Considered as a classic of 20th-century literature, Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22 comedically told the story of a WWII bombardier named Yossarian who desperately wanted to be declared insane so he could stop flying increasingly suicidal missions. The problem was “Catch-22”. Anyone who had the sense to want to be “grounded” was clearly sane, because only a sane person would want to avoid being blown out of the sky. As a result, anyone who asked to be grounded for sanity reasons was, by definition, sane enough to keep flying.
The genius of Heller’s novel was not the absurdity of the “rules” it highlighted. Instead, it was the revelation that such absurdity was the point. The system was not broken. The system was working exactly as designed…for the benefit of the people who designed it. These people had a war to be won against the evil forces of fascism and couldn’t have flight crews walking away from their duties for mental health reasons and designed a system to keep fighting men fighting regardless of their mental condition. For everyone else who had not made the rules or who were not part of their enforcement were just cogs in the “catch”.
Importantly, for a novel that questioned the absurdity of war and especially a war where right and wrong had rarely been so starkly contrasted, Heller didn’t write his book from a distance. In a similar vein to Herman Melville who had first-hand experience on whaling ships that added to the authenticity of his great epic, Moby Dick; Heller joined the US army in 1942 at the age of 19 and two years later was sent to the Italian Front, where he flew 60 combat missions as a B 25 bombardier. B-25 bom
Interestingly, while Heller’s eventual “Catch 22” took him well over a decade to write, his work did not gain acclaim in the US until 1962. It was then that Catch 22 became a cult classic on college campuses where questions around an escalating and not so “black and white” war in Vietnam had begun to vigorously percolate.
Unfortunately, Heller died in 1999 and there is sorrow in this statement as there is a dire need of “Hellerian” insight to unmask the daily absurdities provided by the Trump administration and its orbit. Heller would have found a way to see through a Trump world where reality has become stranger than fiction. He would have done so by revealing the swirl of corruption, lack of coherence and inane adherence to mistruths such as supporting a vandalized reflecting pool narrative through satirical humor rather than the all-too-common frontal assault that has been ingeniously dubbed “Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS)” by Trump supporters. Such a label immediately, by design, puts anyone vocally critical of the corrupt Trump administration on a backfoot when confronted with a charge of being “deranged”.
And since sooooooo many people are voicing dissent against the tsunami of corruption embedded within the DNA of the current Trump administration, the counter accusation of labeling such concerns a “derangement” creates its own Catch 22. If a concerned US citizen speaks out against this administration, for example, you are labeled a lunatic…if you stay silent 1930’s Germany here we come…).
But instead of calling this current moment a modern Catch 22, perhaps Heller would dub it “Catch 47” as a tribute to the current Chief Executive who is the puppet master for the current form of government being practiced in the US at this time. Throw in the extremist Christian Right, characterized as “patriots” by the Trump administration, and White supremacist movements that are also embraced by the Trump team as expressing their “free speech” rights as great Americans do…only enriches a “Helleresque” “Catch 47” framework functioning (or “dysfunctioning”…) in real time.
In terms of capturing the essence of what Heller would look to critique through satire today, let’s remember that Catch 22 was all about the absurdity of rules that keep a war machine going. Today, the Trump administration is at war on multiple fronts. In real terms, there is its festering war with Iran. But beyond this physical war is a greater conflict being waged by the Trump team on the global and domestic order that has existed since the end of WWII.
In this chaotic set up, let’s now examine some of the “rules” that Heller would use to critique this current moment…
The Rules of Catch 47
Rule 1: Everything is unprecedented. Nothing is unprecedented.
The second Trump administration has now generated, by various credible estimates, somewhere between $2.2 billion and $2.6 billion in personal financial gains for the president and his family since January 2025. This figure — tracked in real time by the Center for American Progress’s “Trump’s Take” and the House Oversight Committee’s “Trump Family Digital Grift Wealth Tracker,” two government resources that exist now as a matter of democratic necessity — includes cryptocurrency ventures, meme coins, foreign sovereign wealth fund investments, mineral deals, documentary licensing arrangements, and what one writer has carefully described as “legal settlements,” in what the same writer has placed in parentheses as “more colloquially known as shakedowns.”
This is unprecedented, say the ethics lawyers — former White House ethics lawyers who served administrations of both parties, who have written that Trump “has shattered” the “clear bipartisan norm” that presidents must avoid even the appearance of personal gain from public office.
This is just business, says the media, in the same tone of voice one uses to describe a quarterly earnings report. Meanwhile, not a single leader across corporate America says a word as such a stance would potentially disenfranchise shareholders if the White House were to label such a CEO and company as unpatriotic. And good for ABC and its parent company Disney who have refused to go along with such “bullying” regarding its comedian celebrity Jimmy Kimmel who is critical of the Trump administration.
Away from ABC, however, the unprecedented has been processed, digested, and filed under “normal”. Meanwhile, the asset management industry remains silent even as some of its leaders have written books about leadership. As a result, dirty money being generated by this administration and its orbit becomes “clean” as the “system”, by its silence, acquiesces to it.
Welcome to Catch 47.
Rule 2: The more brazen the act, the less attention it receives and so it is…
Days before Trump’s inauguration in January 2025, an Abu Dhabi investment vehicle backed by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan — the United Arab Emirates’ national security advisor and brother of its president — purchased 49 percent of World Liberty Financial, the Trump family’s crypto venture, for $500 million. Approximately $187 million of this went directly to entities controlled by the Trump family. An additional $31 million went to entities tied to the family of Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Middle East envoy.
Shortly after this arrangement was concluded, the Trump administration approved a plan to export advanced AI chips to the UAE despite national security concerns about China.
In early 2025, World Liberty Financial issued USD1, its stablecoin. Within weeks, an investment fund connected to the UAE used USD1 in connection with a $2 billion investment in Binance — a crypto exchange that had previously pleaded guilty to allowing its platform to be used by illicit actors to fund child sexual abuse, drug trafficking, and terrorism.
Rule 3: You can buy Greenland, or you can threaten to invade it. Either way, it’s Wednesday…
In January 2026, the President of the United States threatened to impose tariffs of up to 25% on eight European countries — Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands — unless Denmark ceded Greenland, an autonomous Arctic territory whose population of approximately 56,000 people had, with some consistency, indicated that they did not wish to become Americans.
The President also declined to rule out the use of military force to achieve this dubious outcome.
Trump subsequently tied his Greenland demands; in a message to the Norwegian prime minister that he explicitly asked be shared widely with world leaders, to the fact that he since he had not been awarded the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, he no longer had an “obligation to think purely of Peace.”
Approximately one month later under the guise of “emergency”, the United States in concert with Israel launched airstrikes against Iran and started a war.
Rule 4: Loyalty above all else…
The civil service; built over almost two centuries precisely to resist the spoils system that Andrew Jackson had pioneered in the early 19th century has been systematically dismantled by Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative with the blessing of the Trump administration. To this end, by late February 2025, more than 30,000 federal employees had been fired. What had been career positions were reclassified into at-will roles that could be filled by those whose primary qualification is alignment with the president’s agenda.
The Department of Justice, whose nominal independence from the executive has been the bedrock of domestic rule of law, is led by a man who spent the years immediately preceding his appointment defending the president himself in criminal proceedings.
These arrangements have generated 550 lawsuits. Plaintiffs have prevailed in 195 of them but the music plays on…
Meanwhile, even though the US Supreme Court ruled that Trump’s tariff policies were illegal they still somehow have been redirected through other channels and continue anyway…
Rule 5: Overt corruption that is so audacious that it can’t be true also means it must not be…
Let’s be clear. When Trump made is way down the escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to throw his hat into the 2016 US Presidential race his net worth, away from goodwill estimates that he loosely used to frame his profile for the US press was in the range of $1.5bn (https://www.opensecrets.org/personal-finances/donald-trump/net-worth?cid=N00023864&year=2015). Fast forward to today and Trump’s most recent financial disclosure reveals $2.2 billion in gains during his first year in office the second time around with $1.4 billion of this total coming in cryptocurrency alone. His overall fortune, estimated by Forbes at $6.3 billion as of April 2026, is nearly three times his estimated net worth at the start of 2024. This growth has been driven, in the words of former White House ethics lawyers writing just this week, by “industries his administration regulates, foreign relationships his administration oversees and markets his policies move.”
By June 2026, a Reuters analysis estimated that Trump and his family had made $2.3 billion from crypto ventures, with investors losing the same amount. The biggest losers, per the data, were retail investors — the small holders, the political supporters, the people who believed in the project. Of those who traded the $TRUMP meme coin, approximately 764,000 wallets lost money. Interestingly, in contrast, fifty-eight wallets made more than $10 million each.
The 58 wallets showed, per Bloomberg, all exhibited “an uncanny ability to time their trades.”
Rule 6: Peace is war. War is peace and arguably driven by less than one percent of the US population. Meanwhile, One Big Beautiful Bill gets quietly passed as a gargantuan wealth transfer while the Trump snow globe swirls…on purpose…
In February 2026, the United States launched a major military attack on Iran alongside Israel, with the stated goal of regime change and an infrastructure for a more peaceful Mid East that would be more pliant to the interests of an expanding Israeli state. This expansionary war for Israel was initiated without the consent of Congress, against a country that had not attacked the United States, on behalf of the strategic objectives of Israel whose relationship to American national interest requires examination.
Under its hawkish prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel has grand plans for an expansion of the current Israeli state at the expense of human rights in the region. There is so much more to write on this one topic that deserves immediate heightened attention, but this paper isn’t the forum to dissect this all too important and real story. What is fair game in this forum, however, is a recognition that the US Jewish population represents approximately 2% of the US populace. Of this 2%, only 23%, according to the Jewish Electorate Institute, are both pro-Israel and fully supportive of Israel’s current policies. And yet, at Israel’s behest, the US started a war with Iran (based on the unscripted words of Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the outset of the conflict) under the guise of an emergency.
In terms of how this sequence of events has unfolded arguably has ties back to the unregulated impact Israel’s lobbying enterprise AIPAC has on US elections. Such silent but potent influence also arguably ties into the asset management industry as well as the media where the avowed Zionist Ellison family owns a disproportionate amount of the US media including CBS News.
Away from the attention of war with Iran, the Trump administration has had free rein to be frenetically busy. The administration recently for example has simultaneously pursued peace negotiations, conducted tariff negotiations, threatened Oman with destruction (“Oman will behave just like everybody else, or we will have to blow them up”), pardoned a former Honduran president who had been sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug trafficking, and signed the One Big Beautiful Bill (OBBB) last summer. OBBB quietly made permanent tax cuts mostly benefiting the country’s highest income brackets while cutting Medicaid coverage for an estimated 11.8 million citizens and eliminating SNAP benefits. The timing of these cuts, meanwhile, doesn’t kick in until after the 2026 midterm elections.
Rule 7: Only Trump could turn a soccer game into a geopolitical incident that makes the US soccer team the bad guy…
The 2026 FIFA World Cup — hosted by the United States, Canada, and Mexico — was developing as a genuine feel-good American story in the making…until the US Men’s Soccer team’s best striker, Folarin Balogun, received a “red card”, disqualifying him for then the team’s next match, late in the game that had propelled the US into the World Cup’s final 16 teams.
And while this development represented a material challenge for the US soccer team and especially given that its arguable second-best player, Christian Pulisic was laboring with a calf issue; this is the type of narrative that had the potential to elevate a World Cup match into the realm of legend. Think 1980 US Olympic hockey team, a team of true amateurs playing against a grizzled veteran and professional USSR hockey squad…
A similar script could have been written for this US soccer team; playing with heart, playing shorthanded, playing for their country on home turf, and potentially elevating US soccer to a rarified height it had never seen in the modern sports era…until… Catch 47 intervened.
We all know what happened next. Trump made a call and Balogun started the match. But Belgium through this process had been psychologically transformed from being the “hunted” to now being the “hunters”. From the writer’s perspective, this match was over before it began and the final score of Belgium 4, United States 1 was not a surprise…
The underdog story America might have had — the one about heart and resilience and playing through adversity — was replaced by a story about favoritism, institutional capitulation, and a 4-1 shellacking that the scoreboard delivered with the ruthless precision what feckless politicians and FIFA leadership bowing to presidential pressure could not.
Rule 8: Only Trump Could Make the World Mourn for Iran
And then there is the funeral.
On February 28, 2026, the United States and Israel launched a joint military strike on Iran opening a war between these countries. Among those killed on the opening day of this war was Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, 86 years old, whose 36-year rule had made him one of the most vilified figures in Western geopolitics. His daughter, his son-in-law, his daughter-in-law, and his 14-month-old granddaughter were also killed in this strike on his compound.
This week, Iran is holding a six-day state funeral for Khamenei — stretching across Tehran, Qom, Mashhad, Najaf, and Karbala. Millions of mourners have filled the streets. Representatives from more than 100 countries are attending. Pakistan’s Prime Minister flew to Tehran. China sent a senior official. Russia sent Dmitry Medvedev. India sent a delegation. Iraq’s president attended. Turkey’s vice president attended. Afghanistan’s Taliban sent their foreign minister.
The United States and Israel, for obvious reasons did not attend. Additionally, most of Western Europe did not attend — not because they weren’t invited, but because Iran told the countries that had taken “an inappropriate position” on the strikes referenced above that they were not welcome to attend. Iran’s foreign minister, meanwhile, told those who did attend that they were “standing on the right side of history.”
In the streets of Tehran, mourners (who were terrified of their government last year) performed a symbolic “stoning the devil” ceremony — throwing pebbles at an image of Donald Trump. Chants of “death to America, death to Israel” filled the air.
Only Catch 47 could have produced such an outcome where in six months a global pariah state in Iran has not only become an international martyr, but also the winner of a war against the US and Israel which now makes Iran a regional power…which also means that the writer is not surprised to see a resumption of hostilities between the US and Iran as this note is being written.
Bottom Line – Where the Laughter Stops
Joseph Heller wrote Catch-22 as a warning disguised as a comedy. He understood that the most effective way to expose a system that had lost its moral bearings was to make you laugh at it until you couldn’t laugh anymore. Contemplative silence then follows and we are all sitting in such reticent quiet now.
And while such satire was informed by WWII, its true utility proved to be invaluable during the Vietnam War era when Heller’s novel Catch 22 became legendary.
Joseph Heller ended Catch-22 not with a joke but with his main character, Yossarian, simply running toward the horizon and anywhere that wasn’t inside “the Catch”.
The laughter in the piece you have just read stops somewhere around the tail of a hawkish Israeli state wagging the dog of US democracy while the Trump family gets exorbitantly wealthy amid the chaos.
The laughter also stops again when Belgium blasted the US soccer team 4 to 1, which is a story line that will follow Trump’s FIFA phone call for years to come. This is the equivalent of a punchline that lands on you rather than for you and Belgian soccer players doing their own version of Trump’s notorious political rally dance serves as an additional form of poetic justice where a sports outcome transcends Catch 47.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DahIDKYho42
And there’s absolutely no one laughing in Iran as they (hundreds of thousands of mourners have flooded the streets in Tehran) and more than 100 countries mourn the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei while the US and Israel and the West looked on. The resumption of hostilities by the US during such a week for Iran speaks volumes as it has been topped off with a quip by President Trump about taking over Iran’s Kharg Island, its oil export site, after all…
This American “new normal” is something that would have been unimaginable to any strategist of the post-World War Two international order. The US, while still a global force economically and militarily, has become a rogue state.
It is against this backdrop that global sovereign wealth funds and central banks that have for decades been reliable buyers of US Treasury securities are quietly reassessing. The premium that American debt has always commanded in global markets, its so-called “exorbitant privilege” has quietly rested on a foundation of institutional reliability and predictable governance is now in question.
Joseph Heller understood that the most dangerous systems are not the ones that fail openly. They are the ones that succeed — at all of the wrong things — for just long enough that everyone inside of them has forgotten what “right” actually looks like.
And for everyone who has been smart enough to sharply overweight tech stocks in the current unprecedented market rally of recent months, congratulations. But beyond this congratulations exists an opportunity to bring Earnest Hemmingway and the famous poet John Donne into this conversation as such fortunate investors may believe they are above the fray of politics. And, as a result, such investors may believe that the ominous and eventual “Catch 47” bell doesn’t toll for them, when indeed it tolls for all of us as Americans who are now part of a rogue state being driven by interests that are not a visible part of the US election process.