Authored by Pepe Escobar,

The Iwo Jima 2.0 pic, immortalizing the Trump fist surviving an assassination attempt, has taken the world by storm – generating everything from a meme tsunami on China’s Weibo to fresh anime in Japan. Not to mention the deluge of hats and T-shirts.

This carefully composed pic changes everything – in more ways than one. So let’s engage in a first attempt to deconstruct it.

We start with the major losers.

The combo running Crash Test Dummy’s teleprompter/earpiece set up is essentially composed by Mike Donilon, Steve Richetti, Bruce Reed and Ted Kaufman.

Government functionaries like Jake Sullivan and Little Blinkie, for their part, are placed at the heart of what is known in Washington as the “inter-agency” racket, better described as The Blob.

The inestimable Alastair Crooke has explained how Sullivan and Little Blinkie’s deliberations are “spread through a matrix of interlocking ‘clusters’ that includes the Military Industrial Complex, Congressional leaders, Big Donors, Wall Street, the Treasury, the CIA, the FBI, a few cosmopolitan oligarchs and the princelings of the security-intelligence world.”

Yet the key – invisible – point is who (italics mine) tells Sullivan and Blinkie what to do.

These are the people who really (italics mine) run the show: the Big Families, and the Big Donors – old money and especially new money (as in invisible Vanguard shareholders).

They are all stunned.

They never thought it would come to this debacle – even if Joe Biden was expressly chosen for what he is: a crude, corrupt, easily-manipulated lackey, and head of a crime family. Everyone in a position of real power in the Blob knew he was becoming a zombie ages ago.

There’s fierce debate across the Beltway over how many factions are at war with each other inside the Dem blob.

There are at least three:

1.The Biden crime family – on which tens of thousands of people with cushy jobs and fat salaries depend.

2.The down-ballot Dem machine – an “extended family” of other tens of thousands who will lose badly, in elections or re-elections, in the event of a Trump 2.0. These are the ones who want to throw Crash Test Dummy under the – retirement home – bus and replace him with a Dem they hope and pray might win (the number one candidate is the uber-incompetent Kamala Harris).

Needless to add, these two factions not only are at vicious Hot War against each other but also at war with…

3.The ones who really matter: the actual Deep State – from the “intelligence community” to webs woven inside the CIA and the FBI. This is the infernal machine that actually gave the White House on a platter to Biden in 2020.

Dem Chuck Schumer once famously proclaimed: if you cross this faction, they have “Six Ways from Sunday” to get to you, destroy you, or whack you. With total impunity.

Enter Six Ways from Sunday

So this is what might happen next – way beyond Iwo Jima 2.0 and the irresistible pull of the Trump-Vance ticket. If the Deep State cannot influence the outcome of the November elections, they can find Six Ways from Sunday to cancel it, by invoking a “national emergency”. Anything goes – from false flag terrorism to war.

Extrapolating from a quite cool analysis by a crack fintech expert in Berlin, it’s possible to characterize the bipartisan War Party arrangement in the Blob as two real Mafioso enterprises fighting over an Exceptionalistan on the brink of abysmal bankruptcy – and forced to choose its final Forever Wars.

The Six Ways from Sunday faction is determined to go all the way – employing every imperial means – to conquer what could be dubbed the El Dorado in the black soil of Novorossiya, whose resources could buy it, maybe, another 50 years of power.

On the other side, the MAGA group doesn’t care about those Slavlands, and is convinced that the real existential threat is the Middle Kingdom. And as it is beholden to the Book of Joshua racket, the MAGA group also believes that “something must be done“ about Iran.

Either group, by the way, is de facto fully devoted to the Book of Joshua racket.

The Empire – of Chaos – happens to be run under a quite peculiar governance, in which a very complicated voting system decides which group gets access to the means for pursuing their obsession.

As long as there was enough gold in the vaults of the Empire – illegally appropriated or otherwise – the two groups alternated Power Possession without too much fuss.

But then all those Forever Wars lost over the years against militarily insignificant adversaries started to take their toll. And the financial times now are really, really tough.

The imperial voting system holds an extremely bizarre characteristic: under roughly equal voter affiliation to either group, the votes cast in just five cities in five states in the midwest Heartland actually determine the fate of those dwindling imperial resources fiercely fought over by the two main groups.

The Six Ways from Sunday group happens to control the voting in those five cities.

Already in the past elections, the Six Ways from Sunday group pre-empted a certain victory of the MAGA group in the Heartland to the tune of 10 million votes, most of them cast in truckloads of forged ballots in those five cities, plus related electronic tampering.

What the MAGA group now clearly sees is the possibility to finally grab those five cities in five states.

And yet 10 million excess votes and trying to conquer those five states may not be enough in the face of the massive fraud machine.

So in 2024 MAGA calculates that they must win another five states typically leaning towards the Six Ways from Sunday universe, and win by an excess of at least 20 million votes to pre-empt the all but certain massive fraud.

That’s where Iwo Jima 2.0 come in – graphically formatting the ticket for a landslide victory.

Six Ways from Sunday may be beyond dazed and confused at the current incandescent juncture. The trillion dollar question is: how will they change the narrative and regain the initiative?

They have made the lethal mistake of picking as their candidate a walking dead. In contrast, MAGA parades the quintessential narcissistic pop superstar, now supercharged and re-energized, and carrying global appeal.

It seems that the landslide is inevitable. Six Ways from Sunday is mired in total panic – knowing they are about to lose control.

Yet the fat lady has not yet sung.

Three and a half months is a galactic eternity in politics. And a cornered Six Ways from Sunday is all set to roar with more ferocity than ever.