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[Un]Happy New Year
Trump Two Is a Formula for" Yes!" Hell on Earth
Honestly, as 2025 begins, isn't it finally time to reimagine American history? So, what do you think of this: George Trump, Abraham Trump, Ulysses S. Trump, Franklin D. Trump, Dwight D. Trump, John F. Trump, Lyndon B. Trump, and even Richard M. and George W. Trump. And yes, of course, on January 20th, Donald J. Trump (of all people) will once again be president of these distinctly (dis-)United States of America.
As Joe Biden hobbles into" well, if not the future, then some unknown past, HE looms over us, the political equivalent of a giant armed drone about to be back in the skies of our lives. Of all the Americans whom, once upon a time, I couldn't have dreamed of being in the White House, Donald J. Trump would have been at the top of my list. No longer, of course. Sometimes I even imagine calling my parents back from the dead and trying to explain President Trump (twice!) to them. They would be" well, flabbergasted is far too modest a word for it, even if, to put him in a context they would have understood, I had compared him to a nightmarish figure of their own time: Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy.
My mother was a political and theatrical caricaturist in the 1950s. Of all the drawings of hers I still have, the one that, grimly enough, I keep propped up near my desk in the room where I work -- call me a masochist, if you will -- is a caricature she did for the New York Post (in the pre-Murdoch days when it was still a liberal publication) of that grimmest of senators of her era, Joe McCarthy. He was the fellow who claimed that the State Department contained hundreds -- yes, hundreds! -- of communists. She drew that eerily smiling portrait in the spring of 1954 at the time of the Army-McCarthy hearings when he insisted that the U.S. military, too, was filled with commies and, in the process, essentially took himself down.
I was then nine years old and Senator McCarthy's face was quite literally the first one I ever saw on a black-and-white TV in my house after the Post hired my mom to draw those televised congressional hearings. On opening our front door and walking in from school on whatever spring day that was, the face on that new TV screen was" well, the political precursor to D.J.T., although McCarthy looked far more like the evil monster he was than The Donald does. (No yellow hair and burnished red face for him.)
And yes, he was indeed a monster (and not just an anti-communist maniac, but an antisemitic one, too). Here's the difference, though: he could indeed wound officials in Washington, as well as figures in the entertainment industry and elsewhere, destroying careers, but he was a senator and no more than that. In other words, he never truly entered the ultimate realms of American, not to speak of global, power.
Unlike Donald Trump, he was never chosen to be president, no less reelected to that powerful position in an era when, thanks in part to this country's Global War on Terror, whoever holds that office has become a far more powerful figure in the American political landscape. Senator McCarthy never had a significant hand in creating the national budget. He undoubtedly couldn't have imagined taking stances like insisting that this country should possess Greenland or repossess the Panama Canal, no less referring to Canada as "the 51st state" and its leader as "Governor Justin Trudeau," as You Know Who did only recently. He could never have ordered the U.S. military to do anything, no less potentially round up and deport masses of immigrants (though, had he been alive in 2017, he might at least have agreed with Donald Trump that a group of neo-Nazi and white nationalist protestors in Charlottesville, Virginia, included some "very fine people").
Strangely enough, however, they had more in common than just a certain grim similarity in style, belligerence, and subject matter. The two of them were also linked by a single adviser, one Roy Cohn, who helped them both find their all-too-aggressive footing in this ever stranger world of ours.
A New "Golden" Age
Now, of course, we're about to face the modern Joe McCarthy the third time around (counting, of course, his loss in 2020 that he's never stopped disputing). He will return to the White House on a planet that, in more than one sense, is all too literally going to hell in a handbasket. I mean, just imagine this: in the last election, 49.7% of American voters and a striking number of energy industry funders decided to send back to the Oval Office a man whose tagline was, above all else, "drill, baby, drill" -- a phrase that, in reality, should have been "heat, baby, heat," or "destroy, baby, destroy," in a world that's already been warming to the boiling point, with year after year of unprecedented high temperatures even when he wasn't in office. We're talking about a candidate who has openly sworn that, on Day One back in the White House, he will direct his government to do everything in its power to turn this planet into an all-too-literal hothouse.
So, expect a presidency focused -- to the extent that Donald Trump can truly focus on anything (except, of course, himself) -- on drilling, drilling, drilling for oil and natural gas, and so adding significantly more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere (and waters) of Planet Earth. Which means more wildfires, droughts, unprecedented storms, you name it. And that, of course, is just to begin to lay out the nightmare to come. And don't forget that, at least until (as predictably will happen) Trump turns on him, it looks like we'll have as co-president the richest person on earth, that potential future first trillionaire Elon Musk. We're talking, of course, about the fellow who only recently and all too symbolically gave his support to Germany's rising anti-immigrant neo-Nazi party, the Alternative fur Deutschland. ("Only the AfD can save Germany.")
Yes, Donald Trump is guaranteed to make this not only the hottest planet around but a planet of billionaires living in a new golden age (both of their wealth and of a world in flames).
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