In a nutshell

Donald John Trump should have this headline emblazoned over his mausoleum in gold:

Trump Buries the 20th Century

(Has he had a gaudy mausoleum designed yet or does he expect to live forever?)

The headline comes from a Politico column by Alexander Burns, Politico’s senior executive editor:

With a roar of rockets and bombs, a gasp of international outcry and the death of Iran’s supreme leader, President Donald Trump’s legacy became clearer than ever.

He is burying the 20th Century: Its villains, its alliances, its political norms and ceasefires. And he is unleashing a future of uncertainty and disruption with no new equilibrium in sight.

Across both his terms as president, and in so many different areas of policy and governance and culture, his signal achievements have been acts of demolition.

His Supreme Court appointees struck down Roe v. Wade, ending the seething political and legal stalemate on abortion rights that governed America since the 1970s.

His military interventions in Latin America have brought the Cuban government, one of the last surviving Cold War regimes, to the brink of collapse.

His tariffs and trade threats have blown apart the Reagan-Clinton policy consensus on free trade, upending half a century of global commercial arrangements and diplomatic relations.

This reads like the bill of particulars in our Declaration of Independence from George III.

Burns goes on. NATO’s post-war legacy of trans-Atlantic stability? Dead. Post-Watergate legal and ethical norms? Dead. Any sense that the United States, the former arsenal of democracy, stands for anything beyond “corporate favoritism and personal enrichment” and “use of the justice system as a weapon of vengeance”? Dead.

“Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

America’s credibility in the community of nations is ground to dust, its legacy abandoned in the desert like the trunkless legs of Ozymandias. Joe Biden considered the TV showman’s self-absorption, Burns writes, with his “philistinism and historical ignorance,” an insult to American tradition and to the office of the presidency. And Trump is.

The builder, it turns out, is better at demolishing what others created than he is at building. That includes our nation of laws. He is better at slapping his name in gold on once noble edifices than at creating anything worthy of the world’s memory, save for what once was. Trump would rather cart the links at his Mar-a-Lago resort and be feted by Botoxed courtiers as artificial as his ridiculous comb over.

Burns concludes:

If the 20th Century is finally dead, this country’s trajectory in the 21st is an immense question mark.

That is the great challenge Trump has left for the next president. For a visionary successor, it could also be an opportunity unmatched in recent U.S. history.

Has anyone checked to see if in his temple of honor, Lincoln’s seated statue sheds tears? Such a miracle might at least shock some Americans deadened by Trump’s garish spectacle into shedding their own over what he’s destroyed. Perhaps to mourn. Perhaps to repent. Perhaps to find themselves once again. It’s long been said that with Trump and the party he leads there is no bottom. No ultimate, dark night of the soul from which springs a renewed commitment to clawing back a life (and a country) worth living. Indeed, there seems none.

As the country staggers toward fall elections and whatever befalls us in 2028, now is a time for visionaries, if there be any left among the technocrats and social media influencers Americans now send to Washington, D.C. in place of statesmen like Lincoln.