The Apocalyptic President

Once upon a time, if you had described Donald Trump’s America to me (the second time around), I would have thought you mad as Alice in Wonderland‘s proverbial hatter — or, if you were a fiction writer, I would have considered your plot so ludicrous that, after reading a few pages, I would undoubtedly have tossed your book in the trash.

And yet here we are, not once (yes, all of us can make a mistake once, can’t we?) but twice!

And the one thing you should take for granted is that Donald Trump in the White House a second time around is the all-too-literal personification of imperial decline. In fact, decline is hardly an adequate word for it. We just don’t happen to have another word or phrase that would describe him and his crew aptly enough in all their eerie strangeness. Yes, this country, even in the best of (imperial) times, certainly had its problems. (Remember the Vietnam War, for instance, or President “Tricky Dick” Nixon and the Watergate scandal.) Still, nothing was ever quite like this, was it? Never.

The First American King?

A literal Mad Hatter in command in Washington, D.C. Once upon a time, who would have believed it? In fact, if we could indeed travel into the past and I were able to take you back to 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed, ending the Cold War, while China had not yet faintly “risen,” the world of that moment might essentially have been considered American property, lock, stock, and proverbial barrel.

This planet could have been thought of then as the property of just one great power — my country, of course — that, in imperial terms, had essentially been left alone on planet Earth in a fashion that might never have happened before in the history of humanity. And if I had then been able to see into our future and had tried to fill you in on the Trumpian world we’re now living through a mere three decades later, you would have quite literally laughed me off the planet (and, believe me, that’s putting it politely).

Truly, who could have ever (ever!) imagined this bizarre Trumpian era of ours in which the joker (in the worst sense of the term) in the ultimate deck of cards is indeed sitting in the White House. Yes, unbelievably enough, he was elected a second time in 2024 by a “sweeping,” “landslide,” “historic” 49.7% of American voters. It’s true, not even 50% of us voted to make him the first American king a second time around.

And if that made you chuckle just a little, well, stop doing so right now! Yes, what happened to us in Trumpian terms was and remains genuinely absurd. Still, given this deeply endangered world of ours, it should be anything but funny. Just imagine for a moment, a president who, before entering the White House, was essentially known for only one thing: being the host of the TV show The Apprentice (“You’re fired!”). Once upon a time, if you had described the (ir)reality we’re now living through, you would have been laughed not just out of the room but off this planet. You would, in short, have been fired.

In fact, if what we’re now experiencing were a novel, it would be considered to have the most ludicrous plot imaginable and, a few pages in, you would undoubtedly have tossed it into — yes, again! — the trash. (Unfortunately, it’s not just you or me but this planet itself that Donald Trump now threatens to toss into that garbage pail.)

So here we are in February 2026 and, like it or not, we’re all apprentices to one Donald J. Trump — oops, sorry, one President Donald J. Trump. And the ongoing TV show he emcees these days from the White House is undoubtedly the wackiest one in our history, as he fires not just everyone but everything that rubs him the wrong way from the Kennedy Center (gone!) to the East Wing of the White House (now rubble) to the U.S. Agency for International Development (once upon a time…).

One way to think about all of this is to go back in time and imagine that, long, long ago, Isaac Asimov or Ray Bradbury wrote a science fiction novel with a distinctly bizarre premise: that, at some future moment, thanks to the endless burning of fossil fuels, we humans would essentially threaten to burn ourselves off planet Earth. And when the voters of the world’s largest democracy heard that such a thing might, sooner or later, actually happen to us, they would respond by freely electing a genuine madman — who ran his second candidacy in 2024 on the all-too-bluntly apocalyptic slogan “drill, baby, drill” — to “lead” us into a literal hell on earth. Now, of course, that “president” is insisting that he be given the largest iced island on this planet, Greenland, that, were all its ice to melt (as indeed is already beginning to happen), could send global sea levels up by 23 feet and quite literally drown this world’s coastal cities. Imagine that!

And now, try to imagine this: in 2026, such terrible fiction is, in fact, our reality and one thing is guaranteed (excuse the colons inside colons but this is a strange, strange world to try to sum up): it’s only going to get worse in the three years to come before Donald Trump’s presidency is officially ended, if, of course, it ever does end. (As he typically said at one point last year, “Based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So we’ll see what happens,” and he’s now talking about “nationalizing”  — think “Trumpifying” — our elections!)

Given him and everything that’s gone on so far in his second term in office, including the way he recently had Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard accompany FBI agents to an election voting hub in Fulton County, Georgia, where they “seized hundreds of boxes containing ballots and other documents related to the 2020 election,” I wouldn’t count on anything Trumpian ending according to plan. Whew! That was one long sentence!

The Declinist President

When I launched TomDispatch (or perhaps it launched me) in November 2001 in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on this country, if you had told me that almost a quarter of a century later, our all-American world would not only be in significantly worse shape but unimaginably (as in Trumpianly) so, I would, of course, have laughed you out of the room.

Donald Trump, president of the United States, not once but twice? Back then, it wouldn’t have worked even as a terrible science fiction story or a truly bad joke. Yes, along with George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, we certainly had some lousy presidents. But in the hundreds of years since 1789, nothing — not a single president — faintly like him (and, yes, in such a context, he does need to be italicized).

And yet here we indeed are. I can’t tell you how sad it makes me feel, after almost 25 years producing TomDispatch, to be on nothing better than Donald Trump’s version of planet Earth and to be handing this deeply unsettled, not to say embattled, world of ours off to my children and grandchildren. I mean, honestly, how could we have elected a president (twice!) who, among other nightmares, is doing everything he can to literally burn this planet down by endlessly promoting fossil fuels (including, of course, Venezuelan oil), while doing his damnedest to wipe out wind power or really any version of clean energy that might in any way come to our rescue.  (Thank heavens, he doesn’t control the whole planet and so, for the first time last year, wind and solar power generated more electricity in the European Union than did fossil fuels.)

It’s true, of course, that, in our history on this planet, we humans have had some genuine monsters as leaders, whether you’re thinking about Attila the Hun, Roman Emperor Caligula, Nazi horror Adolf Hitler, or the Soviet Union’s Joseph Stalin. But whatever else they did — and they were all true monsters — their goal was never to literally destroy this planet itself. Donald Trump’s way of joining humanity’s worst characters in our future history books (if, in that all too ominous future, they even exist) is, it seems, to lend a distinct hand in creating a literal global holocaust, even if in slow motion.

He is, in short, nothing less than the personification of an imperial power, once possibly the greatest of all time, and a planet, once possibly the most livable in our universe, both in grim and rapid decline. And imagine this, to put him in a strange perspective: the American people elected as president, twice, a man who, as a businessman, had either four or more likely six bankruptcies to his name, depending on how you care to count them. And count on this as well: by the time he’s done as president this second time around, he could well have (again depending on how you count) either five or seven of them on his record.

After all, he hasn’t hesitated to call global warming a “con,” “scam,” and “hoax,” claiming that “If you don’t get away from the green energy scam your country is going to fail.” In the process, he’s done just about everything in his power to promote fossil fuels, while trying to dismantle the creation of green energy, genuinely threatening (in his own strange fashion) to bankrupt not just this country but this planet. (Thank heavens, the courts so far have stopped him from destroying coastal wind power projects, though we don’t yet know how [his] Supreme Court will deal with such cases.)

It’s honestly strange (at least to me) that, while all of this is indeed reported in our media and Donald Trump is the eternal center of news attention, so little attention is paid to what he’s likely to mean for the future of humanity on this planet. Climate change, of course, seldom makes the sort of headlines and news that he creates day by day, hour by hour, no matter what he happens to be doing. And that’s doubly strange, because if he were a Stalin- or a Hitler-equivalent in another country, promoting the extinction of parts of humanity, it would certainly be headline news.

But while his words and acts, when it comes to turning this planet into a major heat zone, are certainly reported, they’re seldom the top of the news. They’re just another passing strangeness in the world of You Know Who. And that, under the circumstances, should seem strange indeed — or rather stranger than so much else that takes up our time these days.

Once upon a time, in another life and another world, if someone had told me about the planet I now inhabit (along with the rest of you), I don’t think I would have believed them. Donald Trump as president of the United States? You must be kidding (and it’s not even a good joke)! Our planet is melting in a climate broiler that we control and we’re not only not turning down the heat fast enough, but we Americans elected someone (twice!) determined to turn it up ever higher.  Honestly, who would have believed any of that once upon a time?

Not me, I can tell you that.  Even without climate change, Donald Trump’s presidency would have been an eye-poppingly strange experience. With climate change, however, he’s a nightmare beyond words — though, in a sense, he’s never beyond words. There isn’t a moment when he doesn’t want to say something to the rest of us, his apprentices, and be the center of attention for time immemorial. Yikes, I’m sweating!

This piece first appeared on TomDispatch.

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