http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2026-02-03T15:30:22Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com http://ranprieur.com/#28be7258b0762cc698674fd4256041254f3489aa 2026-02-03T15:30:22Z February 3. I don't want to write about Trump and just say the obvious stuff. So here's something you don't hear every day: Trump is a scientist, and a good one. For his entire career, not just the presidency, he has been methodically doing experiments on human institutions and the human psyche, to see how they stand up to raw power. The most honest thing he ever said was during a debate with Hillary Clinton, where she accused him of tax evasion and he said something like "It was your job to stop me." That was Trump announcing to the world that he is beyond good and evil. He has the ethos of a fire or flood. ICE is not arresting the most dangerous immigrants, but the most compliant, for the same reason a flood fills in the lowest places first.

If it's our job to stop Trump, how are we doing? Imagine you're a teacher giving out letter grades. Around 30 percent of Americans are currently riding an F. With the long memory of the internet, it's going to be hard for anyone openly supporting the Minneapolis killings to walk it back. (And how weird is it that their names are Good and Pretti?) Europe gets a C for eventually standing up for Greenland. Congress and the Supreme Court might yet squeak out a D. If anyone gets an A it's the people quietly fighting in the courts.

The American media get a flat F. The experiment is how much naked power does it take for them to report it as naked power, and the answer is we don't know yet. Their expectation of normalcy has been Trump's number one ally, the fog of war of the supposedly unthinkable. They swallowed Trump's tale that Greenland is a buffer against Russia, when his actions have made it clear that Europe is his adversary and Russia is his uneasy ally. I used to think propaganda meant lying. Now I know that propaganda is saying stuff that's technically true while never saying the most obvious and important stuff.

Trump's obvious electoral strategy is to stir up enough trouble in the cities to cancel midterm elections. If he tries, the states will turn the tables: We're still having elections, try to stop us. MAGA will have to defend federal power over states rights, further pushing the experiment of how much cognitive dissonance the human brain can tolerate. We don't know yet.

Domestically, Trump doesn't have a lot of cards left to play, which is why he's focusing on Iran, and I appreciate the honesty of his foreign policy. No more iron fist in velvet glove, it's all iron fist, fuck you. If somebody goes nuclear, all bets are off. If not, I expect this to be over soon. Historians will surely say that America caught the same disease as Nazi Germany, but that we resisted it better. I know there are full-on concentration camps right now, but I am confident that Trump's eventual death toll will be less than one percent of Hitler's death toll, unless you count the global poor killed by canceling USAID.

I'm confident because I live in the city. If you don't live in an American city, you might have the idea, from the news, that we're all delicate intelligentsia and gutter trash. What I see are tens of thousands of competent, determined, and cheerful people. Even the homeless are tougher than ICE, give them guns and you'll find out. This feels to me like a very slow mass shooting. The shooter is inside the building, he has the upper hand at the moment, and he's not finished. But he can't win, that's not how this works.

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