Donald Trump: The Symbol of the Decline and Fall of Just About Everything

I remember the phrase from my boyhood, listening to baseball games on the old wooden radio by my bed. A major hitter would be up and—bang!—he’d connect with the ball in a big-time fashion. The announcer in a rising voice would then say dramatically: “It’s going, going, gone!” It was a phrase connected to success of the first order. It was Duke Snider or Mickey Mantle hitting a homer. It was a winner all the way around the bases.

Today, though no one may say it anymore, somewhere deep inside my mind I can still hear it. But now, at least for me, it’s connected to another kind of hitter entirely and another kind of reality as well. I’m thinking, of course, about the president of these (increasingly dis-)United States of America, Donald J. Trump, and how, these days, his version of a going-going-gone homer is simply the going-going-gone part of it.

But no one reading this piece should be surprised by that. After all, in my own fashion, for the last 24 years here at TomDispatch, I’ve been recording the going-going-gone version of both this country and, as time has gone on, this planet.

This isn’t simply a moment of imperial decline, something all too common in the long story of humanity, but of a marked planetary decline as well.

And of course, I’ve lived through it all as well. I mean, imagine: I was born on July 20, 1944, less than 13 months before World War II ended in all-American success with the ominous use of two atomic bombs to obliterate the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (Going, going, gone!) And I grew up in the 1950s, years when the president of the United States, Dwight D. Eisenhower, had previously been nothing less than the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe in World War II and a five-star Army general. And it would be under his presidency that this country would end its military action in Korea with an armistice that left that land split in two. And that unsatisfying conclusion would prove to be but the first of what, over the decades to come, would be an almost endless series of unwinnable wars in countries ranging from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, to Afghanistan, Iraq, and in the era of the Global War on Terror, an unnerving percentage of the rest of this planet. (Going, going gone!)

We’re talking about the military that, in those same years, would establish an unparalleled 750 or more military bases across significant parts of planet Earth and would, while it was at it, create what was functionally a global navy and air force.

In those same decades, as literally millions of people died in all-American wars, we would, in response, pour ever more money into the institution that was all too inaptly—or do I mean ineptly?—called the Department of Defense. Of course, the question of whether it should actually have been called the Department of Offense simply never came up. And yet, despite three-quarters of a century of remarkable lack of success in its conflicts, in the years to come, the Pentagon, under Donald J. Trump, is likely to break quite a different kind of record when it comes to success. No, not in fighting wars, but in being funded by the American taxpayer in what, if any sort of perspective were available, would be seen as a staggeringly unbelievable fashion. After all, President Trump is now aiming for a 2026 “defense” budget that, with a rise of 13%, would break the trillion-dollar mark. And mind you, that sum wouldn’t even include the $175 billion he hopes to invest in “securing” our border with Mexico, or the funding for the rest of the national security bureaucracy.

And to set the stage for all of this, he even all too (in)appropriately launched a new American conflict, an air war on Yemen, a country that, I would bet, most Americans didn’t even know existed and certainly couldn’t locate on a global map. And given the American record on such matters since 1945, it was perhaps strangely on target of him recently to suddenly halt that bombing campaign, since you can count on one thing without even having access to the future: There was no way it would have proven successful and victory there would never have been at hand.

And consider it strange as well that, even in the decades of this country’s imperial success, when it helped form and support the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe, when it developed a vast network of military bases and military allies across the Pacific littoral from Japan to Australia and beyond, when it faced off against the Soviet Union on this planet (and did indeed, in the end, leave that imperial power in the dust of history), it was still, in war-fighting terms, a military disaster zone. In short, since its victory in World War II soon after my birth, this country has never again come close to winning a war.

And yet, here’s the strange thing, historically speaking: Those years of disastrous wars were also the years of American imperial greatness. Who, today, can even truly remember the moment that the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, its empire dissolving, while it fell into utter disarray, leaving this country, in imperial terms, standing distinctly alone on planet Earth, not an enemy or even a true opponent in sight? (Communist China was then still a modest power, though on the rise.)

Going Down the Trumpian Toilet

Thirty-four years later, how things have changed! (Yes, given those years, it seems to me that an exclamation point is anything but inappropriate!) And if you want to take in the true nature of that change, you have to look no further than one Donald J. Trump. How extraordinary that he has become the Dwight D. Eisenhower or John F. Kennedy of this strange moment of ours.

I think that someday, looking back, hard as that act may be even to imagine right now, Donald Trump will be seen as a—or perhaps the—symbol of the decline and fall of just about everything. Or looked at another way, what’s left of imperial America appears to be going down Trump’s toilet, while this country itself threatens to come apart at the seams. Meanwhile, America’s first billionaire president, who has surrounded himself with a bevy of other billionaires, continues to have the urge to profit personally from this increasingly strange world of ours. Of course, that should hardly be shocking on a planet where, in 2024, even before his second term in office, the cumulative wealth of billionaires was estimated to have grown by $2 trillion, or $5.7 billion a day, with the creation of an average of four new billionaires a week. And according to Oxfam, “In the U.S. alone, billionaire wealth increased by $1.4 trillion—or $3.9 billion per day—in 2024, and 74 more people became billionaires.”

And mind you, all of that was true even before (yes, that word should indeed be italicized!) billionaire Donald Trump reentered the Oval Office, while his sons continued to wildly circle the globe trying to make yet more money for themselves and him. And who wouldn’t agree that, in these last months, the second time around, he’s been a distinctly tarrific president? (Don’t you dare disagree or I’ll put a 10%,—“the new zero”—if not a 145% tariff on you personally!)

Oh, and the man who rode into office on a promise to save the American middle class has promisingly staffed his administration with at least 12 other billionaires. And oh (again!), I haven’t even mentioned the richest man on planet Earth yet, have I? Yes, Elon Musk has lent a distinctive hand—and what a hand!—to dismantling significant aspects of the U.S. government (but not, of course, the Pentagon!), throwing tens of thousands of people out of work, while ensuring that parts of the government that actually helped Americans and others on this planet of ours would no longer be functional. No less impressively, he did so at a genuine cost to himself. The fall in value of the stock of his increasingly unpopular car company, Tesla, has been little short of stunning, leaving him with a mere $300 billion or so (no, that is not a misprint!), which represents a loss of about $131 billion so far in 2025 alone.

The President from Hell

But what makes Donald Trump’s and Elon Musk’s moment and movement so different from any other moment or movement in our history is another reality (and it is a reality) entirely: This isn’t simply a moment of imperial decline, something all too common in the long story of humanity, but of a marked planetary decline as well.

Yes, the Earth itself is, it seems, going down that same imperial toilet. And unlike the decline of great powers, the decline of Planet Earth is likely to be devastating indeed for the rest of humanity. It’s hard even to believe, in fact, that Americans elected (twice, no less!) a man who has insisted that climate change is a “giant hoax” and, once in office, has seemed intently focused on increasing the levels of drilling for and the burning of oil and natural gas, even though it’s hardly news anymore that such acts will, over the years to come, help devastate this already overheating planet of ours—the last 10 years having already been the hottest on record—and everyone on it.

Storms, floods, and fires of a historic—or do I mean post-historic?—sort clearly lie in our future in a fashion that we humans have never experienced before. And it’s perfectly obvious that 78-year-old Donald Trump simply couldn’t give less of a damn. After all, he certainly won’t be here to experience the worst of it. He is, in short, not just a tariffic president but, in some futuristic sense, all too literally the president from hell.

And all of this should have been obvious enough from his first round in the Oval Office, so consider all too many of us Americans, if not us humans, to have some version of a Trumpian-style death wish, even if not for ourselves but for our children and grandchildren. In so many ways, in retrospect, the reelection of Donald Trump seems to represent—explain it as you will—the enactment of a human death wish on a scale almost beyond imagining.

And with that in mind, let me return to the threesome I began this piece with. Those three words may no longer be a baseball line at all—I wouldn’t know since I haven’t listened to a baseball game in years—but they still have a certain grim futuristic significance on our planet. So let me repeat them again as a kind of warning about where, if we’re not far more careful in our political choices, all too much of humanity is heading—thank you, Donald J. Trump!

Going, going, gone!

(Let’s truly hope not!)