Trojan Trump Returns to War

Well ... unless, of course, he TACOs again!

Apr 21, 2026

Maybe you *should* look this gift horse in the mouth to see what you’re really getting beneath that orange mane.

Today, we have an article by Ed Dowd sharing how he tweeted Trump was a Trojan Horse back in June of 2024:

This needs to be said now and I will be attacked. I have no proof so it’s a literal conspiracy theory but bears watching with eagle eyes.
Conjecture: If I were in the shadows and had an agenda of ushering in a reset to control the end of the current ponzi debt based fiat system with a CBDC and a surveillance state I would need to tame and bridle the populist/maga movement. I would abandon the useful idiots on the left and embrace the right and infiltrate and bribe my way to my agenda under the cover of a “win.”
If Trump ends up in office, and we observe personnel choices or actions that strip any of our liberties away under contrived circumstances, we will know then the above theory has some merit.
Clearly the current cult regime must go. But be on alert for a new cult and hidden agendas that may come to pass.
I have a personal fear that the Covid vaccine poisoning will be memory holed.

I warned about Trump being a Trojan horse almost a decade before that. In 2016, before Trump was elected, I made a similar claim but I gave a whole stack of evidence to back it up. I cannot find the original article now here on Substack, so maybe it didn’t upload over to Substack when I moved to this host, but here is a section about it that I wrote in April of 2017 that did move over.

I wrote it as Trump neared is first hundred days in his first term, with quotes from the article I had written in 2016, so you can, at least, get a taste of that earliest Trojan Horse warning before he ever served as president. You can see I started out with the same awareness, Dowd expresses, that I’d lose a lot of readers over writing the warning, even though it was their interests I was safeguarding. Here’s an excerpt of the 2017 article along with its quotes from 2016:

You Got Trumped! Winning horse in presidential race was Trojan
Back in September when he was still just Candidate Trump, I wrote an article titled “Trump: Trojan Horse for the Establishment or Mighty Mouth for Mankind?” I knew that pointing out my deep reservations about Trump would cost me readers because I write an anti-establishment blog, and Trump was the anti-establishment candidate of choice. I published the article anyway. It not only cost me readers (from which I haven’t recovered), but it also cost me websites that had been carrying my articles. Such is the pursuit of truth over popularity.
Nevertheless, I continued to write on that theme in the months that followed because I believed the warning was important and because I choose to see and describe the world as it is (as best I can) and not how I want it to be. Because I criticize any political party as readily as another, I am often seen as too conservative by liberals and too liberal by conservatives. (I don’t get the benefit of club membership that gains a writer an easy loyal following.) So be it.
Here is some of that article, which is now looking like it was spot on:
“I crave the opportunity to see an anti-establishment candidate win the election. I would exult in seeing our corrupt establishment shattered. So, while I do not like Trump the man (as it would appear he has never done anything that didn’t entirely serve his own self-interest and pompous ego), I have thoroughly enjoyed seeing him upset establishment Republicans and establishment Democrats alike. (And, yes, they are alike, so let’s just call them “the establishment” because whether they are Republican or Democrat is not relevant; both parties exist to serve the same rich people and themselves either way.)”
I’ll even acknowledge that perhaps it takes someone as brazen and blusterous as Trump in order to stand up to such a powerful assemblage of egoists as we have embedded in congress and in the president’s administration, which now rules by decree.... While I have never liked this particular publicity whore, I’d put up with his relentless boasting and forgive his audacious past if it takes that kind of brassy, risk-taking adventurer to find someone with enough spine to stand up to the intimidations of congress.... Whether or not I like him is not important unless it is leading me to see flaws that may mean Trump is not what he makes himself out to be.
From there, I pointed out such character flaws as made me believe Trump would not prove to be what he was making himself out to be. He would let his anti-establishment supporters down hard:
“Overturning a vast global establishment is the kind of battle that will take someone with unbelievable tenacity, intelligence, and courage. The opponents are rich, and you can be sure some are willing to kill to keep the status quo that is making them immensely rich….”
Unfortunately, I have seen often in life that bellicose people are usually nowhere near as brave as they sound. People like Ike, who was strong in war and humble in attitude, are usually the ones with real courage. It is not usually the most blustery people who have the deepest strength to carry through with the right thing for the right reasons, regardless of cost to themselves.
Trump is aptly named for how often he blows his own horn in order to create his own image; but his actions show he backed out of previous presidential races when it was clear they weren’t going to be an easy win after getting lots of publicity for teasing people with the possibility that he’d run. He has also backed out of many business deals when things got rough, rather than push forward to try to make things work....
It’s his latest political actions that concern me. In the few places where we have seen Trump make actual political decisions so far, his choices have been 100% pro-establishment as I pointed out in a recent article titled “Whirled Politics: Would you rather be Trumped or Pillaried?”I wished very much to see something different than what I am seeing.
The article delineated a number of tell-tale signs that indicated Trump was anything but the anti-establishment candidate he was presenting himself to be. I pointed out, for example, how the Trump horse that was being brought into the city gates was filled with neocons and the Wall Street establishment, and how I believed they would come to own Trump if they didn’t already. The Trump horse was brazenly anti-establishment on the outside, but almost total establishment on the inside.
I concluded my intro to the article with this warning:
“Be careful that you don’t believe something just because you want to believe it so badly. That is how the citizens of Troy were conquered in the Trojan war. I’d love to have an anti-establishment candidate roll in, too. Sadly, I don’t think I do.... The time to hold Trump to task is now, not after the establishment makeover turns him into their Trojan Trump card, but while they are trying so that they don’t succeed.”
And I closed the article by asking,
“Is he force or farce?”
April has demonstrated that Trump was either a Trojan horse by design or, in the very least, that his establishment makeover is nearly complete. Before he has even finished his first hundred days as president, President Trump has turned 180 degrees on almost every promise Candidate Trump made, and the couple of times Trump has tried to enact his promises, he has failed “bigly.”

We saw my warning play out throughout Trump 1.0. He failed to deliver his big campaign promises, such as …

repealing and replacing Obamacare,
his implied promise of locking Hillary up,
getting Mexico to pay for a wall that he would finish in no time because building things is what he does,
and most of all draining the swamp, as I noted again and again how everyone in the White House, other than the few he fired like Bannon, were swamp creatures from Goldman Sachs and the MIC. Trump clearly got swamped by the swamp in 1.0.

Trump 2.0 was a totally different picture where the Trump was angry at the swamp that swamped his presidency last time around; so, he came in like a wrecking ball. Still, we see him constantly displaying the very character traits that I said would be his undoing. All year long in 2025, we called it “TACO”: Trump Always Chickens Out. He endlessly made huge threats then backed out of them, said it was the art of the deal. Back then it was in the Trump Tariff Wars where he constantly reneged on his previous deals that he had once boasted about and reneged on many of his worse tariff threats whenever things got dicy in the stock market or bond market. Now we see the same thing happening in the Trump-Israel-Iran War, and clearly he is losing. Stocks markets are dumb and fall for such bluffs. The Iranians are not, and they are not falling for it at all.

So, late tomorrow we face a new deadline: Trump swore he would destroy all of Iran’s electrical generation plants and their major bridges, then chickened out, claiming Iran wanted to deal. Iran said they didn’t want to deal—take our terms or leave them. We all pretty well knew Trump was lying by claiming a big deal was in the making. We’ve seen this vanity so many times before, and Iran proved he was lying by holding to their terms and blowing up a boat or two any time he said they no longer had that capability. It was like they were toying with him to buy time to restock and relook-and-load.

So, here we are: no deal, and now Trump is back to saying he’ll destroy their civilization if they don’t capitulate tomorrow (by Tuesday evening). So, is he going to launch a far greater ground war as he has promised (having much earlier promised there would be no boots on the ground), or will he TACO again because his word on everything is worth less than Trojan horse shit.

You can read the article above to see the many ways I enumerate how Trump had chickened out by the first 100 days of 1.0, but I’ll warn you that it did not upload well from my old platform to Substack, so it has a lot of typographical artifacts, but it is there as archival proof of where I said this was going from the very first days. Here are a few more points where, as we would put it now, Trump TACOed out in 2017, as evidence of what was to come …

The N. Korean Missile Crisis. (Thank goodness, because he was going to blow Rocketman up, and that would have been more perilous than the present war because madman Kim Jung Un does have nukes. It was just big talk. Trump switched to talking about all the love letters Un was sending him—a love long lost now.)
Trump filled every security and intel department with the old military top brass AND made top generals from the old realm his chiefs of staff—the second-most-powerful in the White House as gatekeeper to the Prez.
He placed ivy-league bankers, particularly Goldman Sachs execs in charge of everything to do with finance, money and commers—total swamp creatures.
And he gave us a wonderful vaccine with full indemnity to the drug makers should their vaccine maim or kill people due to being tested on billions at the same time. (And why wouldn’t they take outlandish risks when they have full immunity for not going slow with testing the most experimental vaccine in a century?)

The QAnon folks called me after I wrote these kinds of things and tried to convince me the swampy staffing I kept pointing out by name after name was just a brilliant ploy of “holding your friends close but your enemies closer.” Trump was rounding them all up to take them all down in one big barn fire, once he bolted the barn doors on them and got the gasoline down around the outside of the barn.

Uh, huh.

I’ve called Trump out as Trojan horse for conservatives from the very beginning, but now he is something far more dangerous. He’s a full-on megalomaniac, perfectly fitting every detail given in the psychological description of megalomania that I provided a link to … as I wrote about his mental illness over the weekend:

The Daily Doom

A DEEPER DIVE INTO THE DONALD: The King's Megalomania is Nearing its Imperial Zenith

a month ago · 6 likes · David Haggith

And, you know, the interesting thing about pointing out Trump’s dangerous mental health right now is … that I finally don’t get any defectors when I do because those who hoped he would upset the establishment, as I wrote about above, are seeing what a fraud he is and how insane he is. Even when he comes against the establishment in so many way, he’s still serving the billionaires, still serving the MIC with new wars to burn through weapons and fuel so we can buy a trillion dollars more, and he still doesn’t look like any of this campaign promises mean dirt to him.

As I wrote in another article back in 2017,

It seems like every week Trump has to fire a new swamp creature that he appointed! His backers excuse him with the claim that he is playing 4-D chess. He isn’t even playing 3-D marbles!