What happens in the United States often feels more like a bad dream come true than the outcome of democratic politics.
If, say, 10 years ago someone suggested that a US president would one day sue the Internal Revenue Service for $10 billion (€8.6 billion) and direct his own state lawyers to settle his suit by creating a $1.8 billion “anti-weaponisation” fund to compensate a political cohort which attempted to use violence to overturn a presidential election then the idea would have been dismissed as ludicrous fantasy.
If that settlement also entailed a lifelong immunity for the president and his family from tax liabilities, everyone would have laughed.
Yet that is precisely what has happened. So grotesque and unspeakable is this looting of the public purse that even Republican Party members of Congress are beginning to mutiny. Whether the mutiny comes to much remains unclear. Republicans seem capable of swallowing anything proposed by Donald Trump.
A handful have shown signs of decency and patriotism by voicing dissent against Trump’s autocracy, but all dissidents are ruthlessly hunted down and have their political careers quashed by a combination of Trump invective and his PAC funds let loose on their electorate.
Trump’s notorious claim that he could stand on Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody without losing any voters is sadly true as far as Republican members of Congress are concerned.
When musical performers began to drop out from his gaudy birthday celebration planned for June, Trump dismissed their departure by claiming that the musical aspect of his celebration could be dispensed with. He commented that he was now “bigger than Elvis”. Inevitably, artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to produce grotesque images depicting a gross Trump in a sequinned Elvis suit open to his navel.
“The King” used to refer to the great Elvis Presley. Now Americans have the Idiot King.
All this could be dismissed as a bad dream if it weren’t for the sobering reality that this political monster is in charge of the most potent military force on the planet. In the last 16 months, Trump has all but destroyed the US’s standing in the world, abandoning US allies and threatening half the world with the use of US military might. Even Oman, acquiescent US ally, was threatened with bombing for doubting the efficacy of his Epic Fury military debacle.
Has Trump learned any lesson? Does he appreciate the error of his threat to annihilate Persian civilisation or understand that waging war involves more than air strikes? It’s questionable whether he grasps what Vladimir Putin certainly understands: that warfare without boots on the ground is meaningless and that massive military superiority on paper does not determine political outcomes.
Trump’s relationships with Putin and Binyamin Netanyahu have several common elements. Apart from the growing belief that he is subject to some form of kompromat, Trump appears incapable of laying down an ultimatum for either of them to heed or obey.
Does the US really believe that the Israeli government’s obliteration plan for a two-state solution to the Arab-Israel conflict makes sense? The extreme Zionist aim of expanding de facto control and ownership to southern Lebanon, southwestern Syria, the West Bank and the majority of the Gaza Strip is unfolding before our eyes.
We are not yet halfway through this term of Trump’s second presidency. Assuming that his friends in the US supreme court deny him a third term, there is little to show for either of his two terms as president: an AI share bubble; a monstrous tariff war; Immigration and Customs Enforcement concentration camps for migrants; stagnant employment; near-total collapse in international respect for the US; chaos in the Middle East; the weaponising of religion; conflict with the papacy; and utter failure to modernise crumbling US infrastructure.
Perhaps he regards success as something to be measured in the giant Ponzi scheme of Wall Street indices. Or the space rockets of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Or is the growth of cryptocurrency the sole evidence of the golden age promised by Trump at his second inauguration?
Does he think his engagement with Iran demonstrates the art of the deal? Or has Epic Fury has turned out to be Shakespeare’s tale of sound and fury signifying nothing – or much worse than nothing?
Trump now feigns indifference to possible outcomes of November’s midterm congressional elections. In Trump’s mind, the casino always wins. But how will he conduct himself without the support of both Houses of Congress? He may only become more erratic and volatile and he may not care whether he is succeeded by JD Vance or Marco Rubio or neither of them.
There will be a reckoning some day for the US and for the state of Israel. Tectonic plates of the international order are shifting. Trump is the US’s disgrace and the world’s calamity.