CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The President from Hell on One Hell of a Planet

Image by Diego Casiano.

I grew up with a vision of a possible instant apocalypse, inspired (if, under the circumstances, such a word can even be used) by the nuclear obliteration of the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II. It could happen at any moment, even if you were “ducking and covering” under your school desk, as I did in those years. And I was hardly alone. That was a genuine generational nightmare of the 1950s and early 1960s — the possibility of a nuclear war between my country and the Soviet Union that might devastate my city, New York (or your city, FILL IN THE BLANK), and our world. But in those years what I never could have imagined was that, even without an atomic blast, I might already be living through the extremely slow-motion equivalent of just such an apocalypse, which should, of course, be the definition of climate change.

And with that in mind, let me start this piece with a distinctly slow-motion apocalyptic moment some seven decades later, one I’m living through not as a young kid under that desk at school but as an old man under the presidency of Donald J. Trump. Recently, in a White House ceremony, the president was crowned the “undisputed champion of beautiful clean coal” by the Washington Coal Club, an event attended by Environmental Protection Agency (or do I mean Environmental Destruction Agency?) administrator Lee Zeldin, as well as Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, both, as the Guardian reported, “staunch coal advocates.” The ceremony was in honor of the “signing of an executive order directing the defense department to secure long-term power purchase agreements with coal plants for military installations and other ‘mission-critical facilities.’”

And honestly, you don’t need to know much more to grasp that this world — as the Guardian also reported recently — is heading for a potential “point of no return” on the way to becoming an all too literal (if still reasonably slow-motion) hell on Earth, a genuine “hothouse planet.” Imagine that! And imagine that, in the future, the Trump administration is working so energetically to make far hotter, far faster, there will be no desks to duck under. And imagine as well that the man “we” chose to elect to a second term in office in November 2024 is now working all too feverishly to ensure that he’ll be remembered as the president of no return and that, before he’s done, it won’t just be the East Wing of the White House that he will have turned into rubble.

In that context, let me tell you just whom I feel bad for: the reporters on the beat in Washington, D.C., covering… yes, that genuine nightmare, President Donald J. Trump, the second time around. I often dream about trying to tell my parents (who died in 1977 and 1983) about this world of ours and You Know Who. But there would honestly be no way to do so. If they were to appear now, I’d be at a complete loss and, in any case, they would never believe me. Whatever I told them........

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