Last Friday evening, the four astronauts of Artemis II—commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, and mission specialists Christina Koch and Jeremy Hansen—returned safely to Earth as their Orion spacecraft Integrity splashed down in the deep blue waters of the Pacific Ocean. During a ten-day voyage that took them farther from terra firma than anyone has gone before, the Artemis II crew gave a sterling example of teamwork in action, surveyed previously unseen swathes of the lunar surface and witnessed an eclipse, and beamed back home a plethora of breathtaking, razor-sharp images of Earth, the Moon, and the wider cosmos.

It’s tempting to say that Artemis II offered a brief but welcome respite from the maelstrom of madness that’s engulfed America and the world over these past fifteen months, much in the same way Apollo 8’s first lunar circumnavigation “saved” the violent, tumultuous year of 1968. But there’s also something deeply unsettling about watching these four intrepid astronauts journey to the Moon and back again as a dissolute, self-absorbed president drags us all ever-deeper into his own supermassive moral black hole, issuing increasingly deranged threats as he tries to find a way out of his pointless, unwinnable war in Iran.

This strange, striking juxtaposition laid bare the profound moral and spiritual crisis America has inflicted upon itself, one far deeper and more corrosive than the dissonance between the high-minded ideals of space exploration and the Great Society and sordid realities of the war in Vietnam or urban riots at home that marked the Apollo era in the late 1960s. Indeed, Artemis II feels less like humanity’s next giant leap out into the cosmos and more like an elegy to a dying era: a majestic tribute to the world that once was—and a bright, shining reminder of what it could be again.

It’s a sense of deep pessimism buttressed by the way the Trump administration made plain its intent to gut the agency and cripple Artemis. Just before the launch of Artemis II, new NASA administrator Jared Isaacman—a billionaire with little experience beyond buying seats on a pair of SpaceX flights and whose main qualification appears to be his close relationship with Elon Musk—“restructured” the program so thoroughly as to effectively cancel it. He eliminated the Exploration Upper Stage, the powerful new upper stage for the unfairly maligned Space Launch System rocket, as well as the second SLS mobile launcher, both of which were nearing completion.

Isaacman also torpedoed the Gateway lunar space station, a project NASA had been working on with partners like Japan, Canada, and the United Arab Emirates, in favor of an illusory Moon base that will teach scientists and engineers far less about living in deep space—critical knowledge for any human journeys to Mars—than they’d learn with Gateway. While Isaacman didn’t cancel Artemis outright, his decisions make it likely the program will begin to bleed out over the next several years.

And even as Artemis II circled the Moon, the Trump administration released yet another NASA budget that cuts the agency’s funding to the bone along with the rest of American science. Scientific research and robotic exploration in particular would take a big hit, with some 53 science projects—and 10 robotic exploration missions—terminated if Trump’s proposed budget actually passed. That’s on top of the administration’s previous efforts to disembowel NASA, forcing thousands of experienced NASA workers out of their jobs and hollowing out major research centers like Maryland’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Along with the maiming of Artemis, this budget would transform NASA into a glorified contracting agency—not the engine of scientific research and exploration it has been since its founding in 1958.

In truth, however, Artemis has had more than its fair share of difficulties over the years—and the Trump administration seems dead set on doubling down on them. The fetish for “commercial” solutions in particular led NASA to try and outsource a number of critical program components to private companies that aren’t exactly up to the job. One company contracted to design new space suits for the International Space Station, for instance, gave up on the task, while the complexity inherent in designing a lunar space suit remains a daunting challenge. An attempt to contract out deliveries to the lunar surface, the Commercial Lunar Payload Service, has likewise encountered significant snags, with two missions failing and another cancelled, then revived.

But the most spectacular failure of NASA’s commercial fixation has been the attempt to contract out the lunar lander that would take Artemis astronauts to the Moon’s surface. SpaceX received a $3 billion deal to build a human landing system based on its Starship rocket; more than five years after the initial contract, Starship has yet to reach orbit—and it’d take more than a dozen Starship tanker launches to get a Starship-based lander to lunar orbit, and even then just barely. Blue Origin received a second lunar lander contract in 2023, and while its mission architecture appears less demanding it will still require multiple launches and refueling on orbit. Right now, though, it seems unlikely that either SpaceX or Blue Origin will be ready to land astronauts on the Moon by NASA’s new early 2028 goal.

The irony here is that the two main NASA-owned and -operated parts of Artemis, SLS and Orion, are the parts of the program that actually work. Naturally, then, the Trump administration and Administrator Isaacman want to reinforce commercial failures and let these two spacecraft wither on the vine. All in all, it’s hard to see the future of American spaceflight anything other than bleak—and the American space program as a whole may enter terminal decline over the next three years.

That’s partly why Artemis II feels so elegiac: it represents not only the passing of an age but also the something much more noble in shared purpose and public enterprise. As such, the mission itself stands as an implied rebuke to the venality, self-aggrandizement, and meanness that so dominate American public life today. It embodies the loftier ambitions and higher ideals once defined and fired us as a nation, spurred us on to achieve great things and expand the horizons of the possible—not just for ourselves, but for humanity as a whole. Put another way, Artemis II threw America itself into stark relief and showed Americans who and what we could be at our best.

It’s quite fitting, then, that the Artemis II crew named their Orion spacecraft Integrity, a virtue that’s in quite short supply these days. The crew itself brought humanity with them in both main meanings of the word: humanity as a species and society, on the one hand, and humanity as a sense of fundamental decency toward our fellow human beings on the other. Their humane professionalism and obvious camaraderie—as well as the close international cooperation involved in the mission—provided yet another clear and jarring contrast to the vicious, barrel-of-crabs mentality embraced by President Trump and the general incompetence of his administration.

Artemis II offered something much more important than this contrast, however, braiding together moving, individual human moments with a grander cosmic perspective. Perhaps the single most emotional episode of the mission came when the crew named a newly observed lunar crater after commander Reid Wiseman’s late wife Carroll. But Artemis II also supplied a surfeit of deeper and more philosophical reflections from both the crew itself and those of us watching back on Earth, from new images of Earthset—a deliberate echo of Apollo 8’s indelible Earthrise photo—to mission specialist Christina Koch’s view-from-above-style epiphany on how a glimpse of our home planet in the black void of space ought to underscore our common humanity:

It truly emphasized how alike we are, how the same things keep every single person on planet Earth alive. We evolved on the same planet, and we have some shared things about how we love and live that are just universal.

Or as pilot Victor Glover put it, Artemis II presents “an opportunity for us to remember where we are, who we are, and that we are the same thing. And that we got to get through this together.”

If Artemis II truly represents one last blaze of glory for NASA and America’s space program, it’s at least one that will burn brightly enough to inspire us to build a better future after the present dark age finally passes—an incandescent candle in the dark that reminds us of what we once were and shows who we can be again.

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Often called the high-water mark of the Confederacy, the Battle of Gettysburg represented the furthest the north the armies of slavery and treason would manage to penetrate during the Civil War. It also amounted to the last major Confederate offensive of the war: after Confederate Gen. George Pickett wrecked his forces on battered but stout Union lines on the afternoon of July 3, 1863, it was all downhill for the partisans of human bondage. The First Minnesota Volunteer Infantry Regiment played a pivotal role in the battle, holding the Union line with a near-suicidal charge at a critical moment on its second day and suffering truly appalling casualties—some 82 percent of the regiment’s 262 soldiers were wounded or killed—before losing another 17 men helping repel Pickett’s futile charge on the final day of the battle.

It’s only fitting, then, that in standing up to the Trump administration’s paramilitary invasion of their state over the past few months Minnesotans once again held the line against the most recent variant of militant American illiberalism. Indeed, the streets of Minneapolis may well come to be seen as the rocks upon which the second Trump presidency foundered, dealing them their hardest blows and halting whatever political momentum they may have retained. Put another way, Trumpism reached its own high-water mark in January 2026—leaving it mortally wounded and unable to consolidate its own authoritarian political project, much less impose it by force on a largely unwilling populace.

What Minnesotans did was expose the brutality and lawlessness of the Trump administration in clear, unambiguous terms—ones that brought the cruel reality inherent to its “mass deportation” agenda onto the screens and into the homes of Americans like never before. The murders of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in cold blood and broad daylight put a bright spotlight on the thuggery of Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol stormtroopers. Captured on video, their deaths made it impossible for ordinary Americans and their political leaders to ignore, sidestep, or downplay the campaign of state terror the Trump administration had embarked upon in Minneapolis and across America under the rubric of immigration enforcement.

It was a moment of singular moral clarity that revealed Trump and his administration for what they were: an aspiring tyrant with a sycophantic court whose ambitions lacked anything resembling support from a majority of the population. As polling analyst G. Elliott Morris observed at the end of January, Trump—already underwater on most issues—saw public support for his immigration and deportation policies crater since ICE and CBP laid siege to Minneapolis earlier that month; the public now backs a wide variety of measures intended to rein in ICE. What’s more, Democrats have refused to fund the Department of Homeland Security without much in the way of political blowback while Trump unceremoniously dismissed Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and chief CBP stormtrooper Greg Bovino sulked off into retirement.

Like the Confederate army at Gettysburg, then, Trump and his cronies found themselves denied by the state of Minnesota.

It may be all downhill for Trump and his hangers-on, but that doesn’t mean the war is over by any means—far from it. After all, the Civil War dragged on for nearly two more bloody years before Appomattox. As his decision to launch an unwinnable war against Iran seemingly for the hell of it illustrates, Trump still has the power to do enormous damage at home and abroad in his remaining time in office. Absent a truly sweeping Democratic landslide in this November’s mid-term election—one that could not only impeach Trump but remove him from office—the next three years will amount to nothing less than a death march to the end of Trump’s presidency.

But January 2026 might be remembered as the beginning of the end of Trumpism, the moment it spent itself as a political force with his administration’s attempt to usher in a reign of terror on Minnesota and Trump’s own unhinged threats against Greenland. It’s hard now to avoid the sense that Trump has nowhere to go but down from here—and that the bill for his madness has started to come due.

Trump’s war with Iran is case in point: high on hubris from his Venezuela adventure, he started a new war on a whim and without public support—something without precedent in modern American history. It’s a war untethered from any coherent political ends and without any aim other than war itself. And that’s even before the world begins to experience the material consequences and disruptions involved in this conflict, namely skyrocketing oil and gas prices due to strikes against energy facilities across the Gulf and Tehran’s effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz as well as the potential for a global food crisis with the loss of a third of the world’s fertilizer supply. With no end in sight the war could consume Trump’s presidency, not least because Trump himself has no actual aims and remains the most unreliable of negotiating partners.

Trump himself now appears to be all that now holds Trumpism—or MAGA, or America First, or whatever else you want to call Trump’s own personal brand of fascism—together. It derives its considerable power and remaining influence from the mere fact that Trump holds the presidency, and matters will not improve for him from here on out. Trump could even wind up taking the Republican Party down with him; that’s not yielding to revolutionary defeatism but a plausible extrapolation of the trends we’ve seen over the past three months, trends that seem unlikely to reverse in any real way over the next three years.

Since the start of 2026, America has learned hard and fast and far too late what anyone and everyone who’s ever done business with Trump has discovered: he will run his enterprises straight into the ground, leaving colossal messes that others must clean up. This time, however, he can’t be saved by bankruptcy courts or celebrity branding or even a highly political and unprincipled Supreme Court—we’ll all pay the price for the latest and greatest of Donald Trump’s failures, a failure that will only grow more and more spectacular and disastrous as Trump’s presidency careens downhill with ever-increasing speed.

Trump may have taken Americans for a ride, but we’ve got no one to blame but ourselves for succumbing to such an obvious con for well over a decade now. Unfortunately, the good news about our national predicament is also the bad news: Trump has nowhere to go but down, but he’ll take us all to the bottom of the abyss along with him.

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War generally presupposes some sort of enduring goal, a reasonably consistent and cogent set of political ends or policy objectives to be achieved or frustrated through the use of armed force. It’s a way to help ensure that the death and destruction involved in armed conflict amounts to something more than mere wanton violence, that’s directed toward some just and legitimate purpose.

In this basic and paradoxical sense, America cannot be said to be at war with Iran: neither President Trump nor anyone else in his administration have articulated anything remotely resembling a clear or coherent goal they seek to achieve through force of arms, much less one that remain minimally stable. They appear either unwilling or unable to explain to the American public or the world why, exactly, he ordered the U.S. military to embark upon a massive air campaign against Iran; “for the hell of it” remains the most plausible interpretation at present.

Indeed, President Trump himself cannot make up his own mind as to the rationale behind his blitz against Iran. One moment it’s the nuclear program Trump claimed had been “totally obliterated” by air strikes last summer, the next it’s regime change and nearly five decades of tensions and conflicts with Iran’s ruling regime. Then it’s “unconditional surrender,” and after that Trump’s own personal gut feeling that Tehran would have attacked American troops across the Middle East at some point in the near future. Nor can Trump decide whether or not military operations are going so well that “100% of Iran’s Military capability” has been destroyed or that they’re going so badly that he needs to beg other nations—many of whom he has repeatedly insulted, slapped tariffs upon, and whose contributions to American security he regularly denigrates—to help the U.S. military reopen the Strait of Hormuz. And that’s just over the course of a single Trump social media post.

It’s easy to dismiss this incoherence as typical of Trump’s own tendency to bluster wildly and declare victory no matter the actual circumstances, or treat it as yet another symptom of an already irrational president’s ongoing descent into madness. And there’s more than a grain of truth to these takes; a well political leader does not start large wars for no particular reason whatsoever. But Trump’s well-known reflexes and progressive disconnect from reality only manage to draw attention to the almost total absence of any underlying goal or aim that can be attained through military force beyond the use of military force itself.

Similarly, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth seems to view the air campaign against Iran not as a means to accomplish concrete political or policy objectives but as a way to salve his own cartoonishly insecure hyper-masculinity. He believes his pretentious but ultimately vacuous “warrior ethos” can only be made manifest through deliberate ultraviolence, tolerance (if not encouragement) of war crimes, and degenerate social media memes, not competent military planning or the subordination of armed force to political and policy ends. For Hegseth and his ilk, the violence inherent to the use of military force appears to be an end in and of itself.

Trapped in its own hall of digital mirrors, the Trump White House and communications shop see the military campaign against Iran as simply the continuation of posting by other means. It’s incapable of perceiving reality as anything other than grist for the online content mill, leading to obscene memes that posit armed conflict as a video game or some other form of entertainment.

Then there’s diplomat and national security official extraordinaire Marco Rubio, who claimed the war’s objectives were the destruction of Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal and its navy. In the context of a war started by the United States and Israel, however, these goals do not constitute a political or policy end as such. Their destruction could serve such ends, but these ends have not themselves been articulated in any real much less consistent way by anyone in the Trump administration.

Without anything approximating political or policy aims, this is not war in anything other than the colloquial sense. It is armed force in search of a rationale, ordered on a whim and carried forward for its own sake—nihilism incarnated as official U.S. government policy, with dire consequences for America, Iranians, and the world at large.

In this defining respect, then, Trump cannot win his war with Iran. Without any political or policy end in sight, there is nothing and no way for the United States to “win” through force of arms.

Iran’s ruling regime, by contrast, has one rather simple political objective: survive. It may not do so, though we haven’t seen the sort of internal cracks among regime security services that might lead us to hold out hope that it will crumble any time soon; after all, this regime slaughtered thousands of Iranians to maintain its grip on power not more than a month and a half ago. Still, it’s more than Trump or his administration can say or have said—and in this very limited sense, the Iranian regime can win what would amount to a Pyrrhic victory.

It’s also instructive to look at America’s other intractable wars like Vietnam, where the United States clearly articulated political goals—namely the survival of a non-communist South Vietnam—but could not achieve them at reasonable moral or human cost. Or even Iraq, where a jumble of rationales for regime change coalesced around Saddam Hussein’s supposed nuclear weapons program and stockpile of chemical and biological weapons. When that initial justification fell through, American war aims moved on to democracy promotion and counterterrorism.

Here, however, the United States has no real aims or ends to speak of—and those goals that appear solid melt into air almost as soon as they’re expressed.

The most that might be said about Trump’s military misadventure in Iran is that it’s a return to premodern notions of war, where a political leader’s ego and whims sufficed to start war. Add in Trump’s own predilection for resource seizure—witness his constant yearning to “take the oil” from various nations—as well as the “warrior” culture of the sort feted by Hegseth, and we’re a long way from the notion of war as a moral and legal enterprise intended to govern the use of armed force in the pursuit or denial of specific political ends or policy goals.

This undemocratic de-evolution aside, war in the modern sense—and even premodern senses; contemporary just war tradition stretches back to Augustine of Hippo, after all, if not further—cannot be won in absent any reasonable political aims or policy objectives. In this most significant sense, Trump’s ongoing military campaign against Iran is immoral and criminal: it serves no coherent or comprehensible political or policy purpose. It amounts to little more than butchery and violence for their own sakes, making it a morally abhorrent and patently unjust undertaking. In short, the war in Iran represents perhaps the worst and most vulgar expression of the ever-expanding supermassive moral black hole at the heart of the Trump presidency.

The United States now finds itself locked into a brutal conflict with Iran with no real end in sight—not least due to Trump’s own unreliability as a counterparty. This conflict is and will remain a moral stain on the United States, one that will leave a deeper mark than our previous blunders and compounded by the global economic fallout we’ve only just begun to experience.

Thanks to President Trump and his foolhardy decision to embark upon military action in Iran, the next president will face a profound moral and practical crisis unprecedented in American history—even if nothing else goes wrong in the United States or the rest of the world between now and January 20, 2029. That president will need to address this crisis while at the same time grappling with the acute challenges to American interests and liberal values in both the Atlantic and the Pacific—all while the United States finds itself in a far weaker position than it was just a year and a half ago.

It will be an exceedingly tall order, and right now we can only hope that it can be done.

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With President Trump once again threatening war with Iran for reasons he and his national security team can’t articulate to themselves or anyone else, it’s apparent that there’s much more than an air of absurdity surrounding discussions and debates surrounding American foreign policy today.

Though Trump repeatedly and consistently conducts foreign policy like a hyperactive toddler with a tank of gasoline and an open book of matches, many of us continue to demean ourselves by offering reasoned critiques of Trump’s various half-baked and ill-conceived impulses. Worse, we regularly encounter attempts to impose some sort of method on Trump’s narcissistic madness and sanewash—usually unintentionally—his risible foreign policy moves and lunatic rhetoric.

The truth, however, remains that Trump’s motives aren’t terribly complicated—they’re base and primitive, a twisted amalgam of personal self-aggrandizement, cartoonish machismo and chauvinism, and unadulterated irrationality. These impulses mark not just Trump but his political movement as a whole, no matter what sort of pseudo-intellectual veneer his more canny and verbose supporters try to apply to them. There’s no reason and no deeper logic at play here, just the raw will to power and a lust for theatrical violence. To put it simply, Trump and his administration seem bent on war just for the hell of it.

In practice, then, Trump’s “America First” approach to the world amounts to little more than belligerent nihilism, largely untethered from reality and leavened only by self-dealing and corruption.

Take the president’s repeated threats to use military force against Iran: neither he nor anyone else in his administration has offered anything resembling a real reason for their proposed air campaign, much less anything resembling a feasible goal that can be achieved through military force. Indeed, the supposed rationales for these mooted strikes has shifted repeatedly from supporting Iranians protesting against their nation’s theocratic rulers—protests the regime crushed with extreme brutality, at least for the time being—and regime change to leverage for a new agreement to curb Tehran’s nuclear program, a program Trump claimed was “completely and totally obliterated” by limited American air strikes last summer. It does no one any good to critically analyze this potential air campaign in normal, conventional ways; for Trump and company, the use of force is an end in and of itself—something that’s been demonstrated over and over again with the administration’s ongoing murder spree against small boats in the Caribbean and Pacific.

When detached from any rational and realistic end, the use of military force doesn’t amount to war or armed conflict—it’s just death and destruction for its own sake.

We find ourselves spiraling ever deeper into an abyss of unreason, sucked further and further in by the relentless gravitational pull of the moral black hole at the heart of the Trump presidency. Trying to find some kernel of rationality in this insanity isn’t just futile, it’s a species of irrationality in itself. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible to discern certain patterns and goals in Trump’s policies or to identify the various sub-rational impulses and instincts that drive them; it’s an eminently useful exercise, one that I’ve done myself. Indeed, Trump’s deep-seated abhorrence of trade, immigration, and alliances—in short, any sort of constructive or positive intercourse with other nations—has remained entirely consistent throughout his time in public life. To this enduring hatred of foreigners we can add a sadistic fondness for state violence and official cruelty for their own sake, whether at home or abroad.

But we shouldn’t mistake this worldview and its various throughlines for some sort of intricate scheme or coherent strategy—it’s not, and we’re better off if we don’t pretend otherwise. No matter how sound or necessary they may otherwise be, reasoned critiques of this or that Trump foreign policy move almost always wind up focusing on individual pixels at the expense of the big picture. It’s simply not possible to account for Trump and his foreign policy without accounting for the irrationality and nihilism at its core; with its illogical aims and incoherent means, the whole of Trump’s foreign must add up to less than the sum of its parts.

Irrationality has a way of catching up with itself, however: things that don’t logically add up typically won’t in reality, at least not in the long run. That leaves us with two main questions: how long can our current bout of irrationality sustain itself before it gives way, as it inevitably must? And how much and what kind of damage will it inflict before it finally does?

The former question proves difficult to answer in any meaningful way, but a cursory look at history shows that an exceptionally high potential for catastrophe exists whenever a political leader succumbs to the demented impulse to impose their ideological or personal fantasies on reality. Trump’s push for autarky, his deportation campaign, and clear desire to carve up the world with dictators in Moscow and Beijing all speak to the same underlying desire to force his own ingrained bigotries and delusions on the real world. He and his administration are determined to use the awesome power of the modern state to indulge themselves, their prejudices, and their basest instincts on a global scale.

Indeed, we’ve only just begun to reap the bitter harvest of Trump’s nihilist foreign policy: in little more than a year, Trump and his administration have managed to alienate America’s oldest and closest allies with capricious, constantly changing tariffs and even threats of territorial conquest—to the point where America’s erstwhile NATO allies deployed troops to Greenland to deter Trump from attempting to seize the Danish possession. They’ve cozied up to enemies and rivals abroad, rolling out the literal red carpet for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin at a summit in Alaska and insisting Ukraine settle its war of independence on the Kremlin’s terms. In an abrogation of a U.S. policy that dates back to the early Reagan administration, Trump has even gone so far as to consult with Chinese autocrat Xi Jinping about American arms sales to Taiwan. That’s not even addressing Trump’s murder spree in Latin America or the rampant corruption that’s become part and parcel of his administration’s conduct of foreign policy. And now America stands on the precipice of a major military conflict with Iran for no evident reason whatsoever.

Small wonder, then, that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney offered what amounted to a eulogy for the American-led post-World War II international order at the Davos confab this past January. That world, he announced, “is not coming back” and no responsible political leaders or officials should pretend otherwise. While Carney ended his remarks on the hopeful note that the world “can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just,” it’s difficult to see just how that might happen—not least when confronted with an American presidential administration that knows what and how it wants to destroy but can barely conceive of what or how it wants to create and construct in its place.

Reason isn’t merely asleep in Trump’s America—it’s in a coma, one from which we desperately need to awake before it’s too late.

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I suppose it was ultimately only a matter of time, but we’ve finally gone and done it: Americans now live under the rule of a mad tyrant, our very own version of the notoriously deranged and depraved Roman emperors Caligula and Nero.

America has certainly had its fair share of terrible, incompetent, and corrupt presidents, from James Buchanan and Warren G. Harding to Herbert Hoover and George W. Bush. But none—not even Richard Nixon—came anywhere remotely close to the depths of delusion and megalomania displayed by Donald Trump during his time in the White House, and particularly since the start of the new year.

We’ve seen it in Trump’s narcissistic penchant for plastering his name on anything and everything he can, whether it’s the U.S. Institute of Peace or the Kennedy Center. It’s also showcased by his campaign to vandalize the nation’s capital, from his plans to build a gaudy ballroom on the bulldozed ruins of the White House’s East Wing and paving over the Rose Garden to his proposal to erect a garish triumphal arch across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial. Administration officials have taken their cues from their leader, naming a proposed new warship class after Trump in apparent contravention of the Navy’s own naming traditions, slapping his portrait on annual National Park passes issued by the Department of Interior, and minting a dollar coin with his profile—the last two, at least, in violation of the law.

Worse, Trump has effectively declared war against states and localities that regularly vote for Democrats. His army of ICE and CBP stormtroopers have invaded and occupied a series of major American cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis-St. Paul, marauding through the streets of these cities, murdering Americans with seeming impunity—including what appears to be the summary execution of an observer this past weekend on the streets of Minneapolis—kidnapping citizens and non-citizens alike off the streets, and breaking into cars and homes without any regard for the law. Beyond this clear effort to terrorize and punish the Americans who voted against him, Trump and his administration have threatened to cut federal funding to Democratic-run states and localities on the flimsiest of pretexts—and in the process begun to gnaw away at the very bonds that hold the United States together as a single nation.

Then there’s Trump’s deranged threats of war against steadfast American allies like Denmark and Canada. America’s NATO allies rushed troops to Greenland as Trump made ominous if non-sensical and wholly unjustified territorial claims on the island (apparently linked to his failure to win the Nobel Peace Prize, at least according to an unhinged letter Trump sent to Norway’s prime minister), with Danish troops reportedly armed to fight off any attempted American military invasion. After a petulant and bizarre performance—even for Trump—at the Davos conference, Trump backed off his Greenland fixation, at least for the moment. But his attention then turned back toward annexing Canada, with Trump himself once again threatening massive tariffs against the nation and Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent endorsing an otherwise laughable separatist movement in the province of Alberta.

Add in Trump’s general proprietary attitude toward government, his view of his own power as essentially limitless, a obvious desire to punish enemies and dissenters, a cabinet chock full of schemers pursuing their own ends, and Trump’s own evident cognitive decline, and America finds itself in a predicament ancient Rome knew all too well: a decadent, narcissistic political leader with an increasingly tenuous grasp of reality but nonetheless possessing the enormous power of the state—and intent on using it for his own self-aggrandizement above all else.

There’s only one word for this: madness.

It’s hard to see how this all ends, much less how it ends remotely well.

Trump himself will not change, and if anything his delusions and megalomania will only grow stronger as he both ages and faces greater political opposition—including potential Democratic control of at least one house of Congress. He has refused to give up on his own political fixations and fetishes, whether non-sensical tariffs or wars of aggression and territorial conquest against America’s allies. Self-created crises that seem resolved one day will re-emerge out of nowhere weeks or months later, with little to no logical explanation.

In theory—and a marginally saner world—there’s a way out of this nightmare: the impeachment and removal of Trump from office. The people of Minneapolis and St. Paul have shown us how to resist the Trump administration and oppose its autocratic aspirations. But since Congress and most of its members apparently lack the moral courage needed to remove Trump from office, it seems almost certain that matters will get worse before they get better—and increase the odds that something fundamental about America will have broken by this time next year.

As we wait out our own unhinged president, we can stand for the idea of America ourselves in the best ways we know how, encourage others to do the same, and speak out against the madness while we can.

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We’re well beyond the point where we ought to take documents like the Trump administration’s just released National Security Strategy seriously, at least on a practical level. It’s hard to put much stock in such an embarrassingly sycophantic policy document, especially when the administration itself appears to be little more than a pack of scheming viziers to an increasingly nominal president who himself regularly struggles to stay awake during public appearances.

But it’s beside the point to engage with this document as if it’s a matter of policy, programs, or even strategy. It does no good to point out its incoherence and incontinence, much less ponder how what’s proposed in it might play out in the real world or how, if you stand on your head and squint and read it backwards, it might contain worthwhile ideas. The product of below-replacement intellects who fancy themselves world-historical thinkers but evince no real understanding of America or its place in a world permanently changed by revolutions in science, technology, and industry dating back a century and a half now, this national security strategy both betrays American interests overseas and perverts America’s traditional liberal values both at home and abroad.

In short, this national security strategy amounts to nothing less than a declaration of moral bankruptcy—a statement of immoral principle that stands in direct opposition to what America ought to stand for and represent in the world. (As always, it’s the self-styled super-patriot who hates his country the most.) It doesn’t tell us much that we don’t already know about Trump’s foreign policy, but the document does effectively distill the Trump administration’s ongoing renunciation of any real American responsibility for global affairs and international security.

Indeed, it’s a foreign policy that Charles Lindbergh would have loved: a not-quite explicit tripartite carve-up of the globe with dictators in Europe and Asia, with America selling out its allies in those two parts of the world while building a garrison state in the Western Hemisphere to bully our own neighbors the same way Putin and Xi do theirs. Add dollops of insulting illiberalism, crude dollar diplomacy, and thinly veiled racism, and voila: you’ve reinvented the original America First platform.

In the end, this national security strategy is little more than a manifesto for global gangsterism—or perhaps the longest geopolitical suicide note in history.

Let’s look at some of the specifics: the Trump administration promises to abandon America’s allies in Europe while meddling in their own domestic politics. It parrots the Kremlin’s line on NATO, characterizing the alliance as “perpetually expanding,” while seeking “strategic stability” with Moscow—presumably at the expense of Ukraine and other erstwhile American allies. Combined with a purported 2027 deadline for NATO nations to assume primary responsibility for the alliance’s conventional defenses, a reported lack of communication with key alliance militaries like Germany, and Trump’s own eagerness to sell out Ukraine, the Trump administration seems to be setting the stage for an effective American withdrawal from the Atlantic alliance.

Worse, the Trump administration has made its intent to interfere in European politics on behalf of far-right political parties and, not incidentally, American tech oligarchs quite clear. It employs racist rhetoric to claim that the continent will be “unrecognizable in 20 years,” with certain states “majority non-European” and therefore somehow uncommitted to the NATO alliance. It goes on to assert that it must “regain its civilizational self-confidence,” primarily through the victory of illiberal far-right parties and politicians like Germany’s AfD party and Hungary’s Viktor Orban that the Trump administration views as “political allies” whose success it hopes to encourage.

Like Lindbergh and his original America First movement, this national security strategy focuses monomaniacally on the Western Hemisphere. It casts the challenges in this hemisphere—migration, narco-trafficking, and foreign (presumably Chinese) investment in critical industries—as all-important and all-consuming while tacitly dismissing traditional American strategic priorities in Europe and the Pacific as “peripheral or irrelevant to our own” interests. These priorities, the document heavily implies, were not the consequence of a careful consideration of American interests in a world transformed by science, technology, and industry, but rather the result of deceit by treacherous foreigners who have taken advantage of the United States to further their own interests at America’s expense.

Nor is it hard to see the crude, Putin-style sphere-of-influence logic behind the Trump team’s obsession with Latin America specifically and the Western Hemisphere more generally (at least beyond their obvious preoccupation with immigration). Given the language of this national security strategy, it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Trump—or, more precisely, his perpetually scheming advisers—would like the United States to do in the Latin America what Vladimir Putin wants to do in Ukraine and Eastern Europe. We’ve already tasted the rancid fruit of this impulse with Trump’s murder spree in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, where American special operators blow small boats allegedly running drugs out of the water and, in the first instance at least, massacre the survivors.

China, for its part, is seen primarily as a commercial competitor and not a strategic problem or geopolitical challenger. That’s hardly surprising considering the general emptiness of hawkish Republican rhetoric on China, and this strategy sends yet another signal that Trump talks tough but has no appetite for confrontation with Beijing—a message reinforced by his deep-seated antipathy toward American allies like Japan and South Korea.

It all adds up to a morally bankrupt vision of a world carved up between real and would-be dictators to suit their own whims and fantasies, one supremely hostile to America’s long-standing interests as well as its traditional liberal values. Put another way, the Trump administration now seeks precisely the nightmarish world that American presidents have desperately sought to avoid for more than a century.

On the bright side, it’s unlikely this strategy will ever be fully implemented; national security strategies rarely guide any administration’s foreign policy so much as they reflect it. Moreover, the Trump administration has so hollowed out America’s foreign policy and national security apparatus—his team, such as it is, remains confined to a small clique when not farmed out to one of Trump’s former real estate pals—that it remains a mystery as to how they’d execute any strategy the administration might come up with. Secretary of State Marco Rubio continues to serve as acting national security adviser, for instance, presiding over a National Security Council largely denuded of anything resembling real bureaucratic or subject-matter expertise, while America’s military and intelligence agencies have suffered rolling political purges that will likely reduce their own effectiveness over time.

Trump’s attempt to impose gangster rule at home and abroad will eventually, inevitably fail—though it will inflict enormous damage on America and the world along the way. The danger inherent in this national security strategy lies less with the potential that it might be implemented than in the indecent principles it bases itself upon and seeks to advance. It exposes the moral rot at the heart of the Trump administration and its foreign policy for all to see, presenting us with yet another manifestation of our wider crisis of national virtue and integrity.

In that respect, however, it may paradoxically prove salutary: this strategy should cause a rededication to the basic moral propositions that make America a worthwhile endeavor, an experiment in liberty and self-government that’s more fragile and endangered now than at any point since World War II. Do we stand for freedom, equality, and democracy in the world? Do we keep faith with ourselves and our friends?

Though he could be quite unsentimental in private conversations, President Franklin D. Roosevelt rightly understood that American foreign policy requires a moral sensibility—a spirit that guides it and makes clear that America stands for more than the prerogatives of raw power and the amoral pursuit of national self-aggrandizement offered actual and aspiring dictators as well as self-proclaimed “realists” throughout recent history.1 As Roosevelt himself explained, “order among Nations presupposes something enduring—some system of justice under which individuals, over a long period of time, are willing to live. Humanity will never permanently accept a system imposed by conquest and based on slavery.”

America may not be and may never have been the perfect embodiment of its professed liberal ideals of freedom and equality, but that’s both irrelevant and immaterial. But at its best, America has been the main champion of liberal values in a world where they have had few if any powerful defenders and many influential opponents, a standard to which the the partisans of human liberty could repair when all else failed. In that regard, then, this national security strategy represents a deep and profound betrayal of America itself—one that must be repudiated in the clearest terms and replaced with a renewed moral vision that Roosevelt and his contemporaries would easily recognize.

There was an idea that was America, and it’s well past time to revive it.

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The first ten months of the second Trump presidency have been even worse than even the most pessimistic of us had predicted or expected. Trump has acted with extraordinary and extreme lawlessness, effectively declaring war on the country’s major cities, embarking upon a despotic deportation campaign that throws every American’s basic rights into question, illegally dismantling the federal government and refusing to faithfully execute the law, and in general acting exactly like sort of the tyrant America’s founders feared and warned against.

Like last year, then, it’s hard to say this Thanksgiving will be a very happy one—and it’s just as important to think of reasons to be thankful in our own lives. Here three reasons I’m thankful this year:

Adventures with Buddy. As Buddy has grown and matured—he’s not yet two years old, but he’s finally figured out that my arms aren’t chew toys (even if he thinks my pant legs still are)—it’s become possible for us to go on bigger and longer adventures out in the world. Sometimes that’s a long hike at Sky Meadows State Park (complete with his first encounter with a cow) and a stop at a local winery on the way back, other times it’s a trip to a pumpkin patch in the Shenandoah foothills, meeting some goats, and a flight of cider before we leave. Or it’s exploring a new local trail like Lubber Run, sniffing exciting new smells, and meeting other pups out for walks of their own—and then taking a well-earned nap when we get back home.

But sometimes it’s the simpler things, like heading up to the nearby park and romping with canine friends or searching for wayward balls outside the tennis court. Or it’s hanging out on the stoop outside the local library and watching the world pass by. I’m always grateful to have Buddy around, and it’s hard to imagine life without him or our shared adventures.

An abundance of new music. It’s not just Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl—some of my favorite artists have released a cornucopia of new music this year, including Sarah McLachlan (with her first new album in over a decade), Florence + the Machine, Haim, former Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant, Paramore frontwoman Hayley Williams, blues guitarist Christone “Kingfish” Graham, and industrial rockers Nine Inch Nails. What’s more, we’ve also received expanded and remastered releases of classic albums like Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska and Prince’s Around the World in a Day. For all the complaints about the demise of popular culture and the uncertain economics of the music industry, there’s plenty of music available—at least if you take a moment to look around.

And at a time when things can seem so isolating, it’s good to have new music from some of our favorite artists to create a sense of connection with others and help us make it through tough times. That’s definitely something to be thankful for these days.

Thunderbolts*. I may be totally in the tank for the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it’s been a while since a movie stuck with me as much as Thunderbolts*. It’s a film that sees a cast of emotionally damaged anti-heroes led by the wickedly charismatic Florence Pugh assemble to save the world in spite of their own checkered pasts and endless reservoirs of self-loathing. There’s something about the uncomplicated heroism of the film’s rather complicated and compromised characters that resonates strongly against the real-world background of rampant egoism that permeates our public life today, namely the idea that there may be a higher calling than our own personal self-aggrandizement—the rest of society be damned.

It’s just one movie, of course, but I for one am grateful for it and to all those who made it.

These are three reasons I’m grateful this Thanksgiving, and I hope you have your own reasons for gratitude this year.

Enjoy the holiday and pass the turkey!

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With “doing a Sicario” in Mexico evidently too idiotic even for this crew, the Trump administration has now mounted ten strikes against apparently random boats plying the waters of the Caribbean and Pacific off the coast of South America as part of a lawless and immoral military campaign purportedly against drug traffickers and cartels. It’s a campaign that’s the arbitrary action of an aspiring despot who seems to think he has license to kill whoever he wants, wherever he wants, and however he sees fit for any reason—or no real reason whatsoever. These strikes and the flimsy, morally insulting rationales offered on their behalf both clearly express and aptly encapsulate essential depravity and nihilism that animate this administration at its rotten core.

But Trump’s military campaign in the Caribbean isn’t just a moral abomination—it will probably set American relations with Latin America back decades. Making matters somehow even worse, it’ll be much more difficult to repair the strategic damage done by these strikes—much less the possible war with Venezuela the Trump administration seems intent on launching. As much harm as Trump has done and will continue to do to America’s relationships with its long-time allies in Europe and the Pacific, there’s an enduring strategic logic to these ties on both sides that will compel at least a strenuous attempt to rebuild them once Trump leaves the scene. Not so in Latin America, where there’s a latent reservoir of anti-American sentiment and no similarly potent strategic reasons for Latin American nations to set aside Trump’s trespasses and resume constructive, cooperative relations with the United States.

To justify this rolling atrocity, Trump and his minions have stretched the English language to meaninglessness. Words here do not serve to provide an accurate description of the world or convey truth and meaning, but instead assume a purely instrumental function with no real relationship to either reality or veracity. It’s not even an Orwellian inversion of language, where war is peace and freedom slavery—words and phrases are stripped of meaning and reference to the real world as they’re press-ganged into the service of arbitrary and despotic power.

This sort of rhetorical nihilism and linguistic absurdism is embedded in the genetic code of the Trump administration and the political movement that supports it: immigration somehow constitutes an “invasion” that allows the suspension of civil liberties, popular protests and political opposition amounts to an “insurrection” that permits Trump to deploy active-duty troops in American cities, claiming these “war-ravaged” cities suffer from a crime wave unprecedented in modern American history that necessitates just such a deployment, screaming “weaponization” as the administration aims to sic law enforcement on its enemies as it purges intelligence agencies—the list goes on and on.

It’s certainly at play in the Caribbean as well, where reality has become the first casualty of the administration’s very own special military operation. Trump asserts the United States is engaged in a “non-international armed conflict” with drug cartels, calling them the “ISIS of the Western Hemisphere” and those killed by his strikes “narco-terrorists.” (Colombian President Gustavo Petro and locals in the Caribbean say these strikes have mainly murdered fishermen.) He has also risibly claimed that his campaign targets fentanyl smuggling routes—never mind that most fentanyl comes to the United States through Mexico or that marijuana and cocaine are the main drugs smuggled via the Caribbean. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth likewise vowed to “treat [drug traffickers] like we treat al Qaeda.”

The president and his administration now find themselves trapped in a hall of mirrors of their own design and construction, so consumed by their delusions that they are now engaging in wanton murder on the high seas. They have dismissed or forced out those who have questioned the legality of their actions under either American or international law; Admiral Alvin Holsey, head of U.S. Southern Command, stepped down from his post less than one year into a three-year appointment after he reportedly “had raised concerns” about the legality administration’s campaign in the Caribbean. Other questions about the legality of the strikes have gone unanswered in no small part because “career military and civilian lawyers in the Defense Department and lawyers at other agencies who might otherwise be involved in the deliberations have left government or been excluded from the discussions.”

Worse still, the Trump administration’s fantasies may lead to an outright war with Venezuela. Trump has already threatened to carry out strikes against supposed drug-related facilities in Venezuela, and to that apparent end the U.S. military has engaged in a significant build-up in the Caribbean that includes displays of force by strategic bombers and the diversion of a carrier strike group from its deployment to Europe as well as F-35 stealth fighters, AC-130 gunships, and a Marine expeditionary unit.

If Trump does in fact launch strikes against targets in Venezuela, the resulting war will not even have been sold on false or misleading pretense—it will have been sold on completely imaginary ones. He and his administration will have conjured up a crisis out of thin air, presumably to allow them to do whatever it is they want. The sleep of reason produces monsters indeed.

The strategic consequences of Trump’s Caribbean murder spree are not quite so dire as the moral ones, but they’re significant nonetheless. Let’s start with the rather large opportunity costs involved in the diversion of attention and resources from much larger and more important strategic priorities in Europe and the Pacific. Instead of deterring Russia or reassuring allies like Japan, American bombers and patrol jets are buzzing the Venezuelan coast while an American carrier strike group must now rush back to the Caribbean from its current European cruise. America’s depleted and demoralized intelligence agencies must now focus their diminished energies on the Trump administration’s quixotic military campaign.

Deeper damage has already been done to America’s relations with Latin America. Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s harsh criticism of Trump’s strikes, for instance, has been met with a petulant response from the Trump administration: Trump cut off American military aid to Colombia, a long-time recipient of security assistance given its own fight against drug cartels, and slapped sanctions on Petro himself. It’s a move that only undermines the wider international effort against drug trafficking, one that illustrates Trump’s own detachment from reality and gives the lie to his claims that his strikes are meant to stanch the flow of drugs from the region.

Beyond this immediate self-inflicted wound, however, Trump’s strikes will likely do lasting generational damage to America’s reputation in Latin America. The region itself has always possessed a strong anti-American streak for a variety of reasons, and the current, unjustified military campaign will only bring this vestigial trait to the fore. It all comes at a time when Beijing is investing heavily in Latin America and the region itself is taking advantage of Trump’s tariff fetish to replace, among other things, American soybean exports to China. What’s more, Latin America possesses many of the critical minerals the Trump administration says it wants to secure against Beijing’s attempts to secure and leverage a de facto monopoly on them.

All in all, it’s an insane and brainless response to a problem that would best be addressed by increased law enforcement efforts (such as more resources for the Coast Guard) and greater security cooperation with partners in and across Latin America.

Faced with an irrational military campaign ordered by a lawless president, what can be done?

First and foremost, we can speak plainly and truthfully: these strikes are illegal and immoral, criminal from top to bottom. Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona, a combat veteran, has provided an example that can be emulated, calling Trump’s strikes “murder. It’s very simple.” A possible war with Venezuela would be even worse, a war crime in and of itself morally and legally both at the domestic and international levels. We shouldn’t hesitate to describe these acts for what they are: criminal and immoral and irrational, or whatever other terms one might wish apply.

There will also need to be formal legal accountability for Trump’s strikes, starting at the top but going all the way down to those who may believe they’re just following orders. Blowing random boats out of the water and launching a full-blown war against another nation in the absence of any legal, strategic, or moral rationale should obviously be an offense worthy of impeachment and removal from office. And Secretary of Defense Hegseth appears to actively support war crimes, having successfully sought a presidential pardon for a notorious war criminal, rehabilitated the perpetrators of the massacre at Wounded Knee, and consistently and constantly attacks military rules of engagement based on the laws of war as “politically correct” barriers to “maximum lethality.”

Rank-and-file members of the military are right to be concerned about the dubious legality of these strikes. Such concerns may well have forced the SOUTHCOM chief into an early retirement, while Democratic staffers in Congress told reporters they’ve been “hearing from inside the Pentagon that individuals have been raising liability issues.” Some junior officers have reportedly requested but did not receive written legal approval before participating in the strikes.

As hard as it will be to repair the strategic damage done by these strikes, the moral rot will prove even more difficult to expurgate. We need to start with the recognition that we’re not dealing with bad faith here, but rather no faith at all beyond a belief in the supreme and arbitrary prerogatives of raw, unencumbered power. But we must also reassert our own firm belief in the notion that words do, in fact, mean things, whether they’re meant to describe reality in some aspect or express a particular truth—and act on that belief. At minimum, we can’t let ourselves succumb to a nihilism of our own and fall into the event horizon of the supermassive moral black hole created by the current administration.

That’s not to doom by any means—though things do certainly seem bleak right now, and they only seem to get bleaker by the day. It’s instead a call to once again carry the fire and keep the flames of truth and reason alive, as candles in the dark that can help guide us back to the light when the chasm between reality and fantasy becomes too gaping to ignore.

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Nine months into his second term, President Trump’s dark, small-minded vision of America in the world has come into sharper focus—and its pernicious consequences have become equally clear.

There’s the general desire to repeal the twentieth century at home and abroad, of course, an impossible effort to turn back the clock to the mythical golden age that supposedly existed before the advent of the income tax, social insurance programs, and alliances overseas. But there’s more to it than that: irrational and incoherent as their underlying impulses may be, Trump’s words and actions have made clear that he sees America not as a superpower possessing worldwide interests, global influence, and international responsibilities but as a deeply insecure regional power and armed-to-the-teeth garrison state that seeks to do little more than bully its immediate neighbors as it obsessively pursues delusions of autarky.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because Trump’s jaundiced worldview resembles nothing so much as his idol Vladimir Putin’s foreign policy—in practice if not in Putin’s demented ambition to rebuild a defunct empire. Unlike Soviet Russia, however, the United States hasn’t been bested in a decades-long twilight struggle with an ideological rival that sapped our economic strength and called attention to fatal flaws in our political system. Nor have we been forced to give up suzerainty over satellite nations or let go of our imperial periphery in the same way the Soviet Union did after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and its own collapse in 1991.

No, America has chosen to commit geopolitical suicide for no apparent reason whatsoever other than to indulge the paranoid, irrational fantasies of a vain, cruel old man and his crew of myopic sycophants.

Take the reported contents of the National Defense Strategy. With its apparently monomaniacal focus on “the homeland” and its demotion of threats posed by Russia and China in Europe and the Pacific, this Pentagon document seems like it could’ve been written by Charles Lindbergh and the original America First Committee. It’s as if the global balance of power doesn’t exist or that we can pretend it doesn’t really affect us. We can afford hoard arms and ammunition all for ourselves while leaving our allies overseas in the lurch because, as President Trump himself put it, what happens in places like Ukraine “doesn’t affect us because, like, we have a big ocean in between.”

We’ve already seen what this morally and strategically perverse approach looks like in practice: pointless active-duty military deployments to the border with Mexico, the use of the National Guard to backstop immigration raids and intimidate residents in Los Angeles, Washington, DC, and other cities, and an absurd military build-up in the Caribbean that includes a dozen or so F-35 stealth fighters, a Marine expeditionary unit, a destroyer flotilla, and a nuclear-powered attack submarine. It’s unclear what, exactly, these forces are meant to do in the Caribbean; Trump ordered a trio of futile, immoral, and likely illegal strikes against random boats his administration asserted—but didn’t even attempt to prove—were running drugs while lobbing bizarre threats at Venezuela on his own social media platform. None of this makes much sense, but then again we shouldn’t expect much of what this president and his administration does to make much sense.

Then there’s Golden Dome, the still ill-defined and highly expensive missile defense shield pushed by President Trump. What matters about Golden Dome here isn’t its exorbitant cost or its impossible physics or its potential to transform space into an overt theater of war—it’s the mentality the dogged pursuit of perfect protection reveals. In short, Golden Dome represents a tangible manifestation of the fantasy that America can seal itself off from the world and return to the prelapsarian state of Trump’s 1890s golden age. It’s nothing less than isolationism incarnate.

On top of that, there’s the never-ending gallimaufry of national security absurdities that range from the merely stupid to the outright dangerous. The clownish rebranding of the Department of Defense as the Department of War, for instance, falls into the former category, as does the frequent evocation of meaningless buzzwords like “lethality” and “warfighter.” But the rolling purge of military officers and intelligence officials undertaken by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard for what can only be considered political reasons leaves America and its allies vulnerable in ways difficult to fully enumerate. Suffice it to say that firing competent military and intelligence professionals never ends well, even when they’re not replaced with pliant yes-men who tell their political superiors exactly what they want to hear.

Making matters somehow even worse, Trump has gone out of his way to alienate America’s allies and appease its adversaries. The appalling and degrading spectacle of Trump fawning over Vladimir Putin in Alaska, the constant White House parroting of Putin’s geopolitical line, and the Trump administration’s general diplomatic impotence—always giving the Kremlin a few weeks to make some sort of minimal concession before ignoring his own deadline as Putin escalates his attacks on Ukraine—are just the tip of an enormous iceberg. In addition, Trump has erratically levied non-sensical and illegal tariffs Trump against American allies in Europe and Asia in pursuit of his quixotic drive for autarky, for instance, as well as the still-open threats to the sovereignty of our Canadian and Danish allies.

But the recent immigration raid and deportation of South Korean workers in the United States to help start up a Hyundai battery plant in Georgia may be the best case-in-point for the self-harm Trump has inflicted on American national security and prosperity—and all done in the name of his administration’s ideological fixations and fetishes. The raid itself and the inhumane conditions faced by Korean workers while detained by ICE have already deeply alienated an otherwise close American ally, delayed the opening of the battery plant for months, and given foreign investors a stark warning to about the acute political risks they now face doing business in the United States. Already, Korean workers at a separate battery manufacturing plant under construction in Tennessee fled the United States over concerns about their own safety.

This particular example of national self-sabotage, in turn, leads to the long-term damage done by the Trump administration’s savage cuts to America’s scientific research and technological development funding. The National Science Foundation, for instance, awarded grants at a slower pace in Trump’s first few months back in office than at any point in 35 years. Worse still, Trump’s first proposed budget slashes overall federal science funding by a fifth and basic research by a third, leaving agencies like NASA funded at their lowest levels in decades, forcing them to cancel dozens of missions already in progress, and fostering an exodus of thousands of highly-skilled scientists, engineers, and other employees whose expertise will prove difficult to replace. To put it another way, the Trump administration has taken a jackhammer to the foundations of America’s national security and prosperity in the long run.

And that’s not even mentioning the other ways the Trump White House has eviscerated America’s ability to act in the world, most notably the wanton destruction of the U.S. Agency for International Development at the hands of Elon Musk and his DOGElings.

All in all, Trump’s first nine months in office amount to a wholesale demolition job on American national security, one driven at its core by a cramped and impoverished vision of the United States and its proper place in the world. This nightmarish way of looking at the world has already done untold damage to the United States, its interests overseas, and its own future, to say nothing of the fate of freedom around the world. America as a hemispheric garrison state, bullying its neighbors, and trying to lock itself behind illusory walls to keep out the rest of the world? Charles Lindbergh would be proud.

If there’s one silver lining to these dark and ominous clouds, it’s that this approach to the world will inevitably fail due to its own flaws and contradictions. But Trump’s gangster-style politics and foreign policy will keep doing damage to America and the world so long as he remains in office, weakening the United States at home and making the world a much more dangerous place. We shouldn’t expect a hidebound, weak-minded old man to change course given his well-established hatred for foreigners, a pathology reflected in his ingrained antipathies toward immigration and immigrants, the very notion of trade itself, and America’s long-standing allies and alliances.

Trump, in other words, will do his best to try and impose his autarkic fantasies on the world, and we’ll all be worse off for it. In the end, the objective reality of a world permanently transformed by the scientific, technological, and industrial revolutions of the past century and a half—as well America’s overseas interests in that world—will reassert itself. Until it does, however, the damage will have been done: America will be weaker, more vulnerable, and more isolated thanks to Trump, while adversaries like China and Russia will have assumed stronger and far more favorable positions in the world.

And the worst part? We will have done it to ourselves.

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August 2025 will live in infamy of the darkest months in American history—and there’s still a week to go.

It’s a month that saw President Donald Trump try his best to accede to gangster rule overseas at the same time he started to impose it at home. Just as Trump met with his idol, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, in Alaska, federal officers and National Guard troops occupied the nation’s capital on the flimsiest of pretexts. As has become clear over the past few weeks, the road to dictatorship is paved with lies, delusions, and contempt for observable reality.

Take the Alaska summit: Trump rolled out the red carpet for Putin, visibly giddy to meet with the Russian dictator he so admires for the first time and strike a deal to end the war in Ukraine on terms exceptionally favorable to the Kremlin. Indeed, Trump’s personal affection for Putin goes well beyond mere reverence; he’s smitten with him and can’t help but show it. The world witnessed the appalling spectacle of an aggressive and murderous dictator receiving the warmest of all possible welcomes on American soil as his military continued to down missiles, drones, and bombs on Ukrainian towns and cities. Merely by holding the summit itself, Trump gifted the Kremlin an easy diplomatic victory and received nothing in return.

Worse still, Trump abandoned his own call for an immediate cease-fire in Ukraine and effectively endorsed Putin’s own plan to absorb Ukrainian territory—including land his military doesn’t even occupy—for an empty Kremlin promise not to invade again. Only Putin’s own unwillingness to give up on his ultimate goal of subordinating Ukraine and eliminating it as a sovereign nation prevented Trump from agreeing to a dishonorable carve-up in Alaska. So alarmed were America’s European allies that they joined Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy en masse when he traveled to the White House for a post-summit conference with Trump.

That meeting yielded vague and uncertain promises of security guarantees for Ukraine, promises that Trump went on to undermine in an effort to pressure Kyiv to accept the Kremlin’s terms. Moreover, the administration’s actions—including placing restrictions on Ukraine’s use of American-provided intelligence and hardware to strike inside Russia—make plain that it still sees Kyiv as the party that needs to be coerced by the United States, not Moscow. Trump himself has reiterated that he sees the world through the eyes of a gangster, essentially telling Fox News hosts that Ukraine started the war by resisting a larger and supposedly more powerful Russia’s demands to forfeit its territory and sovereignty.

Even those dubious promises of security guarantees manage to express Trump’s gangster principles. Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent floated the idea that the United States would add a ten percent mark-up to weapons it will sell to European nations to provide to Ukraine in order to cover the costs of potential “air cover” for said guarantees. Whether or not this extortion scheme actually comes to fruition, it certainly reflects Trump’s own repeatedly asserted view of America’s alliances as a protection racket.

Perhaps the only saving grace of the Alaska summit will be Trump’s determination to reveal his own impotence on the global stage. He has given himself no cards to play here, making one threat after another against Putin that he predictably refuses to carry out—leaving himself with zero credibility moving forward. Much the same goes for any pledges and commitments he might make to Ukraine or anyone else. Put another way, there’s no reason for anyone to take Trump seriously as a diplomat—even if America’s allies and Ukraine feel they must entertain his delusions for obvious reasons.

Hardly a surprise, then, that Trump’s delusional diplomacy benefits no one so much as the Kremlin.

Matters are far worse at home, where Trump has used a non-existent crime wave as an obvious pretext to occupy the nation’s capital, intimidate its residents, and threaten other largely Democratic cities. It’s a move that’s as absurd and disproportionate to the alleged problem as it is dangerous to both American democracy and the physical safety of residents of the greater Washington, DC area. ICE and other agencies function as de facto secret police, hiding behind masks as they randomly snatch residents off the streets and set up checkpoints as if they’ve been deployed to Baghdad in the summer of 2006. That Republican-run state governors have sent National Guard troops to DC to participate in the crackdown only makes its partisan nature transparent. Trump has promised to impose this police state on other cities across the country, likely starting with active-duty troops on the streets of Chicago or Baltimore.

Meanwhile, Trump—or more precisely, his appointees—used the power of the state to go after his perceived political opponents and erstwhile allies. John Bolton, one of Trump’s first term national security advisers, saw the FBI raid his home after Trump fulminated against his troublesome former aide. Similarly, the Trump-appointed head of the Federal Housing Financing Agency has made frivolous criminal mortgage fraud referrals for Trump foes like California Sen. Adam Schiff, New York state Attorney General Letitia James, and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook; Trump Attorney General Pam Bondi appointed a partisan flunkey to investigate these baseless charges.

Trump has also threatened to prosecute former president Barack Obama based on Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s attempt to rewrite the history of Russian intervention in support of Trump’s 2016 campaign. Add Trump’s removal of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the wake of a subpar economic data report to his administration’s ongoing purge of national security institutions and his shakedowns of major national media outlets like CBS and universities like Columbia, and it’s apparent that the United States has begun a steep descent into a delusional, gangster-style dictatorship.

Gangster regimes have never been terribly rational; indeed, classical fascism set itself in direct opposition to reason. The Trump administration’s headlong flight from reality shouldn’t be surprising, no matter how shocking and dangerous we might find it. Trump and his administration will only retreat further into delusion as their policies take effect, with tariffs driving up costs at the same time public services erode and his own popularity nosedives.

As for the rest of us, it’s time to brace ourselves for the hard path ahead and take comfort in small pleasures while we still can. Founded on self-deception and run like an extortion racket, Trump’s gangster regime will inevitably fail—it’s only a question of long it will take and how much damage will be done before it does.

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If President Trump and his administration haven’t yet managed to sell Ukraine out, it certainly hasn’t been for lack of trying.

Indeed, Trump and his administration have offered concession after concession to Putin while pressuring Kyiv to accept terms favorable to the Kremlin. Only Russian dictator Vladimir Putin’s obsessive pursuit of maximalist war aims and obstinate unwillingness to accept anything less than complete Ukrainian capitulation have kept Trump from consummating his sellout. Trump longs to hand Putin a substantive victory, attempting to hand the Kremlin a dismembered and geopolitically neutered Ukraine that Moscow would be able to easily dominate. Putin doesn’t just reject these terms—he launches intense air strikes against Ukrainian cities after his conversations with Trump, seemingly in a bid to humiliate the American president.

With his extremely grudging admission that this war may be harder to end than he imagined—and that Putin may not be as interested in peace as he assumed—Trump has begun to learn the hard way that the world does not work the way he or his America First acolytes believe. Putin has made a mockery of Trump’s attempts to sell out Ukraine, just as Hitler did to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s efforts to appease the Nazi dictator before World War II. In apparent response to Putin’s recalcitrance, Trump announced a scheme where NATO allies would purchase arms outright from the United States to then give to Ukraine and threatened to slap comprehensive tariffs on Moscow if Putin does not cease and desist by September.

It's important to recognize that Trump hasn’t had some sort of epiphany on the war in Ukraine, much less a Damascene conversion to internationalism and the value of American involvement overseas. His specific policy shifts on Ukraine have been grudging and convoluted at best, and he remains unalterably sympathetic to Putin for reasons known only to him. Even Trump’s recent tariff threat gives Putin fifty more days to mount offensives against Ukrainian positions while delaying harsher sanctions working their way through Congress.

More to the point, though, these moves occur in the context of an overall foreign policy that can best be classified as solipsistic and belligerent. The Trump administration simultaneously asks America’s European allies to spend more on defense and buy American weapons to give to Ukraine while fighting an irrational, unjustifiable trade war with the European Union and, worst of all, throwing America’s credibility as an ally into severe, existential doubt. To say that this zero-responsibility approach to foreign policy doesn’t add up would be something of an understatement; the whole somehow manages to be less than the sum of its parts.

Trump may have been mugged by geopolitical reality in this particular instance, but don’t expect him to learn any real lessons about international affairs—not that he’s capable of learning. It's far more likely that Trump will persist on his isolationist foreign policy path moving forward. Indeed, when he announced the Ukraine arms purchase deal with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump once again noted that an ocean separated the United States from Europe—with the heavy implication that the United States didn’t need to be directly involved in the continent’s security.

As welcome as the Ukraine arms deal may be, then, it transpires amidst Trump’s wider effort to renounce American responsibilities in Europe and elsewhere around the world. It’s reminiscent of the first great renunciation of the 1920s, when the United States under the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations refused to take up any real security responsibilities in Europe after World War I—much less any broader international responsibilities that came with America’s immense national power. The United States instead acted mainly as a debt collector, indefatigably insisting that its wartime allies pay back their loans in full—a tall order for France, which understandably insisted on a punitive peace with Germany in the absence of security guarantees from the United States. The end result was a jerry-rigged political and economic order in Europe, one that worked well enough until it faced the pressures of the Great Depression and collapsed like a house of cards.

As Americans learned at great cost in the first half of the twentieth century, when the United States spurns the considerable responsibilities that come with great national power, no one else can or will take them up. Trump seems to believe that the United States can wield its power without any real responsibility and still achieve the same results—if not better ones—as the foreign policy pursued in some way, shape, or form by his predecessors over the decades.

The logic, insofar as can be discerned, is that other countries will step up as the United States steps back. But it’s far from clear that other nations can replace the United States and the resources it brings to bear on international problems ranging from security to foreign assistance and disaster relief. Without the catalyst of American involvement or, at minimum, funding, other countries may well prove less eager to make substantial contributions of their own to a particular cause—even when it directly impinges upon their own national interests and security. Alternatively, erstwhile American allies may try to plug the resulting gaps but fail to succeed given generally fewer available resources and significant challenges involved in mobilizing them effectively.

It's not that other nations will or won’t step up in the absence of a responsible United States—it’s that they most likely can’t do so, at least not in a way that functionally recreates American power and influence in the aggregate.

Suffice it to say that this state of affairs does not advance American interests or safeguard liberal values around the world. It can lead to a stable equilibrium of sorts, albeit a fragile and disadvantageous one where the United States and its long-standing allies are all worse off than we were before. A second American renunciation of international responsibility will ultimately result in a less stable and more dangerous world, one increasingly dominated by dictators and hostile to American interests—a specter that ought to remind us why the United States embraced a panoply of international responsibilities in the first place.

Our current foreign policy course will lead to slow decay and quite possibly disaster, like it did in the 1920s and 1930s. The worse things get—and the more visibly worse they get—the deeper Trump and his acolytes will retreat into isolationist fantasies. We’re already seeing this animating impulse in Trump’s Golden Dome missile shield, an attempt to escape from the terrifying realities of the modern world. Technology promises to achieve what mere policy cannot and allow the United States to hermetically seal itself off from the rest of humanity with few repercussions: the ultimate gated community, if only in theory.

Approaches like Trump’s America First impulses, along with progressive notions of “restraint,” attempt to deny the reality of a world fundamentally changed in profound and permanent ways by constant and unabating advances in technology, science, and industry over the course of the past century and a half. They remain blind America’s enduring national interest in the peace, security, and freedom of Europe and the Pacific—and no foreign policy can possibly secure an essential interest it cannot recognize.

But reality tends to bite back, and bite back hard—as we’re only beginning to discover. Trump may not learn much from experience, but the rest of us can’t let these lessons about the way the world actually works pass us by. And one lesson stands out above all others: active, ongoing American involvement overseas remains the best way for the United States to protect itself and its interests in the world that actually exists.

Trump’s ongoing attempt to abdicate any and all American responsibilities in the world crashed into its first major shoal in Ukraine. He will receive further muggings by geopolitical reality moving forward, and he’ll undoubtedly learn very little from them. But that’s no excuse for the rest of us, who will witness first-hand the folly of foreign policy solipsism and the value of vigorous American involvement overseas—albeit mainly through its glaring absence.

Or as President Franklin D. Roosevelt put it in an August 1938 address at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada:

We in the Americas are no longer a far away continent, to which the eddies of controversies beyond the seas could bring no interest or no harm… The vast amount of our resources, the vigor of our commerce and the strength of our men have made us vital factors in world peace whether we choose it or not.

That will be the hardest lesson for all of us to learn, if only because it will have been so utterly unnecessary.

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We interrupt our new war in the Middle East to return to our previously scheduled descent into national moral depravity.

It feels like lifetimes ago now, but President Trump’s nakedly partisan, solipsistic speech in front of a group of self-selected troops at Fort Bragg (nee Fort Liberty)—coming right as his administration deployed active-duty Marines to the streets of Los Angeles to back up lawless Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids in the city and just ahead of a much-ballyhooed military parade in Washington, DC—marked another new low in American public life and morality. But as understandable as the rush to cover the next shiny object may be, especially when it involves serious questions of war and peace, we cannot ignore this seemingly inexorable national slide deeper and deeper into Trump’s moral abyss, letting it go unnoticed and unremarked—or worse, treated as somehow normal and without any real objection.

Indeed, Trump’s mere presence in our public life seriously deforms and distorts it. It’s not just his simple vulgarity (witness his bizarre West Point commencement speech that dwelled on the supposed perfidy of “trophy wives,” for instance) or his apparently innate baseness and incurable venality—it’s his attack on the notion of the common good, shared sacrifice, and even the basic idea of society itself.

In much the same way as a black hole or any other sufficiently large gravity source distorts light, Trump warps our own public morality and our elemental sense of society as a shared enterprise. His repeated, specific transgressions matter, whether they involve brazenly breaking the law, using his position to enrich himself and punish his supposed enemies, or simply speaking like an emotionally stunted teenager with impulse control issues. But these discrete episodes matter more because they incarnate our moral degeneration and manage to deepen it even further at the same time.

Take Trump’s June 10 Fort Bragg speech. It’s bad enough on its own terms, containing as it did Trump’s de facto declaration of war against the half of the country that doesn’t support him and blatant attempt to turn the United States military into a personal, partisan political instrument. But the damage done by Trump’s remarks goes even deeper and radiates out even further: it’s an assault on the very concepts of a shared public life, service to that public and its stated ideals, and the defense of the public as a whole—not just those who pledge allegiance to Trump and his political movement.

Worse still, Trump continually injects his own mean-spirited, narcissistic values into the body politic: rules, morality, and ideals are for suckers, and you’re stupid if you don’t take advantage of others for your own personal benefit. It’s all good as long as you don’t get caught—and if you do get caught, just whine about how very unfair it all is to you and how persecuted you’ve been. There’s no way for society to survive in even a minimal sense on the basis of this spiteful and solipsistic ethos, one that Trump will continue to promote so long as he’s a presence in public life.

For the better part of the past decade, we’ve been slowly and steadily descending into Trump’s moral black hole—and with each passing day, our descent only accelerates. America received an all-too-brief respite from this daily debasement for a couple of years under President Biden, but that obviously wasn’t enough to arrest the nation’s overall trajectory. Matters are even worse now, as Trump and his minions overtly attack and undermine the foundations of democratic self-government and, indeed, society itself in just the first several months of his second term. And our national predicament will only grow more dire moving forward over the more than three and a half years Trump has remaining in office.

Can it be fixed?

I don’t know. We’ve had a decade for the moral rot to set in, and set in it has—and there’s still more time for it to sink even deeper in. The pessimistic case that Trump will warp our collective morality permanently therefore has credibility and cannot be simply dismissed out of hand.

Still, it’s possible to take some small comfort in both the recent protests against Trump and the fact that our national cultural schizophrenia ensures that the seeds of civic virtue and personal morality remain scattered across popular culture. Three or so artifacts in particular come to my mind:

• The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Star Wars. From the very start, the MCU has portrayed deeply flawed individuals who embrace ideals larger than themselves and band together—whether as the Avengers, Guardians of the Galaxy, or Thunderbolts—to protect and defend humanity from the depredations of would-be gods. The notions of self-sacrifice and heroism as a higher calling these characters embrace that stand in stark contrast to the petty egoism and avarice of Trump, Elon Musk, and their ilk. Nor should it be any surprise that Star Wars imagery has appeared at protests against Trump, what with the second season of Andor dwelling extensively on resistance to fascism and the demented but uncanny prophecy of democracy’s self-destruction articulated by George Lucas in his prequel trilogy.

• The Swiftie counterculture. You had to have been at Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour to fully and truly capture the camaraderie, exuberant fellow-feeling, and collective effervescence involved, but the Minnesota Star Tribune’s Chris Riemenschneider came close when he declared that “If there's a blueprint for a future utopia in the year 2023, it could come from a Swift concert.” It’s not as if the hunger for this sense of euphoria and fellowship has faded away, either, if the emerging panoply of Swift- and Eras Tour-themed pop-up bars and tribute acts is to be believed.

• The Daily Stoic. Proprietor Ryan Holiday has done his best to beat real Stoicism into the heads of his readers, social media followers, and podcast listeners, especially in recent months. It’s easy to dismiss Holiday as a promoter of pop Stoicism who offers up the philosophy as a nothing more than a trite life-hack, but spend a bit of time on the feeds of the Daily Stoic or Holiday himself and it’s not difficult to see how he’s trying to advocate for the philosophy as a whole.

This isn’t an exhaustive list by any means, obviously, but it’s not hard to see how prominent strains of American popular culture stand in direct if implicit opposition to the self-centered, small-minded, and plain mean culture fostered by Trump and his MAGA acolytes. So all is not lost; indeed, far from it, if you know where to look—and you don’t need to look all that far.

That leaves open the question of what we can do at an individual level to keep ourselves from falling further into the gravitational pull of Trump’s moral corruption. It’s nigh impossible to keep ourselves completely free from it, but we can turn to the Stoics themselves and Marcus Aurelius in particular to help us keep at least our heads above water.

Serving as emperor amidst the always potentially lethal backbiting of Roman imperial high politics, Marcus constantly took pains to remind himself to not be corrupted by either his own position or the machinations that swirled about him at court, to remain true to his chosen philosophy of life, and to recognize that humanity is social and rational by nature. “Beware of becoming Caesarified,” he warns himself in his Meditations (6.30),“dyed in purple.” Elsewhere (5.16), he tells himself that since it’s possible to live well anywhere it’s possible to live well “in a palace” before going on to recall that rational beings like humans “were born for community.”

That’s an attitude we’d all do well to adopt for ourselves as Trump drags us all ever-deeper into the moral black hole he’s made for us. We may be at further remove from the event horizon than was Marcus in his day, but we can and should do all we can to keep ourselves from succumbing to the gravitational field of moral depravity emanating from the White House—one that stresses and strains and threatens to eventually snap the bonds that hold society together.

If we do that, we can hold onto the rational hope that we can, in fact, fix our broken and degraded society once our present ordeal comes to a final and definitive end.

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Over the past several months, a pall of creeping and inevitable doom has descended on discussions of politics and policy in Washington—particularly when it comes to foreign policy. And it’s not at all hard to understand why: President Trump has certainly given us a surfeit of reasons for the bleak, pitch-black amalgam of despair and fatalism popularly known as doomerism.

After all, the president has leveled clear threats against the sovereignty and independence of stalwart, long-standing American allies Canada and Denmark over and over again. He and members of his administration have also spoken about the use of military force in Mexico and against Panama. Trump has displayed remarkable servility toward Russian President Vladimir Putin, offering the Kremlin unilateral concession after unilateral concession while attempting to brow-beat Ukraine into submission, all while displaying extraordinary contempt for American allies around the world. At the same time, Trump has launched a wholly irrational trade war against the rest of the world that appears aimed to fashion a bizarre and extreme version of American autarky—all while offering enormous opportunities for graft and extortion.

Worse, Trump and company have taken a sledgehammer to the foundations of American power. In myriad ways, they’ve disemboweled America’s capacity for scientific research and technological development: cancelling National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health contracts, launching an all-out assault on research universities and other institutions of higher education, and starving vital science agencies like NASA and NOAA of funding. American foreign aid effectively no longer exists, with even politically popular and effective programs like PEPFAR—the anti-AIDS initiative created by President George W. Bush—illegally dismantled by the Trump administration alongside the Millennium Challenge Corporation and USAID. Some estimates conclude that shutting down global health programs alone has already cost more than 300,000 lives, two-thirds of them children, and may well leave 25 million dead over the next 15 years.

Then there’s the president’s general corruption and venality, most strikingly with his apparent shakedown of the Qatari government for a $400 million 747 jumbo jet. Moreover, Trump’s disgraceful and embarrassing Oval Office contretemps with foreign leaders like Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Jordanian King Abdullah, and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has put his penchant for buffoonish malice on public display for all to see.

Taken together, the Trump administration’s actions paint a grotesque picture—one that’s not even finished yet. But we can take a realistic and unvarnished look at our predicament without succumbing to a doomer mentality that tells us all is already irrevocably lost. This is the sort of “unreasoning, unjustified terror” that President Franklin D. Roosevelt exhorted against in his first inaugural address, a cast of mind that only paralyzes us as we attempt to think constructively about rebuilding American foreign policy—and much else—after Trump.

If there’s reason for a sliver of optimism at the present moment, it’s the fact that basic realities about international affairs and America’s own place in the world haven’t changed. Trump and his America First acolytes can deny these realities all they want, and their denialism will likely do deep and possibly catastrophic damage to the United States, its interests, and the world as a whole. But they cannot repeal the twentieth century and turn back the clock on a world fundamentally transformed by steady advances in science, technology, and industry going back a century and a half.

American interests haven’t changed, either: we still retain an essential national interest in the freedom, security, and stability of Europe and the Pacific, an interest that the United States has fought two global wars to defend and now dates back well over a century. Nor have the interests of America’s erstwhile European and Asian allies changed: they would very much prefer even troubled partnerships with a relatively distant and democratic United States to domination by large and powerful neighboring dictatorships like China and Russia. Just as they have for the past hundred years, these interests compel cooperation between the United States and its allies on security, economics, and a whole host of issues over the long term.

For his part, Trump appears to be embarking on a second great renunciation of American international responsibility akin to the 1920s—an solipsistic foreign policy rooted in what FDR called “the illusion that we can ever again isolate ourselves from the rest of humanity.” There’s no better example of the underlying impulses toward isolationism than Trump’s proposed Golden Dome missile defense program: an inordinately expensive and unworkable shield that tries to neutralize the consequences of industrial and technological advances of the twentieth century and absolve America of any need to care about the rest of the world. The fact that this sort of abdication remains possible does not invalidate or nullify the logic that drives American involvement in the world; strategic reality does not simply disappear when a political leader or government tries to turn a blind eye to or hide from it.

Just as the first great renunciation did a century ago, this sort of foreign policy delivers a sub-optimal world dominated by dictators, prone to armed conflict, and hostile to American interests. It will also make it more expensive and much more difficult for the United States and its allies to recover and repair the damage done by Trump, but just how expensive and how much more difficult this project will be remains to be seen. Trump and his foreign policy will at some point crash hard on the shoals of reality, and a doomer mentality does nothing to help us prepare for the extensive reconstruction effort that will follow.

The point here isn’t to cultivate complacency or offer reassurance that everything will be alright in the end; the former would be foolish and the latter isn’t true. It’s simply to remind us that America has involved itself in the world for a variety of reasons, and these reasons will not disappear simply because Trump and his America First hangers-on choose to pretend they don’t exist.

It's already hard to tally up all the damage Trump has already done to America’s reputation, security, and future in just over four months in office—believe me, I’ve tried—much less predict just how deep a hole he will dig for the country as we continue to slog deeper into his second term.

But doomerism isn’t the right attitude to take when confronted with our current and likely future circumstances. As FDR recognized when he took office as the Great Depression reached its nadir, such ways of thinking don’t spur action but induce paralysis at best and self-destructive behavior at worst. If all is lost, why prepare to recover or fight to rebuild? The mere existence of obstacles—many of them severe, such as broken faith with allies and the evisceration of our capacity for basic scientific research—calls for realism, creativity, and determination, not doomerism.

We should take a cue from the late Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins and instead focus on carrying the fire—not necessarily offering up a suite of specific policies but cultivating the attitude that we’ve been given the responsibility to keep the flame of freedom alive through his particularly dark period of our nation’s history. It’s a much more hopeful and useful way to think about our present predicament, one that can help us be ready—at least intellectually—for the enormous task of recovery that will inevitably come to pass.

When the alternative is a gloomy fatalism that’s tantamount to surrender, this hard-headed sort of optimism isn’t a choice—it’s a necessity.

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We interrupt the rapid unscheduled disassembly of liberal democracy at home to take a look at how President Donald Trump has made the world a far more dangerous place—and war far more likely—in just three short months back in office. The danger and risk of conflict isn’t something that can be precisely quantified; like so many other statements about international affairs and security, it’s inherently a matter of judgment and argument. And while there’s certainly no broader plan or grand strategy at work here, it’s hard to see what Trump would do differently if he actively wanted to lay the groundwork for wars around the world.

Through word and deed, Trump has already rendered decades-old American defense pledges and security guarantees unreliable and incredible. He has no need to formally pull the United States out of NATO or any other American alliance or remove American military forces from allied nations. His zealous and servile courtship of Russian President Vladimir Putin, willingness to apply coercive pressure on Ukraine, and seemingly ingrained hostility toward America’s steadfast allies all combine to raise the risk of the sort of regional aggression that could well escalate to a wider general war—not just in Europe, but in the Pacific as well.

Trump’s tacit withdrawal of American security guarantees in Europe leaves the continent less secure and more vulnerable to aggression while calling into severe question the credibility of American alliances elsewhere in the world—especially in the Pacific. Worse, it makes adversaries like China and Russia far more prone to the sorts of rationalizations, miscalculations, and misperceptions that lead to war. In the absence of the United States in these regions, the powers that be in Beijing and Moscow may well perceive that they can achieve their long-held strategic ambitions through intimidation or outright force of arms.

Matters are most dire in Europe, where Trump’s rhetoric and actions have made abundantly clear that he would not honor America’s mutual defense obligations under Article V of the North Atlantic Treaty. He and his administration have expressed hostility toward NATO and its member nations as well as the European Union over and over again, viewing them not as allies and friends but adversaries and, indeed, enemies. Vice President JD Vance, for instance, has taken multiple occasions to ignore or belittle the sacrifices these allies made fighting alongside the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rumors constantly swirl that Trump may give up the post of NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander—always held by an American—and pull American troops out of Eastern Europe altogether. Worse, Trump himself has repeatedly leveled threats against the territorial sovereignty and independence of Canada and Denmark—NATO allies who lost 159 and 50 soldiers, respectively, in the post-9/11 wars they fought alongside the United States.

Indeed, Trump’s attempt to bully Ukraine into capitulation to the Kremlin should leave America’s NATO allies no doubt that he would abandon them in the face of aggression from Moscow—or that he might try to use American leverage against them to secure a settlement favorable to the aggressor. After all, Trump suspended American military and intelligence assistance to Kyiv after ambushing Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during an Oval Office meeting. Though this aid was later restored, the damage was done: Trump proved willing and able to halt aid to a nation under direct attack from Russia in an effort to coerce it into accepting a tacit surrender agreement. Trump even went so far as to blame Kyiv for Russian aggression, with the apparent assumption that Ukraine should’ve simply caved to Putin after his first threat. It’d be foolish to imagine he would not do the same if allied nations like, say, Estonia, Finland, or Poland came under attack by Moscow.

Trump’s obsequious attitude toward Putin stands in stark contrast with his consistent and chronic denigration of American allies. He and his administration offer the Kremlin concession after concession on Ukraine without asking for anything in return, while Trump obviously idolizes Putin and seeks to emulate him. Compare the fawning treatment he gives Putin with the hostile language he deploys against America’s “very nasty” friends and allies who treat the United States “very unfairly.” While he berates Zelenskyy to the Ukrainian leader’s face, moreover, he characterizes his long chats with Putin in friendly—if not glowing—terms.

It all paints the decidedly ugly picture of a president unwilling to defend America’s oldest and most stalwart allies—and willing to use whatever means at his disposal to undermine their defense should they find themselves victims of aggression and, indeed, aid the aggressor. Even if NATO itself survives the next four years, it’d be more than reasonable if America’s NATO allies to conclude that Article V is a dead letter until Trump leaves office.

That leaves frontline NATO allies—countries like Finland, Poland, and the Baltic states of Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia—vulnerable to pressure, coercion, and outright aggression from Moscow. Without an American security guarantee, these nations would become targets that the Kremlin may find too tempting to pass up given its oft-stated geopolitical intentions and ambitions. Despite what ought to have been a sobering experience in Ukraine, Moscow likely underestimates the likelihood and depth of European resistance to possible Russian aggression—even in the absence of American material and diplomatic support. Such a severe miscalculation, one we’ve already seen the Kremlin make, could result in a large-scale conventional war in Europe, a conflict that could escalate to a nuclear exchange.

Even a relatively bloodless Russian subordination of Eastern Europe would grievously harm American interests. Such a scenario would cause disruptions even more severe than those wrought by Moscow’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Beyond such immediate consequences, the United States would face a more powerful Russia that’s better able to menace the rest of Europe through the threat or actual use of force. It’s precisely the sort of geopolitical nightmare the United States has sought to avoid for a century, one that prompted America to intervene in two world wars: the effective domination of one of the world’s economic and industrial centers by a power hostile to the United States and liberal democracy.

But what happens in Europe won’t stay in Europe: Trump’s callous disregard for America’s NATO allies and clear sympathy for Putin’s aggression hasn’t gone unnoticed elsewhere. It’s bound to reverberate around the world, nowhere more so than in East Asia and the Pacific.

While the credibility of America’s commitments to its Pacific alliances has not yet been damaged the same way it has in Europe, Trump’s willingness to slap irrational tariffs on Australia, Japan, and South Korea ought to serve as a warning sign and strategic shock for these loyal, long-standing American allies. It would only be prudent for these nations not to count on the United States under Trump to come to their aid in the event of armed aggression against them.

Indeed, Trump has already broached the possibility of a grand bargain with China, speaking warmly about his personal rapport with Chinese Communist Party chief Xi Jinping. He has, by contrast, threatened tariffs on Taiwan’s semiconductor manufacturing industry and demanded Taipei pay the United States protection money—all while suggesting that he would not defend the island democracy if China were to attack or invade it, an insinuation made all the more credible by Trump’s obvious animosity toward Ukraine in his first three months in office. If Beijing truly is preparing its military to be able to take Taiwan by 2027, as the U.S. military and other national security institutions believe, then Trump’s actions give Xi all the more reason to give the order to invade—or try and convince Trump to sell out Taipei given his fondness for dictators and distaste for democracies.

With his pattern of hostile rhetoric and antagonistic behavior toward America’s NATO allies in Europe, moreover, Trump has implicitly called into question America’s alliance commitments in the Pacific as well. If NATO allies can’t count on the United States under Trump, why should Japan or South Korea or Australia—much less Taiwan, a de facto nation with a weaker American security guarantee? Without a reliable United States to shore up resistance when confronted with a China willing and able to coerce or threaten them with armed aggression, these allies may find it easier to simply accommodate themselves to Chinese domination of their own backyard.

Suffice it to say that such an outcome would not advance the interests of the United States or freedom in the world. But it’d be unwise in the extreme for our Pacific allies to look at Trump’s words and actions on NATO and Ukraine and refuse to imagine the same could happen to them should Beijing decide to flex its economic or military muscles. Instead, they should—rightly—assume the same sort of faithlessness Trump has shown toward America’s European allies applies to them as well and act accordingly.

By fawning over dictators and casting severe doubt on America’s alliances, President Trump has raised the risk of war and made the world a far more dangerous place than it was when he took office a mere three months ago. Matters are only likely to deteriorate further as long as Trump remains in office, possibly up to and including the outbreak of actual general war in Europe or the Pacific—or even both. Trump has made America’s erstwhile allies in these regions far less secure while providing aggressive dictators like Putin and Xi with every incentive to roll the strategic dice and take advantage of the singular opportunity his presidency represents.

That’s not even taking into account other parts of the world like the Middle East, where Trump has ramped up an existing air campaign against Yemen’s Houthi militants and threatened Iran with military action. Or Latin America, where Trump has reportedly ordered the Pentagon to draw up plans to seize the Panama Canal while top administration officials have mooted potential military operations against drug cartels in Mexico. Indeed it certainly seems like Trump wishes to validate Putin’s aggression in Ukraine in order to sanction his own designs on America’s neighbors and allies.

To be clear, there’s no grand plan or strategic logic here; Trump’s foreign policy remains as unbound by reason the rest of his presidency. But reopening Europe and East Asia to geopolitical jockeying and potential domination by gangster powers like Russia and China remains by far the most alarming and dangerous accomplishment of Trump’s foreign policy, one achieved just a little more three months into his second term. The damage done will only deepen with time, as Trump and his administration say things that can’t be unsaid and take actions they can’t easily take back—even if they wanted to do so.

America fought in a pair of titanic and bloody world wars to prevent this outcome and ensure that these regions would never again threaten American interests or freedoms. Yet for reasons unbeknownst to me and likely a good deal of others, we seem to have forgotten this fact. It’s hard to understand just why, exactly—perhaps the passing of those cohorts who fought against global gangsterism—but we’ve grown complacent and taken our own freedom and security from threats overseas for granted.

For his own appalling part, Trump has begun to throw the sacrifices made by earlier generations of Americans away for no good reason whatsoever—and raised the terrifying risk of major war along the way.

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Here’s a bit from the introduction:

Come January 20, 2029, any Democrat who succeeds Donald Trump as president must be prepared to confront the very different and much more dangerous world Trump will almost certainly create. The Democratic Party must begin thinking seriously about a new foreign policy approach now — one based on the party’s best internationalist traditions and the defense of freedom worldwide, not fantasies of “restraint” conjured up by progressive isolationists or the timid, managerial approaches of the Obama and Biden years.

Democratic foreign policy would have required a serious refresh even had Kamala Harris prevailed in November 2024. But Trump’s return to the presidency makes matters even more urgent: Unconstrained by more experienced and sober national security voices that understand the value of America’s alliances, Trump appears ready and willing to let his deepest and most destructive foreign policy impulses run wild — as became clear during his first weeks back in office. Long-standing American allies and friends have already found themselves treated as enemies, threatened with and subjected to economic and military pressure, while adversaries and autocrats find themselves welcomed as comrades and given leave to act as they please.

Like prudent military strategists who plan for every possible contingency, Democrats need to prepare for world more hostile to American interests and liberal values than at any point in living memory — and an America much weaker and far less able to defend them. Dictators in Moscow and Beijing will see their power and influence grow, possibly with Ukraine as a de facto Russian vassal state and Taiwan under China’s thumb. Other democracies could well follow America’s example and elect illiberal, far-right governments of their own, a task made all the easier by Trump’s gutting of USAID and the vital support it provides to those fighting for freedom and democracy abroad. NATO and other American alliances may either cease to exist altogether or stumble ahead shadows of their former selves, effectively unable to deter conflicts or defend their members. Future American promises and commitments will lack credibility, particularly when it comes to issues of trade and security…

It will, therefore, not be possible for a future Democratic president to proclaim, as President Joe Biden did, that “America is back” and restore the world as it was before. Institutions and relationships demolished, degraded, and debased by a second Trump presidency, both at home and abroad, cannot simply be resurrected as if nothing had happened over the previous four years. Reconstruction and rebuilding, not restoration and refurbishment, will be the order of the day for any future Democratic foreign policy worthy of the name — and it will need to be done at a moment when America finds itself in its most precarious strategic position since before the Second World War.

The report argues that a new Democratic foreign policy should make the strong and forthright of freedom around the world its central organizing principle, supported by four supporting pillars:

• A strong defense capable of meeting present and future challenges.

• Alliances that amplify American power and help secure American interests.

• Free and open trade with friends and allies around the world.

• A willingness to take risks and use American power to defend freedom overseas.

When it come to trade,

President Trump appears hellbent on giving the American public a crash course in the concrete domestic economic benefits of trade. Democrats should seize the opportunity Trump’s trade wars present and once again become the party of free and open trade — not treat trade policy as a political third rail or attempt to out-tariff a Republican Party now committed to protectionism.

That starts with a commitment to repair the damage done by Trump’s trade wars. Democrats should pledge to repeal each and every tariff Trump imposes on America’s friends and allies during his second term, starting with those foisted on America’s closest neighbors. To do so, the United States could either reinstate the U.S.-Canada-Mexico Agreement — the NAFTA successor negotiated by the first Trump administration — should the Trump administration destroy it through tariffs, join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, the twelve-nation trade deal that includes both Canada and Mexico as well as other allies like Australia, Japan, and the United Kingdom, or both. With China angling to become a CPTPP member, it’s especially imperative that the United States sign on to the agreement — in part to ensure that Beijing does not become an irreplaceable export market and source of investment inroads for America’s long-time allies and friends…

American credibility on [trade] can be enhanced if at least one of the country’s two main political parties remains publicly and vocally committed to trade. Democrats ought to shed whatever protectionist impulses they retain and once more take up the cause of free and open trade with America’s friends and allies around the world.

There’s much more in the report itself, which you can find here!

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Nonetheless, it’s possible to detect one particular strain of sub-rational thought in the cacophony of Trump’s deluded ramblings and unthinking impulses: a drive to extreme, paranoid autarky that resembles nothing so much as the bizarre North Korean ideology of Juche—as well as some defining elements of classical fascism. Trump’s apparent obsession with autarky reverberates throughout the rhetoric, goals, and ambitions he and members of his administration have articulated since taking office a little over two months ago, especially when it comes to his international economic and foreign policy agendas. It's a sort of strategic solipsism, the juvenile notion that the United States can somehow make the outside world cease to exist if only it tries hard enough.

Trump’s lifelong tariff fetish offers the clearest example of his ingrained autarkic compulsions. He has promised to impose punitive, blunderbuss levies against all American trading partners (now set for April 2) and cannot seem to conceive of the possibility of mutually beneficial relationships with traditional American friends and allies; it’s zero-sum thinking all the way down, with other democracies like Canada and continental blocs like the European Union “taking advantage of” the United States in some vague, unsubstantiated, and ill-defined way. For whatever reason, moreover, Trump refuses to apply this myopic logic to relations with dictators like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, promising the former “enormous economic deals” and declaring he “fell in love” with the latter.

A laughable and absurd overestimation of America’s economic power appears to rest at the heart of Trump’s tariff mania. Take his risible if deadly serious campaign to annex Canada, presumably through coercive tariffs: Trump has claimed the United States doesn’t need anything from Canada, ignoring the reality that the American and Canadian auto industries depend on one another as well as the facts that over half of America’s aluminum and nearly a quarter of steel imports came from its northern neighbor, along with nearly half of its imported lumber and over half of its imported oil. As with the rest of his foreign and trade policy, Trump’s primordial urge to annex Canada appears untethered from any sort of empirical reality or, indeed, basic logic. He really does seem to believe, in direct opposition to easily ascertained and provable facts, that Canada offers nothing to the United States to the point that America can cut all ties with the Great White North without suffering any ill effects—all while holding fast to the notion that the United States must annex Canada because… it’s hard to say, really.

Trump’s cabinet officials have likewise called on Americans to accept higher prices for consumer goods and the inevitable lower standard of living that would ensue so the country can move down the manufacturing value chain as a result of the administration’s trade policies. “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent proclaimed, nor is that aspiration “contingent on cheap baubles [Americans] get from China.” Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick went further and extolled the exciting opportunities Americans would now possess to make t-shirts, shoes, and television sets—all low-end goods America’s manufacturing sector has advanced beyond—thanks to Trump’s trade policies.

Then there are Trump’s threats to allies and friends like Canada, Denmark, and Panama—all of which have some real or perceived relation to their natural resources or strategic byways. Trump’s longing for Canada in particular exposes the illogic inherent in his push for territorial aggrandizement: he says that the country has nothing of value to offer the United States, yet he covets it for reasons he cannot fully explain or even articulate. In a similar fashion, Trump’s unworkable “Golden Dome” ballistic missile defense scheme reflects his craving to build a technological wall over and around the country to reestablish the false sense of security once provided by the Atlantic and Pacific.

All in all, it amounts to an extreme and irrational form of American autarky, the putrid fruit of a paranoid and small-minded worldview—and, ultimately, a way for the United States to pretend the outside world does not exist and do away with the need to care about it in even the smallest degree.

Beyond the obvious contemporary example of Juche, there are other historical and modern points of comparison for Trump’s instinctive drive for autarky.

For starters, the quest for autarky underpinned classical fascism—not necessarily as an end in and of itself, but as a logical consequence of the fascist worldview. Hitler’s murderous thirst for conquest and “living space,” Imperial Japan’s brutal attempt to impose a “greater co-prosperity sphere” on East Asia, and even Mussolini’s quixotic effort to create a new Roman Empire all testify to the integral role fantasies of extreme autarky played in classical fascism and its campaign of savage aggression around the globe.

It also fits with the impulses behind the historical America First as well, right down to Charles Lindbergh’s bullying rhetoric toward Canada. While Lindbergh beseeched Americans to isolate themselves behind the oceans, arm themselves to the teeth, and accept a Nazi victory as inevitable, he presumptuously warned Ottawa “to behave more circumspectly” and refrain from supporting Great Britain in its fight against Hitler.1 President Franklin D. Roosevelt, by contrast, cautioned his fellow citizens against the misapprehension that “an unprepared America, single-handed, and with one hand tied behind its back, can hold off the whole world.” Indeed, the isolationist pipe dream described by Roosevelt appears to stand at the center of Trump’s foreign policy—the notion that the United States can, in fact, build walls and hold off the rest of the world in its own imagination as well as in reality.

Britain’s exit from the European Union provides a more recent and seemingly apropos analogy, one that works to a point but ultimately does not go far enough in describing the totality of Trump’s apparent intent. However, it does give an abject lesson in overestimating a nation’s own economic power and influence: Brexit advocates and activists didn’t claim that leaving the EU would leave Britain free to pursue autarky; quite the opposite. Instead, they contended that other nations including the United States would rush to strike fabulous trade deals with a Britain unencumbered by EU membership—never mind that President Barack Obama explicitly stated Britain would go to the back of the queue in a visit before the 2016 referendum.

With his own undying conviction that trade in and of itself inherently harms the United States there seems to be no such thing as a good trade agreement for Trump, not even those he himself negotiated. Trump does not see tariffs as a means to an end but as an end in themselves except, perhaps, as a way to fulfill his seemingly undying and innate autarkic impulses. In so doing, he betrays an overestimation America’s economic power and influence so immense that it borders on delusional.

Ultimately, any attempt to describe Trump’s push for autarky needs to deal with the fact that it’s the result of what the scholar of fascism Robert O. Paxton dubbed “subterranean passions and emotions,” a “nebula of attitudes” and an “affair of the gut more than of the brain”2—not anything remotely rational or even adequately thought-through. Classical fascism was shot through with irrational aims and incoherent means; as the historian Richard J. Evans noted in the final chapter of the final volume of his three-part history of Nazi Germany:

In launching a war to be fought on a European scale with the goal of world domination as the long-term aim, Hitler and the Nazis were living out the fantasies that had impelled them into politics in the first place: fantasies of a great and resurgent Germany, expunging the stain of defeat in 1918 by establishing an imperial dominion on a scale the world had never seen before… But Germany’s economic resources were never adequate to turn these fantasies into reality, not even when the resources of a large part of the rest of Europe were added to them. No amount of ‘mobilization for total war,’ no degree of economic rationalization, could alter this fundamental fact of life.3

Irrationality is part and parcel of Trump’s rhetoric and his set of policies. They don’t make sense because they’re not supposed to make sense in any real or meaningful way. Or more precisely, perhaps, Trump’s agenda isn’t meant to add up; rationality and logic simply were not factors in its formulation. With Trump and his acolytes, we’re left dealing with a set of sub-rational, id-driven impulses and urges—not rational or even semi-rational thought. It’s certainly possible to discern these drives and compulsions from Trump’s words and actions, but it’d be an error to attribute any sort of thought-through strategy (much less a masterful gambit) to Trump and his administration. In this case, the whole adds up to far less than the sum of its parts.

History has repeatedly vindicated the Spanish painter Francisco Goya’s assertion that the sleep of reason produces monsters—and all the more so when said irrational monstrosities seize control over the awesome and powerful apparatus of modern states. Unfortunately for America and the world, Trump and his administration seem determined to prove Goya right once again: reason has vacated the White House, and it shows no sign of waking from its deep slumber and returning any time soon.

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It’s easy to understand why many of the Democratic Party’s rank-and-file have torched their elected representatives—and especially the Democratic leadership in Congress—for their presumed passivity in the face of the lightning smash and grab campaign mounted by President Donald Trump and shadow president Elon Musk against the federal government.

Reasonably concerned that the party and its leaders don’t grasp the gravity of the present crisis, many offer these criticisms in an expression of genuine anger and frustration at watching an unelected, ketamine-addled tech oligarch and his crew of twenty-something neo-Nazi curious cybercriminal minions illegally and in many cases unconstitutionally strip the wires out of the federal government—all with the evident approval of the convicted felon in the White House. The point, it appears, is to destroy the federal government and the public services upon which many Americans and the nation as a whole rely and depend.

To their credit, elected Democrats do seem to be moving in the right direction. As the minority party in both houses of Congress, their power remains limited. But in ongoing budget negotiations, Senate Democrats have demanded provisions that would require the Trump administration actually spend the money Congress appropriates.

Still, it’s not hard to have at least some sympathy for the Democratic Party and its elected members right now. Even those of us who expected the worst from a second Trump presidency—me included—didn’t exactly predict or expect that things would get this bad this fast.

Bad as Trump’s campaign policy proposals and his innate autocratic impulses were, most of us assumed that at least some of them would go through the normal machinery of American governance. Congress would still have some say over policy through spending bills and authorization legislation, allowing it to check Trump’s and Musk’s worst instincts. For instance, I myself argued that Congress should exert its own authority on space exploration policy to prevent Musk from hollowing out NASA and transforming it into a glorified contracting agency for SpaceX. Moreover, I expected political self-preservation instincts would cause Republican members of Congress to balk at proposals that would hurt their own constituents and imperil their own re-election chances.

For their part, Democrats in Congress appear to have been more prepared to fight legislative trench warfare against Trump and his agenda than the blitzkrieg they got. Institutionalists to the core, they certainly did not expect their Republican colleagues to submit to the wave of unprecedented lawlessness and looting that began almost immediately upon Trump’s inauguration. It was an even larger error to believe that Republicans would put up sufficient resistance to the usurpation of their own clearly enumerated Constitutional powers—not just by the president but by an unelected oligarch whose precise role remains shrouded in ambiguity. One freshman Republican representative even went so far as to claim that there wasn’t anything he could do as a member of Congress to “approve or deny” Musk’s funding cuts.

Perhaps Democrats should have been better prepared for Trump and Musk’s rapid unscheduled disassembly of the federal government in violation of laws up to and including the Constitution. In truth, though, it’s hard to fault them for a failure to foresee a turn of events that even the most pessimistic among us didn’t see coming. We should by all means encouraged elected Democrats to be made of sterner stuff and hold their feet to the fire when they’re not. But they weren’t the only ones who got their analyses wrong and as a result found themselves unprepared for the scope, scale, and speed of the still-in-progress assault on democratic self-government.

Looking ahead, we all need to be ready for the worst—in both word and deed, Trump has all but declared that he wants to be a dictator. Neither Trump nor Musk deserve anything remotely resembling the benefit of the doubt, only implacable opposition as they eviscerate public services. Nor should we expect Republicans in Congress to stand up for their own institutional prerogatives, at least not in anything like a timely manner. Institutions do not appear to be holding, either; the Republican-led Congress has effectively abdicated its own role and the judiciary seems to think that an unelected oligarch dismantling the federal government at breakneck speed amounts to business as usual.

Elected Democrats cannot fall behind the curve again. They should adopt a more assertive posture against Trump and Musk, difficult as that may be for some—especially for House and Senate leaders managing the party itself. As noted, there are some signs of life in the refusal of Democratic budget negotiators to support any agreement that fails to include provisions requiring Trump and Musk to actually spend the money Congress says to spend. Individual members of Congress from Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez of New York to Rep. Gerry Connolly of Virginia have taken more aggressive positions as well.

As for the rest of us, we can’t abdicate our roles as analysts, intellectuals, and citizens. We must remain clear about what’s happening in front of our own eyes; we must see things as they really are and describe them as such, even if these explanations and elucidations might otherwise sound absurd. There can be no room for sanewashing or rationalizations of deranged and dangerous policies and rhetoric. Admitting when we’re not always entirely correct in our analyses and predictions should be part and parcel of that enterprise, much as we might want to direct our ire at those we think ought to have known better and acted accordingly.

Above all, we need to do what we can to keep ourselves sane in a society that has succumbed to cruelty and irrationality in a fit of extraordinary absent-mindedness. That’s not license to check out and disengage, but a reminder that we need cut ourselves some slack as we steel ourselves for what stands to be a long struggle ahead.

At this point, we have no excuse for complacency.

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It’s no secret that Donald Trump considers the 1890s—a decade of high tariffs, high unemployment, and high imperialism—to be America’s golden age. But Trump’s fetish for the 1890s isn’t exactly an anomaly in a contemporary conservative movement and Republican Party that seeks nothing less than to repeal the twentieth century.

Indeed, the second Trump presidency represents nothing less than the culmination of the conservative movement’s war on the twentieth century—a frontal attack on social insurance programs, essential regulations, progressive taxation, professional government, and internationalism put in place and sustained to deal with the realities of life in a world transformed by the industrial revolution.

Conservative Republicans have attempted to roll back certain aspects of twentieth century policy in the past. President George W. Bush, for instance, tried but failed to privatize Social Security after his re-election in 2004, while the conservative-dominated Supreme Court successfully overturned Roe v. Wade and denied American women of what was a fundamental right in 2022. But the wholesale effort to undo the twentieth century Trump seems likely to mount will be unprecedented in scope and scale.

Take foreign affairs, where Trump is a classic isolationist—and worse. It’s important to note here that this term doesn’t denote a hermit-like retreat into America’s own borders the way it’s often caricatured, even by its opponents. Like Charles Lindbergh during the debates over American intervention in World War II, Trump has no problem with autocratic powers establishing spheres of influence. Instead of opposing global bullies and gangsters, Trump wants the United States to focus on domination of the Western Hemisphere. He sees long-time American allies and partners overseas as threats and enemies while embracing long-time American rivals and adversaries as friends, or at least collaborators.

Trump’s loose talk of economic coercion and the use of military force against American allies also reveal the mindset of a late-nineteenth century imperialist. Canada, Denmark, and Panama have all been on the receiving end of Trump’s threats, while the probability Trump launches a “special military operation” in Mexico remains terrifyingly high. This sort of bellicose rhetoric has already damaged American interests by signaling a possible—or indeed likely—return to the world as it was before 1945 or even 1919, a world where armed aggression and territorial acquisition by force were considered legitimate methods and objectives of statecraft.

Then there are Trump’s tariffs, the one policy issue he has been entirely consistent about his entire life. Those proposed and likely to be imposed by Trump—a ten percent duty on all imports, with even higher rates on Canada, Mexico, and China—stand in contrast to successful American-led efforts to reduce tariffs worldwide over the course of the twentieth century.

Just as noteworthy, high-rate and broad-based tariffs allow conservatives to contemplate a return to the political economy of the 1890s—an era, not coincidentally, before the 16th Amendment and the income tax. No wonder, then, that techno-oligarch Elon Musk’s so-called “government efficiency” commission and Trump’s billionaire Silicon Valley backers are chomping at the bit to eviscerate social insurance programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Congressional Republicans are on it as well, proposing to use tariffs as well as raids on Medicaid and other programs to at least partially offset yet another round of tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations.

What’s more, Trump and his hangers-on clearly want to functionally eliminate necessary federal agencies like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration. The FDIC, established in 1933 after the bank collapses of the Great Depression, insures the deposits of ordinary Americans so that when a bank fails they do not lose their savings, while NOAA houses critical agencies like the National Weather Service that many Americans rely upon every day for weather forecasts and emergency weather information. The call to gut the FDIC is particularly ironic given many of Trump’s Silicon Valley backers begged for a federal bailout when their preferred financial institution, Silicon Valley Bank, went bust in early 2023.

Finally, it'd be remiss not to mention the plentiful opportunities for rampant corruption now available. Trump himself has launched a meme cryptocurrency that’s already lined his own pockets at the expense of those gullible enough to buy it. Tech moguls and media barons have rushed to pay off Trump, hopeful of favorable treatment for their business interests if they grease his palms. Companies like rocketmaker Blue Origin—run by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos—and media giant Paramount all could see federal contracts dry up and federal regulators deny mergers or selectively enforce regulations against them. Nor will the corruption be limited to Trump: the Musk crony nominated as Trump’s NASA administrator has previously lambasted the agency for refusing to rely almost entirely on Musk’s company, while reports on the plans for Musk’s government-gutting commission indicate it’ll offer its own enormous opportunities for graft—a shining example of oligarchy in action.

Throw in Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s anti-vaccine crankery and 1920s-style immigration restrictions, and the picture is complete: a coherent reactionary-cum-fascist platform that aims to repeal the twentieth century.

Will it succeed?

I doubt it, at least not in toto. But the odds are nowhere near as long as I’d like or many others might imagine.

Many—or at least enough—Republicans could balk at what Trump, Musk, and their flunkies have in mind. At least one Republican representative from Texas has pushed back on Musk’s proclamations about space policy, for instance. It’s also instructive to look at George W. Bush’s push to privatize Social Security in 2005, which failed despite Bush’s larger margin of victory and much wider Republican margins in both houses of Congress—and mortally wounded his presidency in the process. Thermostatic public opinion may well reassert itself over time as well, though exactly how or when that might occur remains unclear at the moment.

Some parts of this agenda will undoubtedly make it through—tariffs, most likely given Trump’s obsession with them, plus any number of absurd and dangerous foreign policy initiatives. Whether or not it’s fully implemented, the damage this program will do to the United States, its interests, and ordinary Americans will be immense. But Trump, his party, and the conservative movement are ultimately swimming against the fierce tides of reality. As wiser mid-century conservatives like Dwight D. Eisenhower recognized, the deep and profound changes wrought by the industrial revolution won’t go away because a hardened coterie of reactionaries and their chosen political instrument want them to do so.

We’d all do well to keep in mind a crucial insight from small-c conservatism here: the institutions, policies, and agencies established over the course of the twentieth century—and especially in the New Deal era—exist for very good reasons, and it’s foolhardy as well as perilous to demolish them without understanding why they exist. As President Franklin D. Roosevelt argued almost a century ago, these programs were a necessary response to the myriad challenges, problems, and vicissitudes posed by industrial society—both at home and abroad. Social insurance, regulation of critical industries, and progressive taxation sought to update America’s liberal principles to the industrial era at home, while internationalism, open trade, and alliances in Europe and Asia did so abroad.

Unfortunately, we’ll all have to pay the price for whatever success this vainglorious and futile attempt to repeal the twentieth century achieves—and be ready to pick up the pieces when it inevitably does.

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With the grim reality of a second Trump presidency pressing down upon us, it’s hard to say that this Thanksgiving will be a terribly happy one. A nation in the grips of unreasoning, unjustified pessimism and a malignant culture of resentment has delivered itself into the hands of a corrupt, criminal narcissist and his gang of equally venal hangers-on. In just two months’ time, this clique will try to inflict untold damage on the country and its future prospects—and it’s impossible to calculate just how long it might take to repair it when they’re through.

That makes it all the more important to think of reasons, big or small, to be thankful in our own lives—beyond family and friends. Here three reasons I’m thankful this year:

Buddy. Each and every day, this rambunctious little ball of floof reminds me that life is meant to be lived to the fullest. He’s always in high spirits and incredibly social, wanting to meet every person and play with every dog we encounter out on our walks—no matter what time of day it may be or what the weather might be like. It’s hard for me to get too upset about anything when he’s around, ready to lift my own spirits with a wag of his tail, a lick on the face, or a proud little trot down the sidewalk.

Raising a puppy does take a lot of hard work and involves its fair share of scrapes and bruises. Puppy teeth are famously razor sharp, and puppies tend to see our limbs as chew toys before they learn better. I’ve had to adjust my own schedule to get up much earlier than I did in the past. But it’s more than worth it to see your little guy discover the world around him and learn how to interact with it. For his part, Buddy is curious and has been a quick learner, picking up pretty easily on many things through either training or simply doing.

There’s no companion like an affectionate and loyal dog, and I’m exceptionally grateful to have found Buddy.

Taylor Swift. The hardest-working woman in show business kept at it again this year, taking her Eras Tour international and releasing a new double album, The Tortured Poets Department. She spoke out in support of Vice President Kamala Harris and her presidential campaign, providing a constructive example of political engagement while also showing more courage than a number of political leaders and retired generals who remained silent despite believing Trump to be a budding despot. More than that, though, Swift and her recent tour have functioned as a genuinely countercultural event on a par with Woodstock—compare the joyous camaraderie and fellow-feeling found at her Eras Tour shows with the end-is-nigh pessimism, rancid cynicism, and rank cruelty that permeates far too much of American society today.

Dark as things may be right now, Swift’s popularity makes clear that there may still be some hope for us yet. That’s something to be thankful for.

A smorgasbord of streaming television entertainment. This past year saw the release of a number of great television shows on the wide variety of streaming services at our fingertips. From limited series like Masters of the Air and Agatha All Along to new seasons of shows like Star Trek: Lower Decks, Only Murders in the Building, and Silo, there’s a wealth of entertainment out there to alternatively distract us from our daily troubles or spur us think more deeply and creatively about them. It may not last due to the uncertain economics of streaming services, but this television renaissance isn’t confined to one genre: science fiction, prestige drama, and animation, among others, can all be found in the streaming ranks.

It's easy to dismiss these shows as mere entertainment, and maybe they are. But it’s still good to have something to get us through our days—and something to talk about with others beyond politics and the state of the world. We can have at least a modicum of gratitude for that.

These are three reasons I’m grateful this Thanksgiving, and I hope you have your own reasons for gratitude this year.

Enjoy the holiday and pass the turkey!

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Donald Trump “certainly falls into the general definition of fascist, for sure.”

That’s not some left-wing activist or ivory tower academic talking—it’s Trump’s own former White House chief of staff, the retired four-star Marine Corps general John Kelly.

And it’s not just Kelly: former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, retired Army general Mark Milley, described the former president as “fascist to the core.” Milley would know, having served as chairman when Trump mounted his failed coup attempt on January 6, 2021. Other Trump administration officials have noted the ex-president’s autocratic tendencies and proclivities; former secretary of defense Mark Esper, for instance, recently said Trump “certainly has those inclinations” toward fascism.

In short, these two retired generals have given us all permission to state the obvious: Trump is a fascist, running on an overtly fascist platform.

It’s far too easy to emphasize the many differences and downplay the similarities between Trump and the fascist political movements of interwar Europe, to claim that it can’t be fascism unless it happened in Italy or Germany between the world wars. But this hair-splitting mentality blinds us to what we see happening before our own eyes: the recrudescence of fascism in a postmodern, twenty-first century guise.

In the introduction to his new book Hitler’s People: The Faces of the Third Reich, the historian Richard Evans—author of the definitive three-volume history of Nazi Germany—explicitly asserts that studying fascism’s past can help us better comprehend our own present political predicament. Understanding why Hitler, the Nazis, and “otherwise normal people” launched, supported, or acquiesced to the bloodiest and most destructive war in human history has, he writes, “gained new urgency and importance” with the recent rise of “a class of unscrupulous populist politicians” around the globe. Delving into “the perverted morality that made and sustained the Nazi regime,” Evans argues, we can “perhaps learn some lessons for the troubled era in which we live.”

Fascism, in other words, is not merely a historical phenomenon but a present-day one as well —and it’s not hard to see why Trump has earned the epithet.

As the historian Robert O. Paxton notes, fascism is a matter of “subterranean emotions and passions” more than anything else. Deep and intense resentment over a community’s unjust present lot, an obsession with revenge and retribution against internal enemies believed responsible for this perceived national decline, a resort to criminality and especially violence to win or keep power, and a cult of personality that subordinates the nation’s interests to the will of a single leader all characterize a fascist political movement. Such policies and programs as may emanate from a fascist movement exist mainly to express this “nebula of attitudes.”

Alternatively, the description Evans provides for Hitler’s turgid manifesto Mein Kampf serves just as well as a succinct definition of fascism and its animating impulses: “an overpowering spirit of hatred and resentment, a murderous extremism, a ruthless disregard for ordinary human decency, and a cynical contempt for the conventions of political life.”

And Trump stands for little else beyond resentment and retribution. He has campaigned on three main issues, all of them falling easily under the classic fascist rubric in either motive or effect: high tariffs, mass deportation of millions of immigrants, and the use of either violence or the legal system to subjugate and silence political rivals. Tariffs, for instance, amount to a way for Trump to claim vengeance against trading partners—America’s long-standing allies in Europe and Asia in particular—that have supposedly swindled the United States. They’re also a way to bully or punish companies he sees as opposed to him and his will, all while eliminating the income tax and turning back the clock to the 1890s—the time Trump apparently sees as America’s golden age.

Far more disturbing and depraved are Trump’s stated plans for mass deportation of tens of millions of immigrants—both those who arrived in the country illegally and naturalized American citizens alike. (Indeed, Trump set up a task force to strip Americans of their citizenship in his previous term, and his ghoulish factotum Stephen Miller has promised a “turbocharged” effort in a second Trump term.) As he made clear during a Wisconsin rally, Trump’s impulses on this score remain classically fascist:

You gotta get these people back where they came from. You have no choice. You’re going to lose your culture, you’re going to lose your country, you’re going to have crime the likes of which nobody has ever seen before… If Kamala is reelected, your town, and every town just like it, all across Wisconsin and all across our country — the heartland, the coast, it doesn’t matter — will be transformed into a third-world hellhole.

Executing such a massive operation would almost certainly require an unprecedented use of law enforcement and, in all probability, the United States military. As the historian Timothy Snyder recently put it:

Such a huge mission will effectively redefine the purpose of law enforcement: the principle is no longer to make all people feel safe, but to make some people unsafe. And of course the diversion of law enforcement resources to deportation means that crimes will not be investigated or prosecuted.  So some people will be radically less safe, but everyone regardless of [citizenship or immigration] status will in fact be less safe.

Mass deportation on this scale, Snyder notes, will also require “an army of informers” that inexorably leads to a nationwide culture of denunciation—all to extirpate a group of human beings Trump calls “vermin” and says is “poisoning the blood” of the country. For Trump and his acolytes, it’s irrelevant that uprooting so many people from the United States would wreck the national economy and cost the federal government tens of billions of dollars; the irrationality and stupidity of such monstrous plans are simply beside the point.

Trump’s mass deportation scheme would involve an enormous amount of coercion and violence against otherwise law-abiding individuals who have lived in the United States for decades, as well as many Americans whose citizenship not even Trump or his minions could call into question. What’s more, Trump has repeatedly promised to use violence, coercion, and intimidation against his domestic political rivals and opponents—those who Trump calls “the enemy within.” As the attempted coup of January 6 demonstrated, this is no idle threat; Trump has proven more than willing, able, and indeed eager to use violence to acquire and remain in power even after losing at the ballot box. (He characterizes those convicted of crimes on January 6 as “hostages” and “political prisoners.”) Indeed, Trump explicitly named Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Rep. Adam Schiff, both Democrats from California, as domestic enemies worthy of retribution if and when he regains the White House. Not for nothing have polling places in states like Arizona and Georgia beefed up their election day security, deploying armed guards and drones to keep election deniers from disrupting the proceedings on November 5.

What’s more, Trump also has vowed to jail his political rivals—from former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on down to ordinary campaign workers and, indeed, voters. As the husband of Harris campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon posted, “I’d very much prefer my wife not to be imprisoned simply for working against Donald Trump.” Moreover, Trump has declared that a number of Democrats—including Vice President Harris herself—should not be allowed to run for office.

No wonder Trump envies autocrats like Russia’s Vladimir Putin, China’s Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un—they’re able to do to their domestic political opponents what he would very much like to do to his own rivals.

Finally, like his fascist forebears, Trump has established a cult of personality that conflates his own narcissism and megalomania—and pecuniary interests—with the broader national interest. (It’s easy to see parallels with what Evans calls Hitler’s “vanity and narcissism” and “arrogance and overconfidence.”) He repeatedly portraysAmerica as a dystopian hellscape, all available evidence to the contrary, solely because he does not hold power; he proclaims that he alone can fix things. Then there’s Trump’s vulgar racism, as seen in his constant denigration of former president Barack Obama (“I don’t happen to think he’s a good speaker”) and Vice President Harris (“She’s a stupid person”) as well as his lifelong obsession with “good” and “bad” genes.

Trump doesn’t represent the only or even the first American political movement that can plausibly be deemed fascist. The Second Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s, Charles Lindbergh and the original America First movement that opposed entry into World War II, and George Wallace’s 1968 presidential campaign could all quite reasonably be described as “fascist” in one sense or another. But Trump is the first to have actually seized control of a major American political party and held the reins of power in the United States—and the first major party nominee to have run on an openly fascist platform.

For almost a decade, Trump has blighted American public life. His elevation to the presidency would further debase and mutilate American politics and public life in horrific ways, perhaps permanently. So many Americans have proven willing to accept Trump’s deviance from the norm, none more so than a political press that seems alternately inured to Trump or eager to be entertained by him. Only now, as the 2024 presidential campaign reaches its end, have some in the political media noticed that they as an industry have held Trump to no standard whatsoever.

It's disturbing and distressing to contemplate the possibility that Trump may return to power after running on an explicitly fascist program. We can choose to avoid this bleak fate if we so desire—but we can’t plead ignorance and say we weren’t warned if we don’t.  

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