Fool’s Gold: How Trump’s Populist Return Is a Trap for the Naive

Facilius decipere dulcedine quam dolore

This piece critiques the optimistic writers who continue to champion Donald Trump as a populist force, arguing that they fail to see his capitulation to global financial elites. It warns against blind cheerleading for Trump’s 2025 presidency which is set to advance a globalist agenda cloaked in the rhetoric of populism without actually fulfilling meaningful populist promises. To be clear, the purpose of this post is not to turn a reader anti-Trump, but rather to set very low expectations for the next four years and, ultimately, advocates not to cheerlead for a party or a man but to hold these people to higher standards. “Facilius decipere dulcedine quam dolore” is Latin for “It is easier to deceive with sweetness than with pain.”

People think of a political figure and his supporters as a monolith, but that is almost never the case. Trump ran as a far-right populist during his 2015-2016 run for president, and he was supported by aspects of the elites such as the Clinton’s who encouraged him to run in order to blow up the Republican party (which he had done during his prior run for president in 2000 by undermining the campaign of Pat Buchanan) - everyone including Trump was surprised that he won; he spent his 2017-2020 presidency slowly purging the populist elements, including Steve Bannon, and unsuccessfully trying to accommodate himself to the establishment; he spent 2021-2023 locked in a battle for his life, facing massive criminal and civil charges that could have bankrupted him and put him in prison for life; and then you have the 2024 campaign and the start of Trump’s presidency now, where I contend that Trump completely caved behind closed doors to the upper elites to do whatever they wanted so long as he could win the controlled, rigged election, get rich and avoid prison.¹ I covered the Trump campaign, presidency, and his 2020 run for re-election in this three part series which delves into the details of this narrative. The clue and giveaway that Trump caved in 2024 is that, other than the fact that he was allowed to win a controlled election², Trump’s criminal and civil trials disappeared, the elite-owned media stopped endlessly calling him the equivalent of Hitler and started treating him neutrally to even positively, and the shitlib NPC mobs were placed on idle-mode stand-down — this would literally not have happened unless they were comfortable and accepting of whatever role they now have for Trump.

This framework explains, for example, why he is now chummy with Barack Obama, even though Obama ran the wildly criminal and unpunished Spygate against Trump which made Watergate look like child’s play. They understand, on some level, that they both now work for the same people (Bill Clinton would also be friendly with him but he’s deathly afraid of Hillary, who continues to hold a massive grudge against Trump;

Jon Hampton

had a strong Note on this dynamic). Video of Trump/Obama laughing together is here.

“And that’s when I told the Rothschilds - whatever you want, guys! I’m in. And we danced to hava nagila.”

In 2017 I documented in great detail the specific moves that Trump did as he shifted from populism to globalism, and I don’t plan to do that again this time around. Basically, personnel is policy and the overarching themes of Trump’s personnel choices (which, remember, also have to receive Senate confirmation, and the Senate maybe has 15 populist or populist-adjacent members as explained here) is extreme pro-Zionism (an anti-Zionist Tweet by Matt Gaetz is the reason why his nomination for Attorney General was sunk), pro-cryptocurrency³, pro-technocracy, pro-integration into an Orwellian superstate, and a pseudo-”anti-wokeness”. It’s power derives from the West Coast Straussian nationalist-level counter-elite which I went into detail about here and which

INRI_07

covered well here, which is to a large extent lipstick on a pig as the upper levels of the international financial elite structure remain totally unchanged and unchallenged.

As I explained in my 2025 prediction post and in this recent Note, I expect Trump’s presidency to start with a bang of surface-level populist moves in order to build up capital and momentum among the white populist base and then that capital and momentum will be cashed in during his term in return for war with Iran (or at least a CIA overthrow of Iran), the introduction of central bank digital currencies which will result in the greatest loss of freedom in human history (i.e. the digital panopticon), unlimited H1b Jeet immigration, the furtherance of the Greater Israel project, previously discussed here, along with other actions unsupported by Trump’s base. It also brings to mind this 2023 4chan comment:

As such, various DEI initiatives with great fanfare are being put back in their bottle. Victory, the woke are destroyed! Right? Akshully, DEI was astroturfed elite-sponsored slop from the get-go and, after getting what they wanted out of it, they are phasing it out and moving on to the next stage of their plan. Otherwise how do you explain such a sudden and instantaneous spike in media attention paid to DEI after the corrupt public bailouts of major banks after the 2008 crash? It was designed to shift public attention away from class warfare so the masses would infight along the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation and not focus on the extreme elite theft! Also see Balaji noting in February 2023 that the NYT was transitioning away from woke to statism. He wrote: “NYT is transitioning from wokism to statism. Because the US establishment doesn’t want domestic chaos anymore. They’re in control. So you’ll see less riots calling for abolishing police, more funding for riot police. Less on toxic masculinity, more on troops for foreign wars.” The World Economic Forum is playing their own role in the fake drama, fake-whining, "We Have Lost To Trump!” Uh huh.

Shitlibs, who are unthinking NPC robots who simply do whatever the media and so-called “experts” tell them to, are claiming to be against DEI now because the elite switch for it has been turned off. They are now in zombie idle mode, appearing momentarily "reasonable" until the elites decide to flip another switch on. Nothing underlying this reality has changed.

With that said, let’s now assess what Trump has done in the first couple days of his presidency. In the first day he correctly let the J6’ers out of prison (although I argued that he should have pardoned them before he left office in January 2021 as it was clear that our elites were concocting a giant scam out of 1/6), starting much hyped but transparently ineffective ICE deportations (all the ugly optics with little upcoming results⁴), and unleashed a flurry of executive orders such as a ban on birthright immigration (which will very likely be shot down by the courts; it was immediately blocked), a sham one on banning CBDC research (sham because of the advanced state of CBDC development and because the research on the U.S. version is finished, ready to deploy as soon as the appropriate crisis is unleashed), and a 90 day suspension of foreign aid (including to Palestinians but not for Israel). The Senate suspiciously passed a bipartisan Laken Riley Act “cracking down” on illegal immigration. Meanwhile, Trump has removed sanctions on West Bank settlers and is lifting restrictions on supplying 2,000 lb bombs to Israel. He’s also supported Musk and Vivek Scammerswamy’s intense push for unlimited H1b visa immigration from India, where Musk repeatedly called the anti-immigration Middle America Trump base scum⁵ and which, after massive blowback, he tried to change the topic of conversation by publicly Sieg Heiling like a strange autistic retard. Trump doubled down on his support for massive H1b expansion on January 22. He is also calling for Orwellian superstate integration and has also engaged in perhaps the most egregious piece of public corruption I’ve ever seen with the launch of Trumpcoin (see here and this post by

Michel de Cryptadamus

) along with the cherry on top of a $40 million bribe by Bezos to Trump. On day two of his administration Trump announced support for Project Stargate, a $500 billion project by a performative Trump hater to create the AI infrastructure to create personalized mRNA vaccines, i.e. Operation War Speed on hyperdrive. Did you expect anything else from the “father of the vaccine”?

As I wrote in the above Note:

You can only meet someone at the level of their personal, spiritual, or political development. If you try to explain concepts at a higher level than where they are at, their eyes will glaze over with an almost total lack of understanding. This is why I try to avoid conversations with “normies”, because they don’t get it and it’s a waste of my time.

The current danger is not from the shitlib, who has been rendered mute into a catatonic zombie state, serving as NPCs in idle mode (turned off by their media and “expert” handlers for the moment), but rather from the Trumpenprole who will get ultra-excited by Trump’s surface-level populist moves as he works meaningfully behind the scenes toward establishing the Palantir digital panopticon, regional integration into a continental superstate, and the Greater Israel project, all while engaged in a level of graft that will be unprecedented in American history.

This brings me to the topic of today’s piece. There are certain inflection points that reveal a person’s inner character; whether to support or not support Trump in 2015/2016 was one of them. How to respond to the COVID fraud at it’s peak intensity was another one; the vast majority of public figures failed, including blubbering crybaby Jordan Peterson and “screw your freedoms” “he-man” Arnold Schwarzenegger, while creating new figures worthy of respect like Ian Smith who resisted shutdowns of his gym under intense pressure. Another narrative was one’s position on the fake Russia/Ukraine war, which is controlled on both sides by upper level elites (FYI: Trump will likely “end” the war, although it didn’t happen in 24 hours as he claimed, which will be a Minsk III-style affair and be a total and complete elite victory, despite any propaganda to the contrary, as

Rurik Skywalker

properly explains here). And another inflection point is now but from the opposite perspective: who can keep their wits about them, to soberly analyze a situation without blind cheerleading for one’s side, now that Trump has “won” and the “right wing populists” are “back in control”?

I did a post awhile back on dissident right Substack authors, where I put those that I covered on an optimism/pessimism and level-of-focus (metaphysical, cultural, or political) chart, which was as follows:

Basically, it’s been pretty instructive on how the authors are approaching the Trump presidency. The higher-level pessimist authors have been far more level-headed about it than the optimist authors. I hate to put these guys on blast as I’m friendly with them and my apologies in advance, but

John Carter

,

Librarian of Celaeno

,

Tree of Woe

,

Morgthorak the Undead

etc. have been extremely excited that the right is “back in the saddle” and that the astroturfed woke nonsense is being put away; Tree of Woe was in particular so excited that he called the moment the end of Faustian civilization (which has been ongoing for hundreds of years!) and the start of a new dawn of a radically different civilization (although, to be fair, he later tempered his enthusiasm with more sour 2025 predictions). Their argument is essentially: take your wins where you can get them, politics is a messy affair, wins can build on themselves, you’re too perfectionist and nitpicky and negative and if you had your way you’d never get anything done, etc. After all, there was a binary election with two choices and would you rather have Kamala as president??? (The answer is no, see footnote 1).

Aristotle in Exile

attacks those who sit back in their cushy chairs, criticizing thinkers who think without organizing in real life: What would you have us do, NLF, sit back and do nothing? And hey, maybe they’re right, maybe they’re right; the proof is in the pudding, though, and my contention is that the Trump of 2025 is nothing like the Trump of 2015 or 2016, that there was an orderly handoff of power from globalist left-wing secular Jews to Greater Israel religious right-wing Jews in line with dialectical realities (i.e. America was far too whipped with crushing financial pressure and ultra in-your-face intense woke nonsense; the left had served it’s purpose by putting America on an irreversible path of total destruction, so now the baton has been passed to the next phase of the agenda and the astroturfed woke stuff orderly put back in it’s cage), and the global financial order is in such control, and it’s enemies so confused and shattered, that there is nothing to be done about it at this point other than learning and educating others. By getting excited about the process, by buying into the new narrative one feeds it and gives it energy, as I previously discussed. I prefer to sit back and watch the nonsense unfold. I put my predictions in writing for 2025 here, and we will see who is correct at the end of 2025 and throughout Trump’s term.

Ultimately I don’t care about culture war goyslop, seeing it as always being a complete distraction; we live in a hierarchical global order based around privately owned central bank usury and mass communications used to keep the masses confused and broken as slaves. Trump has totally capitulated to this order, been integrated into it, and no longer serves as any kind of threat to it at all (unlike in 2017 when the upper level elites panicked and revealed themselves to the public; now, they are trying to recede back into the shadows). As J.R.R. Tolkien stated, "The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or, what is most important of all, the banker of the backer."

But just as this is an opportunity for naive writers who buy into the upper elite’s dialectical synthesis to fool their audiences, either intentionally or unintentionally, it is also an opportunity for new figures to stake out a case that Trump is now controlled and his administration will be a failure judged by his original populist promises (to understand what Trump would have to do for his administration to not be a failure in my eyes, see this post). Such new figures include

Paul Cudenec

here,

Leo Hohmann

here,

Geopolitics & Empire

here,

Derrick Broze

here,

dgb

here, and

INRI_07

here. It’s interesting to see how after every new big narrative the people who I’ve ultimately agreed with becomes more selective, more curated - new writers to follow, many old writers to discard.

Rurik Skywalker

has so far been pretty consistently aligned with my perspective.

With that said, I fully expect that only a minority of the right will resist the lure of Trump 3.0 and that the Trump optimist Substackers will continue to be far more popular than the Trump “doomers”. It’s another spiritual test, only this time a spiritual test with a carrot instead of a stick - facilius decipere dulcedine quam dolore - so it’s harder in certain respects. The pull to treat politics as sports is too strong for most - “Support our team against the other team, if you’re not with us you’re against us!” - and furthermore the masses are reactive and have no political memory whatsoever. When they get screwed on a false narrative they very slowly wise up to it, but they forget the lesson when the next narrative comes down from above to hit them from an unexpected direction.

Anyway, I hope you found this post helpful and informative in your own process. As I continuously stress, one needs a grounding mechanism for which to assess endless streams of new information, and the one I recommend is one based on recursive prediction. Make predictions about the future based on your current level of understanding, and then go back and assess whether those predictions turned out to be right or not. No one is perfect, including and especially myself, and I always have a lot of new things to learn and update. We are all finite, fallible, imperfect beings, but the important thing when viewing politics, spirituality or anything else is remaining open minded and flexible to updating one’s worldview if one happens to be wrong. Do not put your faith in anyone else, no one can be your hero and if you try to make someone yours you will always be disappointed. Be your own hero. But to do that requires deep introspection and holding oneself to task.

Ultimately what is required is a transvaluation of values away from egalitarianism and the world uniting as one in overthrowing the parasitical central bank system. One requires hope in order to live, and as a “blackpiller” I personally find hope in Jung’s process of individuation as well as my exploration of gnosticism. Regarding fundamental change, though, I believe it won’t be accomplished through Trump who this time around will, as

Caitlin Johnstone

argues, show the empire unmasked - which, ultimately, may be necessary before more fundamental change is possible.

Thanks for reading.

1. For clarity, I voted for Trump in 2016 enthusiastically, in 2020 reluctantly, and in 2024 at the last second solely because I thought Kamala would let in another 20 million illegals like Biden did during his term if she won. As I stated here, “This isn’t a sports match, you don’t have to pick a side and stick to it loyally. Support public figures to the extent they support the positions you care about, mock and ridicule them to the extent they don’t. Welcome to adulthood.”

2. All elections post-2020 are rigged: between permanent nationwide vote-by-mail overseen by a Marc Elias-approved Democrat post office voting “tsar”, electronic Dominion machine fraud, ubiquitous ballot harvesting, ballot stuffing in key precincts, etc, 2020 marked the end of managed elections and the institution of fundamentally rigged elections.

3. For example, Howard Lutnick, Trump’s Commerce Secretary and CEO of Cantor Fitzgerald, is deeply enmeshed in Tether (which is an enormous and transparent scam). Tether is bailing out the federal government by printing unlimited amounts of dollar equivalents out of thin air and purchasing Treasuries with them - see here and here - in return for the CIA/NSA’s krisha of institutional protection and guarantees of backstopped against losses by the American public, which is these criminal’s end goal here: to trade worthless cryptocurrency for backstopped American fiat, socializing the losses and having the American taxpayer pay for it in the form of massive inflation. Really ugly stuff.

4. It’s actually quite easy to solve the illegal immigration problem without doing any actual evictions if the political will is there: you enforce already existing criminal penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants, you ban the sending of U.S. dollars abroad by illegals, and you cut off all U.S. taxpayer aid to them (they receive thousands of dollars worth of free housing, free debit cards, etc.). It’s easy and simple and doesn’t involve what many will perceive as poor optics.

5. Here is the recording. You can fast forward to 1 hour 49 minutes when Musk really starts going buckwild. Here is a description of what transpired. Even though Musk is a known shill for the elites, previously discussed here, the level of intense vitriol he spewed was still surprising.