A Not-so-Tongue-in-Cheek “Trumpian Traumatic Stress Disorder”

by Peter Blunt / January 12th, 2026

No doubt like many others who awoke to the news that President Maduro of Venezuela and his wife, Cilia Flores (a serving member of the Venezuelan National Assembly with a distinguished career in government), had been ‘captured’ or ‘seized’ by the US and were being transported to NYC to stand trial, my initial reaction was one of shock and disbelief. That any state – even a rogue state like the US – would have the gall to act so brazenly in defiance of the UN Charter and international law, and get away with it, seemed incomprehensible.

Just as shocking was the uniformity of the corporate media’s scramble to euphemise what had happened. The euphemism of (almost unanimous) choice was the word ‘captured’, which carries with it the connotation that the persons concerned were criminals who had escaped.

It was as if editors had been briefed beforehand and told what word to use. As if expunged from their collective vocabulary, the words ‘kidnapped’ and ‘abducted’ were nowhere to be seen.

No need to wonder how the same media would have reacted if Russia had ‘captured’ King Charles and his wife, Camilla. Members of a family whose list of crimes and misdemeanours would provide a much richer source of material for rationalisation – by, say, RT – than the Maduros ever could.

Reminding myself that the US had a long and grisly track record of this type of crime and worse, and that the corporate media always do as they are told, did little to assuage my sense of phantasmagoria and unreality.

Just saying it sounds crazy: “they kidnapped a sitting president of a sovereign country and his wife who are now in NYC facing ‘trial’ on ‘Trumped-up’ charges as drug lords!”

It sounds like a bad (Trump) joke or the theme for a C grade Hollywood movie.

In swift confirmation of the incident’s bizarreness, President Trump then issued a follow-up threat, saying “If they [what’s left of the Venezuelan Government] don’t behave, we will do a second strike.”

He is now openly talking (again) about ‘acquiring’ Greenland and not ruling out the use of military force to do so.

It all made me think that I had been doing a lot of this sort of thing lately, that is, trying to reconcile the lunacy of events like this with the fact that they seem to have become so commonplace and acceptable.

And I wondered whether it might be driving me slightly insane.

This short essay argues that more and more in the Trumpian world that we inhabit doublethink has become the norm and that this erodes deeply held principles and values and our sense of who we are and of reality.

Not-so-tongue-in-cheek, it is suggested that the resulting stress is damaging to our mental health and could lead to a chronic mental illness, a neurosis, which I call Trumpian Traumatic Stress Disorder (TTSD).

The aetiology of the condition, its symptomatology, and treatment options are discussed briefly below.

Aetiology

TTSD develops as a result of prolonged and repeated exposure to behaviour by people in positions of high authority and standing that contradicts what you have been brought up to believe in and value.

The stress of witnessing or being subjected to such behaviour is heightened by the fact that the perpetrators are never held to account. Indeed, one could say that they flaunt their flouting of the law and their complete disregard for standards of decency and fairness and humaneness.

Imagine the devastating effect on an eight-year-old child of realising that his or her revered teacher all along had been breaking rules that she had been teaching her class to uphold. She was a cheat and a liar, a bully, a thief, a murderer, and a racist. She was also greedy and spiteful, and vain, uncaring about others, pretentious, unreliable and inconsistent, and completely without empathy.

Respect for figures of authority and the law and values and beliefs such as those transgressed in the above example are central features of normality and good citizenship. They are deeply ingrained in our sense of who we are and what we would like our children to be.

They are the psychological glue that holds individual psyches, communities and societies together.

Without them, we as individuals and our societies begin to fall apart, as seems to be happening now in the US, as Chris Hedges and others have been arguing for some time.

It is the accumulation of stressful events such as the most recently committed Venezuelan crimes, the genocide in Gaza, and the countless others like them that lead to the development of TTSD.

Symptomatology

Of course, being a Trumpian condition, this is not just any old neurosis.

The principal symptoms of TTSD, which therefore should be writ large and with superlatives ‘like no one has ever seen before’, are the following:

• Free-floating and excessive or disproportionate anger and irritability characterised by intense, often unexplained rage that seems to have no specific cause, or irritability and anger that are triggered by factors that under normal circumstances you would consider to be trivial.

• Intense feelings of dislike – almost hatred – towards Trump and his henchmen and women combined with an irrational tendency to generalise these feelings to US citizens as a whole.

• Feelings of hopelessness and futility, helplessness, loss of interest, isolation, and guilt for not being able to do anything, or enough, to right the wrongs that you perceive.

• Difficulties with concentrating and sleeping, hypervigilance, and hypersensitivity.

• Obsessive thoughts about precipitating or causative events such as those referred to above.

• Pronounced and frequent incredulity or disbelief and a sense of unreality. Could this really be happening?

• Constant questioning of one’s beliefs and values and a growing uncertainty and anxiety as to what and whom to believe.

• Cognitive dissonance or the recurring feeling that you are constantly under pressure to hold or countenance two irreconcilable or incompatible beliefs or attitudes at the same time. What Orwell referred to as ‘doublethink’: shock/horror is the mundane, war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength, kidnapping is capture, peace prizes are for warmongers, euphemism is menace, and so on.

Some combination of the symptoms outlined above can persist for months or years and are highly likely to coincide with Trump administrations and similar ones that might follow in the US or be in place among US allies.

The effects of TTSD on personal and work relationships, and social functioning generally, can be severe and debilitating.

Treatment

The jury is still out on which of the social sciences is the most ‘dismal’. Unfortunately for TTSD sufferers, however, the front runners in this never-ending and fiercely contested race are still the disciplines of economics and psychology.

The treatment of most psychological ailments either relies on very expensive voodoo-like or shamanic rituals such as psychoanalysis, psychiatric drugs that keep you heavily sedated and dead to the world, or the shock and awe of electro convulsive therapy (ECT).

Regarding the latter, apparently its advocates have ‘discovered’ that administering very large electric shocks to a person’s brain while they are strapped immobile to a bed temporarily makes them less manic or reduces them to a semi-catatonic (but more manageable) state – a state of ‘shock’ you might say! The treatment usually comes as a course, meaning that it is not just a one off. The logic and sophistication of this ‘scientific discovery’ are akin to that of showing that if you hit someone very hard and repeatedly on the head with a sledgehammer, they will probably die.

Accordingly, we do not recommend any of these ‘treatment’ options.

For now (and probably a lot longer), our advice to those with TTSD is to just grimace (!) and bear it.

Otherwise, for those of you who have voodoo sympathies or inclinations, perhaps just buy a Trump doll in which you can stick pins or at which you can throw darts. It won’t do any real good, but it might make you feel a little better.

The Law of the Jungle

Clearly, in international affairs a la US, the rule of law is no more, a condition that is unremarkable given that the US has been hurtling towards this goal since the end of WWII.

The always semi-rules-based global order has been replaced by the law of the jungle, that is, a chaotic, primal struggle for power and control in which the biggest and baddest participant wins (Mearsheimer’s Offensive Realism). A state that has been brought about largely by a country whose leaders personify, and whose words and actions corroborate, the idea that the fish rots from the head.

So much so, that the King and Queen of Denmark would do well to beware being kidnapped and charged with claiming suzerainty over a territory that rightfully belongs to the Trump Empire.

Sounds crazy? No prizes for guessing how long before the mainstream media announce that Greenland and its indigenous peoples have been ‘brought under the protective wing’ of the US and that – following the widespread protests in Iran that through sanctions they have created the conditions for, and fomented in other ways – the US and Israel have ‘rescued’ the Iranian people by ‘deposing’ or ‘replacing’ (assassinating) the Iranian leadership, and so on.

Or are these thoughts just a part of my TTSD, examples of some of my more intrusive and obsessive fears, fantasies, and free-floating anger and irritability?

Where did I put those darts?

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Peter Blunt is Honorary Professor, School of Business, University of New South Wales (Canberra), Australia. He has held tenured full professorships of management in universities in Australia, Norway, and the UK, and has worked as a consultant in development assistance in 40 countries, including more than three years with the World Bank in Jakarta, Indonesia. His commissioned publications on governance and public sector management informed UNDP policy on these matters and his books include the standard works on organisation and management in Africa and, most recently, (with Cecilia Escobar and Vlassis Missos) The Political Economy of Bilateral Aid: Implications for Global Development (Routledge, 2023) and The Political Economy of Dissent: A Research Companion (Routledge, forthcoming 2026). Read other articles by Peter.

In Trump’s Economy, Santa Claus Only Comes for the Billionaires

The Republican playbook is as dastardly as it is familiar: shower the rich with tax giveaways, spike the federal debt, and then demand working people like you sacrifice Social Security, healthcare, and a more decent life.

“Americans deserve to know how we’ve been manipulated and ripped off — and by whom — for the past 45 years,” writes Hartmann.

(Photo by hue12 photography / Unsplash)

Thom Hartmann
Dec 24, 2025

Common Dreams

The Washington Post published an article this week titled A Middle-Class Family’s Only Option: A $43,000 Health Insurance Premium about how the GOP’s refusal to extend ACA/Obamacare subsidies means that Stacy Newton’s family in Jackson Hole, Wyoming will have to pay $43,000 a year for health insurance if they want to stay covered.

If, however, the United States had an extra trillion dollars a year — the amount we’re now spending every year on interest payments against the GOP’s $38 trillion national debt — the Newtons would only pay a few hundred dollars a month and we could also have Universal Childcare & Pre-K, Paid Family & Medical Leave, Tuition-Free College, Affordable Housing & No More Homelessness, End Child Poverty & Hunger, and, as mentioned, Affordable Healthcare for all Americans.


Which raises the question: where did our $38 trillion dollar national debt — that’s costing us $1 trillion a year in interest — come from? After all, when Reagan came into office in 1981 we’d been paying down the debt from WWI and WWII to the point where the entire national debt was only $800 billion (less than $1 trillion).

]

So, where the hell did all this debt come from? Turns out, you could call it a conspiracy: there’s an amazing backstory to our national debt with the unique name “Two Santas.”

This conspiracy/strategy was developed by a Republican strategist named Jude Wanniski back in the 1970s, and he quite literally transformed America and the GOP with it.


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Here’s how it works, laid it out in simple summary:

The Two Santas strategy dictates that when Republicans control the White House they must spend money like a drunken Santa and massively cut taxes on the rich, all to intentionally run up the US debt as far and as fast as possible.

They started this during the Reagan presidency when he dropped the top income tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74% down to 28%, and the GOP tripled down on it with four subsequent massive tax cuts for the rich during the presidencies of Bush, Trump I, and Trump II.

Massive tax cuts for the rich and uncontrolled spending during those four Republican presidencies produced three results:They stimulated the economy with a sort of sugar high, making people think that the GOP can produce a good economy;
They raised the national debt dramatically (it’s at $38 trillion today, 100% of which tracks back to Reagan’s, Bush Jr.'s, and Trump’s massive tax cuts and Bush’s two illegal $5 trillion off-the-books wars);
They produced trillions in additional wealth for the richest families in America, who returned the favor by recycling billions into the campaign coffers of Republican candidates;
And they made people think that Republicans are the “tax-cut Santa Clauses.”

Then comes part two of the one-two punch: when a Democrat gains the White House, Republicans and GOP-friendly media must scream about the national debt as loudly and frantically as possible, freaking out about how “our children will have to pay for it!” and “we have to cut spending to solve this crisis!”

The “debt crisis,” that is, that they themselves created with their massive tax cuts and wild spending.

Do whatever it takes to force Democrats to kill their own social programs: shut down the government, crash the stock market, and even damage US credibility around the world if necessary.

This, Wanniski argued back in the day, would force the Democrats in power to cut their own social safety net programs and even dial back the crown jewel of the New Deal, Social Security, thus shooting their welfare-of-the-American-people Santa Claus right in the face.

And, sure enough, here we are with Trump again in the White House having already added $1 trillion to the national debt just this year, with another $5 trillion to come from this year’s tax cuts for the rich, the only significant legislation passed by the GOP Congress all year.

It’s a cynical political and media effort devised by Republicans in the 1970s, fine-tuned in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and since then meticulously followed by every GOP presidency since.

And, politically, it’s been a brilliantly effective strategy that was hatched by a man most Americans have never heard of: economist and GOP partisan Jude Wanniski.

Wanniski first proposed his Two Santa Clauses strategy in The Wall Street Journal in 1974, after Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace and the future of the Republican Party was so dim that books and articles were widely suggesting the GOP was about to go the way of the Whigs.

There was genuine despair across the GOP back then, particularly when incumbent President Jerry Ford couldn’t even beat an unknown peanut farmer from rural Georgia for the presidency.

Wanniski argued back then that Republicans weren’t losing so many elections just because of Nixon’s corruption, but mostly because the Democrats had been viewed since the New Deal of the 1930s as the “Santa Claus party.”

On the other hand, the GOP, he said, was widely seen as the “party of Scrooge” because they publicly opposed everything from Social Security and Medicare to unemployment insurance and food stamps.

The Democrats, he noted, had gotten to play Santa Claus for decades when they passed out Social Security and unemployment checks — both programs of FDR’s Democratic Socialist New Deal — as well as their “big government” socialist projects like roads, bridges, public schools, public hospitals, and highways that gave a healthy union paycheck to workers and made our country shine.

Even worse, back in that day, Democrats kept raising taxes on businesses and rich people to pay for all that “free stuff” and Democrats’ 91% top tax rates on the morbidly rich — from the 1930s up to Reagan’s era — didn’t have any negative effect at all on working people (wages were steadily going up until the Reagan Revolution, in fact).

It all added, Wanniski theorized, to the public perception that the Democrats were the true party of Santa Claus, using taxes on the rich to fund programs for the poor and the working class.

Americans loved the Democrats back then. And every time Republicans railed against these “socialist” programs, they lost elections.

Therefore, Wanniski concluded, the GOP had to become a Santa Claus party, too. But, because Republicans hated the idea of helping out working people, they had to come up with a new way to convince average voters that the GOP, too, had the Santa spirit. But what?

“Tax cuts!” said Wanniski.

To make this work, the Republicans would first have to turn the classical world of economics — which had operated on a simple demand-driven equation for seven thousand years — on its head.

(Everybody then understood that “demand” — aka “working-class wages” — drove economies because working people spent most of the money they earned in the marketplace, producing “demand” for factory-output goods and services. Consumer spending, in fact, accounts for roughly 70% of the entire US economy.)

To lay the groundwork to roll out Two Santa Clauses, in 1974 Wanniski invented a new phrase — “Supply-Side Economics” — and said the reason economies grew and became robust wasn’t because people had good union jobs and thus enough money to buy things but, instead, because businesses made extra/new things available for sale, thus tantalizing people to part with their money.

The more products (supply) there were in the stores, he argued, the faster the economy would grow. And the more money we gave rich people and their corporations (via tax cuts) the more stuff (supply) they’d generously produce for us to think about buying.

At a glance, this 1981 adoption of Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy by the Reagan Republicans to “cut taxes while increasing spending” seems irrational, cynical and counterproductive. It certainly defies classic understandings of economics. But when you consider Jude Wanniski’s playbook, it makes complete sense.

To help, economist Arthur Laffer took that equation a step farther with the famous “Laffer Curve” napkin scribble he shared with Reagan over lunch. Not only was supply-side a rational concept, Laffer suggested, but as taxes went down, revenue to the government would magically go up!

Neither concept made any sense — and time has proven both to be colossal idiocies — but, Wanniski argued, if think tanks, rightwing media, and Republican politicians could convince Americans to buy into it, they offered the GOP a way out of the wilderness.

Ronald Reagan was the first national Republican politician to fully embrace the Two Santa Clauses strategy, although it’s been followed by every Republican in federal office ever since and still is today.

Jumping in with both feet, Reagan told the American people straight-out that if he could cut taxes on rich people and businesses, those “job creators” (also a then-newly-invented Republican phrase) would use their extra money to “build new factories” and “increase wages” so all that new stuff “supplying” the economy would produce faster economic growth.

George HW Bush — like most Republicans in 1980 who hadn’t read Wanniski’s piece in The Wall Street Journal — was initially horrified. Ronald Reagan was proposing “Voodoo Economics,” said Bush in the primary campaign, and Wanniski’s supply-side and Laffer’s tax-cut theories would throw the nation into debt while producing, Bush said, nothing to benefit average American voters.

But Wanniski had done his homework, selling “Voodoo” supply-side economics to the wealthy elders and influencers of the Republican Party, so when Reagan took Bush on as his VP suddenly even Bush “saw the light.”

Democrats, Wanniski told Bush, had been “Santa Clauses” since 1933 by giving people things. From union jobs to food stamps, new schools to Social Security, the American people loved the “toys” and “free stuff” the Democratic Santas brought them every year, as well as the growing economy the increasing union wages and social programs produced in middle class hands.

But Republicans could stimulate the economy by throwing trillions at defense contractors and other fat-cat donor industries, Jude’s pitch to Bush went: spending could actually increase without negative repercussions and that money would trickle down to workers from billionaires and corporate CEOs buying new yachts and building new factories and mansions with middle-class labor.

Plus, Republicans could be double Santa Clauses by cutting everybody’s taxes!

For working people the tax cuts would, of course, only be a small token — a few hundred dollars a year at the most — but Republicans would heavily market them to the media and in political advertising. And the tax cuts for the rich, which weren’t to be discussed in public, would amount to trillions of dollars, parts of which would be recycled back to the GOP as campaign contributions from the morbidly rich beneficiaries of those very tax cuts.

There was no way, Wanniski said, if Republicans stuck to his strategy for a generation or more, that the Democrats could ever win again.

Democrats would be forced into the role of Santa-killers if they acted responsibly by raising taxes, or, even better, they’d be machine-gunning Santa by cutting spending on their own social programs.

Either choice would cause Democrats to lose elections, and, if Republicans executed the strategy right, they could force Democrats to do both!

Reagan took the federal budget deficit from under a trillion dollars when he and Bush were elected in 1980 to almost three trillion by 1988, and back then a dollar could buy far more than it buys today.

They embraced Wanniski’s theory with such gusto that Presidents Reagan and George HW Bush ran up more debt in their twelve years than every president in history up until that time, from George Washington to Jimmy Carter, combined.

Surely this would both “starve the beast” (another phrase invented by Wanniski in 1976) of the American government and force the Democrats to make the politically suicidal move of becoming deficit hawks.

And that’s just how it turned out.

Bill Clinton, the first Democrat they blindsided with Two Santas, had run in 1992 on an FDR-like platform of a “New Covenant” with the American people that would strengthen the democratic socialist institutions of the New Deal and Great Society, re-empower labor, and institute a national single-payer health care system.

A few weeks before his inauguration, however, Wanniski-insiders Alan Greenspan, Larry Sommers, and Goldman Sachs co-chairman Robert Rubin famously sat Clinton down and told him the facts of life: Reagan and Bush had run up such a huge deficit that he was going to have to both raise taxes and cut the size of government programs for the working class and poor.

Clinton took their advice to heart, raised taxes, balanced the budget, and cut numerous social programs. He declared an “end to welfare as we know it” and, in his second inaugural address, an “end to the era of big government.”

Clinton shot Santa Claus, and the result was an explosion of Republican wins across the country as GOP politicians campaigned on a “Republican Santa” platform of supply-side tax cuts and pork-rich spending increases.

Democrats had controlled the House of Representatives in almost every single year since the Republican Great Depression of the 1930s, but with Speaker Newt Gingrich rigorously enforcing Wanniski’s Two Santa Clauses strategy, they finally took it over and held it in the middle of Clinton’s 1990s presidency.

State after state turned red, and the Republican Party rose to take over, in less than a decade, every single lever of power in the federal government, from the Supreme Court to the White House.

Looking at the wreckage of the Democratic Party all around Clinton in 1999, Wanniski wrote a gloating memo that said, in part:
“We of course should be indebted to Art Laffer for all time for his Curve... But as the primary political theoretician of the supply-side camp, I began arguing for the ‘Two Santa Claus Theory’ in 1974. If the Democrats are going to play Santa Claus by promoting more spending, the Republicans can never beat them by promoting less spending. They have to promise tax cuts...”


Ed Crane, then-president of the Koch-funded Libertarian CATO Institute, noted in a memo that year:
“When Jack Kemp, Newt Gingrich, Vin Weber, Connie Mack and the rest discovered Jude Wanniski and Art Laffer, they thought they’d died and gone to heaven. In supply-side economics they found a philosophy that gave them a free pass out of the debate over the proper role of government. ... That’s why you rarely, if ever, heard Kemp or Gingrich call for spending cuts, much less the elimination of programs and departments.”


Two Santa Clauses had fully seized the GOP mainstream, and hasn’t let go to this day.

Never again would Republicans worry about the debt or deficit when in office; and they knew well how to scream hysterically about the debt to the economically naïve national media as soon as Democrats again took power.

When Jude Wanniski died, George Gilder celebrated the Reagan/Bush adoption of his Two Santas “Voodoo Economics” scheme — then still considered irrational by mainstream economists — in a Wall Street Journal eulogy:
“Unbound by zero-sum economics, Jude forged the golden gift of a profound and passionate argument that the establishments of the mold must finally give way to the powers of the mind. ... He audaciously defied all the Buffetteers of the trade gap, the moldy figs of the Phillips Curve, the chic traders in money and principle, even the stultifying pillows of the Nobel Prize.”


Republicans got what they wanted from Wanniski’s work.

They held power for forty years, transferred over $50 trillion from working class families into the money bins of the top one percent, and cut organized labor’s representation in the workplace from around a third of workers when Reagan came into office to around 6 percent of the non-governmental workforce today.

Think back to Ronald Reagan, who more than tripled the US debt from a mere $800 billion to $2.4 trillion in his 8 years. That spending produced a massive stimulus to the economy, and the biggest non-wartime increase in America’s national debt in all of our history.

There was nary a peep from Republicans about that 218% increase in our debt in eight short years; they were just fine with it and to this day claim Reagan presided over a “great” economy.

When five corrupt Republicans on the Supreme Court gave the White House to George W. Bush in 2000, he instantly reverted to Wanniski’s “Two Santa” strategy and again nearly doubled the national debt, adding over two trillion in borrowed money to pay for his tax cut for billionaires, and tossing in two unfunded wars for good measure, which also added at least (long term) another $5 trillion.

Again, there was nary a peep about that debt from any high-profile in-the-know Republicans; in fact, Dick Cheney famously said, amplifying Wanniski’s strategy:
“Reagan proved deficits don’t matter. We won the midterms. This is our due.”


Bush and Cheney’s tax cuts for the rich raised the debt by 86% to over $10 trillion (and additional trillions in war debt that wasn’t put on the books until Obama entered office, so it looked like it was his).

Then came Democratic President Barack Obama, and suddenly the GOP was hysterical about the debt again.

They — and the national media that amplified their message — were so good at it that they convinced a sitting Democratic president to propose a cut to Social Security (the “chained CPI”). Obama nearly shot the Democrats’ biggest Santa Claus, just like Wanniski predicted, until outrage from the Democratic base stopped him.

Next, Donald Trump raised our national debt by almost $7 trillion, but the GOP raised the debt ceiling without a peep every year for the first three years of his administration, and then suspended it altogether for 2020 (so, when Biden won, he had to justify raising the debt ceiling for 2 years’ worth of deficits, making it even more politically painful).

And now Republicans are once again spending like drunken sailors while doubling down on a fifth major round of tax cuts for billionaires since Reagan’s initial 1981 effort. After all, it worked against Clinton, Obama, and Biden and the media never caught on. Why wouldn’t they use it again?

In the meantime, though, interest has to be paid on the $38 trillion national debt Reagan, Bush, Bush, and Trump ran up, and the bill is now around a trillion a year, about the same as our entire Defense budget.

If Reagan had never adopted Wanniski’s Two Santas strategy, we could have a standard of living today much like the Scandinavian nations with just the trillion dollars a year we’re instead spending on interest payments.

Not to mention the trillions in surplus we’d have now if none of those tax cuts had happened, which could easily fully fund a national single-payer healthcare system.

Americans deserve to know how we’ve been manipulated and ripped off — and by whom — for the past 45 years.

Hopefully Democratic politicians and our media will, finally, call the GOP out on Wanniski’s Two Santas scam that’s been so enthusiastically adopted by Reagan, both Bush’s, and Trump.

Pass it along and wake up everybody you can!


Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Thom Hartmann
Thom Hartmann is a talk-show host and the author of "The Hidden History of Monopolies: How Big Business Destroyed the American Dream" (2020); "The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America" (2019); and more than 25 other books in print.
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222 Years of Haiti’s Victory at Vertiéres

Guillermo R Barreto | 22 Nov 2025

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Today, when US imperial arrogance threatens the entire continent with its military power, we must remember that powerful imperial armies have been defeated time and again by the Caribbean peoples. The Battle of Vertières is a historical milestone that has been rendered invisible by hegemonic historiography.

The Battle of Vertières. Photo: wiki commons

This year marks the 222nd anniversary of the Battle of Vertières. It took place on November 18, south of Le Cap, in what was then known as Saint Domingue. In that battle, which lasted five hours, Napoleon Bonaparte’s elite troops were defeated by battalions of former slaves led by Jean Jacques Dessalines, who consolidated the independence of what would henceforth be called Ayti or Haiti.

Haiti is always mentioned in the media in connection with misfortune. The poorest nation in the hemisphere, famine, cholera, violence. What is not mentioned is the cause of poverty or famine or the cholera epidemic or violence, consequences of centuries of colonial and neocolonial domination. At this moment, the situation is particularly serious, especially in the capital Port-au-Prince and in the Artibonite Department. In fact, a series of heavily armed gangs have taken control of large areas, unleashing unprecedented violence that has claimed more than 5,000 lives this year and caused the internal displacement of more than 1.3 million Haitians to safer areas of the country. The situation of children is particularly alarming. According to reports from UNICEF, 680,000 children have been displaced from their homes, 300,000 have interrupted their studies, either because schools have been destroyed or are being used as shelters, and 288,544 children under the age of 5 are at risk of malnutrition. It is important to note that displacement places children in a vulnerable situation, including health risks due to poor hygiene in shelters, malnutrition, and even forced recruitment by armed gangs. A recent report by Catherine Russell, Executive Director of UNICEF, estimated that 30 to 50% of gang members were minors, who are used as messengers, kitchen workers, sex slaves, and even forced to participate in acts of armed violence.

It is important to note that these gangs have destroyed vital infrastructure, including 38 hospitals, six universities, and libraries, and have forced more than 1,000 schools to close. All of this, and the resulting demobilization of the population that this violence entails, calls into question the idea that these are simply conflicts between criminal gangs. These gangs regularly receive weapons and ammunition from the United States, and this action indicates a project that seeks to make the functioning of a nation unviable. But this attack on the Haitian nation is not recent. Haiti has been under siege by imperial powers since its independence.

The island of Haiti was invaded by Christopher Columbus on his first voyage in 1492, establishing the first European settlement in Our America. The entire island became a colony of the Castilian, then Spanish, empire. In 1697, the Treaty of Ryswick between France and Spain granted the western part of the island to France, henceforth to be called Saint Domingue. The island was rich in resources, and Europeans, in need of labor, brought in millions of Africans who were kidnapped and enslaved to work in mines, plantations, and estates. It would not be an exaggeration to say that it was this wealth that provided the economic basis for the development of imperial France. In 1789, the year of the Storming of the Bastille in Paris, the colony had 793 sugar plantations, 3,150 indigo plantations, 3,117 coffee plantations, 789 cotton-producing units, and 182 rum distilleries. With a population of 40,000 whites and 28,000 free mulattoes, production was sustained by the slave labor of 452,000 Africans and their descendants, who made up 86% of the total population.

Control of the colony was characterized by unimaginable cruelty. Rebellions took place from the very beginning of the conquest of the territory. I highlight here the ceremony of Boïs Caiman in 1791, when Dutty Boukman and the voodoo priestess Cécile Fatiman managed to gather 200 slaves and, in a ceremonial cry, swore to fight for their freedom. That same year, a massive uprising began with the burning of plantations and the killing of settlers. It was Toussaint L’Overture who managed to organize an army and defeat the occupiers, declaring freedom for all. L’Overture trusted revolutionary France with its ideals of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, but that same revolution betrayed him, and he ended up dying in a cold prison in eastern France.

France decided to send an expeditionary force of 84 ships with 25,000 soldiers to regain control of its most precious colony and placed a sinister character in command: Donatien Marie Joseph de Vimeur, Count of Rochambeau. In his novel Estela, Emeric Bergeaud describes him as follows: “his small stature, his angular features, his haughty gaze, which complement the approximate portrait of his moral ugliness.” Rochambeau committed atrocities from the moment he landed in Saint Domingue, including the use of dogs trained to hunt and kill. In a letter to his commander Ramel dated May 6, 1803, he writes: “I am sending you, my dear commander, a detachment of 50 men from the Cape National Guard, commanded by M. Bari; they are bringing 28 mastiffs. These reinforcements will also enable you to complete your operations. I will not let you ignore that you will not be paid any rations or expenses for feeding these dogs. You must give them blacks to eat.”

Rochambeau did not count on the determination of a people fighting for their freedom. L’Overture did not die in vain, and the flags he waved were taken up by Jean Jacques Dessalines, who led the resistance and heroically defeated the most powerful army in Europe at Vertières 222 years ago.

Dessalines assumed power as emperor, as Napoleon Bonaparte would do that same year. But unlike Napoleon, Dessalines promoted a constitution for a nation of free men and women. Slavery was abolished forever, freedom of worship was established, and divorce was permitted. Likewise, respect for the self-determination of peoples was established, without this preventing Dessalines from supporting revolutionaries such as Francisco de Miranda or, later, Alexandre Pétion and Simón Bolívar. The latter not only obtained ships, weapons, ammunition, and combatants. Bolívar obtained a political project from the Haitian revolution, and from there the Liberation Army would become a popular army that would end Spanish colonial rule from the Caribbean coast to the Andean highlands. Haiti was a beacon of light on the continent.

Today, when US imperial arrogance threatens the entire continent with its military power, we must remember that powerful imperial armies have been defeated time and again by the Caribbean peoples. The Battle of Vertières is a historical milestone that has been rendered invisible by hegemonic historiography. The Haitian feat must be studied, discussed, and understood. Haiti was a beacon of light that today succumbs to the interests of the Global North but carries within it the seed of rebellion, just as the Caribbean peoples who inherited that seed. Today, in the face of the military threat from the United States in the Caribbean, we remember the Battle of Vertières and what peoples are capable of when they are determined to decide their own destiny.

Guillermo R Barreto is Venezuelan and holds a PhD in Science (Oxford University). Retired professor at Simón Bolívar University (Venezuela). He was Deputy Minister of Science and Technology, president of the National Science and Technology Fund, and Minister of Ecosocialism and Water (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela). He is currently a researcher at the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research and a visiting collaborator at the Center for the Study of Social Transformations-IVIC.

This article was produced by Globetrotter.

Courtesy: Peoples Dispatch

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Sandwich Guy Redux: In Your Fascist Face

Sandwich guy targets most vilely deserving target ever

Photo from RedditStreetArt

FURTHER
Abby Zimet
Aug 30, 2025

COMMON DREAMS

When Pigs Fly Dept: The "remarkable failure" of prosecutors to indict the D.C. "hero with a hero" who hurled his sub at a neighborhood thug prompted glad praise that, "Ham sandwiches are finally getting a break." It also reflected a growing resistance to a fascist takeover that, with its inept efforts to turn small breaches - an open beer, a wrong door, a nap in the car - into felony charges, has judges, lawyer and an aggrieved populace denouncing it as merely, malignantly "fucking with people for no reason."

In the now-famous "assault with a deli weapon," Sean Dunn, a 37-year-old decorated Afghanistan veteran and former trial attorney and foreign affairs specialist with the DOJ, got up in the face of one masked, armed, burly goon among many in D.C., yelled, “Fuck you! You fucking fascists! Why are you here?" and hurled his wrapped sandwich, reportedly salami, at said goon's bullet-proof-vested chest before sprinting away. About 30 federal agents, with little else to do, chased down, handcuffed and arrested him. He was quickly released, but the next day, in the well-worn name of totalitarian pageantry, the DOJ recorded dozens of stormtroopers swarming his apartment, guns drawn Bin-Laden-like, to re-arrest him and charge him with felony assault for what U.S. Attorney Boxwine Pirro called "a serious crime," but definitely not like the Jan. 6 now-pardoned rioters who assaulted over 140 cops.

Despite the perp's later confession - "I did it. I threw a sandwich" - and the maxim that, given the famously low bar for grand jury hearings, resolute prosecutors can successfully find cause to indict a ham sandwich - the grand jury summoned to put away the "Hoagie Hero" basically responded to the evidence presented with, "Sandwich? What sandwich? I don't see no sandwich," and rejected the call to charge him with a felony. The "exceedingly rare," "sharp rebuke by ordinary citizens" fed up with the dystopian mayhem inflicted on them by bulked-up bullies on all sides rendered Dunn "America’s most famous food thrower since a bunch of guys in Boston hurled tea into the harbor." Like the refusal of LA residents to indict anti-ICE protesters, it showed most Americans reject the regime's cynical attempt to escalate minor scuffles into felony assaults, in the words of one attorney, as "horseshit."

To date, prosecutors have accused at least 17 people of felony “assaulting,” “resisting” or “impeding” a federal agent doing their "duty" since Trump declared his imaginary "crime crisis." As phalanxes of bored, masked, ill-trained cops - FBI, DEA, DHS, USBP - join D.C. police on patrols, the charges get preposterous, and the people get pissed. They caught Mark Bigelow with, gasp, "an open container of alcohol" in his parked van; when he struggled with cops shoving him into a squad car, he allegedly "struck" one. The same day, another mob went to investigate possible fireworks or gunfire; as they dispersed a crowd, Terrance Wilson "struck" an officer with his elbow; when his friend tried to retrieve her sweatshirt as he was carted away, she too diabolically "struck" an officer. When Rios Esquivel inadvertently took the wrong exit door at the zoo, multiple agents grabbed him for another felony.

As Pirro wildly pushes prosecutors to bring cases to court "with the most serious charges they can pursue" and tries to keep them in jail pending trial to impress Daddy with "big numbers" - helped by the ending of cashless bail - attorneys say the courts are "buckling." One DC public defender, "It’s a real mess." Meanwhile, prosecutorial failures to retool garden-variety encounters into fake "assault narratives" pile up. Prosecutors tried three times to indict Lori Reid for felony "assault" on a cop's hand at a protest; after grand juries kept calling bullshit, they reduced it to a misdemeanor. After Alvin Summers drove his car near the Mall where he shouldn't, police charged he "speed-walked away" and, when caught, "grabbed (a cop) by the upper body with force"; the grand jury rejected their testimony after seeing body-cam video, which doesn't lie like they do. And then there was Dunn's lethal sub.

Many judges have likewise grown skeptical. Trump-appointed Judge Thomas Cullen dismissed a farcical regime lawsuit against all 15 federal judges in Maryland to limit their power over immigration as a "Constitutional free-for-all," blasting the "concerted effort by the Executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it." In an assault case, Judge Zia Faruqui charged, "Masked and anonymous law enforcement are terrorizing innocent and hardworking residents (to) smear good people and build upon their false narrative they are capturing ‘bad criminals.'" Friday, multiple judges handed Trump big court losses: They ruled most of the tariffs illegal, blocked Ice Barbie from stripping protections from 600,000 Venezuelans - she slammed them as "unelected activists," like her - and blocked government's "startling' claim they can do "expedited removal" of migrants with no due process.

Still, all good inside the MAGA bubble. At a cringe, pointless gathering of bootlickers "that would make Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin blush," Cabinet members called their dear bigoted autocrat, with a "big beautiful face," the "transformational president of the American worker," thanked him for "saving college football" and "the whales," said he should def get the "Noble (sic) Prize," and declared "we're in a revolution," like the one "in 1863 or so." Their beaming idiot king bragged "I have the right to do anything I want," so he did. He illegally returned a massive portrait of Gen. Robert E Lee, a slave holding his horse, to the library at West Point. He offered military funeral honors to Jan. 6 rioter Ashli Babbitt. Using his "weapon of choice" of fake mortgage fraud allegations, he tried to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for being a black woman doing her job at the Fed; in response, she sued him.

Meanwhile, his lunatic Brain-Worm Health Secretary - not a doctor or scientist - dismantles the CDC, fires its leaders, prompts mass resignations and the charge he's using CDC "to generate policies (that) do not reflect scientific reality and (will) hurt rather than improve the public’s health." This week he suggested anti-depressants may have led the Minneapolis shooter to gun down praying children, flubbed statistics on autism and diabetes, said we should "stop trusting the experts, which is not a feature of science or democracy," and diagnosed kids he walked past at an airport with "mitochondrial challenges," which one expert called "wacky, flat-earth, voodoo stuff." Others: "I'm sorry but what?", "This batshit asshole should not be anywhere near the levers of power," and, "Scientist here. Maybe those kids just don’t like you because you’re staring at them like a creep who wants to give them measles."."

Enter, in his defense, Stephen Goebbels Voldemort Miller, who calls RFK Jr. "a crown jewel of this administration" and "one of the world's foremost voices (and) experts on public health." Also, the CDC lacked "credibility" and was run by "partisan bureaucrats." America was a "killing field" before Trump launched his "liberation." D.C. was "body after body after body." Chicago has "shut down" their police, "handcuffed law enforcement." Democrats should be “jumping up and down saying, ‘Thank you, President Trump, for saving our lives.'" The "Democrat Party (is) devoted exclusively to the defense of hardened criminals, gangbangers and illegal alien killers...(It) is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization." And Sean Dunn, now charged with a misdemeanor, goes to court Sept. 4. For now, Banksy-inspired posters celebrating his tasty heroism bedeck D.C; its latest iteration hits Miller on his bald head. Let freedom ring.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Abby Zimet
Abby Zimet has written CD's Further column since 2008. A longtime, award-winning journalist, she moved to the Maine woods in the early 70s, where she spent a dozen years building a house, hauling water and writing before moving to Portland. Having come of political age during the Vietnam War, she has long been involved in women's, labor, anti-war, social justice and refugee rights issues. Email: azimet18@gmail.com
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Fox News confronts Jeanine Pirro on sandwich case: 'You can't get a grand jury to indict'

David Edwards
August 31, 2025

RAW STORY


Fox News/screen grab

Fox News host Shannon Bream confronted Jeanine Pirro, President Donald Trump's U.S. Attorney for D.C., after she was unable to get a grand jury to indict a man who threw a Subway sandwich at a federal officer.

"So you talk about getting to court, getting your prosecutors together and getting these cases together," Bream told Pirro in a Sunday interview. "But here's the headline from the Washington Post just days ago. It said D.C. judges and grand jurors push back on Trump policing surge."

"There's at least one high-profile case where they're making a lot of headline news about the fact that you couldn't get a grand jury to indict," the Fox News host said.



"I know the case that they're referencing, and there's not a lot I can talk about in terms of grand juries, but what I can tell you is this," Pirro replied. "You know, there are a lot of people who sit on juries and they live in, you know, they live in Georgetown or in northwest or in some of these better areas and they don't see the reality of crime that is occurring."

"And my office has been instructed to move for the highest crime possible consistent with the law, the statute, and the evidence," she continued. "And in that one case, in that particular article, we were on point. But the grand jurors don't take it so seriously. They're like, you know, whatever."

Pirro noted that the Department of Justice had decided to charge Sean Dunn, the man accused of throwing a sandwich, with a misdemeanor after the grand jury declined to indict him.

"My job is to protect the victim," she insisted. "We're going to make the criminal accountable."

Watch the video below from Fox News or click the link.