The Declinist President
When I launched TomDispatch (or perhaps it launched me) in November 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on this country, if you had told me that almost a quarter of a century later, our all-American world would not only be in significantly worse shape but unimaginably (as in Trumpianly) so, I would, of course, have laughed you out of the room.
Donald Trump, president of the United States, not once but twice?Back then, it wouldn't have worked even as a terrible science fiction story or a truly bad joke. Yes, along with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, we certainly had some lousy presidents. But in the hundreds of years since 1789, nothing -- not a single president -- faintly like him (and, yes, in such a context, he does need to be italicized).
And yet here we indeed are. I can't tell you how sad it makes me feel, after almost 25 years producing TomDispatch, to be on nothing better than Donald Trump's version of planet Earth and to be handing this deeply unsettled, not to say embattled, world of ours off to my children and grandchildren.I mean, honestly, how could we have elected a president (twice!) who, among other nightmares, is doing everything he can to literally burn this planet down by endlessly promoting fossil fuels (including, of course, Venezuelan oil), while doing his damnedest to wipe out wind power or really any version of clean energy that might in any way come to our rescue. (Thank heavens, he doesn't control the whole planet and so, for the first time last year, wind and solar power generated more electricity in the European Union than did fossil fuels.)
It's true, of course, that, in our history on this planet, we humans have had some genuine monsters as leaders, whether you're thinking about Attila the Hun, Roman Emperor Caligula, Nazi horror Adolf Hitler, or the Soviet Union's Joseph Stalin.But whatever else they did -- and they were all true monsters -- their goal was never to literally destroy this planet itself. Donald Trump's way of joining humanity's worst characters in our future history books (if, in that all too ominous future, they even exist) is, it seems, to lend a distinct hand in creating a literal global holocaust, even if in slow motion.
He is, in short, nothing less than the personification of an imperial power, once possibly the greatest of all time, and a planet, once possibly the most livable in our universe, both in grim and rapid decline.And imagine this, to put him in a strange perspective: the American people elected as president, twice, a man who, as a businessman, had either four or more likely six bankruptcies to his name, depending on how you care to count them. And count on this as well: by the time he's done as president this second time around, he could well have (again depending on how you count) either five or seven of them on his record.
After all, he hasn't hesitated to call global warming a "con," "scam," and "hoax," claiming that "If you don't get away from the green energy scam your country is going to fail." In the process, he's done just about everything in his power to promote fossil fuels, while trying to dismantle the creation of green energy, genuinely threatening (in his own strange fashion) to bankrupt not just this country but this planet. (Thank heavens, the courts so far have stopped him from destroying coastal wind power projects, though we don't yet know how [his] Supreme Court will deal with such cases.)
It's honestly strange (at least to me) that, while all of this is indeed reported in our media and Donald Trump is the eternal center of news attention, so little attention is paid to what he's likely to mean for the future of humanity on this planet. Climate change, of course, seldom makes the sort of headlines and news that he creates day by day, hour by hour, no matter what he happens to be doing.And that's doubly strange, because if he were a Stalin- or a Hitler-equivalent in another country, promoting the extinction of parts of humanity, it would certainly be headline news.
But while his words and acts, when it comes to turning this planet into a major heat zone, are certainly reported, they're seldom the top of the news. They're just another passing strangeness in the world of You Know Who. And that, under the circumstances, should seem strange indeed -- or rather stranger than so much else that takes up our time these days.
Once upon a time, in another life and another world, if someone had told me about the planet I now inhabit (along with the rest of you), I don't think I would have believed them.Donald Trump as president of the United States?You must be kidding (and it's not even a good joke)!Our planet is melting in a climate broiler that we control and we're not only not turning down the heat fast enough, but we Americans elected someone (twice!) determined to turn it up ever higher. Honestly, who would have believed any of that once upon a time?
Not me, I can tell you that. Even without climate change, Donald Trump's presidency would have been an eye-poppingly strange experience. With climate change, however, he's a nightmare beyond words -- though, in a sense, he's never beyond words. There isn't a moment when he doesn't want to say something to the rest of us, his apprentices, and be the center of attention for time immemorial. Yikes, I'm sweating!
Copyright 2026 Tom Engelhardt
-- --(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
