The Rule of the Terror Clowns – Tomas Konicz, 1/11/2026

The Rule of the Terror Clowns

Notes on the clownish return of naked US imperialism in the End Time of Capital

by Tomasz Konicz

[This article posted on 1/11/2026 is translated from the German on the Internet, http://www.konicz.info.]

“We live in a world, the real world, Jake, that is ruled by strength, ruled by violence, ruled by power… These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”

Stephen Miller1

After about an hour, the absurd imperialist theater that the Trump administration staged on January 3 in celebration of its successful aggression against Venezuela finally collapsed.2 Trump’s talk of exploiting oil reserves and not tolerating competition in the US’s backyard could still support the White House’s fascist narrative that the US must use military force to reclaim “its” Western Hemisphere. However, this performance lost all consistency and drifted into the irrational and psychedelic when the president, who has long seemed like a real-life satire from Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” was asked about the reasons for pardoning Juan Orlando Hernandez, the former president of Honduras who was serving a long prison sentence for drug trafficking.3

Trump’s clownish horror show

Hernandez had been treated unfairly and “persecuted,” similar to “a man named Trump” by Joe Biden, according to Trump. This makes the Central American drug dealer and the US president quasi-fellow sufferers. “Me, me, me” – suddenly, for several minutes, everything revolves around Donald Trump and the great injustice that has been done to him by his election defeat. No one laughs, everyone remains deadly serious and professional – and the further the reporting moves away from this grotesque press conference, the more serious the freak show that was performed there appears. The mass media manage to “professionalize” this performance, glossing over Trump’s delusions with well-meaning interpretations, with CNN4 and the New York Times (NYT)5 even legitimizing US intervention in Caracas.

But the fascist delusion, openly manifesting itself in all its irrationality and death wish, can no longer be patronized—it wants primetime. Throughout his professional life, Trump rode the big money wave in one of the most nefarious semi-mafia industries in the US, the construction industry. And Trump demonstrates that all that remains afterwards is a human stump. The hollow shell left behind by capital, the narcissistic shell of a subject, can only imitate capital’s compulsion to exploit, manifested in sheer megalomania – and that is probably what appeals to the millions of human stumps devastated by capital who vote for Trump. They look in the mirror and see their own unfulfilled narcissism and megalomania. Everything always revolves around me – up to the presidency or up to a rampage6 (and why not both?).

Trump, like much of his cabinet, is reminiscent of the internet character of the horror clown, which triggered a short-lived wave of sometimes violent imitations in 2016. 7 Trump’s pathogenic, borderline character traits personify—as the apparently sadistic world spirit in late capitalism would have it—the openly apparent irrationalism of capital, which, in its evident collapse, threatens to drag the process of civilization into the abyss. 8 And it is precisely such fascist freaks, such terror clowns of the extreme right, who, as political subjects, are executing this objective process of destruction.

Washington is a freak show, ridiculous and repulsive (just like Berlin, etc.), which is at the same time deadly serious and extremely dangerous, since these freaks command the world’s largest military machine and thousands of nuclear warheads and delivery systems. America’s terror clowns react most sensitively when people actually make fun of them. This applies to the US president as well as to his right-wing extremist ICE militiamen.

Rackets, rackets, rackets

Trump’s infantile imperialist bragging focused on the almost perfectly executed military action, but the real dirty work was apparently done in advance with devastating efficiency by the US secret services, probably the CIA. Obviously, Venezuelan head of state Maduro was simply sold out to the US in order to prevent an open military conflict – and it is actually obvious who betrayed the Venezuelan president. It is the government actors who are now willing to cooperate with the US, such as former Vice President Delcy Rodríguez, who made generous donations to Trump9 and has already succeeded Maduro.10

Incidentally, Maduro, who also has a penchant for clownish appearances à la Trump, is himself a failed imperialist. Just two years ago, he threatened to invade neighboring oil-rich Guyana11 in order to divert attention from the devastating economic situation in the country in the run-up to the last elections. And this is a well-known power logic that may well have motivated Trump’s imperialist intervention against Maduro, who is struggling with persistent inflation and pedophilia scandals.

In any case, the CIA had a better understanding of Venezuela’s power structures than Maduro’s old-school leftist supporters, most of whom come from the anti-imperialist spectrum. The American intelligence services saw a corrupt regime that had formed on the ruins of Venezuela’s former socialist experiment – and whose rulers were primarily interested in stable revenues for their own cliques. The Venezuelan “state” is not a monolithic block, but an easily broken alliance of rackets that have taken control of the eroding state apparatus in order to pursue their particular interests. This form of decay of state rule, in which the state loses its function as an ideal total capitalist, is characteristic of much of the periphery and semi-periphery of the late capitalist world system. However, in its final phase, the economic crisis process, which is causing the state apparatus to become wild, so to speak, is also spreading to the centers, including Trump’s USA, which has already transformed itself into a pure fascist oligarchy.

When the CIA looks at Venezuela, it is, in a sense, looking in the mirror, at the near future of the US. That is why it was easy for the secret service to find its way around the situation there and pull the appropriate levers. It is clear: Military pressure, sanctions, and most recently, acts of outright piracy against oil tankers increased the pressure, while at the same time signals of potential cooperation were sent to Caracas. The military result of this secret service subversion: American military helicopters were able to fly into the Venezuelan capital with complete peace of mind, kidnap the president, murder dozens of his Cuban bodyguards12 and, apart from sporadic anti-aircraft fire, fly the head of state out largely unmolested, while Venezuelan officials called for calm and order.

Regime design instead of regime change

What is clearly emerging here is a further development of crisis imperialist practice by the fascists in the White House, who hate the old neocons and their democratization plans. The US is not pursuing regime change in Venezuela; the approach could rather be described as regime design, as the – sometimes kinetic – “shaping” or modeling of a regime in line with American interests. The combination of pressure and force is intended to weaken the opposition forces within the state apparatus, while those willing to cooperate and old boy networks are strengthened through incentives.

The whole thing could be described as imperialist “lean management,” in which a direct military presence on the ground—as in the neocons’ bloody regime change in Iraq—is no longer necessary. Selective strikes against recalcitrant groups, coupled with selective incentives for those networks that simply want to get rich in the corrupt power structure – this is what the new form of imperialist aggression, now being tested in Venezuela, boils down to. The central lever of power here is military: it is the ability of the US to hinder Venezuela’s oil exports at will through acts of piracy. The oil tap can be turned off if Caracas does not toe the line.

However, the new strategy of regime reform also implies that there can be no new elections for the time being—Washington must offer the rackets in Venezuela’s state apparatus that are willing to cooperate a perspective that at least allows for an orderly transition. Representatives of the US administration quickly made it clear that there will be no new elections in Venezuela for the time being. And even the crazy Trump story, according to which the US president refused to give Nobel Prize winner Machado his political support because she did not cede the Nobel Prize in his favor, thus has a certain crisis-imperialist internal rationality (this grotesque situation is currently being taken to extremes, as Machado now wants to cede the Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in order to gain a chance at the presidency in Venezuela – Machado wants to trade her Nobel for the presidency).13

In addition, the Trump administration is moving toward articulating its affinity for vulgar fascism more and more openly. Washington wants to continue the tradition of bloody, fascist CIA coups during the Cold War era in Latin America rather than the democratically cloaked rhetoric of regime change that became established during the Western world order wars of the 1990s.

Regional and imperial

Meanwhile, there is open debate about what new targets Washington’s imperialist war machine will set its sights on. The aggression against Venezuela was simply too successful; this is the downfall of the entire region. Washington has acquired a taste for it, and the fascists in the White House have tasted blood. They notice how quickly, for example, the pedophilia scandal involving the US ruling elite has faded into the background. Virtually all Latin American countries that are not led by right-wing governments are under threat. Trump has already threatened Colombia, and Trump’s secretary of state has stated bluntly that Havana should be concerned. Mexico’s moderate left-wing president has been threatened, as has Panama, whose canal Trump wants to control directly again.

Trump is simply moving to realize his vision of a Pan-American empire14, which he threatened at the beginning of his second term. The eroding global US hegemony, which Trump is dismantling in the name of an antiquated nationalism, is being replaced by sheer dominance, by the militarily based law of the strongest. The bizarre feverish fantasies that the American head of state spouted at the beginning of his presidency are to become reality.15 Washington is claiming unrestricted dominance throughout the Western Hemisphere. On the one hand, Trump wants to largely monopolize US access to the region’s resources and energy sources.

On the other hand, the influence of competing powers, especially China and Russia, in Latin America is to be minimized. Venezuela’s close cooperation with Beijing, Moscow, and Tehran is likely to have contributed to the realization of the military option against Maduro. The signal sent to the entire Western Hemisphere is clear:

in the future, Washington intends to at least partially revoke the sovereignty of Central and Latin American states. Trump once again sees Latin America as the imperial backyard of the US, similar to Putin’s imperialist attitude toward the post-Soviet space. So far, only Brazil has been spared Washington’s direct military threats.

But that could change very soon, as the example of Greenland illustrates. Still riding high on its imperialist triumph over Caracas, when most EU leaders at least implicitly agreed with this naked aggression, Washington bluntly declared its intention to take possession of Greenland. If necessary, against the will of Denmark and the EU, if necessary by military force. The claims made in this regard during the first weeks of Trump’s second presidency are now to be realized quickly. At the same time as Brussels and the South American economic zone Mercosur are concluding their free trade agreement after endless negotiations, Trump is on a collision course not only with the EU, but also with NATO, whose continued existence the US president is deliberately subordinating to the seizure of the Arctic island. 16

Global surge in barbarism

His Pan-American empire, which is to stretch literally from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, is more important to Trump than NATO, which was an obsolete instrument of American hegemony. And the European Union is quite simply the weakest link in the chain of centers of the world system now directly affected by the global crisis of capital. This is true not only in military terms, but above all because of the multitude of national interests within this economic and monetary area, which Washington can easily play off against each other.

A united European front to defend Greenland – such is the absurdity of late capitalist reality – is unlikely to materialize. Above all, Germany, the former world champion exporter, is likely to block decisive retaliatory measures—not only military but also economic—against US interests in Europe (a direct military conflict over Greenland is illusory anyway) in order not to lose further market share west of the Atlantic.

And as long as they have no significant consequences to fear, the fascists in the White House will continue this strategy of escalation – if only because they are coming under increasing domestic pressure. This is what the crisis-induced end of US hegemony looks like, now that Washington is no longer willing to bear the costs of this hegemony. An armed 400-pound gorilla, led by a megalomaniacal fascist borderline personality, is setting out to assert its interests directly, while the rudiments of the postwar order are being smashed.

The first week of 2026 has thus fundamentally changed the world. In geopolitical terms, nothing is as it once was. There is no going back to the status quo ante. Even if the institutions and structures that were established after World War II as a consequence of this era of bloc confrontation remain in place for the time being, they have finally degenerated into mere facades. The same applies to the institutional instruments of the defunct US hegemony: the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and NATO.

NATO, the most powerful military alliance in world history, is effectively history.

Decades of stable alliances and hegemonic systems will now be replaced by naked power politics, carried out by increasingly risk-taking state monsters in fleeting, constantly changing constellations. The willingness to take ever greater risks and military ventures is the result of the crisis process, whose increasing internal upheavals are driving the functional elites of capital toward external expansion. This unstable crisis imperialism already carries the seeds of a major war.17

Due to the historical maturity of the global crisis of capital, the current surge in global barbarism is not simply a return to the imperialism of the 18th or 19th centuries, since that imperialism expanded militarily during a historical phase of capital expansion. The current crisis imperialism—which is unfolding in a phase of global contraction of capital—effectively forces states into conflict, ultimately into war with each other, in order to shift the consequences of the crisis onto their competitors. The late capitalist world is indeed becoming a “den of thieves.” 18 Even a blind social democratic chicken like Federal President Steinmeier has found a grain of truth here.

From imperialism to fascism in fast motion

Historically speaking, the ideological hardening from imperialism to fascism took place over several decades: from the second half of the 19th century to the end of World War I, the primordial catastrophe of the 20th century. Currently, this hardening is taking place in fast motion, so to speak. The imperial ambitions of the fascists in the White House are now underpinned by blatant fascist rhetoric—justifications are no longer necessary. The driving force behind this fascist coming-out is Steven Miller,19 the far-right deputy chief of staff in the White House, who is considered Trump’s “confidential advisor” (NYT).20

Miller, who is considered one of the architects of US deportation policy and the transformation of ICE into a Trump-obedient fascist militia, gave an interview to CNN shortly after Maduro’s abduction and the threatening gestures toward Greenland, in which he strictly refused to follow the liberal rhetoric of pro-democratic regime change. 21 Miller, whose administration is currently violently destroying the meager civilizational remnants of the postwar order, resorted to the usual far-right projections by declaring that the late capitalist world system is characterized by sheer violence. According to Miller, who openly articulated his hatred of the postwar order, the US can therefore use force anywhere to assert its interests because it has the means to do so.

The region’s resources, imperialist interventions, territories such as Greenland – according to the fascist Miller, the US can claim or take possession of all this because it has the military power to do so. This is no longer a question of law, but of mere military power. And this very thing—the worship of the naked use of force—is a core element of fascist ideology. In its manifest crisis, the late capitalist world system is effectively falling behind the achievements of the Peace of Westphalia after the end of the Thirty Years’ War.

Steven Miller—a fascist nutcase, a horror clown reminiscent of the Goebbels parody in Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator,” who has no say in the White House? Not at all.

A few days after Miller’s appearance on CNN, Donald Trump gave an interview to the New York Times (NYT) in which he effectively followed the geopolitical line of his far-right political advisor.22 Nothing stands in the way of the United States using military force, the president told the NYT, which openly justified his attack on Venezuela in a commentary using the usual liberal platitudes. 23 There is only one factor that can influence the US military machine, according to the horror clown in the White House: “My own morals, my own spirit. That’s the only thing that can stop me.”

Müller and Trump gave interviews to the few hated liberal media outlets that the fascistization of the US has left behind, in which they confronted liberal bellicose rhetoric with open fascist rhetoric. They made them accomplices. Naked power, violence is to be worshipped, it demands respect. All the liberal-democratic veneer has peeled away, and the fascist extremism of the center shows this disintegrating center, the former neoliberal mainstream, where it actually comes from, where it has its origins. The sometimes openly expressed approval of Trump’s imperialist aggression toward Venezuela is therefore likely to be embarrassing not only to Europeans.

Maduro made fun of Trump, and that is supposed to have been the final straw for the bloody intervention in Caracas, according to one of the crazy clown stories coming out of the White House. JD Vance has already warned Europeans to “take Trump and his crazy Greenland babble seriously.”24 Fascist power spreads ostentatiously, inviting opposition so that it can crush it with all its brutality. This is an element of authoritarian conditioning—the subject must sink to his knees, even before a crazy terrorist clown. The horror clowns in the White House demand constant sycophancy; they want to see bootlickers everywhere, no matter how ridiculous they may seem—as if they had sprung from a drug-induced fever dream. Otherwise, examples will be made: be it recalcitrant heads of state from highly corrupt peripheral countries or even white American middle-class women, who are now simply shot dead by the ICE Gestapo if they show no respect.

Crisis imperialism in concrete terms

Where does all this psychedelic-seeming madness come from? The news is on, and one is tempted to check whether LSD has been added to one’s drink. Trump, this borderline terrorist clown,25 is a symptom, he is the personification of the global crisis of capital in its barbaric final phase. The political right, fascism, are concrete, subjective executors of this objective crisis tendency toward barbarism, toward civilizational collapse.26

Fascism does not come from outer space, it is not a foreign body, it forms in the middle of society, it is its extremism triggered by crises. 27 Approaches to this can be found in the New York Times and on CNN, which legitimized Trump’s attack on Venezuela, and they can be found in Macron, Starmer, and the German stooge Merz, who did not want to criticize the obvious violation of international law by the US—until they themselves became targets a few days later.

The increasing internal upheavals, the tensions and contradictions, the escalating social conflicts—what could be more obvious than to cut through this Gordian knot of crisis with military strikes against external enemies? The crisis is literally written on the foreheads of every Trump supporter, as long as they wear their ridiculous MAGA baseball caps. America should be great again because it is no longer great for ever larger sections of the US population. That is why they voted for Trump, who promised them to reverse the deindustrialization of the United States through protectionism.28

Since this is not working fast enough to win the midterms, since devaluation is already spreading in the form of the “cost of living crisis,” since the departure from US hegemony is jeopardizing the dollar’s position as the world’s reserve currency, leading to very high interest charges on the US budget, other methods of stabilizing power must be found. Trump, who is actually still a 20th-century imperialist, a sleazy oil man, seems to attach such great importance to the direct exploitation of Venezuela’s oil reserves in order to consolidate the position of the US dollar. The US no longer wants to bear the costs of hegemony, which contributed to the de-industrialization of the US in the globalized deficit economy of the neoliberal era, and at the same time Washington wants to maintain its advantages through military power and control of resources.

The same applies to the takeover of Greenland and the attempt to annex Canada – this is how climate denier Trump is responding to the climate and resource crisis, i.e., the external barrier to capital that consists in the finiteness of our planet’s resources, while capital is driven by a boundless compulsion to exploit. During the trade war with China, Trump noticed that the US is vulnerable in terms of its production chains and resource supply—Greenland is intended to close this gap in the medium term.

And yet the fascist option will not overcome the crisis. Although it is the terrorist form of crisis of capitalist rule, 21st-century fascism – despite all its terror and violence – will not be able to “overcome” the crisis and establish stable authoritarian power relations. Nor was 20th-century fascism able to do so, inevitably seeking its self-destructive refuge in world war. But this time, there is no new capitalist accumulation regime, such as Fordism in the second half of the 20th century, that could prevail through world war—especially since the destructive potential of military apparatuses simply threatens civilization and the climate crisis will soon turn into a climate catastrophe.

All the “interests” that fascism now wants to enforce with all its might are only the deceptive surface appearance behind which the world-destroying irrationalism of capital unfolds in its agony. Money must become money; the whole of society, the whole world, is merely material for this fetishistic self-movement, which will only cease when it has completely destroyed the society that is the material for this self-movement, or when capital is emancipatorily overcome.

Systemically, there is only the descent into barbarism, accompanied by the insane antics of the fascist terror clowns who are executing this descent. There is no ground beneath our feet, everything is in dissolution, the panic that will soon set in is within reach, as value itself, the foundation of capitalist working society, is in dissolution. Systemic transformation is inevitable, and so far it is only fascism that is actively driving this objectively imminent transformation in a barbaric direction. Consequently, there is no alternative for all that remains of the left—despite all regression and opportunism—but to fight for an emancipatory transformation,29 against crisis imperialism and, above all, against 21st-century fascism. The struggle for transformation is inevitable.