It’s been epic! A cast of thousands. A spectacular production that, five weeks after opening on every screen of any sort in the US (and possibly the world), shows no sign of ending.

What a hit it’s been. It’s driving people back to newspapers and ensuring that our everyday companions, the 24/7 cable news shows, never lack for “breaking news” or audiences. It’s a smash in both the Hollywood and car accident sense of the term, a phenomenon the likes of which we’ve simply never experienced.

And you know exactly what – and whom – I’m talking about. No need to explain. I mean, you tell me: what doesn’t it have? Its lead actor is the closest we’ve come in our nation’s capital to an action figure, a version of Batman and the Joker rolled into one, a president who, as he told us at a news conference recently, is “the least antisemitic person that you’ve ever seen in your entire life” and the “least racist person” as well.

As for his supporting cast? Islamophobes, Iranophobes, white nationalists; bevies of billionaires and multimillionaires; a resurgent stock market gone wild; the complete fossil fuel industry and every crackpot climate change “skeptic” in town; a White House counselor whose expertise is in “alternative facts”; a White House chief of staff and liaison with the Republicans in Congress who’s already being sized up for extinction; as well as a couple of appointees who were “dismissed” or even frog-marched out of their offices and jobs for having criticized him.

And don’t forget that sons Donald and Eric are already saving memorabilia for the future Trump presidential library, a concept that should take your breath away.

A government of billionaires and generals

Even 20 months after it began, it’s all still so remarkable and new and if it isn’t like being in the path of a tornado, you tell me what it’s like. So no one should be surprised at just how difficult it is to step outside the storm to find some – any – vantage point offering the slightest perspective on the Trumpaclysm that’s hit our world.

Still, odd as it may seem under the circumstances, Trump’s presidency came from somewhere, developed out of something. To think of it (as many of those resisting Trump now seem inclined to do) as uniquely new, the presidential version of a virgin birth, is to defy both history and reality.

Trump's presidency already offers a strikingly vivid portrait of the America we’ve been living in for some years now

Trump’s new radical nature should serve as a reminder of just how radical the 15 years after 9/11 actually were in shaping American life, politics and governance. In that sense, his presidency already offers a strikingly vivid and accurate portrait of the America we’ve been living in for some years now, even if we’d prefer to pretend otherwise.

After all, it’s clearly a government of, by, and evidently for the billionaires and the generals, which pretty much sums up where we’ve been heading for the last decade and a half anyway.

Let’s start with those generals.

In the 15 years before Trump entered the Oval Office, Washington became a permanent war capital; war, a permanent feature of our American world; and the military, the most admired institution of American life, the one in which we have the most confidence among an otherwise fading crew, including the presidency, the supreme court, public schools, banks, television news, newspapers, big business, and Congress (in that descending order).

Support for that military in the form of staggering sums of taxpayer dollars (which are about to soar yet again) is one of the few things congressional Democrats and Republicans can still agree on. The military-industrial complex rides ever higher (despite Trumpian tweets about the price of F-35s); police across the country have been armed like so many military forces, while the technology of war on America’s distant battlefields – from Stingrays to MRAPs to military surveillance drones – has come home big time, and we’ve been Swatified.

This country has, in other words, been militarized in all sorts of ways, both obvious and less so, in a fashion that Americans once might not have imagined possible. In the process, declaring and making war has increasingly become – the constitution be damned – the sole preoccupation of the White House, without significant reference to Congress. Meanwhile, thanks to the drone assassination program run directly out of the Oval Office, the president, in these years, has become an assassin-in-chief as well as commander-in-chief.

Under the circumstances, no one should have been surprised when Donald Trump turned to the very generals he criticized in the election campaign, men who fought 15 years of losing wars that they bitterly feel should have been won.

In his government, they have, of course, now taken over – a historic first – what had largely been the civilian posts of secretary of defense, secretary of homeland security, national security adviser, and National Security Council chief of staff.

Trump shakes hands with his pick for national security adviser, HR McMaster, at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

Think of it as a junta lite and little more than the next logical step in the further militarization of this country.

It’s striking, for instance, that when the president finally fired his national security adviser, 24 days into his presidency, all but one of the other figures that he reportedly considered for a post often occupied by a civilian were retired generals (and an admiral), or, in the case of the person he actually tapped to be his second national security adviser, a still-active army general. This reflects a distinct American reality of the 21st century that the Donald has simply absorbed like the human sponge he is.

As a result, America’s permanent wars, all relative disasters of one sort or another, will now be overseen by men who were, for the last decade and a half, deeply implicated in them. It’s a formula for further disaster, of course, but no matter.

Other future Trumpian steps – such as the possible mobilization of the national guard, more than half a century after guardsmen helped desegregate the University of Alabama, to carry out the mass deportation of illegal immigrants – will undoubtedly be in the same mold (though the administration has denied that such a mobilization is under serious consideration yet).

In short, we now live in an America of the generals and that would be the case even if Donald Trump had never been elected president.

Add in one more factor of our moment: we have the first signs that members of the military high command may no longer feel completely bound by the classic American prohibition from taking any part in politics. Gen Raymond “Tony” Thomas, head of the elite US special operations command, speaking recently at a conference, essentially warned the president that we were “at war” and that chaos in the White House was not good for the warriors.

That’s as close as we’ve come in our time to direct public military criticism of the White House.

The ascendancy of the billionaires

As for those billionaires, let’s start this way: a billionaire is now president of the United States, something that, until this country was transformed into a 1% society with 1% politics, would have been inconceivable. (The closest we came in modern times was Nelson Rockefeller as vice-president, and he was appointed by President Gerald Ford in 1974, not elected.)

In addition, never have there been so many billionaires and multimillionaires in a cabinet – and that, in turn, was only possible because there are now so staggeringly many billionaires and multimillionaires in this country to choose from.

In 1987, there were 41 billionaires in the United States; in 2015, 536. What else do you need to know about the intervening years, which featured growing inequality and the worst economic meltdown since 1929, a meltdown that only helped strengthen the new version of the American system?

In swift order in these years, we moved from billionaires funding the political system (after the supreme court’s 2010 Citizens United decision opened the financial floodgates) to billionaires actually heading the government. As a result, count on a country even friendlier to the already fantastically wealthy – thanks in part to whatever Trump-style “tax cuts” are put in place – and so the possible establishment of a new “era of dynastic wealth”.

From the crew of rich dismantlers and destroyers Donald Trump has appointed to his cabinet, expect, among other things, that the privatization of the US government – a process until now largely focused on melding warrior corporations with various parts of the national security state – will proceed apace in the rest of the governing apparatus.

We were, in other words, already living in a different America before 8 November 2016. Donald Trump has merely shoved that reality directly in all our faces. And keep in mind that if it weren’t for the one-percentification of this country and the surge of automation (as well as globalization) that destroyed so many jobs and only helped inequality flourish, white working-class Americans in particular would not have felt so left behind in the heartland of their own country or so ready to send such an explosive figure into the White House as a visible form of screw-you-style protest.

Finally, consider one other hallmark of the first month of the Trump presidency: the “feud” between the new president and the intelligence sector of the national security state.

In these post-9/11 years, that state within a state – sometimes referred to by its critics as the “deep state”, though, given the secrecy that envelops it, “dark state” might be a more accurate term – grew by leaps and bounds. In that period, for instance, the US gained a second defense department, the Department of Homeland Security, with its own security-industrial complex, while the intelligence agencies, all 17 of them, expanded in just about every way imaginable.

In those years, they gained a previously inconceivable kind of clout, as well as the ability to essentially listen in on and monitor the communications of just about anyone on the planet (including Americans). Fed copiously by taxpayer dollars, swollen by hundreds of thousands of private contractors from warrior corporations, largely free of the controlling hand of either Congress or the courts, and operating under the kind of blanket secrecy that left most Americans in the dark about its activities (except when whistle-blowers revealed its workings), the national security state gained an ascendancy in Washington as the de facto fourth branch of government.

Now, key people within its shadowy precincts find Donald Trump not to their liking, and they seem to have gone to war with him and his administration via a remarkable stream of leaks of damaging information, especially about the now departed national security adviser Michael Flynn.

As Amanda Taub and Max Fisher of the New York Times wrote: “For concerned government officials, leaks may have become one of the few remaining means by which to influence not just Mr Flynn’s policy initiatives but the threat he seemed to pose to their place in democracy.”

This, of course, represented a version of whistleblowing that, when directed at them in the pre-Trump era, they found appalling. Like Gen Thomas’s comments, that flood of leaks, while discomfiting Donald Trump, also represented a potential challenge to the American political system as it once was known. When the fiercest defenders of that system begin to be seen as being inside the intelligence community and the military, you know that you’re in a different and far more perilous world.

We’re now living in an ever more chaotic and aberrant land run by billionaires and retired generals, and overseen by a distinctly aberrant president at war with aberrant parts of the national security state.

That, in a nutshell, is the America created in the post-9/11 years. Put another way, the US may have failed dismally in its efforts to invade, occupy and remake Iraq in its own image, but it seems to have invaded, occupied and remade itself with remarkable success. And don’t blame this one on the Russians.



No one said it better than French King Louis XV: Après moi, le Trump.

A longer version of this article appears on TomDispatch.com, where it was originally published