One of the most widespread forms of intellectual laziness—still sold globally as a mark of moral sophistication—is the tendency to place the faults of an entire system on a single individual. Remove that individual, cast him out like some medieval demon, and reality, we are told, will correct itself. The result is a kind of political fairy tale for adults: once there was an ugly, crude, ill-mannered president, and he ruined everything. As for the system? It remains fundamentally sound—needing only a bit more decorum, more carefully chosen language, and perhaps another Nobel Peace Prize or two, handed out between the manufacturing of crises and the staging of wars and genocides.

But what if this isn’t really about Trump?

“Tuesday will be Power Plant Day and Bridge Day—all in one—in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the damn strait, you crazy bastards, or you will live in hell—JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.”

There it is: direct, blunt, and entirely stripped of diplomatic language. No “we are concerned,” no “we call for restraint,” no references to the “international community,” and no talk of democratization. Just a clear message: open the strait—or face hell. And yet the reaction is one of shock—hands thrown up, voices raised in disbelief: “Is this possible? What kind of man is this?”

In reality, the problem begins precisely where this statement starts to make sense.

Because if we lower the volume on the moralistic drama and engage our reasoning, what we see is not something new, but an unusually blunt translation of a political rhetoric that has been in place for decades. The difference between Trump and his predecessors is not that he does anything fundamentally different, but that he does not pretend to be doing something else. Others issued threats with a rehearsed smile and a thin layer of diplomatic poetry; his style is closer to that of Stojan—the coarse, blunt father figure played by Miki Manojlović in the serbian film Rane—who tells his neighbor, portrayed by Jelisaveta Sabljić, that he will quite literally “defecate on Stradun” in “her Dubrovnik”.  The substance, however, is the same.

In that sense, it is difficult to see how Trump’s crudity differs in essence from that of former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the 2016 election, who stated:

“I want the Iranians to know that if I am president, we will attack Iran. Regardless of the stage of development of their nuclear program, if they were ever to consider an attack on Israel, we would be able to completely obliterate them.”

This brings us to what John Bellamy Foster, a Marxist theorist not prone to caricatured explanations, has articulated with notable precision: oligarchy in the United States is not a novelty that “arrived with Trump.” It has long been a structural feature—only after the crisis of 2008 did it cease to feel the need to disguise itself. The concentration of capital has reached a point where it is no longer sufficient for capital merely to influence the state—it must govern it directly. And once it does, why maintain the pretense that it does not?

Foster goes further, noting something that sounds almost dystopian, yet is entirely grounded in reality: the most powerful sectors of contemporary capital—especially high-tech industries—are deeply dependent on military spending and military technologies. Put plainly: without war, there is no profit; without profit, no growth; without growth, no system. War, therefore, is not a mistake or a correctable anomaly. It is a business model.

Here Michael Roberts offers a complementary insight. His argument is disarmingly simple: the rate of profit tends to fall. Not because capitalists have suddenly become incompetent, but because the system itself, through its own development, undermines the very source of profit—more machines, less living labor, and thus less of what actually generates surplus value. And so, like any system under strain, capital begins to search for ways out: speculation, expansion, intensified pressure on labor—and, inevitably, the consolidation of a more openly authoritarian state.

Michael Roberts sees precisely here the key to understanding increasingly aggressive imperial policies: as profits decline, so too grows the need to “shore them up” from the outside—through control of resources, markets, and, ultimately, through force. And, of course, through war. Because, in the end, this is not a question of style or the temperament of a particular politician, but of balance sheets. And balance sheets, as we know, have no morality; they move in columns, disciplined and methodical, like troops on parade.

In other words, once we are dealing with a system that economically depends on permanent war and politically normalizes it, it is hardly surprising that, in times of crisis, it begins to produce ever more obscure and bloodthirsty figures.

A system that feeds on the consumption of societies, resources, labor, truth, and ultimately human beings themselves will, sooner or later, begin to demand political types willing to articulate that Trumpian logic openly. And when elites sense that the ground beneath them is slipping—that profits no longer accumulate as easily as before, that society is saturated with fear, insecurity, and the very rage they themselves have helped to generate—it becomes difficult to offer the public calm bookkeepers and cautious accountants. No: in such moments, history’s basement is thrown open, and outcome false prophets, self-proclaimed messiahs, deranged guardians of “sacred values,” national exorcists, and the entire menagerie of political figures who shout of God, blood, soil, destiny, and salvation—while, behind the scenes, the profits are counted exclusively by the clerks of the earthly empire, and never of the Heavenly Kingdom. Indeed, such figures are among its first victims.

For a cannibal system demands cannibals.

At this point, Marvin Harris—that uncomfortably rational anthropologist who had a habit of seeking very unholy explanations in every “sacred story”—would likely just shrug. His lesson was simple: people do not believe in things because they have gone mad, but because those beliefs serve a function in the world they inhabit. When societies begin to unravel, ideologies grow darker, more aggressive, more absolute. Not because heaven has chosen to send us deranged fanatics, but because the earth itself has been made unbearable.

The fanatic, then, is not a glitch in the system—he is its modus operandi. His role is to translate real problems into the wrong language: to recast exploitation as “sin,” economics as apocalyptic pseudo-theology, imperial domination as a “clash of civilizations.” And so, instead of asking who has stripped them of the basic means of life, people begin arguing over who is pure enough, faithful enough, sufficiently “one of us”—and who must be sacrificed to keep it that way.

And the system? It runs like clockwork.

Now put all of this together: an oligarchy that governs the state, an economy dependent on war, a profit system that demands new victims, a politics that offers bizarre fanatics as solutions and promises a return to “the good old days.” And then Trump arrives and says: open the strait—or face hell.

So what, exactly, is new here?

Perhaps only this: there is no longer any translation into the language of the decent and empathetic—those who comforted themselves with the illusion that things would not end the way they so plainly are, before the eyes of the entire world.

Which is why the real question is not: how is it possible for an American president to speak like this? The real question is: how was it possible that we believed, for so long, that he did not—only phrasing it more elegantly, with better punctuation and fewer exclamation marks?

And, to conclude as one must at the end of a decades-long self-deception:

All of you who, in November 1989—even for entirely understandable reasons—celebrated the fall of the Berlin Wall: this is what you were celebrating.