Trump’s World Vision: Honest, Yet

Precariously Primitive

Daniel Warner

January 16, 2026

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Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

United States presidents are not known for telling the truth. From Thomas Jefferson’s denial of a relationship with the enslaved Sally Hemings onward, there has been no shortage of political distortions emanating from the Oval Office. President Donald Trump, however, has taken a different track. When asked by New York Times reporters whether there were any restraints on his global powers, the 45^th and 47^th president replied, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” “I don’t need international law,” he added.

There is something almost refreshing about Trump’s forthrightness. He says exactly what he means. Surprised by his violations of international law such as striking boats in international waters, killing survivors and abducting Venezuela’s president? Concerned that the United States military committed the war crime of perfidy by disguising one of its aircraft as a civilian plane in attacking a suspected drug-smuggling boat from Venezuela? Worried that he did not consult members of Congress before sending armed forces abroad? “He who saves his Country,” Trump wrote on Truth Social in February 2025, “does not violate any Law.”

And Trump’s deeds back up his words. As the United States flexes its muscles in Venezuela and threatens other countries in the Western Hemisphere and beyond, the White House announced on January 7 its withdrawal from 66 international organizations associated with the United Nations system. Taken together, the assertiveness in Venezuela and retreat from multilateralism underscore an expansive interpretation of “America First” as well as a very particular twenty-first century rejection of the rule of law and international cooperation.

Executive Order 14199 and Its Follow-Up

White House Executive Order 14199, signed on February 4, 2025, is titled: “Withdrawing the United States from International Organizations, Conventions and Treaties That Are Contrary to the Interests of the United States.” A presidential memorandum followed on July 7, 2026: “I have…determined that it is contrary to the interests of the United States to remain a member of, participate in, or otherwise provide support to the organizations listed in section 2 of this memorandum.” Of the 66 organizations named, 31 agencies and offices are associated with the United Nations, such as such as U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Some are non-U.N. organizations such as the Commission for Environmental Cooperation; others are described as “hybrid threats” including the International Institute for Justice and the Rule of Law.

Among the U.N. entities Trump listed for withdrawal, the most consequential is the UNFCCC.  No country has ever exited the UNFCCC since its adoption in May 1992. The U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change – described by many as the “bedrock” climate treaty – is the parent agreement to the 2015 Paris climate accord.

“The United States would be the first country to walk away from the UNFCCC,” Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Reuters.

What do the 66 organizations have in common? According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, on whose report the withdrawals were based, “It is no longer acceptable to be sending these institutions the blood, sweat, and treasure of the American people, with little to nothing to show for it.” He maintained that many of the organizations were “dominated by progressive ideology” and were also “mismanaged, unnecessary, wasteful, poorly run, captured by the interests of actors advancing their own agendas contrary to our own, or a threat to our nation’s sovereignty.”

The State of Nature

Indeed, the Trump administration interprets any form of multilateralism or international cooperation as an erosion of the United States’ absolute sovereignty. Behind this assertion of absolute U.S. sovereignty lies a reliance on raw power in a lawless world. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller, Deputy White House Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, said in an interview with CNN’s Jake Tapper. “These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Miller’s comments echo the 17^th century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ famous view of human nature: “In the state of nature, life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” U.S. National Security Strategy 2025 defined Trump’s foreign policy as “flexible realism,” and stated that the United States would pursue “peace through strength”- both of which reflect a disdain for law and a return to a Hobbesian state of nature.

As the Genevan philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted in criticizing Hobbes’ state of nature, “Hobbes was taking socialized persons and simply imagining them living outside of the society they were raised in.” Today, we live in a world that is highly interconnected, with many shared norms and values. To imagine a return to a primitive state of nature is historically and sociologically impossible. Even the isolated Robinson Crusoe became socialized when Friday appeared.

Trump’s nostalgia for American post-World War II domination is as unrealistic as his Hobbesian view of a twenty-first century political state of nature. Hobbes’ hypothetical state of nature was without established governments, international cooperation, treaties, multilateral institutions or mutually-agreed upon norms. There may be failed states, violent conflicts, disaster zones as well as unregulated activities such as much of the new digital world. But this does not add up to a lawless state of nature pessimistically described by Hobbes in his 1651 Leviathan.

Donald Trump must be credited for his honesty. The 2025 National Security Strategy, White House Executive Order 14199 and the July 7 Presidential Memorandum are transparent statements of policy positions that are already being implemented.

America’s post-World War II dominance, absolute sovereignty, and the mythical “state of nature” are relics of the past. None exists today. Clinging to illusions of unchecked American power, or imagining a return to Hobbesian lawlessness before the United Nations and modern interdependence is folly – strategically reckless, morally bankrupt, and doomed to fail.

Daniel Warner is the author of An Ethic of Responsibility in International Relations. (Lynne Rienner). He lives in Geneva.

 Dr. King’s Forgotten Warnings About “the Rise of a Fascist State in America”

Paul Street

January 16, 2026

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Image by History in HD.

As Americans gather next Monday to celebrate the legacy of the great martyred civil rights and social justice leader Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in a time of fascist rule in the United States, it is important to remember seven interrelated parts of King’s thought and activism that have been largely forgotten and deleted:

+1. The Dr. King who in 1963 (“Letter From a Birmingham Jail”) wrote that the primary obstacle to overcoming American racial oppression wasn’t the open racism of segregation’s brutal enforcers but the tepid incrementalism of white moderates who counseled excessive patience and discouraged the mass direct action required to overthrow the Jim Crow regime.

+2. The King who spoke out against American imperialism, most particularly against the US War on Vietnam, and who said (on April 4, 1967, in New York City’s Riverside Church) that a society that spent more money on military empire than on programs of social uplift was “approaching spiritual death.”

+3. The King who said that the defeat of de jure segregation and racist voter disenfranchisement in the Jim Crow South needed to be understood as an elementary prelude to the overcoming of deeply entrenched racism, de facto segregation, and economic inequality across the entire nation.

+4. The King who placed the primary blame for the US race riots of 1965-67 on a “white power structure…seeking to keep the walls of segregation and inequality intact” and a “white society, unprepared and unwilling to accept radical structural change,” that told Black people “they must expect to remain permanently unequal and permanently poor.”

+5. The King who denounced what he called “the interrelated triple evils” of racism, economic injustice/poverty (capitalism) and war (militarism and imperialism, and who said that the “real issue to be faced” beyond “superficial” matters was “the radical reconstruction of society itself” – the King who argued that “only by structural change can current evils be eliminated, because the roots are in the system rather in man or faulty operations.” ( “For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the South, a little change here, a little change there,” King told the journalist David Halberstam April 1967. “Now I feel quite differently. I think you’ve got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values.”)

+6. The King who said that poor Black, white, and brown masses “must organize a revolution” that would be “more than a statement to the larger society” and more than periodic “street marches” – a movement that would employ regular “mass civil disobedience” to “dislocate the functioning of a society.” The “storm .. rising against the privileged minority of the earth,” King added, “will not abate until [there is a] just distribution of the fruits of the earth…”

+7. Last not but not least, the officially forgotten King omits his warnings on the “FASCISM” he expected to rise to power in the United States if it failed to undertake this revolution. In his final book, Where Do We Go From Here?: Chaos or Community (1967), King offered a sobering take on the white legal backlash to the racial progress achieved by the struggle for Black equality. Many white Americans, King wrote, “have declared that democracy isn’t worth having if it involves [racial] equality…[their] goal is the total reversal of all reforms with the reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism” whereby the law is wielded to guarantee white supremacy.

How haunting it is to re-read those words five years after January 6, when the fascist leader Donald Trump and his neo-Confederate backers tried to overthrow an election they viewed as illegitimate largely because its outcome depended on nonwhite voters and as the Trump47 fascist regime including the US Supreme Court’s rolls back one anti-racist civil and voting rights victory after another.

After his final national sermon in Washington DC 58 years ago, five days before his execution (which took place exactly one year to the day after he spoke out against the US War on Vietnam in Riverside Church in New York City), King stepped outside the National Cathedral and said that, on its current trajectory, the United States would become a “fascist state”:

“I am convinced we cannot stand two more summers like last,” King said during a post-sermon press conference, referring to the violent racial conflagrations that took place in US cities (most lethally in Detroit and Newark) in 1967. He predicted that more such violence would “bring only a rightist takeover of the government and eventually a fascist state in America….But I have to admit,” King added, “that the conditions that brought the violence into being last summer are still notoriously with us.”

That last sentence is important. Consistent with the enumerated points above (see especially #4), King did not blame the violence on American streets on Black rioters; he blamed it on “the triple evils that are interrelated,” that is on the racism, economic/class exploitation, and imperialism that reflected the perverse functioning and structures of a society that needed to be transformed by a great revolution “for the just distribution of the earth’s fruits.”

King’s April 4^th 1968 extrajudicial racist execution triggered a Black uprising that may have helped fuel the 1968 presidential victory of the proto-fascistic war criminal Richard Nixon, who ran a white-supremacist “law and order” campaign and launched a vicious repression campaign targeting Blacks, the New Left, and antiwar protesters.

Fifty-eight years later, we are in the middle of the “rightist takeover of the government” that King prophesied – a coup driven largely by white racist backlash. We are on the whole too passively (see point #1 above) witnessing the attempted full-on consolidation of “a fascist state in America” under the command of Donald Trump (the genocidal racist son of a Queens Klansman) with Trump’s fellow arch-racist Hitler fan Stephen “We are the Storm” Miller running much of the sick show, and with the racist RepubliNazis JD Vance and Marco Rubio fighting in the wings to claim Mein Trumpf’s mantle. King’s “triple evils” must be expanded to (at least) five to include militant misogynist patriarchy and capitalogenic ecocide and these five evils must be understood as a malignant simultaneous equations system that has given rise to a fascist regime atop the most lethal superpower in world history — a supremely dangerous development that poses a grave existential menace to all humanity.

Paul Street’s latest book is This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America (London: Routledge, 2022).

Dr. King’s Warning Are More Prescient Than

Ever

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad

January 16, 2026

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Photo by Jimmy Woo

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words from his “Beyond Vietnam” speech still ring true.

“When machines and computers, profit motives, and property rights are considered more important than people,” he warned, “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.”

Those words, delivered in 1967, still summarize today’s political moment. Instead of putting the lives of working Americans first, our leaders in Congress and the White House have prioritized advancing corporate profits and wealth concentration, slashing government programs meant to advance upward mobility, and deploying military forces across the country, increasing distrust and tension.

This historic regression corresponds with a recessionary environment for Black America in particular. That’s what my organization, the Joint Center, found in our report, “State of the Dream 2026: From Regression to Signs of a Black Recession.”

The economic landscape for Black Americans in 2026 is troubling, with unemployment rates signaling a potential recession. By December 2025, Black unemployment had reached 7.5 percent — a stark contrast to the national rate of 4.4 percent. This disparity highlights the persistent economic inequalities faced by Black communities, which have only been exacerbated by policy shifts that have weakened the labor market. The volatility in Black youth unemployment, which fluctuated dramatically in the latter months of 2025, underscores the precariousness of the situation.

The Trump administration’s executive orders have systematically dismantled structures aimed at promoting racial equality. By targeting programs such as Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 Equal Employment Opportunity executive order and defunding agencies like the Minority Business Development Agency, the administration has shifted federal support away from disadvantaged businesses.

As a result, Black-owned firms risk losing contracts and resources tied to federal programs, potentially resulting in job losses and reduced economic growth. These changes threaten billions in federal revenue for Black-owned firms and undermine efforts to move beyond racial inequality in the workforce.

The GOP’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill,” passed in 2025, further entrenches inequality by providing tax cuts that disproportionately benefit high-income households and corporations — while simultaneously slashing investments in programs like Medicaid and SNAP, limiting access to essential services for low-income households.

The technology sector, a critical component of the American economy, is also affected by this disregard for civil rights. Executive orders like “Removing Barriers to American Leadership in Artificial Intelligence” have stripped away protections that could advance inclusion in this rapidly growing field. As a result, the future of the American economy risks reinforcing past inequalities.

Dr. King’s call for strong, aggressive federal leadership in addressing racial inequality remains highly relevant. However, instead of eradicating structures of inequality, our current leadership is implementing policies that destroy government jobs and dismantle agencies responsible for preventing predatory economic practices. These choices undermine longstanding efforts to combat racial and economic disparities — and exemplify the regressive economic policies that coincide with rising Black unemployment.

As Dr. King stated, “we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt.” But urgent action is required. Unless we act deliberately, economic and racial inequalities will become entrenched, resulting in generational loss. The core question is whether we will move beyond our nation’s history of racism, materialism, and militarism, and — as Dr. King urged — embrace “the fierce urgency now” to advance equity.

Dedrick Asante-Muhammad is host of the Race and Wealth Podcast and Director of the Racial Wealth Divide Initiative at the Corporation for Economic Development.