Trump’s Win

Donald Trump’s landslide presidential win is another step in the downfall of the American Empire and, more importantly, in our species’ race to destroy our planet. History is always happening, although those living it don’t normally have the perspective to see it. But if we look at 1964 to today as a 60-year span and transpose that to, say, the 19th century, we can notice how much can change in such a period.
I pick 1964 because nothing was quite the same after the Kennedy assassination. The Vietnam War divided a country that had been fairly united since World War II and was the first of many disastrous foreign military ventures. My memories of the Eisenhower years are too few to matter, but when I think of the creation of the interstate highway system I see a nation that could accomplish big projects that would be impossible today. And senators whose names still reverberate because the Senate truly was a deliberative body. Under Reagan and Clinton America held its own and, compared to Russia and Communism, moved ahead. But seeds of nastiness were planted. Think of how Clinton’s extramarital shenanigans were treated, compared to JFK’s. The welfare of the country was no longer as important as destroying your opposition. Men weren’t being sent to the moon anymore, and America’s rail system languished in comparison to the rest of the world.
2000 was an inflection point for the planet. Al Gore recognized what carbon emissions were doing to the ozone and how little time there was to act to slow climate change. It may have already been too late to reverse the ultimately destructive trends, but there was a better chance then than there has been since. George W. Bush was, to my mind, history’s worst president, and the decline in the American Empire began, or at least accelerated, appropriately, at the end of “America’s Century” (per Henry Luce?). Bush’s failings were grossly magnified by 9/11 and our response thereto: wasteful and unnecessary security measures at home and tragically misguided and cruel wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Money that could and should have gone to education, infrastructure, health care, research was siphoned off to unproductive, destructive uses. When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, hope of moving America forward again was blunted by Senate leader Mitch McConnell’s avowed purpose to thwart any and everything Obama would try to accomplish.
Washington insiders for decades now have bemoaned the end of civility between the parties in Washington. Republicans and Democrats always had their differences, but they used to talk to each other and be willing to compromise when necessary. Individual Congressmen could even vote as they wanted, not, as is the case now, as their Party leader instructed. In recent years, as income inequality soared and the planet burned, the U.S. Congress has been a model of dysfunction. In efforts to sell democracy abroad, we have been our worst advertisement.
Of all the things that government dysfunction has stymied, none is more urgent than the climate change that is reshaping the living spaces on our planet. Scientists have long predicted what could happen without corrective action, but they used to talk in terms of fifty years or end of the century. We are now experiencing worsened conditions year by year, and the changes are accelerating, not diminishing. Even if some changes can no longer be halted–e.g., rising sea levels, increased droughts and storms, acidifying oceans, wildfires, species extinction–their effects can perhaps be ameliorated or countered. But to do so requires a community commitment, first in this country, then around the world. If one political party is intent on blocking efforts by the other to combat climate change, the situation is fairly hopeless. The same applies to countries’ going to war against each other. Based on Trump’s actions in his first term and his rhetoric running for a second, it appears that the U.S. government will pull out of efforts, domestic and international, to fight climate change. Like the frog in the kettle of water over the stove, we will be cooked.
The second existential peril facing the world is nuclear war, and here Trump’s victory could be a boon. Inasmuch as he only cares about himself, not the good of the country, it’s less likely that he will feel that a face-off with Putin is worth blowing up the world. This doesn’t help the Ukrainians, but there I feel the U.S. should have been pushing for a settlement once Russia’s intial foray was pushed back, rather than supplying weapons for a hopeless fight.
In fact, there is much to be said for Trump’s, or at least J.D. Vance’s, policy that the U.S. should no longer be the world’s policeman. It’s hard to think of a single country we have helped by our military interference. We have thoroughly messed up the Middle East, although that is due to our subservience to Israel. Unfortunately, that promises to continue.
The mention of foreign affairs raises another huge crack in what we think of as the American Empire. We think of America as the “good guy” on the scene, the one with a moral code and belief in international law. Of course, this hasn’t been true, but it’s never been so exposed as false. The rest of the world sees Israel as conducting a land-grab and genocide and has accordingly worked through approved channels at the U.N. to stop this. The U.S. is not only ignoring international law, it is flouting it by supplying Israel with intelligence and weapons. The world sees our support of Ukraine against Russian aggression coupled with support of Israeli aggression against Palestine as the sheer hypocrisy it is. When the U.N. General Assembly votes 139-2 (the 2 being U.S. and Israel) to condemn the American economic embargo of Cuba, you wonder what kind of leadership or example America is setting.
The American Empire is also crumbling within from economic inequality: the rich are getting (much) richer while the poor are unhoused and a large portion of the population, based on election exit polls, feel they are getting left behind, by inflation, policies of the elites, or whoever is in charge. This is another post-1964 development, exemplified by the glorification of investment bankers, takeover artists and CEO’s, who started getting 10, 20, 30 times their former pay for doing the same job. Trump promises to exacerbate this trend. Whether he will have to pay for it at the polls is another question, for he is a master of evading accountability and never acknowledging the truth.
That brings us to one more chink in the Empire. Pre-’64, and even later, up to whenever Rupert Murdoch took over Fox News and the New York Post, Americans all worked from the same page of facts. We were, as the saying goes, entitled to our own opinions but not our own facts. That has drastically changed. If more people get their information from Elon Musk’s X as from the New York Times, there’s no way we can work together as a country, especially when one side’s only goals are amassing power and discrediting the opposition.
In short, it’s hard to say anymore what America stands for. In the past, it was our common values that kept us together, as we are a land of immigrants with different languages, cultures and beliefs. Donald Trump, whom we just elected in a landslide, has no values, just self-interest. What is left of “America”? What will happen to the world?

The one good thing about Trump’s commanding win is that it wasn’t close. We aren’t left to think, “if only this, or that.” Nothing Harris could have done would have dented the electorate’s feelings 1)that the economy (inflation) was in bad shape and Biden hadn’t fixed it, 2)we’re not ready for a woman of color to be our president, 3)I’m not doing as well as I want to and it must be the government’s fault, and 4)all this attention to Blacks, gays and trans is leaving me cold and out. The shift to the right was systemic, not incidental. Unlike Hillary’s loss in 2016, we all felt in our guts that this could happen, given Harris’s inability to pull ahead in the polls despite all her obvious advantage.
A corollary to this is the recognition that what we did pre-election was performative but without effect. The money we gave our candidates, the rallies we attended, were all about feeling good about ourselves. They didn’t affect the mood of the electorate, and that’s what decided the day. Will I still feel this way two or four years from now? Or will Trump’s actions and behavior force me to distance myself even more from current events and go for walks in the garden?