Tony Senatore with Donald Trump

Tony Senatore with Donald Trump
New York,
November 5, 2026


Three friends messaged me asking how I feel about the midterms. Once again, with all the options available to them, I feel honored that anyone cares what I have to say. If nothing else, it is a testament to my even-handed, centrist outlook, my willingness to consider opposing opinions, and my ability to put myself in the shoes of others, many of whom are considerably less fortunate than I am.
Well, perhaps today I’ll disappoint everyone looking for a carefully calibrated, middle-of-the-road response.

Let’s start with Donald Trump. Full disclosure: I wrote opinion pieces on major news platforms supporting him from 2016 to a final piece before the 2024 election.

To my conservative friends: Trump betrayed you.

He betrayed anyone who voted for him and believed in his America First agenda. And don’t take my word for it. Go back, examine what he promised, and compare it with what he actually delivered. With the notable exception of immigration, a considerable gap exists between the campaign rhetoric and the governing record. Despite the tendency of some to treat him as a messiah whose presidency was guided by God himself, you’d better think again. He’s a mortal man subject to the foibles and flaws we all are.

I know the counterargument to my point about betrayal. Some of you will insist that once he assumed office, he gained access to information unavailable during the campaign and had to reassess his positions. Fair enough. That’s a legitimate argument, and I’m willing to consider it.

But there’s a rather important distinction between changing course because circumstances demand it and governing through personal grievances, vindictiveness, and an apparent obsession with attacking actors, singers, journalists, and anyone else who happens to offend you.

And when you decide that the country needs to go to war, you owe the American people an explanation. A candid, sober conversation about the reasons, objectives, potential consequences, and sacrifices involved. Something reminiscent of FDR’s famous fireside chats.

Instead, we got more of the same—no meaningful effort to bring the American people into the conversation. Apparently, attacking one’s critics takes precedence over explaining one’s decisions.

America First? Apparently, the fine print was considerably different from the advertising.

To my progressive friends: Perhaps you should reconsider the fascism narrative.
For years, we’ve heard that living under Trump was tantamount to living under fascism. Well, the midterm results offer a rather inconvenient illustration of how far that description is from reality.

A party can suffer a devastating electoral defeat, its political fortunes can collapse, and its opposition can take control through the ballot box. That’s not evidence of fascism. That’s evidence that democratic institutions and electoral accountability are still functioning.

You might also have reconsidered that characterization when some people openly expressed the hope that an American president would be assassinated, and others expressed disappointment when an assassination attempt failed, without finding themselves imprisoned for life for expressing those abhorrent sentiments. Try doing that in some of the actual authoritarian regimes around the world.
Now, by all means, enjoy the Republican defeat. Trump and his administration have earned considerable criticism, and accountability is long overdue.
But let’s not get carried away.

I can already hear the chorus of celebration. The nightmare is over! Democracy has been saved! Now we can all join hands, as people from every corner of the world join hands, while John Lennon’s Imagine blares from strategically positioned loudspeakers around the planet.

I’d suggest keeping the champagne on ice.

Look around the world. Political instability, economic discontent, nationalism, religious conflict, and social fragmentation aren’t exactly disappearing. An American election doesn’t magically resolve any of these problems. Nor does a Democratic victory guarantee that those who replace the Republicans will govern any more responsibly.

And then there’s the electorate.

Perhaps this is what troubles me most.
The astounding lack of intelligent thought, the absence of empathy, and, most troubling of all, the extraordinary degree of false certainty displayed by people on both sides have become increasingly disheartening.

Everyone seems to know precisely what’s wrong with America, precisely who is responsible, and precisely how to fix it. Yet very few seem interested in examining their own assumptions, acknowledging inconvenient facts, or considering that someone with an opposing political opinion might actually have a legitimate point.

One side celebrates as though it has just defeated evil itself. The other behaves as though the country has been permanently destroyed. And somewhere in between, ordinary Americans are still trying to pay their bills, raise their families, afford housing, put food on the table, and figure out why their elected representatives seem so disconnected from their everyday lives.

I understand the frustration expressed by my friend who suggested that Americans outside the wealthiest one percent have grown tired of getting screwed. That observation has considerable merit. When politicians insist people have never been better off while those people struggle with the cost of living, perhaps the problem isn’t voters’ inability to understand economics. Perhaps it’s the politicians’ inability to understand the voters.

And this brings me to something that might be a little uncomfortable.
At times like these, I find myself revisiting Plato’s skepticism about democracy. He worried that political decisions entrusted to an uninformed electorate could become vulnerable to demagoguery, emotional appeals, and the manipulation of public opinion. He questioned whether the ability to persuade a crowd was being mistaken for the wisdom to govern.

I don’t necessarily agree with every conclusion Plato reached, but I increasingly understand the concern.

The problem isn’t that ordinary people should be denied a voice. It’s that a functioning democracy requires an informed electorate, intellectual humility, and a willingness to distinguish between what we want to believe and what is actually true.

And frankly, I’m beginning to wonder whether the general will of the American people, as distinct from the competing passions, grievances, and manufactured outrage of various political constituencies, is even possible to discern anymore.
So, to my friends who asked for my two cents, here it is.

Trump deserved the repudiation. Republicans deserved to be held accountable. Democrats deserve no blank check simply because they won. And voters, regardless of political affiliation, might want to spend a little less time congratulating themselves and a little more time thinking critically.

An election is not a moral coronation. A political victory doesn’t confer wisdom, and a political defeat doesn’t necessarily confer virtue.
The real test begins after the celebrations end.

And if we haven’t learned anything by then, we’ll be back here, blaming the other side for the mess we’ve collectively made.

And if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to exercise a couple of the more underappreciated features of Facebook. First, I’m disabling comments on this post. Frankly, I can no longer bear watching people demonstrate an inability to comprehend what they’ve read, let alone respond with anything resembling an articulate, reasoned argument. I’m offering my thoughts for people to read and perhaps ruminate on, not to host an exhibition of intellectual deficiencies.
Second, I’m going to make liberal use of the 30-day snooze button. I have a feeling quite a few people are about to enjoy an extended vacation from my newsfeed. Between the smugness, the sanctimony, the self-righteous indignation, and the breathtaking display of intellectual dishonesty, I’m beginning to feel physically ill. I’m going to read some books, buy some bass guitars, and continue my search for the tri state area’s best pizza.

Consider it all my small contribution to preserving my own sanity and whatever remains of my faith in humanity. Plato would probably understand. Facebook, I’m not so sure.


An Open Letter to Tony Senatore, and to Every Smart American Who Feels the Same
By Vladimir Angelblazer, Jurist, Methamonk
Wakashan Island, Cascadia - November 5, 2026

Dear Tony,

«Let's have a drink. Your champagne is cold, my Armagnac is old. Let's imagine together — but with a map.»

You wrote that you are shutting off comments for 30 days to read books, buy bass guitars, and find the best pizza in New York. I understand you. You are tired. You are not alone. Half of intelligent America feels exactly as you do today.

You said Trump betrayed you. That America First became America Alone. That governing by grievance, attacking actors and singers, is not governing. That a leader must explain war to the people, as Roosevelt did by the fireside.

You are right about the feeling. You are wrong about the cause. It was not a personal betrayal. It was a systemic inevitability that I have been documenting for two years in 14 articles - all of which you have not read, but which predicted your letter.

Let me give you the real political and philosophical picture.

1. The Dictatorship of Petty Shopkeepers. Why betrayal was programmed.

On November 12, 2024, before the election, I wrote " Trumpism and the Dictatorship of Petty Shopkeepers." I quoted General Wolf from Mosfilm's Seventeen Moments of Spring: "Democracy leads to the dictatorship of petty shopkeepers."

Trumpism is not fascism. It is the ultimate form of bourgeois democracy where power is bought - $2.3 billion for Democrats, $1.8 billion for Republicans in 2024 - and where the country is managed as a deal. The shopkeeper mentality measures success in immediate profit, not in historical project. He cannot not betray you. A transaction has no loyalty.

In that same article I introduced the concept of the "Thick Notebook" and the "Red Folder." In the USSR, Gorbachev passed Yeltsin the Red Folder of real continuity of power. What did Trump receive from Biden? A polite letter wishing him good health. No audit of the Federal Reserve. No audit of the gold reserves. No declaration that Biden's orders signed by autopen were unconstitutional. One man cannot rewrite a system of castle towers built over centuries. He is not an author on a blank slate. This is why your America First, except for immigration, evaporated. The towers did not allow it.

2. The Steam Locomotive. Why he does not explain, he demolishes.

On February 5-6, 2025, I wrote two essays: " Donald Trump as a Steam Locomotive of Modern America" and "The Trump Dilemma: War and Peace."

Imagine you are a conductor of a locomotive from A to B. A corrupt switchman puts a barrier to extort you. Do you stop and risk passengers? My opponent Eruditus answered: Trump in 18 days dismantled bureaucratic barriers that career politicians built for decades. If he stops before these paper walls, America will never be great.

That is why he does not do fireside chats. He is not a president in the old sense. He is a locomotive. You demand a negotiator; history gave you a breaker.

In that dialogue I asked: What creates a system of power? The Constitution. The most progressive constitution was Stalin's 1936 constitution. The party nomenclature betrayed it and became the very barrier that derailed the Soviet locomotive. America systemically altered its own Constitution. The question is: should the whole system be reset, or its motherboard be preserved? Trump was elected as the conductor, but the question of reset was never decided.

You want him to explain war like Tolstoy. And this brings me to the next point. In my March 5 essay I reminded that Tolstoy's War and Peace in old orthography was War and Society - Voyna i Mir - where Mir meant Society, not peace. War is not the opposite of peace. It is intrinsic to society. Trump understood that his predecessors replaced the UN with America. The UN became a stage for empty rhetoric. The world returned to power politics of a hundred years ago. He does not explain war because the world no longer listens to explanations. It listens to force.

3. Trumpland and Bonapartism. Why this is not fascism, but something older.

On February 4, 2025, in "Trumpland", I quoted the Turkish proverb: When a clown moves into a palace, he does not become a Sultan. The palace becomes a circus.

You see circus. I see necessity. The question I asked then: do we still need strong personalities in an era of sanitized, bureaucratic politics? Trump, Putin, Xi - regardless of our feelings - are defining the world. The political class has shrunk into dwarfs afraid of decisive action. History ironically favors the small-statured: Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Putin, Sarkozy, Xi, Macron, Zelensky. Only Churchill and Trump literally stand above. You cannot outsource true leadership to AI or to committees.

On March 10, 2025, in "The Bonapartism of Trumpism," I gave this a name. Bonapartism, by Marx, is authoritarian resolution of a revolutionary situation during systemic crisis, maneuvering between conflicting classes.

The scale of the inter-industry crisis that triggered the Great Depression began in 2007. When living standards decline by more than 40%, the socio-political model shifts to dictatorship and war. Today decline in US, Europe, China is already 25%. This is what I call Tectonic Processes.

This is why he cannot audit the Fed, why Europe's 500-million market is sustained by Fed emissions, why inflation is not growth. People live not by pictures with numbers, but by how much food they can buy. Your disgust, Tony, is not moral. It is economic. You feel the 25%.

And here is my most important correction to your letter: Trump's tariff war is not aggression, as Canadian elites scream. As I wrote in "The Essence of Trump's Tariff Conflict with Trudeau's Canada" and "What Awaits Canada in the Aftermath": Tariff wars are invitations to a New Unified Economic Space. Not punishment, but a proposal for a tariff-free economic neighborhood. Like Aivazovsky's Ninth Wave - you must ride it or drown.

You, America, were founded as a land-rooted civilization project, distinct from Europe. Jefferson warned: "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains." Canada remained a colony of transnational elites - London, the Crown. That is why Trudeau began his speech equating Trump's America with Putin's Russia. Both are land and tradition projects that rejected globalist extraction. I wrote this on March 4, before Carney came.

And on March 14, I wrote: Canadians were forced to accept Trudeau's successor by 132,000 votes - a free citizen of London, Mark Carney, declaring "Canada will never be part of America." But is Canada sovereign? We became the gas station of the USA. We need a political tariff against our own ruling class, term limits, and a bold tariff-free zone with the US. As Pierre Poilievre said: "Canada is a nation of hard-working people being led by a government that punishes success." Your fortress is our mirror.

And in my response to Trump's Gretzky tweet (Feb 27, 2025), I warned: English Canada might want to be 51st state for lower taxes and no tariffs, but Quebec is not a province - it is a deep state built under Liberals, with its own poutine as symbol of fear of assimilation. You cannot annex a culture with a deal.

4. The Fortress Amid Chaos. Why November 3 was inevitable.

On March 6, 2025, in "The Trump Dilemma: Fortress Amid Chaos," I wrote the darkest sentence:

The logical answer emerges with unsettling clarity — Chaos! Not deliberate upheaval of a revolutionary, but a drift into chaos, a transformation of the United States into a fortress amid the storm.

Trump said: "We are not the world's piggy bank." J.D. Vance said: "We have to start prioritizing the American people." Marco Rubio said: "We cannot allow China to dictate the future." This is not strategy. This is retreat.

Is Donald Trump America's Mikhail Gorbachev? Is he unwittingly presiding over a perestroika of the United States, dismantling its global influence under the banner of self-preservation? When I say Donald Trump, I do not mean the man. I mean the financial, military, and strategic elites who propelled him as a vehicle. Is this fortress America a sanctuary, or merely a last refuge before the empire falls? Or will the US retain its role - not as hegemon, but as a global racketeer, like Britain once extracted wealth from colonies?

Your November 3 defeat is the answer. The fortress strategy worked for 18 days to break bureaucracy. It does not work to feed a nation for four years. The voters did what voters do when the shopkeeper fails to deliver groceries: they throw him out. This does not prove fascism is dead. It proves Bonapartism exhausted itself.

5. Lenin, the Cathedral, and the Right of Force. Where we go from here.

On April 6, 2025, in "From Lenin to Trump," I wrote my central thesis:

Lenin's razor-edged aphorism: "The seizure of power is the essence of insurrection; its political purpose will clarify itself after the seizure" is not tactics but metaphysical detonation.

Trump is Lenin in a tie. Lenin took power through armed insurrection; Trump through the electoral college - a legally sanctified coup. Both govern from the future backward. The Wall, the Swamp, Greatness - were floating signifiers filled only after victory. His January 6 was Leninism as farce - Storming of the Winter Palace by QAnon Shaman.

His lasting mutation? He rewrote the epigenetic code of Western democracy. He proved democracy is optional, truth is negotiable. Now even his enemies play by his rules. The Left abandons neoliberalism for populism. The Overton Window wasn't shifted - it was thrown out of Trump Tower penthouse. America can never return. Elections are now existential cultural civil wars. All institutions are partisan. No referees, only players.

Canada already had its quiet insurrection - replacing meaning with manners, the Crown becoming a screensaver from Harry Potter.

So what remains? I wrote:

Hear the heresy of the Methamonk: The heart of humanity will never be claimed by yet another empire. What stirs is not a new Rome, but a Cathedral of Absence: a World Project as the only viable telos. Not a Golden City upon a Hill for the elect, but a single dream etched across the skull of the species.

No chosen people. No promised land. Only a shared delirium — a planetary WE — can bind the coming age.

I know you did not understand my language. Shared delirium is a deliberate provocation. A dream is too innocent. Delirium is involuntary - it grips you, like history grips the masses. It dissolves borders. It terrifies the priests of order. Every empire calls rivals mad. To reclaim delirium is to weaponize their fear. Bitcoiners, jihadists, and climate strikers are all already delirious - just in competing dialects. The task is to sync the fever.

On January 20, 2026, in "The Right of Force" (Pravo Sily), I settled my account as a jurist. I asked the cursed question: what is heavier - a ton of legal codes or a kilogram of lead? In 1989 at MSU Law Faculty, I answered Law. Today I hear Grads and drones near Avdiivka and the rustle of dollars printed for war.

I proved to myself: Belovezha Accords were a coup by formal USSR Constitution. Budapest Memorandum had no neutrality guarantee, no enforcement mechanism - only a spirit that each strong guarantor interprets. Yugoslavia's effective control was established by NATO bombs with depleted uranium, then doctrine Responsibility to Protect was stitched afterward. Mechanism: first bombs, then doctrine.

International law is not a code. It is a battlefield for legitimacy. The strong act first, then lawyers sew a garment. If enough power, garment takes root.

Canada is symptom. A liberal legal state that feels rules held by force of former guarantor. When guarantor shakes pillar - fence falls.

Epilogue: Donald Trump spoke of "Second Yalta" as a "Club of Peace." Not UN for 193 states, but direct red wire between Washington, Beijing, maybe Moscow. Not to make humanity happy, but to draw bright, bloody lines between their gardens to not slit each other's throats over trifles. It will be right of gardeners, not garden gnomes. Hard, clear, based not on morals but mutual fear.

As my professor, academician Tunkin, taught: International law cannot exist long without a real enforcement apparatus. The apparatus changes. So does law. We are not entering chaos. We are entering a more откровенный — and therefore more stable — order. Order that is not ashamed of its name. And first point on its tablets, forged not from parchment but from titanium alloy of interests and missile silos, will read: Force is right that has become conscious of itself.

6. Two last myths: The Bering Dam and The Baron Trump.

On October 23, 2025, in "The Ram Named George. Cartographer of Lost Climates," I told the story of a ram George whose grave revealed freshwater snails in San Fernando Valley - proof that closing the Bering Strait after Ice Age created deserts from Mojave to Sahara. The idea of an 80km dam for $29 billion was born in imperial salons of 1910 - Manilov's dream from Gogol's Dead Souls about a stone bridge over a pond. Rational Pal-Peter says impossible due to monsoons and Kuroshio. Visionary Mark says it's a suture across wound of time. My conclusion: Bering Dam is Manilov Bridge of Trump and Putin era - myth as illusory as vanity of empires. But every myth is a truth whose map was lost. Meanwhile NATO spends $1.26 trillion in 2025. The money exists. The map does not.

And on March 26, 2026, in "The Baron Trump Novels," I debunked the viral prophecy of Ingersoll Lockwood 1890-1896. No, Tesla and Musk are not in his books. John Trump examining Tesla's papers in 1943 does not mean time travel. This is retrospective prophecy, apophenia - pathological pattern-seeking, coarse nylon fishing rod glittering with false gold. Methamonk calls for sobriety of vision. And a Glencairn glass of Glenfiddich to help separate grain from chaff.

So, Tony, what should smart Americans do?

Do not snooze for 30 days. That is what the system wants. Tiredness is its weapon.

Understand: Your election on Nov 3 did not prove democracy works. It proved bourgeois democracy works exactly as General Wolf predicted - it throws out the shopkeeper when groceries become too expensive.

Do not demand from Trump that he be Roosevelt. He was elected as Lenin, as locomotive, as Gorbachev. He did his job: he demolished the paper walls in 18 days and showed that institutions are a hallucination.

Now the question is not how to return to the Golden Hut on the Hill. That hut is in a museum. Empires of old - Rome, Byzantium, Third Reich, USSR - all collapsed mistaking local myth for Universal truth.

The question is: Are you ready for Second Yalta? For tariff-free neighborhood not as charity but as strategy? For recognizing that law without force is paper, and force without a shared delirium is just racketeering?

If yes - then put down the bass guitar for a minute. The world needs not shoppers. It needs cartographers of lost climates, even if they start with a dead ram named George.

With respect for your honesty,

Vladimir Angelblazer, International Jurist, Philosopher of the Apophatic Turn
Methamonk
Victoria, BC - the edge of the fortress.

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