Contra Trump
禮崩樂壞
We share the pathologies of all dying empires with their mixture of buffoonery, rampant corruption, military fiascos, economic collapse and savage state repression.
— Chris Hedges, quoted in Death Wish — Promises Made, Promises Kept, 16 February 2026
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A renowned journalist, writer, commentator and broadcaster, Chris Hedges has featured in China Heritage over the years, as well as in our Contra Trump — America’s Empire of Tedium series, which we launched on the eve of the 2024 Presidential Election. For other chapters in the series featuring Hedges’s work, see:
Following his resignation from The New York Times in 2005, something triggered in part by his outspoken criticism of America’s deadly debacle in Iraq, Hedges became increasingly active in the public sphere. Over the past two decades he has been America’s contemporary Cassandra.
Long before I started reading Hedges, Gore Vidal was a guide to American politics. Here, when reading Hedges’ latest essay, I recall Vidal’s observation that:
There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties.
— The State of the Union, Esquire, 1 May 1975
In America today, however, even if they have jointly created the cancerous realities of the present, the contrast between the two parties couldn’t be greater. Emboldened by the fact that they have control over the three branches of government, the Republicans are, on one level, now engaged in becoming a permanent ruling party and, in many regards, turning back the clock, first to before the Civil Rights Movement of 1960s, then the New Deal of the 1930s and, some speculate, with good reason, perhaps even to a time before the Civil War itself. Theirs is a radical counter-revolution.
As we have argued for many years, the United States and the People’s Republic of China share a great deal in common. It is in their worldly materialism that they are most alike, even though both promote their own brand of numinous nonsense when it comes to the sanctity of the state and its historical mission. They respectively champion systems that amass wealth for favoured individuals and war as the average punter — often referred to as ‘garlic chives’ 韭菜 in China — fuels the system. Commentators on geopolitics have a penchant for quoting a line from The Melian Dialogue in Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War; it is just as relevant when discussing the autocratic systems of China and the United States:
The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.
China’s ‘Epstein class’ of interconnected privilege, presumption and prestige is hidden behind a system of secrecy that has been rigorously developed and jealously guarded since the Yan’an days of the 1940s. The raw reality of America is far more confronting, even as its operations are labyrinthine in their workings. In 2026, it is piquant to observe that some who seek to flee the egregious malevolence of Trump’s America believe they can find solace in the fictions of Xi Jinping’s frictionless China and its ersatz values. Neither is a refuge, though there might be a scintilla of mutual recognition.
— Empty Mao Suits & a Soulless Trump — No Chairmen, No Kings
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In 2012, Xi Jinping rose to power and soon amassed more titular authority and real clout than any Chinese ruler in modern history. He enjoyed a measure of popular support as well as the wary approval of some members of the new feudal class and the party-state nomenklatura as his multiyear anti-corruption campaign unfolded. Until his advent there had been widespread talk that China’s party-state was facing a Late-Qing 晚清 terminal decline. Xi was hailed as a unique leader who ‘would save the ship of state before wild seas came crashing down on it and prop up the edifice [of socialist China] before it teetered and collapsed 回狂瀾於既倒，支大廈於將傾. This same ancient expression had also been used to describe Mao Zedong heroic efforts at the start of the Cultural Revolution
Xi Jinping’s rule is often seen as being generally successful, even if far from benevolent. Social stability maintained by overwhelming police force and surveillance and economic growth have continued. Both are in stark contrast to the dishevelled state of Donald Trump’s America. Yet, both China and the US face the same systemic dilemmas: that of long-term regime stability and political succession. Who comes after an aging Xi and who will replace the dotard Trump?
This is a vital question for those of us in the Antipodes as both New Zealand and Australia are bound to China by trade while also being willingly subject to the whims of Washington.
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The Chinese rubric 禮崩樂壞, literally ‘the rites are shattered, courtly music is despoiled’, is based on a passage in The Analects of Confucius bewailing social decline and political disorder. Over the centuries the expression has been a shorthand for cultural decadence and systemic collapse.
— Geremie R. Barmé
Editor, China Heritage
10 May 2026
Superpower Suicide
Timothy Snyder
For an extended written version of this argument, see Timothy Snyder, On Superpower Suicide, Thinking About…, 9 May 2026
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America’s Suicide Pact
America’s suicidal march began long before Donald Trump.
Trump and the buffoons around him are the inevitable
final chapter of the decaying empire.
Chris Hedges
Civilizations, as the historian Arnold J. Toynbee famously argued, “die from suicide, not by murder.” They collapse from within. They fall prey to moral, social and spiritual decay. They are seized by a parasitic ruling class. Democratic institutions seize up. The citizenry is immiserated, wealth is funneled upwards to the ruling class and coercion is the principle form of control.
Our suicidal march began long before Donald Trump and his bizarre court of buffoons, sycophants, grifters and Christian fascists took power. It began when the ruling class, especially under the Reagan and Clinton administrations, set out to harvest the country and empire for personal profit.
There is a word for these people. Traitors.
These traitors, ensconced in the leadership of the two ruling parties, stripped us of assets and power slowly. They used subterfuge, lies and legalized bribery. They pretended to honor electoral politics, checks and balances, a free press and the rule of law while subverting all of these democratic pillars. That old system, however flawed, was hollowed out. It was turned over to the amoral and the idiotic — look at the Supreme Court or Congress — those willing to do the bidding of the billionaire class.
Armed with billions by the mortal enemy of the demos — the oligarchs and corporations — the political elites, Republicans and Democrats, destroyed the careers of those politicians who resisted. They crushed labor unions. They blacklisted honest journalists and consolidated the press into the hands of a handful of corporations and oligarchs. They slashed regulations that constrained unfettered greed and protected the population from predatory corporations and environmental toxins. They passed legislation that created a de facto tax boycott for the rich — Trump famously paid no federal income taxes in 10 of the 15 years prior to his presidency — while stripping the country of its industry and throwing some 30 million people out of work. Wealth is no longer created by producing or manufacturing. It is created by manipulating the prices of stocks and commodities and imposing a crippling debt peonage on the public.
These parasites cut or abolished social programs, militarized the police, built the largest prison system in the world and pumped funds into a bloated and out-of-control war industry. German socialist and politician Karl Liebknecht, on the eve of the suicidal folly of World War I, called German imperialists “the enemy at home.” Our rulers, our enemies at home, mounted a series of futile wars that degraded the empire’s global hegemony and poured trillions of dollars of taxpayer money into their bank accounts. Iran is the most recent example.
Trump is not an outlier. He is the naked, stripped-down expression of this suicidal pact. He does not pretend the system he inherited works. He lies with less finesse. He crassly enriches himself and his family. He speaks in crude vulgarities. He dismantles any government agency dedicated to the common good, including the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Education and the U.S. Postal Service. But he embodies what came before him, albeit without the liberal façade.
“Trump is not an anomaly,” I wrote in America: The Farewell Tour:
He is the grotesque visage of a collapsed democracy. Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels. The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.
The Epstein files, a window into the degeneracy of our ruling class, included not only Trump, but former U.S. president Bill Clinton — who allegedly took a trip to Thailand with Epstein — Prince Andrew, Microsoft founder and billionaire Bill Gates, hedge fund billionaire Glenn Dubin, the former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, former secretary of the treasury and former president of Harvard University Larry Summers, cognitive psychologist and author Stephen Pinker, Epstein’s lawyer and arch Zionist Alan Dershowitz, billionaire and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner, the former Barclays banker Jes Staley, former Israel prime minister Ehud Barak, magician David Copperfield, actor Kevin Spacey, former CIA director William Burns, real estate mogul Mort Zuckerman, former Maine senator George Mitchell and disgraced Hollywood producer and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. They all orbited Epstein’s perpetual Bacchanalia.
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Anand Giridharadas in his book, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, notes that the circle of powerful men, and a handful of women who surrounded Epstein, are emblematic of a privileged caste that lack empathy in the suffering and abuse of others, whether that is sexual abuse, including that of children, financial meltdowns they orchestrate, wars they back, addictions and overdose they enable, the monopolies they defend, the inequality they turbocharge, the housing crisis they milk and the intrusive technologies they refuse to protect people against:
People are right to sense that as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media, that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances. They are right that their pleas often go unheard, whether they are being evicted, gouged, foreclosed on, A.I.-obsolesced — or, yes, raped.
“The Epstein emails, in my view,” Giridharadas writes, “together sketch a devastating epistolary portrait of how our social order functions, and for whom. Saying that isn’t extreme. The way this elite operates is.”
“If this neoliberal-era power elite remains poorly understood,” he continues, “it may be because it is not just a financial elite or an educated elite, a noblesse-oblige elite, a political elite or a narrative-making elite; it straddles all of these, lucratively and persuaded of its own good intentions.”
“These people are,” Giridharadas reminds us, “on the same team. On air, they might clash. They promote opposite policies. Some in the network profess anguish over what others in the network are doing. But the emails depict a group whose highest commitment is to their own permanence in the class that decides things. When principles conflict with staying in the network, the network wins.”
You can see my interview with Giridharadas here.
[CH Note: See also Hemail Peril and On the ‘Epstein Class’, previous chapters in Contra Trump.]
The entire system is rotten. It will not reform itself.
The Democratic Party has hit on the novel campaign issue of reducing taxes to win this year’s midterm elections. It will, no doubt, anoint another vapid, issue-less and genocide-supporting presidential nominee. Democratic donors pumped a staggering $1.5 billion into Kamala Harris’s abridged 15-week celebrity-fueled presidential campaign. She became the first Democratic presidential candidate to lose the national popular vote in two decades and be defeated in every battleground state.
The Democratic Party is not a functioning political party. It is a corporate mirage. Its members can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props in choreographed conventions and rallies. Party members have zero influence on party politics.
The more the diminishing power of the empire becomes apparent, evidenced in Trump’s debacle with Iran, the more a confused population retreats into a fantasy world, a world where hard and unpleasant facts do not intrude.
In the final days of a civilization, a population wallows in self-delusional hubris and trumpets false virtues. It looks for scapegoats to explain its failures — Muslims, undocumented workers, Mexicans, African-Americans, feminists, intellectuals, artists and dissidents.
Magical thinking and the myth of American exceptionalism dominate public discourse and are taught in schools. Art and culture are degraded to nationalist kitsch. Science is dismissed, even in the midst of the environmental crisis. Cultural and intellectual disciplines that allow us to see the world from the perspective of the other, that foster empathy, understanding and compassion, are replaced by a grotesque and cruel hypermasculinity and hypermilitarism.
Trump is perfectly tailored for these death throes. He is not a freak or an anomaly. He is the naked visage of our pathological sickness.
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