Emperor Trump

We're Closer Than You Think

If you’ve been paying attention to the slow-motion train wreck that is modern American politics, the idea of America as an empire rather than a republic has been painfully obvious for years. For a long time, there was a concerted effort, a whole song and dance, to maintain the fiction that the U.S. government was still a quaint institution “by and for” the American people. But let’s be honest—that ship has not only sailed, it’s been retrofitted into a battleship and is currently doing donuts in the Caribbean.

When did the mask really start to slip? Was it with the Patriot Act and subsequent ‘War on Terror’, when civil liberties were tossed onto a bonfire to the tune of “God Bless America”? Or perhaps it was during the Global Financial Crisis, when Wall Street got a multi-trillion-dollar bailout while Main Street got a foreclosure notice? Or maybe the COVID hysteria was the final straw, a masterclass in how to weaponize public health to crush small businesses, silence dissent, and poison a population. And let’s not forget the “great invasion of migrants,” a logistical miracle of human trafficking financed by the very government that’s supposed to protect its borders.

If any of those moments left you with a shred of doubt, the Trump administration’s second act should have shattered it into a million pieces. In a move that was refreshing for some and terrifying for everyone else, Trump has done away with the pleasantries and embraced the role of emperor with open arms.

He kicked things off by churning out a record-breaking 225 executive orders in 2025 alone, a stunning display of unilateral power that makes his first term look like a model of congressional collaboration. To put that in perspective, the first 25 U.S. presidents combined issued just 1,262 executive orders over roughly 112 years. Trump, in a single year, is already a fifth of the way there. This isn’t just a president flexing his executive muscle; it’s a fundamental reshaping of the relationship between the American government and its citizens, on a scale not seen since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Like FDR, who used the crises of the Great Depression and World War II to permanently expand the power of the executive branch, Trump is using the perceived crises of our time to forge a new, more authoritarian American state. He’s slapped on massive tariffs, effectively the largest tax increase in modern history, and bombed a record seven foreign nations in a single year. “Peace through strength,” or just a really aggressive marketing campaign for the military-industrial complex?

The Imperial Boomerang

But the real pièce de résistance came on January 3, 2026, with Operation Absolute Resolve. In a move straight out of a Tom Clancy novel, U.S. forces stormed Caracas and snatched up Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Trump, with his characteristic subtlety, announced that the U.S. would be “running” Venezuela for the foreseeable future, with plans to sell off its oil reserves to the highest bidder. When asked by The New York Times if there were any limits to his power on the world stage, Trump’s response was a masterclass in imperial hubris:

“Yeah, there’s one thing: my own morality, my own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me. I don’t need international law. I’m not looking to hurt anyone.”

And to fund this global adventure? A proposed $500 billion increase to the defense budget, bringing the grand total to a cool $1.5 trillion. Because nothing says “we’re a peaceful republic” like a military budget that could fund a small planet.

Of course, no empire is complete without a little bread and circuses for the folks back home. To keep the masses happy, Trump has directed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to buy up to $200 billion in mortgage-backed securities, capped credit card interest rates, and floated the idea of $2,000 tariff-funded stimulus checks. It’s a classic imperial playbook: keep the population placated with just enough goodies to distract them from the fact that their republic is being dismantled brick by brick.

But the empire’s fist is felt most acutely at home. The historical pattern is clear: empires that are expansionary and vicious to foreign enemies consistently turn on their own populations. Scholars call this the “imperial boomerang”—the repressive techniques developed to control colonial territories inevitably migrate back home and are deployed against their own citizens. The infrastructure of surveillance, detention, and coercion perfected abroad doesn’t disappear; it gets redirected inward. The U.S. is no exception. The surveillance and data integration techniques developed for overseas counterinsurgency are now being deployed domestically. This is the imperial boomerang in its contemporary form, and it has three key components.

First is the digital control grid, a “digital panopticon” where the government can observe the lives of millions of Americans with unprecedented detail. The Trump administration is engaging in “secondary data abuse,” where information given to one agency is reused by another without consent, and “data centralization,” consolidating records from across agencies and supercharged by commercially available data into massive databases. Second is the Real ID, which became mandatory for domestic air travel on May 7, 2025. It’s more than a standardized ID; it’s a national surveillance card that connects to centralized databases, facilitating tracking and monitoring. Third is Palantir Technologies, the data integration engine that makes this all possible. With over $1 billion in federal contracts since Trump took office, Palantir’s “Foundry” software is being deployed across federal agencies to merge data from health, education, law enforcement, immigration, and financial systems into comprehensive profiles of American citizens.

This brings us to the most visible manifestation of the imperial boomerang: the transformation of ICE into a national police force. In 2025, ICE underwent a historic 120% manpower increase, adding 12,000 new officers in under a year. To attract recruits for this new army, the administration offered $50,000 signing bonuses and dropped requirements for age and education, all fueled by a $100 million “wartime recruitment” media blitz.

Source: ICE recruitment advertising, Department of Homeland Security, 2025–2026.

The paradox is that despite this massive buildup, Trump’s deportation numbers still lag behind Obama’s. During his first term, Trump deported fewer than 932,000 people, an average of about 233,000 per year. In contrast, the Obama administration, led by the so-called “Deporter-in-Chief,” removed over 3.1 million people in eight years, averaging nearly 388,000 annually. Even with the accelerated pace in his second term, with DHS claiming over 605,000 deportations by December 2025, after 5 years in office Trump has a ways to go to catch up with Obama.

Admittedly, something must be done to deport the criminals who crossed the border during the Biden invasion. But it’s worth asking—Is ICE street action the answer? Is it working and at what cost? Is it possible this expanded force serves another motive than simply deporting the invaders?

Perhaps this new force isn’t just about rounding up undocumented immigrants; it’s about building a federal police force that specializes in “grabbing and bagging.” If that’s the case, how long before we, the accent-free, heritage Americans, become the targets of a grab and bag security service?

Just imagine if Biden had this tool at his disposal.

Building the Machine

In any case, the setup is bad. The same well-funded leftist teams that brought us BLM, Antifa, and Defund the Police—that orchestrated the mayhem of the ‘Summer of Love’, which was the costliest civil disorder event in U.S. insurance history and resulted in 25 deaths, are on the ground today standing in direct opposition to ICE.

The masked, aggressive, and confrontational tactics of ICE’s “Operation Metro Surge,” has already seen armed federal agents clash with protesters in cities across the country. This already culminated in the death of Renee Nicole Good, a left-wing activist shot by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, whom the DHS Secretary promptly labeled a “domestic terrorist.”

The terrorist designation is easy to apply these days. I’m old enough to remember when terrorists were seriously dangerous people who burnt people in cages and chopped off heads. Today, the label applies to dudes in a boat, Maduro, and now a possibly mentally ill mother of three who clearly made several mistakes, not least of which was putting her car in drive and stepping on the gas. Dumb, yes. A criminal, sure. But a domestic terrorist?

ICE seems destined (if not designed) to meet the leftist street agitators with force and cause an escalation; something that would drive Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act. Once done, Trump could deploy active duty military in the US, federalize National Guard units from any state—placing them under federal command, and maintain indefinite deployment with no congressional oversight or time limits. Not to mention the fact that these military units gain law enforcement powers including the power of detention without due process.

If Trump invokes the Insurrection Act the only real limits on his domestic power will equal those he has on the international scene. “His morality. His own mind.”

The Empire Is Here

Trump is set to give the keynote speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos for the third time. This isn’t a confrontation; it’s a coronation. In his first appearance in 2018, he arrived as a supposed populist disrupter but left as a celebrated pragmatist, having successfully wooed the global elite with promises of tax cuts and deregulation. By his second address in 2025, he had dispensed with salesmanship and was issuing direct commands on everything from oil prices to interest rates. Now, in 2026, he returns with his friend Larry Fink as the WEF’s Interim Co-Chair, completing his transformation from an outsider who promised to drain the swamp to the emperor who now commands it. The man who made a career out of thumbing his nose at the global elite will now stand before them, not as a president, but as the CEO of a global empire, wielding unchecked power.

The empire is here, and it’s not even trying to hide anymore. We must now recognize that America has changed in a fundamental way, and the implications are massive. How long before the imperial ambition that seized Venezuela turns its gaze to the vast resources of Greenland and Canada, or decides to ‘stabilize’ Colombia or Nicaragua? And what actions at home—ones we can’t yet envision—will be justified by this new reality? These changes are not theoretical. They are coming. The only question left is what we are prepared to do about it.

Best,

Matt Smith