CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Making War on Planet Earth, the Rest of Us, and Even Himself

I must admit that if, when I was 16 and John F. Kennedy won the presidency, you had tried to tell me about President (!!) Donald Trump (twice!!!), I would have thought it the lamest joke and you the worst joker (or biggest idiot) on the face of this planet.

Now, mind you, it’s true that all great powers invariably go down in their own fashion, but never, I suspect, quite in the fashion of Donald J. Trump’s America. And consider that no small thing for what was, not so long ago, the greatest power on the face of the earth, if not in all of human history. In that context, it needs to be said that not many of us in our history have had to live through something quite as bizarre as Donald J. Trump as the head of the greatest power not just on this planet now, but possibly ever.

In short, Donald J. Trump (and excuse me for repeating his name but I just can’t seem to help myself!) is giving decline, despite its long imperial history, a distinctly new meaning.

If only we could all walk out on him the way he recently walked out on NBC’s Kristen Welker in the middle of an interview, when she challenged him over his wild claims of election fraud in California’s primaries. But no such luck, of course.

And yet, consider this a guarantee: with two and a half years to go, Donald J. Trump is undoubtedly going to give decline (and fall) a new meaning.

After all, no one is in control of HIM(!) — not even HIM(!). In his own mind at least, he’s clearly president, ruler, king, dictator, you name it, of the increasingly (dis)United States of America. In fact, he should truly be considered a one-of-a-kind, even the first (and, for all we know, anything but the last) of a kind in the quarter millennia of our history. And yes, we Americans live in a country that, in the more than three-quarters of a century since the U.S. emerged successfully from World War II as the great imperial power........

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