In the 1980s, pathologists were missing something hiding in plain sight. Not because they lacked skill or attention, but because they knew it was impossible.

Scientists knew the stomach is sterile: Acid destroys bacteria, therefore bacteria cannot survive in the stomach. So when pathologists examined stomach biopsy slides under their microscopes, bacteria called Helicobacter pylori—present on the slides, stained, and obvious—were invisible to them. Not metaphorically invisible. Literally invisible. Their brains filtered the bacteria out before consciousness could register them. The impossible cannot exist so the impossible is not seen.

When two Australian scientists named Barry Marshall and Robin Warren proved the existence of Helicobacter pylori in 1984, pathologists went back to their own archived slides and for the first time saw bacteria that had always been there.

This is why America’s constitutional scholars, legal commentators, democratic theorists, and other experts do not see what is already visible: how easy it is for Donald Trump to become president for life.

America has a story it tells itself about itself: the Constitution created a system of checks and balances no individual can overcome. The courts are independent. The military serves the Constitution. Power transfers peacefully. The story is believed with what may as well be religious conviction by the people whose professional lives depend on it—constitutional lawyers, political scientists, federal judges, journalists, and other experts who will scoff at the naivety of this article.

But the bacteria are on their slides.

The Supreme Court has five justices who vote to give Donald Trump whatever he needs. This is not speculation. It is demonstrated behavior. The Court created presidential immunity from prosecution from nothing in 2024. It uses its emergency docket—a procedure requiring no full argument, no written explanation, accountable to no one, a sham settlers on America’s 19th century lawless frontiers would have recognized as a “kangaroo court”—to reshape election law repeatedly, each time in directions that benefit Republican candidates and harm Democratic ones.

This week the Supreme Court signaled it will strike down grace periods for mail-in ballots in fourteen states, while making sure its ruling will take effect before the November midterms. Justice Kavanaugh asked the Republican Party’s lawyer whether there would be enough time to implement the decision before the election—a logistical question, not a legal one. The court is explicitly seeking to schedule voter suppression before people vote. All the evidence points in the same direction: the conservative majority works for Trump not the United States and reads the Constitution and law only when looking to excuse its pretextual rulings.

Which brings us to how easy it is for Trump to stay in power forever.

The 22nd Amendment says “no person shall be elected president more than twice.” But a sufficiently corrupt Court—and we have one—can make any ruling it wants. It can say “elected” only applies if we hold elections which, for some reason, we cannot. Or that the originalist definition of “twice” actually means “as often as you like,” according to some previously obscure scrap of medieval English law. Or it can use its kangaroo court emergency docket to simply declare Trump president for life with no explanation whatsoever.

And that is all it takes. A president not ashamed to ask for it, and a court not ashamed to give it to him.

If you do not believe me, ask your favorite constitutional scholar a question: if the court ruled Trump could stay in office forever, what would be the recourse? What could anyone do?

The answer is nothing. There is no court of appeal, no practical limit on the Supreme Court’s power, no escape from a corrupt decision. This is why the expert answer is always “it will never happen.” Because if it does happen, there is no way to reverse it. Despite every story you have ever been told about the United States being a “nation of laws,” five people on One First Street NE, Washington DC, can rule anything is legal.

Thomas Kuhn, a historian and philosopher of science, observed that scientific communities operate within the constraints of stories he called “paradigms”—frameworks that determine not only what explanations are accepted but what questions can be asked and what evidence can be seen. When anomalies appear, they are treated as puzzles to be explained away, not as evidence that the paradigm is wrong. Any scientist who suggests the paradigm is failing is considered foolish.

Experts who have now spent over ten years explaining why Trump’s latest action is unprecedented but containable are like those scientists. Each outrage is a puzzle, an exception, not a sign that their priors are wrong. Anomalies that have occurred daily for a decade are still anomalous. Norms are still norms no matter how many times they have been broken. The bacteria on the slides are not on the slides.

The structure of human brains make this worse. Confidence produces a neural gating effect in which confirmatory information is amplified and disconfirmatory information is deleted before it even reaches conscious processing. The more expert someone is, the more strongly their brain prevents them from realizing their expertise is failing. The people most qualified to sound the alarm are the people least neurologically able to see the fire.

The story of American democracy—separation of powers, independent judiciary, peaceful transfer, self-correcting institutions—has a property that makes it especially resistant to revision: if it is false the careers and identities of the people telling the story collapse. And so the story has to be true. The stakes make anything else literally unthinkable.

Donald Trump is 78. His mother lived to 88. His father to 93 years 8 months. Trump’s generation lives far longer than his parents’ generation. It is quite possible he will live well into his 90s. Four more terms takes him to 2041 and the age of 94 years 7 months—less than a year older than his father’s age at death.

This is not a prediction. It is a description of a path that is open and being walked, and why the people who don’t expect to see it cannot.

The bacteria are on the slides, and they have been visible for years.

For more stuff like this, see my book, The Story of Stories.

For a demonstration of inattentional blindness, take another look at the name of the newspaper in the picture above.

No kind of people is new. The only thing new is that those deemed different no longer have to hide; pretend; struggle to find resources about who they are and how to be who they are; or remain isolated from others who are like them or segregated from those who are not. The proliferation of stories and storytellers enabled by the internet has revealed the heterogeneous beauty and glory of all humanity by giving rise to countercommunities, countercultures, and counterstories galore.

One example of this, insufficiently discussed, is how 2SLGBTQIA+ people, many native to the internet and some even native to the smartphone, have empowered themselves using digital social storytelling to achieve unprecedented liberty, victories, and visibility.

This empowerment dates back at least as far as the early 1990s, when the United States government gradually opened the internet for public use. Here’s an early example, from a gay sixteen-year-old with the username JohnTeen O posting on America Online’s Gay and Lesbian Community Forum in 1994:

From: JohnTeen O. My high school career has been a sudden and drastic spell of turbulence and change. Once I was an automaton, obeying external, societal, and parental expectations like a dog, oblivious of who I was or what I wanted. I conformed to society’s paradigm, and I was rewarded. Yet I was miserable. Everything I did was a diversion from thinking about myself. Finally, last summer, my subconsciousness felt comfortable enough to be able to connect myself with who I really am, and I began to understand what it is to be gay.

The Gay and Lesbian Community Forum was a source of hope and guidance for gay and lesbian teenagers all over America a nightfire around which tens of thousands of adolescents gathered to tell their counterstories and support each other as they became more like themselves.

Our new age of hatred is a reaction to a revolution long unstoppable—a multicolored uprising of all the people standard stories typically oppress: Black people and people of color; people who are differently abled; feminists; geeks; Hindus; Indigenous peoples; Jewish people; Latin Americans; people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, agender, inter- sex, aromantic, asexual, polyamorous, ethically nonmonogamous, or kinky; Muslims; nerds; the neurodivergent; people who are pregnant or breastfeeding; sex workers; the unconventional; the young and the old; vegans and vegetarians; and anyone else who is not of European descent, straight, vanilla, white, and comfortable in and privileged by systems of patriarchy. The standard story calls all these disparate peoples “minorities,” but they add up to nearly everyone.

Tellers of counterstories always ask for more, look beyond, and seek an ever better world, and so they should: progress has no finish line. But that does not mean we cannot acknowledge how much has changed, how it changed, who changed it, and the bright rays of hope it shines on our futures.

From The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art.

One million years ago, in the foothills of East Africa, humans learned to create and control fire and extend their days into the dark. The magic and sanctuary of fire drew tribes together each evening and caused a radical redirection of human evolution. The wavering flames were too dim for gestures, grooming, or play, so these early people socialized using sounds.

There are many ways for living creatures to make deliberate noise. Some fish vibrate their swim bladders; crickets and katydids rub body parts together; and rattlesnakes rattle their tails. For humans and other mammals, the most common noisemaking method is the controlled modulation and vibration of exhalation called vocalization.

Vocalization first evolved to send fertility signals and warnings. When our distant ancestors started communicating beside their nightfires, they repurposed the calls and cries they made for foraging, hunting, and mating. But what they wanted to communicate at night differed from what they wanted to communicate by day. Day talk uses imperatives, commands, and warnings to convey information about immediate practical matters. It communicates things like go there, stop, mate with me, or look out! a hyena!—the human equivalent of birds cawing and wolves barking. There are few immediate practical matters around a nightly fire, so humans did something no creature had done before: In the warmth and security of their flames, they communicated about events remembered and imagined, from places and times near and far. Or, they started telling stories.

Storytelling requires more nuance than the pointing and hollering of hunting and gathering, and so, over hundreds of thousands of years, beside hundreds of millions of fires, human vocalization evolved, and the grunts and yelps turned into a complex series of sounds about subjects, normally human, acting on objects—the infinitely expressive system of communication we now call language. Language did not give us stories; stories gave us language.

From The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art.

Image: Prehistoric Art From Tassili n’Ajjer. Photo by Patrick Gruban. Sharealike License.

When Donald Trump said he was sending a “great hospital boat” to Greenland to “take care of the many people who are sick, and not being taken care of there,” many people laughed out loud.

Here’s a typical social media post:

“Our imbecile of a commander-in-chief doesn’t know the difference between a boat and a ship, plus he’s unaware that both USNS Comfort and Mercy are drydocked in Alabama..”

And a typical headline:

“Trump’s talk of sending a hospital ship to Greenland puzzles leaders. Greenland doesn’t want the help, and the U.S. doesn’t appear to have any hospital ships available to send.”

Much attention was drawn to the fact that Trump’s words were accompanied by a picture of a particular hospital ship, the USNS Mercy, and the fact that it is not ready to sail, but in dry dock undergoing maintenance, and the irony of sending medical help to people who already have excellent free healthcare. These points were not only made by the general public, but also by experts on things like foreign affairs and national security.

And all of them missed the point.

We cannot decode Trump’s strange story without a little history.

In 1980, the US Army’s 7th Psychological Operations (PSYOP) Group developed a new strategy for psychological operations— the US Army’s euphemism for propaganda-which they called Mind War. Where much of the purpose of conventional psychological operations had been to influence the enemy, much of the purpose of MindWar was to influence US citizens to support US military action. This seemed especially urgent in the aftermath of Vietnam, a war which the military believed it had lost “not because we were outfought but because we were out-PSYOPed.”

MindWar’s first big test came in 1991, with the first Gulf War, and it won decisively. The majority of the US population—as well as the majority of the populations in most of the countries in the US-led coalition that fought the war—enthusiastically supported the war. The US has fought mind wars ever since.

So what do we see if we look at Trump’s post through the lens of MindWar?

The first thing to notice is that Trump almost certainly did not write this post. It has none of the hallmarks of his social media writing style. For example, it does not use his idiosyncratic form of capitalization; the phrase “not being taken care of there” is a very soft sell by his standards—he favors hyperbole like tragedy, death, or horror; and the image appears to have been AI generated for this post specifically, which would require prompting an image generator, which is not something Trump is known for—he tends to repost AI images, not create his own. It may therefore have been created by someone skilled in the US military’s art of MindWar—especially as it is no secret that Trump wants to invade Greenland.

Next, there are the two claims. A “hospital boat” is being sent to Greenland, and the people there need medical help. If this post was created by a military propagandist, those two claims each have an obvious and significant function.

Claim 1: “We are going to send a great hospital boat to Greenland … It’s on the way!!”

A lot has been made of the image of the USNS Mercy, but Trump’s post does not say he is sending the Mercy, or even a Hospital Ship. It says “hospital boat.” This is very significant. Hospital Ship is a formal designation under the Geneva Convention.

Hospital ships like the Mercy are unarmed. They fly the Red Cross or Red Crescent flag. Under the Geneva Convention, attacking a ship like the Mercy is a war crime.

But there is another kind of “hospital boat” in the US fleet, one with six operating rooms, fourteen ICU beds, forty-six hospital beds expandable to 600 for mass casualty operations, a trauma center, a pharmacy, a laboratory, and dental facilities—a significant hospital by any civilian standard. This is not a Hospital Ship though; it is a Wasp-class amphibious assault ship, and is also equipped with a fully embarked Marine battalion; AV-8B Harrier or F-35B fighter jets; MV-22 Osprey transport aircraft; AH-1Z attack helicopters; Landing Craft Air Cushion hovercraft; and enough firepower to seize a small country. The Wasp-class assault ship is the centerpiece of what US military doctrine calls an Amphibious Ready Group or ARG—a group of three or more ships that are prerequisite for a land invasion. General Eric Smith, 39th Commandant, US Marine Corps, emphasized this in the military publication Defense One just a few months ago.

If the US decides to invade Greenland, it needs to position a Wasp-class ship (which, due to its medical facilities could feasibly be called a “hospital boat”) off the Greenlandic coast, which means it needs to sail a ship in that direction, which cannot be done in secret. There are a couple of obvious candidates for this maneuver: the entire Iwo Jima ARG, which is currently in the Caribbean with the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit embarked—approximately 4,500 sailors and Marines combined— and the USS Kearsarge, which returned to its homeport at Norfolk, VA a little over a week ago. The US could send the Iwo Jima ARG in the general direction of Greenland under the umbrella of “normal operations,” but turning the Kearsarge around so quickly would need some kind of explanation. “To take care of the many people who are sick,” is probably that explanation. If the Kearsarge sails soon, it will be under the pretense of being the “hospital boat” Donald Trump said was going to help the “sick” Greenlanders.

Claim 2: “To take care of the many people who are sick.”

Where the first claim is a smokescreen to hide a potential invasion from the US public—the Danish-led military coalition assembling to defend Greenland will not, of course, be fooled for a moment—the second claim is new and potentially more interesting. Donald Trump’s previous rhetoric on Greenland has been simple and direct: “we need it for our defense.” This is not a claim anyone skilled in MindWar would make to justify a US war of aggression and choice to the US population.

Domestic justifications for invasions must always be for salvation, or liberation, or something similarly righteous. Russia learned this by applying the US MindWar doctrine to its second invasion of Chechnya. The first invasion, in 1994, failed due to a lack of domestic support in Russia. But by 2000, Russia had developed its own imitation of MindWar, which it called informatsionnoye protivoborstvo, or “information confrontation.” When Russia invaded Chechnya a second time, there was a new justification: the Chechens were dangerous terrorists. The Russian people supported the war, and Russia won. Today, Russia is invading Ukraine under the information confrontation pretense that Ukrainians are Nazis. For now, accusing Greenlanders of being terrorists is pretty much impossible (although that may change if they start defending themselves during or after a US invasion.) But dividing them from Denmark by telling a story that Denmark is exploiting or neglecting them—again, for US public consumption only—provides a moral justification for invading. The US has used this strategy before: by claiming to be “liberating” the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein, or, more recently, the Venezuelan people from President Nicolás Maduro.

The brilliance of this MindWar post “by” Trump—if that is, in fact, what it is—is that it exploits Trump’s widely perceived buffoonery, hyperbole, and eccentricity to hide something truly ominous in plain sight. The US may have just announced that it is sending warships to Greenland, and that it will invade under the pretense of “helping the Greenlanders,” and almost no one has noticed.

PS If you found this interesting, you may also appreciate this post from explaining that “Trump is not building a ballroom,” but a vast, hardened underground AI data center with a ballroom on top. It may have seemed speculative to some when it was first published (despite all the detailed evidence it included), but it has been pretty much corroborated now. And if you are interested in details about the potential Greenland invasion, I highly recommend following former Danish intelligence officer .