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Bankruptcy Is Us
The Personification of Decline
Once upon a time, nothing in this world could have convinced me that I would be living through this moment in this America on this planet. As a start, once upon an increasingly distant time, Donald J. Trump as president of the United States would have been inconceivable. Literally beyond conception, even in some wildly dystopian satiric novel about an all-too(un)-American future.
I mean, forget anything else, a man who in private life bankrupted six (yes, six!) companies has now been elected president of the United States not just once but twice. You know, the fellow who thinks of those he considers his domestic enemies (and that's not too strong a word for it), whether Democrats, Republicans, or journalists as nothing short of -- and this is the word he uses -- "evil." Once upon a time, this would have been inconceivable even in your wildest all-(un)-American dreams! Not a shot in hell of a chance! Never!
Until, of course, it happened (yes, twice).
And indeed, I have to repeat that "once upon a time" because the American past, however grim in all too many periods of our history, now seems something like a dark fairy tale to me. A distinctly "once upon a time" creation.
Having just turned 81 myself, I wonder what world I'm now really living in and how, in that very same world, any of us could ever have ended up here. Sometimes I try to imagine telling my parents about -- I have the urge to capitalize this word but can't quite bring myself to do it, so italics will have to do -- him. My mother was a professional caricaturist for an endless string of newspapers and magazines, and she drew, among other grim figures in this country and on this planet, Senator Joe McCarthy, a distinctly Trumpian character from her moment. The difference being that he was just a senator, not the president of the United States. And he was able to do his damnedest (and that's definitely the word for it) for only a few grim years before the Senate censured him and he essentially drank himself to death. And yet, having lived through presidents from Theodore Roosevelt when she was born in 1907 to Jimmy Carter in the year of her death in 1977, I have no doubt that Donald Trump would have left her speechless (or do I mean pen or pencil-less?).
My father, at age 35, immediately joined the U.S. Air Force after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor and served in Burma during World War II. Even though he was, like my mother a Democrat, he would have found someone who got out of the U.S. military in wartime thanks to fake "bone spurs" almost unimaginable as president. And that would have only been the first of an endless list of Trumpian things that my mom and dad, not to speak of more or less anyone else of their generation, would have found unbelievable in an American president. Even Ronald Reagan (and that's no small "even") seemed like a reasonably sane president by comparison.
It's hard for me to imagine how I would tell either of them about President Trump's "big beautiful bill" that's cutting so much, including medical care, for so many Americans at the bottom of the political spectrum in order to give a $975 billion tax break to the wealthiest 1% of us. Or as he put it, "I said to one guy, he's a very, very unattractive man, but he's smart and he's rich, and I said, you better hope we get this thing passed because your wife will be gone within about two minutes. He said, 'You're right.'"
Red-Tie Decline
And yet, believe it or not, here we are as July ends in 2025, six months into Donald Trump's manic second term in office and ever deeper in the Trumpian swamp.
And prepare yourself. There's really no way to write about this American world of ours without exclamation points! In fact, in some fashion, the exclamation point isn't faintly enough for this moment. Perhaps what we in these all-too-dis-United States of America now truly need is to invent some far wilder form of punctuation to catch the essence of this moment!!! (Three exclamation points are certainly apt, but they don't really work, do they?) Maybe, in fact, what we really need is to turn the exclamation point in any Trumpian sentence into a red tie! Or even a series of them!
And let me make one small instant correction to my first paragraph here: Honestly, it really shouldn't be Donald J. Trump anymore. It should be Donald D. Trump. And I'm sure you've already guessed that such a D would stand for decline. And not, mind you, just the decline of the United States -- though that's certainly significant enough -- but of the planet itself.
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