Security

Stephen Collinson Uses CNN to Promote Dictator Trump Into Normalcy

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A reporter in 1930s Berlin who treated the rise of fascism as political drama to narrate from a ringside seat would be culpable — not for being a Nazi, but for professional choices that served Nazi ends.

Who remembers how unpopular both Ford and Hitler were? Being unpopular, like Trump, was the point because it enabled violent paramilitary groups (e.g. SS/SA -> BP/ICE) to consolidate power by force.

Stephen Collinson is CNN’s senior White House reporter. His value proposition depends on complexity. Simple moral clarity — “this is a crime” or “he is replacing democracy with dictatorship” — doesn’t require interpretation.

It doesn’t require him.

So he provides muddied, abuse-enabling drama headlines instead.

Europe may need to adopt Trump’s brass-knuckle methods to save Greenland

And even worse:

Trump’s Davos hosts might abhor him — but he’s worth listening to

Worth what? Threat detection?

Hey assault victims, from women who had your pussy grabbed to innocent citizens being publicly executed by stormtroopers, did you see the “worth” of listening to Trump?

The Subject

Collinson spent 17 years at AFP before joining CNN in 2014. British expat. Covers the White House. His byline appears on CNN’s daily political analysis.

His headlines from the past month read like episode teasers: “Will Trump push the world to breaking point?” “What Donald Trump has learned about imposing global power.” “America’s strongman places a huge Venezuela wager.”

The pattern is consistent: Trump is the actor, others only react. Trump is the driving protagonist learning and growing. Everyone else is passive, faces, grapples, and struggles to respond.

The Receipts

Date Collinson Headline The Problem Factual Alternative
Jan 21 “Trump’s Davos hosts might abhor him — but he’s worth listening to” Grants epistemic authority to fabricated pretexts for illegal action “Trump repeats discredited justifications for territorial threats”
Jan 21 “The populist storming the elite citadel” Trump inherited wealth, governs with billionaires, is deeply unpopular. He is elite. “Billionaire president addresses fellow billionaires at Davos”
Jan 21 “Europe may need to adopt Trump’s brass-knuckle methods” Advises victims to emulate their abuser’s illegal tactics “International community confronts illegal territorial demands”
Jan 19 “Who can save NATO from Trump?” NATO will save itself. The question is who saves America from Trump. “Will American institutions hold president accountable?”
Jan 16 “Minneapolis is becoming a critical testing ground for Trump’s strongman project” “Testing ground” and “project” — policy language for public killings “Federal agents kill American citizen in Minneapolis”
Jan 15 “Inside Trump’s ‘crazy world’ of milk bottles, sled dogs and threats to bomb Iran” Quirky color story framing for war threats “Trump threatens military strike on Iran”
Jan 12 “Will Trump push the US and the world to breaking point?” Teaser, not journalism “Trump policies destabilize international order”
Jan 9 “What Donald Trump has learned about imposing global power” Character development arc for the protagonist “Trump expands unilateral actions against allies”
Jan 6 “Trump’s new US mission statement: Strength, force, power” Amplifies brand message as news “Trump speech emphasizes military force”
Jan 5 “The surprising US plan in Venezuela comes with huge risks for Trump” Risks for Trump, not for Venezuelans or international law “US military action in Venezuela raises legal concerns”
Jan 4 “America’s strongman places a huge Venezuela wager” Casino language for military intervention “Trump orders military action in sovereign nation”
Nov 2020 “People on both sides fear the country they love will be lost” Equates documented threats with fabricated ones “Trump’s fraud claims threaten peaceful transfer”

The Techniques

Nine patterns appear consistently:

  1. Protagonist framing. Trump acts; others react. He imposes, wagers, learns. Resistance becomes reactive rather than principled.
  2. Brand amplification. “Strongman,” “populist,” “brass-knuckle” appear critical but function as the branding Trump’s team would choose.
  3. Stakes displacement. Consequences attach to Trump’s political fortunes, not affected populations. Venezuela is his “wager.” Greenland tests his leverage.
  4. False equivalence. “Both sides fear” treats documented institutional threats and fabricated propaganda as symmetrical.
  5. Spectacle framing. “Will Trump push the world to breaking point?” is promotional copy, not inquiry.
  6. Responsibility externalization. American authoritarianism becomes something that happens TO others — NATO, Europe, Greenland — rather than something Americans must stop.
  7. Vocabulary adoption. “Globalist” has specific far-right genealogy. Deploying it as neutral description normalizes the frame.
  8. Escalation incentive. Advising victims to “adopt brass-knuckle methods” generates more dramatic copy. Conflict sells.
  9. Pretext laundering. Treating fabricated justifications as “burning questions that timid politicians won’t address” grants authoritarians the frame they need: brave truth-teller rather than liar seizing power. Hitler was “worth listening to” about Versailles. Mussolini about Italian restoration. Every authoritarian manufactures grievances. The question is whether journalists treat pretexts as legitimate inquiry.

The Business Model

“He’s worth listening to” isn’t just normalizing Trump. It’s selling Collinson as essential interpreter.

The structure:

  1. Get proximity to power
  2. Sell that proximity as insight
  3. The “insight” tells audiences to pay more attention to the powerful
  4. Which increases demand for proximity-based interpretation
  5. Which requires maintaining access
  6. Which requires never framing power as criminal

“Trump lies about Greenland to justify illegal threats” doesn’t need an interpreter. Simple truth doesn’t need a broker.

What’s Absent

Words that never appear in Collinson’s framing: violates, breaks, illegal, criminal.

Perspectives that never appear: consequences for affected populations, institutional obligations, moral clarity.

A journalist covering 1930s Germany who avoided “persecution” in favor of “the Jewish question” wasn’t being neutral. He was choosing a side through omission.

The Game

Collinson is a product of incentives. Wire service training optimizes for speed and “balance.” Access journalism requires narrating power on its terms. Career advancement depends on not alienating sources.

Understanding this doesn’t excuse the output. Every framing choice is a choice.

The truth is simple: an American president is threatening to attack an ally. That’s a crime. It requires accountability, not interpretation.

Simple truth doesn’t sell subscriptions. It doesn’t require… him.

So the game continues.

History, Security

241 Reasons Trump Just Used Anti-KKK Law to Criminalize Being Black

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Grant’s Enforcement Acts were designed to do one thing: prosecute the Klan.

President Grant’s tomb says it plainly for all to see, which is exactly why MAGA (America First platform of the KKK) doesn’t want anyone to see it.

The Supreme Court gutted them within a decade.

United States v. Cruikshank (1876) established that the Fourteenth Amendment only restricts state action. The federal government cannot protect Black citizens from private white violence. That’s a state matter.

Southern states, well, you know, “declined” to prosecute Klan.

The Klan’s members often were state actors—sheriffs, deputies, judges—who refused to prosecute themselves. And the doctrine gave them an obvious loophole: put on a hood, become a “private” actor. The same men who wore a badge by day wore a sheet by night. Federal law couldn’t reach them in private citizen garb, and the state law wouldn’t because the state was them.

It’s why ICE wears masks today.

Each red dot represents a local Klan chapter, known as a Klavern, that spread across the country between the 1915 “America First” Presidential campaign and 1940. Source: Virginia Commonwealth University

This protection of domestic terrorists worked exactly as intended. Trump’s father was arrested at a violent Klan march in 1927. Look how that turned out.

Fred Trump arrested in 1927

Black Americans died by the thousands without federal remedy. In Tulsa, 1921, white mobs murdered war veterans and dumped bodies into unmarked mass graves. The Klan built a celebratory hall on the ruins of Black Wall Street.

Trump talks about his destruction of the White House East Wing the same way.

Tulsa officials in 1921 immediately moved to erase the massacre from records and hide the victims. They built a white supremacist meeting hall directly on top of the firebombed businesses and homes formerly known as Black Wall Street.

Now watch what happens when you reverse the polarity, and put the enemies of President Grant in the White House.

The Trump administration is using an anti-Ku Klux Klan law to prosecute Minnesota activists for demonstrating… charged with conspiracy to deprive rights—a federal felony under Section 241, a Reconstruction-era statute enacted to safeguard the rights of Black Americans to vote and engage in public life amid the KKK’s racial violence. Levy Armstrong and Allen are both prominent Black community organizers.

Black organizers protested violence by a federal official. The state is acting. No doctrinal barrier applies. Section 241, as the fragment of Grant’s law that survived, activates instantly to target the very people it was meant to protect.

The law was carefully stripped of power by jurists who saw Reconstruction as the crime. It couldn’t protect Black Americans from private violence.

Yet it retained full power to punish Black Americans if they dared to confront state violence.

The local courts, reversed from history, now try to provide some protection, while Trump intentionally tries to overwhelm them with frivolous and empty attacks. Minnesota magistrates have rejected warrant after warrant because of no probable cause, no evidence of crime. One judge threw out a complaint about an egg thrown at a car. Another rejected the charges, and then saw Bondi loudly announce them anyway.

Trump doesn’t care about laws. They don’t matter to him. The terror of an arrest, the harm of publishing charges, is the punishment. The waste of time and money in a painful process is the point.

“It’s our fucking city,” his CBP commander Gregory “SS Mantel” Bovino told masked men geared up to storm a neighborhood. “Arrest as many people that touch you as you want to.”

Imagine what Fred Trump said after being arrested at a 1927 Klan march, apparently for violence against police, and then look at that rhetoric.

See the long game? They call it QQQ.

An armed mounted Klansmen in Tennessee holding a “Q flag” with the Latin motto ‘Quod Semper Quod Ubique Quod Ab Omnibus’ or ‘What has been taught always, everywhere, and by all’

This is the Lost Cause over three generations waiting for their Klan to rise yet again, repeatedly defeated yet never fully prosecuted.

This is using the legal system to be as racist as the legal system will allow. The Klan’s descendants didn’t repeal Reconstruction. They protested it and sabotaged it until they could capture it.

Prosecuting Black civil rights organizers under anti-Klan statutes was always the game plan. Whatever is architected for safety will be weaponized into a tool of terror.

It fits with decades of saying registration of guns would be the end of freedom, and then forcing registration. Or more recently, after decades of open carry being a sacred right, wearing a holstered gun in public is now a crime so severe it’s punishable by immediate state firing squad execution.

History, Security

Precedent Laundering: The Monroe Doctrine Lie Covering Trump Decisionism

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The BBC is spraying disinformation about Monroe Doctrine history in order to normalize Trump’s rejection of doctrinal frameworks entirely. Some reporters mistake this for historical analysis. Here’s an example from Allan Little:

When it was announced by the fifth president of the US, James Monroe, the doctrine that bears his name was widely seen as an expression of US solidarity with its neighbours… But the doctrine quickly became an assertion of Washington’s right to dominate its neighbours and use any means, up to and including military intervention, to bend their policies into alignment with American interests. President Theodore Roosevelt, in 1904, said it gave the US “international police power” to intervene in countries where there was “wrongdoing”. So could it be that President Trump’s re-interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine is simply part of a continuum in US foreign policy?

No.

Little’s piece does something sophisticated and dangerous: it uses a valid critique of American hypocrisy to launder an analytical collapse.

The piece opens with a Pakistani student’s observation from 2002 that the rules-based international order was “partially false”—that the strongest exempted themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, that international law applied with varying rigor depending on identity. This critique is correct. American hypocrisy is real. Guatemala, Chad, Indonesia, Somalia, Iran, Grenada, Panama—the record is damning.

But Little makes a fatal logical leap: because the US violated rules it claimed to uphold, Trump’s rejection of rules entirely is just “more of the same.”

That’s the sleight of hand. The Pakistani student’s critique depends on there being rules to violate. Hypocrisy requires a standard being betrayed. You can only call American intervention hypocritical if there’s a framework against which to measure the betrayal.

Trump’s National Defense Strategy announces there is no standard. It explicitly purges the “rules-based international order,” calling it “cloud-castle abstractions.” It replaces doctrine with “concrete interests first”—the sovereign decides, justification follows.

That’s not Monroe perverted. That’s Monroe rejected.

The difference is categorical: a policeman who takes twenty dollars to look the other way is corrupt. A policeman who announces “I am the law” is something else. The Nuremberg Trials drew this distinction for a reason.

Little pulls historian Jay Sexton into his frame, asking whether Trump’s “unpredictability” gives America “a 19th century feel.” Perhaps excited to discuss his expertise, Sexton accepts the premise and speaks about Great Power rivalries from 1815 onward.

Wrong question, wrong century.

Nineteenth-century balance-of-power politics had rules—that’s what made it a “balance.” Monroe created a framework. Roosevelt perverted that framework. Trump says framework? What framework? There’s only me.

It’s like the BBC asking whether Bernie Madoff’s interpretation of retirement savings represents a continuum on Wall Street. Madoff was committing fraud while claiming to invest. The crime isn’t an aggressive interpretation on an infinite slope. The crime is that no interpretation was happening at all. The activity being claimed wasn’t the activity being performed.

The interventions Little lists—Iran ’53, Guatemala ’54, Grenada ’83, Panama ’89—were all justified through frameworks. Anti-communism. Protecting democracy. Fighting drugs. The justifications were often lies, but the lies mattered. They created accountability surfaces. You could argue the US was violating its stated principles.

Trump’s “concrete interests first” eliminates the accountability surface. There’s no principle to violate. The justification is generated after the decision—by algorithmic slop if necessary.

Check the simple math. Trump applying Monroe would mean China is the threat to keep out of the Western Hemisphere. That’s foundational to Monroe. Yet the Pentagon was ordered to deprioritize China. The Trump NDS downgrades threats to the hemisphere while prioritizing “credible military options” against American neighbors and allies. China is opening trade with Canada and cementing itself in Latin America, yet Trump targets Canada while ignoring the thing Monroe would have worried about most.

That’s not Monroe extended. It’s Monroe inverted.

Monroe 1823 Trump 2026
Drafted by Adams, debated in cabinet, presented to Congress Unilateral executive, note-card attention span
Welcomed by regional leaders as solidarity against colonization Threatening neighbors and allies with military force
Framework to keep external powers out “Concrete interests first”—no framework, external threats deprioritized
Created predictability by design Unpredictability by design
Middle power proposing defensive solidarity Superpower rejecting all constraint
Progressive. Embraced order and institutions Regressive. Explicit rejection of “rules-based order” as abstraction

Little spends considerable space on Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech, where Carney called for “middle powers” to unite against Great Power politics. Little frames this as a response to Trump abandoning the rules-based order. He doesn’t notice the irony: that’s exactly what Monroe was doing in 1823.

The US wasn’t a superpower then. It was a post-colonial republic barely four decades old, addressing other post-colonial republics, proposing mutual defense against the actual great powers—European empires. Monroe Doctrine was middle-power solidarity against imperial aggression.

Carney is the one who actually calls for a return to Monroe’s original posture. Trump is the empire Monroe organized against. Little cites both without seeing that his “continuum” runs in the wrong direction.

The actual American lineage for Trump isn’t Monroe at all if you are familiar with Jackson’s Florida campaign in the 1810s. The future President manufactured security pretexts, delegitimized indigenous governance, deployed overwhelming force, ignored legal constraints. Mussolini studied this playbook for Ethiopia in 1935. Hitler industrialized it for the Sudetenland in 1938. Each iteration refined the template.

Donald Trump’s favorite president: Andrew “white republic” Jackson. Historian Matthew Clavin says as terrible a human as the genocidal Andrew Jackson was, he likely would have despised Trump.

What we call this today is decisionism—Carl Schmitt’s theoretical framework that made Hitler’s foreign policy formally unpredictable by design. The sovereign decides the exception. All justification flows from that decision rather than constraining it. This is Trump, who calls it his “weave.”

Little’s piece won’t see this. His 19th-century goggles are what you wear when 1933 is too frightening to face. Trump prefers the misdirection, as he doesn’t want to be recognized: Those teenage Epstein girls were just for massage.

Monroe was admittedly very racist, in the typical elite way of 1823—ambient, paternalistic, fearful. He wasn’t choosing a regression to centuries before him when he proposed a way forward. He was creating a progressive framework to be measured against.

Trump in 2025 is also very racist yet inverted to Monroe, consciously regressive. After the documented American genocide. After the Holocaust. After decolonization. After Civil Rights. After the science demolished race theory. After Reagan knew through the ’60s, ’70s, and ’80s that he had to launder his racism through dog whistles.

This is the deliberate choice of race-based regression backed by infrastructure to enforce it at scale. The BBC normalizes this hate platform by grounding it in something it is not.

Three reasons Trump could never be Monroe, and everyone should stop the precedent laundering:

  1. Monroe Doctrine was drafted by John Quincy Adams, debated in cabinet, presented to Congress. Trump doesn’t care about drafts, debates, or separation of powers. He lights fires and focuses on the fire trucks.
  2. Monroe Doctrine was welcomed by regional leaders as forward-looking solidarity against past colonial threats. Trump is the threat that Monroe was trying to prevent. Let that marinate.
  3. Monroe supported law, order, institutions, procedures, consultation, and predictability. He didn’t reject progress; he built and sold solidarity to regional allies. Trump announces an abolition of frameworks, bullying allies, while wearing Monroe’s corpse as costume.

Criticism of rules is grounds for improvement. Rejection of rules is their total loss—just loss.

The BBC’s “continuum” is a slippery slope fallacy. There’s no slope when discussing Trump and Monroe. There’s a cliff, because Monroe evaporates under Trump.

That’s not precedent. That’s laundering.

Security

Trump Tariffs and Troops Crush Americans, Push World Trade to Canada

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Trump has announced an even higher tax burden on Americans, claiming domestic hardship will pressure Canada to listen to him. He makes about as much sense as if he was telling a Canadian woman that if she doesn’t date him then Trump will beat his own wife.

Think about it. If you don’t listen to Trump he will shoot himself in the foot. If you don’t listen to Trump he will smash his own balls with a hammer. No wonder his TACOnomics ends about as well as the Tesla Cybertruck.

Livelsberger left a clear protest note for responders: “This was not a terrorist attack, it was a wake-up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives.” Source: Twitter

To put it simply, Trump has regressed into “fortress economy” doctrine resembling Hitler, abruptly waged the highest tariffs since WWII, regressed the military from power projection to his personal extraction of foreign resources and suppression of domestic dissent, and eroded the dollar hegemony. The trust that underpins America has evaporated by association with Trump, like everything Trump has ever done.

No surprises here.

Trump Brand is Rapid Devaluation

Trump Steaks were an overpriced commodity pushed into wrong venue (Sharper Image), collapsed in months.

Trump Vodka was called “success distilled” when it couldn’t succeed.

Trump University was just fraud, with hush money for settlements.

Trump Casinos were multiple bankruptcies and suspicious deaths, despite the house literally always wins.

The fraud pattern is not hard to see: grab control of something of value, glue a false skin over everything to generate false inflation, extract all the prior value, pull out to watch it deflate completely, blame others, move on.

American Devaluation

Covered by a gaudy fake reskin, like Trump himself, what’s America known for now?

  • Not security – threatening to invade allies and telling them they’re on their own now, illegally abducting foreign leaders, reorienting military toward domestic crackdowns on dissent, ignoring China, ignoring North Korea, pandering to Putin
  • Not market access – highest tariffs since 1946, trade policies randomly rotating by tantrum
  • Not rule of law – doctrine of one man in charge, no checks and balances, TACO as investment strategy
  • Not stability – the one thing reserve currency status actually requires
  • Not partnership – insulting and threatening NATO, unilateral wars started on multiple fronts, intelligence network cut off after used in war crimes
  • Not tourism – Canadian travel down 31%
  • Not imports – Canadian spirits down 85%

Trump toxic failure is America now. The brand is bankruptcy and the product is worse.

There’s already data predicting a global shift away from Trump’s military dictatorship.

Dollar Devaluation

Dollar share of disclosed global FX reserves dropped to 56.92% in Q3 2025 – the lowest since 1994. The US Dollar Index fell nearly 10% through September, with even steeper declines against certain individual currencies – 13.5% against the euro, 13.9% against the Swiss franc.

Gold rose to a fresh record of $4,684.30 per ounce. That’s a clear signal of central banks diversifying out of Trump tainted dollars into real assets.

The leverage point that should be talked about more and more? European countries own $8 trillion of U.S. bonds and equities, almost twice as much as the rest of the world combined, according to George Saravelos, head of FX research at Deutsche Bank.

Republican Rep. Thomas Massie has put it like this:

As the dollar’s reserve currency status diminishes, so does our ability to tax the world by creating more money. When reserve status is lost, maintaining current spending levels and servicing the debt will be even more painful for Americans who will bear the full inflation tax.

Americans are bearing the most pain of Trump’s antics.

Security Devaluation

Withdrawing links globally, shutting down all trade routes other than those direct to a dictator, while also turning the military inward against its own population, is a familiar pattern to historians.

The security stand-down and redeployment pattern is stark. US completed withdrawal from al-Asad airbase in Iraq – the main presence in the country. Syria rapidly pushed the US presence out and it went almost completely unnoticed, like the Epstein Files.

US-backed forces lost 8 bases, leaving them one at best, after Syrian government forces of al-Sharaa pushed on Trump, and took control of Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor. The US even weighed into Israel to block it from complaining about the collapse of US security.

The Houthis likewise declared an easy victory against Hegseth’s billions poured out of the sky. The rout was so severe that Israeli panic rushed into unilateral recognition of Somaliland. The all-show-no-go of Hegseth precipitated a pivot of the USS Gerald Ford to the Caribbean as part of US Southern Command for Operation Southern Spear – it moved from Mediterranean security operations to Latin America for punching down for resource extraction (feeding Trump’s personal bank account in Qatar, to cut out Congressional oversight entirely).

Republican Rep. Massie wrote wistfully, as if Congress even matters anymore:

Selling stolen oil and putting billions of dollars in a bank in Qatar to be spent without Congressional approval is not Constitutional. The President can’t legally create a second Treasury overseas for his own piggy bank.

Except he did, because he’s a dictator and nobody is stopping him. His stormtroopers executing citizens in Minnesota signal the self-funded militant dictator is already eliminating those who disagree. It’s no exaggeration to say Trump stormtroopers were deployed entirely politically to opposition areas, where they publicly executed two citizens within days, and keep threatening there’s more of that to come.

Senator Elizabeth Warren correctly explained:

There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military. That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.

It’s illegal. Until you accept that in a military dictatorship the only law is whatever Trump does. Inquiring minds want to know if Peter Thiel (of “digital Swiss Bank Account to launder Apartheid wealth” infamy, also known as PayPal) was the one who set it up precisely so Congress does not know the specific bank holding the funds, the precise type of account used, who has authority to approve transfers, what audit rights exist, or how transparency and oversight are enforced.

Pentagon leadership’s National Defense Strategy is a dramatic shift from prior plans, almost an exact copy of the doctrine promoted in Canada during the 1930’s by pro-Hitler politicians, such as Elon Musk’s grandfather who was convicted for it during WWII, prompting his emigration to South Africa.

Let me be more precise. Errol Musk claimed as late as 2024 that his father-in-law had promoted Nazi Germany during World War II. Aside from antisemitic speeches, he was mapping out America, Canada and Greenland ruled by a dictator. The Musk rush to South Africa after Hitler was defeated was motivated by escaping to a white supremacist state. Errol Musk said of his wife’s family that they continued to promote Nazism while “very fanatical in favor of apartheid.”

Map of Elon Musk’s antisemitic politician grandfather, who was arrested in Canada as an enemy of the state during WWII, before he fled to build Apartheid in South Africa.

Musk’s grandfather literally promoted the plan for merging US, Canada, and Greenland under authoritarian rule aligned to Hitler. Thiel, allegedly also aligned to Hitler, is funding it. Trump is executing it.

Trump declared domestic use of the military to suppress dissent, which former military officials and experts on civil–military relations admit is an attempt to get Americans used to living under control of Trump stormtroopers, to the tune of a half-billion dollars to fund the National Guard occupation of American cities.

In this context, none of the world needs to form some grand anti-American alliance, because Trump is actively punching himself in the face. Global realignment already emerges, with Asia and the EU rotating rapidly towards relations with Canada, away from mob-like threats from America.

Canada now de-facto becomes seen as the most stable North American geopolitical node connecting economies, as everyone judges syphilitic-lunacy of Trump as bad for business.