Trump’s War on Truth, Democracy, and the American Soul

by Janet Kira Lessin, CEO, Aquarian Media

Trump’s War on Truth, Democracy, and the American Soul (Response to Lev Parnas’s “EXPOSED: Trump’s Secret Plan for ‘Peace’ — and the Price the World Is Paying)
By Janet Kira Lessin | Kira Ninmah on Substack

When Peace Becomes a Propaganda Tool

Since Donald Trump has been in the public eye for most of my life, I have come to know him well enough, after all these decades of him dominating the media, to understand that peace has never been his primary goal, unless it somehow serves his interests. He has always been a dealmaker, not a peacemaker, and every deal he strikes ends the same way: with him richer, more powerful, and surrounded by loyal oligarchs who mirror his appetite for domination. What he calls diplomacy is often just another form of theater, where power and greed masquerade as virtue and the audience is invited to applaud the illusion.

Last week, Lev Parnas published a powerful essay titled “EXPOSED: Trump’s Secret Plan for ‘Peace’ — and the Price the World Is Paying”, a piece that peeled back the curtain on the current administration’s latest performance. Parnas revealed that Trump’s “peace plan” was never intended to save lives or resolve conflicts. Instead, it was a calculated stage act designed to consolidate influence, reward allies, and rewrite the narrative of war into one of personal glory. According to his sources, Trump’s back-channel negotiations with Netanyahu and Putin were not about ending bloodshed but controlling its timing — ensuring that when destruction reached its peak, he could step forward as the self-anointed savior of a chaos he had helped create.

As Parnas wrote, what we are witnessing is peace as performance: a public-relations campaign disguised as statesmanship. It’s a show built on the pain of others, a spectacle that thrives on the world’s exhaustion. While the cameras linger on images of reunited families and ceasefire celebrations, the machinery of profit and power continues to grind beneath the surface. Trump’s “peace” is not about compassion or understanding; it’s about control.

Peace as Performance

Throughout history, rulers have used the language of peace to justify domination. The Romans celebrated Pax Romana as a golden age, though it was purchased through conquest and subjugation. Twentieth-century dictators used “peace” as a euphemism for submission, silencing dissent in the name of stability. Trump’s version of the same story is uniquely American — a reality-TV adaptation of tyranny, where image replaces substance and moral theater replaces moral leadership.

In Trump’s world, peace is a brand. It is a tagline, a marketing hook, a stage set dressed in patriotic colors. Every tragedy, from Gaza to Kyiv, becomes a prop for the ongoing mythology of “Trump the Deal Maker.” The pattern is always the same: create or exploit a crisis, declare yourself indispensable, then sell your solution as salvation. But when one man defines peace as obedience and measures success by the wealth it brings him and his circle, what results is not peace at all — it is performance fascism, a fusion of spectacle and control that feeds on attention, confusion, and fear.

The American Purge

While the headlines fixate on ceasefires abroad, the same authoritarian choreography unfolds quietly within our own borders. Trump’s second term has not begun with healing or unity but with punishment. His administration has turned inward, weaponizing power against the very institutions that uphold democracy — the universities, the press, the judiciary, the civil service, and the diverse citizenry that once represented the heart of the American promise.

The purge began on day one. With the stroke of a pen, Executive Orders 14151 and 14173 dismantled federal Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, erasing decades of progress in a single afternoon. DEI staff were placed on leave, offices shuttered, and websites scrubbed clean. Even Executive Order 11246 — the historic rule prohibiting discrimination among federal contractors — was revoked. It was a message written in bureaucratic ink but heard loud and clear across every agency: loyalty, not fairness, is now the measure of worth.

**THE DEI PURGE**
An empty federal office, boxes stacked by the door labeled *Diversity Office*, *Equity Reports*, and *Inclusion Training*. Fluorescent lights flicker. The American flag slumps in a corner. A removed nameplate lies on the floor beside a half-empty coffee cup. The air feels abandoned and hollow.

Within weeks, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, began circulating lists of employees deemed insufficiently loyal. Career professionals — scientists, analysts, educators — were dismissed or sidelined, their expertise replaced with ideological obedience. Even the CIA was authorized to fire intelligence officers whose only “offense” was participating in DEI initiatives. Competence no longer protected you; neutrality was treason.

From there, the assault spread to universities, where funding threats and investigations became tools of intimidation. “Anti-DEI” task forces, often cloaked in the language of combating antisemitism, pressured campuses to eliminate programs that promoted diversity or equity. The effect was chilling. Educators self-censored. Students feared speaking their truth. The intellectual independence that defines higher education — the engine of innovation itself — was quietly undermined.

**UNIVERSITIES UNDER SIEGE**
Students gather on a grassy college campus for a peaceful protest. Signs read *Knowledge Is Not the Enemy*, *Freedom to Learn*, and *Stop the Purge*. Behind them, a stately brick university building has a new banner reading *ANTI-DEI TASK FORCE*. Faculty members watch anxiously from the steps. The mood is tense but hopeful.

Immigrants and undocumented students became the next convenient scapegoats. Policies once designed to protect them were dismantled or ignored. “Safe zones” were reclassified as law-enforcement targets. In-state tuition for undocumented students was revoked in some regions, cutting off futures before they began. In the name of law and order, cruelty was rebranded as patriotism.

At the same time, the Department of Education’s civil-rights division shrank to a shadow of its former self. Offices overseeing special education and disability rights were closed. Enforcement staff were laid off. Oversight faded into silence. As protections vanished, the vulnerable were left unguarded, and decades of progress unraveled in months.

**REFLECTIONS OF RESISTANCE**. In her lenses, the struggle is literally reflected: the fight for equality, freedom of thought, and the right to learn without fear.

Meanwhile, as ordinary citizens lost safeguards, Trump’s inner circle of billionaires — his oligarchic court — grew ever wealthier. Contracts flowed freely to allies. Regulations evaporated. Privatization replaced public service. What was once a government of the people has become a marketplace for the powerful, where loyalty is rewarded with access and silence is purchased with fear.

The Great Dismantling

Every authoritarian regime begins by redefining reality. Once truth itself is made negotiable, everything else — from the rule of law to the moral compass of a nation — becomes a commodity. Trump’s genius, if one dares call it that, lies in his ability to package tyranny as entertainment. He doesn’t silence dissent by censorship alone; he drowns it out with spectacle until people can no longer tell where reality ends and performance begins.

Greed is a Spiritual Illness

Greed, at its core, is a spiritual disease — a severing of empathy from ambition, of purpose from conscience. In Trump’s empire, money is worshipped as divinity, power is prayer, and domination is the highest sacrament. This isn’t politics as usual; it is a psychological inversion of values, a civilization turned inward on itself. Yet there is a more profound spiritual truth beneath the chaos: peace cannot be imposed, only awakened. The peace that Jesus, Enki, and the enlightened masters spoke of arises not from coercion but from consciousness, from the recognition of shared humanity.

When a society forgets that, it loses more than freedom; it loses its soul.

The Collective of Empathetic Intelligence Awakens

THE AWAKENING: And yet, even now, humanity is capable of remembering. Authoritarianism thrives in silence, but truth thrives in connection. Every act of courage — every word spoken, every kindness offered, every fact shared — weakens the machinery of control. The illusion of power depends on the compliance of the masses, and when enough of us refuse to perform in the dictator’s play, the performance collapses under its own falseness.

We are the counter-current — the light in the dark theater — and our awakening is the one thing fear cannot command.

Peace built on domination will continually implode, for it is constructed from fear rather than love. Peace built on truth, however, endures. Lev Parnas was right to call Trump’s peace a performance. My addition is this: the act is nearing its end. Humanity is stirring, awakening, remembering. And no amount of gold leaf, propaganda, or self-glorifying spectacle can conceal the truth that beneath it all, we are still — and always will be — one.

References

Lev Parnas, “EXPOSED: Trump’s Secret Plan for ‘Peace’ — and the Price the World Is Paying”, October 2025.
Executive Orders 14151 & 14173, January 2025, whitehouse.gov.
The Guardian, “Trump Administration’s Authoritarian Blueprint”, March 2025.
Washington Post, “Anti-DEI Task Force Targets Universities”, July 2025.
Harvard Kennedy School PolicyCast, “Oligarchy in the Open”, 2025.