Like everything else Trump touches
Grab another coffee.
Rebecca Solnit drew attention to an essay at the Guardian that explains how Donald Trump and Trumpism have undone U.S. primacy in the world:
One thing striking to me about Trump and Trumpism is that while constantly squawking about manliness and strength, it’s a bunch of weak men weakening the United States in every way possible. Another is that by taking a lot of right-wing agendas to their logical destructive conclusion, it helpfully demonstrates the folly of those agendas. Here’s an excellent essay on the response to the USA becoming, under Trump, a rogue nation. (That response could mean the end of US hegemony, which could maybe mean we could down the road stop spending so much money on the military….)
“The highly unpopular and illegal war in Iran is fast becoming a vivid example of the chaos and instability bred by unilateralism,” said Antonio de Aguiar Patriota, Brazil’s ambassador to London, in a speech . “It is laying bare a perception that the world will not be made unipolar again.” That’s because beneath the surface “something is happening. Something is moving.”
The rest of the world is climbing out from under U.S. domination.
Patrick Wintour cites Harvard University’s Prof. Stephen Walt, writing in The Guardian:
… American influence is not just a function of its wealth or power. It’s also a function of how the US is viewed. He said it was important for allies “to think that the United States knows what it’s doing, not that it’s infallible, but it generally knows what it’s doing, that it can execute a plan in a competent fashion. The Trump administration has sent a message to the rest of the world that that’s not the case any more, and that means other states are going to be less likely to rely on American advice going forward, at least for a while.”
Walt added that “the other message this war has sent is that the administration really cared about only one other country in the world, Israel, and that came at the expense of other allies in Europe and Asia”, because of the huge economic damage the war has caused and the lack of consultation with other allies before the war began.
U.S. no longer a force for good
“Everything Trump touches dies,” insists former Republican operative Rick Wilson. Including U.S. credibility. Reflecting on Trump’s aggression against Iran, former U.S. ambassador to London, Jane Hartley, recently observed that the world “no longer thinks America is a force for good.” Trump’s aggression against Iran was the final nail in the coffin of American world leadership. Other world powers now must reorder their priorities in trade, defense, and international relations.
Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, has set out his concept of a middle powers grouping, and Canada has already signed more than 20 economic and security deals, including with China, to increase exports outside its US base. New ad hoc alliances and trade corridors that do not go through Washington are being formed. From the Brazilian perspective it is new “coalitions of the responsible” that are being created, with “coordination across regions, cultures and political systems”.
Trump, the convicted felon, pathological liar, despotophile, and Jan. 6 insurrectionist twice elected by American voters is now an electoral albatross. Even MAGA Republicans know it. They just lack the spines and strength of character to admit it. And their own complicity. He is who he is. They are who they are.
“The far right and the right are not shouting because they are winning; they are shouting because they know their time is running out,” Spanish prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, said in a recent speech in China. He’s condemned the Iran war as illegal. Trump responded by threatening to expel Spain from NATO, something he has no power to do. (Still, he’ll huff, and he’ll puff….)
Opportunity and risk in chaos
The collapse of U.S. leadership represents opportunity, explains Wintour, The Guardian’s diplomatic editor:
For millions of people, the head of the UN humanitarian programme, Tom Fletcher, said last week: “The international order is not on the cusp of collapse, it has already collapsed. What we are going through right now is not a drill.” Fletcher called for greater honesty about the scale of global upheaval and the need for a renewed seriousness in public life.
This is because the way Trump and his fellow travellers have put an axe to international law has made the task of humanitarians near impossible. Indeed, humanity itself is under attack, Agnès Callamard, the secretary general of Amnesty International, said in presenting the human rights organisation’s 2025 report. She described 2025 as the year of the predators.
At the head of the line is us. Rather, U.S.
But where there is opportunity in chaos, there is also risk. Think “The Shock Doctrine,‘ for one, but also the risk in unipolarists desperate to “retain their power to punish and wreak revenge” on those who no longer refuse to bow. It’s who they are. It’s definitely who Trump is. This will get worse before it gets better. The game ahead — and your challenge — is Political Survivor: Outwit, Outplay, Outlast. Or in mock Latin, Illegitimi non carborundum.
Someone on my FB feed posted “A Eulogy for the Worst That Has Ever Drawn Breath” by one Tom Wellborn, subtitled “Being a Complete and Unflinching Account of the Most Loathsome Specimen Ever to Consume Resources, Occupy Space, and Insult the Patience of a Universe That Deserved So Much Better.” It’s blistering. Spread it around.
There are villains, and then there are monsters, and then there are creatures so cosmically, transcendently, almost admirably terrible that language itself recoils from the task of describing them. Grammar buckles. Syntax weeps. The thesaurus slams itself shut and refuses to cooperate. He is this thing. He is the thing past the thing past the thing. He is the sub-basement of the human condition, the moldy crawlspace beneath that sub-basement, and the writhing centipede beneath that.
To call him despicable is to call the sun “a little warm.” To call him hatable is to say that the Black Death was “somewhat inconvenient.” He does not merely inspire hatred. He manufactures it, industrializes it, ships it wholesale to people who had never previously experienced a single negative emotion in their lives. Buddhists who have spent forty years meditating toward unconditional love have encountered him briefly and immediately relapsed into pure, screaming fury. Pacifists clench their fists. Quakers throw things. He has caused more apostasy, more broken vows, more abandoned philosophies than any theological crisis in recorded history, simply by existing in the same zip code as decent people.
He has no morals. Not a single one. Not even the bad morals that at least imply a moral framework: the corrupt cop who loves his dog, the mob boss who goes to church. No. He exists in a morality vacuum so total that ethicists have proposed naming it after him. Philosophy departments around the world now use him as a thought experiment: “Imagine a being entirely without moral content. Not evil, because evil requires intention. Simply absent of the entire apparatus.” He is the null set of conscience. A moral negative space shaped vaguely like a man.
He has no empathy. Scientists have confirmed this. They put him in a brain scanner and watched his amygdala just sit there, inert, like a raisin, unmoved by footage of suffering, by crying children, by injured animals, by literally anything. The researchers wept. He asked if there were snacks.
He has no sympathy either, which is worse, because sympathy doesn’t even require feeling. It only requires pretending. He cannot manage the performance. He cannot fake it. When people around him suffer, his face rearranges itself into an expression that experts have described as “a beige wall trying to look interested.” He is incapable of the most basic social theater that even sociopaths manage. He makes sociopaths look like Florence Nightingale.
His regard for human life is so nonexistent that physicists have theorized it may be negative. He is somehow subtracting regard from the universe’s fixed supply, leaving decent people fractionally less capable of caring about one another, because he is consuming their collective empathy like a moral black hole, bending the very fabric of human decency around his grotesque gravitational pull.
He takes without asking. He takes everything without asking. He takes things that aren’t takeable. He takes the goodwill of strangers. He takes credit for things he didn’t do. He takes years off the lives of people who have to deal with him. He takes the oxygen out of rooms. He took someone’s lunch once, a sad and modest lunch that a tired person had been quietly looking forward to all morning, and he didn’t even enjoy it. He took it on principle. The principle being: I can.
He steals right out in the open with the brazen, unembarrassed confidence of a man who has never once considered that other people are real. He doesn’t steal in the dark. He doesn’t steal furtively. He steals the way you pick up your own mail: casually, boredly, without a single spike of adrenaline or guilt. Guilt would require believing that the person he’s stealing from has standing, has claims, has feelings that matter. He does not believe this. He has never believed this. He was not built to believe this.
He is stupid in a way that is almost majestic. His stupidity is not the ordinary kind, the forgivable, relatable kind that all of us carry in patches and compartments. His is total. Unified. A stupidity that has achieved something like integrity. There is not one chamber of his mind operating at even a remedial level of insight. He has been wrong about everything, always, without exception, without a single accidental correct answer slipping through, which statistically should be impossible and yet here he is, a living rebuke to probability. If you put him in a room with a hundred doors and told him the exit was behind one of them, he would find the ninety-nine wrong ones first, in sequence, and then stand in front of the last door and walk into the wall beside it.
He is callous the way concrete is callous: not through malice, not through choice, but through an utter material inability to register the soft pressure of another person’s pain. You could hand him a book of tragedies, and he would complain about the font. You could show him the face of grief, and he would wonder aloud if there was parking nearby. He does not process human suffering as data. It does not reach him. It never has.
He is vicious without the interesting parts of viciousness. Without cunning, without strategy, without even the cold competence of a true predator. He is vicious the way a blunt instrument is vicious: through sheer, undirected force, through the momentum of his own awfulness carrying him forward into collisions that leave damage everywhere and leave him untouched, unmarked, unaware. Animals that bite have reasons. He does not have reasons. He has trajectory.
He is physically unhealthy in ways that feel karmic, as though his body is attempting to file a formal complaint against his soul. His constitution has mutinied. His own biology is staging a protest.
He is untempered. He has never been tempered. He came out of whatever process produced him without the crucial step: the cooling, the shaping, the refinement that turns raw material into something useful. He is still raw. He will always be raw. He is smelted fury with no purpose, unforged, unbent, uselessly molten.
He is, in the final and most complete assessment, a disgusting anomaly. A statistical outlier so extreme that evolution seems to be embarrassed by him, a glitch in the long project of civilization, a misprint in the human genome so catastrophic that it somehow achieved sentience and got a driver’s license. He is proof that the universe has no quality control. He is what happens when the worst possible combination of traits clears every filter, slips through every gate, and arrives, blinking and unconcerned, into a world that never prepared for anything quite like him.
And the most horrifying part, the detail that keeps philosophers up at night, staring at the ceiling, reconsidering everything, is that he will never know any of this. He will never know what he is. He will go to his grave certain that he was, in fact, pretty good. Maybe even great.
That is the final insult. That is the thing that cannot be forgiven.
Calling Trump a TV Batman villain is too kind.