Are the first green shoots of rebellion in the US springing up?

To Serve Man is a classic science fiction short story by Damon Knight, as well as one of the most frightening episodes of the American television series, The Twilight Zone.

For those who do not know the story, a spaceship crewed by three metre-tall aliens sporting big heads and shiny kaftans, the Kanamits, arrives on Earth. They promise endless, free energy without pollution, the cultivation of Earth’s deserts to eliminate world hunger, and – most importantly – to share technology that will do away with warfare by rendering weapons inert.

They make their pitch at the UN, and the world lines up for this cornucopia of free lunches descending, quite literally, from the heavens. Interstellar, benevolent populism, it seems.

But there is trouble in paradise. One of the aliens accidentally leaves behind a small booklet that a cryptographer gains possession of. After months of work, the title is decrypted and reads, To Serve Man. That sounds harmless, yes?

Meanwhile, the Kanamits are recruiting humans to visit the aliens’ home world, and multitudes line up to take up these trips of a lifetime. But, just as the head cryptographer is about to enter an alien ship to embark on one of those trips, his deputy rushes over to him to say she has worked out the contents of the book – it’s a cookbook, and people hurrying to join those tours are being rounded up as prime rib.

As things unfold in America these days, it can almost feel as if the Kanamits really have arrived; that they really have promised us the universe; but that they are actually working overtime to consume us instead. Indeed, our circumstances seem on the verge of being an episode of The Twilight Zone as well.

Sadly, our responses to these current outrages can easily become a disassociative process. With each new horror, there is either the tendency for many to say, it cannot get much worse than it is now, and that self-correcting mechanisms must finally begin to kick in. Or, more terrifyingly, we have already sailed past a point of no return as all of these excesses have become normalised, and the next excess will just be one more inevitable step downward.

At this point, it should be stressed that these excesses being carried out by the Trump Administration do not have the support of the entire nation. Trump does not speak for us all. The president’s support on any of the big issues has fallen well below a majority of voters. In particular, his immigration and foreign policy activities are now seen as wrongheaded by clear majorities, even if Donald Trump and his ilk hold the levers of authority. And there is the key.

ICE raids

For example, the growing recruitment and assignment of legions of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) personnel to carry out raids has now progressed from merely being violent and dangerous to actually being lethal to citizens. Active protesters are taking the brunt of such tactics, but citizens who are more or less minding their own business are being detained before reluctantly being released from illegal custody.

If it hadn’t actually occurred, the recent detention of several Oglala Sioux Native Americans for their failure to produce proof of citizenship to ICE personnel (Did ICE expect a selfie of their ancestors crossing the Bering Strait 15,000 years ago?) could have been perfect raw material for a Saturday Night Live skit. Who, earlier, would have thought that such actions were becoming the norm – and in white bread Minneapolis, in the national capital of “nice”?

But here we are. There are now reports that, besides those ICE personnel in their camo uniforms, masks, military-style utility belts and gear, the Trump Administration is poised to send 1,500 regular army troops to Minnesota as well as stiffening for the ICE guys. No “N” there.

We probably should also recall that the “Alligator Alcatraz” aliens detention facility in Florida remains in use for illegal immigrants/undocumented (human, not Kamanit) aliens until they can be sent packing to another country. And we must note, too, that avenues for legal visiting or immigration into the US continue to become tighter and tighter – or are simply closed off.

“America First” – hat embroidery masquerading as political philosophy – has morphed into a shorthand saying that people who look like Donald Trump’s parents and grandparents (some of whom would certainly now not qualify for immigrant status by virtue of their respective CVs) are not allowed to arrive.

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

The evocative verse, above, by Emma Lazarus, placed at the base of the Statue of Liberty, words that previously welcomed literally millions of political, religious, ethnic and economic refugees and migrants for more than a century, have now effectively been painted over. That is, of course, unless one claims to be a victim of a faux genocide in South Africa.

Tariffs, Greenland and the Nato alliance

Meanwhile, the current administration has twisted economic policies and measures – ie tariffs – usually employed to shelter vulnerable industrial sectors and jobs that are presumably at risk from foreign competition (regardless of the real utility of such measures) or used as bargaining chips against other nations’ protectionist measures, have now been turned into a weapon to bludgeon other nations into acceding to American political choices.

The policy, now, is capriciously raising or lowering the tariff rates almost on a whim, causing havoc for American consumers, importers and international trade more generally. The most recent decision has been to threaten new tariffs on the first of February against European allies, unless they agree that the island of Greenland should be stripped from Denmark and become an American satrapy instead.

The net effect of this quixotic (and dangerous) initiative may be to rupture the world’s most successful security alliance – Nato – and to destroy trade and official, friendly relationships between the European Union’s membership and the US. All this is over an island where the US already holds military basing rights and would, under other circumstances, have little difficulty securing contracts and leases for mineral exploration and exploitation if such things were actually commercially viable.

But in the fever swamp that passes for Trump Administration policy making, you gotta have the real estate in your hands, it seems. Otherwise, you can’t put your name on the title deed and the headquarters offices, and set up mechanisms for offering leases and subleases to family friends and favoured, fawning, business leaders.

Meanwhile, the Trump Administration continually seems to be on the cusp of sacrificing Ukraine as a viable, independent nation – in service of finding yet one more way to appease the president’s best buddy in the Kremlin, despite the truth that this is an international unrequited love affair on the part of Vladimir Putin towards Donald Trump.

This seems to be the case even if it means yet another body blow to the unity of the West (minus the US and only Hungary and maybe Slovakia) in wrestling with how best to defend a nation refusing to bend to a massive assault by Russia.

Meanwhile, over in the Western Hemisphere, in policy now dubbed the “Donroe Doctrine,” the Trump Administration has announced the only principles that apply are whatever fever dreams are bouncing around in Donald Trump’s cerebral cortex at any given moment. Or, more bluntly, as his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, has asserted, might makes right. Go look it up. Right out of a 19th-century realpolitik playbook. Thank you, Count Otto von Bismarck.

Venezuela and the Americas

The list of potential acquisitions, besides Greenland, includes the Panama Canal Zone and Canada, this in addition to Trump anointing himself as a kind of pro-consul (with Marco Rubio as deputy pro-consul) over Venezuela’s oil reserves, arrogating to themselves the right of choosing who shall administer that grievously misgoverned nation, and to give themselves the authority to carry out the sales of any of crude oil actually lifted from its wells.

And yes, the proceeds of any Venezuelan oil sales now go into accounts in a Qatari bank. You couldn’t make that up.

Yes, Nicolás Maduro was a corrupt, inept thug-style ruler who helped drive a quarter of the country’s population into economic or political exile. But the question remains whether the solution was to arrest Maduro, but to then cut a deal with his deputy, Delcy Rodriguez? That was the answer? But what it wasn’t was nation-building.

The Trump dream was that with Maduro out of the way, American oil majors would leap at the opportunity to lavish billions of dollars on rebuilding a near-derelict oil sector, thus providing Trump and his pals an endless revenue stream.

But the oil companies, in public, effectively said, “Uh, no thanks, until things are sorted out properly and there is an effective government, legal system and investment protections, concluding the expropriations agreements… no, we’re going to give a pass on this grift.” Okay, they didn’t actually use the word, “grift”, but it was a loud, albeit unspoken, word that was in the air at that meeting.

Gaza peace plan

While we are on the topic of an awful mixing of public and private, as the semi-stillborn Gaza peace plan is kinda, sorta inching along, the Trump Administration has announced its governing structure, called the “Board of Peace”, for the territory’s reconstruction that – surprise, surprise – includes various Middle Eastern and South Asian leaders, along with former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair, first son-in-law Jared Kushner, and almost-first buddy Steve Witkoff – and with himself as chair.

Vladimir Putin was this week formally invited by Trump to join the "Board of Peace". Moscow was reportedly "studying the details" and seeking clarification on the "nuances" of the board’s mandate before making a decision.

Witkoff is the real estate developer who has become the Trump-world’s version of an all-purpose consigliere-international negotiator, following a long career as a Manhattan property developer. Of course.

A country can secure a permanent seat on this board by pledging a modest $1-billion; otherwise, it is just a three-year term. Is there a sub rosa agenda for this board to begin to supplant the UN lurking in Trump’s mind? We do know he despises the UN…

Branding flurry

Back in the US, the never-ending Trumpian impulse to slather his name on everything – something like the way wild carnivores mark the limits of their hunting territory – means he has had his gnomes chisel his name on to the facades of the US Institute of Peace, the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (the living memorial to the slain president), and even on a class of still-to-be-designed-and-constructed 21st-century capital ships for the navy.

If all that was insufficient to satisfy the man’s edifice complex, he is pushing for a triumphal arch close to the Lincoln Memorial, and he has already bulldozed the entire East Wing of the White House to make way for a grandiloquent ballroom to be built with buckets of cash pledged by donors eager for future government contracts and resulting publicity. Other sponsors are afraid to reveal their names, but nevertheless remain hopeful their secret pledges will get them an inside track for a deal or two anyway, no doubt.

Along the way, we have been witnesses to the most extraordinary displays of obsequious, fawning, heads banging on the floor as they bow deeply, forelock tugging, in those televised cabinet meetings where each attendee has tried to outdo the previous speaker in mouthing ornate praises of the Trump imperial presence.

Supine, incompetent leadership

Just by the way, we might note that with a few exceptions – maybe Jamieson Greer as US Trade Representative, Scott Bessent at Treasury and Marco Rubio at State – there has never been such a group of underqualified senior officials and their deputies who have been given enormous responsibility and authority in the American government.

For starters, ponder the impact of Kristy Noem at Homeland Security and Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense (No, not war, despite the administration’s diktat).

In pretty much any prior administration, their CVs – the lot of them – would never have made it on to the shortlist of possible candidates for US ambassador to a Pacific Island nation like Nauru (Sorry, Nauru).

But here we are, and Trump can still, for the most part, count on supinely loyal Republican leadership in the House of Representatives and Senate to do his bidding on almost any consequential measure.

But in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson has only a majority of three representatives, and so Johnson hopes and prays that on any measure that provokes the ire of Democrats, his caucus will not suffer a single defection or absence due to “illness” either over matters of principle or spite.

Okay, all of this is a mess, and it should frighten the life out of us – unless you are in Vladimir Putin’s or Xi Jinping’s respective inner circles of advisers. But, the crucial question is whether this situation is so irreparable that we must start practising Mandarin Chinese verb forms, or is it just possible that the Orc army can be pushed back and out of power?

Pushback points

To gauge such possibilities, we must look in unexpected, but interesting places for signs of pushback. First, in the most unlikely of all, focus on the office of the chair of the Federal Reserve Bank – the nation’s central bank.

This system was established back in 1913 as a separate body with terms of office for its leadership set so that a president – any president – does not get to appoint all the members. (Of course, the Supreme Court is also an independent body, and the justices are appointed for life and are supposedly free from the chains of allegiance to any one president, but there has been a bit of a hitch there, these days.)

The current Fed chair, Jerome Powell, who was appointed by Trump in his previous term of office, has simply refused to budge on Trump’s entreaties, threats, public browbeatings or open ridicule over the setting of the prime interest rate – a crucial Fed task.

Trump wants it lower to goose the economy – and provoke a bit of currency deflation to help ease the growing crisis of national public debt by effectively shrinking the value of such debt. Powell, by contrast, insists the interest rate must be set at a level that will not trigger a run of inflation.

In retaliation, the Trump Administration is investigating the way spending on the Fed building’s long-overdue renovation was carried out and if there are material irregularities, waste, fraud and mismanagement – real or entirely made-up. Powell says he ain’t budging to please the president. Even after his term as chair ends this year, his term as a board member doesn’t, and so he’s staying.

One way to look at this is that if Trump wins this interest rate debate, the markets – stock and bond – will react poorly as they see political meddling in the setting of rates. Accordingly, Trump must tread carefully lest he upset the economic applecart in the months preceding the upcoming midterm election.

Combine uncertainty in markets and business plans, plus the continuing “affordability” crisis over rising prices, and it is increasingly possible the Democrats will actually gain more than a handful of congressional seats and thus a majority.

If that happens, they can begin to convene hearings, summon administration witnesses and compel testimony – and generally make Trump’s remaining years as president unpleasant.

Powell’s rebellion may trigger others to hang their courage to some handy sticking place and begin pushing back. Weakness can be a powerful encouragement for others.

The oil market

A second possible pushback has come along, as we noted above, from the oil majors to Trump’s plan of lavishing billions of American dollars into Venezuela’s oil fields. The problem here is that with the current world price of oil, lifting crude in Venezuela exceeds what the market will pay, now around $64/barrel, beyond all those other questions about the stability of such investments.

The world is already awash in crude oil, and there is little demand for yet more oil to drive the price even further, ruining profits for either private companies or the state-owned ones, such as Saudi Arabia’s. Supply and demand curves are among the first things taught in university economics classes, but maybe the folks in the Trump White House skipped class for this.

Then there is the not-so-small matter of a few rebellions in Congress over spending – primarily more for science and technology research funding, and even money to revive a nearly deceased Voice of America.

The bet is that the Trump Administration will probably go along with such funding decisions by Congress, but will slow-walk the actual spending, and put all manner of administrative strictures on the actual disbursements. But who knows? At least at this point.

Midterm elections

And so it may all – the mad foreign adventures, the bizarre authoritarian-lite domestic moves – come down to the way the midterm elections go. If the Republicans get a shellacking, Trump may simply hole up in the White House, snarl and issue all manner of increasingly crazy social media postings, and begin to resemble, more and more, the mad King Lear of William Shakespeare’s pen.

The calendar and the biological clock will inevitably punish Mr Trump in the succeeding years as he becomes less and less able to do much more than roar and type near-illiterate social media posts, forcing his staffers to try to interpret his intemperate rants.

Or, and this is horrible to think about, he may well give full rein to the authoritarian impulses of the Pete Hegseths, Kristy Noems and Stephen Millers of his administration and their attempts to take the nation down a path into some increasingly real authoritarian behaviour. Then all prior bets are off about what happens next.

If the latter course emerges, it will force me to take out and reread my collection of dystopian novels about the US – Jack London’s The Iron Heel, Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America – and maybe Yevgeny Zamiyatin’s We and George Orwell’s 1984 for comparison – to help me confront the coming darkness.

One final thought. In my current circumstances, I am thankful I retired years ago from the US foreign service. It must be very hard to be a serving diplomat, now, as an advocate for or explainer of these constantly swirling shifts in policy or decisions over strange foreign adventures.

I am glad this is no longer my cross to bear. Instead, my task is interpreting and explaining as best I can, even as I am still trying to understand it all myself. DM