Completely destroyed every trade agreement to which the U.S. was signatory
Wiped out the entire basis of American soft power abroad
Managed to take an economy with inflation at or under the Fed's target value and get inflation cranking toward "roaring"
Took the nation to war against Iran and, despite Hegseth's "lethality" mantra and "warrior ethos" and all the rest of the testosterone posturing, managed to LOSE that war against what is, at best, a fourth-rate power.
Undermined Ukraine
Strengthened Russia
Greenlighted Putin's direct actions against the United States in Iran and Cuba
Undermined and is about to disband NATO
Repudiated many (most?) of the treaties the U.S. has signed
Eliminated all trustworthiness in the United States as a partner for ANYTHING
Severely damaged our relations with Canada (CANADA!?!?!)
I doubt you'd find another leader in all of history who has so thoroughly and willfully destroyed his own country's prospects, standing, and abilities.
By law, Trump cannot unilaterally withdraw from NATO. Perhaps foreseeing a return of Trump, Congress in 2023 passed a law requiring Congressional legislation or a 2/3 majority of the Senate to withdraw from NATO.
When asked who he was supposedly negotiating with in Iran and how it was going, he "acted" like it was productive and would result in a solution (acting being the appropriate word) he then finished with "well we know where he lives" (standard mob boss like threatening phrase) meaning if he does not cooperate and do as we please, he will be killed.
So, it is worse than just a lack of character, it is despot behavior. We have a Putin-like character in the WH that the GOP in congress will not even stop. The massive detention camps create an image even closer to a pending possible Hitler-like regime.
They are spending billions on this, when the law and order solution would have been to build and open more immigration courts on a massive scale, not camps. Courts not camps to more quickly decide humanely who is eligible to be here if there is such a concern. So, it seems more racially motivated or they would simply do this far more logical approach.
Because of the GOP in congress kowtowing, we are now one of the world's "bad guys" and are no longer seen as "the good guys" protecting democracy, freedom, and law and order.
A complete 180.
Will the poisoning of naysayers and political rivals be next or does "we know where you live" only apply to anyone they do not like outside of our borders?
Trump is an actor on a stage and doesn't care if what he says is true. Today Britain hosted a group of 40 nations to discuss opening the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. was a no-show. Trump and Netanyahu are leaving the Gulf in ruins (like Gaza) and content to just say "Go get your own oil."
everybody talks about oil from the Persian Gulf , but there is more than that. Industries fueled by electricity from natural gas are producing Aluminium, fertilizers : urea, nitrogen based, ammonia and also sulfur....Cargo for these products are waiting
Back in the sisxties when I was at Fort Dix for basic traing we had (in our company) a trainee who's last name was Finster. One day Finster told me and others that I had enough of the U.S. army I wanted to get out. After disobaying when order after another he was admitted to the base paychistriatic hospital and subsequently recived a Medical" discharge. Finster wasn'y crazy but he certainly had chutzpah.
Many people are dumbed down. They don't bother to educate themselves on what is happening in the world. They rely on fake news from social media posts to make decisions. Hard to know how to change this since it appears these adults don't want to make any effort to learn and understand.
He's a KGB plant, and has been, likely since the '80's. All of the points on Derelict's post, above, read as a wish list of KGB/GRU foreign policy objectives. Trump2's foreign policy actions--all of them--have hurt the US, while benefiting Russia. We're on the brink of war with NATO; Ukraine aid was 99% cut in FY2025; Russian oil is now de-sanctioned and making big bucks for Putin's war in Ukraine; 8 billion people across the world now hate the US (and Israel) for making cooking fuel unaffordable.
Simply Google "The case for Trump as a KGB asset" and you'll be treated to a wide and growing range of assertions and analyses, from primary sources like former KGB officials like Shvets and Mussayev, to political summations of his extremely pro-Russian conduct since 2016 by authors like Unger, or even the 2016 Politico articles.
There is *no* hard proof that DJT is owned by the Kremlin. Which is why the MSM presumably treats Donald-as-KGB-spy like its radioactive, even though the case for Traitor is vastly stronger than that for Useful Idiot.
When China comes for us in a few years, we'll be without allies. Alone. Entirely because of Trump.
Having spent time in China--in 2014--and practicing Traditional Chinese Medicine for 25+ years, I'd have to disagree. Xi Xinping is not quite *as* stupid as our dear Donald, but he's beginning his paranoid Joe Stalin phase, in which starting a world war to "liberate" Taiwan is unfortunately not off the table.
Trump will say we are withdrawing even though he can’t legally do so. Just like he tries to rewrite our constitution with executive orders. It will take 18 months of lawsuits and millions in legal fees to reverse his decisions.
So Trump can't formally withdraw, but he can still do so simply by refusing to engage as a member or honor agreements. However, he doesn't realize how much the projection of American power in Africa and the Middle East relies on US assets stationed in Europe, so from a practical perspective he will bloviate but not actually withdraw our assets. And if NATO is smart they will just ignore it. Meanwhile, it appears (you never know for sure) that he is negotiating with Denmark/Greenland to increase the US military presence there. Does that depend on NATO membership?
"..........However, he doesn't realize how much the projection of American power in Africa and the Middle East relies on US assets stationed in Europe."
This is true. Bases in Britain, Italy, Turkey........Diego Garcia. Forward foreign bases are everywhere and used to stage his lunacy. He can't get out of NATO and project military power around the Globe. He is an IDIOT.
The gang who wrote this statement of abdication are? More than one but beyond WH? Sure, maybe they simply clipped/ cut-pasted lines, arrayed them, moved ‘em around, called it coherent but the organizing driver beyond a narcissist’s ego and all -consuming selfish identity? Russ Vought’s Heritage/ project 2025 glance-over? Caine? Seemed like the writer-gang’s premonitions of what’s in store on his downfall slope, ever-fleeting prime time chances to just endlessly project. Before they wrap him up away from view. Astute observers probably have a # for this one on their list….
PAUL MANAFORT WORKED TEN YEARS ON PUTIN’s GLOBAL AGENDA, PAID 10 MILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR, paid by RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS. Part of Putin’s.Global Agenda included: WEAKEN NATIONAL DEMOCRACIES, STRENGTHEN RIGHT WING FACTIONS & TURN COUNTRIES TO HE RABID RIGHT, Weaken, Disrupt, Destroy NATO
War crimes , we have hit Iranian civilians infrastructure. We are killing & hurting innocent people. There is no winners in war only hate and violence spreads . America is a disgrace , that no elected official even feels enough love for our country to stand up says so much.
Trump went into this war without the approval of congress but,, recognizing what he intends--or threatens--to do how is it that he continues to be allowed to drag the US into what could ultimately result in a much wider war--real war--over which all sides have so very much to lose. Where are the safeguards against such a sick and vile man's actions?
Republican congressman and senators give him tacit approval by their silence and praise. If you are standing next to an adult who is beating a child and DO NOTHING .... you are liable. That's all Republicans since Reagan.
No I have not seen it, I will check it out. Everyone will pay , it comes with a real tragic costs to life, the environment. We been in perpetual wars before Afghanistan. ✌️86/47 Vile regime.
Iran has in actuality run a 50yr State Sponsored International Terrorist Program thats killed hundreds of thousands of people both American, Israeli to be sure & European's. When it was abated during JCPOA to get their frozen funds back Qatar & turkey stepped in to make sure Hezbollah/Hamas were still funded
If the Infrastructure use for Military Purposes of any kind it's fair game so an electrical grid that fed Gov Buildings, Military Base or residential buildings that house major political/military leadership is fair game under the laws of armed combat
whatever Iran is and does today is a result of 70 years of US, British and BP Oil hegemony pushing them into theocracy and terrorism....it is in recorded history
There is absolutely no legitimate proof of your rhetoric. Iran fell under the influence of the Russians who taught them how to train, arm & run International Terrorist Groups
The ayatollahs didn't come out of nowhere. Neither did Hezbollah or Hamas (or Fatah, or the PLO). As to "state-sponsored international terrorism," the U.S. has done a fair amount of that in my lifetime, though of course we didn't call it that. Other peoples have longer memories than most USians.
In 1953, democratically elected Iranian Premier Mohammad Mossadegh was removed from power in a coup organized and financed by the British and U.S. governments. Chickens coming home to roost? They had a democratic regime in Iran, but couldn't get their mangy hands off of Iranian oil. Thus, the Ayatollah to replace the Shah after US and Britain installed him in place of Mossadegh.
So your claiming the US's is responsible for Iran's & Russia's State Sponsored International Terrorism??? The 75 yr drive by the Arab League to destroy Israel?? The rise of Islamic Jihad??
I haven't seen US Supporting Internationally Recognized Terrorist Groups with Fed/State Funds & I've been around since the flower power era before Woodstock!
You can point to the Collage of the America's, lieutenant Colonel Olly North & CIA Agents work in Cuba but the first was a school to teach farming, education & Government while the other were illegal actions of individuals. I'm sure it's short list but I doubt that publicly announced State Sponsored Terrorism was ever a part of the US's Gov policies like Irans.
The US has a significant and long history of regime change, invasions to topple govts, back fruit companies in years-long Banana Wars, aquiring land through conquest, supporting repressive regimes. Pobre México! ¡Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!.
But Don, trump has gone beyond that and has announced his intent to do far greater damage and has positioned 50,000 American troops to carry out his threats. He has bombed school buildings full of children, he is talking of depleting water supplies of an entire country of 92 million civilians. These are war crimes.
To suggest Trump has the cognitive abilities to do these things is ludicrous, it's just a madman venting because he thinks he's the leader of the World. I'm confident their a lot of other working him from behind the curtain let alone making these decisions.
In the End Iran's Been Involved In A 50yr Program Of State Sponsored International Terrorism under the guidance of the Islamic Jihadist Ayatollah's Regime. After 10/7 we were collectively very very lucky not to have had a Modern Times Nuclear Exchange. The Ayatollah's Regime's surviving despite the devastation to the Gov/Mil Leadership & putting more pressure on them's far better than nuking Tehran
It is because of this madman that we are left to speculate what would have happened had the JPOC been left in place. The sanctions were lifted and by the time Trump had his fit that Obama was getting credit for it, the Iranians had virtually no weapons grade uranium. Would that have solved a 2000 year old religious war, no but it may have quelled some of the terrorism against western nations and the US specifically. The question of Isreal and their responses to it is a whole other rabbit hole.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has repeatedly stated he issued a religious decree (fatwa) declaring the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons to be forbidden (haram) in Islam.
And yet israel has nukes- why is this permitted? Also Pakistan (who supplied tech to NK) and India have them
What difference does it make, really, if it’s trump making the choice to invade Iran recklessly or Stephen Miller, or someone else? There doesn’t appear to be anyone in this regime w/ enough expertise to change the toilet paper in the guest bathroom. And all the Republicans in Congress are sycophants who appear happy to let the regime do whatever they want—as long as THEY get their gigantic tax cuts! The war has made the entire world less safe, and we’ve lost—against a fourth world power country. Repeating Republican talking point that Iran was a big threat b/c they’ve been sable-rattling for 50 years is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT.
True. For decades, the Middle East has been destroying itself with wars of rival theocracies. Each is run by a fanatic who screams that god is on his side. Of course, oil has a lot to do with it. That’s why the US undermined the freely elected government in Iran and installed the Shah. The backlash to the produced the Ayatollah. On and on…
Look at the way Lindsey Graham salivates, practically downloads in his pants, when talk of bombing comes up. Watch, and you can see how Lindsey can barely suppress his bloodlust from bubbling up and erupting from his fetid id. He, and other members of Congress and this regime's Cabinet are raving lunatics.
"But Trump has to believe or has to claim that he believes that the whole world is extremely impressed. You might say, why do we care? Well, he cares, obviously. His whole thing is about dominance and believing that we’ve got the world awed by our strength."
I think Europe should create a secret commission whose sole goal is to MOCK Trump, loudly and relentlessly. I think it would not take very long for the existing MAGA cracks to open wider, and for him to completely fall apart.
Hopefully the ultimate result would be a fatal health event.
It doesn't need to be secret - MAGAnuts are too stupid to pay attention to anything not right in front of their faces, and sometimes not even that much.
Europe does not need a secret commission. Just tell every blogger and commentator on the internet that it is "open season" on Trump and his cabal. Allow any derogatory post from anyone, anywhere as long as it targets Thump. Then pipe it onto every social media site.
They already know the season is open - Here are a few - Mallen Baker, The United Front, MeidasTouch, Times News (not NYT), The Daily Clash, Heather Cox Richardson, TheGlobalShift, The Rest Is Politics, The Daily Beast, Northern Signal, Trump and MAGA Must Go, US News Report, Heather Delaney Reese, Fastpo, Lincoln Square and the Lincoln Project, Adam Kinzinger, and Paul Lance. Some put out content daily. Others rarely.
If you check out a few of these regularly, the search algorithms will start feeding you many others.
America and Trump demand "freedom of speech" as long as it is their "freedom of speech". A taste of the "medicine" they demand for others might be salutary. Any true statement you made of Trump and his cabal would, by its very nature, be derogatory, if applied to a sane, moral person.
US citizens have been mocking him relentlessly. It seems only to result in greater allegiance. I’m afraid the final solution will be trump self destructing. The question is, what will be destroyed along with him?
I actually made it through Trump's speech last night without pukking. As usual, it was aimed at his adoring, gullible base and fact checkers must have had a very late night. Missing from the arrogant diatribe was any mention of his claim Iran has asked for a ceasefire, only bombing them back to the stone ages. He made me feel embarrassed to be American.
There was no talk about regime change, exiting NATO, how the conflict might end or if he's still considering ground troops. He was there to talk up financial markets, talk down the price of oil and distract from Epstein, rising prices and his anemic poll numbers.
Historian here. No, in all of history there has been nothing like this so far as I can find. To be sure, there have been many extremely bad leaders, delusional or insane, with lots of followers too. The unique thing about Trump and our broken Constitutional system is that he has been able to surround himself and fill the entire government with people who are almost as sick, deluded, and incompetent as himself.
I don't understand why so many in government have so ardently clung to him. Fear of losing their seat in Congress? Losing power? Financial gain? Warped ideologues? I sincerely hope that if he can be made into a lame duck this fall, many who have supported him in the halls of power will begin distancing themselves, if for no other reason than their self serving survival
Unfortunately, many do kill their host (check out the death of the Black Prince of England, probably of amoebic dysentery). The parasite or disease evolves to spread easily to be able to establish "colonies" in other hosts before the current one dies.
I wish these people could see that losing their seat in Congress, financial gain, etc. will likely end of to be small potatoes compared to where they will find themselves if this continues. Life in a ruined country won't be good for anyone.
The sycophants in Congress are supported by the folks back home. None of the Republican voters I interact with are anywhere close to voting for a Democrat. They may not like some of Trump's policies but they love others, especially if it hurts people not like them.
Don't blame congressional Republicans - blame their supporters who are in the house(s) right next to you.
I think many authoritarians end up with extremely incompetent governments because they don't like being told they are wrong. Open discussion of what is true and what is the best way forward is a "democracy thing". Blind trust in the superior "dear leader" is an authoritarian thing.
And Trump, after being told "No" repeatedly by the "adults in the room" in his first term, made sure that would never again happen by only hiring idiotic sycophants the second go around.
I've read pretty widely in European history back to Sumer and somewhat in Chinese and Japanese history but I could have missed something -- there is so much history! I did think of Caligula, as mentioned in another comment, and lots of others. Stalin with his purges and promotion of Lysenko might be the nearest analogy. But Trump's immediate and wholesale destruction of his own administrative apparatus, throwing away generations of expertise... the placing in top positions mainly of people utterly unqualified to organize anything more complicated than a birthday party, many of them riddled with sick fantasies.... maybe in some obscure corner of history but never in a major power.
With all the complaints about all the terrible things Trump has done, it seems to me that most people are missing one of the central points Paul made. This will not be over once Trump is out of power. Americans elected him. Twice! Once is a mistake Two times isn’t a mistake. There is no way this country can be trusted.
I agree. The fact that Trump was elected twice indicates there is something seriously wrong with American society. At the very least, it suggests that the American educational system is failing! Our political system may be failing as well since the majority of eligible voters didn't vote in the 2024 presidential election.
Well if your argument is just math (i.e. more people - 35% according to your numbers - didn't vote at all than voted for Trump) then it is hard to argue.
But if you are trying to refute the original concern - that the fact that we elected Trump twice (sure part of the problem is our electoral system, but a small one, I think) then I think you have missed your mark. If just the right 3% had voted for the way way way "lesser of 2 evils" instead of being so unaware that they felt not voting at all was a perfectly neutral strance, then the whole world would be in a much better place right now.
So I am just about as concerned about people who sat out the election as people who voted for Trump and what that says about our democracy and democracy in general.
What happened was Trump was elected because enough of the public was tired of Team R Tweedledee vs Team D Tweedledum and thus were will to take their chances.
See, the end of the Roman Republic. Of course, the voters thought they were electing Caesar. but they got Caligula or Nero.
Not just that but the transformation of politics from the desire to find solutions to problems into a showroom of negative entertainment flattering the worst in human beings.
This is guy who has a picture of Himself and Putin hanging in the White House, and who clapped like a trained seal when he welcomed Putin onto US soil in Alaska, but do go on about conspiracy theories.
And I'm pretty sure Putin didn't phrase it like that, of course. He either has compromising information or he used flattery. Trump is easy as a child's flute to play.
He doesn't need actual pee tapes. He has the best fake video creators in the world. The only deficiencies in their tapes are the Russian phraseology in the dialogs.
Whether Trump’s unfailingly pro-Putin behavior is purely coincidental or by evil and treasonously conspiratorial design, the result is the same: Trump is an Extreme Putinist, reliably and unfailingly, wrecking all the things that were historically good about The United States of America and exploiting / amplifying all of our historic weaknesses. He is the old Soviet Russian KGB’s wet dream, personified
It’s funny as hell watching Russiagate cultists keep pushing their conspiracy theory, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that there is nothing there. Hell, even Strzok more or less admitted this in a text to his lover, Lisa Page. And And they were in a position to know.
But the cultists cannot let it go, cannot admit that they were duped, and by many of the same crew who sold us the “Iraq is chock a block with WMDs”, the “Assad gassed his own people ZOMG!” and the “Libyan rape rooms” lies.
If that were not comedy enough, the *really* funny and ironic part is that if they want evidence that Trump is working on behalf of foreign governments, there is loads of evidence out there in plain sight. He doesn’t even try to hide it. The cultists need look no further than Israel and Saudi Arabia.
It’s as if Melania were trying to catch Donald cheating. To prove her theory, she comes up with elaborate and ridiculous plots involving multiple body doubles, fake credit card receipts issued by a non-existent bank and a supposed secret Twitter code that Donald uses to communicate with his alleged lover. Also, everyone from Barron to J.D. Vance's dog not only know about this scheme, they are participating in it.
Melania works herself into a lather “connecting the dots” concocting a conspiracy theory that would put the 1961 John Birch Society to shame, and ignoring all the evidence that obliterates her theory. Meanwhile, if she wants to see Donald being unfaithful, Mistress Bibi and Mistress Salman have the chains and whips and bondage gear on full display as they make Donald perform the most obscene and humiliating sexual services, all right out there on the kitchen table in front of Melania and everyone else, and with action video footage to boot.
Of course, the rest of Team D and Team R would very much like to take Trump’s place as Mistress Salman’s slaveboi, so they pretend not to notice any of that.
And yet, the craven Republicans in Congress watch quietly and think only of reelection, or bubble wands or the stock market futures profits they just scored. They will be (among many shameful shambles of our democracy) the legacy of King Feces since many of them will continue blithely in office doing harm.
I agree, but someone will run in their place and the people who do will be even more extreme because that’s the way the GOP has been running things in recent times or probably even and not recent times. All we can hope is that the people who voted them in in the first place will wake up and vote for the Dems. But so many of them refused to ever vote for a Democrat. So our only hope seems to be enlarge part that they don’t vote at all.
Historically the advice was "if you strike down a prince make sure he is dead". The Republicans are terrified that no matter how hard they strike Trump will rise - Dracula-like - to hurl his MAGA cult against them.
From last day the Republican Congress confirmed DJT Secretary nominees the die-was-cast the Republican Party lost its last thread to be the representative of conservative principles, values and policies. In the 1850s the Whig Party collapsed for much the same reason. The Whigs are the last major party to implode and disappear from the American political landscape. The 21st century Republican Party needs to replace the Whigs on that roster.
I wonder how people manage to forget that it's quail part of Trump's DNA never to apologize, and never to back down until there literally is no other way.
The US will fight this Iran war until either Trump is out of office or her weapons are fully depleted. This is like Vietnam, just Johnson might have been convinced to back down.
And here's a crucial difference between Trump and Nixon’ Trump would not have withdrawn.
"A country that will elect somebody like that twice is not a country anyone can rely on. And that is the ultimate lesson here."
And that is the horrible humiliation that ALL of us must bear.
The ultimate degradation of what was once the greatest country on earth.
I will NEVER forgive or forget what the MAGA movement has done to us, all because they value their shameless, hollow vanity over humility and critical thinking skills.
It's the one of the primary reason Canada's looking at the Swedish SAAB Jas 39 E/F Gripen's instead of the Stealth Fighter's. That & the 2023 Not Combat Capable designation for production f-35's
There's an important nuance to Canada's Gripen decision: It is a cost benefit decision.
The best fighter jet is the one you can count on being able to fly when there's a crisis. The F35 is billions over budget, years behind schedule, and Trump pushing future sales off a cliff isn't going to make things better. The Gripen is inferior technically, but delivers on schedule, close to budget, is NATO compliant, and can be maintained in many countries, including locally in Canada.
The fact that Canada is buying some F35s is a testament to how seriously Canada takes integrated North American defense. The decision to also buy some Gripens is not anti-American.
It is just that when an emergency actually happens, Canada has to be able to get planes in the air. F35s stuck in a maintenance queue, somewhere in the US won't do the job, no matter how good the tech.
Just recall the RAF F-35 that was stuck in India for a while, which proved irreparable by non-US technicians. Too complex to maintain. And now we see that the supposedly stealthed F-35 was hit by Iranian fire over Iran.
The recent Iranian missile penetration of Israel's "Iron Dome" has demonstrated that this hubristic achievement was not as perfect as believed.
The war in Afghanistan was the start of using drones to overcome traditional armed forces. Ukraine has pushed that development through technology and tactics to make Russia's ageing weapons highly vulnerable. Drone warfare has shown that "cheap" weapons made en masse can overcome expensive, hi-tech weapons. The next step is drones that are far more autonomous, more like "fire and forget" armaments. Battleships proved vulnerable to aircraft starting in WWI, and very much more so in WWII. British destroyers proved vulnerable to air power in the Falklands War. US nuclear carriers are the next weapon that is just waiting to be damaged or sunk by cheaper weapons, whose aura for power projection will be undermined. It is the almost inevitable result of arms races, especially when weaker nations have to devise weapons to try to overcome the technically superior weapons of the stronger enemy.
They were only ever "the greatest country on earth" in their own minds. No country is the greatest country on earth. No matter, the US is a pariah state now.
Unfortunately many of descendants of the Europeans who ‘‘discovered’’ both North and South America would prefer to ignore these historical facts. So much could have been learned from the native populations and maybe the bounties of the Americas could have been shared. But, sadly not. And then to compound that with the slavery … well, the U.S. is still dealing with the fallout of that, and doing a rather poor job of it. Thanks for the link.
Except I would argue that following WWII we were for a brief shining moment living up to our ideals. I think European leaders would recognize that the "Pax Americana" that existed during the Cold War assisted in the formation of the EU economic block and NATO, among other valuable contributions. Anecdotally can recall when I was stationed in Europe being thanked by people who were in the war for our involvement.
The post war system lasted until the current train wreck, which was set in motion long before Trump set everything on fire, by a conversative movement intent on reversing civil rights policies among other things. Ironically this domestic strife has boiled over to destroy any semblance of a foreign policy and our standing in the world.
Reagan to Newt to Norqist to Limbaugh to Chaney to Fox News , on and on. The connections were always there. America slept through it all and went to Walmart instead.
Oh, and he'll go at any length to pull a victory. He's been seeking an excuse to throw a nuke ever since he got elected (in his briefing on nuclear weapons as a candidate 2016, he asked three times why he couldn't push the button) his fuse won't be long.
If that happens, the US will be regarded as a rogue nation, the only one that used nukes to end the Pacific campaign in WWII, but had resisted the use of nukes ever since. It would make the US a potential target for a nuclear attack by any nuclear-armed state, increase the need for nations to acquire nuclear weapons, and make the US into a far more authoritarian state to try to prevent any method of managing such an attack from happening, the subject of so much fiction. Could a swarm of drones carrying mini-nukes or simply dirty bombs aimed at DC from a ship or truck prove to be the start of such a change?
I'm not a military expert. I'm only aware that there will be plenty of effects working against the US and the “West” in general that it must be prevented at pretty much any cost. It would help a lot if the public was loudly criticizing the use of nukes, protests and media. Silence will not help. Luckily Trump doesn't seem to actively seek excuses for it, just for how long?
This summer would be a good time for a Republican to take a step forward, define an alternative strategy to Trump, distance the party from MAGA, and declare allegiance to the Constitution, world order, and Ukraine. Throw in a total support for exposing the Epstein/Trump “files.”
The filth of Trump and the loss of trust in government is not a recipe for success and prosperity.
I have many issues with Ms Cheney and she would perhaps fortunately be unelectable but she would be magnitudes of order preferable to the monster she so courageously opposed, at enormous personal and career cost. I lived in N Idaho prior to the 2024 election and was very disheartened by the snarling tribalism of the majority Republican population there, with their precious conspiracy theories and glowering disdain for any ideas beyond their white christian nationalism (cannot bring myself to capitalize the movement.) They seem to revel in shared willful ignorance. They are sadly a revealing slice of the American political and societal pie. Hoping the prices at the pump will educate them to some degree, but most aren’t capable of reasoning through the issues.
And about that little item "smashing research, science, and health": this also has deep effects on our international standing. Students, postdoctoral fellows, and senior scientists are already holding back from coming here. And the encouraging of anti-vax and anti-science attitudes will lead to our country being a cesspool of infections and possible new strains that could affect the world.
In Russia it’s SOP that everyone in power has something incriminating on everyone else and I believe that same is true of the convicted felon child rapist. You can count on one hand the republicans who have gone against something he wants. I’m in Iowa and to watch one of our senators who had a decorated military career and was sexually assaulted twice vote to confirm a clown who has said multiple times women don’t belong in the military and has been credibly accused of sexual assault is mind boggling. I’ll never understand how someone can totally abandon their beliefs.
Trump has been described a crisis manufacturer who needed crisis for political survival.
But the accumulated pattern of this particular set of crises — the Iran war that benefits Russia economically, the NATO threats that benefit Russia strategically, the Ukraine abandonment that benefits Russia militarily, the sanctions relief that benefits Russia financially — raises a question that the crisis-manufacture framework alone cannot answer.
The question is not whether Trump is coordinating with Russia. It is whether the distinction between coordination and alignment of interests matters, when the outcomes are indistinguishable.
Re your last sentence: Well, Hitler did a pretty good job of wrecking Gemany, didn't he? But your point is well taken. At least Hitler never got a majority without suppressing part of the vote. Trump won a bigger plurality in 2024 than Adolf got in 1932-33. And Germans were a lot more desperate then than Americans were in '24. So as I never tire of saying, don't let the American voters off the hook. They put a felon who is also a moron back in office. There's gotta be payback for that.
Dr Krugman confirms what the Chief Economist writer for the Financial Times Martin Wolf said yesterday, and I paraphrase, that why should the world trust the US after it elected him twice and could in the future elect someone even worse. So the world is not just walking away from Trump they are walking away from the US.
Came here to say this--Wolf, Krugman, others too, realizing that the US has committed such gross errors (even if we don't go ahead with bombing Iran into the Stone Age) that for many years we will not be trusted or even respected. This is a fact that we Americans need to ... well, acknowledge and accept like a mensch.
We should not be trusted or respected until such time as we implement safe guards from ensuring that this kind of madness doesn't happen again for a very long time…
Why Americans should "accept like a mensch": Don't conflate "don't trust" with "despise". The rest of the world is reacting to the US much as you react to a beloved relative who has dementia. Unlike an individual with dementia, a state can recover... but... it will take a lot of time and effort from the citizenry.
Other than the crumbling of the US and all of the side effects to the world at large of having a monstrous madman in power, the loss of the trust of the world in the US is one of the worst consequences of all of this nightmare regime. While I no longer trust a large part of the US population who voted for him even once, I think I’ll always wonder if captain crazypants truly won the election in 2024.
Trump regurgitated everything he’s been saying over the past month. Weirdly, the passage of time has not made any of his false assertions more true. At this point, I am not sure his palilalia is due to a belief in the gullibility of the electorate. Instead, I am beginning to suspect Trump has a particular type of delusion, a magical-thinking belief that repeating words, as if they are a mantra, actually makes them come true.
Any explanations for his voters? We wouldn’t be in this predicament if it weren’t for them. There have always been low information voters, but they didn’t start consistently preferring candidates with obvious cognitive impairments until 1980.
In the 1930s only about 1/3 of American adults had graduated high school, but they chose better leaders. As for the dumbing down theory of high school graduation requirements, I researched 1920s high school graduation tests and requirements and discovered only basic arithmetic and rote memorization of Revolutionary War hero names was common in those days. There wasn’t any critical thinking component.
I suspect (1) there were enough first and second generation immigrants in those days who had experienced European caste systems directly so they took voting more seriously and (2) the entertainment industry hadn’t yet wormed its way into people’s brains the way it has now. This is based on the movie (Reagan), TV (Trump and Hegseth), and gaming (Tech Bros, Hegseth) angles of voting since 1980.
To summarize your comparison of America before 1940 to today: It's not the level of education that matters, but the level of engagement. If citizens see their votes as determining whether or not they are in depression or at war, they will find a way to get the information they need to make good decisions. If they see politics as a reality TV show and voting like a video game that doesn't impact real life, they won't bother... no matter what education level they're starting from.
I feel like the majority of people who voted for him - and many of the people who didn't vote against him - are as disinterested in reality as he is. It's like this weird mix of hubris and apathy. "Nothing ever changes - we've been in a housing crisis for 20 years, so obviously it doesn't matter who we vote for because it's not going to get better. Meanwhile, I'm sure it's not going to get worse because we are too exceptional, rich, and powerful for anything to happen to us."
The thing is, back in the day education wasn't as critically necessary to survive and perhaps thrive. Perhaps the same old dysfunctional education system you describe is still being used, but now to "ready" our population for a more complicated social/cultural landscape than 100 years ago, and it's not working.
Maybe that's an explanation for "what about the people who enthusiastically voted for him?" The bet that we finally weren't generally educated enough to catch the grift, and they were right. I tend to think there is a general volume of evil intent on the planet that occasionally coalesces into what we have now in the US. Like. long running hurricane. Hurricanes end. :)
Don't conflate illiteracy with lack of intelligence. The fact is many Americans look at the US school system, think critically, and do not see education beyond the 6th grade as a good use of their time.
While I agree with other comments that education matters, that is only one piece and may not even be the main driver anymore.
The exponential proliferation of constant tech has been a huge drag on society. From basic email and texting to Teams and Slack to Insta and TikTok, human life has been totally upended. Living this way affects our brains so deeply that even seniors who lived 2/3-3/4 of their lives without it are being utterly retrained. We are constantly asked for attention with essentially zero rules and regulations. We have no training and no control, and even if we did, it is getting harder to navigate what is real and what is not. There is such a deluge, it gets harder and harder to filter and find that matters. It also takes zero effort to completely disengage and not hear any real news whatsoever. Focus, critical thinking, patience, so many critical assets are dropping to dangerous levels…have dropped to dangerous levels considering where the US is currently finding itself.
Hi Paul. I don’t know if we can diagnose ‘at a remote distance’ but I also raise a red flag for the governance which permits Trump, be it due to neuropathological or personality disorder in origin, to discharge his constitutional duties. OMG!, doesn’t cover the degradation in Us governance here. Anthony
Paul and David N: I think you are both right. Not to diagnose, here, but in my opinion the child-man is in way over his head, can’t see a way out because of his many personality and other disorders, is completely overwhelmed and trying to delusional, magical, wishful thinking which is exacerbated by growing dementia. It is a “both/and” situation. He is rapidly deteriorating and needs to leave office NOW. I fear for the whole world with a mentally-ill demented child-man in charge of a country with many nuclear weapons. Congress needs to unite and step up to the plate and do their jobs to safeguard us all by getting him out of office NOW. The need is urgent as his decompensation is severe.
That is one of the hallmarks of narcissists. When their narcissism is threatened, they can resort to bending reality to fit their narcissistic self image.
Trump has always, always been the King of Bullshit, And his speech last night was a good example of that. Most of us on Paul's Substack recognize that and are appalled by it. World leaders recognize it, too, and hopefully NATO understands that until Donald Trump is, to borrow a phrase from Caroline Leavitt, no longer on planet Earth, they are on their own in defending themselves against Putin's agression.
He has to live in an alternate reality - he can't face the world otherwise because on what clearly must be an unconscious level he is aware of his myriad inadequacies and refuses or is unable to do anything about them. He is also one of those people who has to tear down everything around him, in whatever way possible, in order to feel superior/powerful/better than. He truly is the embodiment of evil.
That's the basic structure of malignanat narcissism. "Something horrible is happening and so therefore it has to be something somebody else is responsible for, because it couldn't possibly ever be ME that's the problem, oh no."
I also had to look-up palilalia. Several solid sources say itcan be a symptom of Parkinson's. Hmmm. (I didn't go to medical school, but unfortunately my Dad had Parkinson's.)
It is wild to me, as someone outside the US, just how much damage the US has done to its reputation. There are young people outside the US - who have grown up seeing China as the stable and responsible player out of the world super powers. And these are young people who live in countries that would have always regarded the US as an ally. The long term damage to the US is truly not being appreciated. And when they now are potentially going to experience global turmoil following on from the actions in Iran, I can’t see them supporting the US for much longer.
How about the other people in the United States that feel helpless by this toxic ruler the future is that in our hands unless someone gets a grip of this shit show
In 1991 the Soviet Union, exhausted, depleted, and demoralized, dissolved itself and its former members went their own ways. From 1940 onward it had been almost constantly at war with other counties or itself until there was nothing left but preparation for the next war. The country of Russia has never recovered. It has become weakened and disoriented and obviously susceptible to autocratic rule.
Compare the history of the United States to that of the Soviet Union over that same time-period and an almost identical pattern appears. While politicians love to say we are a peaceful country, the United States has almost constantly participated in conflicts of a legal and illegal nature with other countries or groups within and outside of its boundaries since December 7, 1941. Following World War II, during the cold war, which can be considered a pause between massive battles, much of our national economy centered around weapons development and preparation for global conflict. An indication of this Spartan attitude, it has been common for peace-loving U.S. citizens to measure the value of a war or conflict by asking whether we won which was almost always the case until 1946. However, applying that measure, since World War II we have not “won” a single conflict and therefore all the thousands of resulting deaths have been wasted. While many reasons for this can be presented, it is also possible this country, like Russia, has worn itself out by incessantly beating the war drum. We seem to have become the image of a punch-drunk boxer looking for an opponent, not realizing that such a contest is obsolete.
When I visited the US Marine Corps Museum I was particularly struck by the long American history, going back into the 1800s, of interventions in foreign countries, mostly done by the US Marines which is why it is detailed in this museum. So the above comment actually understates the history of American meddling in other countries by a huge margin.
There is a real failure of imagination in the psyche of a nation that continually attempts to assert its importance through brute force. And it IS the American voter who deserves the blame - not the criminal it placed into power. He will be dead soon, but we are who we are.
War is apparently inherent in the human psyche dating back to prehuman ancestors. We modern humans have merely refined it to a science and those who find themselves in positions of authority have often used it to achieve their personal objectives leaving others to resort to similar techniques to defend themselves. All in all, it is a silly way to live.
"dating back to prehuman ancestors" - The astonishing expansion of the frontal cortex during out evolution, and then the handicap we seem to have chosen for ourselves with the over-emphasis on the left hemisphere [sorry if this sounds nerdly, but it's a situation I think about a lot!] has seen us make war not just on other beings but on ourselves, each other, our own offspring. And on the planet itself, where we live, as animals (oh no!) - which, in its own interest is in the process of bucking us off.
I believe war is still considered an art, rather than a science. "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces." von Molke the elder.
He's brought in a force of several thousand Marines and a section of the 82nd Airborne Division. The Nimitz-class carrier George Bush left port a couple days ago for an undisclosed destination. It was disclosed, however, that it expects other portions of its task force to join it during its trip "across the Atlantic." It also expects to pick up its aircraft during the trip. I doubt that anyone is bluffing , but I think that Hegseth is the one behind all of this.
IMO, the Marines can't be used to take Kharg island because their ship won't be able to pass the strait of Hormuz. I expect Hegseth plans to take the island with the paratroopers and then fly in the Marines. What happens then is anyone's guess.
PT Barnum 2.0: “There’s a sucker born every minute…” I’m old enough to remember when, in the late 70s through mid 80s, Barnum and Bailey surgically altered goats to have one horn, then presented them as unicorns on a “seeing is believing” tour. Kind of reminds me of all of the surgically-altered spokeswomen we’ve seen. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-04-05-mn-27173-story.html
47 is a convicted felon found guilty of dozens of counts of fraud. He’s presiding over a nation that made strategic deception legal in politics, business, law enforcement and military. I’d welcome input on why any rational person—here or abroad—would believe this administration, as it’s incomprehensible to me.
BTW, none of our allies have legal strategic deception. They’re stunned and appalled that we are incapable of honor or relationships of trust. The US is the only nation in the western world to do this and one of just a handful worldwide. The others are Russia, China, and Iran. I don’t know when strategic deception became legal but it wasn’t like this when Jimmy Carter was at the helm. It needs to be criminalized in all forms, imho. Our neighbors don’t need to deceive the public. Why do we?
I can't just understand why those who have a major influence on the stock market rally every time Trump spews a bunch of lies or lower the price of oil. I get that he's paving the way for insider trading "pump and dump" for himself/family/co-conspirators), but can they alone "pump" enough?
It's speculation all the way down at this point. Things aren't priced on what you think they're worth, or what you think other people think they're worth, but on what you think other people think other people think they're worth.
Many traders in the stock market know how to profit from any market movement, regardless of its implications for long term economic performance. Up or down doesn’t matter.
I live somewhere in "the rest of the world", and I'm pretty certain that we're not "extremely impressed". "Flabbergasted and appalled" would be closer to the British consensus.
Indeed, Keir Starmer is in the rather unusual position of seeing his personal polling improve quite significantly as a direct result of him refusing to say "how high?" when Trump yelled "Jump!". And I imagine his polling figures would be even better if he'd taken a leaf out of the Spanish prime minister's book and been considerably blunter, although I concede that there are diplomatic issues at play here that apply less to Spain.
If the UK followed Mark Carney’s example at Davos and Charles postponed his state visit it would help. When dealing with someone “with an alcoholic’s brain”*, enabling them just prolongs the misery.
*Chief of Staff Susie Wylie’s assessment in December 2025, affirmed by Trump himself.
Until recently I worked for a US based technical training company (I'm British). After the first Trump presidency I assumed that any sensible person would avoid him like the plague. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that many of the people who work in the US side of the company, were celebrating the Donald's soon-come ascendancy. Come it did, on the first effect on the company I worked for was that they lost all of their government training work as DOGE ripped through unnecessary expenditure. It's rare one gets to see the "I never thought face eating leopards would eat MY face!" come true quite so quickly. I guess it's true: you can't teach stupid.
"The thing about what this means for America’s role in the world is not only that Trump and company are doing great damage, but the whole world is watching. They saw that this guy, and it wasn’t hard to see what kind of a person Trump was, that America elected this guy twice. It appears that the American public has completely lost sight of what it means to be a responsible, serious person."
Speaking as someone from the UK, this is the main point. America seems unbelievably broken. And I have no faith it will fix itself any time soon. The rest of the world doesn't understand why this dangerous lunatic is still president. No Kings was inspiring, but it simply isn't enough. Why aren't Americans on the streets in their millions every single day until he's gone? He cannot be allowed to remain in office. And once he's gone him and his lackeys all need to be in prison for the rest of their lives. At this point, nothing else will do.
Professor Krugman: i grew up amongst the soon-to-be MAGA cult and i escaped as fast as i possibly could. even as a child, i recognized these people were dangerous: weak minds, weak wills, unwilling to become educated, easy to dupe, and always ALWAYS potentially violent and severely destructive. to see that they took over the psyche of the entire nation with their rabid hatred TWICE fills me with great sadness. but between the MAGA cultists and all those arrogant uninformed non-voters, america deserves the evil that has arrived and that is coming for all of us. we asked for this, we deserve this. all of it.
I don’t think indigenous and Black Americans, who have been trapped into this car wreck, deserve the results forced upon them. And they are the first ones to suffer. For example, see DOGE’s impact on Black female unemployment, although 92% of Black women voters saw through Trump’s shtick.
There is a terrible disadvantage, horrible it is to realise, to grow up as a member of what is in effect "the dominant race". Even among well-meaning people there can be a bias about who can be trusted, whom one should listen to. A strangely inevitable kind of bias that plays out in ways that are subtle or invisible to the members of the dominant group and yet howlingly obvious to the members of the non-dominant group.
I worry that in his non-ending quest to “bomb them back to the Stone Ages”(BTW, if you’re going to use a trite cliche, at least get it right - although there were three stages, there weren’t multiple Stone Ages), this nut job has his finger on the nuclear button and lacks the impulse control not to use it.
Casually pluralizing nouns has been a trend in spoken non-grammatical English for a while. There aren't multiple "Straits of Hormuz" either -- but at least at some point Trump was advised that it's not a "so-called 'Straight'" as he initially tweeted. Anyone who cares enough to speak intelligently about a geographic feature would look at a map. Trump is a lazy ignoramus (wholly apart from whatever cognitive deficits may explain his exaggerations and lies), and as Prof. Krugman has emphasized today, we have a president who is devoid of character when character is desperately needed in this moment.
Pretty amazing that in just one year Trump:
Completely destroyed every trade agreement to which the U.S. was signatory
Wiped out the entire basis of American soft power abroad
Managed to take an economy with inflation at or under the Fed's target value and get inflation cranking toward "roaring"
Took the nation to war against Iran and, despite Hegseth's "lethality" mantra and "warrior ethos" and all the rest of the testosterone posturing, managed to LOSE that war against what is, at best, a fourth-rate power.
Undermined Ukraine
Strengthened Russia
Greenlighted Putin's direct actions against the United States in Iran and Cuba
Undermined and is about to disband NATO
Repudiated many (most?) of the treaties the U.S. has signed
Eliminated all trustworthiness in the United States as a partner for ANYTHING
Severely damaged our relations with Canada (CANADA!?!?!)
I doubt you'd find another leader in all of history who has so thoroughly and willfully destroyed his own country's prospects, standing, and abilities.
NATO won't disband - will just go on without the US.
By law, Trump cannot unilaterally withdraw from NATO. Perhaps foreseeing a return of Trump, Congress in 2023 passed a law requiring Congressional legislation or a 2/3 majority of the Senate to withdraw from NATO.
He’s not a great believer in Congressional authority. He has started a war without approval. When he tells them to jump they ask how high.
He seems like the epitome of a mob boss.
When asked who he was supposedly negotiating with in Iran and how it was going, he "acted" like it was productive and would result in a solution (acting being the appropriate word) he then finished with "well we know where he lives" (standard mob boss like threatening phrase) meaning if he does not cooperate and do as we please, he will be killed.
So, it is worse than just a lack of character, it is despot behavior. We have a Putin-like character in the WH that the GOP in congress will not even stop. The massive detention camps create an image even closer to a pending possible Hitler-like regime.
They are spending billions on this, when the law and order solution would have been to build and open more immigration courts on a massive scale, not camps. Courts not camps to more quickly decide humanely who is eligible to be here if there is such a concern. So, it seems more racially motivated or they would simply do this far more logical approach.
Because of the GOP in congress kowtowing, we are now one of the world's "bad guys" and are no longer seen as "the good guys" protecting democracy, freedom, and law and order.
A complete 180.
Will the poisoning of naysayers and political rivals be next or does "we know where you live" only apply to anyone they do not like outside of our borders?
Trump is an actor on a stage and doesn't care if what he says is true. Today Britain hosted a group of 40 nations to discuss opening the Strait of Hormuz. The U.S. was a no-show. Trump and Netanyahu are leaving the Gulf in ruins (like Gaza) and content to just say "Go get your own oil."
everybody talks about oil from the Persian Gulf , but there is more than that. Industries fueled by electricity from natural gas are producing Aluminium, fertilizers : urea, nitrogen based, ammonia and also sulfur....Cargo for these products are waiting
I don't think the US was invited ???
Trump and Netanyahu are criminals who belong before the international court in The Hague, which will never happen.
I have heard from several reliable sources that the United States was not invited to the meeting. So it was not a no show if this is correct.
And go rebuild your own Gaza.
Thank you for that update.
A Mob boss would be more competent. Trump is more like Caligula.
Idi Amin or Mugabe
Or Nero?
Back in the sisxties when I was at Fort Dix for basic traing we had (in our company) a trainee who's last name was Finster. One day Finster told me and others that I had enough of the U.S. army I wanted to get out. After disobaying when order after another he was admitted to the base paychistriatic hospital and subsequently recived a Medical" discharge. Finster wasn'y crazy but he certainly had chutzpah.
Our democracy democratically elected Trump ... twice. What does that say about 1) democracy and 2) the American people??
Many people are dumbed down. They don't bother to educate themselves on what is happening in the world. They rely on fake news from social media posts to make decisions. Hard to know how to change this since it appears these adults don't want to make any effort to learn and understand.
So, it shouldn't have come as a surprise to his voters.
We voted for him to offend you.
He's a KGB plant, and has been, likely since the '80's. All of the points on Derelict's post, above, read as a wish list of KGB/GRU foreign policy objectives. Trump2's foreign policy actions--all of them--have hurt the US, while benefiting Russia. We're on the brink of war with NATO; Ukraine aid was 99% cut in FY2025; Russian oil is now de-sanctioned and making big bucks for Putin's war in Ukraine; 8 billion people across the world now hate the US (and Israel) for making cooking fuel unaffordable.
Simply Google "The case for Trump as a KGB asset" and you'll be treated to a wide and growing range of assertions and analyses, from primary sources like former KGB officials like Shvets and Mussayev, to political summations of his extremely pro-Russian conduct since 2016 by authors like Unger, or even the 2016 Politico articles.
There is *no* hard proof that DJT is owned by the Kremlin. Which is why the MSM presumably treats Donald-as-KGB-spy like its radioactive, even though the case for Traitor is vastly stronger than that for Useful Idiot.
When China comes for us in a few years, we'll be without allies. Alone. Entirely because of Trump.
China isn't led by the kind of aggressive fools that lead America!
Having spent time in China--in 2014--and practicing Traditional Chinese Medicine for 25+ years, I'd have to disagree. Xi Xinping is not quite *as* stupid as our dear Donald, but he's beginning his paranoid Joe Stalin phase, in which starting a world war to "liberate" Taiwan is unfortunately not off the table.
https://youtu.be/BbbWzMGSUuE?t=55s
Doesn’t need their approval to command the military. The Constitution gives him this authority.
The fun part is that it was Marco Rubio who sponsored it with A Democratic colleague. Now he's trying to undo his own work.
Trump will say we are withdrawing even though he can’t legally do so. Just like he tries to rewrite our constitution with executive orders. It will take 18 months of lawsuits and millions in legal fees to reverse his decisions.
That timescale is optimistic. And requires willing. Perhaps his successor will be worse.
How could anyone be worse ?
Given the constraints of the US constitution. Which although being violated, much of it still holds.
Oh, the US Constitution is dead dead deadski.
Any constitution that only applies when one party is in power is a ·dead· constitution.
Aye.
What I wouldn't give for a President Camacho right now.
So Trump can't formally withdraw, but he can still do so simply by refusing to engage as a member or honor agreements. However, he doesn't realize how much the projection of American power in Africa and the Middle East relies on US assets stationed in Europe, so from a practical perspective he will bloviate but not actually withdraw our assets. And if NATO is smart they will just ignore it. Meanwhile, it appears (you never know for sure) that he is negotiating with Denmark/Greenland to increase the US military presence there. Does that depend on NATO membership?
No that is a direct agreement between US and Denmark.
I think the Danes are smart enough to say "Sure Donnie go play on the ice - we got a lot of it".
"..........However, he doesn't realize how much the projection of American power in Africa and the Middle East relies on US assets stationed in Europe."
This is true. Bases in Britain, Italy, Turkey........Diego Garcia. Forward foreign bases are everywhere and used to stage his lunacy. He can't get out of NATO and project military power around the Globe. He is an IDIOT.
No. He's, unfortunately a TRAITOR who obeys the will of the KGB, and has done so since the 1980's, when he was first recruited/entrapped.
"By law...."
----
"Law? He doesn't follow no law! He doesn't ·need· no stinking law!"
When have laws or congress ever stopped him? This time around he rules by fiat and fuck everybody else!
He doesn’t have to formally withdraw. He no longer consults or coordinates with the Europeans.
He is finding out that not consulting doesn't work the way he would like. Even somewhat right wing Italy firmly condemned his adventure against Iran.
A law means nothing to this Supreme Court. Such things can be disregarded with barely an acknowledgement.
The gang who wrote this statement of abdication are? More than one but beyond WH? Sure, maybe they simply clipped/ cut-pasted lines, arrayed them, moved ‘em around, called it coherent but the organizing driver beyond a narcissist’s ego and all -consuming selfish identity? Russ Vought’s Heritage/ project 2025 glance-over? Caine? Seemed like the writer-gang’s premonitions of what’s in store on his downfall slope, ever-fleeting prime time chances to just endlessly project. Before they wrap him up away from view. Astute observers probably have a # for this one on their list….
PAUL MANAFORT WORKED TEN YEARS ON PUTIN’s GLOBAL AGENDA, PAID 10 MILLION DOLLARS PER YEAR, paid by RUSSIAN OLIGARCHS. Part of Putin’s.Global Agenda included: WEAKEN NATIONAL DEMOCRACIES, STRENGTHEN RIGHT WING FACTIONS & TURN COUNTRIES TO HE RABID RIGHT, Weaken, Disrupt, Destroy NATO
(DALLAS MORNING NEWS ARCHIVE)
War crimes , we have hit Iranian civilians infrastructure. We are killing & hurting innocent people. There is no winners in war only hate and violence spreads . America is a disgrace , that no elected official even feels enough love for our country to stand up says so much.
Trump went into this war without the approval of congress but,, recognizing what he intends--or threatens--to do how is it that he continues to be allowed to drag the US into what could ultimately result in a much wider war--real war--over which all sides have so very much to lose. Where are the safeguards against such a sick and vile man's actions?
The safeguards are locked away in Mike Johnson's desk.
Correction: The safeguards are locked away in patriarchal religious nutjob Mike Johnson's desk.
Republican congressman and senators give him tacit approval by their silence and praise. If you are standing next to an adult who is beating a child and DO NOTHING .... you are liable. That's all Republicans since Reagan.
The plan, the real plan, ever always only was to turn Iran into a failed state, much as was done to Iraq, Syria and Libya.
As long as Trump does not pay any personal consequences, he could not care less. Ever seen "Don't Look Up!"?
Instead he turned the US into a failed state!
Much as i may wish otherwise, we have a long ways to go before we hit levels like Libya.
Iraq, Syria and Libya were all State Sponsors of International Terrorism & as such at war with dozen's of European & North American Countries
Are you still repeating those old and long discredited canards?
No I have not seen it, I will check it out. Everyone will pay , it comes with a real tragic costs to life, the environment. We been in perpetual wars before Afghanistan. ✌️86/47 Vile regime.
Iran has in actuality run a 50yr State Sponsored International Terrorist Program thats killed hundreds of thousands of people both American, Israeli to be sure & European's. When it was abated during JCPOA to get their frozen funds back Qatar & turkey stepped in to make sure Hezbollah/Hamas were still funded
If the Infrastructure use for Military Purposes of any kind it's fair game so an electrical grid that fed Gov Buildings, Military Base or residential buildings that house major political/military leadership is fair game under the laws of armed combat
whatever Iran is and does today is a result of 70 years of US, British and BP Oil hegemony pushing them into theocracy and terrorism....it is in recorded history
Thats willfully Obtuse anti-American Rhetoric!
There is absolutely no legitimate proof of your rhetoric. Iran fell under the influence of the Russians who taught them how to train, arm & run International Terrorist Groups
go read a book....I cannot debate someone who ignores history. hint: it has to do with greed and OIL
"Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel."
The ayatollahs didn't come out of nowhere. Neither did Hezbollah or Hamas (or Fatah, or the PLO). As to "state-sponsored international terrorism," the U.S. has done a fair amount of that in my lifetime, though of course we didn't call it that. Other peoples have longer memories than most USians.
In 1953, democratically elected Iranian Premier Mohammad Mossadegh was removed from power in a coup organized and financed by the British and U.S. governments. Chickens coming home to roost? They had a democratic regime in Iran, but couldn't get their mangy hands off of Iranian oil. Thus, the Ayatollah to replace the Shah after US and Britain installed him in place of Mossadegh.
So your claiming the US's is responsible for Iran's & Russia's State Sponsored International Terrorism??? The 75 yr drive by the Arab League to destroy Israel?? The rise of Islamic Jihad??
I haven't seen US Supporting Internationally Recognized Terrorist Groups with Fed/State Funds & I've been around since the flower power era before Woodstock!
You can point to the Collage of the America's, lieutenant Colonel Olly North & CIA Agents work in Cuba but the first was a school to teach farming, education & Government while the other were illegal actions of individuals. I'm sure it's short list but I doubt that publicly announced State Sponsored Terrorism was ever a part of the US's Gov policies like Irans.
The US has a significant and long history of regime change, invasions to topple govts, back fruit companies in years-long Banana Wars, aquiring land through conquest, supporting repressive regimes. Pobre México! ¡Tan lejos de Dios y tan cerca de los Estados Unidos!.
But Don, trump has gone beyond that and has announced his intent to do far greater damage and has positioned 50,000 American troops to carry out his threats. He has bombed school buildings full of children, he is talking of depleting water supplies of an entire country of 92 million civilians. These are war crimes.
To suggest Trump has the cognitive abilities to do these things is ludicrous, it's just a madman venting because he thinks he's the leader of the World. I'm confident their a lot of other working him from behind the curtain let alone making these decisions.
In the End Iran's Been Involved In A 50yr Program Of State Sponsored International Terrorism under the guidance of the Islamic Jihadist Ayatollah's Regime. After 10/7 we were collectively very very lucky not to have had a Modern Times Nuclear Exchange. The Ayatollah's Regime's surviving despite the devastation to the Gov/Mil Leadership & putting more pressure on them's far better than nuking Tehran
It is because of this madman that we are left to speculate what would have happened had the JPOC been left in place. The sanctions were lifted and by the time Trump had his fit that Obama was getting credit for it, the Iranians had virtually no weapons grade uranium. Would that have solved a 2000 year old religious war, no but it may have quelled some of the terrorism against western nations and the US specifically. The question of Isreal and their responses to it is a whole other rabbit hole.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has repeatedly stated he issued a religious decree (fatwa) declaring the production, stockpiling, and use of nuclear weapons to be forbidden (haram) in Islam.
And yet israel has nukes- why is this permitted? Also Pakistan (who supplied tech to NK) and India have them
What difference does it make, really, if it’s trump making the choice to invade Iran recklessly or Stephen Miller, or someone else? There doesn’t appear to be anyone in this regime w/ enough expertise to change the toilet paper in the guest bathroom. And all the Republicans in Congress are sycophants who appear happy to let the regime do whatever they want—as long as THEY get their gigantic tax cuts! The war has made the entire world less safe, and we’ve lost—against a fourth world power country. Repeating Republican talking point that Iran was a big threat b/c they’ve been sable-rattling for 50 years is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT.
True. For decades, the Middle East has been destroying itself with wars of rival theocracies. Each is run by a fanatic who screams that god is on his side. Of course, oil has a lot to do with it. That’s why the US undermined the freely elected government in Iran and installed the Shah. The backlash to the produced the Ayatollah. On and on…
The Shah's had been in power for 30yrs before Mossaddegh was elected??
O what bullshit!
9/11? Nope, Sunni fanatics, sponsored by Saudi Arabia and the Gulfie tyrannies.
Al Qaeda? Nope, Sunni fanatics, sponsored by Saudi Arabia and the Gulfie tyrannies.
ISIS? Nope, Sunni fanatics, sponsored by Saudi Arabia and the Gulfie tyrannies.
Go on, tell us how bad Iran is.
Hamas/Hezbollah/Fatah/PlO/FPLP/Houthi's/PIJ/ect for 50yrs
The Ayatollah Regime's crippled & dying
Most of which are Sunni fanatics, sponsored by the Saudis and Gulfie tyrannies.
As for the remainder - they'd leave us alone if we left them alone.
Yes… but will Trump get rid of them? I don’t think so.
I hope your wrong but you could be right no doubt
I hope I’m wrong too.
IF .
Look at the way Lindsey Graham salivates, practically downloads in his pants, when talk of bombing comes up. Watch, and you can see how Lindsey can barely suppress his bloodlust from bubbling up and erupting from his fetid id. He, and other members of Congress and this regime's Cabinet are raving lunatics.
"But Trump has to believe or has to claim that he believes that the whole world is extremely impressed. You might say, why do we care? Well, he cares, obviously. His whole thing is about dominance and believing that we’ve got the world awed by our strength."
I think Europe should create a secret commission whose sole goal is to MOCK Trump, loudly and relentlessly. I think it would not take very long for the existing MAGA cracks to open wider, and for him to completely fall apart.
Hopefully the ultimate result would be a fatal health event.
Invite him to The Hague for a special award from ICC?
It doesn't need to be secret - MAGAnuts are too stupid to pay attention to anything not right in front of their faces, and sometimes not even that much.
Europe does not need a secret commission. Just tell every blogger and commentator on the internet that it is "open season" on Trump and his cabal. Allow any derogatory post from anyone, anywhere as long as it targets Thump. Then pipe it onto every social media site.
They already know the season is open - Here are a few - Mallen Baker, The United Front, MeidasTouch, Times News (not NYT), The Daily Clash, Heather Cox Richardson, TheGlobalShift, The Rest Is Politics, The Daily Beast, Northern Signal, Trump and MAGA Must Go, US News Report, Heather Delaney Reese, Fastpo, Lincoln Square and the Lincoln Project, Adam Kinzinger, and Paul Lance. Some put out content daily. Others rarely.
If you check out a few of these regularly, the search algorithms will start feeding you many others.
Does Europe routinely censor bloggers and podcasters?
So allow freedom of speech, but only for this?
America and Trump demand "freedom of speech" as long as it is their "freedom of speech". A taste of the "medicine" they demand for others might be salutary. Any true statement you made of Trump and his cabal would, by its very nature, be derogatory, if applied to a sane, moral person.
US citizens have been mocking him relentlessly. It seems only to result in greater allegiance. I’m afraid the final solution will be trump self destructing. The question is, what will be destroyed along with him?
I actually made it through Trump's speech last night without pukking. As usual, it was aimed at his adoring, gullible base and fact checkers must have had a very late night. Missing from the arrogant diatribe was any mention of his claim Iran has asked for a ceasefire, only bombing them back to the stone ages. He made me feel embarrassed to be American.
There was no talk about regime change, exiting NATO, how the conflict might end or if he's still considering ground troops. He was there to talk up financial markets, talk down the price of oil and distract from Epstein, rising prices and his anemic poll numbers.
That is what they are working towards.
Don’t give a fuck. They’re our enemy then.
Historian here. No, in all of history there has been nothing like this so far as I can find. To be sure, there have been many extremely bad leaders, delusional or insane, with lots of followers too. The unique thing about Trump and our broken Constitutional system is that he has been able to surround himself and fill the entire government with people who are almost as sick, deluded, and incompetent as himself.
I don't understand why so many in government have so ardently clung to him. Fear of losing their seat in Congress? Losing power? Financial gain? Warped ideologues? I sincerely hope that if he can be made into a lame duck this fall, many who have supported him in the halls of power will begin distancing themselves, if for no other reason than their self serving survival
probably due to all of the above. Being in Congress appears to have generally been a great way to become wealthy - or even more wealthy.
Being rewarded for greed has to be something we remove from our governance.
Parasites don't kill their host
Unfortunately, many do kill their host (check out the death of the Black Prince of England, probably of amoebic dysentery). The parasite or disease evolves to spread easily to be able to establish "colonies" in other hosts before the current one dies.
Most do not amoebas are not parasites, ticks, tape and other worms, lice, lampreys, leeches, are.
too funny, and true
I wish these people could see that losing their seat in Congress, financial gain, etc. will likely end of to be small potatoes compared to where they will find themselves if this continues. Life in a ruined country won't be good for anyone.
"YBGIBG" as they say on Wall Street. "You'll be gone, I'll be gone."
Consequences are for the little people to deal with. The situation in, say, Brasil, suits the elites there just dandy.
The sycophants in Congress are supported by the folks back home. None of the Republican voters I interact with are anywhere close to voting for a Democrat. They may not like some of Trump's policies but they love others, especially if it hurts people not like them.
Don't blame congressional Republicans - blame their supporters who are in the house(s) right next to you.
Exactly, that's how democracy works - people vote for those representing their opinions.
I think many authoritarians end up with extremely incompetent governments because they don't like being told they are wrong. Open discussion of what is true and what is the best way forward is a "democracy thing". Blind trust in the superior "dear leader" is an authoritarian thing.
And Trump, after being told "No" repeatedly by the "adults in the room" in his first term, made sure that would never again happen by only hiring idiotic sycophants the second go around.
Which ultimately implicates the Senate majority, who had to approve his unqualified sycophants, as incompetent or corrupt.
His loyal cabinet and appointees are merely parasites and paraites don't kill their host.
That is a very insightful analogy.
Cat here. Caligula comes prominently to mind.
He made his horse a Roman senator, simply to rub the Senate's noses in their own impotence.
Yes!
I've read pretty widely in European history back to Sumer and somewhat in Chinese and Japanese history but I could have missed something -- there is so much history! I did think of Caligula, as mentioned in another comment, and lots of others. Stalin with his purges and promotion of Lysenko might be the nearest analogy. But Trump's immediate and wholesale destruction of his own administrative apparatus, throwing away generations of expertise... the placing in top positions mainly of people utterly unqualified to organize anything more complicated than a birthday party, many of them riddled with sick fantasies.... maybe in some obscure corner of history but never in a major power.
With all the complaints about all the terrible things Trump has done, it seems to me that most people are missing one of the central points Paul made. This will not be over once Trump is out of power. Americans elected him. Twice! Once is a mistake Two times isn’t a mistake. There is no way this country can be trusted.
I agree. The fact that Trump was elected twice indicates there is something seriously wrong with American society. At the very least, it suggests that the American educational system is failing! Our political system may be failing as well since the majority of eligible voters didn't vote in the 2024 presidential election.
65% voted in 2024. Which means about 33% of eligible voters voted for the drar leader
Well if your argument is just math (i.e. more people - 35% according to your numbers - didn't vote at all than voted for Trump) then it is hard to argue.
But if you are trying to refute the original concern - that the fact that we elected Trump twice (sure part of the problem is our electoral system, but a small one, I think) then I think you have missed your mark. If just the right 3% had voted for the way way way "lesser of 2 evils" instead of being so unaware that they felt not voting at all was a perfectly neutral strance, then the whole world would be in a much better place right now.
So I am just about as concerned about people who sat out the election as people who voted for Trump and what that says about our democracy and democracy in general.
Or one or both elections were stolen. There are enough anomalies in 2016 and 2024 to justify suspicion. My question is, why weren't they challenged?
Richard Nixon got elected twice also, as I recall. We recovered from that. We’ll recover from Trump. Hopefully while I’m still around. I’m 85.
What happened was Trump was elected because enough of the public was tired of Team R Tweedledee vs Team D Tweedledum and thus were will to take their chances.
See, the end of the Roman Republic. Of course, the voters thought they were electing Caesar. but they got Caligula or Nero.
Not only did they elect Trump twice, but the opposition was weak and an easy pushover for Trump.
Not just that but the transformation of politics from the desire to find solutions to problems into a showroom of negative entertainment flattering the worst in human beings.
He is following his marching orders from Putin to destroy the US republic. That's what Occam's razor says, at least.
His unreasonable acquiesence to Putin over & over really draws out the conspiracy theories
"Russia if you're listening..."
This is guy who has a picture of Himself and Putin hanging in the White House, and who clapped like a trained seal when he welcomed Putin onto US soil in Alaska, but do go on about conspiracy theories.
I felt something deep and horrible when I heard him say that.
And I'm pretty sure Putin didn't phrase it like that, of course. He either has compromising information or he used flattery. Trump is easy as a child's flute to play.
putin will release the pee tapes when it will damage the US the most - around an election
He doesn't need actual pee tapes. He has the best fake video creators in the world. The only deficiencies in their tapes are the Russian phraseology in the dialogs.
Whether Trump’s unfailingly pro-Putin behavior is purely coincidental or by evil and treasonously conspiratorial design, the result is the same: Trump is an Extreme Putinist, reliably and unfailingly, wrecking all the things that were historically good about The United States of America and exploiting / amplifying all of our historic weaknesses. He is the old Soviet Russian KGB’s wet dream, personified
yup.. exactly
It’s funny as hell watching Russiagate cultists keep pushing their conspiracy theory, in spite of the overwhelming evidence that there is nothing there. Hell, even Strzok more or less admitted this in a text to his lover, Lisa Page. And And they were in a position to know.
But the cultists cannot let it go, cannot admit that they were duped, and by many of the same crew who sold us the “Iraq is chock a block with WMDs”, the “Assad gassed his own people ZOMG!” and the “Libyan rape rooms” lies.
If that were not comedy enough, the *really* funny and ironic part is that if they want evidence that Trump is working on behalf of foreign governments, there is loads of evidence out there in plain sight. He doesn’t even try to hide it. The cultists need look no further than Israel and Saudi Arabia.
It’s as if Melania were trying to catch Donald cheating. To prove her theory, she comes up with elaborate and ridiculous plots involving multiple body doubles, fake credit card receipts issued by a non-existent bank and a supposed secret Twitter code that Donald uses to communicate with his alleged lover. Also, everyone from Barron to J.D. Vance's dog not only know about this scheme, they are participating in it.
Melania works herself into a lather “connecting the dots” concocting a conspiracy theory that would put the 1961 John Birch Society to shame, and ignoring all the evidence that obliterates her theory. Meanwhile, if she wants to see Donald being unfaithful, Mistress Bibi and Mistress Salman have the chains and whips and bondage gear on full display as they make Donald perform the most obscene and humiliating sexual services, all right out there on the kitchen table in front of Melania and everyone else, and with action video footage to boot.
Of course, the rest of Team D and Team R would very much like to take Trump’s place as Mistress Salman’s slaveboi, so they pretend not to notice any of that.
Yeah, it's well documented you cult folks aren't the brightest bulbs in the box. Thanks very much for illustrating that here.
Brilliant logic there, Socrates.
LOL... that was an example of simple observation, not "logic." Again, you cult folks really don't think very well. Sad.
Well, it's not an argument either.
Spot-on.
And yet, the craven Republicans in Congress watch quietly and think only of reelection, or bubble wands or the stock market futures profits they just scored. They will be (among many shameful shambles of our democracy) the legacy of King Feces since many of them will continue blithely in office doing harm.
But a record number GOP are retiring … tired, disgusted, getting out before the whole thing falls apart … dissociate themselves from the results?
I agree, but someone will run in their place and the people who do will be even more extreme because that’s the way the GOP has been running things in recent times or probably even and not recent times. All we can hope is that the people who voted them in in the first place will wake up and vote for the Dems. But so many of them refused to ever vote for a Democrat. So our only hope seems to be enlarge part that they don’t vote at all.
Historically the advice was "if you strike down a prince make sure he is dead". The Republicans are terrified that no matter how hard they strike Trump will rise - Dracula-like - to hurl his MAGA cult against them.
From last day the Republican Congress confirmed DJT Secretary nominees the die-was-cast the Republican Party lost its last thread to be the representative of conservative principles, values and policies. In the 1850s the Whig Party collapsed for much the same reason. The Whigs are the last major party to implode and disappear from the American political landscape. The 21st century Republican Party needs to replace the Whigs on that roster.
He came in with a blueprint - Project 2025 - that provided him with a process by which he could wreak total havoc from day one.
I wonder how people manage to forget that it's quail part of Trump's DNA never to apologize, and never to back down until there literally is no other way.
The US will fight this Iran war until either Trump is out of office or her weapons are fully depleted. This is like Vietnam, just Johnson might have been convinced to back down.
And here's a crucial difference between Trump and Nixon’ Trump would not have withdrawn.
"A country that will elect somebody like that twice is not a country anyone can rely on. And that is the ultimate lesson here."
And that is the horrible humiliation that ALL of us must bear.
The ultimate degradation of what was once the greatest country on earth.
I will NEVER forgive or forget what the MAGA movement has done to us, all because they value their shameless, hollow vanity over humility and critical thinking skills.
It's the one of the primary reason Canada's looking at the Swedish SAAB Jas 39 E/F Gripen's instead of the Stealth Fighter's. That & the 2023 Not Combat Capable designation for production f-35's
There's an important nuance to Canada's Gripen decision: It is a cost benefit decision.
The best fighter jet is the one you can count on being able to fly when there's a crisis. The F35 is billions over budget, years behind schedule, and Trump pushing future sales off a cliff isn't going to make things better. The Gripen is inferior technically, but delivers on schedule, close to budget, is NATO compliant, and can be maintained in many countries, including locally in Canada.
The fact that Canada is buying some F35s is a testament to how seriously Canada takes integrated North American defense. The decision to also buy some Gripens is not anti-American.
It is just that when an emergency actually happens, Canada has to be able to get planes in the air. F35s stuck in a maintenance queue, somewhere in the US won't do the job, no matter how good the tech.
A tiny part of the equation - Pentagon can remotely disable any US built aircraft if they want to. It can fly, but can't shoot.
Just recall the RAF F-35 that was stuck in India for a while, which proved irreparable by non-US technicians. Too complex to maintain. And now we see that the supposedly stealthed F-35 was hit by Iranian fire over Iran.
The recent Iranian missile penetration of Israel's "Iron Dome" has demonstrated that this hubristic achievement was not as perfect as believed.
The war in Afghanistan was the start of using drones to overcome traditional armed forces. Ukraine has pushed that development through technology and tactics to make Russia's ageing weapons highly vulnerable. Drone warfare has shown that "cheap" weapons made en masse can overcome expensive, hi-tech weapons. The next step is drones that are far more autonomous, more like "fire and forget" armaments. Battleships proved vulnerable to aircraft starting in WWI, and very much more so in WWII. British destroyers proved vulnerable to air power in the Falklands War. US nuclear carriers are the next weapon that is just waiting to be damaged or sunk by cheaper weapons, whose aura for power projection will be undermined. It is the almost inevitable result of arms races, especially when weaker nations have to devise weapons to try to overcome the technically superior weapons of the stronger enemy.
They were only ever "the greatest country on earth" in their own minds. No country is the greatest country on earth. No matter, the US is a pariah state now.
Unfortunately many of descendants of the Europeans who ‘‘discovered’’ both North and South America would prefer to ignore these historical facts. So much could have been learned from the native populations and maybe the bounties of the Americas could have been shared. But, sadly not. And then to compound that with the slavery … well, the U.S. is still dealing with the fallout of that, and doing a rather poor job of it. Thanks for the link.
As far as I know native tribes fought with one another too.
Except I would argue that following WWII we were for a brief shining moment living up to our ideals. I think European leaders would recognize that the "Pax Americana" that existed during the Cold War assisted in the formation of the EU economic block and NATO, among other valuable contributions. Anecdotally can recall when I was stationed in Europe being thanked by people who were in the war for our involvement.
The post war system lasted until the current train wreck, which was set in motion long before Trump set everything on fire, by a conversative movement intent on reversing civil rights policies among other things. Ironically this domestic strife has boiled over to destroy any semblance of a foreign policy and our standing in the world.
Reagan to Newt to Norqist to Limbaugh to Chaney to Fox News , on and on. The connections were always there. America slept through it all and went to Walmart instead.
"arrogant, entitled, and so much more" -- Childish. Ignorant. Superficial. -- I live abroad, so I could go on and on.
Oh, and he'll go at any length to pull a victory. He's been seeking an excuse to throw a nuke ever since he got elected (in his briefing on nuclear weapons as a candidate 2016, he asked three times why he couldn't push the button) his fuse won't be long.
If that happens, the US will be regarded as a rogue nation, the only one that used nukes to end the Pacific campaign in WWII, but had resisted the use of nukes ever since. It would make the US a potential target for a nuclear attack by any nuclear-armed state, increase the need for nations to acquire nuclear weapons, and make the US into a far more authoritarian state to try to prevent any method of managing such an attack from happening, the subject of so much fiction. Could a swarm of drones carrying mini-nukes or simply dirty bombs aimed at DC from a ship or truck prove to be the start of such a change?
I'm not a military expert. I'm only aware that there will be plenty of effects working against the US and the “West” in general that it must be prevented at pretty much any cost. It would help a lot if the public was loudly criticizing the use of nukes, protests and media. Silence will not help. Luckily Trump doesn't seem to actively seek excuses for it, just for how long?
😢 losing my words.
This summer would be a good time for a Republican to take a step forward, define an alternative strategy to Trump, distance the party from MAGA, and declare allegiance to the Constitution, world order, and Ukraine. Throw in a total support for exposing the Epstein/Trump “files.”
The filth of Trump and the loss of trust in government is not a recipe for success and prosperity.
Sounds like you are proposing Liz Cheney as the next Republican presidential candidate.
I have many issues with Ms Cheney and she would perhaps fortunately be unelectable but she would be magnitudes of order preferable to the monster she so courageously opposed, at enormous personal and career cost. I lived in N Idaho prior to the 2024 election and was very disheartened by the snarling tribalism of the majority Republican population there, with their precious conspiracy theories and glowering disdain for any ideas beyond their white christian nationalism (cannot bring myself to capitalize the movement.) They seem to revel in shared willful ignorance. They are sadly a revealing slice of the American political and societal pie. Hoping the prices at the pump will educate them to some degree, but most aren’t capable of reasoning through the issues.
NATO would be nice, but the EU and Canada have moved on. F-US. How could it get worse that the largest threat to NATO is within it?
Yup, and this list doesn’t even include the things that were done directly to Americans…
Gutting of the civil service - firings, disbanding, budgets, morale
Allowing DOGE, Palantir, etc access to government databases, including the personal information of all Americans
Politicizing everything from the DOJ and FBI to the ACIP to the Kennedy Center
Cuts to the ACA, Medicaid, and critical social services
Rolling back green initiatives (which also impacts the world)
Rolling back protections such as OSHA, FDA, and CFPB
Tax breaks for the wealthy
Citizens and legal immigrants seized and held
ICE and other armed aholes sent into our cities - poorly trained, no guardrails, meant to bully and terrorize
Smashing research, science, and health
Allowing and encouraging mergers and consolidation
Demanding random redistricting rather than the normal cycle
Vindictiveness that costs literal time and money to tax payers such as going after law firms and universities
Myriad unilateral ways in which he envisions himself king from an unprecedented amount of executive orders to all of the changes to the White House
And about that little item "smashing research, science, and health": this also has deep effects on our international standing. Students, postdoctoral fellows, and senior scientists are already holding back from coming here. And the encouraging of anti-vax and anti-science attitudes will lead to our country being a cesspool of infections and possible new strains that could affect the world.
In Russia it’s SOP that everyone in power has something incriminating on everyone else and I believe that same is true of the convicted felon child rapist. You can count on one hand the republicans who have gone against something he wants. I’m in Iowa and to watch one of our senators who had a decorated military career and was sexually assaulted twice vote to confirm a clown who has said multiple times women don’t belong in the military and has been credibly accused of sexual assault is mind boggling. I’ll never understand how someone can totally abandon their beliefs.
And Trump is only getting started!
Trump has been described a crisis manufacturer who needed crisis for political survival.
But the accumulated pattern of this particular set of crises — the Iran war that benefits Russia economically, the NATO threats that benefit Russia strategically, the Ukraine abandonment that benefits Russia militarily, the sanctions relief that benefits Russia financially — raises a question that the crisis-manufacture framework alone cannot answer.
The question is not whether Trump is coordinating with Russia. It is whether the distinction between coordination and alignment of interests matters, when the outcomes are indistinguishable.
https://marcusnunes.substack.com/p/the-speech-that-said-everything-and
I've said this before: Trump is a Russian asset whose assignment is to weaken/destroy American and the West...and he's doing a superb job
Re your last sentence: Well, Hitler did a pretty good job of wrecking Gemany, didn't he? But your point is well taken. At least Hitler never got a majority without suppressing part of the vote. Trump won a bigger plurality in 2024 than Adolf got in 1932-33. And Germans were a lot more desperate then than Americans were in '24. So as I never tire of saying, don't let the American voters off the hook. They put a felon who is also a moron back in office. There's gotta be payback for that.
Dr Krugman confirms what the Chief Economist writer for the Financial Times Martin Wolf said yesterday, and I paraphrase, that why should the world trust the US after it elected him twice and could in the future elect someone even worse. So the world is not just walking away from Trump they are walking away from the US.
Came here to say this--Wolf, Krugman, others too, realizing that the US has committed such gross errors (even if we don't go ahead with bombing Iran into the Stone Age) that for many years we will not be trusted or even respected. This is a fact that we Americans need to ... well, acknowledge and accept like a mensch.
We should not be trusted or respected until such time as we implement safe guards from ensuring that this kind of madness doesn't happen again for a very long time…
Why Americans should "accept like a mensch": Don't conflate "don't trust" with "despise". The rest of the world is reacting to the US much as you react to a beloved relative who has dementia. Unlike an individual with dementia, a state can recover... but... it will take a lot of time and effort from the citizenry.
I really don't think you meant that. I would never despise an elderly relative with dementia. It is incredibly sad.
That’s precisely the point: the person you’re replying to is saying that the rest of the world doesn’t despise the US, they just distrust us.
Other than the crumbling of the US and all of the side effects to the world at large of having a monstrous madman in power, the loss of the trust of the world in the US is one of the worst consequences of all of this nightmare regime. While I no longer trust a large part of the US population who voted for him even once, I think I’ll always wonder if captain crazypants truly won the election in 2024.
Do you think that people realize how ill this man is? Essentially he has not developed into adulthood let alone manhood.
Trump regurgitated everything he’s been saying over the past month. Weirdly, the passage of time has not made any of his false assertions more true. At this point, I am not sure his palilalia is due to a belief in the gullibility of the electorate. Instead, I am beginning to suspect Trump has a particular type of delusion, a magical-thinking belief that repeating words, as if they are a mantra, actually makes them come true.
Trump has frontotemporal dementia. Side note: I went to medical school.
Any explanations for his voters? We wouldn’t be in this predicament if it weren’t for them. There have always been low information voters, but they didn’t start consistently preferring candidates with obvious cognitive impairments until 1980.
130M US adults can barely read at a 6th grade level, which makes critical thinking all but impossible for them.
That's not just some statistic. That's HALF the adults in your grocery store.
Only 22% of high school seniors have a proficiency in math.
Only 35% have a proficiency in English.
Dopes raising dopes. That's your answer.
As to why stupid people vote for stupid people, well, duh. :)
A feature not a bug. Destroying public education has been a top priority for the GOP since the so-called "Reagan Revolution."
Perhaps true, but this misses the racism & misogyny that kept a lot of voters home, and Musk’s money influencing bigtime, plus Twitter.
— and FOX news!
In the 1930s only about 1/3 of American adults had graduated high school, but they chose better leaders. As for the dumbing down theory of high school graduation requirements, I researched 1920s high school graduation tests and requirements and discovered only basic arithmetic and rote memorization of Revolutionary War hero names was common in those days. There wasn’t any critical thinking component.
I suspect (1) there were enough first and second generation immigrants in those days who had experienced European caste systems directly so they took voting more seriously and (2) the entertainment industry hadn’t yet wormed its way into people’s brains the way it has now. This is based on the movie (Reagan), TV (Trump and Hegseth), and gaming (Tech Bros, Hegseth) angles of voting since 1980.
To summarize your comparison of America before 1940 to today: It's not the level of education that matters, but the level of engagement. If citizens see their votes as determining whether or not they are in depression or at war, they will find a way to get the information they need to make good decisions. If they see politics as a reality TV show and voting like a video game that doesn't impact real life, they won't bother... no matter what education level they're starting from.
TV wasn't the main entertainment in the 30's.
How many can pass the 1895 Salina, Kansas, 8th grade exam?
https://www.issues4life.org/pdfs/8thgradetest.pdf
I feel like the majority of people who voted for him - and many of the people who didn't vote against him - are as disinterested in reality as he is. It's like this weird mix of hubris and apathy. "Nothing ever changes - we've been in a housing crisis for 20 years, so obviously it doesn't matter who we vote for because it's not going to get better. Meanwhile, I'm sure it's not going to get worse because we are too exceptional, rich, and powerful for anything to happen to us."
The thing is, back in the day education wasn't as critically necessary to survive and perhaps thrive. Perhaps the same old dysfunctional education system you describe is still being used, but now to "ready" our population for a more complicated social/cultural landscape than 100 years ago, and it's not working.
Maybe that's an explanation for "what about the people who enthusiastically voted for him?" The bet that we finally weren't generally educated enough to catch the grift, and they were right. I tend to think there is a general volume of evil intent on the planet that occasionally coalesces into what we have now in the US. Like. long running hurricane. Hurricanes end. :)
But – until the 1950s or '60s – Americans did learn to read and write
Don't conflate illiteracy with lack of intelligence. The fact is many Americans look at the US school system, think critically, and do not see education beyond the 6th grade as a good use of their time.
While I agree with other comments that education matters, that is only one piece and may not even be the main driver anymore.
The exponential proliferation of constant tech has been a huge drag on society. From basic email and texting to Teams and Slack to Insta and TikTok, human life has been totally upended. Living this way affects our brains so deeply that even seniors who lived 2/3-3/4 of their lives without it are being utterly retrained. We are constantly asked for attention with essentially zero rules and regulations. We have no training and no control, and even if we did, it is getting harder to navigate what is real and what is not. There is such a deluge, it gets harder and harder to filter and find that matters. It also takes zero effort to completely disengage and not hear any real news whatsoever. Focus, critical thinking, patience, so many critical assets are dropping to dangerous levels…have dropped to dangerous levels considering where the US is currently finding itself.
And greed, greed, greed, and arrogance, cruelty and petty-mindedness disguised as some kind of sacred patriotism. Planned as dominance.
Yes, I blame Fox for a lot of the problem.
Interesting linked story. Thanks.
Hi Paul. I don’t know if we can diagnose ‘at a remote distance’ but I also raise a red flag for the governance which permits Trump, be it due to neuropathological or personality disorder in origin, to discharge his constitutional duties. OMG!, doesn’t cover the degradation in Us governance here. Anthony
Thank you for mentioning this. It gets entirely too little press and repetition in the media and among readers.
C’mon Cholesterol - do your Job
Paul and David N: I think you are both right. Not to diagnose, here, but in my opinion the child-man is in way over his head, can’t see a way out because of his many personality and other disorders, is completely overwhelmed and trying to delusional, magical, wishful thinking which is exacerbated by growing dementia. It is a “both/and” situation. He is rapidly deteriorating and needs to leave office NOW. I fear for the whole world with a mentally-ill demented child-man in charge of a country with many nuclear weapons. Congress needs to unite and step up to the plate and do their jobs to safeguard us all by getting him out of office NOW. The need is urgent as his decompensation is severe.
When will people wake up to who Trump really is and the condition he is in and the consequences?
Dr. Benjamin of the United Front is in complete agreement with you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLypAuIRg7I
That is one of the hallmarks of narcissists. When their narcissism is threatened, they can resort to bending reality to fit their narcissistic self image.
Had to look up "palilalia". Good word!
Me too- it’s a speech disorder.
From Google:
It is frequently associated with neurological conditions like Parkinson’s disease, Tourette syndrome, and autism.
Trump has always, always been the King of Bullshit, And his speech last night was a good example of that. Most of us on Paul's Substack recognize that and are appalled by it. World leaders recognize it, too, and hopefully NATO understands that until Donald Trump is, to borrow a phrase from Caroline Leavitt, no longer on planet Earth, they are on their own in defending themselves against Putin's agression.
Trump tries to bend reality to his imaginary fantasy world. As a rich guy he got away with it for a looooong time.
Comes a time when the account is due.
He has to live in an alternate reality - he can't face the world otherwise because on what clearly must be an unconscious level he is aware of his myriad inadequacies and refuses or is unable to do anything about them. He is also one of those people who has to tear down everything around him, in whatever way possible, in order to feel superior/powerful/better than. He truly is the embodiment of evil.
That's the basic structure of malignanat narcissism. "Something horrible is happening and so therefore it has to be something somebody else is responsible for, because it couldn't possibly ever be ME that's the problem, oh no."
I also had to look-up palilalia. Several solid sources say itcan be a symptom of Parkinson's. Hmmm. (I didn't go to medical school, but unfortunately my Dad had Parkinson's.)
Trump was a disciple of Vincent Peale, the inventor of Positiv Thinking
I doubt that he can read well enough to have been a disciple of Peale.
Trump attended a school in New York, and Peale was the principal at that time.
We never heard anything from our high school principal when I attended school. He didn't teach classes.
The rest of the world is not looking at the US with awe, but with horror. Thanks Paul for being a truthsayer AND a Mensch.
It is wild to me, as someone outside the US, just how much damage the US has done to its reputation. There are young people outside the US - who have grown up seeing China as the stable and responsible player out of the world super powers. And these are young people who live in countries that would have always regarded the US as an ally. The long term damage to the US is truly not being appreciated. And when they now are potentially going to experience global turmoil following on from the actions in Iran, I can’t see them supporting the US for much longer.
How about the other people in the United States that feel helpless by this toxic ruler the future is that in our hands unless someone gets a grip of this shit show
I guess it will give us some sense of how many Iranians feel about the leadership of their country.
And that will be a healthy learning to have about the world and our place in it. (Recalling, "It Can't Happen Here".)
In 1991 the Soviet Union, exhausted, depleted, and demoralized, dissolved itself and its former members went their own ways. From 1940 onward it had been almost constantly at war with other counties or itself until there was nothing left but preparation for the next war. The country of Russia has never recovered. It has become weakened and disoriented and obviously susceptible to autocratic rule.
Compare the history of the United States to that of the Soviet Union over that same time-period and an almost identical pattern appears. While politicians love to say we are a peaceful country, the United States has almost constantly participated in conflicts of a legal and illegal nature with other countries or groups within and outside of its boundaries since December 7, 1941. Following World War II, during the cold war, which can be considered a pause between massive battles, much of our national economy centered around weapons development and preparation for global conflict. An indication of this Spartan attitude, it has been common for peace-loving U.S. citizens to measure the value of a war or conflict by asking whether we won which was almost always the case until 1946. However, applying that measure, since World War II we have not “won” a single conflict and therefore all the thousands of resulting deaths have been wasted. While many reasons for this can be presented, it is also possible this country, like Russia, has worn itself out by incessantly beating the war drum. We seem to have become the image of a punch-drunk boxer looking for an opponent, not realizing that such a contest is obsolete.
When I visited the US Marine Corps Museum I was particularly struck by the long American history, going back into the 1800s, of interventions in foreign countries, mostly done by the US Marines which is why it is detailed in this museum. So the above comment actually understates the history of American meddling in other countries by a huge margin.
There is a real failure of imagination in the psyche of a nation that continually attempts to assert its importance through brute force. And it IS the American voter who deserves the blame - not the criminal it placed into power. He will be dead soon, but we are who we are.
War is apparently inherent in the human psyche dating back to prehuman ancestors. We modern humans have merely refined it to a science and those who find themselves in positions of authority have often used it to achieve their personal objectives leaving others to resort to similar techniques to defend themselves. All in all, it is a silly way to live.
"dating back to prehuman ancestors" - The astonishing expansion of the frontal cortex during out evolution, and then the handicap we seem to have chosen for ourselves with the over-emphasis on the left hemisphere [sorry if this sounds nerdly, but it's a situation I think about a lot!] has seen us make war not just on other beings but on ourselves, each other, our own offspring. And on the planet itself, where we live, as animals (oh no!) - which, in its own interest is in the process of bucking us off.
"our", not "out"
I believe war is still considered an art, rather than a science. "No plan of operations extends with any certainty beyond the first encounter with the main enemy forces." von Molke the elder.
The Trump train, those who elected
He's brought in a force of several thousand Marines and a section of the 82nd Airborne Division. The Nimitz-class carrier George Bush left port a couple days ago for an undisclosed destination. It was disclosed, however, that it expects other portions of its task force to join it during its trip "across the Atlantic." It also expects to pick up its aircraft during the trip. I doubt that anyone is bluffing , but I think that Hegseth is the one behind all of this.
IMO, the Marines can't be used to take Kharg island because their ship won't be able to pass the strait of Hormuz. I expect Hegseth plans to take the island with the paratroopers and then fly in the Marines. What happens then is anyone's guess.
I just watched this. An experienced military war gamer gives his feedback to the BBC. Frightening. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEnMliyLmtI
Yes Milton. I also wonder if we are observers at the ‘decline of the USA’?
There is a similar falling away from principles of humanity that is taking place in Israel that merits examination and understanding.
I came, I saw, Iran
😂(if only DJT would friggin’ run!)
I’d settle for shuffle. And prefer crawl.
I'd prefer stay put and die.
Veni vidi volavi
PT Barnum 2.0: “There’s a sucker born every minute…” I’m old enough to remember when, in the late 70s through mid 80s, Barnum and Bailey surgically altered goats to have one horn, then presented them as unicorns on a “seeing is believing” tour. Kind of reminds me of all of the surgically-altered spokeswomen we’ve seen. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-04-05-mn-27173-story.html
47 is a convicted felon found guilty of dozens of counts of fraud. He’s presiding over a nation that made strategic deception legal in politics, business, law enforcement and military. I’d welcome input on why any rational person—here or abroad—would believe this administration, as it’s incomprehensible to me.
BTW, none of our allies have legal strategic deception. They’re stunned and appalled that we are incapable of honor or relationships of trust. The US is the only nation in the western world to do this and one of just a handful worldwide. The others are Russia, China, and Iran. I don’t know when strategic deception became legal but it wasn’t like this when Jimmy Carter was at the helm. It needs to be criminalized in all forms, imho. Our neighbors don’t need to deceive the public. Why do we?
I can't just understand why those who have a major influence on the stock market rally every time Trump spews a bunch of lies or lower the price of oil. I get that he's paving the way for insider trading "pump and dump" for himself/family/co-conspirators), but can they alone "pump" enough?
It's speculation all the way down at this point. Things aren't priced on what you think they're worth, or what you think other people think they're worth, but on what you think other people think other people think they're worth.
💯
Many traders in the stock market know how to profit from any market movement, regardless of its implications for long term economic performance. Up or down doesn’t matter.
I live somewhere in "the rest of the world", and I'm pretty certain that we're not "extremely impressed". "Flabbergasted and appalled" would be closer to the British consensus.
Indeed, Keir Starmer is in the rather unusual position of seeing his personal polling improve quite significantly as a direct result of him refusing to say "how high?" when Trump yelled "Jump!". And I imagine his polling figures would be even better if he'd taken a leaf out of the Spanish prime minister's book and been considerably blunter, although I concede that there are diplomatic issues at play here that apply less to Spain.
If the UK followed Mark Carney’s example at Davos and Charles postponed his state visit it would help. When dealing with someone “with an alcoholic’s brain”*, enabling them just prolongs the misery.
*Chief of Staff Susie Wylie’s assessment in December 2025, affirmed by Trump himself.
Until recently I worked for a US based technical training company (I'm British). After the first Trump presidency I assumed that any sensible person would avoid him like the plague. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that many of the people who work in the US side of the company, were celebrating the Donald's soon-come ascendancy. Come it did, on the first effect on the company I worked for was that they lost all of their government training work as DOGE ripped through unnecessary expenditure. It's rare one gets to see the "I never thought face eating leopards would eat MY face!" come true quite so quickly. I guess it's true: you can't teach stupid.
I’m so upset. I never voted for this fraud and criminal but I’m put into the same bucket as the ones who voted for this jackass and his monkeys 🐒
Ye're not. We understand he does represent sane, normal Americans.
Jings, I missed oot does NOT!
"The thing about what this means for America’s role in the world is not only that Trump and company are doing great damage, but the whole world is watching. They saw that this guy, and it wasn’t hard to see what kind of a person Trump was, that America elected this guy twice. It appears that the American public has completely lost sight of what it means to be a responsible, serious person."
Speaking as someone from the UK, this is the main point. America seems unbelievably broken. And I have no faith it will fix itself any time soon. The rest of the world doesn't understand why this dangerous lunatic is still president. No Kings was inspiring, but it simply isn't enough. Why aren't Americans on the streets in their millions every single day until he's gone? He cannot be allowed to remain in office. And once he's gone him and his lackeys all need to be in prison for the rest of their lives. At this point, nothing else will do.
Most USAmericans live paycheck to paycheck.
Or doesn't work.
At the end of the day… nothing was accomplished. They still have uranium, theocracy, oil but fewer children since America bombed a school.
Do not forget the 150 sailors who did not know the US had started a war.
Professor Krugman: i grew up amongst the soon-to-be MAGA cult and i escaped as fast as i possibly could. even as a child, i recognized these people were dangerous: weak minds, weak wills, unwilling to become educated, easy to dupe, and always ALWAYS potentially violent and severely destructive. to see that they took over the psyche of the entire nation with their rabid hatred TWICE fills me with great sadness. but between the MAGA cultists and all those arrogant uninformed non-voters, america deserves the evil that has arrived and that is coming for all of us. we asked for this, we deserve this. all of it.
I don’t think indigenous and Black Americans, who have been trapped into this car wreck, deserve the results forced upon them. And they are the first ones to suffer. For example, see DOGE’s impact on Black female unemployment, although 92% of Black women voters saw through Trump’s shtick.
This 100%. They warned us, over and over. They worked harder than anyone else to staunch the flow towards Trump.
There is a terrible disadvantage, horrible it is to realise, to grow up as a member of what is in effect "the dominant race". Even among well-meaning people there can be a bias about who can be trusted, whom one should listen to. A strangely inevitable kind of bias that plays out in ways that are subtle or invisible to the members of the dominant group and yet howlingly obvious to the members of the non-dominant group.
I worry that in his non-ending quest to “bomb them back to the Stone Ages”(BTW, if you’re going to use a trite cliche, at least get it right - although there were three stages, there weren’t multiple Stone Ages), this nut job has his finger on the nuclear button and lacks the impulse control not to use it.
Casually pluralizing nouns has been a trend in spoken non-grammatical English for a while. There aren't multiple "Straits of Hormuz" either -- but at least at some point Trump was advised that it's not a "so-called 'Straight'" as he initially tweeted. Anyone who cares enough to speak intelligently about a geographic feature would look at a map. Trump is a lazy ignoramus (wholly apart from whatever cognitive deficits may explain his exaggerations and lies), and as Prof. Krugman has emphasized today, we have a president who is devoid of character when character is desperately needed in this moment.
Well, Trump is certainly right about one thing: the world can't believe what it's seeing. Not in a good way though.