Another Psychopath for US Secretary of State

By Caitlin Johnstone – Nov 19, 2024

Marco Rubio will be joining a long list of psychopaths as the next US secretary of state. A few of Trump’s cabinet picks might have a hard time getting past the Senate, but not Rubio. He’s the exact type of blood-guzzling swamp leech those creatures on Capitol Hill adore.

Psychopathy is almost a job requirement for secretary of state, because the title entails a responsibility for helping to roll out the violence and tyranny which serves as the glue that holds the US empire together. As secretary of state you are responsible for whipping up international consensus for brutal economic sanctions regimes, drumming up support for heightened aggressions against the official enemies of Washington, and making up excuses for the criminal abuses of the US and its allies.

This is funny in a dark sort of way because the secretary of state is supposed to be in charge of US diplomacy, which in theory should mean making peace and resolving conflicts without violence. The US Department of State was supposed to be the peacemaking counterbalance to the US Department of War (renamed the Department of Defense in 1947 because “Department of War” was a little too honest), but because the US runs a globe-spanning empire that is held together by endless violence it has little use for peacekeeping, so the State Department mostly gets used to help inflict more violence and abuse. In theory it was supposed to be the Peace Department, but in practice the US just got two War Departments.

Rubio will be a suitable addition to the list of sadistic manipulators who have served in that role before him, joining the likes of Antony Blinken, Mike Pompeo, Hillary Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Henry Kissinger as the next soulless manipulator to lead the US State Department in pressing the imperial boot into the throat of the global south.

I’ve had multiple Kamala supporters angrily tell me I helped Trump win by criticizing Biden’s foreign policy in the lead-up to the election. I cannot imagine being so much of an unprincipled bootlicker that I’d expect people to lie about a genocide to help someone win more votes.

Nothing Trump will do inside US borders over the next four years will be the tiniest fraction as murderous, tyrannical and worthy of ferocious opposition as what Biden is doing in Gaza right now.

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American progressives who stopped talking about Gaza in July-August to avoid hurting Kamala seem to have forgotten to go back to talking about Gaza now that the election is over.

Trump is profoundly evil, but he is a very conventional kind of profoundly evil, of the same variety as Biden, Obama and Bush before him.

The big lie about Trump is that he is a special deviation from the norm, and both sides believe this lie. Everything about the actual policies of his first term reveal that he is a very ordinary Republican president, who is evil in more or less the same ways as all the other evil Republican presidents. He didn’t do anything that wasn’t already being done by those before him and won’t continue to be done by those after him. But both Democrats and Republicans see him as a drastic departure from status quo US politics, differing only in whether they perceive this as a good thing or a bad thing.

This happens because US presidents cannot significantly differ from one another in actual policy and decision making. If they were the sort to disrupt the status quo too much, they never would have been allowed to ascend to the presidency. There is simply too much power riding on the US empire for any significant change in its operations to be tolerated by the actual power structure which really runs things. So because presidents and viable presidential candidates cannot significantly differ from each other in terms of policy, they instead differ from each other in terms of narrative and emotion.

That’s what we’re seeing in all the vitriol and passion and frenetic punditry about Trump on both sides of the US partisan divide. A bunch of empty narrative fluff pouring a lot of emotional energy into either supporting or opposing a very ordinary evil in a very ordinary Republican president.

If they didn’t do that, the entire US political landscape would just be Democrats and Republicans agreeing with one another about 99 percent of the evils of the US empire and half-heartedly disagreeing about the remaining one percent. And that would give the whole game away. It would kill the illusion that Americans live in a real democracy where their votes actually mean something and they actually have some meaningful degree of control over what their government does. If this understanding took root, it would only be a matter of time until America’s heavily-armed population began thinking thoughts of revolution.

So we’re left watching these ridiculous histrionics over what amounts to the ordinary everyday pendulum swings between ordinary everyday Democrat governance and ordinary everyday Republican governance, with one side remaining in control about half the time and both sides working together to push the status quo further and further into oligarchy, militarism and tyranny.

The whole US political spectacle is all emotion and no substance. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

(Caitlin’s Newsletter)