Donald Trump: The Symbol of the Decline and Fall of Just About Everything [View all]

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http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/113870/donald-trump-the-symbol-of-the-decline-and-fall-of-just-about-everything

Donald Trump: The Symbol of the Decline and Fall of Just About Everything
by Tom Engelhardt | May 17, 2025 - 5:25am

— from TomDispatch

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I think that someday, looking back, hard as that act may be even to imagine right now, Donald Trump will be seen as a—or perhaps the—symbol of the decline and fall of just about everything. Or looked at another way, what’s left of imperial America appears to be going down Trump’s toilet, while this country itself threatens to come apart at the seams. Meanwhile, America’s first billionaire president, who has surrounded himself with a bevy of other billionaires, continues to have the urge to profit personally from this increasingly strange world of ours. Of course, that should hardly be shocking on a planet where, in 2024, even before his second term in office, the cumulative wealth of billionaires was estimated to have grown by $2 trillion, or $5.7 billion a day, with the creation of an average of four new billionaires a week. And according to Oxfam, “In the U.S. alone, billionaire wealth increased by $1.4 trillion—or $3.9 billion per day—in 2024, and 74 more people became billionaires.”

snip//

The President from Hell

But what makes Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s moment and movement so different from any other moment or movement in our history is another reality (and it is a reality) entirely: This isn’t simply a moment of imperial decline, something all too common in the long story of humanity, but of a marked planetary decline as well.

Yes, the Earth itself is, it seems, going down that same imperial toilet. And unlike the decline of great powers, the decline of Planet Earth is likely to be devastating indeed for the rest of humanity. It’s hard even to believe, in fact, that Americans elected (twice, no less!) a man who has insisted that climate change is a “giant hoax” and, once in office, has seemed intently focused on increasing the levels of drilling for and the burning of oil and natural gas, even though it’s hardly news anymore that such acts will, over the years to come, help devastate this already overheating planet of ours—the last 10 years having already been the hottest on record—and everyone on it.

Storms, floods, and fires of a historic—or do I mean post-historic?—sort clearly lie in our future in a fashion that we humans have never experienced before. And it’s perfectly obvious that 78-year-old Donald Trump simply couldn’t give less of a damn. After all, he certainly won’t be here to experience the worst of it. He is, in short, not just a tariffic president but, in some futuristic sense, all too literally the president from hell.

And all of this should have been obvious enough from his first round in the Oval Office, so consider all too many of us Americans, if not us humans, to have some version of a Trumpian-style death wish, even if not for ourselves but for our children and grandchildren. In so many ways, in retrospect, the reelection of Donald Trump seems to represent—explain it as you will—the enactment of a human death wish on a scale almost beyond imagining.

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http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/tom-engelhardt/113870/donald-trump-the-symbol-of-the-decline-and-fall-of-just-about-everything