Unlike every other column of mine, this one won’t be broken up with section titles for a simple reason. It’s all about Donald J. Trump and when it comes to him, in this strange world of ours, no one ever really gets a break.

In that context, here’s my advice to you: Don’t get old. For years, I managed not to do so, but unfortunately that’s all over now and I’m increasingly an old man. In fact, I’m not quite two years older than Donald J. Trump. I was born on July 20, 1944, while World War II was still ongoing, and he was born on June 14, 1946, in the peacetime that followed but would all too soon become the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

And let me tell you something else: these days it’s hard enough to keep the website I still run, TomDispatch, in some kind of reasonable shape, while also keeping track of our ever-stranger, more confusing, all-too-Trumpian world. But keeping track of things nationally and globally as an 80-year-old president of the United States (with another two-and-a-half years to go) in a world that seems to be coming apart at the — whoops, sorry, I can’t help it! — seams? I simply can’t imagine that. Of course, I couldn’t imagine it for Joe Biden either, and yet he left the presidency when he was a staggering 82 years and 61 days old and will still have been younger than Trump if he truly makes it to January 20, 2029. (And both of them will have beaten the oldest Roman Emperor, Gordian I, who at 81 only lasted a few weeks in power.)

It’s hardly news that Donald Trump is now the oldest president ever to take the oath of office (twice!) and, in that sense, he’s been both record-setting and, in his own strange way, remarkable. But in case you hadn’t noticed, while he’s always had his odd moments, they are indeed getting ever odder and more frequent. After all, how many times has this country had a president who mistook himself for (or do I mean confused himself with) Jesus Christ? Oh, wait, how could I be so confused? That image wasn’t of Jesus but (as “our” president insisted) of a lookalike medical doctor. (“I thought it was me as a doctor,” the president said. “Only the fake news could come up with that.”)

And meanwhile, of course, in his own ever stranger fashion, “our” president took out after Leo, the American pope, himself a veritable youth at 70 years old, calling him of all things, “WEAK on crime” and, of course, “catering to the Radical Left.” Oh, and while he was at it, Trump also posted an image of himself being hugged by (yes, of course!) Jesus. And Leo responded to the president’s abuse by all too accurately deploring a world being “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” (including, of course, You Know Exactly Whom).

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, as an imperial power (even, historically speaking, the imperial power, the only one at its height to control quite so much of the planet in one fashion or another), this country, too, is growing ever older and (again) in its own strange fashion going down (as, of course, all great imperial powers do sooner or later). Phew! That was a long sentence for this old guy, but you can’t get too long and complicated (or do I mean confused?) when it comes to the world of Donald J. Trump. In electing him a second time in 2024, 49.8% of American voters clearly opted to go down in style by giving imperial oldness a startling new meaning.

These days, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Trump’s approval ratings are heading for the planetary basement. As I was writing this piece, for instance, only 31% of Americans approved of how he was handling the economy. (Of course, you might wonder, at this point, why it wasn’t 11% or even 0%.) Meanwhile, Vice President J.D. Vance’s approval ratings, too, have been hitting historic lows.

Mind you, Donald Trump has always given unpredictability new meaning, but these days, a constant version of unpredictability is his aging middle name. Remember the president who was against “warmongers and America-last globalists” and was going to remove them from office in his second term in the White House? Remember the president who was going to “turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars”? Hmmm, well, think again (and again and again!) now that he’s gone to war (or is it to peace, or even to pieces?) with Iran in an all too strikingly destructive fashion. But that’s today’s news and, in the era of the aging Donald Trump, who knows what tomorrow might hold for any of us (or, for that matter, what might happen an hour from now)? Count on one thing, though: “our” president sure doesn’t know and so, sadly, neither can we.

(Phew! Without section breaks, I’m already exhausted, but who can truly take a break when it comes to Donald Trump?)

And here’s what might be the saddest thing of all (not that all of it isn’t sad as hell, and potentially leading the rest of us all too literally into a hell on earth): given this country’s military machine, which “the peace president” seems eager to feed an extra $500 billion (and no, that’s not a typo!), which would raise the Pentagon budget by an exceedingly modest 50%, the United States still has the power to turn this planet into a hell on Earth in a fashion no other imperial power in decline has ever been able to do. (And I’m not even thinking about this country’s vast nuclear arsenal.)

So, here’s our horrifying reality: in the next two and a half years, if, of course, he doesn’t either keel over tomorrow or somehow grab even more time as president — remember that, last year in Iowa, which he won in all three of his election campaigns, he asked an audience ominously, “Should we do it a fourth time?” — Donald J. Trump is genuinely capable of preparing to take not just this country but the planet down with him. Phew again!

And I’m not just thinking about his ability (if that’s faintly the word for it) with allies like Israel to turn parts of this world into hell zones of war. I’m thinking instead about the climate disaster to come and the president who has called it “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and a “green........

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