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.
These days, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Trump’s approval ratings are heading for the planetary basement. As I was writing this piece, for instance, only 31% of Americans approved of how he was handling the economy. (Of course, you might wonder, at this point, why it wasn’t 11% or even 0%.) Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance’s approval ratings, too, have been hitting historic lows.
Mind you, Donald Trump has always given unpredictability new meaning, but these days, a constant version of unpredictability is his aging middle name. Remember the president who was against “warmongers and America-last globalists” and was going to remove them from office in his second term in the White House? Remember the president who was going to “turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars”?
Hmmm, well, think again (and again and
again!) now that he’s gone to war (or is it to peace, or even to pieces?) with
Iran in an all too strikingly destructive fashion. But that’s today’s news and,
in the era of the aging Donald Trump, who knows what tomorrow might hold for
any of us (or, for that matter, what might happen an hour from now)? Count on
one thing, though: “our” president sure doesn’t know and so, sadly, neither can
we.
(Phew! Without section breaks, I’m already exhausted, but
who can truly take a break when it comes to Donald Trump?)
And here’s what might be the saddest thing of all (not that
all of it isn’t sad as hell, and potentially leading the rest of us all too
literally into a hell on earth): given this country’s military machine, which “the peace president” seems eager to feed an extra $500 billion (and no, that’s not a typo!), which
would raise the Pentagon budget by an
exceedingly modest 50%, the United States still has the power to turn this
planet into a hell on Earth in a fashion no other imperial power in decline has
ever been able to do. (And I’m not even thinking about this country’s vast
nuclear arsenal.)
So, here’s our horrifying reality: in the next two and a
half years, if, of course, he doesn’t either keel over tomorrow or somehow grab
even more time as president — remember that, last year in Iowa, which he won in
all three of his election campaigns, he asked an audience ominously, “Should we do it a fourth
time?” — Donald J. Trump is genuinely capable of preparing to take not just
this country but the planet down with him. Phew again!
And I’m not just thinking about his ability (if that’s
faintly the word for it) with allies like Israel to turn parts of this world into
hell zones of war. I’m thinking instead about the climate disaster to come and
the president who has called
it “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and a “green
scam,” and is prepared in his own fashion to heat this planet to the boiling
point. (And keep in mind that the U.S. military is
the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases,
even in peacetime, on Planet Earth.)
Honestly, I still find it hard to imagine that a near
majority of American voters elected such a distinctly disturbed old man as
president yet again, one seemingly intent on squashing
green energy of any sort and potentially taking this planet down with him the
second time around. Consider it truly strange, in fact (or do I mean: consider
it unstrange beyond words) that the two oldest presidents in our history (Donald Trump,
Joe Biden, and, yes!, Donald Trump again) have occupied the White House
consecutively for the last decade, given that this country is now distinctly an
aging, even potentially, fading power on a planet that may itself be aging and
fading all too rapidly.
I’m old enough to have experienced 15 presidents in my lifetime so far (and that’s not
even counting Trump the second time around) and yet he is distinctly, day by
day, month by month, year by year, one of a kind in the worst sense imaginable.
Consider it odd, in fact, that, as a con artist first class, he may himself
turn out to be the greatest con job ever perpetrated on this world of ours and,
in his own eerie fashion, a world-ending figure. Worse yet, whether we like it
or not, it seems as if we are all now his apprentices.
Imagine as well that making war and “unleashing” ever more coal, oil, and natural gas are the two things he seems to be
specializing in during his second term in office, even if, thanks to his
conflict with Iran, he actually put a sudden limit on the global distribution of oil and gas via the Strait
of Hormuz and helped (in his own fashion) and with a distinct hand from Iran to
clobber the big oil producers
of the Middle East.
(Whew! If only I could put a section break up right here and
take a break myself! Facing such a world and such a president, this old writer
finds himself increasingly out of breath!)
You know, if, when I was young and when, in the midst of the
Cold War with the Soviet Union, the youthful John F. Kennedy was president, you
had even tried to describe Donald Trump’s version of the world to me, I would
have thought you not just literally mad, but one of the worst creators of
fiction around. Can there be the slightest doubt, in fact, that President Trump
has indeed turned out to be among the worst creations of a planet that couldn’t
be in deeper trouble?
I wanted to write “fictional creations” there. If only this
were indeed a grim dystopian novel, rather than the actual world, and if Donald
Trump himself were indeed some mad fictional creation. What a thrill that would
be! After all, such a weird and wild version of a Philip Roth noveI would once
have seemed to readers like a mad laugh-a-thon.
If only…
But when the voters of your very own country decide to make
just such a fiction our reality a second time around in this all too real
world, you know that something is truly wrong on Planet Earth.
In a sense, Donald Trump could be thought of as the way,
after this country’s endless decades of imperial war-making from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan
to Iraq, and now to Iran (and that’s leaving out plenty of our warring activities), we Americans
decided not just to make war on the rest of the world but on ourselves as well.
And by reelecting a man who proudly insists that climate change is
the “greatest con job ever perpetuated” and a total “green new scam,” we’re obviously involving ourselves in a
big-time fashion in what might be thought of as World War III, the ultimate war
on planet Earth itself.
I mean, you have to feel anxious when you only have to put
“Donald Trump, climate change” into your computer search window and up come
endless disturbing pieces, including, for me just now, Maxine Joselow of
the New York
Times writing an article headlined (rather mildly under the
circumstances) “Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump’s Washington.”
It began this way:
“Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by ‘leftist
politicians.’ Fossil
fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere will be harmless. These were some of the false claims made at a
conference on Wednesday held by groups that reject the overwhelming scientific
consensus on climate change. What might have seemed like a fringe event in
years past this time boasted a prominent keynote speaker: Lee Zeldin, the
administrator of the Environmental
Protection Agency and one of President Trump’s possible choices for
the next attorney general.”
Tell that, of course, to all of us in New York City, who
only recently lived through record-breaking 90-degree July weather in early April.
Consider it strange indeed that, in response to the never-ending news that we
humans have long been turning this planet into a fossil-fuelized hothouse, a
near majority of us would indeed opt to again elect a president who makes climate-change
denial seem like a far too mild term.
Of all the things that Donald Trump hasn’t done, he’s worked
in what, for him, is a remarkably organized fashion to stall or nix any projects that wouldn’t further heat
this planet of ours. Utterly unfocused as he so often is, he’s remained
strikingly focused on shutting down wind power and solar energy projects, while
launching ever more fossil-fuel ones, including opening more than a billion acres of coastal waters to
oil and gas drilling and paying a French company almost a billion dollars not
to create two wind farms off this country’s east coast, but instead to invest
in oil and gas projects here in the U.S.
Talk about dystopian! Donald Trump should truly be
considered a full-scale dystopian nightmare playing out in real time.
Wait! I have a last urge for this piece. Think of it as a
way for me to finally catch my breath. To end it, I want to create one of those
missing section heads right here, right now. How about:
The Hothouse President on a Planet Going to Hell
[And yes, that is indeed the end of this piece, but not for
a moment the end of the nightmare we’re now living through.]
© 2023 TomDispatch.com
Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Type Media Center's TomDispatch.com. His books include: "A Nation Unmade by War" (2018, Dispatch Books), "Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World" (2014, with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald), "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050"(co-authored with Nick Turse), "The United States of Fear" (2011), "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" (2010), and "The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond" (2007).
