President Apocalypse
A Winner on a Losing Planet
Do I even faintly believe the times Iβm living in?Β The simple answer is: no.
Every now and then, I try to imagine going back in time to tell my long-dead parents about the world of President Donald Trump, which just happens to still be mine as well. Of course, they simply wouldnβt have believed it, not for a single second.
To put it in the context of their time on this planet, the only equivalent I can imagine would be if Sen. Joseph McCarthy, that anticommunist nightmare-and-a-half of the 1950s, hadnβt flamed out, been censured by the Senate, and died young but somehow had made it to the White House. But even he undoubtedly would have fallen short in terms of chaos and cruelty, if judged by the standards of Trump World. A President McCarthy might have been catastrophic for America, but Trump is on another level, an apocalyptic one.
Trumpβs capacity for ushering in world-wrecking havoc is made possible by a character constructed almost entirely of flaws. His second term has been defined by global aggression and hostility. Yet he recently complained bitterly β and in a fashion itβs hard to imagine any other politician ever doing β because he wasnβt awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. As he put it, βThe United States of America, represented by me as your president, should have received the Nobel peace prize, but didnβt. And this is an indelible stain on the country of Norway, and those people that made such a disgraceful and embarrassing decision.βΒ
This is not only a petty man, but also a delusional one. As president, Trump has presided over more than 20 military interventions, armed conflicts, and outright wars who nonetheless swears that he βsettledβ eight conflicts and should have βwon 8 Nobel Peace Prizes, not just 1.β This includes a war between Egypt and Ethiopia that, of course, never happened and a failing war with Iran that drags on to this day.
If youβre going to βendβ a war with bombs and missiles, then there are, of course, going to be casualties. A few thousand or more Iranians killed, obviously, and tens of thousands injured, not to mention ever-rising American casualties.
Frighteningly, the Iran war may not even be enough for him. Heβs already starting to hint (if there even is such a thing as βhintingβ in the all-too-blunt world of Donald Trump) that he might join Saudi Arabia in taking on the Houthi rebels in Yemen. βWeβre going to look at itβ was how he put it. I should really have added βagainβ there, since he essentially began his second term in office by attacking those same Houthis β killing large numbers of civilians in the process. But after the U.S. burned through $1 billion and failed to even achieve air superiority in Yemen, Trump ended the stalemate. Despite having vowed the Houthis would be βcompletely annihilated,β he announced a cessation of hostilities last May, leaving the group in control of most of Yemenβs populated areas.
Given American history β think the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, and Iraq, among other places β thereβs nothing faintly strange about endless American military operations thousands and thousands of miles away from Washington, D.C., even for a president who said, upon taking office in 2025, that he would measure success by βthe wars we never get into.β
A Grim Presidency
You would hardly know it from the mainstream press but one of those 20 Trumpian conflicts is the forever war in Somalia. And that war has an increasing domestic component. Recently, the Department of Homeland Security raided the home of Somali American Rep. Ilhan Omar in the Washington, D.C., area, aiming in some fashion or other to discover information that might help denaturalize her and so make it possible to eject her from this country.
As the president put it on Truth Social, Omar βleft Somalia with NOTHING, and is now reportedly worth more than 44 Million Dollars.β Of course, who would know better about such things than the president of the United States who, in these years, is estimated to have made literally billions of dollars while in office?
And yet, the never-ending war in Somalia, the nearby conflict we may reenter against the Houthis, and the failed war in Iran should be considered the lesser of the potential disasters that will sooner or later be associated with Trump.Β After all, he clearly has the urge to do nothing less than end this very world of ours, at least as weβve known it, even if in a distinctly slow-motion fashion.
Iβm not even thinking about nuclear weapons (although he admittedly still is). No, Iβm thinking about the president who, at the United Nations in 2025, called climate change βthe greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.β And since then, he has indeed done everything he could think of to ensure that this planet would get hotter yet.Β His Environmental Protection Agency, for instance, has recently repealed βrules that limit planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions from power plants fueled by coal and natural gas.βΒ And thatβs just to start down a long list of what should truly be considered Donald Trumpβs ultimate war on this planet of ours β including blocking wind power development and doing the same with solar power.Β
All of this is happening as global warming reaches unprecedented levels, sea level rise is accelerating, northern forests and tundra are releasing more carbon dioxide than they absorb, the Greenland ice sheet has lost about 129 gigatons of ice (or roughly 129 billion metric tons), and other major ecological systems like tropical coral reefs, the Amazon rainforest, and Antarcticaβs ice sheet are being pushed toward catastrophic tipping points.
While Trump campaigns for eight Nobel Peace Prizes, his war on humanityβs only home continues unabated, a slow-motion destruction that threatens us all. My parents couldnβt have imagined a leader in the White House who would put McCarthy to shame and push the country β and the world β to the precipice of doom: a commander-in-chief worthy of the name President Apocalypse.
The post President Apocalypse appeared first on The Intercept.
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