share a worldview in which only large, feared countries deserve respect. Trump famously told Bob Woodward that “real power is… fear.” In both domestic and foreign affairs, neither operates appears to believe that promises matter or that empathy should guide decision-making. While many politicians behave similarly, few presidents so openly belittle neighboring countries and their leaders as Trump and Putin routinely do.

Both men consider loyalty—even feigned loyalty—to be the only true virtue. Trump's pardoning of the January 6 insurrectionists demonstrates his adherence to this principle. Unlike in his first term, when staffers frequently defected or expressed dissatisfaction, Trump now trades competence for loyalty in those he employs, exactly as Putin does. 

Just observe JD Vance's transformation. During Trump's first term, he was a clean-shaven intellectual on a book tour who compared Trump to Hitler. Now, he resembles a Central Asian heir to the throne and his almost comically masculine posturing mimics his boss’s style. This shapeshifting ability shouldn't surprise anyone who read Vance's memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” in which he described his childhood talent for adapting to different father figures. "With Steve, a midlife-crisis sufferer with an earring to prove it,” Vance wrote, “I pretended earrings were cool... With Chip, an alcoholic police officer who saw my earring as a sign of 'girlieness,' I had thick skin and loved police cars." For men like Trump and Putin, loyalty isn't optional, it's existential, and Vance has mastered the art of becoming whatever his current patron requires.

Both Putin and Trump harbor a profound distrust of democratic institutions. Trump's fixation on the "stolen election" of 2020 mirrors Putin's trauma from his failed bid to manipulate the 2005 Ukrainian election to his advantage. For both men, personal political losses were transformational. In Putin’s case, every challenge to his authority has turned him into a different, usually worse, person. 

It may seem paradoxical that a man who never faces competitive elections changes with each successive term, but it's true – and each iteration is more dangerous than the last. Trump too has changed since his last term. He may still be erratic, may still be a lying, megalomaniacal, overconfident salesman. But those of us who have seen authoritarian evolution up close recognize a fundamental transformation. Trump’s rage at institutional betrayal has calcified into conviction, into a doctrine founded on distrust. The trauma of defeat in 2020 didn't just wound Trump's ego; it convinced him to view the entire democratic apparatus as illegitimate. This shift, this hardening of his position should not be underestimated.

Another thing Trump and Putin have in common is that both believe corruption is universal. I recognize in Trump a mindset common in Russia—indeed, it's fundamental to how power operates in Moscow. Trump doesn't just call opponents "crooked” as a joke, he seems to genuinely believe that graft, and graft alone, motivates everyone. For Trump, corruption is not merely personal enrichment but is the only effective means of governance, of exerting control. This approach makes dealing with Putin convenient—negotiations are simpler when you believe everyone has a price. But I’ve seen in my country how such transactionalism ultimately backfires, creating whole new avenues of institutional corruption that involve orders of far greater magnitude than simple personal enrichment ever could. 

Apart from an intrinsic understanding of corruption, both Trump and Putin also understand, crave and deliberately create chaos. Whether through war, nuclear threats, dismantled treaties, or bureaucratic upheaval, disorder provides leverage. When Elon Musk is tasked with destroying the civil service, the goal is to make government employees more pliable for whatever comes next. The damage, of course, will extend beyond Trump's tenure—after he leaves office, American civil servants will have lost their trust in the entire American system, the whole edifice of government, and it won’t be easy to restore that faith.

And now If Trump and his all-too-loyal allies seem detached from reality, then the joke is on reality.

Many American observers now hold out hope that constitutional guardrails and democratic institutions will do their job. These observers believe checks and balances will contain Trump's excesses until the midterms or the next presidential election bring relief. They're not entirely wrong—America is certainly better positioned to withstand authoritarian creep than Russia was in Putin's early years. 

America's independent judiciary, free press, federalized power structure, and long democratic tradition provide genuine protective layers that Russia lacked. But I've also seen how institutions crumble not through frontal assault but through slow erosion, as bureaucrats, judges, and legislators become complicit through fear, ambition, or simple exhaustion. 

When I read pundits like Ezra Klein argue we shouldn't believe Trump's threats because his power is more limited than he pretends, I recognize a familiar pattern of wishful thinking. Klein suggests that since Trump lacks congressional control and broad public support, his power exists mainly in our collective imagination of it. This analysis assumes Trump operates within the traditional boundaries of American politics. But that's precisely what authoritarians never do. Those who dismiss Trump's ability to transform America make a fundamental error of perspective. They judge his capabilities by the system's rules, while he succeeds by dismantling those very rules. 

Trump has few constitutional powers, true. But autocrats rarely acquire power through constitutional means—that's precisely why they want to become autocrats: to avoid this hassle. They find cracks in the system—a corrupt judge here, a sycophantic legislator there, a couple of overworked bureaucrats willing to look the other way.

Worse, those who can most effectively prevent state capture are least equipped to recognize it. Trump isn't trying to subdue coastal liberals and activists; he’s going after unelected civil servants, military officers, and corporate stakeholders. Whatever their qualifications, these aren't people prepared for civil disobedience—that's not in their job descriptions. They advance their careers by executing orders without overthinking them, not by questioning authority. Whatever resistance they might offer has been further diminished by Musk's crusade against the "deep state."

Meanwhile, the elected officials who can resist often voluntarily surrender. Many Republican congressmen, whatever their real feelings and opinions, have meekly knelt before Trump's throne. Autocratic systems actively select for the unprincipled and obedient. Compare Trump's second administration to his first—adverse selection is already evident.

And now If Trump and his all-too-loyal allies seem detached from reality, then the joke is on reality. 

So far, Trump has twice won the most competitive elections on the planet, and Musk is officially the world's richest man, having built businesses few thought possible. JD Vance, in addition to becoming VP by 40, wrote a bestseller at 31. They all have a history of making their ideas come true. If you think the world isn't crazy enough to follow them further into the abyss, you might want to reconsider your assumptions. In my part of the world, at least, it's always been just crazy enough.

Even though nearly every statement Trump makes is false, he remains deeply true to those falsehoods. His fictions, which share so much with those invented by Putin, have given both men control of their nations’ narratives – false or not. So, when evaluating Trump's threat, consider Pascal's wager: If we spend four years on high alert over dangers that never materialize, we've endured unnecessary stress. If we relax and let his worst ambitions come to fruition, we face a potential catastrophe. The first scenario is clearly preferable.

Americans often ask how ordinary Russians can support Putin's regime. Perhaps now you're getting a clearer picture. The path from democracy to autocracy isn't marked by tanks in the streets but by the slow erosion of norms, the replacement of competence with loyalty, and the methodical exploitation of institutional vulnerabilities.

Trump has given us plenty of advance warning. Authoritarians announce their crimes long before they commit them. Even the most unprincipled men hold deep convictions and manifest character traits that rarely change. That's not advanced political theory—it's Russian History 101. The question remains, though, now that we know – what are we going to do?

The post The Shadow Puppet: A Russian’s Warning about Trump appeared first on Coda Story.

BUKELE’S BITCOIN BET

But first to El Salvador. News of the death of its bitcoin project appears to be exaggerated, with the country buying yet more of the cryptocurrency just days after agreeing a $1.4billion deal with the IMF that seeks to “confine government engagement in Bitcoin-related economic activities.” On X, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele posted: “No, it’s not stopping. If it didn’t stop when the world ostracized us and most ‘bitcoiners’ abandoned us, it won’t stop now, and it won’t stop in the future.”​​

El Salvador has many problems – not least excessively high levels of debt and a sluggish economy – to which Bukele has presented Bitcoin as the answer, including by making it legal tender in 2021 and obliging merchants to accept it for payments. Under pressure from the IMF (which says Bitcoin’s “widespread adoption could threaten macroeconomic stability and raise fiscal risks”, without elaborating), the El Salvador government has cancelled those reforms. But Bukele’s latest tweets suggest he’s not given up on his plans.

I don’t think anyone outside the IMF is nostalgic for the days when the lender used to bully the countries of Central and South America. But I doubt the IMF will take Bukele’s taunting quietly, so we’ve presumably not heard the last of this.

Personally, given my interest in financial crime, I think Bitcoin is a bit of a sideshow. It’s clunky, it’s expensive to use, and it’s wildly volatile – all of which mean it’s great for speculation, but not much good as a money laundering tool. Tether, on the other hand, now that is something to keep an eye on.

TOO LITTLE TOO LATE?

“What El Salvador has achieved, thanks to President Bukele, is truly incredible and will be narrated in history books,” posted Tether’s CEO, the emollient Paolo Ardoino, after Bukele said he would keep buying bitcoin. Tether issues the world’s biggest stablecoin, which is a cryptocurrency that’s worth the same as a dollar, but doesn’t suffer from any of the restrictions imposed by the kind of squares who comply with anti-money laundering rules at banks. Tether, incidentally, relocated its headquarters to El Salvador in January, so technically Bukele’s government is responsible for regulating it (lol).

Unlike Bitcoin, Tether is cheap, easy to use and non-volatile, which is why it’s become a funding vehicle of choice for Hamas, Hezbollah, the gangsters of the Mekong region, Russian money launderers, North Korea apparently, and almost any other baddies you can mention. Also unlike Bitcoin, Tether is a centralised operation, meaning it can freeze its currency if it wants to. The fact that it so rarely did was either a mark of its commitment to financial inclusion, or a sign that it didn’t care about enabling rampant fraud. But it looks like it may be trying to clean up its act.

Because bombshell news: almost three years after the U.S. sanctioned Garantex, a Russian cryptocurrency exchange, Tether finally got around to freezing its digital wallets. Before we get too delighted about the stablecoin’s decision to cooperate (the EU having also sanctioned Garantex last month), this was the result of the US Secret Service – in cooperation with Germany and Finland – working to cripple the exchange’s infrastructure. Tether presumably had little choice but to do what it did. 

In the meantime, sophisticated obfuscatory skills have allowed Garantex to move $60 billion worth of crypto since the US imposed sanctions. Still, there will be many annoyed Russians who will now be on the lookout for an alternative exchange. “We have bad news,” as Garantex announced on Telegram, “Tether has entered the war against the Russian crypto market… Please note that all USDT held in Russian wallets is now under threat. As always, we are the first, but not the last.”

THE CRYPTOCRATS’ LAMENT

If Russians who use crypto are struggling with sanctions, American crypto investors are increasingly annoyed by the suspicion that still shrouds the industry. “None of the federal banking agencies have actually overturned any of the anti-crypto guidance,” said Caitlin Long, CEO of crypto-friendly Custodia Bank. “It is still presumed unsafe and unsound for a bank to touch a digital asset.”

Donald Trump won substantial backing from crypto folks in last year’s election, thanks to his promises to cancel what they felt was excessive regulation of their activities. “We can't live in a world where somebody starts a company that's a completely legal thing, and then they literally get sanctioned and embargoed by the United States government,” said Marc Andreessen on the Joe Rogan podcast in November. Remarkably self-pitying, considering Andreessen’s a tech billionaire,

He and his fellows complain about widespread debanking – by which they mean that banks are closing the accounts of crypto companies and/or their owners, because of concerns about money laundering – and the fact there is no appeal process against such decisions. Crypto industry leaders insist the practice is really driven by banks’ determination to smother a competing technology in the cradle, and has unfairly targeted right-wingers. Trump promised to end the practice, but in truth this is a complex issue, and Long’s comments suggest they’re losing patience with his failure to master it.

The Senate Banking Committee held a hearing on debanking last month, which featured three representatives of the crypto industry. But the witness who impressed me most was the Brookings Institution’s Aaron Klein who made it clear that the real victims of debanking are not crypto bros, but the kind of people without the money to effectively lobby President Trump.

“Approximately one in ten Black, Hispanic, and Native American households lack a bank account, about five times higher than for whites. Being unbanked is even more likely among those with a disability, with an unbanked rate above 11 percent,” said an excellent 15-page primer he submitted as evidence, which is well worth reading (it can be downloaded at the bottom of this page.)

The core of the issue is that banks face onerous regulations, worry about being fined, and therefore can’t see the value in providing accounts to clients who are more likely to cost them money than earn it. Yes, some of those clients work in crypto, but most are poor immigrants just trying to get ahead. (Check out quite how many of the FinCEN enforcement notices relate to convenience stores that cash cheques, rather than multi-billion-dollar money laundering schemes, and you’ll see what I mean.)

There is no easy fix to this, but the roots of the problem lie in the global rules against money laundering set by the Financial Action Task Force, which is currently holding a consultation on the issue. Should you have a lot of time on your hands, and an exceptionally high boredom threshold, you can read it. Perhaps you could send in an opinion too. Everyone has known about the problem for decades, and no one has ever been bothered to do anything about it before, but perhaps this time they will. Or perhaps they won’t. 

What we’re still waiting to learn is how the Trump administration intends to regulate crypto, or if it intends to regulate at all, given the investigations being dropped, last week’s crypto industry summit at the White House, and the mooted creation of a national cryptocurrency reserve.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Cryptocrats fear regulation will stymie a new crypto era appeared first on Coda Story.

For nearly a decade, our team has documented how anti-LGBT legislation and rhetoric has migrated from Russia to Central Asia to Turkey to Georgia, Brazil, and now the United States. 

Trump's speech was instantly recognizable to those who have followed this trail. He took us on a tour of its classic landmarks: presenting anti-transgender policies as "protecting women," framing gender-affirming care as "mutilation," and positioning this politicized language as a return to common sense rather than an attack on civil rights. 

But to understand how we got here, we need to look back more than a decade to when the Kremlin first deployed anti-LGBT rhetoric not as a moral stance, but as a tactical weapon.

A Russian export

In 2012, facing mounting protests over corruption, Vladimir Putin's government desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere. As our contributing editor Peter Pomerantsev later wrote: "Putin faced a mounting wave of protests focusing on bad governance and corruption among the elites. He desperately needed to change the agenda and refocus national anger elsewhere."

The opportunity came when self-declared feminist provocateurs Pussy Riot performed their "punk prayer" in Moscow's central cathedral. Putin seized the moment. Suddenly Russian state TV shifted their attention from corruption scandals to tabloid rants about witches, God, Satan, and anal sex. Europe, previously a symbol of the rule of law and transparency, was rebranded as "Gayropa."

This wasn't about deeply held religious beliefs. As Pomerantsev noted, "Putin was probably telling the truth when he told a TV interviewer he had no problem with homosexuals. His administration is said to contain several, and some key members of the media elite are themselves discreetly gay." Russia's social culture is, Pomerantsev wrote, "hedonistic and, if anything, somewhat libertine; rates for abortion, divorce and children born out of wedlock are high. Church attendance is low. The US Bible belt it certainly isn't." 

But if Putin had no personal problem with homosexuality, he saw the potential of playing to prejudice. Russia's 2013 "gay propaganda" law banning the "promotion of non-traditional sexual relations" to minors became the template. Soon, nearly identical laws appeared in former Soviet countries—first in Lithuania, then Latvia, then across Central Asia. The language was often copied verbatim, with the same vague prohibitions against "propaganda" that left room to criminalize everything from pride parades to sex education to simply mentioning that LGBT people exist.

The creation of a global axis

What began as a deliberate distraction from Putin’s failure to rein in corruption evolved into a transnational movement. Russian "family values" defenders organized international conferences, bringing together American evangelicals, European far-right politicians, and anti-LGBT activists from Africa.

Those meetings bore fruit. The most powerful connections happened through the World Congress of Families, where links between Russian Orthodox activists and American evangelical groups were forged. These meetings created pathways for rhetoric and policies to travel, often through multiple countries in other continents, before reaching the mainstream in Western democracies.

"Homosexual propaganda is the disease of a modern anti-Christian society."

When Trump spoke about banning "gender ideology," he echoed language first deployed by the Kremlin. When he announced that he had "signed an executive order to ban men from playing in women's sports," he was repeating almost word-for-word the justifications used for Russia's bans on transgender athletes.

From Russia to Brazil to America

By 2020, this Christian-inflected, homophobic, family values playbook had made it to Brazil, where President Jair Bolsonaro deployed its tactics to appeal to a wide swathe of religious conservatives. In May 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolsonaro attempted to divert attention from his mishandling of the crisis by posting on Facebook that the World Health Organization was encouraging masturbation in children as young as four.

The post was bizarre, quickly deleted, and made little sense—but it wasn't the product of some Bolsonaro fever dream. Anyone who had watched Russian state television was already familiar with the crazy conspiracy theory about WHO encouraging childhood masturbation.

It first appeared on Russian state TV channels around 2014, when Putin's traditional values crusade had really picked up momentum. The whole theory was based on a WHO document on sex education that mentioned early childhood masturbation as a normal psychosexual phenomenon that teachers should be prepared to discuss—an obscure, academic point distorted by Russian media into evidence that European children were being forced to masturbate from the age of four.

Bizarre as it was, the story had legs, repeated so often that it migrated from Russian television to the Brazilian president’s social media to Christian conservative talking points in the U.S. and Britain. 

Watching the Edges

What happens on the periphery—both geographical and narrative—eventually moves to the center. Eight years ago, we were documenting anti-LGBT legislation in Kyrgyzstan that seemed fringe, distant, and surely far removed from established democracies. Today, similar laws are being implemented in countries like Hungary, Georgia, and even the United States.

"People [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, you will be killed."

Georgia, my own country, is a fascinating case study in how such rhetoric takes root. Once the most promising democracy among the former Soviet republics, Georgia has regressed. With the Kremlin-friendly Georgian Dream in power, and despite determined and vocal opposition, the ruling party pushed through a "foreign agents" law modeled directly on its Russian counterpart and “family values” legislation that targets LGBT rights, including banning Pride parades and public displays of the rainbow flag.

The pattern is unmistakable and what makes it particularly dangerous is how these policies are laundered through increasingly respectable channels. Phrases that began on Russian state TV like "gender ideology" and protecting children from "propaganda" have become mainstream Republican talking points.

Russia's Blueprint: Unleashing Violence

The consequences of this exported blueprint are devastating. It gives license to religious conservatives everywhere to act on  their prejudices and then point to them as universal. In Indonesia, for instance, which has been mulling changes to its broadcast law that single out investigative journalism and LGBT content, two young men in conservative Aceh were publicly flogged under Shariah law for gay sex. Vigilantes burst into a flat to find the men allegedly mid-embrace.   

In Russia, the gay propaganda law unleashed unprecedented violence against LGBTQ people. As Lyosha Gorshkov, a gay Russian professor who fled to the United States, told us in 2016:  "people [who] call themselves traditionalists rise up. If you are gay, lesbian, especially transgender, you will be not only beaten, but you will be killed. Government keeps targeting LGBT population because it's easiest target.”

Before fleeing Russia, Gorshkov was targeted by the Federal Security Service (the modern version of the KGB). An agent at his university called him into his office and demanded he identify communists and homosexuals. "He would follow me every single week, calling me, looking for me at the university," Gorshkov explained. When a bogus article circulated claiming Gorshkov was "promoting sodomy," he knew he had to leave.

In St. Petersburg, which became the epicenter for Russian homophobia, LGBT people faced increasing danger. Nearly nine years ago, journalist Dmitry Tsilikin was murdered in what police believed was a homophobic attack. Local politicians like Vitaly Milonov, who masterminded the city's gay propaganda law that later went national, routinely used dehumanizing language that inspired vigilante violence.

"We have to face moral dangers,” Milonov told our reporter Amy Mackinnon. Homosexual propaganda, he said, is “the disease of a modern anti-Christian society," Milonov told our reporter Amy MacKinnon.

Coming Full Circle

President Trump's speech this week represents a concerning milestone in this journey of authoritarian rhetoric. When he promised to bring "common sense" back by recognizing only two genders, he was echoing Putin from a decade earlier, though no one acknowledged the source.

Particularly troubling is how within the United States such rhetoric is becoming law. Iowa's legislature recently passed a bill to strip the state's civil rights code of protections based on gender identity—the first state to explicitly revoke such protections. Georgia's state legislature, meanwhile, passed a bill to cut off funding for gender-affirming care for minors and people held in state prisons. Georgia had already passed a bill banning transgender athletes from school sports.

These are the legislative fruits from rhetorical roots planted over a decade ago. I'll never forget the May afternoon in 2016 when I sat in Tbilisi's main concert hall, watching Josiah Trenham, an Eastern Orthodox priest from California, take the stage at the World Congress of Families conference. The hall was packed with hundreds of guests, many of them Americans who had traveled to the Georgian capital to discuss ways to "save the world from homosexuality." What still haunts me is how warmly the audience applauded Trenham’s words.

"I have witnessed my nation disgrace itself before God and men," he thundered. "My counsel to beloved Georgians is this: stand firm in your faith against the LGBT revolution. Do not give in or your cities will become like San Francisco, where there are 80,000 more dogs in the city than there are children. Tell the LGBT tolerance tyrants, this lavender mafia, these homofascists, these rainbow radicals, that they are not welcome to promote their anti-religious anti-civilizational propaganda in your nations."

Later, when I confronted Trenham, he insisted he hadn't encouraged violence, claiming instead that the people "who are for provocation and violence are the LGBTs themselves." Outside, hundreds of Georgian Orthodox activists were gathered with religious icons and signs that quoted Biblical scripture. They were free to express their hate. But when my phone rang, it was an LGBT activist calling in panic because ten of his friends had been arrested for writing "Love is equal" on a sidewalk only a few blocks away.

Cynical Kremlin propaganda coupled with genuine religious fervor had created this monster, and more monsters were being bred everywhere. The success of the Russian playbook lies in its incremental nature. First, you frame the issue as one about protecting children. Then you expand to education. Then to adults. At each step, those opposing the restrictions can be painted as ideologues who don't care about protecting the vulnerable.

Setting Trump's speech alongside those made by others, from political leaders to religious preachers, reveals that the U.S. is just the latest domino to fall. Solid family values as a contrast to the licentiousness of the decadent West  was a campaign that began in the Kremlin's halls of power as a distraction. It has now become a cornerstone of authoritarian governance worldwide.

In Tbilisi, at the World Congress of Families conference, a Polish anti-abortion activist explained: "You have to understand that in the west politicians are thinking in four-year terms... but in Russia they think more like emperors." The Kremlin’s long game has paid off.

For years, we've documented how authoritarianism travels across borders, now that story is becoming America’s story.

The post From Russia with hate appeared first on Coda Story.

The first bit to go is the last part of the phrase – “by the corrupt” – because winning elections is the easiest thing for crooks to achieve in a society with well-established institutions. It’s the other stuff that gives the crooks trouble. Once corrupt people are in government, the middle part of the phrase – “for the corrupt” – does not necessarily follow. If the institutions remain run by honest people, kleptocracy not only may not take root, but the corrupt politicians may be pushed out of office by the next election.

HOW KLEPTOCRACY TAKES ROOT

So something I’ve been keeping an eye on since Donald Trump’s inauguration is how the Securities and Exchange Commission  treats Justin Sun. In case you don’t remember him, Sun is a Chinese crypto billionaire who spent $6.2 million on a banana, then ate it.

In March 2023, the SEC charged Sun and eight celebrities (including Lindsay Lohan, which I was disappointed by, being a fan of both Mean Girls and The Parent Trap) with fraudulently promoting crypto tokens. “Sun paid celebrities with millions of social media followers to tout the unregistered offerings, while specifically directing that they not disclose their compensation,” said Gurbir Grewal, head of the SEC’s enforcement division at the time. “This is the very conduct that the federal securities laws were designed to protect against.”

Six of the celebrities agreed to pay up to settle the charges at the first opportunity, another did a few months later. But Sun was in no hurry, which may have been a sensible policy. Last week, lawyers for Sun and the SEC wrote to the Manhattan judge overseeing the case asking that it be put on hold, saying they’ll come back with a status report in two months’ time. Now, this may all be procedural and above board, but it also may not be.

By September 2024, Trump began to talk about a new crypto company he was launching called World Liberty Financial. It had the admittedly clever tagline: “Be DeFiant” (DeFi of course meaning decentralized finance, the term for digital peer-to-peer transactions). But Trump’s venture struggled to hit its fund-raising target until it found a cornerstone investor: Justin Sun, who put in $75 million.

“This guy,” said World Liberty co-founder Zak Folkman at a forum in Hong Kong last month, with a gesture towards Sun, who was sitting beside him, “saw that regardless of the outcome, this project is a monumental move forward for the entire crypto community.” It is not yet clear what if anything, besides fundraising, World Liberty actually does, but at the same event, Folkman – who once set up a company called ‘Date Hotter Girls LLC’ – said its success came despite there being “no special treatment to anybody who purchased the token."

Hmmm, about that. Now, it’s clearly not true that the Trump White House is going easy on crypto just because Sun gave Liberty Financial $75 million. The SEC has already dropped a case against Coinbase, and last summer Trump was already telling a crypto conference that “when we see the attacks on crypto, it's a part of a much larger pattern that's being carried out by the same left-wing fascists who weaponize government against any threat to their power.” 

Since his inauguration, Trump has issued an Executive Order promising to make the United States the “crypto capital of the planet.” Pausing the investigation into Sun could just be part of a general reluctance to enforce regulations or crackdown on crypto. And the cryptocurrency Sun founded was not named as part of the national crypto reserve mooted by Trump.  

But the Sun case didn’t ever really have anything to do with crypto as such anyway, and the SEC was always careful to make clear it was charging him for the way he marketed his token, not for the fact of it. “We’re neutral about the technologies at issue, we’re anything but neutral when it comes to investor protection,” said Grewal.

So, from the point of view of people who don’t want the United States to tilt further towards Rajaratnam’s definition of a kleptocracy, it would be nice if the SEC maintained its case against Sun or else made very very very very clear that any decision to drop the case was in no way connected to the fact that he gave the US president’s company a nine-figure sum. It would also be nice if the Trump White House was prepared to promise action against some of the more egregious crypto frauds, but not many people are holding their breaths.

PROTECTING THE PRIVACY OF KLEPTOCRATS

On an unrelated note, it appears that Sun also shares the Trump White House’s, er, particular approach to which kinds of free speech should actually be free. Sun, reportedly, put pressure on a crypto trade publication to take down an article critical of his stunt with the banana. Spending six million dollars on a banana should, apparently, be above reproach. 

Talking of free speech and those who believe themselves to be above reproach: the authorities in the uber wealthy Swiss town of Cologny were not cool about the idea that some journalists might stage walking tours pointing out homes bought with the proceeds of some of the more egregious bits of financial crime enabled by folks nearby.

“The residential area perched above the lake is a popular refuge for certain kleptocrats, potentates and other financial pirates,” the event’s publicity announced, before it got cancelled because the local authorities wouldn’t give permission for it to go ahead. Which is to say: the world may be changing more quickly with each passing minute, but Switzerland isn’t.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

The post Of the corrupt, for the corrupt, by the corrupt appeared first on Coda Story.

But if things were getting uncomfortable for him in Buenos Aires, bounding onto the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland with a chainsaw, he seemed right at home. The chainsaw was a gift for Elon Musk, an unabashed admirer of Milei’s economic policies, his belief that government needs to essentially just get out of the way.  

In Argentina, Milei frequently cites his international clout as evidence of the appeal of his libertarian ideology. He says that Trump brought Musk into his government to replicate the role of Federico Sturzenegger, Argentina’s Minister of Deregulation and State Transformation. Whether Musk is a committed libertarian in the Milei and Sturzenegger mold is unknown. And unlike them, Musk has no electoral remit to enact his reforms. Back in September 2024, though, when DOGE had not yet taken shape, Musk posted on X that the “example” Milei was “setting with Argentina will be a helpful model for the rest of the world.”

And With DOGE fully up and running, Musk described Sturzenegger’s “Chainsaw 2.0” or “deep chainsaw” plans as “awesome.” In this plan, the national government of Argentina would, for instance, not build public housing because it’s something the private sector can do. The “lesson for other countries,” Sturzenegger says, “is that we should revisit the limits of what can be done.”

Just over a year into his government, Milei cut public spending by 30%, shut down half of the country's ministries, eliminated hundreds of laws and decrees, slashed nearly 40,000 public sector jobs, and reduced public works budgets to a bare minimum—all without major civil unrest, in the face of an opposition that remains largely paralyzed.

The shock Americans feel as they try to comprehend exactly how much power DOGE has been given, is how Argentinians felt as they watched Milei’s government—largely composed of individuals with no political experience, some without even a formal appointment—dismantle the state. 

While Milei has dramatically reduced inflation to 2.2%—no small feat in a country where inflation had crossed 200%—his cuts, alongside soaring costs, have also pushed some into poverty and his once high approval ratings are falling. 

That’s why his trip to the U.S. was important. At CPAC it’s Milei’s conservatism – last month in Davos, he railed against the “promoters of the sinister agenda of wokeism” – that counts, not the facts of his governance. Milei takes pride in his high standing within the global right wing. He is a part of what Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, in her own CPAC speech, called a global conservative collaboration. “When Bill Clinton and Tony Blair created a global, leftist liberal network in the 90s,” she said, “they were called ‘statesmen.’ Today when Trump, Meloni, Milei and, maybe, Modi talk, they are called a ‘threat to democracy.’ This is the left’s double standard.” It is this global prominence, Milei hopes, that will continue to propel his agenda forward in Argentina and shield him from the fallout of the crypto scandal. 

As for Milei’s effect on the U.S. – both Trump and Musk appear to be looking at him as the canary in the coalmine of radical deregulation. Just how far can governments go down the path of libertarianism? How far can they go to redefine the role of government in society?  Both approaches reflect a foundational shift in governance philosophy - from institutional processes to disruption by outsiders who view existing systems as obstacles rather than safeguards.

Milei’s first year in government offers a preview of what's unfolding in America. Musk is now taking Milei's playbook further by adding technology - developing AI tools to automate the government downsizing that Milei executed manually with his 40,000 job cuts. Both men use their credentials as disruptors to justify radical changes while dismissing criticism as establishment resistance. And both have created a mutual amplification system - Milei points to Musk's support as validation while Musk points to Argentina as proof that his approach works, despite emerging evidence to the contrary in both cases. A U.S. district judge has, at least temporarily, stopped DOGE from accessing treasury data on the grounds that such data might be “improperly disclosed.” As questions mount about DOGE’s intentions, including from its own employees, Americans should watch Argentina’s libertarian experiment closely. It could serve not as a blueprint but as a warning about what happens when bureaucratic guardrails are dismantled with chainsaws, real or metaphorical.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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OLIGARCHS CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH

It was partly the revelation of how gross the fallen kleptocrats’ greed had been; it was partly the realisation of how complicit Western enablers had been in the corruption of these kleptocrats; it was partly how Russia’s bought-and-paid-for proxies used blatant lies as cover for its annexation of Ukrainian territory; and it was partly the way that corruption had crushed Ukraine’s ability to respond. Ultimately, it was the combination of all four factors working together that convinced me there was nothing more important to the future of democracy than bringing illicit finance under control.

This is why it was so appalling to see the president of the United States repeating the Kremlin’s lies about Ukraine last week. Corruption of truth plus corruption of morals plus corruption of money equals the destruction of democracy.

Now I’m not going to pretend I have any influence over supporters of Donald Trump. Let's face it, not many of them read this newsletter, and if they did, they wouldn’t listen to me anyway. But it has made me think about what needs to be done in response.

The core of Putin-style politics is what he understands winning an argument to look like. When his opponents are too scared, confused, exhausted, or dead to continue, he thinks he’s won. Sometimes he has: murdering anyone who disagreed with him in Chechnya, shattering an entire city, plus driving out hundreds of thousands of people, did indeed pacify that poor, beautiful place, though it did not work so well as a strategy in Syria.

But here’s why the truth is so troubling to oligarchs, and why Trump unleashed his inner troll when Zelensky said some anodyne but true things, because, no matter how loud you shout, no matter how many people you imprison or murder, two plus two always equals four. And “if that is granted, all else follows.”

SO LET’S CONFRONT THEM WITH THE TRUTH

No matter what the trolls say, actual free speech is not just about letting your opponents say what they like, but about creating structures in which everyone can speak, everyone can be heard, and everyone can agree that the point is to arrive at the truth, not to shout louder. A marketplace of ideas, like any marketplace, can’t function without fair regulations.

And if our rulers refuse to abide by those regulations – like Trump or Putin or, in the U.K., former Prime Minister Boris Johnson – then it is everyone’s duty to call them out. So, it was great to see that Josie Stewart, a British civil servant who lost her job for exposing falsehoods told by Johnson’s government about the withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021, won a tribunal case for wrongful dismissal.

“We can’t have a system that says stay silent, no matter what you see, and forces dedicated public servants to choose between their conscience and their career,” she said. The usual boring people will claim she was part of the deep state or “the blob,” or whatever, but actually Stewart and people like her are a crucial safeguard against corruption.

Incidentally, in Wales, parliament is debating a new law that would mean politicians could lose their seats if they deliberately lie, which is an interesting idea.

LIKE THE TRUTH ABOUT THE DAMAGE BEING DONE BY MUSK

The good folks at Accountability Lab and Humentum have continued their work to assess the effect of Elon Musk’s decision to destroy USAID (all to save the equivalent of around three and a half days’ worth of the U.S. budget deficit). They have responses from 665 recipients of aid funding, and have broken down how much those organisations will lose and what it means.

The money was spread across many areas, but the largest group affected have been organisations that provided healthcare services, followed by those working in “governance” and “anti-corruption”, with the impact potentially catastrophic even for those who didn’t rely on USAID for all of their money.

Here’s another estimate: after one week of the freeze, almost a million women lost sexual health services; after a month, that figure will hit four million. After 90 days, the supposed length of the freeze, almost 12 million women and girls will be denied life-saving care. That means, if previous trends repeat themselves. 4.2 million women will become pregnant without wanting to, of whom 8,340 will die.

Clinics were one of the few places in rural Afghanistan where women could still work, but now that’s gone. “To be honest, it was one of the worst days of my life,” a midwife in rural Afghanistan told Service95. Imagine what other days an Afghan midwife has likely lived through, and marvel that somehow Elon Musk has managed to make it worse. The knock-on effects in terms of increased misery, increased corruption, and increased terrorism are impossible to calculate, and how any of it benefits the United States is a mystery to me.

WAITING OUT SANCTIONS

While the U.K. is talking tough on sanctions, it is unclear what the Trump administration means to do about the sanctions on Russia and its oligarchs as it continues to negotiate peace. I found this UK Financial Threat Assessment nerdily fascinating. Particularly for its description of some of the mechanisms used by sanctioned Russians to evade restrictions on the movement of their money. Take this choice sentence: “Neo-Bank fails to detect that the regular deposits it receives from Global Bank into the account of Seafarer Z are made by Manager Y, which is funded by Company X, and therefore indirectly by the (sanctioned individual).” 

The British government has promised to keep oligarchs with ties to the Kremlin out of the U.K., where they once bought their most expensive toys, including mansions, newspapers and football clubs. But the oligarchs are sitting tight. For instance, superyachts are expensive toys. And Roman Abramovich hasn’t moved his 162-metre monolith for three years. Mooring fees alone cost more than $200,000 a year. If oligarchs are prepared to go to all that trouble just to keep the crews of their yachts paid, what will they do to buy weapons?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Oligarchy newsletter. Sign up here.

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Today, that solidarity has been replaced by something no one could have imagined in February, 2022: the United States has refused to back an annual resolution presented to the UN General Assembly that condemns Russian aggression and demands the removal of troops. Instead, the leader of the world's most powerful democracy now repeats the Kremlin's false narrative that Ukraine started the war.

This stunning reversal of the U.S. position represents Vladimir Putin's greatest victory - not in the battlefields of Ukraine but in a war that most of us thought ended over 30 years ago: the Cold War. 

Putin's win is no accident. For decades, he has been explicit about his ultimate goal: to return to the world of 1945, when the leaders of the U.S.S.R., U.S. and Britain sat around a table in Yalta to divide the world between them. The invasion of Ukraine three years ago was never about Ukraine - it was about reclaiming lost power and forcing the West back to the negotiating table. Putin’s success stems from the collective failure of the Western establishment, convinced of its own invincibility, to recognize his systematic dismantling of the order they claimed to defend.

It would be too simple to blame Donald Trump or any single political leader for finally giving Putin his seat at the table. This failure belongs to the entire Western establishment - including media organizations, think tanks, universities, corporations, and civil society institutions.

The values the West claimed for itself - defense of individual rights, rule of law, democratic values - were worth fighting for. But having “won” the Cold War, Western establishments grew complacent. They assumed the moral high ground was unassailable, dismissing those who warned it could be lost.

When Putin called the Soviet collapse "the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century," Western analysts dismissed it as rhetoric. When he told George W. Bush that Ukraine was "not a country," they treated it as diplomatic bluster. When he used his 2007 Munich speech to declare ideological war on the Western-led world order, they saw a tantrum.

Each subsequent action - from the invasion of Georgia in 2008, to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, from the downing of MH17, also in 2014, to the killing of opponents throughout Putin’s reign - was treated as an isolated incident rather than part of a carefully orchestrated strategy. When Georgian leaders warned that Ukraine would be next, the Obama administration ignored them, dispatching Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Geneva to meet her Russian counterpart and present him with the infamous "reset" button. When Baltic and Polish leaders pleaded for increased NATO deployments and warned about the Nord Stream pipeline's security implications, they were dismissed as paranoid.

"The Western Europeans pooh-poohed and patronized us for these last 30 years," former Polish foreign minister Radosław Sikorski told Politico in 2022. "For years they were patronizing us about our attitude: 'Oh, you know, you over-nervous, over-sensitive Central Europeans are prejudiced against Russia.'"

The Lost Victory

Meanwhile, inside Russia, Putin was perfecting the playbook that would eventually transform the West itself. His ideologues, like Alexander Dugin, weren't just discussing Russia's future - they were designing a blueprint for dismantling liberal democracy from within. Dugin, and the influential Izborsky Club think tank, understood that the key to defeating Western values wasn't to challenge them head-on, but to turn their contradictions against themselves.

It wasn't that Dugin had anything particularly compelling to offer. His vision of a post-liberal world order where traditional values trump individual rights was hardly original. But when he sat down with Tucker Carlson in April last year to present Putin as the defender of traditional values against the decadent West, his message resonated with conservatives because too many Westerners felt that liberal values had become hollow promises. 

Many studies, like this from the Pew Research Center, showed that Americans were rapidly losing faith in their institutions. Rather than addressing these grievances, the Western establishment preferred to blame disinformation and foreign interference, dismissing citizens’ concerns and creating resentments that Putin proved masterful at exploiting.

Putin was also methodically building a global coalition that extended far beyond the West. While Western media focused on Russia's influence operations in Europe and America, Moscow was crafting a different narrative for the Global South. In Africa, Russian embassies bombarded newsrooms with op-eds positioning Russia as the successor to the Soviet Union's anti-colonial legacy. The message was simple but effective: Russia was fighting Western imperialism, not waging colonial war.

Engineering the West's Downfall

While Western governments spent billions setting up fact-checking initiatives and disinformation monitoring centers - always reacting, always one step behind - Putin was methodically building loose, agile networks that tapped into genuine popular anger about Western hypocrisy and double standards.

Putin's triumph lies not in offering better ideas or values - democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences"

The West's reactive stance allowed Putin to continuously set the agenda. The vast "counter-disinformation" industry - now effectively destroyed by Trump’s aid cuts-  focused on debunking individual claims but consistently missed the bigger picture. From RT Arabic's dominant position in Lebanon to coordinated social media campaigns across Africa, Putin crafted narratives that positioned Russia as the champion of all those who felt betrayed and marginalized by the Western-led order.

"Russia's message lands well and softly," one editor from Johannesburg told me during a gathering of African editors in Nairobi in 2022. "The challenge for our team is to objectively navigate overwhelmingly pro-Russian public sentiment." 

The success of this strategy is now undeniable. And yet, Putin offers little in return for his repudiation of the West. Democracy, individual rights, and rule of law remain powerful ideals. His genius was in exploiting the growing gap between these principles and people's lived experiences, a gap that Western establishments proved unwilling or unable to address.

This blind spot - coupled with the West’s inability to imagine losing - became the so-called free world’s greatest vulnerability. While liberal establishments were congratulating themselves on the "end of history," Putin was methodically working to rewrite its ending. While they dismissed the appeal of traditionalist values as backwards and parochial, he was building a global alliance of like-minded leaders and movements. 

Putin's victory was never inevitable. At each step, Western institutions had opportunities to recognize and counter his strategy. Instead, their conviction in their own righteousness led them to consistently underestimate both the threat and the extent of their own failures.

Today, as Russian state media hosts celebrate their triumph and Trump prepares to negotiate Ukraine's surrender, the scale of Putin's achievement is breathtaking. He has succeeded where generations of Soviet leaders failed: not just in resisting Western influence but in fundamentally transforming the West itself. 

The Cold War’s new ending is exactly as Putin scripted it. Not with the triumph of Western liberal democracy, but with its possibly fatal weakening. The Kremlin's guiding framework—where power is truth, principles are weakness, and cronyism is the only real ideology—now defines the White House as well.The question isn't how we got here - Putin told us exactly where he was taking us. The question is whether we can finally abandon our arrogant certainties long enough to understand what happened - and what comes next.

Read More

The Club That Wants Russia to Take Over the World: Our 2018 investigation revealed how the Izborsky Club, a self-described "intellectual circle" of philosophers, journalists and Orthodox priests, was working to dismantle Western liberal democracy. Read how they laid the groundwork for today's reality.

The post How the West lost the war it thought it had won appeared first on Coda Story.

Jones’ efforts began in 2017 with a YouTube channel, where he pitched himself as a “nationally recognized authority on border security and transnational crimes.” His one-man show, Tripwires and Triggers, lacked sophisticated production. Early videos featured primitive graphics, poor lighting, and awkward jump cuts. Many received fewer than 500 views. 

Then, in 2019, Jones landed a gig with Breitbart, a Trump-aligned media outlet that hired him to write about border security. Around that time, he met Lara Logan, an Emmy Award winner and former CBS correspondent who has become a darling of the MAGA-sphere. She interviewed Jones for her show, Lara Logan Has No Agenda, before being let go from Fox News after comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci, of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to a sadistic Nazi doctor.

Soon, the former lawman, despite his rudimentary Spanish, was being regularly featured as an expert on Mexican drug cartels on primetime Fox News programs, including Tucker Carlson’s show. In 2021, he became a correspondent for Newsmax, a once-fringe Fox rival that grew into a MAGA media powerhouse following the 2020 election. In June, a Reuters Institute study found that 8 percent of Americans—about 25 million—consulted Newsmax at least weekly. (That’s about the same number who report reading the Wall Street Journal weekly. Its online-only reach is similar to NPR’s, the same study showed.) 

As a Newsmax correspondent, Jones hasn’t always nailed the details in his reporting, often misspelling words and names. In one broadcast, his graphics misidentified Bubba Shelton—the sheriff of McMullen County—as the sheriff of “McAllen County” (McAllen is a Texas border city, not a county). In the title of a recent YouTube video, Jones misspelled Lukeville, Arizona—an unincorporated community on the international border and one of the state’s only ports of entry—as “Luthville.”

But, in MAGA-aligned media, it seems to be consistent political messaging that matters—not specifics. As a former DPS officer, Jones enjoys favorable treatment from the state police agency, including access to helicopters and police intelligence of which other journalists could only dream. He often features DPS helicopters, aircraft hangars, or personnel in movie trailer-style videos. In one video on his YouTube channel, Jones totes a large bundle of seized drugs on his shoulder, transporting the illicit goods from a DPS helicopter to a U.S. Border Patrol pickup. In another, Jones runs behind a state police officer, up and down boulders and through thick brush and creosote bushes—as if he, too, is part of the law enforcement team.

During many of his dispatches, Jones wears the same brown-and-black checkered scarf as DPS airmen, from whom he regularly receives intel: The division’s head pilot, Stacy Holland, texts Jones on a regular basis, according to records obtained by the Texas Observer. (In 2012, then-captain Holland was maneuvering an agency helicopter when a trooper shot at a speeding pickup, killing two Guatemalan migrants and injuring another, according to police video obtained for a previous Observer investigation.)

Most DPS officers decline interviews, instead directing journalists to the agency’s media office, which often ignores press inquiries. Holland, on the other hand, has a close relationship with Jones, often sending him photos and videos. The exchanges show that Jones has obtained access to a stream of intelligence, including suspicious activity reports, screenshots of a helicopter’s aerial view cameras, and photos of tracking devices from a DPS computer.

Jones calls Holland “bro” and praises him for his contributions, some of which are not public information. “I like it!” Jones replied to one photo. “Anything new from the field coming in lately? We should ramp that up again.” In text conversations, the two refer to migrants as “bodies,” as if they were corpses and not living human beings.

Referring to fellow human beings as “bodies” is not unusual for Jones. On a chilly December night—a few days before Christmas 2023—Jones filmed a scene from a 47-acre park in Eagle Pass, where local children and families played baseball and soccer before the Texas National Guard turned it into a de facto military base for Governor Greg Abbott’s multi-billion dollar, multi-agency border security initiative, Operation Lone Star. That night, the park was lined with concertina wire, its entrance was barred, and the fields were filled with hundreds of migrants, most of whom had few possessions and slept on the ground under emergency blankets. “So you got big groups of bodies that come in here about every 10 to 15 minutes,” Jones said. “Every silver blanket or bump on the ground is a body,” he added, referring to asylum-seekers. 

Jones’ access to DPS and to Operation Lone Star military activities—which serve as popular Hollywood-style backdrops for “border invasion” content creators—helped put him on the radar of Trump’s allies, including Tom Homan, who was an acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Trump’s first administration and who was recently named the president-elect’s new “border czar.”

“We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country.”

In July 2023, Homan founded a nonprofit called Border911, and he later named Jones vice president of the organization, which included other former state and federal law enforcement officers as team members who crisscrossed the country spreading the false narrative that criminal terrorists are invading the United States at the invitation of the Biden administration and Democrats. Border911 members also received government security contracts and speaking gigs for themselves or for companies that employed them, as revealed in a prior investigation in this series. The group argued that only Trump could save America, laying the groundwork for his reelection.

Jones’ DPS contacts were crucial in this pro-Trump messaging. In Border911 videos posted on social media channels and promoted at events, Jones and Homan sweep across the Texas borderlands in state police aircraft, set to a thunderous soundtrack fit for a thriller. “Whether you like President Trump or not, you can’t argue with his success,” Homan says in one video from March 2023, before it cuts to another scene: an airplane hangar in West Texas, where he, Jones, and DPS airmen in flight gear walk in slow motion toward a helicopter.

As of early December, other Border911 team members were being considered for key positions in the incoming Trump administration, including former Border Patrol Chief Rodney Scott, who was tapped to lead Customs and Border Protection. With Homan as incoming “border czar,” and assigned by Trump to oversee border enforcement and mass deportations, Jones is uniquely positioned to influence homeland security strategy and messaging in Texas and beyond. 

Trump and his allies have made clear that the right wing’s most extreme ideas are now on the table, from constructing deportation camps in Texas to designating Mexican drug cartels as “foreign terrorists.” Classifying cartels as terrorists has, in Jones’ own words, been one of his goals since retiring from DPS in 2016. For nearly two decades, some Texas Republican officials have tried to convince the federal government to make this decision, but they’ve always been rebuffed partly because it would spark conflict with Mexico, the United States’ closest trading partner. 

Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, a professor at George Mason University and author of Los Zetas Inc., a book about one of Mexico’s most feared drug cartels, said she does not consider Jones to be a true border authority.“He’s unknown to me. … I don’t consider him an expert,” she told the Observer. But she considers the ideas that Jones and others have espoused, including labeling cartels as foreign terrorists, to be dangerous propaganda that could well be used to justify bombings or other incursions on Mexican soil. 

In an essay for the Observer about such proposals, she wrote: “Nobody denies that extreme levels of violence and brutality in Mexico are connected with the drug trade. Something needs to be done, but deploying U.S. troops would only escalate a costly and ineffective drug war and put many innocent lives at risk.”

In the ballroom of a San Antonio Embassy Suites last October, Daniel Korus, a dean at Del Mar College in the coastal city of Corpus Christi, introduced Jones as the keynote speaker for a South Texas regional policy conference, stating that Jones had a 25-year career in border intelligence. “Now, he educates the rest of us,” said Korus, a former high-ranking naval officer.

Jones did not correct the introduction, though most of his time in the state police was actually spent in non-intelligence roles away from the border, according to DPS records. His only recorded formal DPS training course specifically on the subject was “Intelligence Gathering/Sharing/Mapping,” according to the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, and he took that just a few months before his retirement. 

Nonetheless, Jones promotes himself as a border intelligence expert and profits from it. With the All American Speakers Bureau, a platform for hired experts, Jones lists himself as charging $30,000 to $50,000 per speaking gig, though Korus said Jones was paid $10,000 or less for the San Antonio appearance. 

Dressed in black leather cowboy boots and a matching suit, Jones paced in front of his audience, telling tales of the borderlands and the violence between rival organized crime groups in Mexico. “What happens there is coming here, and I’m gonna show you,” he said.

On a projector screen, Jones displayed graphic videos and told stories about drug cartel members committing lurid acts of violence in Mexico: decapitations with a fillet knife, a head bashed in with a sledgehammer, and the wiping out of most of a town. 

“These people live in Texas. We have been dealing with this for many years—but you have not been told,” Jones warned, before moving to the next PowerPoint slide.

Throughout his presentation, a table full of sheriffs in cowboy hats nodded along in agreement as others in the ballroom gasped at the violent scenes. Twice, he paused to ask the audience some version of the question: “Is this a drug trafficking organization—or is this a terrorist organization?”

He told the audience what the foreign terrorist designation would accomplish: expedited investigations into bad actors that would allow police to skirt due process protections, to obtain more resources, and to freeze more organized crime organizations’ assets abroad.

“We’re gonna take this country back.”

Jones has repeated similar arguments in various venues, including a hearing of the U.S. House Homeland Security Committee, Newsmax, the Dr. Phil show, and Tucker Carlson’s former show on Fox News.

To Jones, the most important aspect of the foreign terrorist label seems to be that it could enable hastened deportations for people in any way associated with Mexican drug cartels. “You can’t be a terrorist in our country,” he told Dr. Phil last year. “We can just grab ’em, pick ’em up and remove ’em out of this country, and go after ’em anywhere in the world, and that’s what we really need to do.”

But many of his assertions about the foreign terrorist designation—a process codified in federal law and overseen by the U.S. Department of State—are incorrect, according to experts interviewed by the Observer. Some actions Jones described can already be taken by the government without the foreign terrorist label, such as freezing assets, said former State Department official Jason Blazakis. Whether a suspect is affiliated with a foreign terrorist organization or another criminal network, individuals have a right to due process, he added.

“I think he doesn’t understand how terrorism investigations work,” Blazakis said. “He’s trying to make the designation look like some kind of special panacea.”

During his speech, Jones also informed the audience that the cartels deploy a threat, “plato y plumo”—a misstatement of “plata o plomo” that changes the meaning from a menacing choice between a bribe or a bullet to a perplexing offer of a plate and a nonsense word.

Jones emphasizes different credentials depending on his audience. Sometimes he speaks as a correspondent for Newsmax, and other times as a member of Border911. In legislative settings, he often emphasizes his DPS career, such as when he advocated designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations at a press conference outside the Arizona Capitol. (Representative Steve Montenegro introduced a related bill about a week later.) 

Much of Jones’ work for Newsmax relies on strategically edited footage, meant to portray the border as a frightening place and asylum-seekers as criminal invaders.

Last January, volunteers at a humanitarian camp for asylum-seekers near the border in the unincorporated community of Sasabe, Arizona, were surprised to see Jones roll up with a cameraman. As shown in footage aired by Newsmax and separate videos a volunteer provided to the Observer, Jones was accompanied by armed and masked men from Mayhem Solutions Group, a private security firm, who flanked him as he recorded his content. The Mayhem men were mostly dressed in military fatigues, and some wore hats with patches bearing the insignia of Texas DPS Intelligence and Counterterrorism—the division Jones worked in before retiring. 

The appearance of these men in Arizona puzzled the volunteers, especially when the arrivals claimed to be part of a state or federal “task force.” One volunteer, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, said the armed Mayhem personnel left asylum-seekers with the impression that they were police because they wore tactical vests and patches emblazoned with the word “investigator.” Those armed men said they had been hired to collect information, and they “were going around telling people that they were obligated to give them their information, implying that they were a federal agency,” the volunteer said, as previously reported in The Border Chronicle, on the day the men came to the camp. “They said multiple times that they were going to citizen’s arrest us if we tried to interfere with what they were doing, and that they would bring the U.S. forces in if we didn’t step aside.” 

Meanwhile, Jones continued to film, the volunteer said. “While these guys were intimidating people, he was talking about all ‘these illegals invading the country.’” 

When volunteers asked Jones about his armed companions, he provided little information. “I’m with Newsmax,” the volunteer recalled him saying. “You guys are doing your thing. We’re doing ours.” 

The Observer reached the founder of Mayhem Solutions Group, but he claimed he did not know Jones. A state contract database and public records requests show that Mayhem Solutions Group has never held a contract with Texas DPS. The agency did not respond to a request for comment about the security company employees wearing DPS insignia on their hats. The federal Department of Homeland Security stated it held no formal agreement with the company. 

In some settings, Jones introduces himself as CEO of Omni Intelligence, which he founded in 2017. The company has been described by the right-wing Texas Public Policy Foundation as a provider of “intelligence and analytics services to government agencies and media.” Omni Intelligence has no website, and its business address has alternated between rental homes and P.O. boxes across Central Texas. (Letters sent to two of his business addresses were returned as undeliverable.)

A search of public records revealed one Omni customer: No Greater Love, a nonprofit based in Wimberley that says it educates “millions of Americans daily about the truth of open borders” and holds occasional teach-ins for doomsday preppers at a local Veterans of Foreign Wars post. Over a two-year period, the group paid Omni Intelligence $45,000, according to its IRS Form 990 tax filings. Its website heavily features Jones’ video content. 

It is unclear if Omni has any employees, aside from Jones’ personal assistant, who lives in the Philippines. 

One of the firm’s former unpaid consultants was Ammon Blair, a recently retired Border Patrol agent. Blair was also featured in one of Jones’ YouTube videos and on Newsmax. While still at Border Patrol, Blair said he passed intelligence to Jones, and one of those stories went “viral.” 

Jones did not respond to repeated requests, via email, letter, and phone for an interview for this story. He also denied a request made in person at the San Antonio conference, saying he was unavailable that day and for the following several weeks, but that he might have time later. Jones never replied to the Observer’s subsequent inquiries.

Last April, Jones appeared with Homan and Trump at the now-president-elect’s Mar-a-Lago Club during a fundraising gala for Border911. As Homan’s sidekick, Jones has identified allies among sheriffs at the border and beyond, as well as other county and state officials who could support and potentially financially benefit from Trump’s mass deportation plans. 

In Arizona, Jones describes Pinal County Sheriff (and failed U.S. Senate candidate) Mark Lamb as a “close friend,” and Jones once embedded with Lamb’s agency for a week. Jones also moderated a panel including Lamb and Mark Dannels, a right-wing border sheriff who has referred to deporting undocumented people as a “cleanup.” In Texas, Jones spoke at a rally with Kinney County Sheriff Brad Coe, whose department has collaborated with vigilante groups, stocked up on pepperball guns to shoot migrants, and sued the Biden administration over immigration policy. 

In Florida, Jones found another powerful ally: Richard Mantei, a state prosecutor who helped lead a year-and-a-half-long grand jury investigation, a non-criminal probe of policies to address illegal immigration. Records show Mantei sent Jones money via Venmo for “Florida expenses” last fall. (The Florida Attorney General’s Office said it lacked records of any related invoice or receipt, and it refused to release any affidavits or grand jury testimony records signed by Jones.) When the same grand jury completed its final policy recommendations, Mantei emailed the document to Homan.

In some video clips, Jones appears as Homan’s right-hand man. Homan often heralds Jones as a premier border expert because of his DPS experience. At a January 2023 press conference outside the Arizona Capitol, Homan introduced Jones as a good friend and a top authority on crime and the drug trade, after citing Jones’ DPS career.

“I’m gonna walk around the country with these men here in this organization,” says Homan in one of Border911’s signature trailers from March 2023, over footage of himself, Jones, and DPS airmen near an agency helicopter, “and educate American people on why the border is a disaster.”

At times Jones appears to have also coached DPS airmen on how—and when—to take videos so he could better use the footage. “Hey, being advised you may have up to 2,000 surging the border in El Paso bro,” Jones wrote to Holland, the chief DPS pilot, in March 2023. “Can you get some video from helicopter ASAP?” In iMessages to Holland in February 2024, he praised state police for the videos they provided. One reads: “Tell the crew great job for me. Best field production of all time.”

In a September 2023 message, Jones invited DPS to steer the narrative he portrays on Newsmax. “I’ll run it Monday,” he replied to a message from Holland. “Anything you want me to say specifically?” 

Holland and his airmen have apparently returned the favor for Jones’ flattering coverage by furnishing him with the backdrops for his propaganda videos. In one January 2024 clip, Jones and Homan walk perfectly framed between two DPS aircraft on a tarmac at sunset in West Texas, with mountains in the background.

“You know Tom, this border, it’s gotta get fixed. It’s absolutely unsustainable,” Jones says solemnly, walking beside Homan with the sunset as a backdrop, the sky painted in hues of blue and purple.

Homan responds matter-of-factly: He wakes up every morning pissed off, but at least they’ve got Border911. “We’re gonna take this country back, we’re gonna secure the border, we’re gonna protect our national security,” Homan says. 

“We’re not going to get rich doing it,” he adds, not mentioning how Jones and other members of Border911 have already benefited from various government contracts and speaking gigs.

“But what a team we built.”

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Trump had said that by his deadline Israel should demand the return of all 76 of the remaining Israeli hostages (including the remains of the 35 or so believed to be dead), or "let hell break out". Hamas had earlier threatened to call off the scheduled release of another three hostages unless the Israelis lifted the curbs it said they had imposed on the flow of aid into the battered enclave, especially shelter items. 

Egyptian and Qatari mediators ironed out the problem, as they had done with previous hitches. But, in the meanwhile, Benjamin Netanyahu's far right government took up the baton Trump had handed to it. In preparation to unleash hell, if "our hostages" were not freed by the deadline, Israel massed troops in and around Gaza. It was left unclear whether Israel was demanding the release of all 76 hostages, or just the 17 due to be freed over the current 42-day first phase of the Gaza agreement, or just the three originally meant to be freed on that Saturday in line with the accord.

In the event, the sixth hostage handover of Phase 1 went ahead smoothly, with three Israeli men, looking as fit and healthy as could be expected given their ordeal, handed over to the International Red Cross and thence back to Israel in exchange for the release of 369 Palestinian prisoners, 36 of them serving long-term sentences and the rest Gazans picked up at random with no charges. 

Netanyahu hates the Palestinian Authority at least as much as he does Hamas, because the PA wants a two-state solution. "There will be no Hamas and no PA in Gaza after the war," he said.

As before, and against the wishes of the Red Cross, Hamas turned the handover into a spectacle aimed at conveying the message that it is still strong and in control, with hundreds of heavily-armed, smartly-uniformed fighters, some toting advanced Israeli combat weapons probably seized in the October 7 2023 attack, cordoning off a large square and displaying the hostages on a stage festooned with Hamas banners and slogans. 

With the closing stages of the first phase set to continue (14 more days, 14 more hostages) did this mean that some daylight was opening up between Netanyahu and Trump, who had railed against the release of hostages in "dribs and drabs"? Not really. Trump is clearly in tune with the more vocally extreme elements in the Israeli cabinet, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, but Netanyahu could not simply junk the elaborately-negotiated and signed agreement, especially as the highly-emotive issue of hostage lives was at stake. At the security cabinet meeting where the exchange was approved, he is reported to have told his ministers not to give interviews or mention the Trump plan, to avoid appearing to act counter to the volatile US president.

So the focus shifted to the second phase of the accord, which was supposed to see the release of all Israeli hostages and many more Palestinian prisoners, and the complete withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Gaza Strip. It would mean the end of the war, with preparations for a third phase devoted to reconstruction. 

Negotiations on Phase 2 were meant to start on February 4, but two weeks went by before movement started in that direction, and the process was clearly going to be fraught. The issue of who would control and govern Gaza had been left open. As the TV screens glaringly showed, Hamas was still very much there and in charge. All attempts had failed to encourage an alternative local leadership, or to posit a takeover by the discredited Palestinian Authority from the West Bank. 

Netanyahu hates the PA at least as much as he does Hamas, because the PA wants a two-state solution. "There will be no Hamas and no PA in Gaza after the war," he said on February 17. "I am committed to U.S. President Trump's plan for the realization of a different Gaza."

"Any plan that leaves Hamas in charge of Gaza will be unacceptable to Israel," said Trump's Secretary of State Marco Rubio. After talks with Netanyahu, he added : "Hamas cannot continue as a military or government force. It must be eliminated or eradicated."

"The next phase of the hostage deal remains under great threat," concluded Amir Tibon in Haaretz. "It is clear that Netanyahu wants the deal to collapse and the war to resume, and that he is doing everything in his power to make that happen." The collapse of the deal with Hamas would be the only way to enable Trump's "plan" for the US to "take over, own and cherish" a Gaza flattened beyond redemption and devoid of its Palestinian inhabitants, who would be rehoused happily and permanently in "beautiful communities" elsewhere while their Gaza was reborn as an incredible Riviera for others. 

It's a real estate hustler's fantasy that collides head-on with every sanctity and imperative in Arab history and politics. Egypt and Jordan immediately rejected Trump's suggestion that they take in Palestinians from Gaza. Trump was presumably assuming that the several billion dollars both receive in US military and economic aid would leverage obedience. But there are some issues that are beyond pressure and bribery. It would be an existential threat for King Abdullah's Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in particular. He knows that if the Gazans are displaced, the much closer and more numerous inhabitants of the West Bank, where things are already hotting up dangerously, would not be far behind. 

No Arab leader can go down in history as collaborating in a second Nakba, the first being the displacement of Palestinians by the creation of Israel in 1948. The Saudis, who Trump is counting on to join Israel in an expanded Abraham Accord despite Gaza, know this as well as any, and have long made it unequivocally clear that there is no way normalisation will happen without a clear pathway to a Palestinian state. They were further irked by Netanyahu's facetious suggestion that if they were so keen on that, why not establish it in the Kingdom? 

Riyadh set about rallying the Arabs behind a plan to counter the Trump scheme, with Egypt and others working on the details of a formula for reconstructing the Strip without displacing its inhabitants. The key issue is whether Hamas could be induced to stand aside, and who would take political and security control. Whatever the arrangement, Hamas would still be the power behind the camouflage. Would Israel accept such a cosmetic ploy, or, with Trump's backing, go all out to complete its stated war aim of destroying Hamas? 

That would complete the conversion of Gaza into a totally unlivable hell on earth, to which it is already pretty close. If that were to happen and the doors were opened, the bulk of the population might have no option but to stream out for the sake of simple survival. "Give them a choice. Not forcible eviction. Not ethnic cleansing," as Netanyahu said.

If the Gaza issue might produce some Arab pushback against Trump's wilder notions, Israel's ambition to deal with Iran is less contentious, though further conflict is unlikely to be welcomed by the Gulf countries. The Saudis, UAE and others roundly condemned Israel's large-scale attack on Iran on October 26 last year – their relations with Tehran have improved considerably since Trump's first term. 

But Iran is certainly in the crosshairs. After meeting with Secretary of State Rubio on February 16, Netanyahu said that with President Trump's support, "I have no doubt we can and will finish the job." While Rubio said that Israel and the U.S. "stand shoulder to shoulder" against Iran, it remains to be seen whether Trump, who supposedly prefers making deals to making war, would prefer to squeeze Iran into quasi-submission rather than encouraging or engaging in conflict. 

The effect of Israel's devastating blows to Iran's regional allies is being felt strongly in Lebanon, where the new government formed by PM Nawaf Salam onFebruary 8 clearly reflected a new balance of power, with Hezbollah losing its ability to veto decisions it doesn't like. 

The day after the new Lebanese cabinet held its first meeting, Israeli warplanes broke the sound barrier over Beirut, rattling windows and nerves throughout the city. It was a clear message aimed at Beirut airport, which the Israelis (through the US) threatened to bombard if it allowed flights from Tehran to land, on the accusation that such planes were bringing in cash and possibly weapons for Hezbollah. The airport cancelled the incoming flights, prompting protest demonstrations by Hezbollah followers around the airport in which vehicles of UN peacekeepers were attacked and burned. The Salam government then went further, and cancelled all flights to and from Iran until further notice.

Under the November 27 ceasefire agreement last year between Israel and Hezbollah, Israeli forces were supposed to leave Lebanon by January 27, but the deadline was pushed back to February 18. Though the accord's co-sponsor France insisted the Israelis should then pull out fully, the U.S. did not oppose Israel's decision to retain five strategic hilltop positions in southern Lebanon. Israel also continued to carry out strikes on what it deemed Hezbollah targets in the Beqaa Valley, and on February 17 assassinated a Hamas officer with a drone strike on his car in the Lebanese city of Sidon. The concept of "ceasefire" seemed to be somewhat relative.

Netanyahu hailed Trump as the best friend Israel has ever had in the White House. The question now is whether the American president can treat the Arab side of the equation as amounting to nothing.

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PayPal and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel must have thought the bet he made on Vance in the 2022 Ohio Senate race had paid off in Paris. Thiel, alongside fellow venture capitalists David Sacks and Elon Musk, is the money behind the rise of JD Vance to the vice presidency of the United States. And in the French capital, Vance gave his investors the returns they've been banking on, making the argument that even the tamest regulation would stifle the AI industry and kill innovation.

"The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety," Vance lectured assembled global leaders. "It will be won by building." Perhaps inevitably, given the tone being taken, the United States (alongside the United Kingdom) refused to sign an innocuous pledge at the end of the conference to "reduce digital divides" and "ensure AI is open, inclusive, transparent, ethical, safe, secure, and trustworthy." Nearly sixty other countries did sign.

Trump, it seems, doesn’t do multilateral, global treaties, having already pulled the U.S. out of a panoply of international agreements on health, climate change, justice, trade and taxation. And as the U.S. refused to play ball, China declared its intent to collaborate freely with other countries, to play its part in creating "a community with a shared future for mankind".

Vance’s first speech abroad as vice president showed how the Trump administration is looking to force everyone - allies and adversaries alike - to react while the U.S. sets the tune. Clearly, by countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Not long after Vance’s visit to Paris, it was Hegseth’s turn to lecture the U.S.’s European allies. “Make no mistake,” he said in Brussels, “President Trump will not allow anyone to turn Uncle Sam into Uncle Sucker.”

Hegseth told reporters that the “peace dividend has to end.” Europe needs to spend more on its own defense because there are “autocrats with ambitions around the globe from Russia to the communist Chinese.” Either the West, he added, “awakens to that reality… or we will abdicate that responsibility to somebody else with all the wrong values.” 

The Trump administration is looking to force allies and adversaries alike to march to the beat of America's drum. By countering American abrasiveness, China senses an opportunity to strengthen its soft power.

Meanwhile in Washington, DC, Donald Trump was demonstrating the extent to which the United States seemed to be marginalizing NATO, by claiming to have already agreed with Vladimir Putin to begin negotiating a peace deal over Ukraine. No European leader had been clued in; neither had the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. If Europe was getting the stick, it very much seemed as if Putin was getting the carrot. “I know him very well,” Trump said about Putin. “I think he wants peace. I think he would tell me if he didn’t.” Trump also expressed his hope that Russia could rejoin the G7 (formerly G8) bloc of the world’s wealthiest nations.

“Europe must be part of any negotiations,” a group of European foreign ministers said in Paris, insisting plaintively on a seat at the table even as Trump seems intent on pulling that seat out from underneath them. A meeting between Putin and Trump has been mooted to discuss Ukraine – it will be held in Saudi Arabia and, as of now, nobody else has been invited. Though, as Vance prepares to meet with Zelensky at a security conference in Munich at the weekend, at least the U.S. acknowledges that Ukraine will need to be a part of the process. But an indication of the terms on which a peace deal with Russia might be agreed was provided by U.S. defence secretary Pete Hegseth who said that neither NATO membership nor reclaiming all its land occupied by Russia were “realistic” goals for Ukraine. 

China, reportedly, has also offered to host Trump and Putin for a summit to discuss a peace deal. Speaking in London, Wang Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, said “China is willing to work together with all parties, including the European side, to continue to play a constructive role in this regard.” The “rationality” of China’s position, he maintained, has been borne out by recent developments. Last year, China and Brazil said it could broker a peace deal, an offer Zelensky dismissed, questioning both countries’ motivations. “You will not boost your power,” he said, “at Ukraine’s expense.”

Since Trump returned to the White House, China’s approach has been to remind the world that it is a responsible global power. As the U.S. puts the world on the defensive, "China will increasingly be seen as a reliable global partner," noted one state magazine. The article was a reaction to the USAID freeze and argued that Beijing could now persuade other countries that its model "provides a more predictable and lasting choice for cooperation." 

Russian commentators, even as they welcomed Trump’s return, have been more cautious about any strategic benefits Russia might accrue. "The liberal agenda of previous administrations was something we learned to counter effectively," wrote an RT columnist. "But this conservative agenda, focused on patriotism, traditional family structures, and individual success, could prove more difficult to combat." Moscow must now compete with a Trump administration that can’t be attacked for being “woke,” that addresses the world from a vantage point that Russia thought was theirs, through conservative rather than progressive values and through Big Tech and trade tariffs rather than aid.

But with Trump intent on posturing as the lone gunslinger in town, Russia might take comfort in its alliance with China. What of Europe, though, and Western consensus?

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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The encounter was jarring not just for its surreal nature - a discussion of political theory amid artillery fire - but for what it revealed about Russian propaganda's evolving sophistication. When I researched the Overton Window after our conversation, I discovered that Russian state media had long been obsessed with the concept, transforming this Western analytical framework into something more potent: both an explanation for social change and supposed proof of Western cultural warfare. Russian commentators didn't just cite the theory -  they wielded it as both explanation and evidence of Western attempts to undermine Russian society.

Over the next decade, I watched this once-academic term slide from Russian state TV screens and the trenches of eastern Ukraine into mainstream Western discourse - embraced by commentators on both the far left and far right of the political spectrum. What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

Now we're watching this process play out in real time.  For instance, Elon Musk's handpicked team running DOGE - the new Department of Government Efficiency - are inexperienced young men between the ages of 19 and 24 with unfettered access to federal systems. A decade ago, putting Silicon Valley twenty-somethings in charge of critical government functions would have sparked outrage. Today, it's celebrated as innovation.

What began as a framework for understanding social change became a blueprint for engineering it.

The transformation extends far beyond Washington. When America's president proposes to "take over" Gaza and turn it into "the Riviera of the Middle East," when Musk tells Germans to "move beyond" Nazi guilt, they're deliberately expanding what's politically possible. From Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson, from African opinion writers praising Trump's aid cuts as "liberation" to conservative thinkers reimagining solutions for Gaza - each pushes the boundaries of acceptable discourse a little further.

The shift manifests across every domain of power. Inside federal agencies, tech executives now make decisions once reserved for career civil servants, normalizing private control of public functions. On the global stage, raw deal-making has replaced diplomatic principles, with decades-old alliances discarded in favor of transactional relationships. El Salvador's president offers his prisons to house American inmates. Ukraine, fighting for survival against Russia, signals its willingness to trade military support for mineral rights. Even humanitarian aid, long seen as a moral imperative, is being recast as a form of dependency that needs to be eliminated.

BlackRock, the world's largest asset manager, has already adapted to this new reality. Their latest analysis simply divides nations into "winners and losers" based on their ability to navigate this new transactional diplomacy and stay on Trump’s good side. No moral judgments, no democratic values - just raw negotiating power.

The Overton Window - or "Окно Овертона блядь" as the Russian commander put it in 2014, mechanically adding the profanity at the end of each phrase like a full stop - offers a powerful framework for understanding how societies transform - not through sudden upheaval but through the gradual shifting of what people consider acceptable.  Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries.

This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook - a calculated strategy of gradually expanding what society will tolerate, inch by inch, controversy by controversy. The goal is not just to push boundaries, but to exhaust resistance, to make the previously unimaginable seem not just possible, but inevitable.

The same mechanism operates in political discourse, where deliberate provocation becomes a strategic tool for reshaping collective perception. Donald Trump is the master of this approach. 

Whether through the brutal recalibrations of war or the calculated provocations of political theater, the Overton Window is always in motion, reshaped by those willing to push its boundaries. This systematic normalization of the extreme is a core tenet of the authoritarian playbook.

His political methodology isn't about achieving specific outcomes, but about continuously expanding the boundaries of acceptable discourse. Each provocative statement serves as a strategic instrument, deliberately designed to recalibrate social and political norms. When he suggests purchasing Greenland or proposing radical reimaginings of geopolitical landscapes like in Gaza, the actual feasibility becomes secondary to the act of introducing previously unthinkable concepts into mainstream conversation.

The genius of this approach lies in its relentlessness. By consistently proposing ideas that initially seem outrageous, extreme positions gradually become reference points for future discussions. Each controversial statement doesn't just distract from previous controversies; it fundamentally reshapes the political imagination. The goal is not immediate implementation but permanent transformation - moving the entire conceptual framework of what society considers possible.

Russian propagandists were early to grasp its significance, weaponizing the Overton Window theory itself as supposed evidence of Western cultural imperialism. That commander in Donetsk was just echoing what Russian state media had been claiming for years: that the West was deliberately expanding society's boundaries to impose its values on Russia.

A decade later, we're watching this process unfold in reverse. As transactional relationships replace values-based alliances, as oligarchic control displaces democratic institutions, as the unthinkable becomes routine - the transformation of our societies isn't happening by accident. 

Through the years of Brexit, Trump's first win, Orbán's rise, and the growing global polarization, that conversation in the ruins of Donetsk has stayed with me. There was something chilling about a commander discussing political theory between artillery fire - not because it felt academic, but because he embodied how thoroughly manufactured narratives could drive real-world violence. He was willing to fight and die for a worldview constructed by Russian state media about "traditional values" under attack. 

In the end, we are all unwitting participants in this grand narrative shift, our perceptions subtly recalibrated by the very forces that seek to reshape our understanding of what is possible, acceptable, and true. And whether we are shocked by those in power or find ourselves applauding them, we are simultaneously the observers and the changed.

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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And that’s without counting the cost of Trump’s decision to withdraw from the World Health Organization which has particularly serious implications for Africa. Eventually, Marco Rubio, the new U.S. secretary of state, walked back some of the order, saying exceptions would be made for “life-saving aid” including HIV treatments.

Despite Rubio’s clarification that essential aid would be granted a “humanitarian waiver,” many aid workers said they hadn’t yet been told whether they could resume operations, having already been told to cease operations last week. In Uganda alone, an estimated 1.2 million people would have been affected by the withdrawal of funds from AIDS relief. The Ugandan-born executive director of UNAIDS, Winnie Byanyima said that the United States’  “unwavering commitment to addressing HIV stands as a global gold standard of leadership.” If Trump continued to back AIDS relief, she added, the U.S. could effectively “end AIDS by 2030.” 

But few Ugandan politicians expressed any anger or even disappointment in the immediate aftermath of Trump’s blanket order to freeze funding. On X, human rights activist, Hillary Innocent Taylor Seguya asked “where is the outrage?” Months before, he had told me how the autocratic Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni’s government monitored social media posts and sometimes used online criticism as grounds to arrest activists.  

By contrast, in August, 2023, when the World Bank decided to suspend new public financing to Uganda, Museveni himself took to social media. The World Bank made its decision in the wake of Uganda’s “Anti-Homosexuality Act, 2023” which sought to “prohibit any form of sexual relations between persons of the same sex” and to “prohibit the promotion or recognition of sexual relations between persons of the same sex.” 

The range of punishments included life imprisonment and even the death penalty. For LGBT activist Hans Senfuma, the passage of the act into Ugandan law turned his nightmare into reality “It essentially gives the go-ahead to attack those who are assumed to be LGBTQ+,” he said, explaining that he himself now lived a life of secrecy, rarely leaving his apartment for fear even of his own neighbors.

It is, posted Museveni, “unfortunate that the World Bank and other actors dare to want to coerce us into abandoning our faith, culture, principles and sovereignty, using money.” Uganda, he added, “does not need pressure from anybody to know how to solve problems in our society. They are our problems.” Later that year, Joe Biden suspended Uganda from a group of African countries granted special duty free access to the US for specified products.

With the election of Trump, Uganda sees an opportunity to return to the fold. “We are going to start engaging with the new administration as soon as possible,” said Vincent Waiswa Bagiire, a senior foreign ministry official. “The tone which His Excellency Trump has set is favorable.” Over a five-year period, it was estimated that Uganda’s anti-LGBTQ law would cost it over $8 billion. But with Trump having signed his own anti-LGBTQ executive orders, the Ugandan government sees him as a likely ally, as someone who shares their values. 

Trump has used his executive power to restore U.S. participation in global anti-abortion pacts to deny millions of women around the world access to contraception and safe abortions. It’s a stance that puts the United States in league with Hungary, Russia and extreme theocracies.

Indeed, as The Bureau of Investigative Journalism reported, Valerie Huber, a former adviser to the Trump administration, has been traveling across Africa soliciting government investment in her sex education programs. Huber, TBIJ noted, is the “driving force behind the Geneva Consensus Declaration, a statement signed by 34 countries saying that there is ‘no international right to abortion.’” 

Trump’s executive order commits the United States to recognizing “two sexes, male and female” which are apparently “not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.” This has emboldened anti-LGBT activists across the continent. In Ghana, for instance, a bill has been proposed to imprison people for “identifying” as LGBT or funding LGBT groups. While the new Ghanaian president John Mahama, who like Trump was inaugurated in January, says the bill is “effectively dead on procedural grounds,” activists have been pushing for its passage into law. “With Donald Trump’s return,” said one activist, “Ghana is on the right side of history.”

In a paper commissioned by the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education in September, the researcher Malayah Harper assessed the global ramifications of the implementation of Project 2025 proposals. Project 2025, she argued, “calls for an end to using U.S. diplomatic soft power in Africa to protect the rights of LGBTQ+ communities, and refers to this diplomacy as ‘imposing pro-LGBT initiatives.” Connected to this, is the conservative desire for Trump to pull the plug on U.S. funds for foreign organizations that promote or provide abortions. 

And Trump has done exactly that, using his executive power to restore U.S. participation in global anti-abortion pacts to deny millions of women around the world, including in Africa, access to contraception and safe abortions. Significantly, while speaking of the government’s “humanitarian waiver,” Rubio made sure to say exemptions did not apply to abortion, family planning, transgender surgeries, and diversity, equity and inclusion programs. It’s a stance that puts the United States in league with Hungary, Russia and extreme theocracies.

It is a key trope of Russian propaganda that homosexuality is a decadent Western concept. Russia, the Kremlin insists, is the last bastion of traditional family values, a pitch which has resonated with conservative communities everywhere. Now that the U.S. is following along the same path, the effect on women’s health could be catastrophic. 

Also, as Trump retreats from public health initiatives in Africa and elsewhere, it leaves the door open for others, particularly China to step in and reshape global alliances to its benefit. Anna Reismann, the Country Director for Uganda and South Sudan at Konrad-Adenaur-Stiftung, a foundation associated with the Christian Democratic Union of Germany, a major center-right political party, told me that dropping aid funding only fueled anti-Western narratives. “It plays to sentiments against colonialism and paternalistic behaviors of Western powers," she said. In other words, the vacuum left by the U.S. would be filled by China, Russia and other non-Western powers that do not impose human rights conditions on funding. 

A version of this story was published in this week’s Coda Currents newsletter. Sign up here.

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As anticipated, Trump began his second term in office with a flurry of executive orders, including withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement (again); withdrawing from the World Health Organisation, completing a process he began in 2020; suspending all U.S. foreign aid programs for 90 days, in part because the industry and bureaucracy “serve to destablize world peace”; insisting that it is “the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female” and ending “the Federal funding of gender ideology.” He also unleashed a number of aggressive economic threats, potentially sparking a global trade war.

But beyond these attention-grabbing gestures designed for both domestic and international audiences, Trump is engaged in a game of international high stakes poker. At his inauguration, Silicon Valley leaders shared front-row space with Cabinet picks, visual confirmation that Trump primary allegiances are to the tech billionaires. It is these already stratospherically wealthy men, that Trump seeks to further enrich – the unseemly scramble to buy TikTok, effectively the seizure of a foreign-owned asset, being an example of how the administration and the broligarchs will work together. 

In response, countries in Trump’s crosshairs – China particularly – will reconfigure their own alliances to counter the effect of the U.S. president’s penchant for protectionism and isolationism. Tellingly, Putin and Chinese president Xi Jinping held a widely publicized video conference call just hours after Trump’s inauguration to reaffirm their deep, abiding strategic partnership and to reform the “global governance system” dominated by the United States.

It was a strong move in the geopolitical chess game. Here's how some of the key players are positioning themselves for what comes next:

China: Unspecified Chinese goods will be subject to a 10% tariff from February 1, claims Trump. "We always believe there is no winner in a tariff or trade war," said a Chinese spokesperson in response, continuing China's tactic in the face of the U.S. president’s pronouncements of acting like the only adult in the room. If anything, by saying he would impose only a 10% tariff, Trump had climbed down from his earlier talk of 60% levies. Still, both the Chinese yuan and stock markets fell in response to Trump’s threats. Before the inauguration Trump and the Chinese president had apparently had a productive call. But, as noted earlier, the most prominent call in the hours after Trump began his second term was between Xi and Putin and their ambition to reshape the global order .

Russia: President Trump used his first day in office to issue a rare and blunt criticism of Vladimir Putin. "I think he should make a deal," Trump said about Putin's position in the war with Ukraine. "I think he's destroying Russia by not making a deal. I think Russia is kinda in big trouble." It suggests Trump believes Putin is feeling the heat and might be pushed, however unwillingly, to take a seat at the negotiating table. Putin, for his part, praised Trump's character and courage and willingness to "avoid World War III." His chummy tone was followed through by the state-owned Russian media, which uniformly praised Trump's values as aligning with Russian values. Still, Putin's first call was to Xi, not Trump – a reminder that Russia intends to play a key role in a new global order that challenges American dominance.

Canada: It’s not just China that is Trump’s crosshairs. Also on February 1, Trump insists he will impose 25% tariffs on both Canada and Mexico as retribution for apparently letting swathes of illegals and fentanyl, the drug synonymous with the opioid crisis, cross over into the United States. The fentanyl, incidentally, Trump insists, comes from China. Justin Trudeau, Canada's lame duck prime minister, said Canada would be willing to "inflict economic pain" on the U.S. if necessary to get Trump to back off. Will Trump really begin his term in office with a trade war against America's closest allies? The European Union too, Trump says, “treats us very, very badly, so they’re going to be in for tariffs.”

India: As with Putin, Trump is said to have chemistry with the Indian prime minister Narendra Modi. But in keeping with his belligerent post-inauguration mood, Trump threatened to levy "100% tariffs" on BRICS nations, including India, if they sought to reduce dependence on the dollar as the currency of international trade. Indian stock markets traded lower with investors nervous about retaliatory tariffs against India. But the Indian government is reportedly mulling tariff cuts on U.S. goods to placate Trump. Other placatory gestures include India indicating its willingness to take back 18,000 illegal migrants. Modi is said to be desperately seeking bilateral talks with Trump in February. Trump’s decision to end so-called birthright citizenship from February 20, thus denying babies born in the U.S. citizenship if their parents are not permanent residents, has left hundreds of thousands of Indians on temporary visas in limbo. India has long maintained that the movement of skilled Indian labour from India to the U.S. benefits both countries.  Should Modi get his longed-for audience with Trump next month, they will have a lot of tensions to address.

Trump's first week back in the White House reveals a clear strategy beneath the apparently freewheeling threats. America first, in his view, has always meant not just putting the interests of America and Americans first but maintaining America’s position as the world’s pre-eminent power. And that means eliminating or at least neutralising the opposition.

From his actions in the first week, it’s clear Trump’s mind is on China. His newly appointed secretary of state, Marco Rubio, held his first meeting not with European allies but with counterparts from India, Australia and Japan - members of the Quad, a group explicitly intended to counter China's influence in the Indo-Pacific region. While Trump builds this coalition with one hand, with his other hand he wields targeted economic threats against BRICS, a group which has proposed itself as an alternative to Western hegemony. India happens to be a member of BRICS too, though key U.S. allies such as Saudi Arabia, which had said it would join BRICS, have postponed any such step, perhaps recognising Trump’s penchant for retribution.

Meanwhile, Putin and Xi's video call signals the possibility that Trump's return to office might accelerate the urgency to execute on their shared vision of a post-American world order. The question is whether Trump's strategy of mixing economic coercion, even against allies, with strategic coalition-building will hold them at bay or further weaken America’s global standing.

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Now the United States could become the latest nation to pass an anti-terror law that will effectively stifle dissent.

Undeterred by a failed attempt earlier this month, the U.S. House of Representatives tried again last week to pass H.R. 9495, a bill that gives the treasury secretary the authority to designate non-profits as “terrorist supporting organizations.” This time, with Donald Trump poised to take office and retribution on his mind, the bill passed. It gives, noted Human Rights Watch, “the executive branch broad and easily abused authority.” 

Gravely titled the “Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act,” the bill enjoys broad bipartisan support. No one objects to the parts of the bill that seek to alleviate tax burdens and deadlines on “U.S. nationals who are unlawfully or wrongfully detained abroad or held hostage abroad and their spouses.” Or the “refund and abatement of tax penalties and fines paid by hostages, detained individuals, and their spouses or dependents.”

But, bundled together with its uncontroversial sections, the bill also announces its intent to “terminate the tax-exempt status of terrorist supporting organizations.” How such organizations are designated appears to be entirely up to the treasury secretary who is appointed by the president. According to Human Rights Watch, the bill does not “clearly define” criteria by which organizations can be deemed to be enabling terrorists, nor does it “require the government to provide evidence to support such a decision.” Instead, it requires the nonprofit to prove to the government that it does not support terrorism.

In a letter to the House of Representatives, civil society groups asked why such legislation was necessary when it is already a federal crime for nonprofits to provide “material support to terrorist organizations.” Such a law, the letter argued, would hand the U.S. executive “a tool it could use to curb free speech, censor nonprofit media outlets, target political opponents, and punish disfavored groups across the political spectrum.”

Shoved off the news agenda by the intense speculation and reporting over President-elect Trump’s cabinet picks, the bill has received scanty mainstream media coverage. Its impact, however, could be outsized, particularly on free speech. “A sixth grader would know this is unconstitutional,” said the Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin as the bill was debated on the House floor. It is, he said, “a werewolf in sheep’s clothing” giving the American president “Orwellian powers and the American not-for-profit sector Kafkaesque nightmares.”    

Democrat Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib said the bill was “part of a broader assault on our civil liberties.” Introduced in the wake of protests on American campuses over the war in Gaza, the bill, Tlaib warned, is not “just about Palestinian human rights advocacy organizations, this is about the NAACP, the ACLU and Planned Parenthood.” It criminalizes social justice organizations, she added, the “folks that have been trying to make it safe for our kids to go to school away from gun crisis and violence.” 

Less than 10 days before the House passed the bill on November 21, it had been voted down, failing to secure the necessary two-thirds majority. Earlier this year in April, a version of the bill gained overwhelming support in the House only to be stalled in the Senate. Now in its third iteration, the bill may yet languish in the upper house of Congress, though most analysts expect it to be brought before Congress again next year if necessary when the Republicans will have a majority in both houses.

Across the globe, legislation aimed at the funding of civil society has had an inevitable chilling effect on dissent. “The misuse of anti-terrorism legislation,” observed the European commissioner for human rights in April, “has become one of the most widespread threats to freedom of expression, including media freedom, in Europe.” Why would the United States, even with its much vaunted protection of free speech, be any different?

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I was at a dinner party in California, when one guest who clearly did not vote for Trump said: “My hope is that there will be such chaos, they won’t get anything done. They don’t seem to have a plan.” 

I’ve heard versions of this analysis a few times since that dinner, both in conversation and in print, and every time it has  baffled me.

Of course there will be chaos. But isn’t that the plan? It certainly seems so now that Trump’s proposed cabinet features an alleged Russian “asset” as national intelligence chief, an alleged sexual predator as attorney general, thus leading a department that recently investigated him for sex-trafficking, and as health secretary an anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorist who does not believe HIV causes AIDS. Trump’s nominee to lead the Department of Defense sports a tattoo associated with white supremacist groups, doesn’t believe in women serving in combat or, bizarrely, in washing his hands and has never run anything bigger than a small non-profit. These nominations are designed to cause a flurry of noise and chaos, and this has long been deliberate. 

Disruption, noise and chaos was most certainly Steve Bannon’s plan when I met him in 2019.  I had been invited to speak at the annual Eurasia Media Forum. The vanity project of the daughter of Kazakhstan’s former President Nursultan Nazarbaev, the conference still managed to bring together an eclectic and fascinating group of people. I accepted the invitation mostly because I had heard a rumor that Steve Bannon was going to be the keynote speaker.  

“I’ve taken the model from Soros. I disagree with Soros’ ideology, but I admire the way he’s done it. He’s very smartly built cadres, he’s built cadres that can go into NGOs that can go into media companies, that can go into political things, that can go into businesses, and be able to get stuff done. I’m trying to build a cadre.”

Right up to the last minute, Bannon kept the organizers guessing. Eventually he showed up, wearing his signature black button-downs, one on top of the other, and gave a performance that was equal parts chaotic, thought-provoking, disturbing and entertaining. He was, I thought to myself at the time, perhaps the best public speaker I’d ever encountered. 

After the panel, Bannon agreed to an interview. The three of us – Bannon, myself and British journalist Matthew Janney who was reporting for Coda from the event – rode up the elevator to his hotel suite on the 26th floor of a glitzy skyscraper. Along the way, we chatted about gay rights and racial equality: Bannon was enthusiastically “pro” both. He told me he was worried for his gay friends who had to live in a hostile world. It was the first of many inconsistencies in his approach that we never managed to resolve.

This week, as the initial contours of Trump’s new cabinet take shape, I keep circling back to that experience, that conversation with Bannon and Matt’s insightful piece that emerged from it. 

“Revolution is coming,” Bannon said on the stage in Almaty, addressing his fellow panelists: a former EU Commissioner for Trade and a liberal professor from New York. “You are all finished,” he shouted passionately “From London to Frankfurt to Berlin, you are finished.” According to my notes, at that point the room exploded in applause as he raised his voice, drowning out the EU commissioner, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, who was trying to say something in response. I listened closely to make out her words. She was saying: “Shouting is not good.” Even to those of us who agreed, her attempted intervention felt beside the point. 

Afterwards, in his suite overlooking the glittering skyline of Almaty, the economic capital of Central Asia’s largest petrostate, Bannon was friendly and engaged even as Matt and I challenged him on some very obvious discrepancies in his arguments and some ironies. Including the fact that he was calling for revolution in a country run by a corrupt elite which allowed no freedom of expression. He shrugged off every one of our counterpoints. What he wanted to talk about was the time he was spending working with the far right in Europe and Latin America. He was excited about the movement he was helping to build alongside Europe’s rising far right political stars. 

To my surprise, though, the one person he really admired, he said, was the person he vilified most: George Soros, bête noire of the global right. “I’ve taken the model from Soros. I disagree with Soros’ ideology, but I admire the way he’s done it. He’s very smartly built cadres, he’s built cadres that can go into NGOs that can go into media companies, that can go into political things, that can go into businesses, and be able to get stuff done. I’m trying to build a cadre.” 

Just weeks ago, Bannon was released from prison, where he apparently taught civics, continuing, I assume, to build that cadre. Bannon, pending further legal troubles, is now a free man and even though he is no longer in Trump's inner circle, he has a voice, a vision and a plan. A friend of mine, inadvertently, is part of this plan: he is on Bannon’s vast retribution list, the list of people on whom he wants to take revenge. 

“You better be worried. You better lawyer up. Some of you young producers, you better call Mom and Dad tonight. ‘Hey Mom and Dad, you know a good lawyer?’ Lawyer up. Lawyer up,” Bannon said on his show, War Room, last week.  He is excited, he says, for Attorney General Matt Gaetz to start rounding up journalists. 

Bannon built the cadres. They are in power now. And chaos is the plan.

A version of this story was published as a newsletter. Sign up here to be the first to get Coda’s stories delivered straight to your mailbox. 

Disclosure: This article is part of our ongoing coverage of the changing nature of modern day authoritarianism. As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization, we are committed to transparency about our funding sources. The Open Society Foundations is among our many supporters. We maintain full editorial independence, and our funding sources are publicly disclosed to ensure accountability to our readers.

The post What Donald Trump owes to George Soros appeared first on Coda Story.

Think pieces and blogs across Chinese state media hailed the conversation as yet more evidence that Putin backs China’s claims over Taiwan — which in turn bolsters his own expansionism. 

“Putin is very good at helping China teach a lesson to its rebellious son. He made demands on Musk and hit Taiwan's weakest points,” wrote one Chinese military commentator to his 300,000 followers following the revelation. 

SpaceX responded to the allegation by saying that Starlink doesn’t operate over Taiwan because Taiwan won’t grant the company a license. The island democracy doesn’t want Starlink having majority ownership control over any satellite connection, so it’s been racing to build its own independent satellite internet service, free of Elon Musk’s grip.

Musk said last year, to Taiwan’s fury, that he believes Taiwan to be an “integral part of China,” comparing it to Hawaii. So it makes sense that the self-ruled island doesn’t want the billionaire in control of its satellite internet. 

Nonetheless, satellite internet is something Taiwan urgently needs. Its undersea fiber optic cables connecting the island to the internet are vulnerable, easily severed by ships in the South China Sea. It’s happened 27 times in the last five years. And as the Chinese military stages almost daily “war games” and drills around the island, including simulating a blockade of the island’s ports — an exercise it carried out most recently in October — it feels more urgent than ever that Taiwan has some way of accessing the internet via satellite. But it doesn’t want Starlink having the power to turn on – or off – that connection.  

What would Trump do if Xi Jinping imposed a blockade on Taiwan? “Oh, very easy,” he told a Wall Street Journal reporter last month. “I would say: If you go into Taiwan, I’m sorry to do this, I’m going to tax you at 150% to 200%,” meaning he would impose tariffs. When asked if he would use military force against a blockade, Trump replied “I wouldn’t have to, because he respects me and knows I’m fucking crazy.” 

Our colleagues at the China Digital Times collected and translated a series of responses to this statement that are worth a read. It was “intriguing”, wrote Hong Kong professor Ding Xueliang, that this was Trump’s only response. 

Chairman Rabbit, a nationalist WeChat blogger with more than two million followers, went further: “Trump has absolutely no interest in Taiwan or the South China Sea, and has no intention of becoming embroiled in a conflict with China,” he wrote. 

Since the Musk-Putin revelations, Taiwan’s government has said it welcomes applications from all satellite internet services, including Starlink, “provided they comply with Taiwanese laws.” 

The irony is that manufacturers in Taiwan actually make some key bits of hardware for Starlink satellite systems, like circuit boards and semiconductor chips. 

Taiwan supplies 90% of the world’s most advanced chips, and Trump wants to slap tariffs on those too. He has said in the past, without providing much evidence, that Taiwan “stole our chip business.” 

But Taiwan’s politicians say Trump needs Taiwan just as much as Taiwan needs Trump. Francois Wu, the country’s Deputy Foreign Minister, told reporters this week that "without Taiwan, he cannot make America great again. He needs the semiconductors made here."
On election day in the U.S., it was revealed that Starlink had asked its Taiwanese suppliers to shift manufacturing off the island, citing “geopolitical risks.” The report sparked fury in Taiwan, with talk of boycotting Tesla, and viral praise for Musk’s “foresight” across Chinese social media.

This story was originally published as a newsletter. To get Coda’s stories straight into your inbox, sign up here. 

The post Does Trump need Taiwan to make America great again? appeared first on Coda Story.

Homan, the president and CEO of the 501(c)(3) nonprofit Border911 Foundation, Inc., and his group’s members have largely flown under the radar, receiving little coverage outside of right-wing media. But if Trump were to win  on November 5, Homan, the architect of Trump’s family separation initiative, and his allies could receive prominent posts. Trump already promised at a rally this summer that he is “bringing back” Homan in 2025.

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,” Homan vowed during a July immigration panel in Washington, D.C. “They ain’t seen shit yet. Wait until 2025.” 

The mission of Homan’s tax-exempt Border911 Foundation, formed in Virginia in October 2023, is to “educate the American people about the facts of a non-secure border,” according to Internal Revenue Service (IRS) filings. But, by promoting disinformation about a “border invasion” of “illegal immigrants,” Homan's Border911, the nickname he often uses for the foundation, is helping to lay the groundwork for challenging November’s election if the results don’t favor Trump. 

Border911 remains linked to a 501(c)(4) group, called The America Project, a major funder of election conspiracy efforts. Unlike a 501(c)(3) charity, 501(c)(4)s can legally support political campaigns, and they are sometimes referred to as “dark money” organizations because they aren’t required under U.S. tax law to reveal their donors. However, they lack one important advantage of a 501(c)(3)–their donors’ contributions are not tax-deductible. (Homan also in 2023 created another 501(c)(4) he called Border911 Inc.) 

Border911 Foundation, and its members, identified on its website, are promoting extremist policies, such as declaring an invasion at the border, to elected leaders and law enforcement officials and falsely portraying the country as beset by voter fraud, according to a joint investigation by a multistate team of journalists from Lighthouse Reports, the Texas Observer, the Arizona Center for Investigative Reporting, and palabra based on dozens of interviews, attendance of various Border911 events, and reviews of public records, videos, speeches, and social media posts. 

Border911’s policy agenda foreshadows Trump’s most extreme immigration proposals, which include mass deportations and deploying troops to the U.S.-Mexico border. The nonprofit has already had an impact in Arizona, where several Border911-backed bills have been introduced and where Republican lawmakers are pushing a controversial November ballot initiative that would formally declare a border invasion and empower state and local officials to become immigration enforcers. 

Despite his background in law enforcement, IRS filings show that Homan’s foundation and his Border911 dark money organization may be skirting federal tax law, according to tax documents and interviews with experts, that prohibits tax-exempt charitable organizations from participating in “any political campaign on behalf of, or in opposition to, any candidate for public office.” 

Border911 associates have testified in Congress as law enforcement experts, instead of as Trump-aligned activists, and spread disinformation in media interviews, calling the Biden Administration's handling of the U.S.-Mexico border "the biggest national security threat to the American people since 9/11." Meanwhile, these same players are securing lucrative border security contracts for themselves or for-profit companies that employ them, documents show. 

“BORDER911 is a team of operators with decades of experience,” Homan posted on X last November, announcing the group. “We helped create the most secure border in history. The war on America is going to be won when we band together. … The cavalry is on its way. … The border is our theater of war.” 

Homan’s cavalry, who are publicly featured as team members, includes former state and federal law enforcement, some of whom have intelligence backgrounds, including Rodney Scott, former Border Patrol Chief; Derek Maltz, a former Drug Enforcement Agency special agent; Victor Avila, a former agent with Homeland Security Investigations (HSI); Sara Carter, a Fox News contributor; and Jaeson Jones, a former Texas Department of Public Safety captain turned NewsMax correspondent, according to public records and the Border911 Foundation’s website. 

For the last several months, the group’s members have been targeting battleground states and cities “to educate them [about the] border crisis,” Homan said on a March podcast. At a July conference in El Paso, Homan claimed that “Millions of people heading to sanctuary cities will be counted in the next census.” When seats are apportioned for Congress, he said, “That’s going to create more seats in Congress for Democrats. They sold this country out. It’s almost treasonous.” 

Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic presidential nominee in August, the gruff-talking and pugnacious Homan has attacked her on Fox News, where he is a contributor. The former federal agent, who got his start as a police officer in West Carthage, New York, before becoming a Border Patrol agent then moving to ICE, characterized Trump’s Democratic opponent on Fox as “disgusting” and said that Border Patrol and ICE agents did not respect her. She “broke the border,” he said.

From Dark Money Group to Charity 

Homan claims he launched his nonprofit as a purely self-funded passion project. “I started Border911 with my own funds because every day I wake up pissed off,” Homan said in a March 2024 interview. “And we have to educate Americans why border security matters.” 

But before it became its own foundation, Border911 was part of The America Project, an organization founded by serial election deniers: former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne and Lieutenant General Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security advisor. 

At a raucous White House meeting on December 18, 2020, Byrne and Flynn were part of a group of advisers that counseled Trump to use National Guard soldiers to seize voting machines to overturn the election. When martial law was not imposed, the two formed The America Project. And Byrne poured  $27 million of his own money into that project, according to a post on X, including funding a sham election audit in Arizona, and recruiting radicalized individuals as poll workers with an emphasis on those with military and law enforcement backgrounds. 

For part of 2023, Homan served as CEO of The America Project, then he launched Border911 Foundation Inc. in October of that year as a nonprofit. Homan is no longer the CEO of The America Project, but, as of June 2024, he was still listed as a board director. It’s unclear what salary and compensation, if any, he has received from The America Project.

Homan declined to be interviewed for this article, and he referred questions about Border911 to Steve Lentz, a corporate attorney in Virginia. Lentz said he didn’t know how much Homan was paid as CEO of The America Project or whether Byrne or The America Project supported Border911. “I don't know whether the foundation has received any money from them or not,” he said. Regarding the Border911 organizations, Lentz said that “Mr. Homan received no compensation in 2023, and will receive $1.00 in 2024.” 

“Trump comes back in January, I’ll be on his heels … and I will run the biggest deportation force this country has ever seen,”

In addition to Homan’s tax-exempt charity, IRS tax filings show that in October 2023 he created Border911, Inc, the 501(c)(4), and both organizations list their corporate headquarters as a UPS store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Both Border911 organizations also declare the same purpose in tax filings: to “educate Americans about a non-secure border.” In 2023, both of Homan’s Border911 organizations reported almost the same expenses – about $87,000 – but the 501(c)(4) claimed zero revenue. (The groups have not yet disclosed figures for 2024.) 

Two nonprofit compliance experts who examined Border911’s 2023 tax documents said it was unusual to see nearly identical expenditures for the two entities, while one of them—the dark money organization—reported no revenue. It appears, they said, that the tax-exempt charity money may have been passed through the dark money organization, which would violate IRS tax law. “I don't have any explanation for how the (c)(4) can bring in zero money in its first year and be able to spend tens of thousands of dollars,” said Robert Maguire, vice president of research and data at the nonpartisan Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

It would be particularly concerning, he said, if ex-law enforcement officials openly flouted federal law. “These are hard and fast rules, to make sure that people aren’t misusing nonprofits for purposes they weren’t meant for,” he said. “You would hope that someone who cares about the rule of law would care about making sure their donors have the confidence that they are not misusing the funds.” 

Lentz, the attorney who serves as a spokesman for Border911, said the 2023 tax filing for the dark money organization was incorrect. “There was an entry in the [501](c)(4) that shouldn’t have been there,” he said. “It should be all zeros. We’re going to amend that 990 for Border911, Inc.” Lentz added that the 501(c)(4) was created in 2023 but not operational until March 2024. That month, ABC News reported that Border911’s tax-exempt charity appeared to be illegally backing Trump’s campaign, which Lentz told ABC was “inadvertent.” 

The war on America is going to be won when we band together. … The cavalry is on its way. … The border is our theater of war.” 

After being informed of Lentz’s statement, Maguire said: “Still, even if the explanation is more innocent, the impact can be such that it obscures their activities and makes it more difficult to hold them accountable. I certainly hope that if these were honest mistakes, they will correct them and endeavor to do better in the future. After all, these documents are all signed under penalty of perjury.” 

Reporters for this story also requested comment from five people named on the Border911 website as team members, whom Lentz said are reimbursed for expenses by the foundation.

Two members replied to questions via email–former Border Patrol official Rodney Scott and former DEA special agent Derek Maltz–emphasizing that they joined Border911for philosophical reasons and were not paid employees. Maltz said he wanted “to educate America about border security and the growing fentanyl crisis.” Maltz deferred questions about his compensation to a Border911 Foundation representative but said that most work there is on a “volunteer basis.” 

Scott said that he was “a member of the Border911 Foundation’s speaker’s team.” The organization “will normally reimburse me for limited/reasonable (coach) travel,” he said and that he has “been compensated for larger speaking events that required travel and extensive time.” Sara Carter, Jaeson Jones, and Victor Avila did not respond to requests for comment by publication date. 

Border Propaganda and Legislation 

Homan has made no secret of his close ties with Trump, who promoted him to acting director of ICE where he initiated and pushed for separating families at the border before retiring in 2018. “I’m a Trump guy and not ashamed of it,” he said in a video announcing The Border911 Foundation, which Trump promoted on his Truth Social media platform last year. 

It’s unclear when Homan first met Byrne, the Overstock.com millionaire, who has funded numerous election denial groups across the country through The America Project. (Byrne did not immediately respond to an interview request.) But, in April 2023, only a few months before Homan started Border911 as “his organization,” Byrne celebrated Homan’s hire as CEO of The America Project at a fundraising event in a gilded ballroom at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. “What an honor it is to be turning the command of this vessel over to a real national security professional,” he said. 

Byrne then launched into a speech. “I’m not sure that the affluent people who I’ve met know what’s coming for them,” he said. Under President Biden’s America, we are “living through a Chavista Revolution. It’s a classic Maoist doctrine coming at you in all stages,” he told the audience. “I have literally poured 90 percent of my liquidity into this effort because there is no country, no future, if we don’t win this.” 

Homan nodded from the stage. “I’ve never met a man who loves his country more than Patrick Byrne,” he said. “I’m honored that you even asked me.” 

A year later, Homan would return to Mar-a-Lago heading his own fundraiser for the Border911 Foundation with Trump in attendance. Lentz, the attorney representing Homan and the Border911 organizations, said an individual donated the Mar-a-Lago venue to Homan’s group for the April 2024 fundraiser, but he said he didn’t know who it was. The attorney also said that he had no idea how much the group had raised at the event, but that the amount would be reported in their 2024 tax filing next year. 

Prior to becoming CEO, Homan had already participated in America Project events: In January 2023, he appeared alongside Arizona state Representative Steve Montenegro, who had been serving as the America Project’s national political director, at a Phoenix press conference to promote a slate of Border911-endorsed bills, followed by a speaking event two days later with MAGA-aligned Arizona legislators, which included free entry and meals for active-duty military. 

At the press conference, the men repeatedly tied fentanyl deaths to the border “invasion,” insinuating migrants were bringing in the drugs, even though most fentanyl is smuggled by U.S. citizens through ports of entry, according to a recent study by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “This border is out of control. It's a crisis,” Homan told reporters. “Anybody who argues differently is ignoring the data, and they're lying to you.” 

“I started Border911 with my own funds because every day I wake up pissed off,” Homan said in a March 2024 interview. “And we have to educate Americans why border security matters.” 

Two days later at a nearby theater, Montenegro publicly touted a “Border911” legislative agenda for the 2023 session that included declaring cartels foreign terrorist organizations, repurposing the Arizona National Guard as a border force, allowing unauthorized immigrants to agree to orders of deportation to avoid prosecution, and prohibiting migrants from pleading down charges if they caused the death of an American citizen, mirroring some initiatives that Texas had already adopted under Republican Governor Greg Abbott. (Trump has suggested cartels be designated as foreign terrorist organizations as part of the justification for his proposal, if reelected president, to use his emergency powers to deploy even more active duty military to police the border and protests elsewhere.) 

“We’re going to focus on educating representatives and senators on what their authority is … so that we can start passing the right legislation,” Montenegro told the audience. Then, he added, “We’re going to replicate what we’re doing here” in other states “so that the entire country understands that every state is a border state.”

Montenegro introduced bills in 2023 and in 2024 that would’ve furthered Border911’s goals. Much of this legislative work coincided with Montenegro’s tenure as the America Project’s national political director, which he followed up with paid consulting work, according to state disclosure forms. Yet he never filed a personal financial interest statement with legislative officials before introducing or voting on Border911-aligned bills, a House clerk confirmed. 

It's unclear how much The America Project has paid Montenegro, since Arizona doesn’t require legislators to disclose compensation amounts. Whether Montenegro remains on the group’s payroll is also unknown, since his most recent state filings don’t cover 2024. The lawmaker did not respond to multiple requests for comment. 

Receiving money from an outside group while advancing its legislative agenda raises ethical questions, according to Paul Eckstein, a longtime Arizona attorney and expert in legislative conflicts of interest. “If he's receiving … $10,000 or more, if I were giving the advice, I would say he's got a substantial enough financial interest that he should not be involved in any way, in any (related legislative) action,” Eckstein said. 

Some Border911-backed bills have made it through the Republican-controlled House and Senate only to be vetoed by Arizona Governor Katie Hobbs, a Democrat. But Montenegro and other Republicans successfully referred the “Secure the Border Act” to the November ballot, which, if approved by Arizona voters, would authorize state and local law enforcement to act as immigration officers—even though Arizona border sheriffs have said they lack the manpower and funding to carry it out. One ex-border sheriff, a Republican, called it an “ill-conceived political stunt.” (Similar bills have previously been approved, and largely struck down by the courts, in Arizona and other states.) 

Separate Organizations with the Same Goal 

By May 2024, Homan was running the Border911 Foundation as a separate nonprofit, but he was still collaborating with Montenegro and The America Project. In his capacity as a state elected official, Montenegro approached city leaders in Tombstone, Arizona, in May and requested and received a special permit on behalf of The America Project for a Border911 “Borders and Elections” town hall meeting. Alongside Montenegro at the city council meeting was Shawn Wilson, CEO of a private security firm called Mayhem Solutions Group. “We partner with [Mayhem] them for data and intel coming across the border, not to mention with our law enforcement,” Montenegro said of The America Project’s relationship with Mayhem. (Wilson, who describes himself as an Army veteran, previously volunteered with Arizona Border Recon, a paramilitary group that claims on its website to provide intel and security services to federal agents.) 

The purpose of the event, where Border911 member Victor Avila, the former HSI agent from Texas, was identified as a speaker, would be to “sound the alarm” about the “current administration failing to do its job” when it came to securing the border, Montenegro said, according to the city council meeting minutes. “We’re trying to sound the alarm … not just in the state of Arizona, but we're trying to reach out to every state in the union.”

“I’m not sure that the affluent people who I’ve met know what’s coming for them,”

In addition to a press conference and a Border911 panel with elected officials, they would meet privately with “law enforcement intel officers and other folks that collect data intelligence,” he said. The America Project would also deliver food to local Border Patrol and law enforcement, Montenegro said, and give the local sheriff an award. 

Border911 members have held and filmed similar events in Texas, New York, and elsewhere. Team members often produce and distribute strategically edited video from the border that bolsters MAGA conspiracy theories about invasion and immigrants as criminals. Like Homan, Sara Carter, another Border911 team member, is also a Fox News contributor who often talks about “criminals flooding the border.” 

Jaeson Jones, the former captain in Texas DPS’s intelligence division, who identified himself at one point as Border911’s vice president, creates “invasion” content as a correspondent for the far-right NewsMax, and has been featured on Fox News. Those two media companies separately settled multimillion-dollar defamation lawsuits with voting machine companies after falsely alleging voter fraud in the 2020 election. Trying to overturn that election was The America Project’s initial focus, and election denial remains a major theme of Trump’s reelection campaign. 

Jones and Mayhem Solutions Group use the same video production company, Cine 48, co-founded by the media director of the far-right group Turning Point USA. (Turning Point USA is yet another 501(c)(3) charitable organization with an eponymous dark money group for political purposes.) Jones and Border911 have also regularly produced content about the border for a Turning Point USA series called “Frontlines,” as well as a mini-series co-starring Mark Lamb, the sheriff of Pinal County, whom Jones has called a “close friend.” 

Lamb is closely aligned with the far-right constitutional sheriffs movement, and he is a promoter of election conspiracies, including about non-citizen voting. 

In one presentation to a Central Texas GOP chapter, Jones showed videos that he said revealed armed cartel members driving around Arizona. He attributed the footage to his firm Omni Intelligence and to Mayhem Solutions Group, and bragged of embedding with Pinal County deputies in Arizona. 

The Border is Open for Business 

The tactic of portraying the border as under invasion has proved useful for efforts to undermine confidence in the election—and has proved profitable for Border911’s members. 

Last summer, Maltz, the former DEA special agent, and Jones, the former DPS captain, testified in Washington, D.C., before the House Homeland Security Committee about the border, identifying themselves only as private citizens and former law enforcement. Jones didn’t mention his Border911 public relations role, his private intelligence company, or the $20,000-30,000 speaker fees he advertises that he charges as a border expert. 

Maltz did not disclose his Border911 speaker role or his job with a firm that has earned more than $250 million in federal government security contracts. Maltz is the executive director of government relations for PenLink, Ltd., a tech firm that sells surveillance tools to law enforcement, including software that can track cell phones without a warrant. The tech has been purchased by ICE, the DEA, and Texas DPS, among other agencies. Maltz said his job with PenLink includes interacting with the firm’s U.S. government and foreign customers, but he’s not registered as a lobbyist because his position does not involve lobbying. He said he became a member of Border911 because of his concern about Mexican cartels, Chinese organized crime, and escalating fentanyl deaths: “My work with the Border911 Foundation is completely independent of my role with Penlink. … I am a member of the Border911 Foundation’s speaker’s team, but I am not a board member or employee.” 

Maltz isn't the only Border911 team member linked to a firm that’s cashing in on border security-related government contracts. Rodney Scott, the ex-Border Patrol chief, founded a consulting firm in July 2021—about a month before retiring from the federal government. At the time, a nonprofit immigrant advocacy group in California filed a complaint alleging that founding the firm, Honor Consulting, while serving as Border Patrol chief violated federal law and ethics rules. (The Justice Department did not respond to questions about the complaint. The FBI and Homeland Security inspector general’s office said they could not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation.) In an email response to questions for this story, Scott said that prior to founding the firm, he consulted with U.S. Customs and Border Protection legal counsel, who, according to him, said there were no legal issues or concerns. When asked about the complaint, a CBP spokesperson said the agency does not comment on personnel matters. 

“He’s going to be our next president whether you like it or not, and I will be at the White House with him.”

In 2023, Scott incorporated a new company with a similar name: Honor Consulting Plus. Some of the firm’s customers include Republican Wisconsin Congressman Bryan Steil’s re-election campaign, and the Texas Office of the Attorney General, records show. 

In May, the Texas Attorney General’s office granted Scott’s firm, Honor Consulting Plus, a $50,000 contract to advise on the state's lawsuit defending Governor Abbott’s contentious floating buoy barrier on the Rio Grande, part of the governor’s multibillion-dollar militarized immigration enforcement initiative called Operation Lone Star. Scott is tasked with providing expert testimony in the case and is approved to invoice $600 an hour, with no monthly billing limit, according to the contract. Scott referred questions about the contract to the AG’s office. 

Since 2018, Homan has also had his own for-profit firm, Homeland Strategic Consulting. His Virginia-based firm registered to lobby in Texas in 2021, though state filings show no activity. Public records reveal only a handful of clients, including $32,000 to provide “strategy consulting” for failed U.S. Senate candidate Jim Lamon, one of the 11 Arizona Republicans who falsely claimed he had been authorized to cast the state’s electoral votes for Donald Trump in the 2020 election. Homan also has been personally paid $1,300 in travel reimbursement funds from Trump’s campaign, according to Federal Election Commission data. 

Border911 team member Avila has focused less on government contracts and more on aspirations for public office, making unsuccessful bids for city council, Texas Land Commissioner, and Congress. A year ago, Avila launched Border Patriot PAC, which to date has endorsed a single candidate, John Fabbricatore, a former ICE agent running as a Republican for a congressional seat in Colorado. Fabbricatore, who resides in the Denver suburb of Aurora, contributed to nationwide misinformation about a Venezuelan prison gang taking over an apartment complex in his city—a false story the Trump campaign repeated. 

Otherwise, Border Patriot PAC hasn’t done much. According to its July 2024 filing, the PAC only had $19,000—of which $15,000 came from Wilson’s Mayhem Solutions Group. 

In the weeks before the election, members of Border911 have joined a final America Project-backed blitz called “Operation Restore Freedom,” giving speeches about the border along with other pervasive election conspiracy theorists in Texas and in crucial swing states like Nevada and Arizona that Trump needs to win. 

If Trump does prevail, Homan and other Border911 members may get the chance to fundamentally reshape national security and immigration policy. 

If Trump loses, Homan and his former military and law enforcement allies at Border911 and the America Project will likely be on the frontlines sowing doubts about the election for months to come. 

At speaking events, Homan sounds confident in Trump’s victory. At an America Project fundraiser at Mar-a-Lago, Homan said he’d pledged to Trump, as they dined together in Las Vegas, that the former president would win the November election and he’d serve under him again. “I can’t wait to be back,” Homan said. “He’s going to be our next president whether you like it or not, and I will be at the White House with him.”

The post Border 911: The Misinformation Network Profiting Off the ‘Invasion’ Narrative appeared first on Coda Story.

That question of whether we will be left behind has stalked this American election. Democrats claim that they are all for old alliances–though of course it was the Democrats under Obama who first signaled they were becoming disinterested in us and wanted to think about Asia instead. Today, the more Trump-leaning Republicans now openly pride themselves that they, in the words of Vice Presidential candidate JD Vance, “don’t really care what happens to Ukraine.” They claim it’s time to think about “America first.”

But what’s at stake here is not just a geopolitical choice between Europe or Asia–a choice that has been debated in Washington for a hundred years. It’s not just a choice between being outward looking or isolationist–a choice that has been debated in America even longer. There’s something else at play, namely, what sort of country America is and what kind of country it wants to become. Giving in to Russian autocracy in Europe is intertwined with giving in to autocratic tendencies at home. The outer and the inner are co-dependent. It’s not just “us” America is leaving, it’s leaving a version of itself. 

I am not unbiased. I grew up in the provinces of the American project. I was born in Ukraine. My parents were political dissidents arrested for advocating freedom of speech and human rights in the Soviet Union. In the 1970s they were exiled, moving first to London, then Munich and Prague. They moved because my father worked in all three places for Radio Free Europe–the US Congress funded stations that aimed to help end the Soviet dictatorship–and he moved as RFE changed its headquarters. Our journey was literally inseparable from America’s mission. In this context America was intertwined with ‘the good’: in the sense of being the Superpower that here, in the region I knew best, aligned itself with basic dignity, truth and self-determination. Across the world–from Latin America to South Asia to the Middle East–America’s track record is often pernicious and often justifiably maligned. But in standing up to Nazi Germany and then the Soviet Union it became more than just another shithole Superpower. It could claim to be good too–or at least better than the autocratic alternatives. 

It was the historian Anne Applebaum who first pointed out to me, on a podcast series we worked on for The Atlantic, that this projection of ‘good’ power had a transformative impact inside America as well. Being in an alliance that claimed to support democracy made America more democratic; tamed its own traditions of autocracy. You can see this in the dynamics around the civil rights movement. Part of the impetus for enacting anti-racist legislation was to ensure that America’s self-declared Cold War position as the leader of the free world also aligned with what it did at home. 

In the 1950s, Soviet propaganda was successfully hammering America for being dishonest: backing democracy abroad while oppressing African-Americans at home. America’s allies were dismayed too. In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case at the Supreme Court, which rolled back segregation in schools, the Department of Justice filed a brief arguing that the law should be changed not only for domestic reasons, but also because racist laws were causing “doubts even among friendly nations as to the intensity of our devotion to the democratic faith.”

Earlier, in 1947, the Harvard professor and leading civil rights advocate W. E. B. Du Bois capitalized on America’s claims of promoting freedom around the world, post World War II, as a way to raise the issue of its lack of human rights towards African Americans at home.

Imagine an alternative history in which America had aligned itself with totalitarian powers in the 20^th Century–Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Or what if the US had just not taken a strong position against them. It may not have copied their systems fully–but it would also have removed part of the impetus for ruling elites to deal with their own autocratic practices.

During the Cold War, Washington defined itself in opposition to the Kremlin. This in turn could have some positive consequences domestically. Now, however, what you hear in both Moscow and Washington can sound all too similar.

In the first decade of Putin’s rule I lived in Russia, and saw how Communist ideology was replaced with a new propaganda playbook. First you seed doubt in the very idea of truth, spreading so much confusion and conspiracies people don’t know who to trust. Then, you obliterate any notion of there being a difference between good and bad with an extreme relativism and a triumphant cynicism. And in this moral and epistemic wasteland you create  propaganda that legitimizes the nastiest emotions: conspiratorial, paranoid identities, and a politicized, theatrical religiosity that has less to do with ethics and everything to do with supremacist groups belonging and the desire for submission to authority and controlling others. And finally, you use all of this as an excuse to engage in strategic kleptocracy, so that the purpose of running the state becomes corruption.

Ever since Putin first fine tuned this strategy, versions of this practice have been sprouting up around the world. Moscow may have lost the global ideological race in the Cold War, but it looks increasingly like it might be on the winning side this time.

Donald Trump has always been the obvious manifestation of the American strain of this phenomenon. But while Trump embodies a post-truth, post-values worldview, it’s left to those around him to rationalize it. JD Vance is the most eloquent. Vance is a successful writer, whose memoir was lauded by liberal critics. He is one of the finest debaters in America. Everyone who meets him says he is clever, pleasant and witty. In many ways he now plays the role that Putin’s eloquent, shape-shifting courtiers played in Moscow. When Trump spread blatant falsehoods about immigrants “eating cats and dogs”, Vance argued that evidence didn’t matter and that it was right to “create stories” if they get “media attention” for what he termed the sufferings of Americans. A total disregard for evidence was reframed as a higher calling–and makes possible all sorts of rollbacks of rights and truths. It makes placing immigrants in detention camps easier. It makes denying the results of elections possible.

Vance’s explanation of why America should abandon Ukraine is also telling. Twice now Vance has made the point that there are no “good sides” in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, calling it a “fairy-tale mindset” to apply categories of  “good versus evil.” Each side is to blame: Russia was wrong to invade, he argues, but Ukraine has corruption problems. Everything is relative.

It’s the sort of extreme moral relativism that Moscow’s spin doctors have long perfected. It goes against what most Americans, and what most Republican voters, think. Evangelicals especially are supportive of Ukraine. But by obliterating the confrontation of good versus evil in Russia’s attempt to obliterate Ukraine, it gives an excuse to erode the sense of right or wrong at home too. This is not about us, it’s about the US.

So where does that leave those of us who still need America? Of course it’s long past time that Europe, or more realistically North Eastern Europe, arms itself and learns to fight. The Ukrainians have shown us how to do it. But  there is no way to avoid America’s role in this fight. It’s still the only superpower that can on occasion wield a blow against evil–if it can still recognise evil.

Part of the work will be the business of skilful and grubby diplomacy. There are many reasons why America–even a triumphantly cynical, utterly relativistic America–should stand up to Russia. Economically, it keeps their main trading partner, the EU, secure. Militarily, it degrades an adversary and keeps the main enemy, China, wary of adventurism. Diplomatically, it creates a global coalition of partners. And just showing American primacy and resolve brings vast benefits including everything from trust in the US dollar to the desire of “swing countries” like India or Saudi Arabia to play along with Washington.

But if we acknowledge that the drama here is not just about its own foreign interests, but also about the battle within America itself, then the field for action becomes bigger. Standing up to corruption, oligarchy and kleptocracy in Russia is part of standing up to corruption, oligarchy and kleptocracy in America. Standing up to bullying, hate and lies in Russia is about standing up to bullying, hate and lies in America. Standing up to Russia’s mafia state turned mafia Empire means standing up to the potential of a mafia state in America.

For those of us who were raised in the provinces of the American project but now dwell or engage with its core, the aim can’t be to simply scrape and beg for security. America made us. And many of us are now literally Americans or integrated into the American conversation. Sometimes those who have come from the periphery see the issues clearer than the capital. If the center has lost its purpose, then it’s up to those who have come from the provinces to help remake it.

The post How to make M.A.G.A. mean ‘Make America Good Again’ appeared first on Coda Story.

PB: Haiti, which is just 700 miles from the coast of Florida, is the United States’ ultimate other. Americans know very little about it. When I tell people that I lived in Haiti for a while, a few would say, “Oh, I've always wanted to go to Polynesia!” And I'd say, no, not Tahiti, Haiti. This is the same Haiti that is a four hour flight from JFK. I think that geographical proximity stands in sharp contrast to the wild American ignorance about Haiti, and I don't think that ignorance is unintentional. We'd rather not think about it as Americans. We would rather not know the manner in which the United States, our country, has subverted Haiti from the very get go.

Haiti is the only successful slave rebellion in history and what they managed to do was kick out Napoleon's own army. They were the first republic in the entire world to abolish slavery. And this was at a time when Thomas Jefferson was president in the United States, and the US had 60 more years until its Emancipation Proclamation. Haiti was way ahead of the United States on these issues, and it posed a terrible threat to these white imperial powers. These imperial powers built enormous wealth on ideologies of white supremacy — you saw this with England and India, France and Haiti and the United States with plenty of its own enslaved people. In that moment, the moment of its birth, Haiti was a pariah to the white imperial powers.

A lot of times there's a kind of obsession with the things that threaten us. I'm no psychologist, but the neuroses and the racism of the United States says a lot more about the United States than it does about Haiti; about the ways in which we remain threatened more than 200 years after the founding of the first black Republic. We remain threatened by the idea of black people governing themselves. You can see this in the ways that over the past 35 years, and even over the past 15 years, the United States has really done quite a lot of meddling with Haiti’s democracy, to put it mildly, which is what has led to its current state of violence and insecurity, and the complete dismantling of the state.

NJ: We see the same stereotypes and rhetoric each time this happens — foreigners and immigrants eat strange foods, they want your jobs, they are violent. Yet the American economy needs immigrant workers. When those workers express their cultural identity, or need health care, then immigration becomes an easy target for resentment. It’s like saying: come here, work in our factories, but don't be visible or have needs. Is that a correct characterization?

 PB: There's this wonderful Haitian saying: If you want to kill a dog, say it has rabies. That's what JD Vance is doing. What he's really doing is trying to foment fear among Americans, right? Foment fear of change, of black people, of the other and galvanize that fear. And so a great way to do it is to say that Haitians, they're diseased or they eat pets. These tropes have a very long history, of the third world being a place of diseases, or the savages.

NJ: “Savages” who are devoid of compassion for animals unlike civilized people, and only know how to hunt and kill. 
PB: Exactly! And this idea of eating pets is also interesting coming from the Republicans, who pride themselves on eating meat. Like Vance who received some flak for adapting to his wife's vegetarian diet. I think for a lot of Haitians have felt, like, what the fuck do I need to say? Should Haiti’s Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and all the Haitian pet lovers need to now come out and say, actually, we don't eat cats and dogs?

I know what you mean about the critical mass, it’s like saying — go ahead, you can be different in America as long as you act the same. But I have a feeling that a lot of the anti immigrant sentiment does not come from the people in towns like Springfield. It seems like the farther you are from actually knowing immigrants, the easier it is to scare you. These terrible lies are a great disservice to Haitians and immigrants, of course, but also to the people in towns like Springfield, even to those who might have voted Republican. Many people do try really hard to welcome immigrants, to make room, make resources available, and try to do the right thing.

I’m thinking of the incredible grace of the family of the boy who was killed in a vehicular accident in Ohio last year, by a person from Haiti. His death was a terrible and tragic accident, and even now, his family is showing up to city council meetings and asking for his death not to be used as a political tool.

The post Why is Trump obsessed with Haiti? He’s not the only one appeared first on Coda Story.

Nishita Jha: Doctor Saha, why do you think we are obsessed with cults and how did your own obsession with cults begin? Relatedly, why do you think they are a source of such deep fascination in the world of books and cinema and streamers? 

Poulomi Saha: I think cults are much more than just a pop cultural phenomenon, they are a phenomenon that has seeped into all parts of our life, popular, political, social and psychic. The class that I started teaching during the pandemic [Cults in Popular Culture] began because, like many other people, I was spending my days and nights watching docuseries and listening to podcasts on cults. In some ways, it was one of the singular forms of feeling connected to other people. I was getting a little concerned for myself and I was pretty surprised to see myself giving up on my own, long held, sometimes innate reactions to cults. In some ways, the class was an attempt to make sense of this with hundreds of other people. Around me too, I saw the attention and obsession with cults getting more fanatical. It seemed like it was time to move this kind of social analysis outwards.

NJ: One genre of TikTok videos I know your students keep sending you is “What would it take to get you to join a cult?” and it’s a question that’s been memed and stitched by millions of users — a mini-cult of people who love cults on Tik-Tok, which is a platform that spawns its own consumer cults of Stanley Cup users and beauty treatments and such. Did writing your book make you more aware of the many cults that surround us today?

PS: The meme on Tiktok you’re referring to is fascinating because you also have this remarkable effect that in the repetition (through stitching the videos) you are producing a structure that we might actually call cultic: to participate in this imagination together. In the meme, someone says “Would you join a cult if they offered you a free lunch?”, you respond “Well, I would join a cult. I don't even need the free lunch. I would take a donut.” But what is really happening is that the two people now have something in common. They are repeating the same words back to each other so that they recognize that they think in the same ways, they are announcing an affiliation to each other, and that is a powerful thing. Memes are a really interesting and new vehicle to produce a kind of group think. I'm trying very hard not to pathologize it or to suggest that memes are hypnotizing people into mindless repetition or some hypnotic state. I actually think the repetition is actually a way to articulate a long standing desire to simply be like other people. So we see a kind of second form of sociality being produced here in social media, and we also see it in the world of politics. 

NJ: How does that need for belonging play out in American politics? 

PS: I live in Northern California — so I am in some ways, at the epicenter of a particular version of the cult phenomenon. I have a theory which I'm delighted to have proven wrong, that America is a unique place when it comes to cults. America in its vision of itself as this great open space which drives the settler colonial fantasy, has long been obsessed with newness. Americans have really envisioned themselves as a new man, long before the advent of something called the State of the United States, and well into the early part of the colonial project. That fantasy is so compelling and it stretches to all parts of American life, from politics to economics to society. And what it gives birth to is a really unique phenomenon, where we say this is the only place where newness is celebrated as innovation and it's not condemned as heresy.

In most other societies, if you announce the advent of a new messiah it's not just that you're going to have, like, local resistance. There are often overarching religious and/or social and political structures that will limit this. I mean, imagine a new messiah announcing their advent in Italy. It's hard to imagine, right? 

NJ: I see what you mean, in that there is almost a uniquely American obsession with what the era-defining Big New Thing will be, in culture and spirituality, tech, health and of course politics.

PS: We see the ways in which these kinds of things flourish outside the mainstream. What popular culture has done has brought the outside, the fringe, not just into the mainstream, but literally into our homes. We're watching, we're listening, we're obsessing on the internet, and this is where I think we're seeing a new vision of what cult culture is. When you have people who watch a docuseries become quite obsessed, what do they do next? They're not largely going out and joining these groups in the world. Instead, what they are doing is joining subreddits. What they are doing is getting on social media and producing Tiktok, what they're doing is actually trying to reproduce the feeling of being fully immersed with other people.

Along with the invitation to newness, at the same time it is also a highly normative conformity seeking culture. So you have powerful guardrails in place that would claim to keep most people outside of these radical choices, these insular groups, these new religious movements, except the more powerful the guardrail, the more powerful the interdiction, the more powerful the draw. 

NJ: How does the cult of personality shape American politics? What we see now is this almost perfect and uncanny merging of political leaders with social media and reality TV. They are characters with narrative arcs and followers, we watch whether we love them or love to hate them. 

PS: The cult of personality is so interesting because there's a way in which it operates is a totally different thing than social cults, but they do have a couple important things in common. The term “cult of personality” actually comes out of the Romantic period where Immanuel Kant spoke about the cult of genius — that there was a way of thinking and being in the world that should make you exceptional, and that exceptionality was singular in your mind, but always producing a kind of collective. The cult of genius was about finding these figures who had a particular kind of understanding of clarity of the world, a kind of philosophical elevation and becoming their followers. Now, when you become a follower, of course you never become the genius. Within the cult of genius, there's only one genius, and you have inside these followers who go looking for profound truth….

You think about charismatic leaders, whether they are charismatic figures like Adolf Hitler, Donald Trump, but also Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King … you cannot know how a person comes to have this kind of power. Again, they aren't faster, stronger, necessarily smarter, and yet when they speak, you feel yourself elevated, transformed, transported. When you have a kind of charismatic figure, so much of the power comes from the fact that they will often tell the story about themselves, a kind of self mythologizing in which they'll say things often like either I am an ordinary person or I was born ordinary. My parents were normal. They were working class, middle class. I had no silver spoon. I had no great grace from on high. What I am before you is utterly ordinary. And of course, as they say it, their effect is so extraordinary that it really kind of burnishes this image of magic, of something you cannot explain and you cannot touch, and it is so compelling. What happens is they begin to develop a following, and the followers all recognize that they witness the extraordinary in this figure. 

So you feel as though you are in the presence of the Divine and all around you when you go home and you're talking to your family when you go to work, you're trying to describe the inordinate force of this person. And people are like — that person? They're a buffoon, they're not very smart, they're not very successful, they're not a real billionaire. That dissonance, rather than breaking through the mind of the follower, actually solidifies the sense of a kind of magical capacity that the charismatic leader has.

Now the follower is also imbued with it because they believe they can see the truth that no one else can. It produces a kind of fanaticism. If you believe that you have access to a new kind of messianic figure and people all around you don't see it, it is very easy to begin to feel like you too are chosen. You too have a kind of special capacity.

It's incredibly compelling, and especially for people who have historically felt as though they're disenfranchised or that their birthright has somehow been taken from them, to have it resurrected. I mean, that's a pretty good compensation to having felt kind of economically disenfranchised for a couple decades.

NJ:  You may not have the answer, but I wonder if that also produces a profound alienation from the rest of the world that doesn't get it. I'm thinking of politics, of how easily groups that are fanatic, or disenfranchised can become militarized or turned into violent mobs. Is the leap from one to the other made easier through disinformation and mass media, and how easy it is to spread the word of the messianic figure?

PS: It does produce a kind of alienation, and I think that there are many different ways that people cope with that. A lot of mass media really flattens the experience of it, we've gotten very good at diagnosing not just misinformation, but a kind of misunderstanding in the followers of these charismatic figures. Here I am really profoundly thinking of Donald Trump. You'll see again on social media, the phenomenon of young reporters, usually lay reporters who go to these Trump rallies and they try to catch the follower in a kind of gotcha moment, to sort of reveal the fundamental cognitive dissonance in a MAGA believer.

So they'll say things like, now, how do you feel about the fact that Joe Biden didn't go to Vietnam because of bone spurs? And you'll have a person who's like, “He's a coward! He's a disgrace! He cannot be commander-in-chief.” And then the reporter will say, oh, I misspoke. I meant to say Donald Trump didn't go to Vietnam because of bone spurs, and then the follower will say, “Well, you know, my father had dropped arches. It was so painful, and that's a real danger, not just to himself, but to his platoon.” This is actually a video that I watched recently, and of course, as the viewers watching this on Tiktok or on Instagram we are supposed to laugh. We're supposed to think —  look at this sad, pathetic person who doesn't even see that they're being conned.

It is really satisfying for those of us who believe that we see the truth. We see beyond the smoke and mirrors, but it doesn't allow us to actually contend with what is happening individually to those people, socially, within that group and as these people live in the world.

But it is not possible that the people at the MAGA rally are totally unaware of the gap between what they say and what they believe. But you have to find some kind of compensation. People do that by refusing information that refutes their beliefs and surrounding themselves with people who share those beliefs. So the phenomenon of the Trump rally is important, it becomes a place and time where you get relief from the barrage of being told no, you're not right, you're wrong, not true, not good. In the space of that rally, everyone around you is saying, yes, they're saying you're not crazy, you're not stupid, you're not being manipulated by someone smarter than you. Community is bound together by so many things, including a mutually reinforcing truth, and that truth becomes more and more potent.

NJ: I’d like to go back to what you said about the American obsession with newness, but also that it is a society that is conformist, or wants to protect the old, in a sense. You see that tension play out with the candidates right now, where someone like Harris must always find a way to balance the fact that she represents newness — there’s never been a US President that looked like her — with someone like Walz, who fits into the American ideal of an older, white patriarch. If you had to make a guess, will America choose the new or the old? 

PS: I do think that you are putting your finger on the pulse of something that really underpins a lot of this conversation around cults of personality and politics. Think about the MAGA project — Make America Great Again is about a return to a prior moment again. At these rallies, you have people being asked, When was America great? And the way in which they're struggling to find a moment is telling — it's always a moment before they were born, always a moment of a kind of mythic abundance and freedom, the 19th century or the industrial revolution. When you press on it and say, well wasn't that before women had the right to vote, or wasn’t that an era of racial segregation … you realize that the actual moment matters much less than the fantasy that there was a kind of reparative moment in America's past where the new man had all of this abundance before him.

Donald Trump, for a non believer, is a terrifying, sometimes funny, but a kind of monstrous figure. For his believers, he is a prophet, and he is a prophet who is able to see more clearly than anyone, a moment where America was great and return us there, with a kind of future oriented promise.

What we also see in world history across multiple generations of world leaders is that charismatic authority is never correct. When they die, or there's a transfer of power, the next leader is either a failed charismatic leader. That is, they cannot reproduce the same intensity, or they're a bureaucrat.

Many political scientists have been speculating on what will happen if Trump does not win this election. If he does not win this election, will Trump fade away, but Trumpism continues to flourish? What many liberal theorists want to believe is that the cognitive dissonance will be revealed. That Trump’s followers will think, “Oh no, I've been following this fraud and con man all along. I see clearly now I repent. Let me be reincorporated into this rational state.” I don't know what will happen in the election, but I do think that the latter is very unlikely to happen. I don't think that even if Trump loses, we are going to see the skies parting and the light of knowledge falling on the dark minds of MAGA. I think his influence has drastically changed what it is possible to do in American politics, and there are too many smart, canny, charismatic political figures in the machine who will want to capitalize on the fact that people are clearly hungry for that feeling of being together, believing in this impossible thing that on the outside is being laughed at, but where you know you have access the truth and freedom and Liberty. I mean, that's what drives American politics, rhetorically, at the very least. 

Dr. Poulomi Saha is Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley and co-director of the program in critical theory. They are currently at work on a book about our abiding and potent obsessions with cults. Fascination is a state of rapt unbelief—the gripping curiosity and fervent disavowal of what we do not ourselves inhabit or experience and yet cannot shake. We aren’t simply frightened of or repulsed by cults. There is a powerful draw to these groups, to the possibility of utter self-transformation. At its heart, the book FASCINATION is interested in how cults reveal what we truly hunger for—spiritually, socially, politically, and culturally. Not just for those who join but for all of us who believe we never would. In FASCINATION, Saha explains why we love, hate, and love to hate cults—why we can neither lean in nor look away.

The post Will the Cult of Personality Make America Great Again? appeared first on Coda Story.

I was in the crowd, reporting for the BBC at the time, as hundreds of thousands of people came out to greet George W. Bush in the main square of the capital Tbilisi. It must have felt refreshing to Bush, by then already hated by so much of the world for the disasters caused by the “war on terror”, to arrive in Georgia to a genuine hero's welcome. Georgians embraced Bush, because they needed him to fight their own existential battle against constant, ongoing threats from Russia.

Tens of thousands turned up and stood for hours in the heat as they waited for George W Bush to come out into the main square to give public support to Georgia and send a message to Moscow that the country was not alone in the face of Russian aggression. 

Among those in the square was 27 year old Vladimir Arutunian. According to this FBI report, which is full of rather brilliant detail, he “stood for hours in the hot sun, wearing a heavy leather coat and muttering and cursing to himself, part of a huge crowd waiting for President Bush to speak …He was clutching to his chest a hand grenade hidden in a red handkerchief. He was planning to kill the President.”

As soon as Bush started speaking, Arutunian “pulled the pin and hurled the grenade in the direction of the podium. It landed just 61 feet from where the  President, First Lady Laura Bush, the President and First Lady of  Georgia, and other officials sat”

Compared to the unforgettable scenes that unfolded in Pennsylvania, the assassination attempt against Bush was pretty anticlimactic. The grenade failed to detonate, no one on stage even realized it had been thrown, President Bush’s speech went uninterrupted, and afterwards, Arutunian went home to the apartment he shared with his mother in a sleepy Tbilisi suburb. 

His miscalculation, FBI would explain later, was that he tied his red handkerchief a bit too tight around the grenade, preventing the firing pin from deploying fast enough.

It didn’t take long for the FBI and the Georgian security services to track down Arutunian. A few months later, Arutunian who was unemployed and spent most of his days  experimenting with chemicals and explosives in his makeshift home laboratory, appeared in a small stuffy courtroom overflowing with reporters. He had already confessed to throwing the grenade and said he didn’t regret a thing because he hated the Georgian government for “being a puppet of the US.”

What I remember most vividly from the trial is Arutunian, thin with a black beard, pacing back and forth in his two by two meter metal cage in the corner of the courtroom. I counted his laps to keep myself awake in the airless room, as the judge began to read the verdict. A couple of my colleagues in the back tried to stay awake by chatting to each other, which got the rest of us in trouble. The judge forced everyone to stand up as he very slowly and very monotonously read the entire verdict. It took him four hours. I lost count of the laps, because Arutunian never stopped pacing. 

I reported at the time that as he was led out of the courtroom, he was asked by one journalist if he considered himself a terrorist or an anti-globalist. "I don't consider myself a terrorist, I'm just a human being," he replied.

Today, the man who could have changed global history, is in the 20th year of his lifetime sentence. He spends his days making crafts: tiny soldiers and tanks and occasional portraits of Lenin, Stalin and Che Guevara, according to his mother who spoke to our reporter, Masho Lomashvili, the day after Trump’s assassination attempt. 

Masho called the 83 year old Anjela Arutunian to ask whether she had spoken to her son and whether he had heard about the Trump assassination attempt. “Someone tried to kill Trump? I hadn’t heard, I have mostly been watching football,” said Angela Arutunian “Is he okay?” she asked.

Additional reporting by Masho Lomashvili.

The post Almost an assassin  appeared first on Coda Story.

Barack Obama had just won reelection in a hard-fought presidential race and the celebrity host of “The Apprentice” was stewing. Back then, Donald Trump was a mere reality TV star and a staunch proponent of the birther conspiracy, the baseless claim that Obama was born abroad, and therefore ineligible to serve as president of the United States. Those were also the days when Trump was still on Twitter, and he took to the bird app to voice his dismay with the U.S. electoral college system. “This election is a total sham and a travesty,” he declared, in a series of now belligerently familiar tweets. “We are not a democracy!”

Fast-forward a decade. That Twitter tantrum that generated a few eye-rolls from coastal media in 2012 now reads like foreshadowing to the kaleidoscope of election fraud myths that have metastasized since the 2020 election and proven ever more resilient. Some 60% of Republicans believe that the last presidential election was stolen. 

This “Big Lie” – the meritless claim that the election was hijacked by voter fraud and President Joe Biden was its illegitimate victor – has had tangible policy consequences, leading to the introduction of a slew of state house bills in the U.S. that would restrict voter access, and inspiring Trump acolytes in swing states to run for offices that oversee elections, a development one Democratic secretary of state characterized as a “five-alarm fire.”

The Big Lie reshaping America’s electoral landscape is also providing fertile ground for politicians abroad, who are adopting the rhetoric of widespread voter fraud over the inconvenient realities of legitimate electoral loss. From Brazil to Israel, accusations of rigged elections are gaining momentum, animating conspiracists, and undermining faith in the democratic process. Here are four examples:

Brazil

Trump fanboy and far-right President Jair Bolsonaro defended Trump’s allegations of voter fraud the day after the disastrous January 6th assault on the U.S. Capitol. “What was the problem that caused that whole crisis, basically? Lack of trust in the election,” he hypothesized. “There were people who voted three, four times. Dead people voted. It was a free-for-all.” It’s not just the U.S. electoral system Bolsonaro railed against. For months, the Brazilian president has been leveling fraud claims against Brazil’s electronic voting system and already questioning the legitimacy of the country’s upcoming 2022 presidential race – but only if he loses, naturally.

Bolsonaro’s attacks on Brazil’s electoral system come as polls consistently show him trailing the candidate most likely to run against him, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. Recognizing the importance of the upcoming election, Trump allies – including former Trump strategist Steve Bannon – have thrown their weight behind Bolsonaro and are faithfully propping up his voter fraud allegations. According to the New York Times, Bannon argued Bolsonaro “will only lose if ‘the machines’ steal the election.” Bolsonaro, too, has preempted a loss to Lula by declaring fraud as the only possible explanation for his defeat, and has suggested he won’t concede the election if that happens. “I have three alternatives for my future,” Bolsonaro explained of his electoral prospects in August. “Being arrested, killed, or victory.” 

Israel

Former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sounded downright Trumpy in June as a coalition of opposition lawmakers were poised to remove him from office. “We are witnessing the greatest election fraud in the history of the country,” he declared, arguing the coalition that later succeeded in ousting him was in league with the “deep state” and the journalists covering the news were “taking part in a propaganda machine enlisted in favor of the left.” The rhetoric became so heated in the country’s online spaces in the lead-up to Netanyhau’s ouster that the directory of the country’s security agency, the Shin Bet, released an exceedingly rare statement warning of “ a serious rise and radicalization in violent and inciting discourse” that could lead to political violence, drawing comparisons to the warnings that preceded the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Although Netanyahu did eventually step aside for his replacement and the country was spared from the alarming prospect of an Israeli version of the QAnon Shaman, the former prime minister has yet to walk back his earlier allegations of election fraud.

Germany

Even Germany hasn’t been spared from the abyss of election conspiracies. As Coda reported in the fall, the Big Lie found an eager audience among a number of leaders within the country’s far-right movement, who have amplified Trump-inspired false claims about the security of voting by mail in the run-up to the country’s 2021 parliamentary elections. Unsurprisingly, some of the conspiracies were well outside reality. While the country doesn’t use voting machines, one researcher found U.S-originated conspiracies about rigged voting machines circulating through the country’s right-wing social media outlets over the summer. “These alternative realities that are created in the United States, and are really popular there, have a huge impact on countries that the U.S. is allied with,” he explained. At a campaign event in eastern Germany, a politician with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland party urged supporters to vote in person rather than by mail, citing the possibility of election fraud and warning them to “stay alert.” The election, a voter told Schultheis, “is going to be manipulated.”

Peru

Keiko Fujimori promotes the election fraud myth that just wouldn’t quit. In June, Fujimori, the daughter of jailed former Peruvian dictator Alberto Fujimori, lost the country’s presidential election to leftist rival Pedro Castillo, and then refused to concede the race, leveling unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud and demanding tens of thousands of ballots be thrown out, leading to massive pro-Fujimori rallies in which supporters donned bullet-proof vests and prophesied about civil war. 

Though Washington and the European Union called the election fair and international observers found no evidence of fraud, the claims delayed the country’s election certification process by a nail-biting six weeks. Castillo was eventually declared the winner, but experts worry Fujimori’s Big Lie amplification has deeply damaged faith in the country’s democratic institutions and radicalized elements of the country’s right. Consider this disturbing New York Times dispatch a month after the election:

“In the crowd at one recent Fujimori rally, a group of young men wearing bulletproof vests and helmets marched with makeshift shields painted with the Cross of Burgundy, a symbol of the Spanish empire popular among those who celebrate their European heritage. One man flashed what looked like a Nazi salute.

Ms. Fujimori, the granddaughter of Japanese immigrants, part of a larger Peruvian-Japanese community, has allied herself closely with the country’s often European-descended elite, just as her father eventually did.

A number of her supporters have talked casually about their hope that the military will intervene.

“Just for a moment, until the military can say: ‘You know what? New elections,’” said Marco Antonio Centeno, 54, a school administrator. “The alternative is totalitarianism.”

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The post The year the Big Lie went global appeared first on Coda Story.

“Viktor Orbán of Hungary truly loves his Country and wants safety for his people,” Trump wrote on January 3 in an endorsement of Orbán’s bid to be reelected in Hungary’s race for prime minister to take place in April or May of this year. “He is a strong leader and respected by all.” 

Early on in Trump’s political career, his praise of an authoritarian leader would have raised eyebrows. His admiration of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un at first vexed and infuriated Republicans. But after years of coming to the defense of despots around the world, Trump’s embrace of authoritarians has become a defining characteristic of his foreign policy. From Jair Bolsonaro to Orbán, Trump emerged as the leader of a group of wily, "soft" authoritarians who de-legitimize elections, demonize the press and take a xenophobic approach to immigration. 

I spoke to experts on authoritarianism to understand why Trump’s endorsement of Orbán isn’t just more flattery. 

Trump is known for publicly praising authoritarians from Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to China’s Xi Jinping. Is it saying the quiet part aloud — authoritarians stick together? 

It’s no secret that Trump has a soft spot for authoritarians, and he has shown his support for autocrats facing reelection before. In 2020, Trump endorsed Polish President Andrzej Duda, who weaponized homophobia to fuel his campaign. He continued the practice even after he left office and endorsed Brazil’s far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in October 2021. “Brazil is lucky to have a man such as Jair Bolsonaro working for them,” Trump wrote. 

Trump has admitted that he sees himself in Orbán. According to David Cornstein, who served as the U.S. Ambassador to Hungary under the Trump administration, the former president compared Orbán to a twin brother when the two leaders met in 2019. 

“Trump correctly believes that Orbán is fighting the same forces as Trump fought in America: democratic institutions, a free press, an independent judiciary, ethics rules, and opponents who still try to insist on democracy and rule of law. Birds of a feather flock together,” said Brian Klaas, an associate professor of global politics at the University College London and author of “How to Rig an Election.” 

Have other former U.S. presidents endorsed foreign leaders? 

Yes. Former President Obama endorsed Emmanuel Macron in 2017 during the French presidential election which pitted Macron against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen. But it’s not a common practice for a U.S. president to endorse a candidate in a foreign election once they’ve left office.

Are there elements of Hungary’s style of authoritarianism reflected in Trump’s way of governing? 

“Authoritarians learn from one another,” Klaas wrote in an email to me. “Their playbooks draw on similar tactics: attack the press, demonize opponents, particularly if they're ethnic or religious minorities, engage in nepotism and cronyism, undermine rule of law, steal, blame your opponents for the things that you're guilty of, and attempt to subvert free and fair elections.” 

All of this is characteristic of both Orbán and Trump.

What about the GOP more broadly? 

The embrace of Hungarian-style authoritarianism isn’t limited to Trump. It’s a facet of the GOP, argues David Pepper, the former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party and author of "Laboratories of Authoritarianism."

Hungary is a competitive authoritarian country where the facade of democracy hides an autocratic reality. Elections take place, but districts are heavily gerrymandered and mail-in voting rules favor Orbán’s supporters. The government controls the national election agency and packs the courts with conservative allies. 

Pepper sees similar patterns in the U.S. He points to Ohio, where Republicans in the state legislature pushed to change the election process for judges to require candidates' party ID on the ballot. Or Wisconsin and Georgia where the Republicans have fought to take control of the states’ electoral commissions. 

Orbán’s brand of competitive authoritarianism is “a system where they cling to keeping an appearance of legitimacy while predetermining all the outcomes,” said Pepper. “And that’s, I think, the closest parallel to what we see in so many states, and if those states and people like Trump have their way, what we would see nationally.”

It’s not a coincidence that Hungary shares anti-democratic strategies like gerrymandering with the U.S. In fact, Hungarian autocrats have learned from the GOP, argues Szabolcs Panyi, a Hungarian investigative journalist with the independent newsroom Direct36.

“I think Orbán learned a lot from Republican policies and also mostly from Republican spin doctors. So it’s Orbán who has been importing and implementing Republican tactics into Hungarian politics, not the other way around,” said Panyi. 

Other people in Trump’s inner circle have been friendly towards Orbán recently. Tucker Carlson took a trip last summer to Hungary where his interview with Orbán made headlines. What does this say about the GOP and Trumpism right now? 

Trump’s support of Orbán ahead of Hungarian elections goes beyond his praise of Bolsonaro or Putin, argues Klaas. “The authoritarian Republican base has made Orbán into a sort of folk hero,” he said. “They have created a false caricature of Orbán as some sort of conservative who defends Western values, rather than as a racist, anti-Semitic authoritarian who is using state power to destroy dissent while steadily enriching himself.”

In August 2021, Tucker Carlson took his viewers to Hungary to show off what he claimed was an exemplar of conserviatve nationalism. In a full week of coverage and one-on-one interviews with Orbán himself, Carlson praised the crackdowns on immigration and the pro-family stance that has fostered blanently homophobic policies.

On a visit to the Hungarian capital in September 2021, Former Vice President Mike Pence praised Orbán’s restrictive abortion policies. 

“Hungary has become the GOP’s new model in terms of racist demographic politics and electoral autocracy,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University and author of Lucid, a newsletter on threats to democracy. 

It isn’t a coincidence, Ben-Ghiat argues, that the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), the annual gathering of American conservatives, will be held in Budapest later this year. 

What’s the message Trump and his inner circle are sending?

In a way, Trump is endorsing his own brand of authoritarianism too, argues Pepper, the former former chairman of the Ohio Democratic Party.

“I think it says that they’re all in on this form of governing,” he said. It legitimizes Orbán, but “it also legitimizes that brand of politics.”

Pepper is worried conservatives in the U.S. are taking notes on Orbán’s authoritarian strategy.  Tucker Carlson’s visit to Hungary, CPAC’s upcoming conference in Budapest and Trump’s endorsement are all signs that conservatives are “studying how they can build something here where they have a minority party and view of the world locked into power through an Orbán-style competitive autocracy.”

Hungarians aren’t going to be swayed to vote for Orbán because of Trump’s endorsement. So what does this mean for Hungary?

The Hungarian election between Orbán and the opposition is tight, but it’s hard to imagine that someone on the fence is going to be convinced by Trump’s endorsement. But that doesn’t mean the endorsement is unimportant. 

Orbán has few allies in the European Union, and prior to Trump’s administration, the Hungarian government was on the outs with the U.S. too. But because of Trump’s public support, Orbán can claim he has allies who share his autocratic worldview, according to Panyi, the Hungarian journalist. 

“This is material that Orbán and his people can use to fuel their propaganda, saying that ‘Oh, even Trump supports us,’” said Panyi. “He can still portray himself as having some kind of backing from influential people. But in reality, Trump’s out of power,” he added.  

Hungary is a small country with the population the size of Michigan. But a former U.S. president’s support allows Orbán to claim legitimacy and relevance on the international stage. “Think about it this way: do you think Trump knows the name of the president of Estonia? Absolutely not. The fact that Trump knows Orbán shows that Hungary is punching above its geopolitical weight, and Orbán and his followers will try to exploit that for their political gain,” said Klaas, the political scientist at University College London.

So will Trump’s endorsement add extra votes for Orbán? Probably not. But let’s say the election doesn’t go the way Orbán wants. By refusing to accept the results of the U.S. 2020 election, Trump created a roadmap for authoritarians to claim unfavorable elections were rigged. This cozy relationship between Orbán and Trump might set the stage for the Hungarian autocrat to make the same argument, said Orsolya Lehotai, a doctoral student in the Politics Department at The New School for Social Research. “It basically endorses aspects of what happens when a political leader accuses its opponents of cheating with elections,” said Lehotai. 

The post Trump admires a lot of authoritarians. Viktor Orbán is special appeared first on Coda Story.