Donald J. Trump has done more during the
first fourteen months of his second term as president to undermine, and indeed,
destroy the reputation, standing and integrity of the United States than any
other phenomenon in American history.
I make this statement advisedly, because
the US Civil War was indeed the greatest tragedy in American history. But it
was also one of the nation’s greatest triumphs, reuniting the country as one,
ending the scourge of slavery, reestablishing the rule of law, and, despite decades
of hardships and challenges that were to follow, moving the country gradually
toward ever greater equality and social order. Donald Trump has, on the
contrary, even backtracked on much of that progress, by systematically seeking
to turn the clock back to a pre-Civil Rights Era racist mentality—floating the elements
of “manifest destiny” and of replacement-theory politics—and to a time when
women were considered second-class citizens.
America's domestic essence and
international reputation have been founded, historically, not on “power”, but
on strength, the international strength of representing Western
democratic ideals and of standing against aggression, and the domestic values
of upholding free and fair elections, the strict rule of law, and the stability
of peaceful transfers of power from one administration to the next.
While Trump’s first term in office
tested all of these healthy and honorable traditions and principles to the
limit, the liberal democratic system managed to endure. And the system
prevailed despite scant effort on the part of the Republican Party, corrupted
and hijacked by the Trump phenomenon, which, even after the fact, purged the
most honorable of its members, who had demonstrated their devotion to political
rectitude, and to the values of nation over political affiliation.
Incomprehensibly re-elected, however, by
a slim popular margin in 2024, Trump has taken his second term as a mandate to
completely dismantle the constitutional system that he repeatedly assaulted
without final success during his first four years from 2016 to 2020. I have
often compared Trump to “a bull in a china shop” when it comes to the
Constitution, civil rights, the rule of law, and plain common decency. But in
his second term, this metaphor has fallen short. The past fourteen and a half
months have indeed been more like a prolonged and unabated category five
hurricane in terms of the devastation wrought by Trump in the areas of
constitutionality, democratic health, ethical traditions, civil rights,
American culture, and the international standing of the United States on the
domestic and global stage.
Since Day One of his second term
starting on January 20th, 2025, Trump has, with the aid of his
unqualified but sycophantic picks for key posts in the Department of Justice,
intelligence and law enforcement, systematically weaponized federal power
against any and all opposition to his absolute power, not merely blurring, but
basically obliterating the once sharp line between democracy and political
retribution. He has underscored this corruption of American justice by making
public attacks on judges, juries and the courts—including the Supreme
Court—thus diluting confidence in American judicial independence, once the
cornerstone of America’s credibility both at home and abroad.
The impact of this is a fast-growing
perception of the US as an increasingly authoritarian regime in which once
democratic institutions now serve power rather than constraining
it.
Along these lines, a hallmark of this
second term to date has been the gross use of government agencies for political
ends. Immigration enforcement—something nearly all sides agree must improve,
but which the majority of Americans agree must be carried out within the
confines of the rule of law—has been particularly affected, expanding in ways
that are blatantly illegal, unconstitutional, patently violent, and in frank
violation of civil rights granted to citizens and foreigners alike under the
Constitution.
“Immigration concerns” have also been
used by the second Trump administration as an excuse to literally invade major
cities and states governed by his political opponents, creating a personal army
of thousands of federally-immune government agents as a shock force to attempt
to intimidate dissent based on states’ rights. Congressional criticism—even
among a handful of members of Congress from Trump’s own party—point to
widespread concern over the Trump regime’s lawlessness and complete
indifference to civil rights.
Trump has also openly pressured or
publicly discredited both intelligence and law enforcement agencies whenever
their findings point to credible reports of wrongdoing on his part or on the
part of his friends and cronies, or when such findings conflict with his
political or personal goals. Hundreds of law enforcement and intelligence agents—three hundred in the FBI
alone—many of them highly experienced experts in investigation,
counter-terrorism, espionage, etc., have been unceremoniously sacked because of
previously having been involved in probes into the Epstein files, or in Jack
Smith’s inquiry into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and into his
attempts to manipulate and overturn the 2020 elections. And more than three
thousand prosecutors, investigators and staffers have been forced out of the
DOJ for similar reasons.
This last, the savaging of the DOJ and
federal law enforcement, has significantly weakened America’s ability to defend
itself against its enemies, both foreign and domestic. And Trump has doubled
down on debilitating the US by replacing some key officials in this area with individuals
who have no qualified experience whatsoever. The naming of Kash Patel to head
the FBI is a blatant enough example of placing highly trained agents under the
command of a clueless sycophant—as was the stint of former DHS Secretary Kristi
Noem.
But an even greater and almost ludicrous
example of this sort of surreally sycophantic restaffing of the State is that
of Thomas Fugate III, appointed to head the Center for Prevention Programs and
Partnerships (CP3)—a division of the Department of Homeland Security charged
with combating domestic terrorism and targeted violence.
The man Fugate replaced was Bill
Braniff. Braniff was an Army veteran with more than two decades of national
security experience. Prior to heading up CP3 during the second half of the
Biden administration and the first three months of the Trump regime, Braniff
had been director of the University of Maryland's National Consortium for the
Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism—in other words, a consummate
professional and expert. On leaving DHS, Braniff joined the Polarization and
Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at the American University.
Fugate, for his part, prior to his
appointment as the head of CP3, was working in 2022 as a cashier in a
supermarket, then later was a staffer in the far-right Heritage Foundation. His
only other qualification for the DHS appointment was apparently his being a
self-described “Trumplican”, and having volunteered as a GOP campaign
organizer.
All of this undermines the United
States’ reputation as a neutral rule-of-law state, and aligns it with the sort
of governments—Putin’s Russia and Orbán’s Hungary, for instance, as well as
tinpot dictatorships in third world nations—that the US has historically
criticized and condemned.
In line with all of this, both in his
first term, and, to an even greater extent, in his second, Trump has normalized
hate speech, while systematically dismantling through State action most of the progress made since the Civil Rights Era in
terms of diversity, equality and inclusion—positive values in modern civilized
society but perceived by the Trump regime as negative terms that undermine
MAGA’s most cherished white-supremacist principles (manifest destiny and the
myth of “reverse racism”). Trump’s rhetoric,
on the whole, is reckless, disdainful and inflammatory. But it is particularly
contemptuous when it comes to immigrants, political opponents, and
international institutions.
Add to that his most recent attack on
the Supreme Court for refusing to allow his regime to decide who, born on US
soil, can be a citizen and who can’t. The Fourteenth Amendment clearly states
that if you are born in the US, you are an American citizen, period. And that
was the interpretation, even of the three far-right justices Trump named to the
Court during his first term. Trump is now calling the three of them “stupid”,
and has suggested that if they are on
the Court thanks to him, they should be grateful and always rule in his
favor, no matter how outlandish the request might be. Someone should probably
tell him, perhaps, that justices are bound to rule in accordance with the
law, not in harmony with the
president. But then, who’s going to tell him? His lapdog sycophants in the DOJ?
Trump’s effect on political and social
rhetoric has been so all-pervasive that he has managed to normalize language
once considered a violation of democratic norms. He has persuaded his most
loyal followers that it is now okay to employ the racial slurs they had been
inhibited from using in good company by liberal democratic norms in the
post-Civil Right Era. He has made it okay in certain circles to sneer at
political correctness, to insult those one considers different, or as
representative of “the others”, to reject, offend and ostracize people who
failed to fit the framework of MAGA, and so on.
A recent example that pretty much says
it all was Trump’s comment on the death last month of Robert Mueller. When
learning of Mueller’s death at eighty-one, Trump could think of nothing more
proper to say than, “Good. I’m glad he’s dead.”
It is worthwhile recalling who Robert
Mueller was and why that makes Trump’s vile statement all the more egregious. Even
as far back as the late sixties, before he had reached his mid-twenties, Robert
Mueller was heroically serving his country. Born into privilege like Donald
Trump, Mueller, much to the contrary of Trump—who comes from a long line of
service-shirkers, and describes America’s dead heroes as “suckers and losers”—joined
the Marines after receiving a bachelor’s degree from Princeton and a
post-graduate degree in international relations from New York University.
It is worthwhile remembering that there
was still obligatory conscription during that war and that Donald Trump was
eligible for it, but managed to acquire four temporary deferments from serving,
and finally, a fifth permanent rejection which alleged he had bone spurs in his
heels that rendered him physically inept.
After completing Officer Candidate
School and being commissioned as a second lieutenant, Mueller went to the
Army’s Ranger School. Marine officers frequently trained with the Rangers for
experience leading long-range reconnaissance patrols—often search-and-destroy
missions with a high casualty rate. He was placed with a Marine combat company
in South Vietnam near enemy lines
It was on this first tour as a young
second lieutenant that Mueller won a Bronze Star for valor. It was on December
11, 1968, while leading a Marine rifle platoon on patrol in Quang Tri Province
that Mueller and his men fell victims to an ambush by Vietcong armed with
grenade-launchers, machine guns, mortars and small arms. The citation issued
with his Bronze Star said that he “personally led a fire team across the
fire-swept area terrain to recover a mortally wounded Marine,” while it commended
his “courage, aggressive initiative and unwavering devotion to duty at great
personal risk.” Four months later, he would win a Purple Heart for taking an
AK-47 assault rifle slug through the thigh while leading his platoon on a
mission to rescue US soldiers pinned down under another lethal Vietcong attack.
After leaving Vietnam, Mueller attended
the University of Virginia where he completed his law degree by 1973. Three
years later, he was already a federal prosecutor in San Francisco. And in a
meteoric rise of a few short years was chief prosecutor for the criminal
division of the Northern District of California.
By 1982, at age thirty-seven, Mueller
was in Boston prosecuting fraud, corruption, money-laundering and terrorism
cases. Mueller joined the Justice Department in Washington in 1989, and within
a year, would be chief of the criminal division, where he would grapple with
managing a hundred US Attorney offices and some two thousand federal
prosecutors, while serving as a nexus with the FBI.
Ironically enough, Mueller’s immediate
superior at the Justice Department was William Barr, with whom he would cross
paths again three decades later, when Barr was Trump’s attorney general and
Mueller was a special prosecutor investigating Russian interference in Trump’s
election.
Mueller would also oversee prosecution
of Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega, whose power stemmed in large part from
his long-term relationship with the CIA—one of those dictators immorally
supported by the US in its so-called war on communism in Latin America. Mueller
was investigating Noriega as a kingpin in cocaine trafficking to the US. He
would also head up the investigation into the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over
Lockerbie Scotland that killed two hundred fifty-nine people on board and
eleven people on the ground. The FBI had probed the case unsuccessfully for two
years, when Mueller used his authority as head of the criminal division to
break through the agency’s barriers to multi-agency investigations and brought
in the CIA, Britain’s MI5 and the Scottish police and got them all to share
their information. As a result, Mueller made use of a tip from Scottish
authorities to put the FBI on the trail of a Libyan intelligence officer who
had used his cover as security chief for the Libyan flag-carrier airline to
plant the bomb on the Pan Am plane. The bomber, Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, was indicted in 1991,
but it would take until 2001 to convict him.
That, 2001, was, paradoxically, the same
year that George W. Bush, following the nine-eleven Twin Towers attack, would
appoint Mueller to head the FBI. Mueller would serve in that post for the next
twelve years. And over the course of that time, he would turn the agency into
one of the most effective counter-terror organizations on earth. His tenure
would make him the second-longest-serving FBI director in history, only
outdistanced by FBI founder J. Edgar Hoover.
After his retirement from the FBI,
Mueller would again volunteer to serve his country at a time when Washington
was known as “the murder capital of the USA”. President Barack Obama’s Attorney
General Eric Holder, who had worked under Mueller at the DOJ, said Mueller
called him “out of the blue” and asked if he needed a murder prosecutor. Holder
asked Mueller if he wasn’t maybe “over-qualified” for a line prosecutor’s post,
but then said, “When can you start?”
Over the next three years, Mueller
successfully investigated and brought down dozens of killers, helping significantly
reduce the murder rate in the nation’s capital. During that time, he always
answered his own phone, with a simple, “Mueller, homicide.”
This is the American hero about whom the
current president could think of nothing better to say than, “Good, I’m glad
he’s dead.” And adding, “He can no longer hurt innocent people!” In typical
style, the “innocent people” Trump referred to was only one person: him. It was
Trump’s own DOJ that appointed Mueller as special counsel to investigate
alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election. Mueller, as
always, did his job thoroughly and effectively. The report that he handed to
Attorney General Bill Barr at the end of his probe concluded that while Trump
himself had committed no crime, there was indeed evidence that Russian
intelligence had interfered in the elections.
Barr, at Trump’s behest, smoothed this
over by suppressing the report and providing an interpretation in which he
dispelled any reports of collusion between Russia and the Trump camp. But Trump
never forgave Mueller for carrying out an honest and impartial investigation,
instead of engaging in a pro-Trump cover-up. In this second term, Trump has
gone to great pains to ensure that there is no one impartial and effective in
key positions in the government, surrounding himself with sycophants who are
willing to break the law and the Constitution to protect his interests.
In conclusion of this point, Trump’s
vile rhetoric and disdain for diversity, equality and inclusion—and the
language that goes with it—has not
merely emboldened his cultist followers to take his lead. It has also emboldened
other authoritarian leaders worldwide, who cite the United States as no longer
having moral authority to criticize repression or abuses against their own
citizens. Therefore, the US has lost its ability to influence other nations through
values rather than force.
Worse still, Trump has single-handedly
trashed America’s reputation as a reliable ally. It would be hard to exaggerate
the importance of this, since the full trust in us of our allies has been among
America’s greatest strategic assets since World War II.
Starting already in his first term,
Trump’s disparaging remarks regarding our closest Western allies, his cozy
relations with perceived enemies of the West and dictators in general, his
loose-lipped handling of shared intelligence and his transactional (extortive)
brand of “diplomacy” badly weakened
long-standing partnerships including NATO. And in the first year and three
months of his second term, the eighty-year-old Western NATO alliance has been
stretched to the breaking point. America’s erstwhile allies are now reluctant
to share intelligence with Washington and are studying contingencies for NATO
without the US, and, perhaps even, NATO with the US as its enemy and as a clear
and present threat.
Even if Americans manage to topple the
Trump regime, the damage he has done to our world standing will surely take
decades to heal. And that will only happen if a Trump-free Washington has the
humility to act proactively to get the West back on board with us.
Trump’s illegal war in Iran has only
underscored this disconnect, with Trump’s Secretary of State Marco Rubio
threatening to pull out of NATO because the alliance has refused to aid and
abet the Trump regime in its war of aggression against Iran—a supreme crime
against humanity under international law. Moreover, Trump’s lawless action has
caused Iran to shut down the Strait of Hormuz, effectively blocking worldwide
delivery of a fifth of the world’s oil.
And now Trump’s regime is telling our
one-time allies that the oil blockade is
not his problem. That it will be up to them to re-open Hormuz, since he seems
to have grown bored with his war and is planning to end it soon. This is
tantamount to tossing a live grenade into the midst of a group of friendly
acquaintances and then running away.
Trump’s abrupt unilateral military
actions without allied consultation and in violation of international law and
the UN Charter have, in short, underscored uncertainty about US decision-making.
Escalatory actions like airstrikes or other military interventions are being perceived
as authoritarian and impulsive rather than strategic, and, as such, an imminent
threat to world peace and prosperity.
Allies are, then increasingly hedging
their bets. They are building independent capabilities or turning to regional
arrangements, because they understand that if the Trump phenomenon could happen
twice in a decade in the US, with Congress doing nothing to rein in the chaos,
then any prior commitments the US has ever agreed to are now untenable.
These fears among our allies are further
underscored by the economic and institutional unpredictability that is rampant
under the Trump regime. Especially worthy of worldwide concern is how Trump has
abandoned every economic and trade norm ever upheld by the US. The perception
is of a demented leadership that is completely unpredictable and that, at any
time, can turn on its allies and trading partners like a mad dog or—more aptly,
perhaps, like a psychopath. Suddenly, our long-standing trading partners are
witnessing erratic policy shifts, onerous trade tariffs, economic coercion, and
apparently intentional creation of instability.
Add to this the undermining of normally
independent domestic agencies, such as the Federal Reserve and regulatory
agencies, and the US is garnering worldwide concern about its capriciously
politicized economic management. In the end, what this means is that global
investors are beginning to treat the US like a marginal and volatile State,
rather than as the once foundational system in the worldwide economy.
In global economics and diplomacy this
is sometimes referred to as the “concentration effect”. What this means is that
the Trump regime is not just seen as damaging because of its severity, but also
because of the concentration of its effects. Multiple institutional norms are
being challenged simultaneously, and the assault on them is not part of a
structured national policy, but the whims of a single despotic leader who is
going internally unchallenged. And the messaging in this sense is continuous
and global, since Trump is, perhaps, the most globally mediatic world leader in
history—with the possible exception of Adolf Hitler.
The end-result is that each action by
the Trump unipersonal regime has the global effect of reinforcing the
perception that the United States is no longer internally stable or externally
reliable.
Many will argue that the US has faced
crises before and has always prevailed “because we are the greatest nation on
earth.” But I submit—as do many other political analysts—that this time it is
different.
Never before has a crisis emerged so
directly from the presidency. Never before have the co-equal branches of
government simply sat on their hands and watched a president wreak havoc. (For
instance, Watergate was a major leadership crisis, but in that case, Richard
Nixon’s own party demanded his resignation en lieu of impeachment and
removal). Never, more than Trump, has a president and his administration
targeted so many democratic pillars simultaneously, nor have the other branches
permitted the Executive to get away with it. Never has the abuse of authority
been so blatant or as consistent over time, and never have the abuse and its
consequences been so domestically and internationally blatant, unbridled and
visible in real time.
Seen in this light, the first fourteen
months of the second stage of the Trump regime have been uniquely, historically
and, perhaps, permanently damaging to the reputation, standing and integrity of
the United States—more so than any other phenomenon in the nation’s history.
The eight million Americans who turned
out at more than three thousand No Kings demonstrations across the country and
the world recently gives me hope for the future. Still, I can’t help but ask
myself daily: When are we going to quit pretending that this is business as
usual, and demand, by the tens of millions, that our representatives remove
this criminal tyrant from office and take back our nation?
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