Goddamn Trump Doing His Damnedest to Take Us All Down With Him

Here’s the truth of it: after all these years, today I don’t know what to write about.

I mean, in this ever-stranger world of ours, where even to start?

Oh, wait, give me a second and I’ll be right back! I don’t want to miss the latest ads featuring our president, paid for with millions of our tax dollars. It’s obviously important to check them out since, as he told us recently, “I’m not promoting myself because I’m not running for office. I’m promoting the country.” And who wouldn’t want him to reassure us about the state of this fair land of ours?

As he put it in one of those ads, “America will never be a communist country.” Whew! Who among us wasn’t worried about that!

Oops, and here I am again! It certainly seems as if my country (though, in truth, it doesn’t exactly feel like mine anymore) is now, to use a classic phrase, distinctly up shit’s creek without a paddle -- unless you consider Donald Trump a paddle. If so, there’s little question, of course, that he’s paddling us all to hell and back. And mind you, as I was writing this, the latest polls of voters for the upcoming November elections suggested that I wasn’t alone in thinking such thoughts. A surprising number of Americans, even ones who once voted for him (yes, him!), are now clearly worried that “our” president has put us on that very pathway to hell and, worse yet, the “and back” in that phrase (”to hell and back”) might no longer apply to this all-American world of ours.

Even more strikingly, we are evidently on a planet that, in terms of habitability -- from the historic (or do I mean ahistorical?) El Niño now developing in the Pacific Ocean to heat, drought, fire, you name it -- seems to be going down, down, down, again without a paddle in sight. We are, of course, living in an ever-hotter new world (and not faintly in the ancient all-American sense that the phrase “new world” once had). After all, with record seasonal heat from Europe to North America and distinctly beyond, we humans (not to speak of alligators, elephants, penguins, and turtles) are clearly living on a different planet in a fashion that should seem all too devastating to so many more of us than it evidently yet does.

Just consider it good luck that you and I aren’t polar bears living in a distinctly (yes, that word again!) heating Arctic -- its sea ice having “shrunk by nearly half a million square kilometers per decade since 1979, equivalent to losing an area the size of Spain every 10 years.” In fact, congratulate yourself if you’re not living in the Swiss Alps, where glaciers have lost nearly one-fifth of their volume over -- no, not the past half-century but the last five years! -- and between July and September of this year alone, around an additional 2.2 trillion liters of water. Oh, and it’s not just on land either. After all, “more than 90% of emperor penguin colonies could be near extinction by 2100 if sea ice loss persists at its current rate.”

Of course, in such a world, it won’t necessarily just be animals potentially going extinct but, perhaps somewhere down the line, we humans, too. (Okay, you’re right! We are indeed “animals.” I certainly didn’t mean to argue with you about that!)

Donald Trump Is Doing His Damnedest to Take Us All Down with Him

Although all of what I cited above represents the latest news and figures I could find, none of it should really surprise us. After all, it shouldn’t have been hard to learn that such a world was on the way, with one record year of heat succeeding another, and that far worse is clearly still to come. And yet, imagine that, somehow, in 2024, in a world already setting heat records globally, the American people elected a president -- for the second time, no less -- who refuses even to admit that anything whatsoever climate-related is happening on this planet. (I was tempted to write “of ours,” but it really isn’t anymore, is it?). He, of course, made it all too clear during that election campaign and thereafter that he considered climate change a “con job.” (Someday, he himself will undoubtedly be known as the con-job president.)

We’re talking about an 80-year-old guy who’s clearly starting to lose it (and given that I’m referring to Donald J. Trump, who even knows quite what that “it” means). In the process, he’s quite literally doing his -- yes, what an appropriate world under the circumstances! -- damnedest to take us all down with him.

Worse yet, in the midst of what should be the greatest crisis in human history, we -- in particular Donald Trump (Iran), Vladimir Putin (Ukraine), and Benjamin Netanyahu (Gaza and Southern Lebanon, not to speak of Iran, too), and of course local leaders from Myanmar to Sudan to Somalia (again with a helping hand from Donald Trump) -- seem to be doing our damnedest to make things so much worse, since war pours fossil fuels into the atmosphere in a stunning fashion.

And keep in mind that Vladimir Putin, the climate-change-averse leader of Russia, has now begun threatening to turn to that other method of global destruction humanity possesses for the first time since my country dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 to end World War II. I’m thinking about nuclear weapons, of course, to salvage (or do I mean savage?) his war in Ukraine. (Oh, and he seems to be planning, however indirectly, to harm Ukraine’s nuclear power plants as well.)

Honestly, you couldn’t make most of this up, could you? And who even knows what I’ve left out. As for the future, however uninventive we may be when it comes to lending this planet a hand, give us full credit, since we continue to be all too inventive when it comes to making war on each other and increasingly on the planet itself.

In early October, as I was writing this, the weather in my town, New York City, breached 80 degrees, and they’re predicting warmer-than-usual weather all fall here. (What a shock!) Of course, no one should be faintly surprised by that or any other news like it. Across the planet, an increasing heat hell seems to be causing violent avalanches in the Himalayas and wiping out glaciers in the Alps. In fact, you name it and it’s probably already happening on this ever more disturbed planet of ours.

And worse yet, count on this: unless we act with reasonable focus and speed, everything I’ve mentioned is likely to grow so much worse in the years to come. Yes, in terms of green energy, we increasingly have the means to put a brake on all of this. But perhaps it tells you everything you need to know that China, the greatest producer of green energy (and the equipment to make it) on this planet right now, also remains the greatest user of fossil fuels.

And don’t even get me started on that giant user of fossil fuels, AI!

All in all, tell me that we’re not indeed up shit’s creek without a paddle.