Repent at leisure? Hell, no.
It’s rare that I bother with a Thomas Friedman column. He’s usually full of himself and his breathless “deepisms.” But the headline on his piece today grabbed me. It’s bumper-sticker messaging about Republican efforts to kill the border security deal, and it’s absent Friedman’s usual verbal filigree.
The G.O.P. Bumper Sticker: Trump First. Putin Second. America Third.
Every so often there is a piece of legislation on Capitol Hill that defines America and its values — that shows what kind of country we want to be. I would argue that when it comes to the $118.3 billion bipartisan compromise bill in the Senate to repair our broken immigration system and supply vital aid to Ukraine, Taiwan and Israel, its passage or failure won’t define just America but also the world that we’re going to inhabit.
There are hinges in history, and this is one of them. What Washington does — or does not do — this year to support its allies and secure our border will say so much about our approach to security and stability in this new post-post-Cold War era. Will America carry the red, white and blue flag into the future — or just a white flag? Given the pessimistic talk coming out of the Capitol, it is looking more and more like the white flag — autographed by Donald Trump.
Republicans have abandoned any “America First” pretense. When they say America they mean Mr. L’État, c’est moi. These are not serious people:
“The United States has for some time ceased to be a serious country. Our extreme polarization combined with institutional rules that privilege minorities makes it impossible for us to meet our international obligations,” the political theorist Francis Fukuyama remarked on the American Purpose website. “The Republican Party has grown very adept at hostage holding. … The hard-core MAGA wing represents a minority within a minority, yet our institutional rules permit them to veto decisions clearly favored by a majority of Americans.”
The WWII and Cold War generations are passing away, and the soberness they learned through hard experience with them, Friedman suggests. Joe Biden is one of the few. Although just a few years older than Trump the Unserious never held an office in public service until he was 70. And then just to boost his brand and make another buck.
Trump’s GOP is a throwback, U.S. foreign policy historian Michael Mandelbaum tells Friedman, “to the interwar period between World War I and World War II, when a whole segment of the elite felt World War I was a failure and a mistake — the equivalent today of Iraq and Afghanistan — and then approached the dawn of World War II as isolationists and protectionists, seeing our allies as either hopeless or leeches.”
If they’re not making money for Trump, that’s just what America’s allies are to him. His pre-White House dalliance with Russian President Vladimir Putin was about getting a Trump Tower-Moscow deal. Then Trump got a shot of real power up his nose and acquired a taste for something money couldn’t buy. He/they will sacrifice the world for more of it.
“Being president,” Michelle Obama said, “doesn’t change who you are, it reveals who you are.”
Who Trump is was nakedly visible for those with eyes to see well before his election. Trump is emotionally stunted, mentally unstable, amoral, deeply insecure, needy, venal, vain and vengeful, a pathological liar and con man who has lived his life on the edge of the law (and outside it) using his father’s fortune to shield himself, and now his former office. The law may or may not finally catch up to him before the fall election.
But in how willingly MAGA Republicans have been baptized into Trumpism, they have revealed who they are. These are people without honor, bad people. Not just misguided. Bad. Except Friedman will not say so in the pages of The New York Times.
Where the First Church of Trumpism will lead the U.S. and the world is predictable, Friedman will say:
As Financial Times columnist Gideon Rachman just reported, “the ammunition shortage” in Ukraine “has already led to an increase in Ukrainian casualties. … The shortage of weaponry is also having an effect on the willingness of Ukrainians to volunteer for military service. The mounting pressure on the Kyiv government is part of the explanation for the public falling-out between President Volodymyr Zelensky and his commander in chief, Valeriy Zaluzhny.”
If this is the future, and our friends from Europe to the Middle East to Asia sense that we are going into hibernation, they will all start to cut deals — European allies with Putin, Arab allies with Iran, Asian allies with China. We won’t feel the change overnight, but, unless we pass this bill or something close to it, we will feel it over time.
America’s ability to assemble alliances against the probes of Russia, China and Iran will gradually be diminished. Our ability to sustain sanctions on “pariah nations” like North Korea will erode. The rules governing trade, banking and the sanctity of borders being violated by force — rules that America set, enforced and benefited from since World War II — will increasingly be set by others, and by their interests.
Ater Trump is gone and the hangover sets in, cultists will have time to repent at their leisure. They won’t, of course.
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