American politics has recently passed catastrophic equilibrium. On Twitter, Donald Trump performs his authoritarianism by labelling the news media as ‘the enemy of the American people’ (Trump, 2017a). Views like these are not to be lightly dismissed. As Trump proclaims, ‘more than 90% of Fake News Media coverage of me is negative’, and so, for him, ‘Social Media [is] the only way to get the truth out’ (Trump, 2017b). This manoeuvre is but one in a series of coordinated efforts by the Trump administration to routinely delegitimize media organizations like MSNBC and CNN to assert that he is the only valid source of information.

This technique has been very effective. Consider how the New York Times published a story based upon an 18-month investigation into Trump's taxes, which include tax fraud and financial losses throughout the 1980s of $1.17 billion (Barstow and Buettner, 2018). But while the reporters were later awarded a Pulitzer Prize for their journalism, the story effectively dropped from the news cycle.

Meanwhile the Trump administration is obsessed with national security, defined primarily in narrow terms to target refugees and migrants from Central America. Demonized and dehumanized through indefinite detention in concentration camps along the US southern border by lionized state security forces, these refugees are spoken of as a plague to be necessarily removed if the American nation-state is to prosper again. Yet in stark contradistinction to migrants being denied human rights, white supremacists have been embraced as a core constituency in Trump's electoral base. These conjoined beliefs now routinely find expression in the state. But it should not be surprizing as the officials Trump has appointed are the ideological kith and kin of South African apartheid-era securocrats. Staff appointments of this sort are to be expected, because, in plain terms as Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said of Trump, “He's a race-baiting, xenophobic, religious bigot” (CNN, 2015).

Having set the stage for the mainstreaming of devastating neo-Confederate politics, sadly, but to no one's surprise, right-wing stochastic terrorism is on the rise in the United States (Anti-Defamation League, 2019; Greenblatt and Selim, 2019).