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The Surrender President
Creating a Distinctly Declinist Power on a Distinctly Declinist Planet
Ours would be the normal story of imperial powers rising and falling on Planet Earth nothing new there, of course if it weren't for one thing: the fact that this world, too, is now falling. Unfortunately, nothing is truly normal about this planet of ours anymore, as the slow-motion equivalent of atomic weaponry goes off in our already distinctly overheating atmosphere. And though hes seldom thought of that way, President Trump, the who would once have believed it? second time around, should be considered an all-too-literal embodiment of some mad human urge to turn this planet into a (once almost unimaginable) disaster zone. He would, in fact, be truly unbelievable, if whats happening to this planet at this very moment weren't even more so.
Were distinctly in a twenty-first century from hell and yet our president continues to act as if this were still the twentieth (if not the nineteenth) century. Under other circumstances, it might seem little short of amusing, but not on this planet, not in 2025, not in a world drying out at a remarkably rapid pace, not on a planet to whose atmosphere we humans have added about 200 billion more tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases just between 2020 and 2024. (And if you're already sweating, I don't blame you!)
If you want to know what century Donald Trump is in, check out his recent visit (his second!) to yes! Great Britain to meet King Charles III and Queen Camilla.And what a dinner the king and queen threw for him with some of the wealthiest, most influential, and best connected people in the world all together at one long table inside a nearly-thousand-year-old castle.
It was so wonderfully twentieth, if not nineteenth, century! Of all places to pay the only visit of his second term in office so far, Donald Trump chose to travel back in time, which is, of course, no small thing, to an era when Great Britain and its royalty mattered globally in order to offer an imperial bow to a planet that functionally no longer exists.
But honestly, you shouldn't have been surprised.Though you might not have noticed few have made a point of it Donald Trump is indeed living in the wrong century. In his brain, I suspect, hes still in the era when, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, this country became the planets sole superpower. Hes still in the century in which Elvis was king. Hes still in the time when tariffs (I am a Tariff Man) actually mattered.
Oh wait, wasn't that the nineteenth century of President William McKinley who, as Trump has claimed, made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent?
Admittedly, the president did go to Great Britain accompanied by AI executives, and that certainly made him look reasonably modern, but don't be fooled, not for a second. Strange as he may be in some deeper sense, he distinctly is Donald J. (Been There, Done That) Trump. And in retrospect (if, of course, there even is a retrospect), I think it will be all too clear that, by identifying with Big Oil, Big Gas, and Big Coal, and turning his back on climate change and the twenty-first century, while putting tariffs from another age on much of other nations economic dealings with the United States, he will have turned this very planet of ours over to the place China that's producing twice as much green power as the rest of the world combined and madly developing the equipment to produce more of it (not to speak of electric vehicles), while already starting to sell its green products around the world. Phew!
Donald Trump, on the other hand, has essentially declared war on green energy and, in doing so, has in his own strange fashion declared war on the American people, modernity, and the future of this country, not to speak of this planet. And yet, all too sadly, doing exactly that got him elected president a second time. After all, he ran his winning presidential campaign in 2024 on, above all else, a slogan that couldn't have been blunter about his vision of the future drill, baby, drill and he now seems intent on ensuring that the world-record profits of the five big oil companies and the estimated investment by banks of almost $7 trillion in the fossil-fuel industry since the Paris Climate Agreement went into effect in 2016, will indeed remain a, if not the, crucial part of our future, not our past. (Only recently, at the United Nations, he called climate change the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, while praising clean, beautiful coal.) And that should be considered his way of turning that very future over to China.
Hes also using tariffs from another age, in his own striking fashion, to reject and cut the U.S. off economically from much of the rest of this planet, while giving China the economic edge it needs to thrive at least to the degree that anyplace can thrive on a world that's literally going to hell in a handbasket (even if in relatively slow motion). Long ago, in 2017, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested, however tongue-in-cheekily, that Donald Trump might actually be a Chinese agent. He pointed out then that, in his first weeks in office, the president had already taken his Make China Great campaign to a new level by rejecting the science on climate change and tossing out all Obama-era plans to shrink our dependence on coal-fired power.
The Drill-Baby-Drill Presidency
Now, more than eight years later, he seems, if anything, intent on doubling down when it comes to rejecting any thought of dealing with climate change, while still focusing remarkable energy (and I use that word advisedly) on helping the oil, natural gas, and coal industries prosper. Think of the drill-baby-drill president as, in his own way, a satanic force (since the result will be heat of an unparalleled nature). China, on the other hand, continues to put striking amounts of money and (again, excuse the word) energy into the creation of a green-energy economy. Yes, I know that it also continues to produce and use staggering amounts of coal at record rates (though its use of carbon energy is expected to peak soon), but its already beginning to sell green-energy equipment wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars globally in a fashion not faintly equaled by any other country.
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