Our Foundering Ship of State
Pundits say he “tends to be naive about how things can happen,”1 is a “petulant child when someone disagrees with him,”2 is “deeply childish,”3 has the attention of a “pinball,”4 that his “behavior is increasingly erratic.”5
These milquetoast statements refer, of course, to U.S. President Donald J. Trump.
This public and repeated acknowledgment that our president acts and thinks like a child should have galvanized action to remove him from office months ago. But since his retaking office on January 20, 2025, we have only carped at his actions, which — whether due to incompetence, malevolence, or greed — get more destructive by the month. And now, with this child at the helm, our ship of state is in serious trouble.
Trump started his second term by meddling in the country’s domestic affairs, jeopardizing financial stability, harmony, and confidence in American liberties. He imposed tax cuts the country couldn’t afford, then began borrowing $50 billion a week to make up the difference. Since October 2025, he’s added $1 trillion to our financial burden. Cleverly, instead of taxing the wealthy, he’s borrowing the money from them, binding average taxpayers to pay back his rich creditors with interest.
Trump attacked the nation’s communities by canceling federal funding for social, educational, health, and research programs. Then, under his direction, teams of ICE agents fanned out to trawl American cities, kick down doors, drag people from their homes, manhandle senior citizens, blind bystanders with pepper balls, and shoot those who got in their way. Infamously, federal agents blocked medical assistance from reaching Renée Good, leaving her to bleed out in her car — bleed out is what Israeli settlers let West Bank Palestinians do after they’ve shot them. The agent who murdered Ms. Good shouted homophobic slurs at her corpse.
In response to the October 2025 “No Kings” rally, Trump took off in an AI video plane and flew through the skies to dump load after load of some kind of crap on virtual protesters.
A special target of the peevish Trump has been Americans’ First Amendment right to freedom of speech and assembly. In response to the October 2025 “No Kings” rally protesting Trump’s behavior and policies, he took off in an AI video plane and flew through the skies to dump load after load of some kind of crap on virtual protesters. However, serious measures to suppress protesters were already in the works. The month before, he had issued an executive order designating Antifa to be a domestic terrorist organization. In a presidential memorandum some days later, he specified anti-Christian, anti-capitalist, and anti-American sentiments as features of domestic terrorism.
Despite being contested as illegal,6 Trump’s “domestic terrorism” designation granted his DoJ the authority to convict nine anti-ICE protesters as “North Texas Antifa Cell operatives” for their activities at a “noise” rally7 at the Prairieland ICE Detention Center on July 4, 2025.8 Most face prison sentences of between 10 and 60 years. One faces life in prison for shooting and wounding a police officer who drew his firearm on the protesters first. Clearly, this draconian strategy is meant to intimidate U.S. citizens from participating in protests of any kind by threatening to apprehend or actually arresting protesters on false charges of assaulting officers, for example, with the unpleasant consequences of detention, doxxing, and nontrivial financial and physical hardships.9 An active, conscientious senior citizen must seriously consider if the roughing up ICE agents routinely perform just might break their neck.
As an afterthought, the Trump administration beat up climate change policies as well. It decreed it a matter of national security to ease pollution regulations on copper smelters, coke ovens, and coal plants. It redefined “waters of the United States” to open millions of previously protected acres of wetlands to unregulated industrial waste discharge. And we all knew Trump loved “clean, beautiful coal,” but we found he is also a friend of soot, rolling back standards on particulate matter by loosening air toxics standards for coal- and oil-fired power plants. But the most pot-bellied pig-headed move was Trump’s recent appropriation of $928 million of taxpayer dollars to pay off TotalEnergies SE to cancel its wind farm projects off the New York and North Carolina coasts — with the stipulation that it invest the money in U.S. oil and gas projects.
With the country tottering under his blows, it’s hardly worth a mention that Trump is having the beige Tennessee paving stones ripped out of the West Colonnade to be replaced with the black granite he thinks will set off to much greater effect the gold now cluttering the White House — his White House.
Although it surprised Trump, his blow set off completely foreseeable strikes across the Middle East and triggered Iran’s highly foreseeable closure of the Strait of Hormuz.
With domestic programs defunded, agencies crippled, inspectors general sacked, Congress’s allegiance to the Constitution in doubt, and the exercise of citizen rights subject to criminal prosecution, Trump was free to direct his full fury on the world. Not Micky Mouse tariffs, understand, but a full-fledged excursion.
He hit Iran February 28, 2026. Although it surprised Trump, the blow set off completely foreseeable strikes across the Middle East, triggered Iran’s highly foreseeable closure of the Strait of Hormuz, and jeopardized major economies, whose primary source of oil flows through that strait. As historian Alfred McCoy explains, Trump managed to compound the world disaster by attacking in spring:
It’s spring. Farmers in the entire Northern Hemisphere, the entire northern half of the globe, are planting their crops, and they need fertilizer in order to either cover the costs of their planting the seed stock and to guarantee a good crop to feed the world’s millions. And the flow of fertilizer out the Straits of Hormuz is absolutely stopped. In the Nile River Valley, the price of fertilizer is already up by 40%. In the United States, the price of fertilizer has nearly doubled, from $350 a ton to $600 a ton. And this means that farmers worldwide, if they plant, are going to be faced with reduced crops. I mean, this was completely irresponsible. If you want to attack the Straits of Hormuz, there are eight months in which you can do it without disrupting fertilizer supply for spring planting. The Trump administration, in its genius, found exactly the right month to attack Iran and effectively shut down the Straits of Hormuz and completely disrupt global agriculture.10
The collateral damage of Trump’s excursion — should anyone give it any thought — is the thousands of civilians blown to bloody bits because they got in the way of Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s precision bombs for King Jesus.
And what do we hear in response to Trump’s carnage and havoc? How childish he is. What tantrums he throws. How vindictive, vain, unpredictable, and selfish he is. That he sulks when he’s mad. Now, now. We mustn’t complain. He is doing exactly what we let him do.
The inevitable has happened: the electorate of a bully country elected a bully president who stripped all nuance from American hegemony.
“Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” One of history’s most famous quotes was abridged from what Lord Acton11 wrote in a letter dated April 1887:
I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way, against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority, still more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.
Lord Acton was speaking of individuals. We must now apply that insight to nations, specifically, the United States. Its long duration of unrivaled global power has done the country no good. Ever since its victory in World War II, it’s been throwing its weight around as if it were the only empire that had anything to say, had the only way of life worth living for, had the only money worth spending, and had the only God worth worshipping. Why did the United States turn into such a bully? We’ve heard the excuse many times for many offenses: Because it could.
And now the inevitable has happened: the electorate of a bully country elected a bully president who stripped all nuance from American hegemony. With Congress paralyzed and all thoughts of impeaching him banished, the courts gummed up, and federal measures fixing to rig our elections, Trump’s tactics are shaping up to look very like those favored by his soul mate Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Make failed states of perceived enemies and rival nations. Israel’s victims include Syria and Libya. It is currently at work on Lebanon and, with Trump’s help, Iran.12 But Trump’s got a bigger fish to fry, the biggest of all. Quite obviously, he is intent on making a failed state of us, the United States, while we gossip about it. Yes, in Trump’s funny little zero-sum mind, for him to win all Americans must lose.
- Leon Panette, former defense secretary and Central Intelligence Agency director. ↩︎
- Chris Christie speaking of Trump in 2023. ↩︎
- Jimmy Kimmel referring to Trump’s publicly expressed glee over former FBI director Robert Mueller’s death this month. ↩︎
- Fire and Fury, by Michael Wolff. ↩︎
- Letters from an American, March 22, 2026, Heather Cox Richardson, https://open.substack.com/pub/heathercoxrichardson/p/march-22-2026?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web ↩︎
- https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/trumps-orders-targeting-antifascism-aim-criminalize-opposition ↩︎
- “A noise demo is a very common type of protest that happens outside of prisons and jails. And usually they happen in loud days — right? — Fourth of July, New Year’s Eve. And what people do outside is just literally noise. The purpose is to get people inside to remember that they’re not forgotten, that they are seen, that they are heard. And that is what was happening on July 4th. There was a flyer: ‘Noise demonstration. Come. Make Noise.’” Xavier de Janon, one of the defendants attorneys, speaking with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!, https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/17/antifa ↩︎
- https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/antifa-cell-members-convicted-prairieland-ice-detention-center-shooting ↩︎
- https://open.substack.com/pub/robertreich/p/a-report-you-need-to-read?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web ↩︎
- https://www.democracynow.org/2026/3/23/mccoy_alfred_imperial_decline_history?jwsource=cl ↩︎
- “John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli, KCVO DL (10 January 1834 – 19 June 1902), better known as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, Liberal politician, and writer. A strong advocate for individual liberty, Acton is best known for his observation on the dangers of concentrated authority.” Wikipedia. ↩︎
- https://open.substack.com/pub/chrishedges/p/the-madness-of-the-donald-moats-w?utm_campaign=post-expanded-share&utm_medium=web ↩︎