As always, the Trump administration is setting ever stranger records for public “entertainment,” and yes, I certainly do have to put that word in quotation marks.

Only recently, Secretary of—you choose—War or Defense (I certainly know which I’d choose) Pete Hegseth made it clear that Nidal Hassan, a former US Army psychiatrist and American-born Muslim, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Ft. Hood, Texas, in 2009 (claiming to be waging jihad “for what he called the illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq”), would be executed by a military firing squad on December 3 and that the killing would—a first—be “live-streamed” for—obviously!—public entertainment. (The last time a member of the US military was even executed by firing squad was for desertion in France on January 31, 1945, only months before World War II ended in Europe.)

And just to put such a plan in perspective, these days, on this planet of ours, the only other two countries that regularly carry out public executions of capital sentences are Afghanistan and Iran. Even Saudi Arabia has stopped doing so (which should tell you something about the company the United States is now keeping).

Executioner-in-Chief Donald Trump is also now in retreat on almost every front imaginable, from global politics to the American version of the same.

In this country, nothing quite like this has happened since the public hanging of Rainey Bethea, a Black confessed rapist and killer, in Owensburg, Kentucky, in 1936, witnessed by an estimated 20,000 onlookers. Ever since then, execution as a public spectacle has been forbidden. But evidently, in the age of Donald Trump, nothing, however grim, is truly forbidden anymore, though, of course, the president did finally have to break down and, while not stopping the firing-squad execution, cancel its public screening.

In fact, in some strange sense, that public firing-squad execution, had it actually happened (and there certainly was opposition to it, even among congressional Republicans, though not, of course, from the president of the United States), would have been all too symbolic of the age of Trump and of a country that is distinctly going down, down, down on a planet that is, in fact, doing the same.

This may simply no longer be a Trumpian planet in any sense of the term. Give him full credit, of course. He’s been nothing short of amazing (or rather amazingly bizarre) during one and a half presidencies (so far), especially since, once upon a time, the very idea of him as president of the United States would have been the most ridiculous joke imaginable—or do I mean unimaginable? He should, in fact, be all too literally considered the living definition of imperial decline.

And yes, it’s true that Executioner-in-Chief Donald Trump is also now in retreat on almost every front imaginable, from global politics to the American version of the same. Don’t doubt for a second, for instance, that his party is likely to get clobbered in the upcoming November congressional elections, even though American billionaires are spending a fortune to help Republican candidates. After all, it looks like all too many of his potential voters might simply stay home, a phenomenon already labeled “the red undertow.”

Globally, once upon a time, who would have even believed this version of the United States? Admittedly, there was that disastrous Vietnam War in the previous century, but still, this country remained a power beyond compare as its competitor, the Soviet Union, collapsed. These days, however, in the age (or do I mean the aging?) of Donald Trump, it’s down, down, down, and down again.

In fact, retreat now seems to be distinctly the name of the game. As a recent New York Times headline bluntly summed it up: “Trump’s Retreat: From the Gulf to Britain, American Forces Pull Back.” That, of course, was in relation to the war he launched against Iran which, if you happen to remember, was going to be victoriously ended within weeks. Seven months later, he’s talking about pursuing it yet again in a big-time fashion after the November........

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