Der Untergang

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Note: After I recorded this it was reported that Trump officials are threatening to demolish the Kennedy Center if it can’t be renovated to Trump’s taste (and presumably with his name added). Matches my argument exactly.

Der Untergang naht.

Pardon my German pronunciation. I’m going to take a break today from wonky economic analysis and talk about, well, Donald Trump, but in a slightly different way from what I think most people are saying. Not positive, obviously.

Just before recording this, I saw that Trump wants to rename Lake Ontario Lake America. Which is silly, would be funny, except that this guy is the President of the United States. And it’s really kind of troublesome that someone in that position is that out of it, that petty, disconnected from reality.

And look, it’s not news to anybody that Trump is ego-driven, disconnected from reality, and at the same time, somehow commands a level of deference and obedience from the entire machinery of the federal government that no president has ever had before. So this is really quite serious.

What I don’t think people are fully aware of is just how bad it can get, given that Trump is so obviously dissociating, decompensating, that he’s not all there.

Obviously, he was already a very problematic personality, which was doing a great deal of damage to the United States. I don’t think even now people fully appreciate the amount of damage that has been done. Even before the Iran War, Trump’s provocations, insults, his trade wars, really destroyed the world’s trust in America.

America became a country that could not be trusted to honor agreements. It was a country that constantly tried to bully other countries. Our word was worth nothing. Our sanity was not to be taken for granted. And then, of course, along comes Iran, where in addition to showing that we’re not to be trusted, that we’re not going to be relied upon., we also showed that we were far weaker than people imagined.

If there’s one thing people thought it was, well, America has a powerful military. It turns out, well, not as powerful and not nearly as competent as people thought. How much of that is the result of Trump and Hegseth degrading it and how much of it was there to begin with is an interesting question. But anyway, at this point, we are not loved, we are not respected, and we aren’t even feared.

And we’re not getting that back. Even if Trump is succeeded by someone decent —God help us if he isn’t— but even if we have a more or less rational, well-intentioned government that follows, the world now knows that we are capable of putting someone like Trump in a position of unprecedented, almost absolute power and that it can happen again.

And the world also knows that we’re just not as fearsome as we seem to be. That we can be defied much more successfully even by smallish countries than anyone really imagined.