What I Would Have to Say to Donald Trump

Photograph Source: The White House – Public Domain

Let me imagine that, at some future moment, I might be ushered into the presence of President Donald J. Trump and the question would then be: What in the world would I have to say to him? Keep in mind that this would be after he had renamed the former Lake America (once, of course, Lake Ontario) Lake Trump, the former Gulf of America (once, of course, the Gulf of Mexico) the Gulf of Trump, and the former Ocean America (once the Atlantic Ocean) Ocean Trump. (Okay, Ocean America hasn’t happened quite yet, but don’t for a moment think that it won’t, sooner or later.)

As a start, I would certainly want to say as politely as possible: “Just in case no one has told you yet, sir, you are a genuine self-aggrandizing maniac.”

And I have no doubt that he would smile back at me all too proudly.

And then, I might add that I still believed in Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico, not to speak of the Atlantic Ocean, and that I considered him a genuine madman for starting a war with Iran that, by definition (given American wars since World War II), he couldn’t possibly finish in any faintly successful fashion.

And I might next want to add that, once upon a time, nothing I ever imagined about this country, dismal as its politics could sometimes be, had faintly prepared me for him — and not, mind you, just for him to be elected president of the United States one time (itself a genuinely unbelievable phenomenon), but somehow yet again, eight years later, by 49.8% of voting Americans. Honestly, once upon a time, you couldn’t have made that up and, had any novelist written such a plot back then, the book would have been laughed off the shelves.

Let’s just hope that, by the time he has the urge to give himself an unprecedented third term in office in January 2029, everything will have been such a Trumpian nightmare that he’ll be laughed off the shelves himself. Take my word for it, it could happen to the president whose approval rating, at the very moment I was writing this, had already dropped to 38%. And of course, his name could then be changed to Donald Ontario.

Honestly, once upon a time, in another world, the scenario I just described — and I’m not even thinking now about that imagined third term, but the two thoroughly idiotic ones we’ve been living through — would have been as ridiculous, if nightmarish, a fantasy of the first order (or do I mean the second order, or for that matter the final order?) as anyone could previously have imagined. It wouldn’t even have been a reasonable plot for a thoroughly dystopian novel. And yet here we are.

Yes, 20 years ago, if you had suggested that all of us might someday be the apprentices of Donald J. Trump, that every one of us would be thoroughly Trumped, it wouldn’t even have been a bad joke, no less a possible reality of any sort.

Honestly, it would have been too ridiculous even to mention. It would have been literally — to call up a term from my childhood — out of the ballpark. Of course, speaking of ballparks, when I was a little kid rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team, if you had told me that, by the time I was 14, after 68 seasons in Brooklyn and a couple of recent world championships, they would depart for — yes! — Los Angeles, I would have thought you an idiot first class. And yet, of course, they did just that. And if you had told me that, almost 70 years later, the whole team would have visited Donald Trump — yes, him! — in the White House not once, but — yes, again!! — twice, I would have thought you mad as a hatter.

Similarly, if years ago, you had told me that I — and every other American — would functionally be apprentices to President (though not yet Emperor) Donald Trump, I would have known you were — yes! — out of the ballpark and as crazy as the proverbial loon (as in, of course, the word loonatic).

And yet, whether our world is now completely loony or just Looney Tunes, there he is, at this very moment, the second time around, creating a World Eeries (not Series) of chaos on this planet of ours from Iran to Ontario. And these days, who even knows if, in 2028, he’ll agree to leave the White House? He may, of course, but in our present world, it seems as if there’s all too little of a nightmarish nature that’s not possible.

In short, reality — or at least what passes for it these days — increasingly appears all too wildly ridiculous and madly unbelievable.

Still, taking all of that into account, Donald Trump — or rather President Trump (you must be kidding me!) — has given wildly ridiculous and madly unbelievable new meaning to so much in this ever-stranger world of ours. In some sense, even after all these years, he remains eerily indescribable. (Give it a try and see what I mean!) And of course, what makes his version of reality so unbearably crazed is that our world is going down around us, even if in slow motion. And you can’t say that he’s doing nothing about it either, since he’s clearly doing his damnedest to take this planet of ours down (or do I mean to heat it up?) ever faster, making him all too literally the definition of a world-destroying head of state. (Or perhaps, if you’ll excuse me for saying so, I’d prefer to call him — far more appropriately — an ass of state.)

Hey, if he can change the names of anything he wants, why can’t we? Why can’t we call him Donald Lump, or Donald Grump, or for that matter Donald Dump, or… well, it’s your turn now.

Put another way, just imagine that, in 2024, almost 50% of Americans voted in someone who, when it comes to the two ways humanity has created to destroy this planet, doesn’t believe the first one, climate change, even exists (”It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world“) and couldn’t be happier to feed ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere to make our global situation so much more perilous. And when it comes to the second one, he could hardly be more ominous. After all, he’s at least suggested that he might restart nuclear testing and expand this country’s already monstrous nuclear arsenal.

So, can he be thought of as the Mission (Un)Accomplished president? Well, when it comes to Iran, more than six months later, you bet, even though on April 7th, 38 days into his already failing war, he swore on Truth Social that “a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” And he later suggested he might destroy that country’s civilian infrastructure on what he termed “Power Plant Day and Bridge Day,” even implying that he might use nuclear weapons to do so.

And if you want a sign of how bad things could in the end become, consider that former Trump ally Tucker Carlson evidently now fears the president might indeed use nuclear weapons in his failing war with Iran. He only recently asked, in fact, “Why isn��t there an attempt to remove him from office, like, immediately?”

And yet, more than six months after his disastrous war on Iran began, here we are (again).

Still, let me be balanced in this piece and not claim that Donald Trump has accomplished nothing. Quite the opposite: he has accomplished his mission, just not in Iran but right here in the United States of America. After all, he did manage a total presidential first by tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a distinctly Trumpian dance hall (with a recent helping hand from five justices on the Supreme Court) and that’s no small thing, don’t you think? And mind you, that’s not faintly the end of it either. After all, the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts recently voted to inscribe “Restored and Renovated by President Donald J. Trump” on the building’s facade and what more could any president want?

So, here we are, distinctly in Donald Trump’s America on Donald Trump’s planet — both of which are undoubtedly to be renamed The United States of Trump and Planet Trump — and what could possibly go wrong?

This piece first appeared on Tom’s Substack.

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.