Among the possible ways such planning may not work out, here’s one thing Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGA crowd don’t recognize: the troops they plan to rely on to carry out the deportations of potentially millions of people are, in their own way, also migrants. After all, on average, they move from place to place every two and a half years — more if you count the rapid post-9/11 deployments and the Global War on Terror that followed, often separating families multiple times during each soldier’s tour of duty.

Soldiers, sailors, and airmen know what it means to be out of place in a new community or in a country not their own. President Trump and his crew are counting on our armed forces being able to live with forcibly taking people from their homes and separating families right here in the United States, an experience that many of them are all too familiar with. As a military spouse myself, I wonder how amenable they will be to the kinds of orders many Americans can already see coming their way.

An Uncertain Future

Donald Trump’s goals have been outlined in countless campaign speeches, rallies, and press conferences, as well as in Project 2025. According to Tara Watson and Jonathon Zars of the Brookings Institution, his administration could, in fact, do a number of different things when it comes to immigrants. One possibility would be to launch a series of high-profile mass deportation events in which the military would collaborate with federal, state, and local law enforcement, instead of leaving such tasks to Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agencies typically responsible for managing migration. To do so, the federal government would have to expand its powers over local and state jurisdictions, including by imposing stiff penalties on sanctuary cities, where local officials have been instructed not to inquire about people’s immigration status or implement federal deportation orders.

Watson and Zars assume that the policies of the second Trump administration will impact a number of other vulnerable groups as well. For example, about four to five million people with temporary parole status (TPS) or a notice to appear in immigration court are seeking asylum, having fled political persecution or humanitarian disasters in their home countries. Millions of them would (at least theoretically) have to return to the situations they fled because the new administration may not grant their petitions. It could even try to repeal TPS for the approximately 850,000 individuals who already have it.

It might also reinstitute the “remain in Mexico” policy last in place in 2019, which required Central and South Americans requesting asylum to wait on the Mexican side of our southern border — a measure the Biden administration repealed due to significant safety concerns. Also at risk would be the two-year grace period granted to approximately half a million people from war-torn or politically unstable countries like Haiti, Ukraine, and Venezuela, while new people would probably no longer be admitted under that program and asylum might be denied to those caught up in this country’s backlogged immigration courts.

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Additionally, President Trump could try again to end Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, a protected status that now covers more than half a million young people who came to this country as kids. His administration would also undoubtedly slow-walk legal paths to immigration, like the granting of student and work visas to people from China, and could institute policies that would make it ever more difficult for immigrants to access services like Medicaid and public education. His divisive rhetoric around immigrants, calling them “vermin” who are “poisoning the blood of this country,” has already created a climate of fear for many migrants.

A Merging of Powers

In the early 2000s, America’s post-9/11 War on Terror, the remnants of which are still underway in dozens of countries around the world, provided an impetus for the U.S. to consolidate its military, intelligence, and law enforcement entities under a behemoth new Department of Homeland Security, the largest reorganization of government since World War II. As part of that reorganization, Customs and Border Patrol has become ever more involved in non-border-related functions like local law enforcement while benefitting from closer resource- and information-sharing relationships with federal agencies like the Pentagon.

CBP officers now use military hardware and training and work closely with Pentagon intelligence. To take just one high-profile example, consider the heroic intervention in May 2022 by both on- and off-duty federal Border Patrol agents, including several from a special search-and-rescue tactical unit, during the deadly elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. While much has (justifiably) been made of the heroism of those individuals who stormed the building, relatively little has been said about the fact that CBP, state, and local law enforcement agents were all on the scene within minutes and that the presence of hundreds of Border Patrol officers may have actually contributed to the confusion and long period of inaction that day.

Perhaps more to the point, few questioned why Border Patrol agents were better prepared to enter an elementary school than a local police force, or why it seemed like such an obvious thing for them to do in the first place.

Given all that, consider this a distinct irony: the flip side of CBP’s speed in arriving at Uvalde is how regularly it has failed to perform a range of functions it’s supposed to carry out at the border itself in a timely fashion (or at all), especially when such functions are not combative in nature. Take the standoff in early 2024 in Shelby Park, Texas, a 2.5-mile stretch of border along the Rio Grande named for a Confederate general. There, Texas Governor Greg Abbott deployed state National Guard members to prevent CBP from actually processing arriving migrants, complaining that “the only thing that we’re not doing is we’re not shooting people who come across the border.” Abbott’s planned standoff marked the first time a governor had deployed a state national guard against federal orders since 1957, when Governor Orval Faubus deployed the Arkansas National Guard to keep black children from attending an elementary school under federal orders.

The Strange Bedfellows Who Would Implement Trump’s Desires

Military troops who would no doubt have to step in to implement migrant deportation plans as massive as Trump’s would occupy a similarly complicated position, both as outsiders on the local scene and as those charged (nominally at least) with protecting innocent lives. Stranger yet, a small but significant slice of any set of troops asked to take part in such deportations would themselves be immigrants. Five percent, or one in 20 servicemembers in our military, were not born here. And there’s nothing new about that. Since the Civil War, hundreds of thousands of noncitizens have served in America’s wars. During times of hostility, which (officially speaking) include all the years since the War on Terror began in 2001, the federal government expedited the legal path of those immigrant troops to citizenship. It remains unclear how a military that has long been diverse will respond to orders to brutalize people, some of whom may come from their very own communities.

As a military spouse and a private practice psychotherapist who treats U.S. troops, refugees, and migrants from our post-9/11 wars, I can also say that our servicemembers — all of them — are migrants of a very real sort. Culturally, our troops understand both migration and multiculturalism because they have to adapt again and again to new towns or cities where residents don’t see them as real members of their communities, where it’s hard to find doctors and childcare within the military’s anemic infrastructure, and still harder to find these services in communities about which they lack knowledge and connections. In the most challenging of such cases, servicemembers and their families end up in countries where they don’t speak the language or know anyone, and where they may encounter justifiable hostility towards their presence.

The experiences of the myriad groups I see in my practice and know in my broad military community overlap in often profound ways that bring images of immigrants to my mind. Many in such populations understand in their bones what it’s like to be the object of local attention, curiosity, even hostility when they venture out each day. They know what it means to constantly translate from your own language and world into that of a local one (or navigate life without knowledge of the native language at all). They also know what it’s like to have all too few resources to handle a medical emergency or an event like the illness or even the death of a loved one that neither the military nor local resources can help with.

I know one military family whose members struggled for two years in a foreign post because one of their children had a physical disability that neither the military nor the local educational system could accommodate, forcing the military spouse to homeschool. When that spouse came down with a severe case of Covid-19 during the pandemic, they searched long and hard for an appropriate doctor to provide outpatient care so that she didn’t have to leave her young children.

Their experiences mirror those of many I see within migrant communities of color here in the U.S., who come up short when they seek educational and health services for children with special needs, and who suffered more gravely during the Covid-19 pandemic due to overcrowded hospitals as well as social isolation and lack of enough connections to care for young family members when one got ill. It’s no wonder that two groups among us with some of the highest rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality are military families and immigrants from poor countries.

Violence Touches Us All

Broadly speaking, what those two distinctive groups have in common is that, in this century, they felt the most pressure when it came to dealing with this country’s global imperial desires, either by fighting our remarkably disastrous post-9/11 wars or by finding themselves forced to pick up and start over amid the never-ending destruction of those very wars. To end that cycle of migration-as-combat and combat-as-migration, a better world would not dream of kicking out the migrants in this country. Instead, it would be working to bring back the troops from all the places where they are currently still engaged, rather than preparing for conflicts that will only help to create more migrants.

The United States should stop organizing military “exercises” in places like Saudi Arabia and Somalia; stop training troops in countries like Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uzbekistan; and cease drone and air strikes in Syria and Iraq, among other examples of our military involvement abroad. We should just get out. And we should start funneling some of the hundreds of billions of dollars we’ve channeled annually into weapons production into our education system, healthcare, and green infrastructure here at home, so that there’s room for everyone, immigrants included, to be safe and cared for in the communities where they live.

Otherwise, if President Trump manages to realize even a modest part of the immigrant deportation goals he and his political allies have outlined, the bulk of the work of ejection will be done by those for whom it may be the most morally devastating. Many more of our troops than he could ever imagine will, I suspect, be unnerved by what they have in common with the people they’re charged with deporting from their adoptive homeland.

Yes, this may very well be wishful thinking on my part, but I do believe that, Donald Trump or not, our common humanity is likely to win out in the end. After years of studying America’s post-9/11 wars from a range of viewpoints (and listening to those deeply disturbed by their War on Terror experiences), the largest commonality I find among our troops is not a desire to take up arms or fight terrorists in distant lands, or even the experience of being personally victimized — hunted, shot, tortured, or maimed. Rather, it’s the trauma of hurting another human being. It’s wrought from looking a Taliban soldier in the eye at a checkpoint in Kabul and realizing he’s human just like you, or separating a suspected opposition fighter from his spouse and kids during an arrest. It’s the scream of a child whose parent you shot during a raid to prevent an attack on you.

In no small part, the stress of those experiences also came from having to leave your own children for months at a time, knowing that the youngest might not even remember you when you return, or telling your teenager that she has to abandon everything she knows — boyfriend, school, sports teams — to go to a new military town where no one will even know her name. Many of those involved in America’s post-9/11 wars have witnessed another’s suffering in an up-close-and-personal fashion and the ongoing nightmare they face is the possibility of hurting yet more people in all of our names.

Thanks to Donald Trump, at least some of those troops will undoubtedly face the choice of having to do it all again, this time on our own soil. Unless they pause at the memory of what that may be like, Americans could find themselves in an unrecognizable land. It will be a nightmare if, his second time in the White House, Donald Trump launches a war on terror domestically against migrants, because that would be a war on America itself.

Copyright 2025 Andrea Mazzarino

Via Tomdispatch.com

This principle was demonstrated on Friday when the International Development Committee (do we even have one of those?) issued a Report on the situation in Israel and Palestine.

The committee is not a court, and noted its lack of ability to render a legal verdict, but said: “In line with a growing list of experts, we believe that there is a plausible risk that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza may have included grave violations of international humanitarian law, which has given rise to accusations of genocide.”

They add, “this Report also calls on the Government to set out further details and a timeline for the recognition of a Palestinian state — a statement of intent to match the rhetoric of this and previous Governments. This recognition, alongside safety and security for Israel, are necessary for a sustainable and long-lasting peace.”

Although there are individual congressmen who might say such a sensible thing, I can’t imagine a whole committee of our US House of Representatives coming up with such language.

The Committee is entirely correct. As I pointed out in my book, Gaza Yet Stands, the statelessness of the Palestinians is a constant obstacle to their well-being. Stateless people don’t have the right to have rights. You can make a treaty with them, like the 1993 Oslo Accords, which Israel signed off on, and then just entirely renege on it. What are they going to do? Sue?

That Palestinians have no citizenship in a state also means that there is no real reason for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to adhere to the terms of the ceasefire deal his cabinet approved just before midnight on Friday. Apparently incoming president Donald Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff flew to Israel last weekend and read Netanyahu the riot act. Netanyahu blew off and humiliated Joe Biden for over 15 months, but he folded after some choice expletives from Witkoff.

Photo by @nomundodejr Jr.: https://www.pexels.com/photo/thames-river-panorama-with-big-ben-and-westminster-bridge-london-england-17487791/

I’m not sure why, but Trump appears to have felt that it was important for his image that the Gaza War wind down before his inauguration, and Netanyahu decided not to cross him, even though the Israeli cabinet did not want this deal and Netanyahu did not want the deal. The members of the far, far right Jewish Power bloc, the Israel equivalent of Neo-Nazis, resigned in protest, including Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir.

The problem is that the long 3-stage peace process in Gaza will only succeed if both Hamas and the Israeli government abide by it. And we can’t be sure that Trump or Witkoff will keep the pressure on.

Moreover, when they speak about Palestine, many US congressmen and senators appear to have a nervous breakdown and they start shouting AIPAC slogans and denigrating and dehumanizing Palestinians, so you can’t expect this Congress to play a positive role in upholding the peace process.

If Washington loses interest or turns even more malicious than usual, and given that the Palestinians are stateless and without any power or leverage, then Netanyahu can restart his extermination of the Palestinians of Gaza at any time.

The UK parliamentary committee continued, “We call on the Government to treat the removal of Palestinian civilians from the West Bank, through co-ordinated destruction of property and settler violence, as forcible transfer, which is illegal under international law, rather than simply displacement. Finally, we restate our view that it is imperative that UNRWA — United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East — be permitted to carry on its UN-mandated role across the Occupied Palestinian Territory unimpeded, in the light of laws passed recently by the Israeli Knesset that will effectively ban UNRWA from the region.”

Beyond Gaza, the committee is worried about the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from Occupied Territories, including the Palestinian West Bank, and urges the government of Prime Minister Keir Starmer to recognize these actions as severe violations of international law. [They violate the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949.]

Member of Parliament for the Labour Party Sarah Champion heads the committee, and has a long record of speaking out about Palestine — and of visiting there.

Scott D. Sagan, a Stanford political scientist, and researcher Katherine E. McKinney point out that the Truman administration’s bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945 would violate international law as it is accepted today. That acceptance is not just verbal or aspirational. It is embodied in treaties adopted by national legislatures and therefore has a binding character. The US Senate, for instance, ratified the Charter of the United Nations together with the Statute of the International Court of Justice on October 24, 1945.

McKinney and Sagan write of Hiroshima, “More than 70,000 men, women, and children were killed immediately; the munitions factories on the periphery of the city were left largely unscathed. Such a nuclear attack would be illegal today. It would violate three major requirements of the law of armed conflict codified in Additional Protocol I of the Geneva Conventions: the principles of distinction, proportionality, and precaution”

They explain later that these principles, codified in the first protocol to the Geneva Conventions (ratified by 174 countries), require combatants “to not intentionally attack civilians (the principle of distinction or noncombatant immunity); to ensure that collateral damage against civilians is not disproportionate to the direct military advantage gained from the target’s destruction (the principle of proportionality); and to take all feasible precautions to reduce collateral damage against civilians (the precautionary principle).”

The Israeli military repeatedly and publicly violated all three of these principles in its total war on Gaza civilians, as has been documented by the International Criminal Court, South Africa, Ireland, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.

The Likud Party and the parties to its right that dominate the current Israeli cabinet desperately wish to undo all these three principles, which were legislated by the international community after the end of WW II. That is because they are committed to genociding the Palestinian people, and international law is very inconvenient to this aspiration.

In 1945, President Truman alleged that Hiroshima was a legitimate military target. But McKinley and Sagan point out that, while Hiroshima housed certain military-related industrial sites, an army command center, and troop embarkation docks, the bustling metropolis of over 250,000 residents -— men, women, and children -— was far from being “a military base”… In fact, they say, fewer than 10 percent of those who perished in the city on August 6, 1945 were members of the Japanese armed forces.

Alas, they say, U.S. planners of the attack made no effort to “minimize, as much as possible, the killing of civilians.” They say that the historical record of discussion by principals such as Robert J. Oppenheimer, Maj. Gen. Leslie Groves and Secretary of War Henry Stimson shows that the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima was purposefully detonated above the city’s residential and commercial hub, rather than above valid military targets, to amplify the psychological impact on the Japanese population and the leadership in Tokyo.

International humanitarian law has subsequently been erected and widely adopted by treaty in order to prevent the Trumans, Oppenheimers, Groves’s and Stimsons of the future from ever behaving this way again with impunity.

1948 and after are a new era, where, fitfully and in a staccato fashion, the human community is trying to turn a page on the mind-boggling butchery of the mid-20th century, which included the horrors of the genocide of Europe’s Jews.

Netanyahu and his cronies want to pocket the good will toward Jews created by revulsion at the Holocaust, but to hold themselves harmless from the very legal strictures, such as the Geneva Conventions, that underpin the sentiment of “never again.”

Thus, Israel and the United States are signatories to the United Nations Charter and the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Last summer, the ICJ ruled that the Israeli occupation of Gaza and the Palestinian West Bank has departed so starkly, in so many ways, and for so long from the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949 on the treatment of occupied populations that it is now illegal.

I can’t tell you how inconvenient for a Greater Israel aggressor like Netanyahu this ruling is. It is also inconvenient for the US government, Netanyahu’s patron and enabler, which is why Washington has ignored the ruling, despite its treaty obligations to abide by it.

Netanyahu’s response to this series of inconveniences? Tear it all down! He wants to abolish international humanitarian law.

The United States, on the other hand, still has uses for IHL, as in its campaign against Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

“Hiroshima on the Mediterranean,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

These are Biden’s revelations to O’Donnell about his discussions with Netanyahu regarding the Israeli use of disproportionate force in Gaza:

Biden: “When I went to Israel immediately after the attack led by Hamas, eight days later or whatever it was, I told him that we were going to help. And I said, ‘But Bibi, you can’t be carpet bombing these communities.’ And he said to me, ‘Well you did it. You carpet bombed Berlin. You dropped a nuclear weapon. You killed thousands of innocent people because you had to in order to win a war.’”

Biden: “I said, ‘But that’s why we came up with the [United Nations]. New deals by which—how what we do relative to civilians and military.’”

O’Donnell: “So he was comparing twenty-first-century war tactics, battle tactics, with World War II?”

Biden: “Well, what he was really doing was going after me for saying, ‘You can’t indiscriminately bomb civilian areas. Even if the bad guys are there. Even if the bad guys are there, you can’t take out two, 10, 1,500 innocent people in order to get one bad guy.'”

“And he made the legitimate argument, his perspective -— ‘Look, these are the guys that killed my people. These are the guys that are all over in these tunnels. Nobody has any idea of the miles of tunnels that are down there. The only way to get to them is to take out the places under which they got to the tunnels.’”

Needless to say, Netanyahu’s argument that he was justified in razing all civilian objects in Gaza to the ground to get at some Hamas fighters was not in fact “legitimate.” Like the Hiroshima holocaust, these tactics violate current international legal norms, which is why there is an arrest warrant out for Netanyahu from the International Criminal Court.

That Biden thought Netanyahu’s argument was “legitimate” tells you everything you need to know about the hypocrisy, bankruptcy and sheer evil of current American foreign policy. As Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling said at The New Republic, “it’s bad.” Biden had some successes domestically. His eager and steadfast pursuit of a genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza will haunt his legacy, and will forever stain the escutcheon of the United States of America.

Although my respect for MLK is enduring, when it comes to that upward-trending curve connecting past to present, his view of human history has proven to be all too hopeful. At best, history’s actual course remains exceedingly difficult to decipher. Some might say it’s downright devious (and, when you look around this embattled planet of ours today, from the Ukraine to the Middle East, deeply disturbing).

Let’s consider a specific, very recent segment of the past. I’m thinking of the period stretching from my birth year of 1947 to this very moment. An admission: I, too, once believed that the unfolding events during those long decades I was living through told a discernible story. Although not without its zigs and zags, so I was convinced once upon a time, that story had both direction and purpose. It pointed toward an ultimate destination — so politicians, pundits, and prophets like Dr. King assured us. In fact, embracing the essentials of that story was then considered nothing less than a prerequisite for situating yourself in the ongoing stream of history. It offered something to grab hold of.

Sadly enough, all of this turned out to be bunk.

That became abundantly clear in the years after 1989 when the Soviet Union began to collapse and the U.S. was left alone as a great power on Planet Earth. The decades since then have carried a variety of labels. The post-Cold War order came and went, succeeded by the post-9/11 era, and then the Global War on Terror which, even today, in largely unattended places like Africa, drags on in anonymity.

In those precincts where opinions are manufactured and marketed, an overarching theme informed each of those labels: the United States was, by definition, the sun around which all else orbited. In what was known as an age of unipolarity or, more modestly, the unipolar moment, we Americans presided as the sole superpower and indispensable nation of Planet Earth, exercising full-spectrum dominance. In the pithy formulation of columnist Max Boot, the United States had become the planet’s “Big Enchilada.” The future was ours to mold, shape, and direct. Some influential thinkers insisted — may even have believed — that History itself had actually “ended.”

Alas, events exposed that glorious moment as fleeting, if not altogether illusory. For several reasons — Washington’s propensity for needless war certainly offers a place to start — things did not pan out as expected. Assurances of peace, prosperity, and victory over the foe (whoever the foe it was at that moment) turned out to be false. By 2016, that fact had registered on Americans in sufficient numbers for them to elect as “leader of the Free World” someone hitherto chiefly known as a TV host and real estate developer of dubious credentials.

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The seemingly impossible had occurred: The American people (or at least the Electoral College) had delivered Donald Trump to the pinnacle of American politics.

It was as if a clown had taken possession of the White House.

Shocked and appalled, millions of citizens found this turn of events hard to believe and impossible to accept. President Trump promptly proceeded to fulfill their worst expectations. By almost any of the measures habitually employed to evaluate political leadership, he flopped as a commander-in-chief. To my mind, he was an embarrassment.

Yet, however inexplicably, Trump remained to many Americans — growing numbers, it would turn out — a source of hope and inspiration. If given sufficient time, he would redeem the nation. History had summoned him to do so, so his followers believed, fervently and adamantly.

In 2020, the anti-Trump Establishment did manage to scratch out one final chance to show that it was not entirely bankrupt. Yet sending to the White House an elderly white male who embodied the politics of the Old School merely postponed Trump’s Second Coming.

No doubt Joe Biden was seasoned and well-intentioned, but he proved to possess little or nothing of Trump’s mystifying appeal. And when he stumbled, the remnant of the Establishment quickly and brutally abandoned him.

So, four years on, Americans have reversed course. They have decided to give Trump — now elevated to the status of folk hero in the eyes of many — another chance.

What does this head-scratching turn of events signify? Could History be trying to tell us something?

The End of the End of History

Allow me to suggest that those who counted History out did so prematurely. It’s time to consider the possibility that all too many of the very smart, very earnest, and very well-compensated people who take it upon themselves to interpret the signs of our times have been radically misinformed. Simply put: they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Viewed in retrospect, perhaps the collapse of communism did not signify the turning point of cosmic significance so many of them then imagined. Add to that another possibility: Perhaps liberal democratic consumer capitalism (also known as the American Way of Life) does not, in fact, define the ultimate destination of humankind.

It just might be that History is once again on the move — or simply that it never really “ended” in the first place. And as usual, it appears to have tricks up its sleeve, with Donald Trump’s return to the White House arguably one of them.

More than a few of my fellow citizens see his election as a cause for ultimate despair — and I get that. But to saddle Trump with responsibility for the predicament in which our nation now finds itself vastly overstates his historical significance.

Let’s start with this: Despite his extraordinary aptitude for self-promotion, Trump has shown little ability to anticipate, shape, or even forestall events. Yes, he is distinctly a blowhard, who makes grandiose promises that rarely pan out. (If you want documentation, take your choice among Trump University, Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump Magazine, Trump Taj Mahal, and even Trump: the Game.) Barring a conversion akin to the Apostle Paul’s on his journey to Damascus, we can expect more of the same from his second term as president.

Yet the yawning gap between his over-the-top MAGA rhetoric and what he’s really delivered should be instructive. It trains a spotlight on what the “end of history” has actually yielded: lofty unfulfilled promises that have given way to unexpected and often distinctly undesired consequences.

That adverse judgment hardly applies to Trump alone. In reality, it applies to every president since George H.W. Bush unveiled his “new world order” back in 1991, with his son George W. Bush’s infamous 2003 “Mission Accomplished” claim serving as its exclamation point.

Since then, at the national level, American politics, especially presidential politics, has become a scam. What happens in Washington, whether in the White House or on Capitol Hill, no more reflects the hopes of the Founders of the American republic than Black Friday and Cyber Monday express “the reason for the Season.”

In that sense, while Trump’s return to the White House may not be worth celebrating, it is entirely appropriate. It may well be History’s way of saying: “Hey, you! Wake up! Pay attention!”

The Big Enchilada No More

In 1962, former Secretary of State Dean Acheson remarked that “Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role.” Although a bit snarky, his assessment was apt.

Today, one can easily imagine some senior Chinese or Indian (or even British) diplomat offering a similar judgment about the United States. America’s imperial pretensions have run aground. Yet the loudest and most influential establishment voices — Donald Trump notably excepted — continue to insist otherwise. With apparent sincerity, President Biden all too typically clung to the notion that the United States does indeed remain the planet’s “indispensable nation.”

Events say otherwise. Consider the arena of war. Once upon a time, professing a commitment to peace, the United States sought to avoid war. When armed conflict became unavoidable, America sought to win, quickly and neatly. Today, in contrast, this country seemingly adheres to an informal doctrine of “bomb-and-bankroll.” Since three days after the 9/11 attacks (with but a single negative vote), when Congress passed an Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, war has become a fixture of presidential politics, with a compliant Congress issuing the checks. As for the Constitution, when it comes to war powers, it has become a dead letter.

In recent years, U.S. military casualties have been blessedly few, but outcomes have been ambiguous at best and abysmal — think Afghanistan — at worst. If the United States has played an indispensable role in these years, it’s been in underwriting disaster, spending billions of dollars on catastrophic wars that were, from the moment they were launched, of distinctly questionable relevance to this country’s wellbeing.

In his inconsistent, erratic, and bloviating way, Donald Trump — almost alone among figures on the national stage — has appeared to find this objectionable and has proposed a radical course change. Under his leadership, he insists, the Big Enchilada will rise to new heights of glory.

To be clear, the likelihood of the incoming administration making good on the myriad promises contained within its MAGA agenda is close to zero. When it actually comes to setting basic U.S. policy on a more sensible course, Trump is manifestly clueless. Buying Greenland, taking the Panama Canal, or even making Canada our 51st state will not restore our ailing Republic to health. As for the team of lackeys Trump is assembling to assist him in governing, let us simply note that there is not a single figure of Acheson’s stature among them.

Still, here we may find reason for at least a glimmer of hope. For far too long — all my life, in fact — Americans have looked to the White House for salvation. Those expectations have met with repeated, seemingly endless disappointment.

Vowing to Make America Great Again, Donald Trump has, in his own strange fashion, vaulted those hopes to a new level. That he, too, will disappoint his followers, no less the rest of us, is, of course, foreordained. Yet his failure might — just might — bring Americans to rethink and renew their democracy.

Listen: History is signaling to us. Whether we can successfully interpret those signals remains to be seen. In the meantime, brace yourself for what promises to be a distinctly bumpy ride.

Copyright 2025 Andrew Bacevich

Tomdispatch.com

Dear Representative Jared Golden:

Your decision to vote in favor of sanctioning the International Criminal Court of Justice, (ICC) which had ordered Israel to take steps to prevent genocide in Gaza, was dismaying. This recent vote to sanction the ICC by Representatives of Congress erodes the ability of the high court to adhere to the principles of “ International Humanitarian Law, whose purpose is the reduce suffering during war”. 

The legislators passed this so-called “illegitimate Court Counteraction act” by a vote of 243-140, mostly supported by 198 Republican legislators. The question is why you, Rep Golden, felt it necessary to join this charade in support of a far-right regime in the Israeli Knesset, led by a man who is roundly detested by most citizens of Israel.

The intent of the legislation was to sanction anyone who assists the ICC in its attempts…to prosecute a citizen of an allied country” (ie Israel). In this case, it involved posting arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for their leadership in promoting genocide in Gaza.

Perhaps it would be to your benefit to do some serious reading on the horrors taking place in Gaza, with 46,500 civilians having been killed, including 16,000 children, by Israel bombs, supplied by the U.S.. 

Several highly regarded Israeli historians have written about the plight of the Palestinians which has now fallen upon extreme destitution, as most of  their homes, hospitals and schools have been destroyed by a continual barrage of  bombing. In addition, even many tents, inhabited by refugee families in  camps, have been bombed.

The Israeli military  (IDF) is being urged on by the extremist  leadership in the Knesset in a process of “ethnic cleansing”.  Israeli historians have taken note of this attempt to exterminate a population, such historians as Avi Shlaim, an Oxford University scholar raised in Israel who served with the IDF; Shlomo Sand who teaches in Tel Aviv University and has written books including “The Invention of the Jewish People”; Ilan Pappe, an historian teaching at Reading University in the UK who has written “The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine”.

Rep Golden, with the above in mind, it appears  that you are making decisions based on a very limited understanding of the history of Palestine. Are you aware that 5-6 million acres were expropriated from 750,000 Palestinians in 1947, forcing them into homelessness, and into becoming refugees, many having no choice but to move to Gaza.

It is shameful that you take the part of a right -wing cabal, led by a man totally lacking in empathy, not only for the thousands of children being killed by the IDF bombing, but also, until recently, for his unwillingness to negotiate in good faith, for the release of  Israeli captives. 

“Justice in Chains,” Digital, Dream / Dreamland v3, 2024

There are over 160 organizations in Palestine/Israel involving hundreds of thousands of people devoted to building a shared society of cooperation, justice, equality and mutual understanding. Such groups as this are among a significant number of Israelis who are opposed to this genocidal bombing and killing that is taking place in Gaza.

Walls of separation between Palestinians and Israelis have, unfortunately, become a major issue.  Such walls are a form of “Apartheid” which our admirable former President, Jimmy Carter addressed in his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid”. He noted that Israel’s “construction of settlements” has been the primary obstacle to a comprehensive peace agreement. In addition, he wrote: “some Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and [then] justify their subjugation and persecution [thus creating a sense] of hopelessness among Palestinians”

I would hope that you had kept  in mind President Carter’s words  when you voted for this repugnant piece of legislation: to sanction the ICC (International Criminal Court) indicates that you did not reflect very deeply on the issues. Instead you supported far-right leaders in the Israeli government. The question that is paramount in my mind is that you might have been  persuaded by financial considerations. After all,  you received from the “American Israel Public Affairs Cmte”, (AIPAC) the sum of  $375,091, making Israel lobbyists your top Contributor for 2023-2024. (as reported by “opensecrets.org/members of congress).  

It may be worthwhile for you to reflect on  the ancestral home of many residents of Maine: Ireland, which recently filed a “declaration with the International Court of Justice (ICC) with their intention to intervene in [the] genocide case against Israel’s tactics in its war on Gaza. Ireland believes that every state, of the 189 nations who have signed the Genocide Convention, “has the right to intervene in the proceedings” based upon the principles expressed in the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide of 1948.

The essence of Ireland ‘s declaration is that “the crime [of genocide] may also be committed where a perpetrator– regardless of his or her purpose – knows (or should know) that the natural and probable consequence of these acts is either to destroy or contribute to the destruction of the protected group [ie Palestinians] , in whole or part, as such, and [yet] proceeds regardless.”

In conclusion, you still have an opportunity to develop a sense of fairness and justice for all, and not to allow yourself to  be swayed by political contributions meant to influence your vote on crucial issues relating to Palestine and Israel.

“Efficiency” may be the word of the hour, but a more “efficient” imperial military, with a looser leash to attack Iran, bottle up China, and threaten Russia would likely bring yet more unrest to a world that’s already experiencing war-making chaos. When military “lethality” becomes the byword of even the Democrats, as was true with Kamala Harris’s campaign — her vice-presidential running mate’s main criticism of the Trump record on Iran was that his leadership was too “fickle” when it came to that country’s possible acquisition of a nuclear weapon — one wonders if any move toward restraint, let alone sanity and peace, is possible within the Washington beltway.

If Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy want to lead a useful DOGE when it comes to the U.S. military, they should focus on effectiveness, not efficiency. Remind me, after all, of the last major war America effectively won. Yes, of course, it was World War II, 80 years ago, with a lot of help from allies like Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union.

On the other hand, remind me of just how “effective” the U.S. military was in replacing the Taliban with… yes, the Taliban in Afghanistan after 20 years of effort and roughly $2 trillion in expenditures; or how “effective” it was in finding Saddam Hussein’s (nonexistent) weapons of mass destruction while bringing democracy to Iraq; or how “effective” it’s been in decreasing the risk of a world-altering nuclear war (while building a whole new generation of nuclear weaponry), as the Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists creeps ever closer to a thermonuclear midnight.

Color this retired Air Force officer red, as in angry and scared. Still, a new administration should represent somewhat of a fresh start, another opportunity for this country to alter its militaristic course. Perhaps you’ll indulge me for a moment as I dream of 10 ways the Trump administration could (but, of course, won’t) bring a form of “greatness” back to America. (An aside: Explain to me Donald Trump’s eternal focus on making America “great again” when any president should instead be focused on making America good, as in morally just and decent, again.)   

1. It’s said that Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, will “end wokeness” in the military.  No more DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) generals, whatever that may mean. Apparently, the next administration wants to return to a military world of white men wearing stars (and losing wars) — the twenty-first-century equivalent of the heroes who “triumphed” in places like Korea and Vietnam in the previous century. Perhaps the new Trump administration should reanimate former Air Force Strategic Air Commander General Curtis LeMay to “win” a nuclear war against China or Russia. Whatever else you can say about LeMay, he wasn’t “woke.” Nor were generals like Douglas MacArthur in Korea and William Westmoreland in Vietnam. Nor, of course, were they victorious or even that effective, as was no less true of more recent “savior” generals like David Petraeus in Iraq and Stanley McChrystal in Afghanistan.

America, we don’t need a secretary of defense to “end wokeness” in the military. What we need is one to end warness, the pursuit of perpetual conflict across the globe. Instead of channeling his inner Darth Vader and choking the careers of the “woke,” Hegseth — assuming he makes it to the Pentagon — should act to rein in all its “warriors” and civilian neocons who keep boasting of putting on their big-boy pants as they clamor for yet more war.

2. Speaking of Darth Vader and Star Wars (and recalling its planet-destroying weaponry), the $2 trillion or so planned for the “modernization” of this country’s nuclear arsenal, including new Sentinel Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, a new stealth bomber (the B-21 Raider), and new Columbia-class nuclear submarines, could easily be curtailed, even cut completely, without faintly impacting national security. Instead, the U.S. could pursue nuclear reduction talks with Russia and China that would enhance world security so much more than building a whole new genocidal set of nukes and their delivery systems. If the Trump administration wants to show “greatness,” it should do what President Ronald Reagan once did: work to put an end to nuclear madness through diplomacy.

3. Speaking of diplomacy and disarmament, isn’t it time for this country to stop being the world’s foremost merchant of death? The United States is, in fact, an uncontested number one in international arms sales, accounting for 40% of the marketplace. For a start, Trump and his minions could regain a smidgen of moral authority by halting the endless flow of (nearly) free bombs, missiles, and shells to Israel, thereby slowing its genocidal efforts to murder yet more Palestinians in Gaza. (Good luck on that one, of course.)

4. If Trump is so keen to put “America First,” shouldn’t that mean sending money to Main Street, USA, rather than to Wall Street, K Street arms lobbyists in Washington, D.C., and giant military contractors in Crystal City, Virginia, and elsewhere? Euphemistically called the “defense” budget, the money that flows into the U.S. military is now officially set at nearly $900 billion, but its future ceiling seems unlimited and the total “national security budget” is already closer to an astounding $1.4 trillion. Why are Americans letting the Pentagon and the National (In)Security State gobble up roughly 60% of the federal discretionary budget, year in, year out, no matter which political party gains the presidency? In truth, America’s real political party is a warbird with two right wings.

5. Given those two right wings, perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising how often it spins, flails, and fails. Only recently, for example, the Pentagon failed its seventh audit in a row. Had it been a Trump casino, it would have declared bankruptcy and gone belly up 30 years ago. Even then, you couldn’t have dissolved and distributed its assets, since roughly $2 trillion of them are “missing.” (America, your money is MIA, or missing in action, while the American dream has been KIA, or killed in action, by wanton, wasteful, and wrongheaded Pentagon spending.) Want that institution to pass an audit? Cut its budget in half until it produces a credible and accurate accounting. Something tells me that the bureaucracy would finally “win” its war on the numbers if faced with the equivalent of a budgetary guillotine.

6. Isn’t it finally time for the Pentagon to abandon its global fever dream of “full-spectrum dominance”? An American military deployed everywhere is also one that is vulnerable everywhere. What sense is there in having U.S. Special Forces in 80+ countries? What sense is there in having roughly 800 military bases around the globe? Harkening back to my sci-fi youth, America today most closely resembles the power-driven empire in Star Wars (with the belligerence of the Klingons in Star Trek thrown in for good measure). If Elon Musk truly believes that less can be more (as in more efficient), why not start with far fewer bases and foreign entanglements?

7. Speaking of Star Trek, this country could use a new “prime directive” where we don’t go in search of monsters to destroy everywhere. Isn’t it high time we turned inward and focused on healing ourselves? As presidential candidate and Senator George McGovern, a decorated World War II bomber pilot, said so powerfully in 1972, “Come home, America.” Leave the world to settle its own affairs.

8. Speaking of new approaches, why not try rapprochement? Stop attempting to dominate Russia and China, countries that could conceivably destroy the U.S. (as we could destroy them), and start finding smart ways to cooperate. Echoing the business-speak that might appeal to Musk and Trump, isn’t it time to seek win-win scenarios rather than war-war ones?

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9. They say fascism will come to America only if it’s wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross, but maybe some version of that is, in fact, the only way to neutralize future fascism — with critical patriotism (rather than jingoistic nationalism) that stresses fidelity to America’s highest ideals. Stop hugging the flag and start living up to the vision of a United (rather than increasingly dis-united) States, a true land of the free and home of the brave that refuses to be frightened by drones in the sky or an expanding China. Stop promoting a vision of a crusading America and start living a vision of a country in which peacemakers are honored, even revered.

10. The names of American drones — “Predator” and “Reaper” — reveal much about this country’s direction over the last half-century. What this country needs to be “great again” are military and government establishments that are far less predatory and reap far fewer bodies overseas or, even better, none. (Keep in mind the millions of people killed, wounded, or displaced in countries ranging from Korea, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia to Afghanistan, Iraq, and all too many other lands across this planet in this century.)

There you have it, Donald Trump and Elon Musk, my 10 thoughts on your all too dodgy (rather than DOGE) quest for “efficiency” and “greatness” (again). In a nutshell, efficiency, as in doing things right, is far less important than effectiveness, or doing the right things, as management guru Peter Drucker put it. So, for example, a more efficient military might have fought in a somewhat smarter fashion in Iraq, but an effective military (and government) would have recognized that such a war should never have been pursued to begin with. Let me be clear: I don’t want an “efficient” war with Iran or China or any other country. I want an effective American foreign (and military) policy where, to cite Abraham Lincoln, right makes might.

Put bluntly, you can’t do a wrong thing the right way, a simple maxim I fear will be lost on that potential future trillionaire Musk and his DOGE. Therefore, the U.S. military and government will continue to do all too many wrong things, perhaps in a few cases slightly more efficiently, only making U.S. “defense” policy ever more predatory and so reaping yet more innocent lives across this globe of ours.

When it comes to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, let me say the obvious: the U.S. needs a smaller military establishment capable of defending this country by upholding the ideals and freedoms delineated in the Constitution. Fighting endless wars in distant lands is not the solution here, it’s the problem. As a result, America has an ineffective military (inefficient as hell to boot) that essentially launders trillions in taxpayer dollars to merchants of death like Lockheed Martin and Boeing while filling far too many body bags with dead foreigners. Your DOGE, Mr. Musk, won’t change this, nor will your predilection for spoiling the Pentagon with ever-higher budgets, President Trump.

So, what is to be done, America? As the prophet Michael Jackson once sang, we must start with the man in the mirror. Collectively, we need to ask ourselves and by extension “our” government to change its ways.  Or, more effectively, we need to demand radical and extensive changes, since power of the sort wielded by this country’s national security state will concede nothing without a demand.

The forms those demands take are up to you, America.

In my darker hours, I wonder if, in our latest Trumpian moment, this country will be the national equivalent of the Titanic, post-iceberg — meaning that our fate is sealed. If that’s the case, maybe we can play sweeter music and be kinder to each other as we slip toward an ice-cold watery grave. But there are other moments when I imagine the iceberg still looming before the ship of state and a course correction still possible.

I hope that’s the case, even if our ship’s captain (Donald Trump) and his senior officers appear asleep at the wheel, while a few nutcases seem to be seeking that iceberg as a national death wish of sorts or, if you prefer, as an “end times” quest.  As Howard Zinn once said, you can’t be neutral on a moving train — or for that matter on a ship of state already deep in perilous waters.

To use a different nautical reference, a more hopeful (if fictional) one, before the USS Caine goes down with all hands in high winds and heavy seas under the blundering and blustering Commander Queeg, maybe it’s time for us, the crew, to take matters into our own hands, as difficult as that may be to contemplate.

Come hard about, America! Seek the fair winds and following seas of peace. If we have the courage to do that, we will truly save our ship, ourselves, and much of the rest of the world from looming disaster.

Copyright 2025 William J. Astore

Via Tomdispatch.com

Learning on the night of November 5th that Donald Trump had probably been reelected president certainly left me feeling stupefied, with a sense that I’d somehow sustained a number of heavy blows to the head. The experience was undoubtedly amplified by the fact that I’d spent the previous three months in Reno, Nevada, as part of a seven-day-a-week political effort to prevent just such an outcome, along with a crew of valiant UNITE-HERE union members and more than 1,000 volunteer canvassers organized by Seed the Vote.

Still, I hoped that battered feeling would wear off after our campaign office was dismantled, the rental car returned, and the extended-stay hotel room vacated. Surely, once reunited with my beloved partner (and a pair of disgruntled cats), I’d find the disorienting pain of repeated shocks beginning to dissipate.

And the Hits Just Keep on Coming

In fact, it’s only gotten worse, as Trump has rolled out his picks and plans for the new administration. As old radio DJs used to shout: the hits just keep on coming! Unfortunately, these hits aren’t rock-n-roll records; they’re blows to the collective consciousness of those of us who worked to prevent Trump’s reelection, and perhaps even to a few of those who voted for him.

Ethics-deficient Matt Gaetz for attorney general? Bam! Kristi Noem, the puppy-killer, to run the Department of Homeland Security? Pow! Wait, Matt Gaetz is out! Now, it’s Pam Bondi, the woman who accepted an illegal $25,000 campaign contribution from the now-defunct Trump Foundation for attorney general. Bam! Anti-vaxxer Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to run health and human services? Bang! Convicted (and Trump-pardoned) felon Charles Kushner (Jared’s dad) for ambassador to France? Take that, Emmanuel Macron! Wham! And then there’s a double-whammy for those of us who spent a couple of decades opposing this country’s Global War on Terror, as we watch the liberal media (even the British Guardian) lionize old neocon war criminals like John Bolton and Dick Cheney for their opposition to Trump this time around. Whack! No wonder our ears are ringing!

As one uppercut after another left us reeling, a whole flurry of stiff jabs followed in the form of Trump’s announcements of new territorial ambitions for this country. He wants the Panama Canal back. And Greenland, which was never ours to begin with. As he wrote on his social media platform Truth Social, “For purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” L’état, c’est Donald Trump, apparently.

O Canada! Yes, he wants that, too! “It was a pleasure to have dinner the other night with Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada,” he wrote on Truth Social. Governor Trudeau, really? Bernie Sanders jokingly probed the possible benefits of a U.S.-Canada assimilation, asking on X, “Does that mean that we can adopt the Canadian health care system and guarantee health care to all, lower the cost of prescription drugs, and spend 50% less per capita on healthcare?”

The Referee Goes AWOL

One problem with being punch-drunk is that not only do you feel funny, but you begin to think everything else is a little funny, too. Demanding the Panama Canal and Greenland, not to mention Canada, is the kind of thing you’d expect to see in a Saturday Night Live skit. As it turns out, though, it’s neither a caricature nor a joke. In fact, Donald Trump has transformed this presidential transition period into a Theater of the Absurd performance. And while some of his most outrageous statements may indeed turn out to be mere political theater, in the post-November 5th world, we won’t be waiting for Godot, but for the other shoe to drop.

And that’s undoubtedly been part of Trump’s point with his recent flurry of absurdities. He’s already testing how far he can go without meeting any meaningful resistance. How hard can he hit (and how far below the belt) before the referee blows the whistle and stops the fight? Or is there even a referee anymore?

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Our problem (and the rest of the world’s, too) is that the fight is rigged and anyone who might have refereed it is either too corrupt, too terrified, or too absent to do the job. Don’t count on the courts, not after the Supreme Court granted the soon-to-be sitting president more or less blanket immunity for anything he does on the job. Too many Republican members of Congress, never known for possessing spines of steel, now seem perfectly happy to relinquish their lawmaking powers to unelected First Buddy Elon Musk, ducking and covering when he threatens their reelection prospects with primary fights.

With Congress and the judiciary unwilling or unable to do the job, the executive branch will undoubtedly be largely left to referee itself. Foxes and hen houses, anyone? In fact, at least since Ronald Reagan, no president has sought to reduce the power of the executive, while the once-fringe theory of a “unitary executive” has increasingly come to underpin the moves of successive administrations, locating ever more power in the person of the president. That principle was fundamental to Project 2025, the transition program the Heritage Foundation prepared for the next Trump presidency. The central premise of its key document, Mandate for Leadership, is that all executive government functions belong under direct presidential control. That control would extend even to those offices Congress made independent, such as the Federal Reserve, various special prosecutors and inspectors general, and agencies like the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency. This is the reasoning behind Project 2025’s plan to replace as many as 50,000 career civil servants with Trumpist political appointees, who will serve only at the pleasure of the president.

During his recent campaign, Trump disavowed any knowledge of Project 2025 or its architects. But today, the project and the key individuals connected to it are once again openly in his good graces. In fact, he plans to restore one of its key architects, Russell Vought, to his old job directing the Office of Management and Budget, or OMB, a low-profile agency with tremendous power. The National Archives describes it this way:

“The core mission of OMB is to serve the President of the United States in implementing his vision across the Executive Branch. OMB is the largest component of the Executive Office of the President. It reports directly to the President and helps a wide range of executive departments and agencies across the Federal Government to implement the commitments and priorities of the President.”

In other words, the head of the most powerful office in the executive branch will, under President Donald Trump, be someone whose understanding of the role of president is frankly monarchical — that is, the government of a single, all-powerful ruler.

Still Standing — and Not Standing Still

So, if we can’t count on this country’s vaunted checks and balances to either check or balance the power of an absurdist president, where else can we look?

Well, there’s the media. Its freedom is enshrined in the first article of the Bill of Rights and the rest of us must do what we can to protect journalists (whether from U.S. missiles flying in Gaza, or Trumpian threats at home). Of course, it’s also worth remembering journalist A.J. Liebling’s classic observation that “freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Such prescient words first appeared in his 1960 New Yorker article about the disappearance of competing newspapers in various markets. I doubt he would be at all surprised, more than 60 years later, by the spectacle of the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times preventing their editorial staffs from publishing pre-election endorsements of Kamala Harris. I wonder what he would have made of ABC’s abject $15-million surrender to Donald Trump’s patently frivolous defamation lawsuit.

A free media will remain crucial in the coming period, but though it pains my writer’s soul to admit it, there are limits to the power of the written (or even the spoken) word. To check a power-mad president and his fascist handlers, those of us who are already punch-drunk but still standing in the ring will have to find new ways to amplify our commitment to freedom and human dignity through collective action.

We can undoubtedly look to existing organizations like the fighting unions of today’s reinvigorated labor movement for guidance and inspiration. We can value our own narratives in the fashion of Renee Bracey Sherman of We Testify, who creates the space for women to tell our stories in Liberating Abortion: Claiming Our History, Sharing Our Stories, and Building the Reproductive Future We Deserve. We can work with any number of national progressive electoral organizations like Seed the Vote, Swing Left, or Indivisible. We can support organizations dedicated to defending the groups that even many mainstream Democrats are ready to blame for their loss of the White House — among them undocumented immigrants and transgender folks.

Seeing Negative Spaces

I really do believe what I just wrote. We must continue learning and practicing the skills, discipline, and joys of collective action. However, I wonder whether there’s something else we — each of us individually — need to do as well in the new age of Trump.

Over the last year, I’ve been trying to learn to draw. As I struggle with line and value, and my never-very-impressive hand-eye coordination, I remember how my father, a painter and illustrator, used to say that he could teach anyone the basic skills. He’s been gone for more than a decade now and, though I’m glad he didn’t live to see Donald Trump in the White House, I’m sad that I never asked him to teach me to draw. So, I’ve turned elsewhere.

For all its horrors, the Internet contains wonderful resources when it comes to learning anything — from how to knit to how to interpret that annoying little illuminated wrench on your car’s dashboard. Hundreds of thousands of generous people freely share their hard-won knowledge there with strangers around the world. One of them is Julia Bausenhardt, a German artist and illustrator. I’ve learned so much from her many video lessons on sketching the natural world. Above all, I’ve learned that drawing is as much about what you do with your eyes as with your hands. It’s about learning to look.

Like most drawing teachers, Julia emphasizes the value of observing “negative space.” If you want to understand, for example, how a tangle of overlapping leaves and blossoms relate to each other, take a look at what isn’t there. Consider the negative spaces around the shapes you’re drawing.

I wonder whether those of us seeking to forestall an autocratic takeover of this country would benefit from focusing on the negative spaces around the Trump phenomenon, looking for what isn’t there as much as what is. I suspect that’s what the historian Timothy Snyder is doing when he counsels those resisting Trump not to “obey in advance.” There’s no reason to fill in the space around the future autocrat with our own obedience before it’s even demanded. Let’s decorate it with resistance instead.

Similarly, in the spaces around the program Trump’s handlers have devised (most explicitly, Project 2025), we can discern what’s missing from it. Surrounding its blueprints for destroying public education (the foundation of democratic life), decimating labor unions, and resurrecting long-buried regimes of child labor, forced marriage, and childbearing we can discern negative space.

What’s missing from the Trumpian program is something human beings require as much as we need food to eat and air to breathe: respect for human dignity. Don’t mistake my meaning. Respect is not acquiescence to another person’s racism or woman-hatred. Respect for human dignity requires evoking — calling out — what’s best in ourselves and each other. That means avoiding both cowardice in the face of conflict and any kind of arrogant belief in our own superiority.

In some ways, this fight is about who our society counts as human, who deserves dignity. Over seven decades, I’ve fought alongside millions of other people to widen that circle — reducing the negative space around it — to include, among others, myself, as a woman, a lesbian, and a working person. Now, we have to figure out how to hold — and expand — the perimeter of that circle of personhood.

We must do this work collectively in organized ways, but we can also do it individually in small ways. As I contemplate another four horrific years of Donald Trump, I’m also thinking about the negative spaces of daily life. I’m thinking about small daily interactions with strangers and acquaintances. I’m thinking about the in-between times that surround the events of our lives — “negative time,” if you will. In the era of Trump 2.0, I hope to fill my negative time waiting in lines or sitting in yet another endless meeting with small acts of attention and respect. Those, too, can be acts of resistance.

Copyright 2024 Rebecca Gordon

Via Tomdispatch.com

As Joe Biden hobbles into… well, if not the future, then some unknown past, HE looms over us, the political equivalent of a giant armed drone about to be back in the skies of our lives. Of all the Americans whom, once upon a time, I couldn’t have dreamed of being in the White House, Donald J. Trump would have been at the top of my list. No longer, of course. Sometimes I even imagine calling my parents back from the dead and trying to explain President Trump (twice!) to them. They would be… well, flabbergasted is far too modest a word for it, even if, to put him in a context they would have understood, I had compared him to a nightmarish figure of their own time: Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.

My mother was a political and theatrical caricaturist in the 1950s. Of all the drawings of hers I still have, the one that, grimly enough, I keep propped up near my desk in the room where I work — call me a masochist, if you will — is a caricature she did for the New York Post (in the pre-Murdoch days when it was still a liberal publication) of that grimmest of senators of her era, Joe McCarthy. He was the fellow who claimed that the State Department contained hundreds — yes, hundreds! — of communists. She drew that eerily smiling portrait in the spring of 1954 at the time of the Army-McCarthy hearings when he insisted that the U.S. military, too, was filled with commies and, in the process, essentially took himself down.

I was then nine years old and Senator McCarthy’s face was quite literally the first one I ever saw on a black-and-white TV in my house after the Post hired my mom to draw those televised congressional hearings. On opening our front door and walking in from school on whatever spring day that was, the face on that new TV screen was… well, the political precursor to D.J.T., although McCarthy looked far more like the evil monster he was than The Donald does. (No yellow hair and burnished red face for him.)

And yes, he was indeed a monster (and not just an anti-communist maniac, but an antisemitic one, too). Here’s the difference, though: he could indeed wound officials in Washington, as well as figures in the entertainment industry and elsewhere, destroying careers, but he was a senator and no more than that. In other words, he never truly entered the ultimate realms of American, not to speak of global, power.

Unlike Donald Trump, he was never chosen to be president, no less reelected to that powerful position in an era when, thanks in part to this country’s Global War on Terror, whoever holds that office has become a far more powerful figure in the American political landscape. Senator McCarthy never had a significant hand in creating the national budget. He undoubtedly couldn’t have imagined taking stances like insisting that this country should possess Greenland or repossess the Panama Canal, no less referring to Canada as “the 51st state” and its leader as “Governor Justin Trudeau,” as You Know Who did only recently. He could never have ordered the U.S. military to do anything, no less potentially round up and deport masses of immigrants (though, had he been alive in 2017, he might at least have agreed with Donald Trump that a group of neo-Nazi and white nationalist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, included some “very fine people”).

Strangely enough, however, they had more in common than just a certain grim similarity in style, belligerence, and subject matter. The two of them were also linked by a single adviser, one Roy Cohn, who helped them both find their all-too-aggressive footing in this ever stranger world of ours.

A New “Golden” Age

Now, of course, we’re about to face the modern Joe McCarthy the third time around (counting, of course, his loss in 2020 that he’s never stopped disputing). He will return to the White House on a planet that, in more than one sense, is all too literally going to hell in a handbasket. I mean, just imagine this: in the last election, 49.7% of American voters and a striking number of energy industry funders decided to send back to the Oval Office a man whose tagline was, above all else, “drill, baby, drill” — a phrase that, in reality, should have been “heat, baby, heat,” or “destroy, baby, destroy,” in a world that’s already been warming to the boiling point, with year after year of unprecedented high temperatures even when he wasn’t in office. We’re talking about a candidate who has openly sworn that, on Day One back in the White House, he will direct his government to do everything in its power to turn this planet into an all-too-literal hothouse.

So, expect a presidency focused — to the extent that Donald Trump can truly focus on anything (except, of course, himself) — on drilling, drilling, drilling for oil and natural gas, and so adding significantly more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere (and waters) of Planet Earth. Which means more wildfires, droughts, unprecedented storms, you name it. And that, of course, is just to begin to lay out the nightmare to come. And don’t forget that, at least until (as predictably will happen) Trump turns on him, it looks like we’ll have as co-president the richest person on earth, that potential future first trillionaire Elon Musk. We’re talking, of course, about the fellow who only recently and all too symbolically gave his support to Germany’s rising anti-immigrant neo-Nazi party, the Alternative für Deutschland. (“Only the AfD can save Germany.”)

Yes, Donald Trump is guaranteed to make this not only the hottest planet around but a planet of billionaires living in a new golden age (both of their wealth and of a world in flames).

When you think about it (as so many American voters obviously didn’t) on this ever hotter, more arid, more wildly stormy planet of ours, we (and I think under the circumstances I should put that in quotes) — “we” voted back into office someone who will leave Senator Joe McCarthy in the dust of history when it comes to utter malevolence and destructiveness. Consider it guaranteed that he will go a long way toward tearing both this country and this world apart. Indeed, he truly does give the all-American decline of the United States and this planet wild new meaning.

Unlike Senator McCarthy, he won’t just malignantly take out a few imagined bad guys, but potentially all of us. In such a context, four years of (or do I mean in?) hell will have a new, anything but metaphorical meaning in the wake (not an inappropriate word under the circumstances) of the year that will undoubtedly prove to have been the hottest ever and which, in the years to come, will undoubtedly be left in — once again! — the dustbin of history. Oh, and with the help of Elon Musk (or as Bernie Sanders calls him “President Elon Musk”), he only recently tried (and failed) to ensure that Americans who were recently clobbered by two horrific hurricanes that had been fed mightily by the ever more severely overheated waters of the Gulf of Mexico would not get any further government help in the recovery process.

Consider it no small thing that, 70 years after Senator Joe McCarthy went down in flames (and then essentially drank himself to death), an all-too-fierce update of him (and what an update he is!) will once again be in the White House, backed — imagine this, Joe! — by the richest man on Planet Earth, a possible future speaker of the House of Representatives, Trump’s ultimate attack dog — or do I mean (thanks to Space X) the commander in chief of outer space? — Elon R. Musk, who controls a world of commentary, communication, and entertainment that would have been inconceivable on the planet where black-and-white TVs were a wonder to behold.

Make America Gross Again

Imagining the future has never been among humanity’s greatest skills. With that in mind let me nonetheless suggest that Donald Trump’s return to the all-too-grimly Grayer House is a sign of how this country and this planet are preparing to go down big time. The second time around, consider him the functional definition of decline — even if the U.S. does get Greenland and the Panama Canal in the bargain. (Okay, I’m just joking or do I mean Donalding?) In fact, think of MAGA the second time around as Make America Gross Again.

There have, of course, been distinctly bad times in this country before. Consider, for instance, 1968, the year of the assassinations of both Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, of rioting and destruction in American cities, and of the horror of the ongoing war in Vietnam and the election of — god save us! — Richard M. Nixon as president. Still, it remains hard to face the second round (or is it the 102nd round?) of Donald J. Trump.

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Yes, starting on January 20th, you can plan on watching the country that, in the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, American officials came to think of as “the sole superpower” on planet Earth, begin to come apart at the seams on a planet that, unfortunately, is now doing the same. After all, a Europe increasingly threatened by rightist regimes seems itself at the edge of a similar reality (while, of course, Donald Trump functionally dismisses the NATO alliance), even as the nightmarish war in Ukraine spins on (and on and on), while the Middle East seems to be in a stunning process of disintegration.

It’s important, in fact, to put Donald Trump in a global context since he was anything but solely responsible for either the climate or war chaos that’s been increasing for all too long with or without him. What he represents, however, is the coming apart at the seams of that once-upon-a-time sole superpower and that’s no small thing in what still passes for human (or perhaps I mean inhuman) history.

And don’t expect any better when he takes on what passes (even if not very well these days) for the rising superpower on Planet Earth, China, tariff by tariff. Believe me, it won’t be pretty, economically, politically, or even potentially militarily to see who trumps whom in that global showdown between the two powers now putting more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than any other countries on this planet.

In short, we’re living in a world of increasingly human-made chaos (with a distinct helping hand from nature) that’s about to experience an occupant of the White House who should be considered President Chaos. You know, the man who won the 2024 election by “a landslide” (or so he claims) and is, as Senator Bernie Sanders has suggested, moving us ever closer to oligarchy and authoritarianism. Under the circumstances, don’t be surprised if, in our future, lurks an even more devastating set of landslides due to… yes, among other things, climate change.

So, thank you, President Chaos (and, for the time being, Elon) for offering such a helping hand in putting us on the path to an all too literal hell on Earth.

Copyright 2024 Tom Engelhardt

Via Tomdispatch.com

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