The imperial presidency flaunts its technofascist power as liberal illusions collapse

By Weaponized Information | May 5, 2025

Part I: NBC’s Propaganda and the Normalization of Imperial Power

Let’s not waste time with polite euphemisms: NBC’s Meet the Press just broadcast an open confession of executive contempt for the very legal architecture the U.S. claims to uphold. And it did so without blinking. When President Donald Trump declared, in response to Kristen Welker’s question about constitutional accountability, “I don’t know,” he wasn’t fumbling. He was flaunting.

This wasn’t a gaffe—it was a signal. A line drawn in the sand, not just against the Constitution’s text, but against the very liberal illusions of constitutional governance itself. And NBC News, serving faithfully as the imperialist media apparatus it is, wrapped the moment in the bland neutrality of “analysis,” laundering it into mere political theater for bourgeois consumption.

But propaganda doesn’t merely hide in lies. It lurks in what’s left unsaid, in the editorial silences, in the framing of scandal as spectacle rather than structural rot. This was not a story about Trump as an individual anomaly. It was a coordinated PR sanitization of what Weaponized Information identifies as the continuing mutation of the U.S. presidency into an imperial executive—unconstrained by law, answerable only to power.

Luke Garrett, the NBC journalist credited with the write-up, emerges not as a rogue propagandist, but a functionary of the imperialist media apparatus. His prose does not challenge power; it narrates it. His framing does not interrogate technofascism; it reduces it to a quirk of personality. In doing so, Garrett’s piece doesn’t expose executive lawlessness—it normalizes it.

And NBC? Its role is older than Trump himself. It has long served as an ideological organ of capitalist legitimacy, manufacturing consensus for wars abroad and repression at home. The platform’s history of rehabilitating war criminals, sanitizing coups, and lauding imperial violence made it the perfect amplifier for Trump’s soft admission of tyrannical intent. The outlet’s complicity is structural, not circumstantial.

This is enemy propaganda. It functions to mediate the spectacle of constitutional erosion without ever naming the ruling class that benefits from such erosion. It focuses on Trump’s idiosyncrasies while deflecting from the bipartisan imperial presidency’s expansion under Bush, Obama, Biden. It traps critique inside the horizon of liberal “norms” already shattered by material reality.

Our excavation begins here: identifying NBC News and Luke Garrett as producers and amplifiers of imperialist propaganda; exposing the ideological function of their framing; naming the ultimate beneficiary—not a single man in office, but the imperial capitalist state itself, tightening its grip as its legitimacy decays.

The Empire’s Executive: Stripped of Pretenses

We need to clear the fog: Trump’s “I don’t know” wasn’t a rupture—it was a culmination. His shrug at constitutional obligation doesn’t mark a break from U.S. governance; it reveals its telos. The imperial presidency has been eroding legal constraints for decades. From Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus to Roosevelt’s internment camps; from Nixon’s enemies list to Bush’s torture memos; from Obama’s kill lists to Biden’s border militarization—the executive branch has always operated in a tension between law and sovereign exception.

Trump’s refusal to affirm constitutional duty is the latest symptom of a metastasizing imperial executive forged through bipartisan imperial consensus. Every war waged without congressional declaration, every expansion of executive privilege, every “emergency” power invoked to bypass legislative constraint has built this edifice. The presidency Trump inherited wasn’t a neutral vessel—it was a ready-made apparatus for technofascist governance.

This isn’t simply an expansion of power; it’s the consolidation of a political economy of imperial decline. As U.S. global hegemony unravels—challenged by multipolar realignments, BRICS+ de-dollarization, and South-South cooperation—the imperial core turns inward, redirecting repressive apparatuses once reserved for colonies onto its own population. The empire’s counterinsurgency machine, perfected in Baghdad and Kandahar, is recalibrated (once again) for Baltimore and El Paso.

Trump’s deportation rhetoric—promising to expel “millions” without due process—is not just anti-immigrant vitriol. It is technofascist labor recalibration aimed at destabilizing an exploited migrant labor force while signaling loyalty to a disoriented settler working class increasingly positioned as disposable within capitalist restructuring. Every detention center is a node in this apparatus. Every ICE raid is a domestic echo of imperial logistics.

NBC’s report obscures this structural context, presenting Trump’s statements as personal bluster rather than as a coherent extension of technofascist policy. The piece de-links Trump’s constitutional ambivalence from the material realities driving executive overreach: the crisis of imperialism, the collapse of the neoliberal consensus, and the transition from unipolar domination to multipolar contestation.

This context matters. Trump’s “I don’t know” isn’t an apolitical slip—it’s an ideological declaration. It signals to capital that the rule of law is subordinate to the imperatives of imperial survival. It signals to the settler base that “rights” can be suspended when faced with racialized internal enemies. And it signals to the world that U.S. liberalism’s mask has been discarded, revealing the coercive state beneath.

Extracted from NBC’s spectacle is a truth the empire won’t admit: the U.S. Constitution has always been an imperial document—ratified by enslavers, protecting property over people, expanding settler colonial conquest under the veneer of republicanism. Its “rights” were never meant for the colonized, the enslaved, the proletariat. Trump’s disdain isn’t an aberration—it’s a return to form.

By situating this moment historically and materially, we expose the lie that Trump threatens the Constitution. The reality is starker: the imperial presidency, empowered by capital, has already hollowed it out. Trump merely said the quiet part aloud.

From Constitution to Counterinsurgency: Telling the Story from Below

We must reject the illusion that Trump’s constitutional ambivalence represents a “betrayal” of democratic ideals. The U.S. Constitution was never written for the oppressed. It was drafted by property-owning settlers to secure their wealth, codify their dominion, and extend a colonial empire westward. Its guarantees of rights were exclusionary scaffolds—extended selectively to consolidate settler unity while denying sovereignty to Indigenous nations, Africans in bondage, and the colonized world beyond.

Trump’s disdain for constitutional restraint is not an assault on democracy. It is a reassertion of settler-colonial prerogative. His willingness to bypass due process for millions of undocumented migrants signals a return to foundational logics: the racialized sorting of human beings into those entitled to rights and those reducible to labor, waste, or threat. Every deportation is an iteration of the settler’s original theft. Every ICE raid echoes the slave patrol.

NBC’s coverage frames Trump’s statement as shocking, even absurd. But to the colonized, there is nothing absurd about an empire that suspends law when its supremacy is threatened. The imperial state has always held “rights” as provisional—revocable at the moment they interfere with accumulation or control. From the Espionage Act of 1917 to COINTELPRO, from Japanese internment to the Patriot Act, the U.S. state invokes constitutional rights when useful, discards them when inconvenient, and weaponizes them when expedient.

This is why Trump’s statements must be reframed not as personal aberration but as class war from above. His posture toward the Constitution signals a deepening of technofascism: the fusion of monopoly capital, militarized repression, and algorithmic governance to manage imperial decline through coercion and violence. When courts “hold him back,” Trump doesn’t chafe against law—he chafes against any friction slowing the system’s capacity for extraction and domination.

For the immigrant worker targeted by Trump’s mass deportation promise, the question isn’t whether the Constitution protects them. It’s whether the state ever recognized their humanity. For the colonized Black proletariat policed by militarized departments, surveilled by predictive algorithms, and entrapped in debt-peonage, the Constitution functions as a formal parchment beneath which dispossession continues unabated.

We must tell this story not as an anomaly in American democracy but as a clarifying moment in the crisis of imperialism. Trump’s open contempt for constitutional restraint is the symptom of an empire increasingly incapable of mediating class antagonism through liberal institutions. As U.S. global hegemony fractures, the domestic order follows suit, preparing to govern through naked coercion rather than liberal consensus.

In this sense, Trump’s words are not an empty provocation. They are a preview. A preview of a political economy willing to discard liberal facades to maintain imperial relations of domination. A preview of a ruling class consolidating power not through consent but through preemptive repression. A preview of a settler-colonial state collapsing inward, deploying its colonial arsenal against its own proletariat and racialized underclass.

The narrative, reframed from the vantage point of the oppressed, is not a tale of constitutional crisis but of imperial continuity. It is the story of a settler empire reverting to form, clutching its guns and borders as the world beyond its gates demands multipolar sovereignty. It is the story of a constitution that never protected the colonized, now hollowed out to serve the terminal phase of imperial capitalism.

The Call: Build Power Beyond the Constitution

We must be clear: no constitutional amendment, no Supreme Court ruling, no legal appeal will stop the trajectory of this crisis. The Constitution cannot be saved because it was never meant to save the oppressed. It is time to shift from defense to offense, from pleading for recognition to building dual and contending power.

Every raid, every deportation, every eviction, every shuttered clinic is not just an act of policy—it is a battle in an ongoing war against the poor, the colonized, the racialized. The law is not neutral terrain. It is an instrument forged in the furnaces of settler domination. We do not defend the parchment—we defend the people.

To our migrant comrades: organize migrant defense networks. Build sanctuary in defiance of the state. Link your struggle to the global working class under siege from the same imperial enemy. From the farms to the factories to the kitchens to the care centers, you are not alone. Your struggle is global.

To our Black proletarian comrades: deepen the work of mutual aid, copwatch, and community defense. Every neighborhood clinic, every food co-op, every bail fund is a node of dual and contending power. Remember: the police were never “reformed”—they are the standing army of settler-colonial pacification. We cannot reform the occupying army. We must build the power to disarm it.

To our white comrades who seek solidarity: defect. Break ranks with the settler state. Reject the wages of whiteness that buy you crumbs in exchange for complicity. Refuse to be foot soldiers of repression. Commit your labor, resources, and bodies to the abolition of the empire, not its defense.

And to all of us, across the faultlines of race, gender, nation: the terrain is shifting. The crisis of imperialism is an opportunity. We are not entering fascism—we are living technofascism, the digital, financial, and militarized mutation of imperial capitalism in decline. It cannot be voted away. It cannot be sued into compliance. It must be overturned.

This moment demands revolutionary clarity. It demands we stop mistaking the enemy’s masks for friends. It demands we stop clinging to the dead husks of liberal promises. It demands we begin building the institutions of dual and contending power: autonomous economies, people’s defense, liberated media, revolutionary education, mass organizations disciplined for struggle.

Trump’s words are a gauntlet. Not a surprise. Not an aberration. A warning. The settler state is preparing to discard even the illusion of universal rights. Our response must be to accelerate our rupture with the settler state.

The time for reformist dreams is over. The time for defensive petitions is over. The time is now for revolutionary preparation.

As the empire hardens into technofascism, let us harden our resolve. As they weaponize the Constitution against the oppressed, let us weaponize solidarity against the empire.

The task is not to save their Constitution.
The task is to build the power to bury it.