The nightmare that is Donald Trump
Tom Engelhardt in the TomDispatch
In that context, here’s my advice to you: Don’t get old. For years, I managed not to do so, but unfortunately that’s all over now and I’m increasingly an old man. In fact, I’m not quite two years older than Donald J. Trump.
I was born on July 20, 1944, while World War II was still ongoing, and
he was born on June 14, 1946, in the peacetime that followed but would all too
soon become the Cold
War with the Soviet Union.
And let me tell you something else: these days it’s hard enough to keep the website I still run, TomDispatch, in some kind of reasonable shape, while also keeping track of our ever-stranger, more confusing, all-too-Trumpian world.
But keeping track of things nationally and
globally as an 80-year-old president of the United States (with
another two-and-a-half years to go) in a world that seems to be coming apart at
the — whoops, sorry, I can’t help it! — seams? I simply can’t imagine that. Of
course, I couldn’t imagine it for Joe Biden either,
and yet he left the presidency when he was a staggering 82 years and 61 days old and will still have been
younger than Trump if he truly makes it to January 20, 2029. (And both of them
will have beaten the oldest Roman Emperor, Gordian
I, who at 81 only lasted a few weeks in power.)
And meanwhile, of course, in his own ever stranger fashion,
“our” president took out after Leo, the American pope, himself a veritable
youth at 70 years old, calling him of all things, “WEAK on crime” and, of
course, “catering to the Radical Left.” Oh, and while he was at it, Trump
also posted an image of himself being hugged by (yes, of
course!) Jesus. And Leo responded to the president’s abuse by all too
accurately deploring a world being “ravaged by a handful of
tyrants” (including, of course, You Know Exactly Whom).
Just in case you hadn’t noticed, as an imperial power (even,
historically speaking, the imperial power, the only one at its
height to control quite so much of the planet in one fashion or another), this
country, too, is growing ever older and (again) in its own strange fashion
going down (as, of course, all great imperial powers do sooner or later). Phew!
That was a long sentence for this old guy, but you can’t get too long and
complicated (or do I mean confused?) when it comes to the world of Donald J.
Trump. In electing him a second time in 2024, 49.8% of
American voters clearly opted to go down in style by giving imperial oldness a
startling new meaning.
.webp)
.png)
