How Donald Trump Helped My Life

Consider this my deeply felt thank you to Donald Trump. Only the other day, this ancient mariner (that’s me, of course!) turned 82 years old and, in another world, I would undoubtedly have retired long ago. But — much appreciated, Donald! — not with this president in the White House. After all, I don’t have to struggle (as once upon a time) to come up with subjects to write about. He’s a dream (in the sense of a nightmare, of course!) when it comes to that. And in the very year when I was to turn 82 (as I now have) and he had just turned 80, he went out of his way to ensure that I would be able to sail into the future with a wind (something of a storm actually) at my back by deciding, more or less out of the blue, to launch a war with Iran.

I mean, give him credit. At this point, considering this country’s history since World War II, you’d think that no American president would ever again launch a war on any country, no less on a more or less distinctly random land a mere 6,000 or so miles offshore of Washington, D.C.

And give him credit again, didn’t it feel familiar to you from the moment it began? A war launched by an American president in a distant country without even consulting Congress? I mean, it certainly should have!

Of course, once upon a time, he knew. He truly did. That’s why he promised American voters that, of all things, there would simply be no more such wars. “I’m not going to start wars, I’m going to stop wars” was the line he used then. Not with him in the White House! He swore to that, which is one reason so many Americans voted for him the third time around. He wasn’t going to turn out to be a typical president of our times. You know, the one who launches a war that, like just about all the wars this country has been involved in since World War II, would go on and on and end in anything but victory. As he said in 2023 about his first term in office, “ I was the only president in modern history who did not have any new wars.” (Okay, okay, there was that miserable little conflict that would indeed not end for so long in Syria, but it was nothing compared to other American wars of this era.)

And as he put it on the campaign trail in October 2024, “You don’t have to send your kids out to war, have your kid blown up for a country that you’ve never heard of and that doesn’t want anything to do with you anyway. But I will not send you to fight and die in a foolish, never-ending foreign war.”

From Korea to Vietnam, Afghanistan to Iraq, and beyond, the post-World War II United States has, I believe, been the first great imperial power never to actually win a significant war and so Trump’s response seemed all too appropriate. But explain it as you will, evidently no American president, not even Donald Trump, can learn anything from the last 80 or so years of our history. Who cares how obvious the lesson(s) might be?

It turns out that, however bizarrely different Donald J. Trump was from every president who ever preceded him in almost every way imaginable, he’s proven the same in one all too significant fashion. Whatever he may have promised, the second time around, he promptly launched the latest disastrous war that this country — it’s a guarantee — can’t possibly win, this one against Iran.

Hey, it should have brought back memories fast, given that its neighbor in the Middle East is — yes! — Iraq. And that should have brought to mind a memory or two about another Republican president, George W. Bush, who launched a war (similarly without a helping hand from Congress) claiming that its goal would be to disarm that country of “weapons of mass destruction” (nukes!) that it simply didn’t have. And that should certainly sound eerily familiar these days with a president focused on supposedly stopping Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, right?

Now that American soldiers are once again dying (in however modest numbers so far) in another war that can’t possibly end well and already seems, all too typically, to be going on and on and on, don’t you think that somebody should be reminding us about the wars that so disastrously preceded it and so giving us a distinct vision of where this one is likely to be heading, too?

After all, we already know that President Trump’s decision to loose American air power on Iran and the Iranian decision to closethe Strait of Hormuz and so cut off the distribution of perhaps 20% of the world’s oil and natural gas hasn’t proved to be enough and so it’s evidently only going to get worse. Just recently, after all, the Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen threatened to shut the Red Sea’s Bab el-Mandeb Strait, potentially reducing global oil supplies by another 7%, while the average price of regular gas in the United States has already leaped across the $4 a gallon mark again, even as a White House spokesperson insisted that “President Trump remains committed to unleashing American energy dominance, cutting costs, and putting more money back in the pockets of hardworking American families.”

Sure, Donald, unleash away! What could possibly go wrong?

And with all of the above and so much more in mind, let me offer my own personal thank you to “our” president. Yes, you, Donald J. Trump.

Honestly, what would I have done without you? You’ve made my distinctly ancient life so much easier, since everything you do, every bizarre act you engage in, every disaster you create, including another mad war, makes my life as an ancient substacker that much easier. You continue to be thoughtful enough to repeatedly ensure that I have another disastrous set of all-American acts to write about. And given your record so far, you leave me with a certain hope for my own aging future.

Honestly, as bad as George W. Bush and crew were, you’re a dream (in the sense, of course, of a nightmare) worse. At my age, I suspect that I needed a madman in the White House to keep on going. And since you’ve already provided just what I had to have, I now have a deep faith that you won’t stop being who you are anytime soon.

So, here’s my own little three-line thank-you poem, my bow to you, Donald J. Trump:

In translation, that means you, Donald J., ran for president, I tried to duck, and you ran all too wildly on. And that final “ran” should be considered to have been taken from “ransack,” since in a great American tradition, you seem deeply prepared to further ransack this planet of ours.

Here’s my only question at this moment: When, somehow or other, the Iran War finally ends, what country will be next? What about — just for old time’s sake — Afghanistan, or even Vietnam?

Tom Engelhardt is a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The United States of Fear as well as a history of the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. He is a fellow of the Nation Institute and runs TomDispatch.com. His latest book is Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.