Venezuela, Greenland, Minnesota: The Monarchical Theory That Explains Everything

Brad Onishi: Welcome to Straight White American Jesus. I'm Brad Onishi, author of the forthcoming American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Making America into a Monarchy. I'm also the founder of Axis Mundi Media. Today I want to talk about Venezuela and Greenland. I want to talk about what's happening in Minnesota, and I want to do that by discussing a new theory that I think explains what's happening in this country—what's happening with ICE and immigration and the cruelty, what's happening with the threat to invade Greenland, tariffs, and all of those things. It's called neo-royalism, and I think it will help you understand Trumpism in ways you never have before. Lot to cover. Let's do it.

All right, y'all, welcome to 2026. We have exciting plans for this year for our show. One of them is we're going to be moving our interviews to Sundays, and we'll start that at the end of January, and you're going to hear a kind of chorus of voices in those interviews. We're going to be looking at them as a kind of Sunday long form, and they'll be expanded to more like an hour or around there. And you'll hear me, Brad, but you'll also hear Leah Payne, who's the host of Spirit and Power and just an award-winning podcaster and author, somebody who you've heard on this show many times. And also Annika Brock Schmidt, who is somebody you've heard on this show, is an author and a journalist, and to me, one of the most insightful voices on these topics around. So you'll hear us switching off every Sunday coming up in 2026.

We also have Reign of Error, hosted by Sarah Posner, the wonderful veteran journalist who wrote Unholy, and we'll be doing deep dives into news headlines. And so she's going to be balancing following the news cycle with deep dives into the topics in the news cycle. The first episode is January 22nd with Anthea Butler. They'll be talking about racism and the new Trump regime one year after his inauguration as the 47th president. You don't want to miss that. You can find the link in the show notes. That's Reign of Error with Sarah Posner. More to come from us, but those are the things I wanted to tell you about today.

All right, there's a paper out that has gotten some attention, and folks have been discussing it, and it just so happens to line up with quite a bit of the material from my forthcoming book. I have a book coming out in September. Pre-orders will be available soon, and that book is called American Caesar: How Theocrats and Tech Lords Are Turning America into a Monarchy. There's a new paper out by Stacie Goddard of Wellesley College and Abraham Newman of Georgetown University, and they put forth a theory called neo-royalism—as in the royal family, neo-royalism. The paper is called "Further Back to the Future: Neo-Royalism, the Trump Administration and the Emerging International System." And I want to go through that today to, I think, make sense of what's happening in Minnesota right now, what's happening with the threats to take over Greenland, or invade Greenland, colonize Greenland, what happened in Venezuela, so much more—the destruction of American institutions, DOGE. I think this theory is really helpful, and it actually mirrors and maps on to so much of what I write about in my forthcoming book about monarchy.

And so to me, this was a really great opportunity to dig in. One of the claims that Goddard and Newman are making is the same claim I make in my book, which is this: we often think of Christian nationalists as wanting to go back to the 1950s—a time before civil rights, the civil rights movement, before queer liberation movements really took hold, before Stonewall, The Feminine Mystique, before all of the gains that were made in the 60s and 70s in terms of social and civil rights for marginalized communities. And that is bad enough. That's a retrograde vision. It's a racist and xenophobic vision. It's a misogynist vision. Talked about that on this show forever, and I talked about it in my other book, Preparing for War, quite explicitly.

What I argue in my new book, and what I think Newman and Goddard are arguing as well, is that the vision now is really to go back further than the 1950s to something like the 1650s. And the goal is to find something that goes back further beyond American democracy to another system, and to institute something that looks nothing like the liberal democratic order that we have come to know in this country, and that has come to really take hold in the world since World War II.

So they call this neo-royalism. And here's a quote: "It centers on ruling cliques, networks of political capital and military elites devoted to individual sovereigns."

So neo-royalism is about networks of political capital and military elites. So political elites would be United States senators or governors. They would also be people like the Department of the Secretary of State, Marco Rubio, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, JD Vance—political elites. Capital elites—so these, to me, are like technocrats, billionaires, Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, so on and so forth. And military elites—these would be generals, but these would also be Gregory Bovino, who's out in front on the disgusting and cruel crusade with ICE in Minnesota as we speak. And they're devoted to individual sovereigns. So they're devoted to individual sovereigns like Donald Trump, not to the will of the people, not to the Constitution, not to anything but the will of that sovereign.

And they do that to create material and status hierarchies. They want to create a hierarchy of power that goes from a sovereign down to the elites and then a big and far gap all the way down to the rest of us who are not part of those cliques. And the goals of this whole framework are, as Newman and Goddard say, extraction of financial and cultural tributes. The goal is not freedom for the people. The goal is not liberation or safety. The goal is not human flourishing. The goal is not for anyone who is not part of the ruling clique to gain a better life, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The goal is extraction of financial and cultural tributes. They want to extract as much money as they can, oil as they can, crypto value as they can, and cultural tributes. They want to rename the Kennedy Center to put Trump's name on it. They want to make sure that everything has Trump's picture on it. They want to make sure when you go to a national park that you see his face. They want to rename and tribute every cultural phenomenon we have to the sovereign.

And this helps explain how you see the behavior of the Trump administration with other countries, and this will get us to Venezuela and to Greenland.

Goddard and Newman put it this way: "Rather than competition, we see collusion with the United States seeking deals with Russia and China once believed antithetical to US interests." Dan and I talked about this Friday. To me, this is a situation where Trump really sees the world being divided into three or four sovereign royal orders. You have China, you have Russia, and you have the United States. Now you might throw in Modi in India, you might throw in one or two others, but for the most part, it's really Russia and China.

Goddard and Newman continue: "Whereas Westphalian orders rest on recognition of external sovereignty, the United States has repeatedly questioned the authority of even its closest ally to govern their own territories."

So when they say Westphalian here, you're like, what does that mean? It's going all the way back to the Peace of Westphalia, which basically established 500 years ago the idea that there are sovereign states, and that within the territory of that sovereign state, the authority belongs to that government, to the people in charge there—that you're not allowed to overrun the sovereignty of another nation, whether that's Mexico, whether that's Spain, whether that's anywhere else.

And yet, when Trump took over a year ago, we started to see him question the authority of our closest allies, calling the leader of Canada a governor, calling Canada the 51st state, claiming that, as JD Vance has done, that Europe and countries within Europe are pathetic—basically treating them as vassal territories rather than as sovereign nations. And of course, this brings us right into what happened with Venezuela, kidnapping Maduro, directing the regime there, and very openly talking about extracting what can be used for financial gain: oil.

The Westphalian order rests on legal legitimation, and yet Trump doesn't do that. There's no sense here of like "I have the legal right to do this as the president." Instead, there is the insistence that "I am doing this because I have the power and I have the authority."

Remember when Trump tweeted—he who, or posted—"He who saves his country does not violate any law," meaning the President is above every law.

I couldn't get to it the other day, but there is a quote, I'm sorry, a tweet from C.Jay Engel that goes like this—I need to find it here. Sorry, I lost my place.

"Donald J Trump must become the living Constitution, the fleshly embodiment of the will and well being of what remains of heritage America." C.Jay Engel is a Christian supremacist who I talk about in my book as well. He's a xenophobic, anti-Semitic, racist, Christian supremacist, but he's calling for Trump to be the embodiment of the Constitution, meaning we don't have loyalty to the Constitution. We have loyalty to Trump—that Trump is the law. Trump embodies the law like a king, like a monarch, okay?

And what Goddard and Newman say in their paper is that Trump has an unparalleled power as the leader of the United States in terms of our military and in terms of the dollar-based global financial system for him to act as a world orderer—to institute a particular vision of the whole world, to create and modify and reproduce the ways that nations relate to one another on this globe. And that's a big threat. That's a big problem.

Okay, now others have adopted this. And we could talk about Berlusconi, we could talk about Orbán, Modi, Xi, Putin, and they've all kind of instituted this kind of centralized sovereignty in their own countries, but they don't have, as Newman and Goddard say, the global power of the United States and Donald Trump. It's just not there.

He has a vision of absolute sovereignty, and he has a clique that's based on family members like his kids and loyalists like Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem and others that we talk about a lot. He also has these American-based companies and the monarchs at the top of them: Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, not to mention Elon Musk.

So what this leads to is explaining some of the things about American foreign policy and domestic policy that might seem to be self-inflicting wounds, like, why would they do this? It's only going to hurt us. Why would they do what they're doing? It doesn't make sense. Well, here's how the foreign policy works under a neo-royalist framework.

Trump doesn't recognize leaders in terms of their control over or their authority over or their election to places of power in their countries. He sees leaders based on their relationship to him and his ruling clique.

So if we want to talk about Greenland, Goddard and Newman point out that we already have a base in Greenland, and Denmark has offered to allow us to expand our presence there. Canada is a steadfast NATO ally. Canada is a founding member of NATO, and yet we have treated both of them as things to colonize, things to take over. Why? Like, what good would come from that? Why?

"Threatening their legal sovereignty," the authors say, "undermines the external balancing necessary in a traditional game of great power politics, but it does have the advantage of securing hierarchy for those on the inside."

Trump is not interested in the well-being of anyone else, except for him and his royal clique. Greenland and Canada are things to colonize. They're places where they can extract power and finances. They can force Canada and Greenland and others into submission, into a subservient place within the Western Hemisphere's royal monarchy. They will be vassals of the king, not sovereign nations, not territories of other countries—Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, Cuba. They will be vassals of the United States royal clique. That is how they look at it. And will that undermine security, safety, peace? Will that lead to good things for the rest of the American people, for the Canadian people, for the folks living in Denmark, and not just Denmark, but Greenland? No, it will not. They don't care.

If you stop seeing their goal as anything related to the good of anyone but them and you start seeing their goal as not to do anything but gain power and finances by way of extraction, then threatening Canada with becoming the 51st state or taking over Greenland starts to make a lot of sense. And so do tariffs.

Over and over and over and over again, economists and pundits and everybody else, including us at this show, have said tariffs help nothing. Why would you do this? And Trump keeps claiming, "Oh, we have trillions of dollars in tariff money," and we all know that's not true. Tariffs are a tax on us, the American people. Tariffs are disrupting global trade. Tariffs are making it so small businesses in this country, farmers, are not doing well. This is not helping anyone except for him.

Tariffs are a rent-seeking opportunity. They're a way of leverage. They're a way of subservience, of forcing other countries to make deals with the President himself, to kiss his ring, to show loyalty to him, his businesses, his ventures, his empire. The same goes for those who want to have their business exempted from the tariffs in the United States. So Nvidia gives some of their profits to Trump and the American government. The American government has a stake in Intel—like this is not about you or me or anyone doing better, and they will lie all day about that. This is about them getting rent like racketeering mafiosos from other countries, and it's all in line with the idea of being a new royal monarchy.

Now, when it comes to domestic policy, we can see how that works at home as well. "While tactics of domination," the authors say, "are often most visible, many everyday interactions are resolved through exchange processes. In contrast to the liberal order, protection and cooperation become private goods doled out to encourage obedience."

We are seeing this in Minneapolis and Minnesota right now. The Trump administration is cutting off funding to Minnesota based on what they perceive as the governor and the mayor of Minneapolis's disloyalty to Trump, like period. They are cutting off aid to Americans based on the disloyalty of the leaders in Minnesota. They're cutting off federal funding to specific states because they think they're kings. They don't care if it hurts Minnesotans. They don't care if it hurts the children in the schools, the elderly who need the assistance, the people who need the food. They don't care. They dole out protection, cooperation, goods, services to encourage obedience.

These things benefit the clique's position, the royal family's position, and they come at the expense of the state's general welfare. They don't care if the economy is bad. They don't care if you hurt. They don't care if the people who voted for them are struggling. It does not matter. People will be worse off, but the goal is not you and you doing better. The goal is rent extraction. They want to amass wealth from anywhere they can, and that includes those countries that they're putting tariffs on in terms of goods, and that includes in the domestic sphere too. They want to get as much as they can.

Here's what Goddard and Newman say: "Such dominant strategies can prove resilient as royalist cliques disrupt collective resistance through side payments and use the shadow of violence to create powerful incentives for obedience."

So when it comes to side payments, do you remember when the Trump administration said they were going to pay the military, even during the government shutdown, creating loyalty to the monarch, not to the Constitution, not to the will of the people, but to whom? To Trump.

"Use the shadow of violence to create powerful incentives for obedience." That is what is going on in Minnesota right now.

"What appears as arbitrary demands and threats of coercion can be understood as regulated injections of distrust, which increases the demand for protection." They want to control the resources such that you need them in order to be protected and to be safe, and if you're not loyal to the King, you will be cut off, period.

Now, a big part of this that Newman and Goddard talk about is the idea that "only I can do it"—only I can save you, only the king can save you—that there is a uniqueness, a singularity, a divine right, a chosenness to the leader, whether that's Putin, whether that's Orbán, whether that's Trump. And Trump has said this many times: only I can save the United States. Only I can do it. And his followers have this sense of him as like he has been somehow given a unique and singular set of powers. Some of them think, as Christians, that he's chosen by God. Others don't.

Regardless, as long as he's alive, he will be the object of adoration and reverence, like a king. You see this every time they hold a meeting of the cabinet. Every secretary goes around—Kristi Noem and Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum and all the rest—and they just kiss the ring of the king, talking about how great he is and how wonderful. Kristi Noem even said one time she thanked him for keeping the hurricanes away during hurricane season.

This is the kind of stuff that leads to Trump maniacally wanting a Nobel Peace Prize, to renaming the Kennedy Center after him, and so on and so on and so on.

The claim is that there is something so special and unique and divinely chosen about this leader that they get this power over you.

Now, going back to the 1650s or the 1350s, monarchy was based on lineage. It was—right—in many cases, it was based on, did you have the right blood? In some cases, it was based on, like, a family that basically rose to the top—the Medicis. But that's what we see here. It's the exact opposite of what the American Revolution was about: rule by the people, rule for the people, rule with the people—of the people, by the people, however you want to say it. That was supposed to be what it is.

What we see in neo-royalism, and what I argue in my forthcoming book, is that the goal now is not to go back to the 1950s. The goal is to get rid of democracy and to get rid of liberalism, to get rid of anything that is not devotion to a king who will protect you and your people, and if, as long as you're loyal, you'll get the life you want, and all those others will get punished. All those others will get what's coming to them.

I want to make two more points. One is about cruelty, and one is about institutions.

One of the things here with cruelty is when it comes to Renee Nicole Good or so many others who have been hurt or killed in the last however many years, you see coming from Christians, you see coming from people who claim to be people of faith and others, justifying her death, saying that someone like her had it coming. The Vice President said that himself: "tragedy of her own making."

There's a sense here that if you don't obey the king, then you deserve to hurt. That it's not about all of us being human, equal. It's not all of us sharing the same condition. It's not about us having a sense that no matter who you are, you deserve not to be treated cruelly, to be shot while sitting in your car, to be shot while walking home, to be kidnapped off the street. There's a sense now that no—if you did, if you're this person, or you did that thing, you had it coming. And you hear that from Christians more often than not.

That comes right from this sense that this is not about the will of the people. It's not about democracy. It's not about us being equal. It's about an order. If you don't fit the order, if you choose not to fit the order, then you have what's coming to you by nature, by dint of how the world works. Sorry.

And that sounds like everything we fought against in the American Revolution, doesn't it? The idea that you're just born into a place in the world as a peasant or as a plebeian, as a commoner, or as an elite, as a Medici or a knight, as a king or a prince. Isn't it the idea, whether it's ever been achieved in any real way, that you have a chance to be what you want to be in this country based on your inalienable rights, based on the fact that we are all equal and we have the same opportunities, even if we don't have the same talents or gifts, even if we are born into unequal conditions, socially or monetarily—that you can become president or governor, you can become a business person or a teacher, a scientist or a professor, whatever it may be.

But now it is this: if you don't fit the order, if you have the wrong skin color, then you don't belong here, and you should be eradicated or excised. If you get in the way of those enforcing the order, you should not get due process. You should not get a police officer who's going to follow policy, do everything they can to de-escalate, do everything they can to make sure the situation ends not in death or violence, but in something else. Instead, you get a gun in a car, you get a man who calls the woman a slur, and then you get a regime that says he followed orders and did everything like he was supposed to and that we should pray for him.

Secondly, I want to talk about institutions. Institutions have been demonized by Trump for 10 years. When Trump came into office a year ago, he put Elon Musk and DOGE onto the federal government, and they destroyed things in a just scorched earth policy—USAID, US Institute of Peace. Wherever we looked, they were destroying institutions. Trump wants to destroy every institution we have. Why?

Because institutions are what ensure that one leader, one clique, one royal family cannot rule all of us. Institutions are what make things equal. They check power, they check process. They don't let rogue agents in the government do things that will hurt the rest of us. They don't let people like Elon Musk destroy USAID so that 400,000 people across the world have died already. They don't let the military or anything else be at the whim of one Caesar.

Institutions are the enemy of this neo-monarch. Institutions stand in their way of having a mafia that can control in this case, not just the United States, but the entire world order. Institutions are what stand in their way.

Now this is not me being an institutionalist. This is not me saying, "I'm so glad Chuck Schumer follows the decorum." This is me saying, if you're wondering why the judiciary branch is the only one that stood in Trump's way, if you're wondering why there are still some checks on his power, it is because of institutions. This is why they label anything in their way the deep state, the administrative state, the out of control bureaucrats, whatever, because they won't let one man do whatever he wants.

Bureaucracies will always be the enemy of the neo-royalist.

For bonus content today, I'm going to talk about some of the things in my book that relate to this and why Christian nationalists have switched from wanting the 1950s to the 1650s. I think Newman and Goddard in their paper do a great job explaining this theoretical framework. I want to talk about some of the people who are supporting this framework, who are arguing for it as Christians, because they think it will benefit them.

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