( Tomdispatch.com ) – Once upon a time, nothing in this world could have convinced me that I would be living through this moment in this America on this planet. As a start, once upon an increasingly distant time, Donald J. Trump as president of the United States would have been inconceivable. Literally beyond conception, even in some wildly dystopian satiric novel about an all-too(un)-American future.
I mean, forget anything else, a man who in private life bankrupted six (yes, six!) companies has now been elected president of the United States not just once but twice. You know, the fellow who thinks of those he considers his domestic enemies (and that’s not too strong a word for it), whether Democrats, Republicans, or journalists as nothing short of — and this is the word he uses — “evil.” Once upon a time, this would have been inconceivable even in your wildest all-(un)-American dreams! Not a shot in hell of a chance! Never!
Until, of course, it happened (yes, twice).
And indeed, I have to repeat that “once upon a time” because the American past, however grim in all too many periods of our history, now seems something like a dark fairy tale to me. A distinctly “once upon a time” creation.
Having just turned 81 myself, I wonder what world I’m now really living in and how, in that very same world, any of us could ever have ended up here. Sometimes I try to imagine telling my parents about — I have the urge to capitalize this word but can’t quite bring myself to do it, so italics will have to do — him. My mother was a professional caricaturist for an endless string of newspapers and magazines, and she drew, among other grim figures in this country and on this planet, Senator Joe McCarthy, a distinctly Trumpian character from her moment. The difference being that he was just a senator, not the president of the United States. And he was able to do his damnedest (and that’s definitely the word for it) for only a few grim years before the Senate censured him and he essentially drank himself to death. And yet, having lived through presidents from Theodore Roosevelt when she was born in 1907 to Jimmy Carter in the year of her death in 1977, I have no doubt that Donald Trump would have left her speechless (or do I mean pen or pencil-less?).
My father, at age 35, immediately joined the U.S. Air Force after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and served in Burma during World War II. Even though he was, like my mother a Democrat, he would have found someone who got out of the U.S. military in wartime thanks to fake “bone spurs” almost unimaginable as president. And that would have only been the first of an endless list of Trumpian things that my mom and dad, not to speak of more or less anyone else of their generation, would have found unbelievable in an American president. Even Ronald Reagan (and that’s no small “even”) seemed like a reasonably sane president by comparison.
It’s hard for me to imagine how I would tell either of them about President Trump’s “big beautiful bill” that’s cutting so much, including medical care, for so many Americans at the bottom of the political spectrum in order to give a $975 billion tax break to the wealthiest 1% of us. Or as he put it, “I said to one guy, he’s a very, very unattractive man, but he’s smart and he’s rich, and I said, you better hope we get this thing passed because your wife will be gone within about two minutes. He said, ‘You’re right.’”
Red-Tie Decline
And yet, believe it or not, here we are as July ends in 2025, six months into Donald Trump’s manic second term in office and ever deeper in the Trumpian swamp.
And prepare yourself. There’s really no way to write about this American world of ours without exclamation points! In fact, in some fashion, the exclamation point isn’t faintly enough for this moment. Perhaps what we in these all-too-dis-United States of America now truly need is to invent some far wilder form of punctuation to catch the essence of this moment!!! (Three exclamation points are certainly apt, but they don’t really work, do they?) Maybe, in fact, what we really need is to turn the exclamation point in any Trumpian sentence into a red tie! Or even a series of them!
And let me make one small instant correction to my first paragraph here: Honestly, it really shouldn’t be Donald J. Trump anymore. It should be Donald D. Trump. And I’m sure you’ve already guessed that such a D would stand for decline. And not, mind you, just the decline of the United States — though that’s certainly significant enough — but of the planet itself.
Yes, in 1991, after the Soviet Union collapsed and the last vestiges of the Cold War ended with the U.S. becoming this planet’s “sole superpower,” there were certainly thinkers who already sensed that someday, somewhere along the line, like any great imperial power, this country was bound to enter a path of decline. After all, what great power in history hadn’t done so sooner or later and, in the process, had some idiot or idiots run the show for a while?
Still, let’s face it, there’s decline and then there’s DECLINE (followed, of course, by several red ties). And Donald DECLINE (red tie, red tie) Trump has offered us a path down that simply couldn’t be more uniquely his. I doubt that anyone in the history of imperial power has ever both personalized and personified decline in quite such a… well, deeply, madly personal and unbearably convincing fashion.
Planetary Decline in the Age of Trump
And give him credit, he’s able to do it so much more convincingly because of his advanced age. After all, his second time around, he is indeed — offer him record-setting credit here (red tie) — the oldest president ever to take office in two and a half centuries of all-American history. In other words, in the next three years and five months, we’ll clearly be able to watch not just this twenty-first century imperial power of an almost unimaginable sort — consider, for instance, those 750 or so U.S. military bases that still span this globe of ours — or our 79-year-old president both decline in an up close and personal fashion, but our planet do so as well. And that’s something new in human history.
Never in the past has the Earth itself been on such a precipitous path downward. And before Donald Trump is done (or do I mean, like the rest of us aging creatures, done in?), given his attitude toward climate change, he may manage to take not just this country but the planet down with him. No small feat (and, believe me, I don’t mean feet or even bone spurs here [red tie]) when you think about it. (As a matter of fact, thinking about Donald D. Trump is, in every sense, a declinist activity[red tie].)
I mean from those devastating floods in Texas on the fourth of July weekend, the deadliest inland flooding in this country in almost half a century, to the record-setting, never-ending mega-drought across the American Southwest, to those flooded subway stations in my hometown of New York, climate change is increasingly being felt by Americans of every sort. (It’s mid-summer and I’m sweating as I write this amid a striking heatwave across the Eastern U.S.) Climate change was certainly visible in the staggering temperatures that hit Europe this June, leading to an unexpectedly high death toll, and the horrifying wild fires that have recently ravaged parts of Greece and Turkey; the extensive flooding and other natural disasters in China; and the devastation of every sort it’s been causing in Africa. And that’s just to start down a list that certainly would have to include the Arctic, which may now be heating up four times faster than the global average.
Mind you, none of that should truly be surprising, since this year the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has peaked above 430 parts per million. That’s the highest it’s estimated to have been in millions of years, according to data recently released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and Scripps Institution of Oceanography. And overall, it’s estimated that, in the last year alone, climate change has added an extra 30 days of extreme heat for more than four billion people globally. Think about that for a moment, take a breath, and make sure you’re not overdressed.
And the Trump response to all of this? Among other things, to open Alaska’s wilderness areas more fully to oil and natural gas drilling and mining. Brilliant, no?
Trump Him (Red Tie)
All of that undoubtedly only makes Donald D. Trump all that much prouder. After all, he’s the man (or do I mean: The Man?). And imagine this: the country that was already the historically largest emitter of planet-heating carbon dioxide is, under him, certain to retain that title for the (un)foreseeable future.
Of course, he invariably has an urge to be the ultimate record holder in anything. After all, he’s going all out to cut funds to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) that might have been used to deal in some fashion with climate change’s potential devastation in this country. As the New York Times recently reported, “In an effort to shrink the federal government, President Trump and congressional Republicans have taken steps that are diluting the country’s ability to anticipate, prepare for and respond to catastrophic flooding and other extreme weather events, disaster experts say.”
In his Big Beautiful Budget, he’s been ready to cut so much that matters to this country. Yet the soaring trillion-dollar military budget he’ll preside over (whatever its other problems, including its staggering cost for American taxpayers) will only add to the planetary mayhem by making the U.S. military “the 38th largest emitter [of carbon] in the world if it were its own nation.” And don’t forget the Trumpian-induced science brain drain from this country that’s now underway.
And yet here’s the strange thing (or rather one of all too many strange things): among the Trumpian — and yes, on this planet at this moment in this country, he’s certainly a noun, a verb, an adjective, and undoubtedly an adverb, too — wildness and disastrous acts being covered in the media, it’s amazing how relatively little attention is being given to what may be by far the worst of all his visible urges, his deep-seated desire not just to take this country down with him but our whole overheating planet, too. In a sense, in fact, one thing Donald Trump has proven particularly skilled at is removing attention of any sort from climate change.
Yes, who doesn’t know that, among other things, he once called it a “Chinese hoax”? And it seems to matter not at all to him that, at this very moment, this planet is heating up in a record-setting fashion. Of course, I’ve been writing about just that reality repeatedly because it repeatedly stops me short.
Still, to this day, I can’t understand how 49.8% of American voters found Donald Trump appealing enough to elect him president (again!) in 2024. And of course, we’re talking about the guy who is reportedly dreaming about not running for but just being president a third time around — to hell with the Constitution. His backers have already produced a “Trump 2028” red cap, and he’s told some of them that it would be “the greatest honor of my life to serve not once, but twice or three times or four times” (only later claiming that he was joking).
Don’t you have the urge to call George Orwell back from the dead to write a Trumpian sequel to 1984? Perhaps 2026? And speaking of bringing back the dead, if only I could bring back my parents and let my mother do her ultimate devastating caricature of Donald D. Trump.
However it happens, he really does need to be trumped before he Trumps us all off this planet and global bankruptcy becomes us.
Trump him (red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie, red tie).
Copyright 2025 Tom Engelhardt
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