I must admit that if, when I was 16 and John F. Kennedy won the presidency, you had tried to tell me about President (!!) Donald Trump (twice!!!), I would have thought it the lamest joke and you the worst joker (or biggest idiot) on the face of this planet.
Now, mind you, it’s true that all great powers invariably go down in their own fashion, but never, I suspect, quite in the fashion of Donald J. Trump’s America. And consider that no small thing for what was, not so long ago, the greatest power on the face of the earth, if not in all of human history. In that context, it needs to be said that not many of us in our history have had to live through something quite as bizarre as Donald J. Trump as the head of the greatest power not just on this planet now, but possibly ever.
In short, Donald J. Trump (and excuse me for repeating his name but I just can’t seem to help myself!) is giving decline, despite its long imperial history, a distinctly new meaning.
If only we could all walk out on him the way he recently walked out on NBC’s Kristen Welker in the middle of an interview, when she challenged him over his wild claims of election fraud in California’s primaries. But no such luck, of course.
And yet, consider this a guarantee: with two and a half years to go, Donald J. Trump is undoubtedly going to give decline (and fall) a new meaning.
After all, no one is in control of HIM(!)—not even HIM(!). In his own mind at least, he’s clearly president, ruler, king, dictator, you name it, of the increasingly (dis)United States of America. In fact, he should truly be considered a one-of-a-kind, even the first (and, for all we know, anything but the last) of a kind in the quarter millennia of our history. And yes, we Americans live in a country that, in the more than three-quarters of a century since the U.S. emerged successfully from World War II as the great imperial power (perhaps even the greatest of all time), has made war anything but successfully across the planet from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Iran (and that’s not faintly a full list either). And now, Donald Trump has been talking about essentially invading Iran. (”At some point in the not-too-distant future, we will be taking Kharg Island, and other oil infrastructure points, and assume total control of their Oil and Gas Markets, much like we have with Venezuela, which is working out brilliantly for both Venezuela and the United States of America.”) Of course, he’s also talking about making peace with Iran and, given him, anything (even everything) could happen.
Not that “our” president would notice, but consider it extraordinary that, since World War II, the greatest power on this planet, bar none, hasn’t been able to win its wars of choice against countries whose power bore literally no relation to America’s. (Of course, in the last four-plus years in Ukraine, that other great power, Vladimir Putin’s Russia, has discovered that such a fate is anything but Washington’s alone.)
In that sense, whatever may happen, Iran at this moment is all too typical. Somehow, especially in a world where it seems that any power can have the latest in drone weaponry and missiles, being number one has become a formula not for imperial success but imperial disaster (again and again and again). Explain that as you will, it certainly isn’t typical of the history of imperial powers over the centuries.
And here’s something I wonder about: have this country’s leaders learned anything from the war-making disasters of the last three-quarters of a century? Not a chance, it seems! In Donald Trump’s first term, he might have appeared to be a rarity among American presidents—one who had learned something about this country’s historic inability to win its imperial wars of choice planet-wide since 1945. Except for a spat with ISIS in Syria, he avoided war-making entirely in his first term in office. But explain it as you will, with four years off to think things over, no such luck the second time around.
Donald Trump is at war with the planet
Oh, and let me just add that the country that may become the greatest power on a future Earth (if such a livable planet even turns out to exist) is certainly China and its leaders seem to have learned a distinct lesson from Washington’s war-making disasters. With the exception of a war with Vietnam in—yes!—1979 and some border skirmishes with India between 2020 and 2022, it has spread its influence globally (in part, by creating most of the green energy architecture for this increasingly desperate world of ours) without going to war. Yes, there’s no question that it’s certainly built up its military and has made itself the third major atomic power on this planet (after the U.S. and Russia). Still, its leaders since Mao Zedong have distinctly shied away from war.
And by the way, consider it a genuine miracle that, with nine nuclear powers now on this planet (and an ongoing war over the possible tenth), in the 80 years since the U.S. atomically blasted the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II, no country has ever again used an atomic weapon. (Given humanity, who would even believe it?)
Wait, let me add a footnote to that point (a very, very large one, in fact). It’s true that no country’s military has ever again dropped an atomic bomb or launched an atomic missile, but give us humans some credit. After all, ever so long ago, we came up with a slow-motion version of atomic warfare, which has now gained the name “climate change” (a name that, in fact, is far too mild for such an all-too-slow-motion nuclear-style reality).
And when it comes to that, there can be no question that Donald Trump is at war with this planet (and so the rest of us) in a big-time fashion. A hoax, a scam, a con job, you name it and he’s probably used it to describe what we humans (and he in particular) have been doing to our world. Only recently, in fact, he insisted that the Earth is actually “cooling as a planet.” (Can you believe it?). Meanwhile, he seems to have little short of an overwhelming urge to turn our world into a genuine hothouse, as heat records indeed continue to be set both globally and in the United States. Only recently, in fact, his Environmental Protection Agency made it clear that its officials consider any actions to deal with climate change to be “futile.”
And so, on a planet heating up by the year (and one where wars only add staggering amounts of fossil fuels to the atmosphere), Donald Trump is prepared to make war, whether on Iran or on the planet itself (no matter the American record for war-making over the last 75-plus years), and so, on the rest of us—and even in some strange sense on himself. If you don’t mind my ending this piece on a distinctly grim note, think of Donald J. Trump as, in every sense imaginable, this country’s possible ETP—our end times president.
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