Trump breaks bad

And lessons from the 14th Century

Jan 11, 2026

“I’m in the empire business”. Walter White, Breaking Bad

Walter White took the name “Heisenberg”who came up with the Uncertainty Principle— the core of which is that the more precisely you know a particle’s position, the less you know about its momentum and vice versa. The more Trump articulates a position, the less you know where’s he going next . That’s true of the US, too .

Uncertainty. Unpredictability. Contradictions. Yet, a trajectory.

The government of the United States doesn’t want peace. It wants to exploit its system of exploitation, of pillage, of hegemony through war. It wants peace. But what’s happening in Iraq? What happened in Lebanon? In Palestine? What’s happening? What’s happened over the last 100 years in Latin America and in the world? And now threatening Venezuela — new threats against Venezuela, against Iran?

Who said this? Me? Brian Berletic?

No, this was spoken by Hugo Chávez, the first president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, in an address to the UN General Assembly in 2006.

Donald Trump is doing nothing new —he is just doing it more openly, more obviously, and more stupidly. He thinks he can get away with it because previous presidents did.

But previous presidents always pretended their actions were about “freedom”, “democracy”, ”human rights’ and the like-- even “rules-based order” and “international law”, Commuters on the way to work, read their words and thought, “Oh yeah, I like those things”. They had other things to think about, like what to have for lunch.

Trump now just says his actions are just about resources – not that the US doesn’t have a lot of resources, but exploiting them takes effort and costs money — it is much easier to just steal resources that belong to others and somehow get them to pay for it.

The US is very, ~~very~~ hungry . It is like an old lion that can no longer hunt as it used to and resorts to raiding villages – pigs, goats, and the villagers, too. It is an apex predator no longer at the apex.

It needs to be put down.

But Trump failed recently in Venezuela. Chavismo has survived—because of what it hs given to Venezuela, a record of liberation, almost unequalled in history.

And the Gringo challenge has made the country stronger. Venezuela is now unified against the Gringos – even those who do not subscribe to Chavez’s concepts.

Chavismo will defeat the US because it has moral power. Trump’s America has lost that, not that it ever really had it.

Asabiyyah

Ibn Khaldun, the 14th century Islamist sociologist made an important distinction —-that power is not just what you have —weapons/money—as Americans seem to think— but how you are connected morally and socially). When the moral bond that is asabiyyah breaks even huge empires break too.

The Chavistas have that asabiyyah.

Do Americans?

They kill people outside the US capriciously and fund genocide. Inside the US, masked and armed agents kill defenseless protestors.

If Americans have asabiyyah, it is not as a country, it as people but in their local communities. The country will die - but those communities will survive and thrive.

Small is big.