Trump’s America is a Bully and a Spoiled Brat

Here are a few facts that reflect on Trump’s assertion that the USA has been taken advantage of by other nations and that we desperately need to put America first.  The first fact is that our GDP is by far the largest in the world and is seven to fifteen times more than the GDP of the next ten strongest economies excluding China, whose GDP is a little more than half of ours.  The per capita GDP is also very high, eclipsing all but a few small-nation outliers – Luxemburg, Switzerland, Iceland and Singapore.

The second fact is that our average personal wealth is more than twice that of every other developed nation, with the exception of Luxemburg, Switzerland and Hong Kong.  The third fact is that the average wages in the USA are higher than every other nation except Luxemburg, Hong Kong and Iceland. 

It is hard to argue that the USA is suffering in a general sense.  We are the acknowledged technology capital of the world, we have been the largest producer of crude oil in the world since 2018, we have an unmatched military capability, and we have untapped natural resources and vast areas of arable land that are the envy of the world.  

 

Trump’s brutal trade policies and his threats to acquire Greenland, the Panama Canal and Canada can only be interpreted as the antics of a spoiled child and bully that will never be satisfied.  There is no rationale, either economic or political, for these hyper aggressive actions, other than the greedy frenzy of an arrogant, ignorant MAGA group led by two narcissistic autocrats.

 

It is true that the last 30 years have left a good part of the American population behind with stagnating wages and cultural shocks.  The high wages and wealth skew wildly toward the top end of the American wealth demographic.  Somehow, Trump has managed to convince this group that radical liberals and the rest of the world are at fault for their economic malaise.  This fiction will not stand the test of time, but Trump’s strategy will no doubt be to shut the door on any democratic processes and eliminate all opposition before that happens.  

 

The USA is powerful and can assert its will on many nations even if the terms are wildly unjust and punitive. A bully can prevail for a time.  But in the long run, I believe there is enough strength and integrity in other nations to enable a re-ordering of world commerce and affairs.  The sad truth for us is that it will be the stature and economic strength of the USA that will be diminished in the end.  This is what happens to bullies and spoiled brats.

Patience

I am not a particularly patient person.  This is most evident in my driving habits.  I like to say that I am an energetic driver, but it is clear that I generally am impatient and too eager to get to my destination in the most efficient and fastest way possible.  My impatience is also evident in my unwillingness to endure long plateaus in new hobbies or acquiring new skills.  I am not big on persevering if progress doesn’t come pretty quickly.  

Recently, I have been confronted with an example of patience and perseverance that is making me reevaluate my own predisposition for impatience: my grandson.  He was born on October 18^th and I have seen him about every two weeks since his birth.

 

The thing that has really made an impression on me is how much time it takes for a baby to develop various physical capabilities.  Other animals can ambulate almost immediately.  Our family watched an Icelandic horse give birth to a foal that was up and walking within minutes!  Baby birds start to fly around two weeks – is that crazy or what?

 

My grandson, Oliver, whom I love dearly, just recently found his feet at five months.  He is capable of flinging his arms and kicking his feet quite energetically, but he is just now learning how to control his hands to bring objects up to his mouth for exploration.  He can roll over, but not back yet.  Crawling is months away and when he finally walks, at about a year, he will ‘toddle’ like a drunken sailor for another year.

 

Human babies are incredibly slow developing in the realm of physical capabilities.  They are literally helpless for years!  But something very profound and amazing is going on behind the scenes during all that time.  That big human brain is gobbling up much of the energy provided by its caregivers and creating a basis for incredibly complex activities in the future.

 

And despite the apparent frustratingly slow progress on the physical front, Oliver is undeterred.  He tries again and again to make different movements or explore different sounds or try different facial expressions.  He learns how to smile and laugh and emit shrieks of glee or frustration or discomfort.  

 

As it slowly dawns on him that his parents and others around him have amazing freedom of movement and speech, he recommits himself each day to emulating them.  His determination, and yes, his patience, are laudable.  He will not leap up and walk right away, nor will he make an intelligible sound for some time.  But he works on it, making slow but steady progress.  

 

Maybe I need to be more like Oliver.  I need to be willing to keep plugging away at the things I become interested in.  I need to persevere.  And maybe, like Oliver, I will find that some amazing things are going on behind the scenes when I persevere and be very happy with the long term result.

The Trump Gestapo

The arrest and possible deportation of numerous students who protested on campus against Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza is a shocking and dangerous assault on free speech.  It is reminiscent of the early moves by the Nazi regime to eliminate political opponents.  If our country cannot allow people to express their opinions freely and without repercussion then what kind of a democracy do we have?

The video of the Tufts graduate student being arrested by ICE is chilling to the bone.  Masked agents taking her into custody as she left her home as though she were a desperate criminal.  What kind of America is this?  If Trump had been our president during the Vietnam War, he would no doubt have made mass arrests of student protesters and attempted to silence all criticism.  

 

There is only one way to interpret these actions: a rapid descent into an authoritarian police state.  The ICE Gestapo are the first step.  What comes next?  Every patriotic American should go out into the streets and demand an end to these vengeful and unlawful acts before it is too late.

A Return to the Dark Ages?

Science funding cuts, vaccine skeptics elevated to key positions, incompetent sycophants in cabinet positions, climate change denial, a fire hose of falsehoods, religious fundamentalism directing public policy, attacks on the judiciary, retribution initiated against all perceived enemies or critics.  The Trump/Musk regime, in its quest for vengeance, is doing its best to send America back to a modern variant of the dark ages.

It is hard to know how many of the Trump/Musk initiatives are ideological and how many are simply tossing red meat to the adoring minority of the population that feeds their massive egos. Trump famously denied any knowledge of Project 2025 and even suggested that some of it was too extreme, but he has been following its playbook almost to the letter.

 

The half of the population that voted for Trump was motivated by various concerns, but chief among them was the economy and the declining quality of life for much of the middle class.  The actions that Trump has taken to address these issues have mainly been chaotic and unfocused, such as imposing and rescinding tariffs on an almost daily basis.  Or cutting important programs to supposedly decrease our deficit, though the programs’ cost is down in the noise of the federal budget.  

Congress may, by some sleight of hand, be able to make some popular cuts in taxes before the midterms, but the promised return of manufacturing, and a solution for the general economic malaise are highly unlikely to occur by then, or ever, for that matter.

 

The anti-DEI, anti-abortion, anti-vaccine, anti-science, climate denying part of MAGA that is propelling us toward a new dark age is probably much smaller, perhaps as low as 25% of the population.  But they are a highly agitated group and they worship Trump.  Trump and Musk may find it euphoric to bathe in the glow of their frenzied adulation, but I suspect that their promotion of those causes will backfire in the midterms, especially if no economic benefits have accrued.

 

Is the USA really regressing to a state of ignorance where most of its citizenry rejects science, revels in conspiracy theories, and seeks a return to conservative religious values?  I refuse to accept that as inevitable and I expect the American people to deal a crippling blow to the MAGA extremists in less than 20 months.

 

 

Trade Deficits, Tariffs, AI and the Future of Manufacturing

One of Trump’s signature obsessions is the trade deficit.  He sees everything as win/lose, and despite the fact that most economists disagree with his position, he believes he can use tariffs to erase our trade deficit and bring back manufacturing jobs to America.

The loss of manufacturing jobs here has occurred over several decades.  It is not difficult to understand why.  Once global trade and relations offered the opportunity for developing nations to play in the game, their lower labor rates made the shift inevitable.  The result was a loss of middle-class jobs here, but also the increased availability of less expensive goods.  

 

The use of tariffs to ‘even the playing field’ will certainly make goods more expensive.  But will it truly bring back manufacturing to our country?  It seems that tariffs would have to be applied worldwide to avoid just having the manufacturing move from one low-cost labor country to another.  And the investment and time necessary to create new factories here would require investors to believe that this is a long-term phenomenon and not just a Trumpian phase that will be gone in a year or two.

 

But there is an interesting question about the future of all manufacturing that plays a role here and makes Trump’s vision of an American factory renaissance even less likely.  The question is this one:  how will AI impact manufacturing in the next 20 years? 

 

About 10 years ago I visited a brand-new diesel engine plant in Mississippi.  Mississippi was no doubt chosen because of its low labor rates and the lower probability of union formation.  The general manager of the plant told me that the starting salaries for workers were around $18-20/hour, much lower than traditional manufacturing salaries in years gone by.  But more astounding was the fact that the total number of workers in the plant was around 400, in stark comparison to previous engine plants where the number was closer to 4000.  The use of robotics and automation had reduced the number of workers by a factor of 10.

 

As the AI juggernaut accelerates, which no doubt will spur major improvements in manufacturing automation and robotics, how many jobs will future manufacturing plants actually have?  It is highly likely that the great majority of these jobs will disappear.  If so, then the location of a factory will become less dependent on the cost of local labor.  It will probably be more dependent on the tax situation, the availability of materials, and the overall corporate strategy.

 

If manufacturing no longer employs significant numbers of workers, then it will have less impact on the country where it is located.  It will no longer play a large role in solving the crisis of middle-class salary stagnation or unemployment.  It will enrich the corporation and its stockholders, but not much else.

 

Rather than focus on the delusional nemesis of trade deficits, the real challenge for the future is understanding the very nature of work in an AI saturated world.  In the revolutions of the past, new jobs have always replaced old jobs, and there is a temptation to believe that will be the case with the AI revolution.  But the computer revolution has already demonstrated that new jobs are not always the equal of old jobs, and that allowing the market to take its course may not produce satisfactory results.  Things are changing too fast to be complacent.  

 

 

Living Forever – Blessing or Curse?

If one can take a short break from breathless exclamations about the AI revolution, another area of technology with potentially life-changing consequences comes to mind: aging research.  A field that has long labored in obscurity has recently made significant progress and is causing some to predict dramatic new anti-aging regimens in the coming years.

Many hallmarks of aging have been identified, such as deterioration of cells or organs over time due to increased inflammation; genome instability; damage to DNA, proteins and lipids due to the reactive oxidative species that metabolic processes generate; and changes to telomeres, the repetitive DNA sequences at the ends of chromosomes that get shorter as a cell divides.

 

One area of aging research focuses on preventing aging by addressing the factors above.  The result would be a slowing of aging.  There are also hormonal therapies that rejuvenate skin cells, an aesthetic attack on aging to produce a more youthful appearance.

 

But in the last year scientists have also demonstrated ways to ‘turn back the clock’ on cells and restore them to their youthful state.  This was accomplished in a limited setting by inserting specific Yamanaka genes into cells.  This epigenetic approach (epigenesis is the process by which cells differentiate), whether by chemical process or gene therapy, actually changes the instructions that the cells receive and can accelerate, slow down or even reverse the aging process.  In some experiments, the cells have essentially been ‘re-booted’ to their original youthful state.

 

The implications of this research are profound.  If the human body can stop aging or be continually restored to a youthful state, what kind of world would we have?  Two extremes come to mind:  In one, we age gracefully to a certain point and then arrest the aging process.  We stay 65 or 70 for eternity.  But if anti-aging can completely restore youth, then certainly no one would choose to age past whatever ideal age they imagine for themselves, which is the other extreme.  Or perhaps we would age up to a certain point to have the full experience of aging, then backtrack to that ideal age?  The variations are infinite.

 

The sensible approach to anti-aging would seem to be to slow down the aging process so that people have longer and healthier lives.  But once the genie is out of the bottle there would be no turning back.  The rich would trade in their face lifts, tummy tucks, collagen lips and hair transplants for a return to their glorious youth at any price.  

 

What kind of fiendish groundhog’s day would our lives become?  A world full of 18-year-olds strutting around with full hormonal impetuosity!  Would our brains stay youthful and accumulate wisdom and experience?  Would injuries eventually curtail our exuberant youthfulness or would they all be repairable as well?  

 

If we think we have problems with climate change and environmental disasters now, just imagine the impact of exponentially increasing hordes of Peter Pans inhabiting our planet.  What the hell would the billions of eternal 18-year-olds do with themselves?  What kind of nightmarish society would evolve?

Even if anti-aging remedies merely extend our lives another twenty years I can't get very excited about them.  Who wants to live with a 90 year old body for another twenty years?  Even pickleball gets old at some point.  The younger generations would come up with some sort of a soylent green solution for that nonsense.

 

Anti-aging, gene editing and AI are all technologies that have potential repercussions that simply boggle the mind.  To be honest, I have a hard time imagining their advantages outweighing their disadvantages.  But wait, there may be a simple solution.  AI may just gene-edit and anti-age the hell out of us and create an eternal caste of slaves to do their bidding.  It would be a bit of poetic justice, you have to admit.

My Abhorrence of Arrogance and Malice

I am finding it very difficult to accept the fact that Trump, Vance and Musk are the face of our nation.  I am at odds with most of their policies and actions, but it is their arrogance and toxic behavior that most disturb me.  I despise bullies, blowhards, braggarts.

I have interacted with many people in my seventy years of life, from childhood friends to teachers to coaches to bosses to co-workers and subordinates.  People exhibit many different types of behaviors, from enchanting to offensive.  

 

I have had coaches, teachers and bosses who were taskmasters and quite demanding.  I accepted that behavior in good faith if their approach was respectful and had a measure of humility.  But some of them were malicious.  Their treatment of others was imbued with arrogance and a mean spirit.  When they were critical, they spoke angrily and hurtfully, not caring about the impact of their words and their actions.  They did not hesitate to brag about their own capabilities while demeaning others. They reacted viciously to any perceived slight. They didn’t acknowledge or tolerate nuance or ambiguity or disagreement.

 

They could be quite charming and friendly under some circumstances, especially with friends and acquaintances, or people they considered their equals.  But their mode of management and direction was brutal.  They had a tendency to lie or misrepresent things to obtain their goals.  They were the personification of ‘the ends justify the means’.  Some were spectacularly successful.  Trump, Vance and Musk are these people on a larger stage.

 

The substantial part of our nation that voted for Trump is either blind to his obvious narcissism and mendacity, or they are willing to accept ‘rough’ behavior in the service of crushing woke culture or fixing our economic woes.  I suppose that in their view, liberal elites and government workers looked down upon them and belittled their religious beliefs, their patriotism, and their concerns about government excess.  Trump, Vance and Musk are their avengers, and their supporters don’t seem to mind the cruel tactics they employ.  Indeed, they appear to be delighted.  So much for our better angels.

 

Trump’s petty, vindictive acts – renaming the Gulf of Mexico, threatening Greenland, Panama and Canada, treating Europe like a vassal state, firing non-white and female military leaders, threatening and firing government workers without any real analysis of what parts of government can reasonably be trimmed, taking away security details from people who have criticized him, excoriating a courageous leader who rallied his nation against a ruthless Russian invasion – may have underlying motives that one can assign to his overall ‘America first’ mantra.  But the manner in which he has conducted his first month in office is unquestionably that of a brutish and arrogant tyrant.

 

In my worldview, there is no excuse for arrogance or cruelty.  There is a sadistic element in the Trump/Vance/Musk playbook.  It is purposely vengeful.  It delights in shocking and wounding.  And I am ashamed to have these men represent me in the world.  

Why Do Good Things Happen to Bad People?

As I watch the Trump/Musk plutocracy conduct a cruel and chaotic mass firing of government employees and threaten and blackmail other nations, I feel heartsick and horribly disappointed at how life often seems to reward the worst people with power, wealth and fame.

Donald Trump and Elon Musk are both profoundly impaired human beings.  They lack empathy, they are emotionally immature, they are grotesquely vain and narcissistic, and they are frighteningly vindictive. Both Musk and Trump seem to be trapped in an endless adolescence.

 

Their business success is probably at least partially due to these pathological traits, which is a very sad and depressing fact.  The history of human endeavor is replete with examples of people with horrific flaws wielding tremendous power and causing mayhem and tragedy.  

 

Both Trump and Musk achieved wealth through audacious, risk-taking ventures.  Trump was never seen as a great genius, but his massive accumulation of wealth made him a celebrity in a nation that worships the rich.  His unscrupulous character and hardball business ethics were well known from the start, but he, like so many of the rich, was never called to account for the way he did business.  The only thing that mattered was that it succeeded.

 

Musk, on the other hand, was idolized early on for his technical acumen and his apparently visionary commitment to a world of electric vehicles and space adventure.  He cast himself as the planet’s savior from climate change and the world swooned in admiration.  A closer look at his business trajectory poses many questions as to how much of this hero myth was self-generated after clever appropriation of other businesses and their already well-developed strategies. 

 

But now the true character of both men has come into stark relief.  With the unbridled glee of a spoiled eight-year-old torturing a cat, Musk revels in wreaking havoc in real people’s lives.  He seems to experience a diabolical joy in the fear and heartbreak that his DOGE goons have inflicted on tens of thousands of dedicated government employees.  And Trump stands behind him, sneering proudly – “this is my son, with him I am well pleased”.

 

Yes, it is a sad truth that bad people will often have their way in this world.  I find it highly dispiriting, but I know from history that their success is not the end of the story.  Justice will not necessarily be served directly to Trump or Musk.  Trump may keel over from a fast food induced heart attack before he experiences any sort of consequences for his actions.  But good people will rise and the pendulum will eventually swing away from the red zone of the Trump/Musk villainy.  I just wish it were more like the movies and the bad guys got their punishment quickly and we got to see it happen.  Sigh.

 

The Liberal Bias in Academia is No Conspiracy!

Conservatives have complained bitterly about liberal bias in academia since the 60’s.  The hysteria became particularly shrill in the last 10 years or so, appending the pejorative ‘woke’ as a further term of disdain.  The right believes that college and universities specifically hire and encourage liberal professors and administrators, and reject or ostracize conservatives.  They consider this part of a liberal conspiracy to corrupt impressionable students and bolster ‘woke’ culture and America-hating.

But the simple fact is that across America (and, for that matter, the rest of the developed world) higher education is associated with more liberal political views.  The Pew Charitable Trust conducted a survey on political views with people of various levels of education (https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap-between-more-and-less-educated-adults/).  People with postgraduate education and degrees were much more likely to hold liberal views, and people with high school and some college education were very likely to hold conservative views.  The liberal bias in the well-educated is not simply a college professor phenomenon, but extends across the US population.

 

Every professor has a postgraduate degree, so it is no surprise that the majority of them hold liberal political views.  And when a majority of people hold similar views, then there is always the potential for some level of bias in that population and it is certainly possible that students and professors who hold conservative views may feel unwelcome or in some way demeaned.  My own experience in college was that professors did not hide their political inclinations, but they also welcomed other opinions and were never dismissive of them.

 

One might argue that people with postgraduate education have generally been corrupted by the liberal universities, but I find that to be a specious argument.  Once people leave the university there are multiple factors influencing their thinking and it is unlikely that they would cling to views formed at the university unless they continue to make sense to them in the marketplace of ideas that they confront throughout their lives.  And indeed, the tendency, as one grows older, is to become more conservative and less idealistic, as taxes and self-interest curb one’s zeal for liberal causes and ideology.

 

There is a better explanation for why postgraduate education leads to liberal political views.  Better educated people recognize the contradictions and injustices in society and they tend to read widely and dig deeply into history, science, economics and other concepts.  They have developed the skills and habits necessary for deep thinking and processing of more complex data.  They have the same self-interest that less educated conservatives have, but they recognize the contradictions and the paradoxes and choose to err on the side of social justice and the social contract.  In the balancing of liberty and equality, they are willing to push the scale a bit toward equality because otherwise it will steadily slip further away from it.

 

Yes, colleges generally tend to be liberal.  But quite frankly, it is typically the only time in one’s life that the surrounding culture will tilt that direction.  There is no broad conspiracy to indoctrinate our youth in Marxism, atheism or socialism or any other specific ideology. It is simply a great time to explore different ways of thinking and be challenged in one’s point of view.  We should all have faith in the intellectual strength and the ethical and moral code that we have nurtured in our children.  They will find their own way.  

 

But if they get well educated, and don’t simply go to frat parties and football games, then there is a high probability they will lean left. 

Leadership versus Autocracy

What is the difference between a leader and a dictator?  A leader identifies goals and objectives, explains them to the people and to the legislators that must enact laws to support those goals, then works to build consensus to legitimize those laws and objectives.  If compromises are necessary to build broad support, then a leader will make those compromises and negotiate a course that may not be exactly what he or she originally desired.

This is the process that has more or less been the method of presidential leadership and congressional lawgiving over the course of our nation’s history.  Change has generally been incremental, sometimes frustratingly so.  But given the nature of a divided populace and the underlying passions of the people, incremental change is the safest and most effective method of governance.

 

A dictator, on the other hand, does not seek consensus.  He does not attempt to reconcile the wide diversity of opinions and positions.  He does not respect or acknowledge the opposition’s point of view.  He is convinced that his objectives must be achieved at any cost. He is neither willing to compromise nor engage in negotiations or even discussion.  He will go to the extremes of his power to suppress dissent or steamroll over opposition.  

 

If a leader has to make difficult choices and cut back programs or let people go, he does it delicately and with empathy.  A dictator does it gleefully, without a trace of respect or compassion.  

 

The lack of leadership and the cruel, vindictive approach that Trump and Musk have demonstrated in their first weeks of power are not only horribly divisive, but they are completely out of step with the long history of progress and improvement by negotiation and consensus in the United States.  They are especially egregious considering that Trump won by a tiny margin and both the house and senate have tiny Trumpian majorities.

Changes that are made at the point of a gun are not likely to stand the test of time.  Trump and Musk will lose their luster even among their most ardent supporters.  They have already earned the enduring enmity of at least half of the country.

This Is the Way the US Empire Ends; Not with a Bang but with a Whimper

It was a good ride, I guess.  Depending on when you start the clock, Empire USA has been either on top or heading rapidly towards the top for about 150 years.  I put the start at the Centennial Exposition of 1876 in Philadelphia.  That was when the world got a great glimpse into the industrial and technological might that the USA was developing.  Not long after, our imperial ambitions came into stark view with the Spanish American war and Teddy Roosevelt.  

It took a while for us to edge out Great Britain, but their descent was clearly evident in the Boer War and then amplified by their fragility in WWI, the unraveling of their colonial empire, and the decay of their industrial economy after WWII

 

Our empire has been teetering for some time.  We had what appeared to be rather glorious years in the 50’s and 60’s, though our original sin of slavery and our inability to address major social issues sowed the seeds for future distress even during those supposedly halcyon years.

 

The wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated both our hubris and our growing vulnerability.  The almost gleeful outsourcing of our manufacturing capabilities by management consultants and the resultant middle-class malaise accelerated the process.   Our dominance in computer and Internet technology shielded us from a more rapid decline, but the benefits accrued more and more to a fairly small part of our population.

 

So here we are today, with a deeply divided people, a sly but completely amoral and unhinged president, and a cabal of plutocrats, one of whom has been given carte blanche to wreak whatever havoc he chooses on our government and institutions.

 

Trump may believe he is a master negotiator, and perhaps he was in real estate, where a no-holds-barred approach and lack of ethics can apparently bring great success.  But his style on the world stage can ultimately only bring isolation and pariah status to our country.  Other countries will find new allies, new ways to conduct business.  Even his cohort of MAGA crazies will eventually tire of his posturing.  In the meantime, Musk’s incoherent ravaging of our government will cause a steady exodus of talent and a rapid degradation of services and sanity.

 

The US empire will fade away, but the Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple and Tesla empires will continue to expand and control the world.  They will gobble up potential competitors and dictate how whatever remaining governments interact with them by buying political influence and controlling information.  Yes, China will become the dominant nation, but it may soon find itself controlled more and more by its own technology companies.

 

There was a movie back in the mid-70s called Rollerball, where corporations were the most powerful entities on earth and made all the decisions.  The individual corporations sponsored teams in a brutal sport called Rollerball, meant to pacify the masses.  It wasn’t the best movie in the world, but I think it is very prescient in terms of where we are headed.  Most of us sit in front of screens watching series and interminably scrolling already.  We don’t have far to go.

 

It may be that the corporations are already powerful enough to stop the idiot Trump from starting a world war, though all bets are off on that question.  The next couple of years will see Trump careen from one outrageous demand to another, and there is no telling what kind of mayhem will ensue.  

 

Everyone fears that AI will cause wars, loss of jobs and that we will end up with AI conquering and perhaps obliterating humanity.  But I think the AI juggernaut will simply provide corporations with the tools necessary to completely control the world.  No more nationalism, no more wars, no more populism, no more immigration, no more democracy, no more compassion, no more visible dissension.

 

And then the plutocrats will build a lovely colony on Mars and flee there with their retinues while the earth dies from climate disasters, plastic pollution and the inevitable revolt of a few billion very disgruntled Amazon customers.

 

 

They Warmed to Hitler Too

Megalomaniacs and narcissists who attain positions of power can be very charming and compelling, even charismatic, before things go south.  Whether their appeal is warranted or simply an illusion due to their aura of power and a human predilection to be awed by celebrity, is an interesting question.  I strongly suspect it is the latter.

Before Hitler came to power, he was generally ridiculed and dismissed as a laughable character by those in power and those unlikely to embrace his ideology, which at the time were the majority of Germans.  Once he was declared Chancellor and began to wield power things started to change.  Serious people took a second look.  His early successes in stabilizing the German economy and establishing order were heralded as great accomplishments.  Yes, he was a bit rough in his speech, and clearly a narcissist, but damned if he didn’t have a big effect on his country!

 

Credible newspapers, radio broadcasters, diplomats and cultural icons all begin to come around to Hitler due to his apparently dramatic impact on Germany.  People who met him in person often came away enchanted by his personality and charisma.  Perhaps he was what Germany really needed, they opined.

 

Donald Trump was a laughable character too, all through the 80’s, 90’s and 2000’s.  His wealth was prodigious, but few people had any respect for him as a person.  He was viewed as a pompous blowhard and self-promoter – the worst example of rogue capitalism writ large.  In the elections of 2016 and 2020, few of the elites and powerful were in any way impressed by him.  

 

He won the nomination in 2016 because there were enough MAGA crazies (there always are) to give him a slight majority over the 10 other more reasonable candidates.  In the general election, large numbers voted for him (though not enough to win the popular vote!) simply because they couldn’t bear to have a democrat (or a woman) in the White House.

 

But time and familiarity do strange things.  Despite the insurrection of January 6^th and his ignominious behavior post-election and throughout the pandemic, or perhaps even because of it, Trump retained the loyalty of 15-20% of the population (again, more or less the crazies), and their activism was enough to doom any republican who didn’t profess allegiance to Trump and his catechism (climate change denial, stolen election, weaponized justice department, deep state radical left, etc.)

 

A weak attempt by less extreme republicans to sideline him in the 2024 primaries amounted to nothing, and the wealthy and powerful began to acknowledge that Trump was likely to be the next president.  Years of exposure to his lying, his thin skin, his preposterous boasting, his vendettas and his messianic complex had made these characteristics seem almost quaint or eccentric rather than dangerous to people whose lives are already filled with vanity and excess.

 

We now have the elites, the tech bros, the financial tycoons all cozying up to Trump, seeking his favor.  And Trump, who more than anything else has always craved the approval and respect of these people, is feeling empowered to go to any extreme to make his mark and create his legacy.  What could go wrong?  Ask the Germans.

The Triumph of Spite

Cue the Nuremberg Rallies!  Gather the MAGA faithful from all across the land and let us worship at the feet of our glorious leader.  Let us revel in our spite, our ill will, our grudges, our self-righteousness, our imagined grievances.  Trump has returned with his colossal mandate of 1% of the popular vote, and his vengeance is ours.

Oh, this time it will be different.  No half measures, no attempts to assuage the full half of the country that is completely opposed to our agenda.  This time the cabinet and all of the government leadership will be inhabited by true believers.  There will be no room for RINOs or half-hearted conservatives.  And certainly, no traitorous America-haters from the left.

 

The purge will start on day one.  The Musk-led oligarchy will use its master-of-the-universe brain power to whittle down the government with dramatic eliminations of services and social net infrastructure.  The first to go will be any suspected ‘deep-state’ elements.  Let’s piss them all off on day one by forbidding remote work and expressing our utter contempt for them.

 

Then let’s pardon all the violent rioters from January 6^th and pretend that it was just a love fest for our glorious leader and a justified outrage at the stolen election that not a single lawsuit or investigation could ever legitimize even under Trump-appointed judges.  Vengeance is mine, sayeth Trump. Sadly, rewriting history is not quite so easy, as Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Pinochet and others have discovered.

 

Then on to America First!  Scrap the Paris Accords; abandon all efforts to fight climate change; exit the World Health Organization; persecute the International Criminal Court members that dared to call out Israel and Netanyahu for crimes against humanity; ignore anything from the UN that doesn’t align with our interests; threaten Panama, Greenland and any other country that is bold enough to question the might and the manifest destiny of the greatest country that ever existed.  International cooperation be damned!

 

Declare emergencies right and left!  An energy emergency, a border emergency, a law-and-order emergency.  Maybe we’ll need to set a Reichstag fire or two to get things moving!  Fortunately, the first steps of a massive manhunt for undocumented people will set the stage for future crackdowns.  Getting rid of the liberal press will require some finesse, but all in due time.

 

Am I being melodramatic?  Perhaps, but given Trump’s increasingly messianic lunacy (‘I was saved by God to make America great again’), his aggrieved desires for vengeance, his absurd narcissism, his dark inclinations toward violence and his absurdly simplistic appraisals of world events, it seems prudent to expect and prepare for the very worst.

 

There may be many aspects of Trump’s agenda that appear to be highly desirable and reasonable to the run-of-the-mill conservative or the Christian fretting over cultural issues.  I want to believe that we can find ways to achieve some of what the Trump voters desire without making a frightening lurch toward autocracy.

But it is an incredibly dangerous Faustian bargain to give so much power to a man with such obvious psychological flaws.  Let us all pray that the remaining legal, bureaucratic, and legislative barriers will be enough to prevent a full authoritarian transformation in our country, or worse yet, a major war.

 

 

The Sadly Predictable Decline

In 1945 the United States was the sole nation to emerge from the devastation of World War Two with its economy and population intact.  Indeed, the USA was master of the world – a booming industrial economy, a dominating military capability and a population eager to take advantage of both.

As the world slowly recovered, it became a captive market for the USA.  America produced everything and no other economy even came close.  No longer allowed to engage in direct colonization, we mastered economic imperialism, manipulating developing nations to use their resources and manpower to benefit our economic domination, all the while rationalizing our role in the spirit of free market capitalism and a rising tide that lifts all boats.

 

We grew comfortable in our exalted position.  Even though we failed to lift up our own bottom 15-20% out of poverty and despair, the 50’s and 60’s were times of heady economic optimism for most of the country.

 

By the time the 70’s and 80’ came along, Europe had begun to compete effectively with us in many markets, and the Japanese industrial juggernaut caught us by surprise.  An economic malaise took hold in the late 70’s due to multiple factors, so we tightened our belts, reduced taxes for the wealthy and began to look for ways to maintain the high earnings that wall street had come to expect.

 

Globalization took hold in the 80’s, as other nations began to cultivate industrial capabilities and provide less expensive labor.  A legion of freshly minted MBAs spread out across industrial America with the gospel of offshore factories and production, and corporate profits began to soar again as American manufacturing fled overseas.

 

American dominance in the technology revolution masked the insidious changes afoot throughout the 90’s. So-called knowledge jobs became the mantra and we convinced ourselves that the disappearing industrial base would be easily transformed into an even more lucrative knowledge economy. 

 

Economics is perhaps not truly a zero-sum game, but as other nations developed and began to claim their share of the world’s riches, it was not hard to predict that average wages and employment opportunities would be affected in previously dominant economies as the global economy became ever more inter-connected.  Even knowledge jobs can be outsourced with the Internet and gigabit networks.

 

Slowing population growth in established economies resulted in increased immigration to augment the labor market.  In good times and at a measured pace, immigration can be tolerated and even embraced by a native population.  But as economies began to stagnate and the middle class to languish, the immigration waves of the 2000’s and 2010’s created a tsunami of resentment that foretold a rise in populism.

 

Sharing the world’s resources was never going to be easy.  When you have a part of the world that was accustomed to being in the catbird seat and is now struggling to find its equilibrium in a changing world, there was bound to be a very difficult transition.

 

But now, with increasingly rampant populism and the rise to power of authoritarian figures like Trump, Putin, Xi, Modi, Orban and Netanyahu, the prospects for global cooperation on the thorny issues facing this world seem increasingly dim.  Unilateralism, clownishly personified in Trump, appears to be the watchword for the superpowers.  

 

There was a period in the 90’s when we all felt optimistic about the future.  Democracy seemed to be flourishing, economies were growing, global conflict was minimal, hundreds of millions across the globe were rising into the middle class.  But the seeds of discontent were already there.  Did we squander the momentum we had at that time?  Could we have changed the arc of history to a more harmonious path by making some adjustments?  Who knows?  Human nature does not easily tolerate decreased expectations, and sharing is not easy.  

 

I see hard times ahead, but I have faith in our basic humanity.  Unfortunately, we may have to endure some very difficult moments before that really kicks in.