Finding the Real in Reality Distortion
In a strange sense, Trump is a Peace President
I spent a lot of time reading non-fiction every week, but I must say that I prefer reading fiction.
That is why I enjoyed reading the US National Security Strategy from November 2025.
Even though the document describes a fictitious world, it brims with legitimate insights into the mind of MAGA America and serves as a timely and relevant reminder for European countries, and other countries, to de-Americanize their digital infrastructure as quickly as possible.
De-Americanization does not only mean changing the location of cloud servers from US to Europe. It means banning Meta’s services, finding viable alternatives to digital services like Snapchat, Netflix, YouTube, and ChatGPT, exchanging every layer of our tech stack in favor of sovereign solutions, including training our own foundation models. All this will essentially change how we live and govern our societies. However, it’s not a matter of choice, but of necessity, and MAGA America is straightforwardly asking Europe to do it.
MAGA America envisions a tripolar world where Europe has no power. From a recent Substack post by Anne Applebaum:
“Nearly a year ago, I heard an American woman tell a large room full of people that the recently inaugurated US president was going to bring about world peace. Implying that she had special links to the new administration, she explained that Trump, Putin and Xi Jin Ping were going to divide the planet into three spheres of influence. The US would control the Western hemisphere, China would control Asia, Russia would control Europe. A pact between the three great powers would then prevent future war. “
The American woman Applebaum cites believes in a world governed by force. So does Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor, Stephen Miller. As he recently told CNN reporter Jack Tapper:
“We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world since the beginning of time.”
In Trump’s National Security Strategy, the phrase “peace through strength” is mentioned several times. The subtext of this MAGA slogan is of course: “peace through force”. Achieving peace means investing heavily in the military (+$1 trillion), rewarding loyal servants to the people in power, punishing those who disobey, and undermining dissent.
In MAGA America, unlike a democracy, two opposing viewpoints cannot co-exist. Ultimately, the opposition are faced with a choice: either you conform or you die. In critical situations, you may literally die if you resist the authority of those in power as recent video footage of a murdered woman in Minnesota shows. The idea is that without resistance, there will be peace. And so, MAGA America’s logic is to fight the resistance, until peace can finally be achieved. Strong resistance is met with strong force. If one spent many hours a day on X and Fox News this logic presumably make sense.
The gaping hole in MAGA America’s peace strategy is a simple lesson that most of us learned through our social experiences in school: The craziest children, are always the ones with strict parents. In a democracy, the government and the parliament metaphorically serve the role of a father and a mother. If the children are expected to act in a certain way, and don’t have the parent’s permission to express their true personalities, they will eventually go insane. Unless, of course, they become so repressed and traumatized that they let go of all resistance and agency, as if their souls had left their bodies. In that case, they will likely not be psychologically capable to make significant contributions to the MAGA American economy.
I hope all American citizens who oppose the MAGA American strategy, will practice peaceful resistance, make use of all democratic means to protest, and vote against MAGA in November 2026 and 2028. Power through violence, force, aggression, and war, were part of a language practiced by the boomer generation which Trump and higher powers of the US are representatives of. But future generations, if there are to be any, will not speak this language.