Imagine this: a completely blank page confronting me in the age of Donald Trump. What in the world can I say, given you know (exactly) whom? Who else could fill it but you know (exactly) whom (and the “m” on that “who” is, of course, for our very own “monster” president).
Well, let me start with this: If I went back in time and tried to tell my parents or anyone else in that ancient world of my childhood and youth about a future Donald Trump presidency (and managed to explain — no small thing, believe me — who he would be and what he would do), there’s no question that I would have been laughed out of the room. I would have been considered a raving lunatic.
I’m talking, of course, about the president who started a war with Iran over nuclear weapons that country doesn’t have and only recently said, “They [the Iranians] can take out a city. Let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego. This is a very small price to pay, and it’s going to be over with very soon. It’s essentially almost over with.”
When it comes to those two California cities that voted for a Democrat for president last time around instead of You Know Exactly Who(m), well, sayonara. A very small price to pay indeed! And that’s “our” president making himself as plain as day — or do I mean as plain as night?
Once upon a time, such language from an American president would have been considered the most ludicrous version of science fiction imaginable. And yet here we are not in the future but in this very moment, the second time around, and there he is — and you know exactly who(m) I mean — suggesting that the Iranians might “take out” a major West Coast city or two and he wouldn’t weep a single tear. (Oh, and only recently Secretary of Defense [no, War!] Pete Hegseth withdrew American B-1 bombers from a base in England — yes, England! — for fear of an Iranian attack, a distinct retreat of the first order.) And here I still am at 82 years old, living in a moment that, once upon a time, would have been considered beyond unimaginable, and I’m not even thinking of AI.
Honestly, after all these years, I can hardly believe it! (And please, don’t even ask me what “it” is!)
To tell you the truth, in fact — and I swear that it is the truth and nothing but the truth — there’s just so much I don’t believe about this ever-stranger world of ours. You know, the very one we’re all living in. As I was writing this piece, for instance, the U.S. military just blew to smithereens the 72nd (supposedly drug-running) boat that it’s annihilated in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean since September 2025, and that includes the most recent of the (and it’s probably an undercount) 239 people killed — until, that is, the Trump crew destroys yet more such vessels (as they undoubtedly will, possibly even before this piece comes out). Admittedly, it could be worse. Donald Trump has yet to decide to shoot down airplanes or blow trains off their tracks, or blast cars off some suspicious highway, but don’t count on any of those not happening either, not in this ever-stranger world of ours.
What Goes Up Must Come Down
Of course, once upon a (distant) time, we never could have imagined any of this, not in a million years. Oh, wait! Let me offer one exception to that. There is, in fact, something in the Donald’s world that any of us would have recognized back then. I’m thinking of his recent TV campaign ad swearing that “America will never be a communist country.”
Yes, once upon a time in another universe, American politicians — Senator Joe McCarthy being the epitome of them — were indeed focused on commies (as they used to say) in a way that bore no relation to any reality in this country. Of course, back then, it still would have been inconceivable for an American president to spend your taxpayer dollars to put his own “anti-communist” (and, of course, wildly pro-Trump) campaign ads on television; no less, as the New York Times reported, personally instructing “his budget director to use taxpayer money for TV ads praising him and his presidency, setting in motion a $20 million contract that used funds from the Department of Homeland Security, according to people familiar with the matter.”
And yes, once upon a time, that would have been shocking even in the United States of America. But that, of course, was another universe. Today, in this strange, artificially unintelligent world of ours, it’s just a passing story and no big deal at all.
Of course, like me, Donald Trump grew up in a world where there was supposedly no greater danger than “the commies.” At that moment in the 1950s and early 1960s, that also meant the other superpower of that (long-gone) era, the Soviet Union. (China, although already a communist country, had yet to rise to superpower status or even, in its own fashion, to be fully noticed here until Secretary of State Henry Kissinger paid a surprise visit to it in 1971 and then, in 1972, President Richard Nixon traveled there himself and met communist leader Mao Zedong in person.)
Now, the latest Communist leader of that country, Xi Jinping, has flown directly to Washington, D.C. to put up with our all-too-mad president, while undoubtedly thanking the gods above that Donald Trump considers climate change a “con job“ and has left green power and the future (such as it may be) to the rising imperial power on planet Earth. In fact, while Trump has taken control of our tax dollars to create self-glorifying ads for the Trump brand of government, China has made the production of green energy it’s imperial brand (even as it also pours fossil fuels into the atmosphere in an unparalleled fashion)
Of course, all great powers rise and then (to repeat myself) fall in one fashion or another. Imperial decline is a given, even a distinctly repetitive part of human history. But there is certainly something new in Donald Trump’s version of falling or do I simply mean failing? In fact, I think I might add another “l” to that, too. He’s not just ensuring that imperial decline on this planet at this moment will be a failing but also a flailing operation (though, of course, you wouldn’t know it from him).
After all, he’s quite literally turning over the future without anything in return to a rising China, leaving it alone to exploit a new kind of power on this planet — green power, of course.
Meanwhile, not just Donald Trump’s world but ours, too, now seems to be flailing, failing, and falling all at once, and that, believe me, is no small thing and would, once upon a time (in another imperial universe), have been literally inconceivable.
And yet, here we are on a planet going down for all sorts of creatures, including us humans.
Ni hao ma (or, translated from Chinese: How are you)? And the answer, in the age of Donald Trump, himself the personification of decline, and a rising China on a falling Earth is: Not so good, thank you.
