Self-destructive manias still entrap MAGA lackeys but not a U.S. majority, western leaders, or world-class economists, diplomats, trade/tariff pros, top scientists—nor the Nobel Prize committee.
Quiz for the day: Will Trump go down as the Ugliest American, Pettiest Pettifogger, most Ludicrous Liar, Creepiest Criminal or Ignoble Incompetent? Or all five? When MAGA Trump offends enough voters, donors, corporations and officials, it will fall off a cliff. Another quandary? Name the worst Trump outrages: 1) stunt-driven militarizing of low-crime Dem cities; 2) abusive, lawless ICE raids plus lawless deportations; 3) ending USAID, thus killing starving babies; 4) ruining key security alliances; 5) mindlessly botching global trade/business; 6) withholding SNAP, Medicaid and ACA subsidies; 7) enacting dodgy drug and vaccine folly; and/or 8) weaponizing the DOJ to punish dissent, maliciously indict foes and critics, plus enable thieving and corruption far and wide. All qualify. Recklessly, and without visible upside, Americans elected a pathological demolisher of both domestic tranquility and global stability/commercial exchanges.
In the 1950s two savvy novelists captured a new frame that exposed arrogant Americans (and leadership) abroad as smugly lording over foreigners, hypocritically subverting post-war claims to foster linkages and treat allies as partners. The novel, “Ugly American,” dramatized how retrograde biases highlighted icons of cultural ignorance, heedless blundering and moral bad faith. Per Wikipedia, loutish Americans exhibit:
loud, arrogant, self-absorbed, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behavior mainly abroad, but also at home. Although [associated with] travelers and tourists, [the term] also applies to U.S. corporate businesses in the international arena. The Collins English Dictionary depicted Ugly American as “. . . an American tourist as a brash and insensitive philistine.” Merriam-Webster described [an official] whose behavior is offensive to the people of that country” . . . ignorant of local customs, social norms, and culture, and consequently losing influence to communism [during] the Cold War.
What summary better captures how MAGA Trump’s vulgar, frantic, blundering lurches come across? Wiping out hard-won, pragmatic tariffs and overseas contracts like empty cartridges at a redneck party, Trump pulls off the impossible: offend both allies and foes, forcing them to make deals with supposed arch enemies China and Russia. Krugman declares this war assails America, Americans and the world. No mean trick.
Bad and getting worse?
With the subtlety of a drunken blowhard, Trump fantasizes now hostile Canada as our fifty-first state, talks up annexing Greenland (forcibly?) and seizing the Panama Canal. Mind games. Just this week, the wannabe Nobel Peace prospect, with zero justification, imperils hardly threatening Venezuelan sovereignty. That follows erasing random Caribbean fishing boats, killing 57 without a molecule of proof that any ran drugs. Driven by irrational hatred against those who resist the Trump kowtow dance, the bullying warlord misbehaves again, though dispatching sneers, not macho toughness.
What does idiotic saber-rattling belligerence achieve – other than skyrocketing his (and our) image as Ugly Americans? Not just in South America but everywhere. Per Huffington Post, “U.S. officials have now chosen targets for airstrikes in the South American country and believe they may be approved imminently, The Wall Street Journal and Miami Herald reported.” Only invading Greenland would be worse. That Trump seditiously rolls over to Putin on Ukraine maximizes his dubious status as the ugliest American leader ever, if not the ugliest imaginable.
Per Pew Canada polling, only 34 percent view the U.S. favorably, down from well over 50 percent one year ago, the lowest since polling began in 2002. Of the 2/3s clocking negative, 39 percent have a “very unfavorable view.” Seventy-five percent are sure Trump can’t handle global issues, with a whopping 59 percent majority judging the U.S. Canada’s top global threat. Denmark, upping its military defenses, matches Canadian numbers: 74 percent of Danes gauge the USA harshly, with only 19 percent backing Donald Trump. Over 40 percent see the U.S. as direct threat. Only Putin is more repulsive than Trump per Le Grand Continent polling. Google AI confirms high repugnance spans Europe: 85 percent in Sweden, 81 percent in Germany, 80 percent in both Spain and Turkey. Worst rankings of all are Mexico’s startling 91 percent objection to U.S. mayhem.
MAGA fails any leadership IQ test
Why do outraged foreigners understand Trump’s global reign of terror but not MAGA miscreants? Bizarro tariff stunts and weekly threats far and wide? Are educations abroad so much better—or networking sites? Is foreign media more enlightened? Hardly. The more Trump abuses savvy foreigners, the faster they conclude MAGA mayhem epitomizes the latest Ugly Americanism. What stands out like bad make-up is both the stunning geographic range of the disgust and their unbendable certainty that American leadership is very bad, oceanic medicine for everyone.
Worldwide repudiation marks the squandering of whatever good will America boasted for serial Ugly Americanism stings us with huge costs, today and for decades. Excluding Israel and Russia, polling proves MAGA Trumpism a repugnant pariah. In Ukraine, a dutiful ally, its majority (73 percent) disdains Trump: 32 percent brace for an “unjust peace”, 22 percent fear a “totally unjust peace,” and all of 3 percent anticipate Trump gains a “just peace.”
Who thinks the inestimable damage already done overseas won’t mount? It’s not as if a century of economic and military belligerence did not expose Yankee imperialism. What Trumpism (ironically) torpedoes is that our pyramid-topping life-style demands dollar stability and dissuading trading partners from rushing to make deals with “enemy forces” in Russia, China or Iran. American affluence staggers when huge swaths of overseas consumers “just say no” to our products, policies and values. Who today trusts the word of a half-crazed, senile, remorseless deal buster?
It’s bad enough MAGA Trump impales America on our own petard, banishing essential laborers along with all-important federal agencies. Name one upside to blasting global markets, eviscerating cost-effective agencies and alienating good allies? That is chaos compounded with chaos. Today’s complex supply chain, and our residual manufacturing prowess, depend on mutually-beneficial world commerce, not erratic blundering, boomeranging faceplants. The double-whammy of imploding from within while alienating critical partners presages inevitable, hard to remedy disasters. Recall how doltish, imperial powers abruptly lurch from riches to rags?
If redemption depends on a well-informed, economic-savvy, non-hating protest majority, we still lack the critical mass (beyond judges) defying still expanding Trumpist abuses. We need boycotts, strikes and shutdowns as MAGA Trump makes the vast majority poorer, sicker and more desperate, presumably to make simplistic non-solutions seem one way out. But the information fog from insular billionaires continues apace, with staying power. If structural guardrails continue to fail, Trump’s intimidating B.S. will lower standards further, a cycle that fuels a suicidal MAGA cult. As long as politics remains tawdry, brain-numbing entertainment, infected by hateful racist bugs, today’s already darkened age will grow darker before en-light-enment may return.
Edward Bernays, the PR/propaganda pioneer a century ago, said “those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society [public/media relations] constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” But what’s undeniable today is that onerous propagandists are anything but unseen. Indeed, Musk, network/tech bros, right-wing influences, racists, anti-Semitic, anti-democracy neo-fascists revel in publicity and arrogant gloating.
High exposure oddly does not yet incite sufficient public outrages, nor leadership visions armed with workable fixes that can impede the double ruination of domestic freedoms and marginal “free-trade” stability. Trump is the unchecked billionaire stand-in for a nasty world order. A Robert Frost poem suggests the world we know ends in fire or ice—but what about delinquent numbness to the corrupt abuses of a very visible government and equally visible, rampaging crony capitalism it falls over itself to support?
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