Analysis
The stress test of deadly power
Every word Trump utters is a stress test of the limits of his domain. After each stress test, the limits give way a little, the domain is a little broader, and the game can start again. Netanyahu has been doing the same thing for longer.
They call it a light free-fall bomb, but there is nothing light about the Mk-82. It weighs 500 pounds (about 230 kilograms), is more American than apple pie – proudly manufactured exclusively by a General Dynamics factory in Texas – and has been in circulation since the Vietnam War. And then the Gulf Wars, right up to Gaza. An evergreen feature of all wars, so many we stopped counting them, which does not mean their numbers have stopped increasing.
It was this American light bomb – dropped by the Israeli army, which is its most generous end user worldwide – that wreaked havoc on the internet café on the Gaza seafront. Thousands of Mk-82s have already been delivered to Tel Aviv, and thousands more will be delivered after a further supply decision made a few days ago. Every administration in Washington has sent them to Israel, some presidents more than others. Joe Biden stopped the deliveries last May after a particularly brutal massacre in Rafah, but that only lasted a couple of months. Donald Trump is now sending them with unparalleled enthusiasm. He is demanding the Nobel Peace Prize and is angling to broker an agreement, but he is playing for one of the teams, and that is simply a given.
Trump and Netanyahu are two sides of the same coin. The UN is asking countries and companies to stop being complicit in genocide, but if there is one main accomplice, it is in Washington. The “world's most powerful democracy” and the “only democracy in the Middle East” are led with an iron fist by similar political animals who complement each other, and neither seems to attach much significance to the term democracy, which was the common ground on which this synergy between the two states was built, with few precedents in history – including military history: since 1946, Israel has been by far the main recipient of American military aid. Vietnam comes in second place, which cost the U.S. half as much, the entire war included. Trump and Netanyahu have made the erosion of democratic norms their code of conduct for exercising power.
At least the democratic norms as we thought we knew them, the written and unwritten rules we called liberal democracy – but after these terrifying years, we will have to invent other terms, update our vocabulary and perhaps our practices, to either give more significance to what we call democracy or witness its change into something else. We will manage this task, but it will not be a pleasant moment. If there is a common thread in Donald Trump's erratic and blatantly irrational behavior, it is the constant pressure on the limits that should circumscribe his power.
Whether it’s tariffs imposed and then withdrawn in a merrily unpredictable sequence, intimidating media or arresting judges, threats against central bankers or former billionaire allies, peddling cryptocurrencies for his own interest or pocketing Ukrainian minerals for the nation’s coffers, every single word Trump utters is a stress test of the limits of his domain. After each stress test, the limits give way a little, the domain is a little broader, and the game can start again. Netanyahu has been doing the same thing for longer, with the same nationalist-populist ideological basis, with the same tension tending towards his own self-preservation as his sole purpose. One of them defies his Supreme Court every day and the other has appointed one tailored to his needs, but the momentum is the same.
The independence of the judiciary and the media, the activities of civil society groups, the freedom of universities and artists, the rights of minorities, electoral and legislative procedures, every aspect of the mechanisms of human coexistence that could counter the impulses of those who use their election by the people as a cudgel, are all being subjected to brutal twists and turns. The price is the blood of tens of thousands of Palestinians, as well as the lives of tens of thousands of Latin American deportees, phenomena that are certainly different but united by the manufacture of a common enemy. Trump and Netanyahu are the spirit of the times. And we live in terrible times.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/lesplosivo-stress-test-del-potere on 2025-07-04