Or Living on a Dump-Truck (Oops, I Meant Trump) Planet
Honestly, I can’t believe I’m in this world of ours (or do I mean His?). Yes, this very one and no other!
Almost a quarter of a century after, in response to the 9/11 attacks, the U.S. launched its war in Afghanistan that would last a mere 20 years until Donald Trump prepared for and Joe Biden carried out a humiliating withdrawal of the last American troops there, the U.S. is back big time, dumber and more wildly destructive than ever.
Whew! That’s a lot of (terrible) history to get into a single sentence!
And so, here’s a TomDispatch question for you: What four-letter country, the first three of which are IRA, has the U.S. now been bombing? No, not Iraq! That war began in 2003 and ended a mere eight years later in 2011. And remind me, how did that work out? It’s Iran, of course.
And what a nightmare that is! By now, everyone who didn’t vote for Donald Trump (and even some who did) knows that he’s an all-American maniac. In his own striking fashion, the former “president of PEACE” has undoubtedly, even proudly, taken possession of the label: the most dangerous man on Earth. And believe me, on this planet of ours right now, that’s no small accomplishment. (Think Vladimir Putin for a start!)
And given that he has almost three years (3 years!!) to go in his presidency (if all goes well and he doesn’t nationalize the American electoral system and run for a distinctly unconstitutional and unprecedented third term in office), everything we’ve seen so far is undoubtedly just a prologue to a future from hell! (And yes, sad to say, at this point we are indeed in the second exclamation-point presidency of Donald J. Trump on an exclamation-point of a planet, itself going downhill all too fast.)
Of course, anyone — and, for that matter, any people — can make a mistake. And electing Donald Trump president the first time around might once have qualified as exactly that.
But no longer — not when, having just missed in 2020 with 46.9% of the vote, he won again in 2024 with 49.8% of American voters backing him.
Of course, at some level, we shouldn’t be shocked. For so many years, the United States was simply the most powerful country on Planet Earth, an imperial #1 of a sort that arguably hadn’t been seen in history. But sooner or later, all great imperial powers do go down. If you don’t believe me, just check any history book. That’s beyond predictable.
What’s been unpredictable is that the United States would begin going down quite so wildly and, as a first in history, that “our” president would distinctly try to take the planet itself down with him. So, here we are blasting the hell out of Iran and, of course, in the process, as all wars do, putting wildly more fossil fuels into the atmosphere. Modern war and preparations for them may, in fact, be the most carbon intensive activity on this ever warming planet of ours.
Of course, century after century, great powers have experienced decline, but seldom have their leaders been quite such a personification of imperial decline as Donald Trump. Yes, the self-proclaimed “president of PEACE,” who campaigned in 2024 on the promise that he’d “break the cycle of regime change,” is now distinctly the president of WAR, leaving the rest of us not in a Dump-Trump, but all too sadly in an increasingly dump-truck of a world.
The “Con Job” Presidency
If, once upon a time, you had told me about a world in which Donald Trump would be president of the United States (twice!), I would have thought you a genuine nut case. And worse yet, he has proven to be anything but alone in his madness. I mean, how could there possibly be a war in its fifth year right at the edge of the European heartland, another in Lebanon, a third in Iran (and mind you I’m not even mentioning Gaza), and a major civil war underway for endless years in Sudan on a planet that already seems to be going down the tubes in a big-time fashion? (And, mind you, I’m not even counting the never-ending American bombing of Somalia!)
How could all of that be happening on a planet already (all too literally) heating to the boiling point thanks to what’s come to be known as climate change (itself far too mild a term for what’s going on)? How could all of that be happening when it’s no secret that wars and militaries (even in peacetime) release staggering amounts of fossil fuels into the atmosphere — and my own country’s military tops them all? (And honestly, in this world of ours right now, it’s hard to write anything without exclamation points!!) As Nina Lakhani of the Guardian has reported, that military is “the world’s largest institutional greenhouse gas emitter” and “the largest single fossil fuel consumer in the U.S.”
You might wonder how that could be possible, when it’s become all too apparent that making war on each other, while a nightmare in itself, is also the worst imaginable way of making war on this planet of ours.
Honestly, how could we Americans have elected — not once, but (yes again!) twice — a president who rejects the very idea that this planet is beginning to broil from the burning of staggering levels of fossil fuels and has openly called climate change a “con job“? And worse yet, he remains deeply indebted to the fossil-fuel industry, which poured at least $96 million into his 2024 reelection campaign and an estimated $445 million into influencing the total election. He might indeed not have won the presidency without their donations, and now, undoubtedly as his thank-you to the industry, he’s doing everything he can to take our future away from us by, among other devastating things, trying to halt projects that spread non-fossil-fuel-producing solar and wind power. Truly, how could 49.8% of Americans have reelected a president who ran for office the third time (with a bluntness almost beyond imagining) on the all-too-incendiary campaign slogan “drill, baby, drill“?
A president of the United States, really?
Honestly, don’t you think that everything I’ve written so far reads like the world’s most unbelievable science fiction novel? And once upon a time, I can assure you (as a former editor in mainstream publishing), no publisher would have ever agreed to put out a book with a plot so pathetically unrealistic and, had it by some miracle — or rather ill omen — appeared, every imaginable reviewer would have panned it mercilessly and few readers would have thought to buy it.
In truth, if, once upon a time, some sci-fi writer had come up with such a plot, he (or she) would have been laughed out of the profession and off this planet. Donald Trump, president of the United States (twice!)? Give me a humongous break! How distinctly unrealistic could any author be in creating such a bizarre character as The Donald, no less coming up with a plot in which he would win the presidency not once, but twice?
And how about, on a planet where there may be no greater broiler than military operations, that very president deciding to launch a new war almost randomly against — yes! — Iran, which has already spread across the region (with, of course, a helping hand, or rather a panoply of bombs and missiles, from Israel), while creating a global oil crisis linked to the largely blocked Strait of Hormuz? I mean, imagine that! Or rather, no need to imagine it, since it’s our reality and Donald Trump is distinctly trying to create a dump-truck (rather than dump-Trump) world.
Living on Borrowed Time and Possibly the Wrong Planet
And so, here we are, all of us, already living through the worst imaginable version of science fiction with a literal madman as president, who seems distinctly intent on nothing less than doing in this planet and so all the rest of us, or at least all too many future us-es.
And under the circumstances, no one should be faintly shocked that 2023, 2024, and 2025 were the three hottest years in recorded history, while the El Niño weather pattern expected to emerge later this year is essentially guaranteed to drive global temperatures to new records in 2026 and 2027. And as Jonathan Watts of the Guardian recently reported, “Climate breakdown is shrinking the amount of time that people can safely go about their lives, according to a study [by scientists from the Nature Conservancy] that shows a third of the world’s population now resides in areas where heat severely limits activity.”
And just to emphasize how strange things truly are these days, imagine this: the country doing the most on this planet when it comes to putting some limits on climate change is — yes, of course, China. As a start, it’s now producing and selling solar panels, wind turbines, and other green energy-producing materials globally in a distinctly record fashion. It has also captured the electric vehicle (EV) market, lock, stock, and barrel, selling millions of those vehicles in more than 150 countries and territories, which should, of course, be truly commendable. And yet, to put all of that in a little Trumpian perspective, China still produces more greenhouse gases (mainly from burning coal) at this very moment than anyplace — yes, anyplace! — else on Planet Earth and an estimated 35% of the total. How beyond strange, beyond science fiction, beyond fantasy, beyond anything someone might once have imagined.
Of course, give him credit. At almost 80 years old, Donald Trump’s own level of energy is somewhat remarkable. And it’s also true that, when it comes to destroying our lives, climate change is just one of the areas he’s taken up with such alacrity. After all, we’re talking about the president who appointed vaccine skeptic (and that’s putting it politely) Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as his secretary of health and he’s been hard at work trying to ensure that Americans will get vaccinated ever less frequently and sicker ever more often. (Fortunately, a Massachusetts district judge only recently “blocked the government from implementing a series of decisions on vaccines made over the last year” by Kennedy and crew.)
I have to admit that, at almost 82 years old myself, having covered so much of this at TomDispatch for almost 25 (increasingly strange) years, I do have the feeling that I’m living not just on borrowed time (because of my age) but increasingly on the wrong planet. And for that reason — if you’ll excuse my repeating myself — I find it no less hard to believe that a near majority of Americans voted in 2024 for You Know Who a third time around.
So much that Trump and crew have done should be considered the political, environmental, and cultural equivalent of putting a gun to all our heads and pulling the trigger. In truth, his name should undoubtedly be changed from Donald J. Trump to Donald D. Trump — “d” for decline, of course. So, give the whole crew of them credit. Thanks to Trump, Kennedy, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, and all too many other strange characters, this country and this planet are both heading down in a remarkably distinctive fashion.
And it’s hard even to imagine that we still have almost three more years of Trumpiana ahead before — well, under the circumstances, who knows what? There can be no question that he and his crew are indeed hard at work trying to create a dump truck (rather than a dump Trump) version of this world of ours. Sigh…
Copyright 2026 Tom Engelhardt
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, and Ann Jones’s They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return from America’s Wars: The Untold Story.