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America's Reputation Is In Ruins

It's said that it takes years, if not a lifetime, to build a good reputation and only one scandal or betrayal to destroy one's reputation. Since January 20, 2025, the Felon and his sycophants have destroyed America's global reputation and sent repeated messages that America cannot be trusted and that treaties mean nothing to the Felon and the hapless GOP where no profiles in courage will be found. Indeed, the Felon's attacks on Canada sound like a retreaded version of Putin's fairy tale that Ukraine was responsible for its own invasion by Russian troops. In less than two months the Felon has destroyed the world order that has maintained a fragile peace since the end of WWII save for the Vietnam and Afghanistan/Iraq debacles where ideologues and American hubris - sadly, our leaders never learn from history and too often believe America can do what others were unable to - cost tens of thousands of American lives and even more in those countries. With the Felon, hubris is off the charts and his sycophants and enablers put perceived personal advancement over all else, including morality and decency. Meanwhile, the GOP, the self-styled party of "family values" and support of traditional religious belief has shown itself to be the enemy of average American families and religion is used to bludgeon those deemed as "other."  A long column in the New York Times looks at America's ruined reputation and the damage being wrought. Here are highlights:

Many years ago, I asked a friend who had been hired as a senior foreign policy official what he’d learned in government that he didn’t know beforehand. He replied: “I used to think policy-making was 75 percent about relationships. Now I realize it’s 95 percent about relationships.”

It’s very hard to do big things alone. So competent leaders and nations rely on relationships built on shared values, shared history and shared trust. They construct coalitions to take on the big challenges of the age, including the biggest: whether the 21st century is going to be a Chinese century or another American century.

In that contest the Chinese have many advantages, but until recently America had the decisive one — we had more friends around the world. Unfortunately, over the last month and a half, America has smashed a lot of those relationships to smithereens.

President Trump does not seem to notice or care that if you betray people, or jerk them around, they will revile you. Over the last few weeks, the Europeans have gone from shock to bewilderment to revulsion. This period was for them what 9/11 was for us — the stripping away of illusions, the exposure of an existential threat. The Europeans have realized that America, the nation they thought was their friend, is actually a rogue superpower.

In Canada and Mexico you now win popularity by treating America as your foe. Over the next few years, I predict, Trump will cut a deal with China, doing to Taiwan some version of what he has already done to Ukraine — betray the little guy to suck up to the big guy. Nations across Asia will come to the same conclusion the Europeans have already reached: America is a Judas.

This is not just a Trump problem; America’s whole reputation is shot. I don’t care if Abraham Lincoln himself walked into the White House in 2029, no foreign leader can responsibly trust a nation that is perpetually four years away from electing another authoritarian nihilist.

So what’s going to happen?

NATO is over. Joe Biden spent four years defending the postwar liberal order. That order grew out of a specific historical experience: Isolationism after World War I led to the horrors of World War II; internationalism after World War II led to 80 years of superpower peace. . . . . The postwar order was a historic accomplishment, but it was a product of its time, and we are not going back to it.

The West is (temporarily) over. What we call “the West” is a centuries-long conversation — Socrates searching for truth, Rembrandt embodying compassion, Locke developing enlightenment liberalism, Francis Bacon pioneering the scientific method. This is our heritage. For all of our history America understood itself as the culmination of the great Western project.

The new civilizational struggle is between hard and soft. Don’t overthink this. Trump is not playing four-dimensional chess and trying to pry Russia from its alliance with China. American foreign policy is now oriented to whatever gets Trump’s hormones surging. He has a lifelong thing for manly virility. In the MAGA mind, Vladimir Putin codes as hard; Western Europe codes as soft. Elon Musk codes as hard; U.S.A.I.D. codes as soft. WWE is hard; universities are soft. Struggles for dominance are hard; alliances are soft.

Europe will either revive or become a museum. It’s possible Europe will become a low-fertility, low-innovation, slow-growth vacation destination for the world. But Europeans know that this is their moment to cut the security cord with America and revive their own might. Germany is increasing its borrowing capacity so it can build weapons. The former Italian prime minister Mario Draghi jolted the continent by arguing that market fragmentation was killing innovation in tech. Many conservatives are convinced that Europe is too secular and decadent to ever recover. Maybe. But Germany is a serious nation. France has an unsurpassed Civil Service. History has shown that the British people can be trusted when times are hard.

A new age of nuclear proliferation. As America withdraws its security umbrella, nations around the world, from Poland to even Japan, will conclude that they need nuclear weapons. What could go wrong?

China will fill the gap. As America betrays its friends, China will seek to make them. China’s special representative for European affairs to the E.U. recently called the Trump administration’s treatment of Europe “appalling.” He continued: “I believe European friends should reflect on this and compare the Trump administration’s policies with those of the Chinese government. In doing so, they will see that China’s diplomatic approach emphasizes peace, friendship, good will and win-win cooperation.”

[T]he reality is that when they are faced with two rogue superpowers — China and America — nations across Europe, Asia and Africa will have to hedge their bets and play both sides.

A global culture war. For years, the World Values Survey has shown that Western Europe and the blue parts of American are drifting toward a hyper-individualistic, postmodern culture that is farther and farther away from the more traditional communal cultures in other parts of the globe. That was bound eventually to produce political rifts. One of the reasons MAGA conservatives admire Putin is that they see him as an ally against their ultimate enemy — the ethnic studies program at Columbia.

A return to national greatness. History is not over. As the historian Robert Kagan points out, America oscillates between periods of isolationism and interventionism. . . . . Trumpian incompetence will provoke a counterreaction, which will prove to be an opportunity and rebirth. When that happens people will be ready to hear the truth that Trump will never understand — that when you turn America into a vast extortion machine, you will get some short-term wins as weaker powers bend to your gangsterism, but you will burn the relationships, at home and abroad, that are actually the source of America’s long-term might.

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The Trump Apologists Are Lying

Other than a campaign of self-enrichment and seemingly destroying America's position as leader of the free world and aiding Vladimir Putin, the Felon appears to have no long term strategic plan either domestically or internationally.  At home, chaos reigns across federal government agencies, Elon Mush has likely hacked the social security numbers and bank and health information for millions of Americans, and America seems headed for a Gild Age 2.0 with all of the abuses and wealth disparities of the late 1890's and first decade of the 20th century.  Abroad, long time allies have learned that they cannot trust or rely on America and in two short months Canadians have come to hate America and with good reason.  None of these actions and insults to allies further the Felon's promised agenda of bringing down consumer prices.  Indeed, the exact opposite will happen as a result of the tariff wars the Felon has unleashed against Mexico and Canada and now the European Union. Throw in the arbitrary ceasing of foreign aid and only America's enemies are benefitting. Much of the public is waking up to the train wreck overtaking the country, yet the Felon's accomplices and, of course the talking heads on Fox News, are working to gaslight the public and lying with great abandon.  Anything rather than have the public recognize the reality of the disaster befalling the nation.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the campaign of lies and untruths.  Here are excerpts:

The past few weeks have felt like a Cold War thriller in which an enemy agent somehow infiltrates the top of the United States government. Soldiers fighting for democracy have been abandoned to die in the field. The U.S. president vows to annex Canada, Greenland, and the Panama Canal. Long-established alliances are suddenly teetering. Economic bungling has pushed the country toward recession. The only beneficiaries of this bizarre series of MAGA outrages have been America’s geopolitical enemies.

Those of us who have reported for any length of time on the pro-Trump movement are called upon again and again to explain what is happening and why. We attend conferences, join television programs, and meet foreign reporters. And when we do, we find ourselves confronted with what I call the opioid dispenser.

The opioid dispenser might be a politician, a business leader, or an academic. Whatever their basis of authority, the opioid dispenser offers a message of reassurance: Yes, these recent actions are very provocative. But they are driven by serious strategic purposes. [Insert an imagined rationale here.]

I compare these bromides to opioids because they soothe immediate pain, but only at the risk of severe long-term harm. Chemical opioids work by blocking pain receptors in the individual brain. Similarly, these calming messages about Donald Trump work by dulling the collective mind.

At a conference on European security, the opioid dispenser may tell you that Trump is hostile to the European allies because they do not spend enough on defense.

If that were true, then you’d think that increasing defense spending would allay Trump’s hostility. Instead, the administration’s de facto chief operating officer, Elon Musk, publicly insulted Poland, America’s European ally with the most robust defense program on the continent, now funded to the level of almost 5 percent of GDP. A few days earlier, Trump’s vice president gave a television interview in which he mocked “random” countries that “have not fought a war in 30 to 40 years”—widely seen as a slighting reference to France and Britain (though he denied it). This came days after the United Kingdom announced the biggest, most sustained rise in defense spending since the end of the Cold War. (France had already committed, in 2023, to a near doubling of its defense spending over the subsequent seven years.) . . . . Whatever’s going on here, it is not about a wish for more allied defense spending.

Justifying Trump’s abject support of Russia, another opioid dispenser will explain the pro-Russia tilt as actually a grand strategy to counter China.

That sounds lofty. But the claim unravels upon contact with reality. For sure, an American president who wanted to counter the world’s second-largest economy would want to mobilize strong allies. But Trump has aggressively alienated allies, starting with America’s two immediate neighbors and its historical partners in Europe and the Pacific Rim. It’s not just that Trump wants Russia as an ally; he seems to want nobody else—except maybe Saudi Arabia and El Salvador.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration is not actually standing up to China at all forcefully. . . Trump’s ravaging of U.S. foreign-aid programs concedes major influence to China, especially in Africa. Musk is significantly vulnerable to Chinese economic pressure on his large business in that country. Trump himself has taken a huge sum from a Chinese investor for his crypto operations.

Trump’s enthusiasm for Russian President Vladimir Putin—and avidity for Russian money—dates back 20 years. . . . . Whatever explains the Trump-Putin bond, acclaiming it as a brilliant, Kissinger-like diplomatic pivot doesn’t pass the laugh test.

An opioid dispenser may try to explain Trump’s anti-Canada economic warfare as an anti-drug policy, a response to the flow of fentanyl south across the Canadian border.

Yet the fentanyl claim was almost immediately exposed as fiction. And if stopping a narcotics flow was the goal, why would the president demand annexation of Canada or parts of Canada? Trump aides have spoken of ejecting Canada from intelligence-sharing agreements, which again is not what you’d do if your goal were to improve cross-border drug enforcement.

To survive a dangerous environment requires accurate assessments of the predators on the prowl.

Inventing an alternative Trump—one more rational and less malignant than the actual Trump—may assuage anxiety. But only temporarily. The invention soon collapses under the burden of its own untruth, wasting time in which the victims of its fiction could have taken more effective action to protect themselves.

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America's Great Unraveling Is Underway

Like I suspect many others, I am witnessing what is happening to America with a mixture of shock, sadness, uncertainty, and outright fear as the Felon and his sycophantic and right-wing minions destroy federal agencies, upend decades old alliances, threaten the economy and basically life as we have known it all to pander to the Felon's ego, insecurities and thirst for revenge on anyone he deems as a treat or challenger.  Indeed, unless one is a white heterosexual male who embraces misogyny and feigned conservative "Christian" beliefs, you are not safe in the Felon's remade America.  Women, racial minorities, and members of the LGBT community are being erased from government websites and history.  In Texas, a bill is pending that would make identifying as transgender a felon carrying jail time and the Felon himself has posted an image of a pink triangle with a huge X over it, suggesting gays are a coming target. On the international stage, one time allies realize that America cannot be trusted in any context and the Felon is driving Canadians to outright hate America and with good reason. As a long editorial in the New York Times lays out, the nation appears to be on a track for self-destruction through the hands of a madman.  Here are highlights:

If you are confused by President Trump’s zigzagging strategies on Ukraine, tariffs, microchips or a host of other issues, it is not your fault. It’s his. What you are seeing is a president who ran for re-election to avoid criminal prosecution and to get revenge on people he falsely accused of stealing the 2020 election. He never had a coherent theory of the biggest trends in the world today and how to best align America with them to thrive in the 21st century. That is not why he ran.

And once he won, Trump brought back his old obsessions and grievances — with tariffs and Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky and Canada — and staffed his administration with an extraordinary number of fringe ideologues who met one overriding criterion: loyalty first and always to Trump and his whims over and above the Constitution, traditional values of American foreign policy or basic laws of economics.

The result is what you are seeing today: a crazy cocktail of on-again-off-again tariffs, on-again-off-again assistance for Ukraine, on-again-off-again cuts in government departments and programs both domestic and foreign — conflicting edicts all carried out by cabinet secretaries and staff members who are united by a fear of being tweeted about by Elon Musk or Trump should they deviate from whatever policy line emerged unfiltered in the last five minutes from our Dear Leader’s social media feed.

Four years of this will not work, folks.

Our markets will have a nervous breakdown from uncertainty, our entrepreneurs will have a nervous breakdown, our manufacturers will have a nervous breakdown, our investors — foreign and domestic — will have a nervous breakdown, our allies will have a nervous breakdown and we’re going to give the rest of the world a nervous breakdown.

You cannot run a country, you cannot be an American ally, you cannot run a business and you cannot be a long-term American trading partner when, in a short period, the U.S. president threatens Ukraine, threatens Russia, withdraws his threat to Russia, threatens huge tariffs on Mexico and Canada and postpones them — again — doubles tariffs on China and threatens to impose even more on Europe and Canada.

Top officials of our oldest allies say privately they fear that we are becoming not just unstable, but actually their enemy. The only person who gets treated with kid gloves is Putin, and America’s traditional friends are in shock.

But here is Trump’s biggest lie of all his big lies: He claims that he inherited an economy in ruins and that’s why he has to do all of these things. Nonsense. Joe Biden got a lot of things wrong, but by the end of his term, with the help of a wise Federal Reserve, the Biden economy was actually in pretty good shape and trending in the right direction. America certainly did not need global tariff shock therapy.

Corporate and household balance sheets were relatively healthy, oil prices were on the low side, unemployment was around only 4 percent, consumer spending was rising and G.D.P. growth was around 2 percent. We definitely needed to address the trade imbalance with China — Trump has been right about that all along — but that was really the only urgent agenda item, and we could have done that with targeted tariff increases on Beijing, coordinated with our allies doing the same, which is how you get Beijing to move.

Now economists fear that the profound uncertainty Trump is injecting into the economy could drive down interest rates for all the wrong reasons — because of so much investor uncertainty driving down growth, both here and abroad. Or we could get an even worse combination: the combination of stagnant growth and inflation (from so many tariffs) known as stagflation.

This is the uncertainty that cuts to the bone, the uncertainty that comes from seeing a world that you knew for 80 years being unraveled by the most powerful player — who doesn’t know what he is doing and is surrounded by bobbleheads.

The world has enjoyed an extraordinary period of economic growth and absence of great-power wars since 1945. Of course, it was not perfect, and there have been many troubled years and countries that lagged. But in the broad sweep of world history, these 80 years have been remarkably peaceful and prosperous for a lot of people, in a lot of places.

And the No. 1 reason that the world was the way it was, was because America was the way it was.

That America was summed up by two lines in John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address on Jan. 20, 1961: “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

Trump and his vacuous vice president, JD Vance, have completely turned Kennedy’s call on its head. The Trump-Vance version is: Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that today’s America will pay no price, bear no burden, incur no hardship, and it will abandon any friends and cuddle up to any foes in order to assure the Trump administration’s political survival — even if it means the abandonment of liberty wherever that be profitable or convenient for us.

When a country as central as America — one that has played the critical stabilizing role since 1945, acting through institutions like NATO, the World Health Organization, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization, and, yes, paying a bigger share than others to make the pie much bigger, which benefited us most because we had the biggest slice — when a country like ours suddenly departs from that role and becomes a predator on this system, watch out.

“Trump is an isolationist-imperialist,” Nahum Barnea, a columnist for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, remarked to me the other day. He wants all the benefits of imperialism, including your territory and your minerals, without sending any U.S. troops or paying any compensation.

I would call Trump’s foreign policy philosophy not “containment” or “engagement,” but “smash and grab.” Trump aspires to be a geopolitical shoplifter. He wants to stuff his pockets with Greenland, Panama, Canada and Gaza — just grab them off the shelves, without paying — and then run back to his American safe house. Our postwar allies have never seen this America before.

If Trump wants to take America on a 180-degree turn, he owes it to the country to have a coherent plan, based on sound economics and a team that represents the best and the brightest, not the most sycophantic and right-wing woke. And he owes us an explanation of exactly how purging professional staff from key bureaucracies . . . . is good for the country and not just him.

And most of — most of all — he owes every American, irrespective of party, some basic human decency.

Alas, though, that is not Trump. What Leon Wieseltier once said of Benjamin Netanyahu is doubly true of Trump: He is such a small man, in such a big time.

If it is the contrast with Kennedy’s inaugural speech that depresses me most today, it is Lincoln’s January 1838 speech to the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Ill., that haunts me most — particularly his warning that the only power that can destroy us is ourselves, by our abuse of our most cherished institutions, and by our abuse of one another. . . . . If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time or die by suicide.”

If those words don’t haunt you too, you’re not paying attention.

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Trump and DOGE Put Lives and Public Health At Risk

Yesterday a friend sent me a text asking me for information on the cuts to cancer research implemented by the Felon and his henchman, Elon Musk.   He was in a debate with MAGA cultists who seemingly only watch Fox News, a/k/a Faux News, who denied that such cuts had been made.  I sent him links to news reports on funding cuts and perhaps he convinced the Kool-Aid drinkers that yes indeed cancer research funding was cut.  However, the threats to countless lives and America's public health embodied by the Felon and DOGE's efforts to cut funding to governmental agencies - all to fund additional huge tax breaks for the super wealthy - extend far beyond cancer research. Not only do we now have a vaccine denier in charge of Health and Human Services, but funding that helps keep contagions on foreign shores from reaching America's shores has be slashed or eliminated entirely. Frighteningly, the Felon and Musk simply do not care that their actions are putting millions of Americans at risk.  I suspect that the Felon believes that only what he has called "shit hole countries" - translate to black, African nations - benefit from the programs being shuttered, yet nothing is further from the truth.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the damage being done and the danger it poses to American lives and health. Here are excerpts:

At Donald Trump’s first Cabinet meeting, late last month, Elon Musk sheepishly admitted that DOGE had “accidentally canceled very briefly” Ebola-prevention programs. After a nervous chuckle, he claimed that the oversight had been swiftly corrected. But it wasn’t. The truth is far more disturbing—this administration didn’t just pause a line item; it has actively dismantled the infrastructure the country relies on to detect and confront deadly pathogens.

For more than a decade, I have worked as a physician and public-health expert responding to infectious diseases around the world. In 2014, while treating Ebola patients in Guinea, I contracted and survived Ebola myself. I know how lethal Donald Trump’s assault on America’s outbreak preparedness could be. We are sure to regret it.

DOGE’s slash-and-burn campaign has hit everything from the NIH to the National Weather Service. The cuts to global health, however, are especially alarming. It’s unclear what Musk thought would happen when he fed the U.S. Agency for International Development “into the wood chipper,” as he proclaimed with gleeful indifference on X . . . . Ditto what Trump thought when he withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization and effectively muzzled the CDC. But the result has been that, in little more than a month, America has transformed itself from a preeminent global-health leader into an untrustworthy has-been. Undermining even one of these institutions would have posed a serious threat; gutting them all at once is an invitation for future outbreaks.

The fallout from these sweeping cuts is particularly evident when examining USAID, or what’s left of it. The agency’s tagline was “From the American people,” and perhaps the American people didn’t understand that it was also for them. Musk disparaged the agency outright—declaring it a “criminal organization.” The White House pointed to alleged wasteful spending, . . . . In decrying the agency’s downfall, many Democrats focused more on the importance of “soft power” foreign policy than on-the-ground impact. Yet much of USAID’s budget was devoted to addressing humanitarian and health crises abroad with the implicit goal of preventing these emergencies from reaching our own shores. (Explicitly, the goal was to “advance American security and prosperity.”) Americans are safer when instability and infectious threats are effectively managed on foreign lands.

USAID was also the primary funder of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, established in 2003 under George W. Bush. PEPFAR has saved more than 25 million lives and helped smother the global HIV pandemic. More than 20 million people—500,000 of them children—were receiving HIV treatment through the program when Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office pausing all foreign aid for 90 days. Secretary of State Marco Rubio promised that waivers would allow the life-saving work to continue, but few have materialized. . . . Without the support long provided by the program, thousands of people will likely die far younger than they would have with proper medical care. PEPFAR’s current authorization ends later this month; its future after that is unclear.

Similarly, USAID’s efforts to stop Ebola at its source are also now gone. USAID’s role in Ebola containment has long been essential. . . . . just days into Trump’s second term, Uganda reported another Ebola outbreak. This time, though, the foreign-aid freeze Trump had put in place meant that USAID was unable to supply the usual resources for transporting lab specimens or implementing airport screening. The day after Musk reassured the Cabinet that Ebola prevention had been swiftly restored, the State Department canceled crucial contact tracing and surveillance efforts for Uganda’s outbreak.

Moreover, the WHO may not have the capacity to do so for much longer. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order moving to withdraw from the WHO, accusing it of demanding “onerous payments from the United States.” In 2023, the U.S. contributed $481 million—an eighth of what Americans spend on professional dog-training services every year—to WHO’s operating budget. . . . . it is an organization we desperately need, and no real alternative exists. . . . .Its global network of laboratories to detect infectious threats—known as the Gremlin—relies heavily on U.S. support and is now at risk of closure. And even as its partnerships alongside U.S. colleagues have strengthened surveillance, containment, and readiness abroad, the WHO also helps us here at home. On the same day as Musk’s Ebola comments, the FDA canceled the meeting where experts decide next season’s flu-vaccine composition.

With USAID and WHO under siege, more responsibility for global disease detection and response would fall on the CDC. But the future of the world’s preeminent “disease detectives” is at risk as well. . . . . Whether the issue is cuts to USAID, defunding the WHO, or hobbling the CDC, the end result is the same: America is walking away from global health leadership, making the entire world less safe—including us.

Understand how this will work at a practical level: Until recently, countries had compelling reasons to report outbreaks, even if such transparency sometimes came with travel bans or other stigmatizing restrictions. Those sticks were often worth the carrots, namely USAID funding and CDC expertise that would appear and help quickly end outbreaks. Now, with no carrots on offer, why would any country submit to the stick? Future outbreaks may be reported too late or not at all—leaving America oblivious to emerging health crises. . . . . The number of Ebola outbreaks is escalating, and climate change will intensify the emergence and spread of known and potentially unknown microbes.

It is in America’s interest to reverse course immediately and rebuild the crucial infrastructure needed to detect and respond to outbreaks.

Americans believe that about 25 percent of the country’s budget is spent on foreign aid. In reality, the figure is 1 percent, or at least it was. USAID’s entire 2023 spending was $43 billion—a 20th of the U.S. defense budget and about what Musk’s enterprises have received in government funding. The CDC’s was even less, just $9 billion.

[W]ith startling speed, the country is turning its back on global health. In doing so, it is endangering other nations, and also itself. USAID’s account on X, once a digital chronicle of its achievements, is gone. When I search for it on my phone, I get an error message: “Something went wrong. Try again.” We must heed that warning. Musk and Trump have destroyed the shield that once protected America from the next global contagion. Deadly diseases don’t bother with borders; no wall will keep them out. If America stays the course, “Something went wrong” will become the epitaph of a great country, one that once led the world in global health preparedness. It will be deeply missed.

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Trump Is Nero While Washington Burns

In the short period of time that he has been back at the White House, the Felon and his co-president, Elon Mush have caused upheaval it home through the firing of federal employees attacks on federal agencies, his on again off again tariffs against Canada and Mexico which have roiled the stock market caused some industries to face backlash for Canadian boycotts of American goods, and his talk of a government shutdown and/or recession in 2025.  On the international stage, the Felon has acted as a vassal to Vladimir Putin and made it clear to decades old allies that America, at least with the Felon in the White House cannot be trusted.   Indeed, the Felon seemingly views himself as a king or emperor yet forgets that such rulers have not always met a good end: Charles I, Louis XVI, Nero, Caligula, and Nicholas II to name a few. Meanwhile, congressional Republicans continue to prostitute themselves to the Felon, forgetting that they themselves might in time find themselves expendable.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the chaos and how the international order has been torn asunder and America diminished in the process.  Here are highlights:

Europe is at a crucial juncture of its history. The American shield is slipping away, Ukraine risks being abandoned, and Russia is being strengthened. Washington has become the court of Nero: an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers, and a buffoon on ketamine tasked with purging the civil service.

This is a tragedy for the free world, but it’s first and foremost a tragedy for the United States. [President Donald] Trump’s message is that being his ally serves no purpose, because he will not defend you, he will impose more tariffs on you than on his enemies, and he will threaten to seize your territories, while supporting the dictators who invade you.

The king of the deal is showing that the art of the deal is lying prostrate. He thinks he will intimidate China by capitulating to Russian President Vladimir Putin, but China’s President Xi Jinping, faced with such wreckage, is undoubtedly accelerating his plans to invade Taiwan.

Never in history has a president of the United States surrendered to the enemy. Never has one supported an aggressor against an ally, issued so many illegal decrees, and sacked so many military leaders in one go. Never has one trampled on the American Constitution, while threatening to disregard judges who stand in his way, weaken countervailing powers, and take control of social media.

This is not a drift to illiberalism; this is the beginning of the seizure of democracy. Let us remember that it only took one month, three weeks, and two days to bring down the Weimar Republic and its constitution.

I have confidence in the solidity of American democracy, and the country is already protesting. But in one month, Trump has done more harm to America than in the four years of his last presidency. We were at war with a dictator; now we are fighting against a dictator supported by a traitor.

Eight days ago, at the very moment when Trump was patting French President Emmanuel Macron on the back at the White House, the United States voted at the United Nations with Russia and North Korea against the Europeans demanding the withdrawal of Russian troops.

Two days later, in the Oval Office, the draft-dodger was giving moral and strategic lessons to the Ukrainian president and war hero, Volodymyr Zelensky, before dismissing him like a stable boy, ordering him to submit or resign.

That night, he took another step into disgrace by halting the delivery of promised weapons. What should we do in the face of such betrayal? The answer is simple: Stand firm.

And above all: make no mistake. The defeat of Ukraine would be the defeat of Europe. The Baltic states, Georgia, and Moldova are already on the list. Putin’s goal is to return to the Yalta Agreement, where half the continent was ceded to Stalin.

The countries of the global South are waiting for the outcome of the conflict to decide whether they should continue to respect Europe, or whether they are now free to trample it.

What Putin wants is the end of the world order the United States and its allies established 80 years ago, in which the first principle was the prohibition of acquiring territory by force.

This idea is at the very foundation of the UN, where today Americans vote in favor of the aggressor and against the aggressed, because the Trumpian vision coincides with Putin’s: a return to spheres of influence, where great powers dictate the fate of small nations.

Greenland, Panama, and Canada are mine. Ukraine, the Baltics, and Eastern Europe are yours. Taiwan and the South China Sea are his.

At the Mar-a-Lago dinner parties of golf-playing oligarchs, this is called “diplomatic realism.”

We are therefore alone. But the narrative that Putin cannot be resisted is false. Contrary to Kremlin propaganda, Russia is doing poorly. In three years, the so-called second army in the world has managed to grab only crumbs from a country with about a quarter its population.

With interest rates at 21 percent, the collapse of foreign currency and gold reserves, and a demographic crisis, Russia is on the brink. The American lifeline to Putin is the biggest strategic mistake ever made during a war.

The shock is violent, but it has one virtue. The Europeans are coming out of denial. They understood in a single day in Munich that the survival of Ukraine and the future of Europe are in their hands, and that they have three imperatives.

Accelerate military aid to Ukraine to compensate for the American abandonment, so that Ukraine can hang on, and of course to secure its and Europe’s place at the negotiating table.

Second, demand that any agreement include the return of kidnapped children and prisoners, as well as absolute security guarantees. After Budapest, Georgia, and Minsk, we know what Putin’s agreements are worth. These guarantees require sufficient military force to prevent a new invasion.

Finally, and most urgently because it will take the longest, we must build that neglected European defense, which has relied on the American security umbrella since 1945 and which was shut down after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The task is Herculean, but history books will judge the leaders of today’s democratic Europe by its success or failure.

This will require massive investment to replenish the European Defense Fund beyond the Maastricht debt criteria, harmonize weapons and munitions systems, accelerate European Union membership for Ukraine, which now has the leading army in Europe, rethink the role and conditions of nuclear deterrence based on French and British capabilities, and relaunch missile-shield and satellite programs.

Europe can become a military power again only by becoming an industrial power again. But the real rearmament of Europe is its moral rearmament.

We must convince public opinion in the face of war weariness and fear, and above all in the face of Putin’s collaborators on the far right and far left.

They say they want peace. What neither they nor Trump says is that their peace is capitulation, the peace of defeat, the replacement of a de Gaullian Zelensky by a Ukrainian Pétain under Putin’s thumb.

The Trumpists are no longer at the height of glory. They control the executive branch, Congress, the Supreme Court, and social media. But in American history, the supporters of freedom have always won. They are starting to raise their heads.

The fate of Ukraine will be decided in the trenches, but it also depends on those who defend democracy in the United States, and here, on our ability to unite Europeans and find the means for our common defense, to make Europe the power it once was and hesitates to become again.

Our parents defeated fascism and communism at the cost of great sacrifice. The task of our generation is to defeat the totalitarianisms of the 21st century. Long live free Ukraine, long live democratic Europe.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

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America is Trapped in a Burning Tesla

Currently, America is trapped in the narcissism and megalomania of the Felon and his co-president, Elon Musk, both of whom believe they know everything and are incapable of seeing their own limitations.  Hence the reckless firing of thousands of federal workers - some of whom have had to be chased after and rehired - and on again off again tariffs that are roiling the economy.  Currently, the auto industry was given a temporary waiver on tariffs when industry leaders tried to make clear how devastating the consequences would be.  Meanwhile, Canadians are boycotting American goods and canceling travel plans to America, something that bodes ill for the liquor industry for one and tourism in general - in Tidewater Virginia, the loss of Canadian tourists could hit Williamsburg and Virginia Beach significantly.  .Most frightening is the reality that there appears no escape in sight as the Republican controlled Congress does nothing to assert itself against the Felon and cancels members' townhalls where constituents rage at them. Vladimir Putin must be laughing hysterically watching his asset - Krasnov - make a shambles of America's economy and the federal government's ability to operate.  Economist Paul Krugman looks at the mess with no apparent means of escape:

Just two days ago Steven Rattner published an article in the New York Times describing the mood among big-business leaders, which I would summarize as smug complacency. Donald Trump, they appeared to believe, was basically their guy, someone who would cut their taxes and remove those pesky environmental and financial regulations. He might be saying some crazy things about trade wars, appointing strange people to top policy positions and threatening our allies, but no need to take that stuff seriously.

Are they still feeling smug? Or are they starting to realize that Trump’s ignorance, irresponsibility and whiny belligerence weren’t an act?

Trump has just imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico that are substantially more extreme and damaging — to our own economy as well as theirs — than anything he suggested during the campaign. By explicitly linking his tariffs to an attack on Canada’s sovereignty — repeatedly referring to Canada’s leader as “Governor Trudeau” is both childish and deeply offensive — he has guaranteed that there will be large-scale retaliation.

I mean, it takes real effort to make Canadians fiercely anti-American, but Trump is pulling it off. And don’t imagine that Mexico, which the U.S. actually has invaded in the past, has failed to notice Trump administration threats of military action. You can expect large-scale retaliation from Mexico too.

Automobile production, which is deeply integrated across our northern and southern borders — there really isn’t a U.S. auto industry, there’s a North American industry operating in all three countries — will be especially hard hit.

One thing that really struck me from Rattner’s piece — something I’ve heard from other sources — is that big businessmen think Elon Musk is doing a good job. I guess this is one of those cases where power and privilege make you blind to things that are obvious to everyone else.

What those of us not cocooned in our corner offices see is that Musk let a bunch of Dunning-Kruger kids — too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent — loose on federal agencies, where they began firing workers without trying to understand what these workers do or why it might be important. These firings have been followed in several cases by desperate attempts to rehire the lost workers, who turn out to have been doing things like, um, securing the nation’s nuclear weapons.

Now, Musk’s DOGE claims that it has already saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, but it has provided no evidence to back those claims. . . . and DOGE has already retracted 5 of its 7 biggest claims about cost savings.

Imagine how a private business would react if it hired a supposed efficiency expert who quickly fired crucial employees while making grandiose claims about the money he’s saving, but kept releasing progress reports that were full of ludicrous errors. You wouldn’t keep him on; you’d have security escort him out of the building and immediately change all the locks.

Sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later, important things are going to break. It could be the U.S. Forest Service, where large job cuts have largely stalled the precautionary work normally undertaken before fire season gets fully underway, and could leave the service short-handed when it comes to fighting fires when they come. It could be air traffic control, where Musk appears set to hand over contracts to renew the system’s technology to … himself.

If forced to guess, however, I’d predict that the first big crack in federal services will come in Social Security. The Dunning-Kruger kids’ ignorance about how the federal government works appears to have been especially acute when it comes to the Social Security Administration. Their inability to understand SSA databases seems to have led to Musk’s false claim that tens of millions of dead people are receiving retirement checks. This claim has been thoroughly debunked, yet Musk is still making it, and Trump repeated it last night.

Most immediately, the key point is that the SSA was already understaffed before DOGE came marching in, and is now facing significant further job cuts. There is now a real concern that the agency will begin missing payments to some seniors for the first time in its history — which will be devastating for the many Americans who depend on Social Security for most of their income. Seniors wondering what happened to their payments might try to visit the local Social Security office — except DOGE is closing many of those offices. And good luck getting the overstretched agency on the phone.

I don’t know who first came up with this metaphor, but it seems to me that America is now trapped in a burning Tesla. If you don’t know this, the doors on Musk’s cars are designed to open electronically; if they have manual releases at all, they’re difficult to get at and use. As a result, there have been multiple instances of people burning alive inside Teslas when the engines catch fire.

Well, large parts of the U.S. economy and government appear to be on the verge of self-immolation. And given the combination of arrogance and ignorance shared by Musk and Trump, it’s hard to see how we get out.

Friday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Trump's Golden Age of Delusion and Chaos

The Felon's long winded speech, if one can call it that, on Tuesday put much of the lunacy of the Felon's agenda in focus: creating chaos at home and abroad while positioning America as a client state of Vladimir Putin.  The "speech was laced with outright lies - e.g., that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security payments - and the only policy initiatives are giving huge tax breaks to the super wealthy while slashing programs and agencies that benefit everyone else, and waging war on all things "woke."  Just as distasteful was seeing congressional Republicans applaud whatever the Felon said.  The Felon could have farted loudly and these self-prostituting individuals would have likely applauded. Meanwhile, the stock market is down, consumer prices are up, and uncertainty surrounds the economy.  The Felon's promised "golden age" is defined by delusion and chaos with of heavy dose of misogyny. With nothing positive economically flowing to the MAGA base other than supposedly "owning the libs" and a rewarmed version of Jim Crow, one has to wonder what it will take for cultists to realize they will be worse off under the glorious leader than they were during the Biden years.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at this age of chaos and insanity:

Six weeks and two days after returning to the Oval Office, Donald Trump headed back to the Capitol, the site of his very recent swearing-in ceremony, to declare victory—again and again and again. Over Joe Biden. Evil foreign gangs. Canada. In his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, Trump claimed that he had done more in his first wild weeks back in power, with his “swift and unrelenting action,” than any President ever, including George Washington.

A flood of words followed, so many that Trump, channelling his inner Fidel Castro, easily broke the modern record for a Presidential address to Congress: Bill Clinton’s one-hour-and-twenty-eight-minute stem-winder in 2000. And yet there was little news in it . . . . Trump made little effort to explain his disruptive moves to jettison America’s traditional alliances and assault the federal government at home, preferring instead to string together greatest hits from his campaign rallies and brickbats aimed at his predecessor, “the worst President in American history.” Much of what Trump said was inflammatory, radical, and dangerous. But it was also familiar, his by-now-standard mix of braggadocio and self-pity, partisan bile and patently absurd lies.

There’s no doubt that Trump, in just six weeks, has compiled a most unusual list of accomplishments to boast about—much of it a result of allowing the world’s richest man to take a chainsaw to the federal government, cutting hundreds of thousands of federal jobs and unilaterally shutting down federal programs and contracts worth billions of dollars in defiance of Congress. The lawless rampage of the second Trump Administration has already touched everything from rangers at America’s treasured national parks to the very pillars of the decades-old transatlantic alliance.

But you wouldn’t have known it from hearing Trump wind his way through nearly a hundred minutes of mostly standard-issue Fox News culture-war talking points and alpha-male American exceptionalism. (Sample: “Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It’s gone. It’s gone,” he said. “Don’t we feel better?”)

Trump’s only major legislative proposal in his second term is to make permanent the tax cuts that Republicans in Congress passed during his first term; his big reveals in the speech were an announcement of a planned “Office of Shipbuilding” in the White House and a pledge to balance the federal budget, which literally no one thinks can be redeemed.

No amount of performative distraction, though, could erase the sense of the world in a state of Trump-induced chaos, whether he chose to mention it or not. The day of the speech, after all, had begun with a Trump-prompted market plunge as his long-threatened twenty-five-per-cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect. In the morning before Trump went to Capitol Hill, the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, made a dramatic televised appeal, “directly to the American people.” “We don’t want this,” Trudeau said. “We want to work with you as a friend and ally. We don’t want to see you hurt, either. But your government has chosen to do this to you.”

Trudeau’s plea captured a bit of the bewilderment of the moment—how is it that one man acting alone could upend so much in the world? And just why, exactly, has Trump decided to turn Canada from America’s best friend to its enemy? . . . . “At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”

Trump can’t and he won’t. The remarkable thing, as Tuesday’s speech showed, is that he doesn’t even seem to think he needs to.

In the speech itself, however, Trump waxed almost poetic about the beauties of the tariff as a tool of national power. “Tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs,” Trump said. “They are about protecting the soul of our country.” Rather than foreshadow an imminent deal to end the standoff with America’s two neighbors, the President warned his supporters to brace for “a little bit of an adjustment period” and, later, “a little disturbance,” which was as close as he came to acknowledging the threat of spiking prices and crashing stocks that economists have warned about. In fact, Trump said he was doubling down on tariffs, promising that on April 2nd, reciprocal tariffs would go into effect on every country in the world that imposes any duties on American goods. So much for Wall Street’s conventional wisdom.

As for the geopolitical consequences of alienating America’s allies, abandoning Ukraine  and pivoting U.S. foreign policy to a decidedly Putin-esque view of the world, Trump hardly mentioned it. . . . . It was one of those tree-falls-in-a-forest moments with Trump; if he blows up the liberal international order but doesn’t explain why America is now on Russia’s side, how do you know if it happened at all?

Even before the gut punches of the past few days, Trump was already in negative territory with the public. According to FiveThirtyEight, he had a net negative favorability rating of close to two per cent as of today—worse than any other President of our lifetime at this point in his term, except for Trump’s own first term, when he was already six points under water, as the pollsters put it, on this day in March of 2017.

[T]he scene of the night came even before Trump started talking, as he walked down the aisle and was, briefly, confronted by a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico, Melanie Stansbury, wielding a small, hand-lettered sign. “This is Not Normal,” it said. Almost as soon as she flashed it, a Republican congressman from Texas, Lance Gooden, ripped the sign out of her hands and threw it in the air. Call it the Trump era’s new normal, where members of Congress fight like toddlers on the House floor while Putin gloats over the greatest self-own in modern history. It’s a golden age, of bunk.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Trump Is About to Tank the Economy

The Felon promised those who foolishly voted for him either out of ignorance or based on his appeals to their hatreds and prejudices that he would bring a golden age to the nation and lower prices.  Like everything else that comes from the Felon's mouth, so far these promises were, surprise, surprise just more lies.  Currently, the stock market is down, consumer prices are rising, residential mortgage rates remain relatively high, and tariffs and the Felon's international bullying are creating economic instability and uncertainty - things corporations and investors strongly dislike.  As a result, some are expecting the country to slide into recession and those who either deliberately or disingenuously whined about gas prices and grocery prices under Biden are seeing none of the promised relief.  Given the Felon's speech last night that seemed aimed at entertaining and thrill the MAGA base contained little to give hope and confidence to the two thirds of voters who did not vote for him (including those who did not bother to vote at all) were given little to encourage them. One has to wonder at what the Felon views as his end game politically if the economy tanks - or does he plan on fixing the 2026 mid-terms.  A piece in Politico looks at the economic issues:

Investors and consumers expected President Donald Trump to be a pro-business billionaire. What they got instead was Tariff Man.

As Trump was preparing for his second term in office, stocks were soaring, consumers were buoyant and economists were feeling optimistic about the year ahead, their hopes fed by potential pro-growth policies like tax cuts and deregulation.

Fast forward to now, when Trump has imposed 25 percent duties on imports from Canada and Mexico and increased existing tariffs on China. Americans have gotten gloomier about what tariffs might mean for their wallets, consumer surveys show. The odds of a recession have risen. And stocks are roughly where they stood on Election Day, facing a punishing rout as Trump’s new tariffs took effect and largely erasing the gains since he took office.

Everyone should have seen this coming. Trump often talked about tariffs on the campaign trail. He also threatened tariffs after he was elected. Then, he threatened more tariffs after he was sworn in. And yet, investors — like everyone else — weren’t sure how seriously to take those warnings until this week.

“They’re believing him more now,” said Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economic research at Renaissance Macro Research. “He finally shot the hostage.”

The U.S. economy was not entirely out of the inflation woods when Trump took office, but steady consumer spending and a low unemployment rate normally provide a healthy buffer against smaller economic shocks.

But throwing new tariffs on top of broader policy uncertainty and potential economic ripple effects from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will mean a hit to growth. The question is how large of a hit it will ultimately be.

“People who would never even think about recession now suddenly have to consider it,” said Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz, the parent company of asset management giant PIMCO. “It’s been an incredible transformation in the last four weeks.”

Essentially, Trump, who seems to care about economic stats and the stock market more than almost any other barometer of success, may be knee-capping his own record.

Of course, administration officials argue that’s not the case. Though Trump told reporters in early February that Americans could feel “some pain” from the trade wars, he and his advisers have argued tariffs aren’t a barrier to growth.

But some level of slowdown is essentially guaranteed. Even in Trump’s first term, when tariffs he imposed were much smaller in scope, business investment suffered and the manufacturing sector fell into contraction, prompting the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in late 2019 amid concern for slowing growth.

This time around, the additional tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China alone could shave a percentage point off of GDP growth, according to Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served in economic roles under both Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

That estimate is based on the “just-pay-it” cost that assumes trade flows stay the same and companies merely pay the tariff . . . though there could be less damage if companies absorb the higher import costs, or there could be more if some firms decide to stop producing in certain countries altogether.

The trade actions so far could take a huge bite out of consumer spending, which is the main engine of growth. . . . . “There’s a quite significant tariff escalation that seems to be built in in early April,” and the scope of those tariffs could “clearly threaten a recession,” Setser said.

Now, Trump’s tariffs will cause a dilemma for Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who has kept borrowing costs at elevated levels in an attempt to bring inflation to heel but has also committed to trying to keep the economic expansion going. If Trump doesn’t reverse course soon, economic activity will likely weaken, putting pressure on the Fed to lower rates to provide relief to the economy even if tariffs push up prices faster and reignite inflation fears.

Renaissance Macro’s Dutta told me it’s telling that Trump still followed through even though markets were shaky before he committed to tariffing Mexico and Canada.  . . . . Trump’s financial pain tolerance is probably higher than we all thought. Adjust your expectations accordingly.