The most shocking scandal to date of the two-month-old administration of US President Donald Trump broke this week when Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, revealed that he had been invited to participate in a private text thread launched on Signal by Trump’s national security team. Someone in the group, by accident or design, had added Goldberg to a group dedicated to strategically planning a campaign to bomb Yemen. The discussion and the bombing took place on March 15.

How and why Goldberg was selected remains a mystery. This is a journalist who, a day earlier, had pronounced his verdict on the new administration: “Two months into his second term, President Trump is destabilizing the world order.” We might presume that this is not what one might think of as the kind of media figure a Trump official would want to reward with a scoop. 

Goldberg revealed none of the “precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing,” which he warned “could conceivably have been used to harm American military and intelligence personnel.” He did, however, recount the remarks made by many of the officials who expressed their points of view on the wisdom of the operation.

As The New York Times reports, one of the participants in the discussion, believed to be top Trump aide, Stephen Miller, “suggested that both Egypt and ‘Europe’ should compensate the United States for the operation.” The actual quote by the person identified as “SM” reads: “If Europe doesn’t remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.”

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Remunerate:

An intransitive verb added to the political vocabulary in 2025 to replace the traditional transitive verb whose modern meaning is to pay feudal dues to the master of the universe located in Washington, DC.

Contextual note

Miller’s logic appears consistent with the thinking of his lord and master, Trump, whose foreign policy has been unanimously described as “transactional,” a polite way of saying “it’s all about the Benjamins” (Puff Daddy). Miller wants the people who asked for nothing but, in his eyes, reap the benefit of Trump’s bold actions, to pony up. This represents a form of economic logic that hasn’t been practiced in the Western world since the Middle Ages.

Times have changed. Everything Trump does tells us that the rules of “civilized” politics have changed. But so have the rules of economics. Forget Adam Smith, who first imagined the marketplace’s smoothly operating “invisible hand.” Forget Friedrich Hayek’s “catallaxy,” his impeccable self-reconfiguring networks governed by the theological virtue of unconstrained exchange. It’s also time to abandon Milton Friedman and his world in which lunch is never free. Civilization has taken a bold step forward… unless, of course, the step happens to be backward.

Yanis Varoufakis claims that our economy today has now abandoned all the basic principles we associate with industrial capitalism. It has settled on a new model that he calls technofeudalism, a system in which digital platforms and big tech corporations have supplanted traditional capitalist markets, creating a new form of feudal hierarchy.

Some may consider the former Greek finance minister’s characterization an intriguing metaphor, but the idea of a return to the logic of the feudal past also seems to be present in the evolution of US democracy in the age of Trump. The obsession with building walls and imposing taxes for crossing boundaries reminds us of the way European society functioned a thousand years ago. And though the US remains officially a democracy in which “all men are created equal,” those who watched Trump’s second inauguration could not have failed to remark the place of honor accorded to a new race of techno-barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Should we be surprised that Trump’s youngest son, who only recently came of age, is named Barron?

In the media’s coverage of this story, many commentators have highlighted the disgusted reaction by European officials to the attitudes expressed in the thread. Not only does Miller want to tax Europe for Washington’s noble effort to defend the privileged trade routes from which Europe is the first to profit; the exchange provides the occasion for the individuals in the Trump team to express their open contempt for Europeans in general.

“I fully share your loathing of European freeloading,” Pete Hegseth responded to JD Vance’s questioning the idea of going to so much trouble for a zone in which the US has only a marginal interest. “I think we are making a mistake,” wrote Vance, according to The Guardian, “adding that while only 3% of US trade goes through the Suez canal, 40% of European trade does.” He characterizes this as “bailing Europe out again.” National Security Adviser Mike Waltz, who, as the BBC reports, took responsibility for creating the list, mentioned that “his team was working with the defence and state departments ‘to determine how to compile the cost associated and levy them on the Europeans.’” That’s what feudal barons do.

Historical note

Although Vance, Waltz and Miller are probably not aware of it, Europe’s feudal barons of the past instituted a practice that appears to correspond to their contemporary thinking. They instituted a tax called “scutage.” Britannica defines it in the following terms: “in feudal law, payment made by a knight to commute the military service that he owed his lord. A lord might accept from his vassal a sum of money (or something else of value, often a horse) in lieu of service on some expedition.” Though modern law has no provision for scutage, European leaders can expect in the near future to learn about how much they owe once Waltz has, in his words, compiled and levied the cost.

Europeans apparently feel more uncomfortable with the idea of returning to the feudal mindset than politicians and business leaders in the US of the 21st century. Observers of economic trends have noticed that, for all its accomplishments as the font of modern civilization and leader of the industrial revolution, Europe has produced none of the conquering technofeudal monopolies that now dominate the global economy. It nevertheless pays homage to all the technobarons and depends on their networks.

At the same time, the drama surrounding the Ukraine war has brought home the realization that the NATO umbrella, crafted by the US — the imperious, if not imperial vanquisher of European fascism during World War II — was designed not so much to protect Europe as to install its nations as privileged vassals of a new global power structure that governed from the DC Beltway and operated out of New York, the home of both Wall Street and the newly created United Nations.

Trump’s Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, may be right when he qualifies Europe as “pathetic.” Not necessarily for the reasons he cites, but rather because of the fact reported by Politico that “British and European officials and diplomats reacted with a mix of hurt and anger to the leak of private messages.” They are upset “now that they realize a US administration thinks so poorly of them.” One EU diplomat admits that “it’s sobering to see the way they speak about Europe when they think no one is listening,” before adding, “But at the same time this isn’t surprising … It’s just that now we see their reasoning in all its undiplomatic glory.”

Permit me to express not my surprise but astonishment at this remark. Was that EU diplomat too young to have caught wind of the notorious recording of former President Barack Obama’s Deputy Secretary of State, Victoria Nuland, in Kyiv in February 2014, in an intercepted phone call with ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt? That is where, after planning the details of the coup that would take place in the following weeks and overturn Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych’s government, Nuland suggested not consulting the allies on those operations, with the simple phrase: “And fuck the EU!”

In the NYT, we read this comment: “But with America’s increasingly hostile attitude toward Europe, the continent’s officials are contemplating a future where the prized relationship stretching across the Atlantic, a foundation upon which decades of relative peace and prosperity have been built, might never be the same.”

The foundation hasn’t changed. It’s just that we can see it more clearly today.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.