By Philip Yeung
Trump is digging his own grave and dragging his country into it.
A little over a year after returning to the White House, Trump has left America friendless on the world stage. Even Canada, joined to the US at the hip, is openly decoupling.
Trump's tribalism treats international relations like a high-stakes boxing bout where he enters the ring as a knock-out artist, playing dirty, and hitting below the belt.
The Trump-ordered surgical abduction of the Venezuelan president leaves him convinced that all countries, friend or foe, will bend to his will. None of his neighbors are off-radar-- the distinction between allies and adversaries no longer exists. What matters is satisfying Trump's own appetite, as he wields the biggest stick and power asymmetry.
But he has seriously miscalculated. His Canadian counterpart is a study in contrast. Against Trump tantrums, Mark Carney is calm, cool and collected. He does not panic or beg. Instead, he has parachuted Canada out of US dependency by bonding with other middle powers like Australia and India, besides befriending America's strategic rival China.
Trump, a dangerously unstable character, is the only US president with a disease named after him, the notorious Trump Derangement Syndrome. In the US-Canada stand-off, an ice-cold chess player is pitted against a madman. Guess who has the fight IQ to win?
Trump's insanity is reaching dangerously pathological levels. Consider this litany of lawlessness: When the then prime minister of Switzerland spoke to Trump by phone, pleading with him to lower the crippling high tariffs for her small country, instead, Trump responded by hiking its tariffs from 30% to 39% just because he didn't like the way she talked. He said simply that she had rubbed him the wrong way. Weighty diplomatic decisions are dished out on a whim.
Bees produce honey, cows produce milk. What does Trump produce? Chaos and cruelty. That's what happens when you put a lunatic in charge of an empire, bristling with lethal weapons, military and economic.
Democracy is down the drain. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a US congresswoman and former vocal advocate for Trump, openly broke ranks with him by speaking out for women victims in the Epstein sex trafficking scandal. Overnight, she found herself on his hit list. With death threats against her and her son, she chose to resign to stay alive.
Next comes Republican senator Thomas Massie whose relationship with Trump has ruptured, again over the Epstein case. He so fears for his life that he tells the world beforehand that he has no intention of killing himself and that he is a strong swimmer, meaning that should he be found dead or drowned, it wouldn't be suicide, but political homicide. The dangers of disagreement with Trump are existential. People are openly questioning whether Epstein died by suicide or was he silenced and neutralized.
America has sunk to a new low.
Trump's irrational anti-immigrant measures have left the country without farm helpers. Many farmers in the southern states are forced to abandon their agricultural operations for lack of laborers.
His xenophobia carries a price that is being paid by American businesses.
Trump's dismantling of democracy is structural and systemic. His lawlessness knows no limits.
When his poll numbers plummet, his solution is to threaten to sue the New York Times for publishing "fake" unfavorable poll numbers. For the first time in US history, the Gallup Poll has suspended its publication of polls for fear of reprisal from a vindictive sitting president. America has crossed another low threshold.
This is a man with a rap sheet longer than his fat hairy arm--convicted of 34 counts of criminal offence, any of which would have torpedoed any political career.
His name appeared 38,000 times in over 5,000 of the three million documents released so far from the heavily redacted Epstein files. And yet, nothing happens. Trump, the sex offender, remains unscathed, while overseas, public figures from the former Prince Andrew and former ambassador Peter Mandelson to the royal family of Norway have not escaped the long arm of the law.
Fear of Trump's vendetta has kept him safe. Congress has been castrated.
America's only hope for salvation is the mid-terms which in vintage Trump fashion he has threatened to control. A serial failure with alarming cognitive decline, having bankrupted nearly every one of his business ventures is now running the mightiest empire in history, dictating the fate of humanity. America is edging over the cliff, and the global order is in utter chaos.
Far from making America great again, he has dragged America back into the gutter again, back when the native Indians were practically wiped out and their land stolen by predatory white invaders. Nasty, racial ugliness has returned to its roots in America.
But the US Supreme Court has just dealt Trump a fatal blow, ruling his tariffs illegal. In his outbursts, he calls the top justices "fools and unpatriotic", but he knows he is at the end of his tether. Karma is coming.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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