Going, Going, Gone!

The President of Decline May Take the Planet Down with Him

[For those of you who like reading about relatively recent history, let me recommend that you pick up a copy of Alfred McCoy’s new book, Cold War on Five Continents, about which another historian I greatly admire, John Dower, wrote: “A masterful account of conflict of every sort in almost every imaginable place. Alfred McCoy’s history of the Cold War is a must-read.” ]

Iran, Iraq, Irate.

What a world! It couldn’t be much stranger, could it?

And by the way, what is it about the Middle East? Since the Gulf War of 1990-1991, it’s just never really ended, has it? Who cares that the region is halfway around the world from Washington, D.C.? Yes, the U.S. fought Iraq there from 2003 to 2008. And recently, of course, Donald Trump has gone after Iran. If you want to spread out just a bit more, you could toss in this country’s relatively brief war in Libya and its almost endless one this century in Afghanistan. And don’t blame me if I left something out. After all, I’m almost 82 years old and starting to forget a few things.

I mean, Iran makes particular sense, right? After all, it’s a mere 6,000-odd miles from this country. Anyway, why not shut down part of the world’s supply of fossil fuels and threaten us all with global economic disaster? And since you asked, how could anyone be surprised? After all, since World War II, my country has indeed been the definition of a (if not the) global imperial power and it’s never really stopped making war.

In my youth, for instance, Washington spent almost 20 years fighting in Vietnam. Of course, who even remembers these days, given all the wars that have followed?

Still, on a planet with so many other problems, particularly heat, you might wonder why our government continues to periodically turn up the heat in the Middle East and beyond, led, of course, by a president who, once upon a time (in the wake of his first term in office) in what now seems like another age and another universe, was proud of not going to war anywhere. Oops! Except -- yes again, in the Middle East -- Syria. Oh, double oops, and I almost forgot to look in the direction of Africa and so include his more recent brief bombing campaign in Nigeria and the seemingly never-ending one in Somalia -- yes, Somalia!

And in case you hadn’t noticed, despite all those endless wars (without a victory in sight), the U.S. military doesn’t exactly feel at the top of its game anymore either. Otherwise, despite Donald Trump’s promise of an unparalleled future Pentagon budget of $1.5 trillion -- and no, that is not a misprint! -- why would one U.S. general after another be resigning, retiring, or -- thank you, Secretary of (most distinctly) War Pete Hegseth -- being fired?

These days, of course, if you want to be a -- if not the -- major power on this planet (and I’m thinking, as I’m sure you’ve already guessed, about China), there’s distinctly something to be learned from the previous great power’s three-quarters of a century of failed wars that (yes, again!) just never seemed to end (and may soon be added to, possibly not in the Middle East or anywhere near it, but in Cuba, or perhaps Greenland, or -- since it’s Donald Trump -- almost anyplace you care to imagine on Planet Earth.

Honestly, just in case you hadn’t noticed, what a truly strange world we now find ourselves in. I mean, from George Washington to Barack Obama, we’ve had presidents of all sorts, temperamentally speaking, but never one faintly like Donald J. Trump. And there have, of course, been endless leaders of powers in decline on this planet, but perhaps never one who so distinctly and personally embodied decline, not at least since ancient Rome’s Caligula or Nero.

President Trump should really be considered the equivalent of a giant piece of green algae from that Washington pool of his, but the pool he’s actually in is the United States of America -- or, perhaps even more accurately, Planet Earth. And it seems there’s simply no way to clean him out.

Worse yet, he wasn’t just elected mistakenly once, but purposely twice by American voters (49.8% of them the third time around), who could imagine only him (and no one else) leading this country. What they seem not to have imagined, however, is the most obvious thing of all: where he might be leading the rest of us, which is, of course, directly down the planetary toilet, algae and all. Of course, it’s no news, historically speaking, that all great powers from imperial Rome to imperial Britain to the Soviet Union do go down sooner or later, but to think of Donald Trump simply as the president of American decline on this deeply disturbed planet of ours is to sell him distinctly short.

And unlike the rest of us, he’s getting just what he’s always wanted. Any day you look at the paper (and yes, I’m old enough that I still read a paper paper), his ultimate dream -- a Trumpian headline -- invariably awaits him. Today’s (as I was writing this) in the New York Times was: “Trump Cut Big Mine Deal, and Sons Stand to Gain, $1.6 billion Pact for Kazakhstan Tungsten Furthers Pattern of Self-Enrichment.” And honestly, you don’t really have to read another word of it, do you? Tungsten in Kazakhstan and his family is going to make a fortune! Well, what’s new? Not much, really.

After all, in some mad fashion, we are now distinctly on a Trumpian planet of billionaires. (Note that I almost wrote “billionaires and a trillionaire,” but of course the first trillionaire in human history, Elon Musk, only recently lost part of his shirt and is once again a mere multi-, multi-billionaire.) And Donald J. Trump would never want his sons or himself to be left out of the action.

Nor would he ever want anyone to say to him, “You’re fired” -- certainly not the six conservative (or do I mean deeply reactionary) Supreme Court justices who just allowed him by the usual 6-3 margin to freely fire the leaders of independent agencies or commissions any time he pleases. Or as Sonia Sotomayor put it in her dissenting opinion: “The Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

Give him another two and a half years and who knows what this president will be able to do -- but the odds are that, by at least a 6-3 margin, he might indeed be able to take this planet down with him. And in doing so, he’ll give that phrase of once-upon-a-time New York Yankees announcer Mel Allen for a batter hitting a home run -- “going, going, gone!” -- a distinctly new meaning.