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Trump Is Trying to Shoot His Way Out of US Decline—It Won't Work
The president wants a 50% increase over last year’s Pentagon budget, to $1.5 trillion; a wiser policy would be to rethink how the US is to co-exist with other nations in what is emerging as a multipolar world.
Jun 08, 2026
The US empire is in decline. Compare it today to where it was only 30 years ago, following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was a “hyperpower,” then, almost inconceivably dominant with no challengers on Earth.
Since then, China has surpassed the US economically. Russia is rated No.1 militarily. The US has to borrow close to $2+ trillion per year (the annual federal budget deficit) just to keep the lights on. Its government based on checks and balances is under assault by a sleazy felon who wants to be king. It is wracked by social divisions that presage civil war.
President Donald Trump’s proposed solution to these problems is to shoot our way out. He wants a 50% increase over last year’s Pentagon budget, to $1.5 trillion. It is stupid in the measure to which it is excessive. It is suicidal to the extent it will degrade our security and our chances of improving national prosperity.
A wiser policy would be to rethink how the US is to co-exist with other nations in what is emerging as a multipolar world. That’s a big rethink. There’s another rethink coming as well: how we run the economy and what it is that actually accounts for national well-being.
The era when the US could dominate, intimidate, and expropriate the rest of the world is over. If it continues to push military power as its primary path forward it will continue to produce catastrophe.
Neither of these “rethinkings”—neither security nor the economy—will be easy. Both will go against existing failed doctrines and the powerful interests that back them. But, without doing this, we face the certainty of continuing national decline.
The highest-level rationale for rejecting a 50% increase in the Pentagon’s budget is that the military simply doesn’t win wars. Sure, it can knock off defenseless, pipsqueak principalities like Grenada, or Serbia, or Libya. But whenever it goes up against a committed adversary, especially one that fights back, it loses.
It lost in Vietnam to a nation of rice farmers that hadn’t even entered the industrial age. It killed more than 3 million Vietnamese, 4 million Southeast Asians when you count Laos and Cambodia. Yet, it lost.
It lost in Iraq, despite Iraq having been bombed for the prior decade, since the first Gulf War in 1991. Even in losing, the US killed more than a million Iraqis and spawned ISIS, one of the most virulent terrorist organizations ever let loose on the world.
It lost in Afghanistan, despite 20 years of trying to win. Afghanistan was a fourth-world country, with the Taliban literally living in caves. The Taliban had only hand-held firearms. No air force. No artillery. No satellite intelligence. The US still managed to lose.
Ukraine isn’t over, yet, but it is lost. Russia has crushed every one of the fabled “wonder weapons” the US has thrown at it. Remember when Trump was going to end the Ukraine war “on Day One”? We’re now past Day 500. It hasn’t ended because Trump is too weak to take the Loss on his watch. But it is lost.
Iran is the most recent—and damaging—case of catastrophic US military failure. It has a military budget one-one hundredth that of the US. Yet, Iran has “humiliated” the US, at least in the words of German Chancellor, Friedrich Merz. Neocon heavyweight Robert Kagan recently wrote, “It’s hard to think of a time when the United States suffered a total defeat in a conflict, a setback so decisive that the strategic loss could be neither repaired nor ignored.”
None of these outcomes are equivocal. None are ambiguous. Is that the kind of outfit we want to give a 50% raise to when it can never come close to accomplishing its essential mission? And when it never learns from its repeated failures?
This is one of the major rethinks that will have to be conducted before any thought can be given to giving even one extra dollar to the Pentagon. We need to hear from the leadership what, exactly, is going to change. And we don’t mean fiddling at the margins. We mean at the core of the institution. For example…
US weapons systems are not made to be able to win in battle. They are made to deliver maximum profits to the weapons makers. Consider…
The Patriot missile system is easily baited with low-cost drones into giving away its location and radar signature. “Here I am! Here I am!” It is then a sitting duck for cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, even swarms of the same low-cost drones.
The HIMARS rocket launcher uses common GPS as part of its guidance system. This is easily jammed resulting in missiles sometimes landing kilometers away from their intended targets. Its greatest value might be that every battery reliably drains $20 million from US taxpayers.
The M-1 Abrams tank wears a gigantic “shoot me” sign as soon as it’s spotted by one of the Russian drones that saturate the skies over Ukraine. The phrase “Fish in a barrel” comes to mind.
The bigger problem—bigger than weapons that don’t work—is that the US economy is not set up to support sustained, high intensity warfare. It gave up that capability decades ago, when it decided to de-industrialize so its companies could make more money building their stuff in China.
This is one of the reasons the US, via its proxy, Ukraine, has not been able to defeat Russia: it simply cannot supply the amount of ammunition Ukraine would need to prevail. Russia is firing 5-10 times the amount of artillery Ukraine is, and there’s literally nothing the US can do about it.
It would take decades to rebuild the weapons-focused industrial capacity the US possessed in the 1960s. Given the failure of the larger military enterprise in the US, there is no certainty that, once delivered, it would not be ill-conceived, misdirected, or already obsolete. In fact, given the Pentagon’s track record, the likelihood is that it would be all three.
The deepest problem for the US in grappling with increased Pentagon funding is rooted in its world view.
That was formed in the aftermath of World War II and reinforced following the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. After both events, the US stood astride the world like a colossus, unchallenged in its ability to destroy any other country. Heady stuff but the world doesn’t sit still.
Countries do not acquiesce in their own destruction. They organize themselves to fight back; they collaborate with other countries for collective self-defense; and they employ asymmetric strategies to defeat predators, as Vietnam and Afghanistan did, and as Iran has just done. The US military hasn’t gotten the memo.
The unprovoked Iran debacle has boosted the fortunes of Russia and China, the US’ principal rivals. It has elevated Iran to being the hegemon in the Persian Gulf. That rise is abetted by a quartet of Islamic powers that are tired of US and Israeli bullying: Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. They are forming an “Islamic NATO” to keep the US and Israel out of the Gulf. This is super important.
Since World War II, the Middle East has been one of the most important regions in the world because of its vast oil wealth. A 1945 US State Department memo stated that “Arab oil resources constitute a stupendous source of strategic power and one of the greatest material prizes in world history.”
It is the Trump Pentagon, the Pete Hegseth Pentagon, that has destroyed the US’ control of that “greatest material prize in world history.” Actually, it’s even worse than that. By forcing 50% higher oil prices on the rest of the world, the US is draining wealth from every country on Earth. Many of those countries were already economically tenuous. There’s not a one that doesn’t despise the US for the extortion.
Is that an organization to which we want to grant an additional half a trillion dollars a year? Every year? So it can wreak more destruction on US fortunes? Before it rethinks itself and how it can contribute responsibly to US well-being in the world? It’s not even fatuous. It’s insane.
So, if a $1.5 trillion budget for the military is not the solution to the US woes, what is?
The US could more plausibly revive its fortunes in the world by investing the would-be increase in Pentagon spending into the civilian economy, instead.
It should invest in the nation’s people—education—so as to improve the economy’s productivity. It should invest in the nation’s infrastructure to increase the economy’s efficiency. It should invest in scientific research and development to boost innovation. And, it should re-invest in alternative energy to build resilience.
Productivity. Efficiency. Innovation. Resilience. Those are what built the US in the 20th century. They are the real foundations of national well-being. None of them are mysteries as far as how they lead to a better economy and a stronger state. None are conceptually hard to carry out.
Donald Trump is doing exactly the opposite.
He is gutting education, rescinding major infrastructure projects, savaging scientific research, and in all ways possible dismantling alternative energy. Those avenues all go against the essence of Trumpism, which is looting, shifting national resources and wealth to the already wealthy—Trump’s base.
Looting is what Trump’s proposed increase in the Pentagon budget is really all about. It is the Mother of All Trump Grifts. It is 277 times larger than his laughable $1.8 billion Slush Fund. It wants to hide the grift under the quasi-sacrosanct cover of military spending.
But it doesn’t begin to even acknowledge, to say nothing of fix, the deep failings in the military. It actively damages the economy by diverting scarce resources to parasitic looting that inflicts more harm than it heals.
Trump’s proposal improves the fortunes of the already very wealthy, as all things from Trump do. It lards them with $500 billion of unaccountable giveaways every year. It is a payoff to his rich backers and to the military Trump thinks he’s going to need to finish his overthrow of the government when the time comes, in 2028.
The era when the US could dominate, intimidate, and expropriate the rest of the world is over. If it continues to push military power as its primary path forward it will continue to produce catastrophes like Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine, and Iran, all of which have degraded US power, influence, and standing in the world.
Alternatively, it can invest in the economy, in the American people, to create higher growth, income, equality, resilience, and prosperity. Instead of trying to shoot our way out of our self-inflicted decline, we can try to think our way out, earn our way out, work our way out. It’s not certain. Nothing ever is. But it has so much more dignity and likelihood of success about it.
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The US Fails Young People by Mobilizing for War, Not Jobs
A country is not secure simply because it can strike targets, protect bases, or surge forces across oceans. It is secure when its people can see a future worth defending.
May 22, 2026
Washington usually measures American decline in external terms: China’s rise, Russia’s revisionism, strained alliances, and military crises in the Middle East. But one of the clearest warnings is coming from inside the United States. In 2025, only 43% of Americans ages 15 to 34 said it was a good time to find a job where they lived, 21 points below Americans 55 and older. In no other surveyed country was the generational gap this wide.
That finding should unsettle a country that is still speaking the language of primacy. Young Americans are not turning gloomy because they have forgotten how to be optimistic. They are reading the economy in front of them. Youth unemployment stood at 9.5% in April. Renter cost burdens hit a record 22.7 million households in 2024. The share of first-time home buyers fell to a record-low 21%, while the median first-time buyer’s age rose to 40. For a generation told that education, discipline, and work would translate into stability, the bargain looks broken.
This is not only a domestic story. It is also a foreign policy failure, because budgets reveal what a government treats as urgent. The Defense Department’s 2026 request totaled $961 billion, among the largest inflation-adjusted requests of the past half century. Additional military-related funding has pushed “national defense” spending beyond $1 trillion. The point is not that every dollar spent on the Pentagon could be mechanically converted into a job, an apartment, or a mortgage. The point is that Washington still knows how to mobilize at scale—but most reliably when the beneficiaries are weapons programs, contractors, and permanent military infrastructure.
The war with Iran has made that imbalance harder to ignore. By May, the US campaign had cost an estimated $29 billion, including operations and equipment repair or replacement. The conflict has also disrupted energy flows through one of the world’s most important corridors, raising the risk that households already squeezed by rent, debt, insurance, and food costs will face still more pressure. For young workers, “foreign policy” is not abstract when it comes back as higher prices, lower confidence, and another delay in leaving home.
If Washington continues to protect an empire more energetically than it protects the next generation’s prospects, the damage will not remain hidden in surveys.
Washington often treats these costs as unfortunate side effects of leadership. They are better understood as evidence of an outdated model of security. A country is not secure simply because it can strike targets, protect bases, or surge forces across oceans. It is secure when its people can see a future worth defending. A state that can finance escalation faster than housing, debt relief, or public investment teaches its younger citizens a bleak lesson: Their insecurity is manageable, but imperial credibility is an emergency.
A serious foreign policy would start from that recognition. It would pursue diplomacy with Iran rather than convert each crisis into a test of dominance. It would restore the congressional role in decisions of war and peace. It would subject military spending to the same moral and fiscal scrutiny imposed on social programs. And it would treat economic security at home as part of national security, not as an afterthought to be discussed after the next supplemental defense bill.
This is not a call for withdrawal from the world. It is a call to abandon the habit of confusing militarization with responsibility. The United States can cooperate, mediate, trade, provide humanitarian assistance, and support climate resilience without treating armed escalation as the default proof of seriousness. In fact, a foreign policy built around restraint would be more credible abroad precisely because it would be more defensible at home.
The warning from young Americans is not just that the job market feels weak. It is that the future feels rationed. If Washington continues to protect an empire more energetically than it protects the next generation’s prospects, the damage will not remain hidden in surveys. It will appear in politics, institutions, and the country’s declining ability to persuade anyone—including its own citizens—that American power still serves a public purpose. The real measure of decline is not only what rivals do to the United States. It is what the United States keeps choosing to do to itself.
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Can We Stop Donald Trump From Crashing Air America?
Having hijacked American democracy, Trump and his cronies are under the impression that they are flying ever upward, but they have not been blessed with a good sense of direction.
May 20, 2026
Ever since North Korea suffered through the death of its first leader in 1994, a loss magnified by an economic collapse and a devastating famine, outside observers have likened the country to an airplane experiencing a serious malfunction. The major question they posed: In the end, would North Korea experience a soft landing or a catastrophic crash?
Perhaps a reformer would come along—say, a North Korean version of Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev—who could right the airship of state and guide it toward the runway of reunification with South Korea.
More direly, the North Korean regime could collapse all of a sudden, like the Communist governments in Eastern Europe in 1989. Those were relatively peaceful affairs, but North Korea’s worst-case scenarios might involve violent power struggles, the return of famine, and a free-for-all scramble for the country’s loose nukes. US analysts have gamed out the consequences of just such a hard landing—and so has the Pentagon with its OPLAN 5029—and they all add up to a tragedy not only for North Koreans and the region, but also potentially for the United States and the rest of the world.
The North Korean government has, however, defied such scenarios by somehow surviving, while rejecting reunification with the South and turning up its nose at conventional versions of reform. Despite additional challenges—a sustained Covid-19 quarantine, several distinctly hostile governments in South Korea, and a flatlining economy—the regime has so far avoided collapse and, if anything, tightened its control over its population. For the time being at least, the North Korean plane evidently has no intention of landing, much less crashing.
Given the state of the airplane—a malfunctioning altimeter, compromised landing gear—it might not matter who the pilot is anymore. Air America may well be heading for a crash landing regardless of who’s in charge.
Today, in an improbable plot twist, however, Donald Trump’s United States is starting to seem ever more like an aircraft in distress.
After all, the present pilot of Air America, exhibiting signs of psychosis or perhaps dementia, has begun to dismantle the cockpit under the delusion that it’s his to transform into a ballroom. The crew—and indeed much of the supporting infrastructure on the ground below—has been decimated by budget cuts. The airline itself is fast taking on debt. Many of the passengers are praying for a soft landing and hoping that, if the plane does touch down for a risky layover, they will get a new pilot.
But another fear lurks in the background. Given the state of the airplane—a malfunctioning altimeter, compromised landing gear—it might not matter who the pilot is anymore. Air America may well be heading for a crash landing regardless of who’s in charge.
Those of us on board, gripping our armrests in terror, are asking ourselves one question above all else: Is it too late to avert catastrophe?
Trump’s Totalitarian Tendencies
North Korea has come closer than any country in the modern era to building a totalitarian state. Beginning with the country’s founder, Kim Il Sung, its leadership has eliminated all oppositional politics; suppressed virtually all signs of civil society; and tolerated no freedom of the press, speech, or assembly. Nor is there any freedom of religion, unless you count the personality cult attached to the Kim family leadership, which is now in its third generation.
But all totalitarianism is aspirational. The Soviet Union had its dissidents and underground samizdat literature. The Confessing Church movement attempted faith-based resistance to the Nazis. Likewise, the North Korean government’s control over the population is not total, as can be measured by rising levels of private enterprise and covert enthusiasm for South Korean culture.
Really, the only way to explain such an attraction of opposites—an elected US leader and the North Korean dictator—is to point out that the two distinctly have something in common: their desire for total control.
So, too, are Donald Trump’s totalitarian tendencies aspirational. He would like to achieve total control, but he’s hemmed in by institutional limits. Still, he prefers to bypass Congress with rule by executive decree. He has attempted to control the media, rein in the power of universities, and tilt the electoral playing field to benefit his party. He has aligned himself internationally not with democrats but with autocrats. He has had a particular fondness for authoritarian leaders like Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and Javier Milei of Argentina who consolidated their power within democracies. But he has also gotten cozy with the likes of Saudi Arabia’s Mohammed bin Salman, who doesn’t bother at all with elections.
The most inexplicable friendship Trump developed while in office is certainly with North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, the founder’s grandson. Having traded escalating threats during part of Trump’s first term in office, the two leaders grew closer after several in-person meetings and a raft of exchanged letters. “I was really being tough,” Trump explained in 2018. “And so was he. And we’d go back and forth. And then we fell in love. OK? No, really.”
Really, the only way to explain such an attraction of opposites—an elected US leader and the North Korean dictator—is to point out that the two distinctly have something in common: their desire for total control. Whether intentionally or not, Trump has applied some of the features of the Kim family playbook to his own governing style. In doing so, he has also damaged, perhaps irreparably, the very idea of America.
Different Beds, Same Dreams
One of the key elements of North Korean politics is the personality cult of the Kim family, which casts a long shadow over the country’s culture. Drawn in part from northern Korea’s earlier Christian heritage—through the development of a trinity of founding figures, the 10 commandments of Kimilsungism, and pervasive themes of sacrifice and redemption—that personality cult has generated so much fervor among many North Koreans that even defectors have spoken of their pride in founder Kim Il Sung and his ideology.
Trump, too, has tried to construct such a personality cult—by placing his name on public buildings (the Kennedy Center), putting his face on US coins (the semiquincentennial dollar), inserting his image in future passports, and planning a golden statue of himself at his presidential library that resembles one of Kim Il Sung in Pyongyang. So far, however, outside of the MAGA faithful, his cult seems to have generated little more than ridicule.
Another aspect of Pyongyang’s governance that probably attracts Trump is its overemphasis on the military. North Korea devotes 34% of its gross domestic product to military spending (compared to Russia at 6% and the United States at under 4%). Although it hasn’t launched any wars of its own for more than 75 years, Pyongyang has dispatched thousands of troops to help fight Russia’s war in Ukraine. Since the 1990s, the government has spoken of a songun—military first—doctrine to justify the sacrifices made to maintain a huge standing army, a range of missiles, and a small but significant nuclear arsenal.
Trump is guiding the United States toward the kind of triple whammy that hit North Korea in the 1990s, when environmental disasters and political criminality combined with rising energy prices to bring its manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a virtual halt, while killing an estimated 1 million people.
Similarly, the prevailing theme of Trump’s second term has been war and military spending. Despite his once-upon-a-time promises not to become involved in “forever wars,” particularly in the Middle East, Trump joined Israel this year in an attack on Iran, a conflict that cost over $11 billion in its first week alone. He has proposed an astonishing $1.5 trillion military budget, an increase of 50% over last year’s already bloated total, and that sum doesn’t even include the costs of the Iran War.
Then there’s Trump’s economic thinking, if you can call it that. He has repudiated the free market orthodoxy of his fellow Republicans to embrace a form of economic nationalism: high tariff walls to reduce trade imbalances, a focus on rebuilding American manufacturing, and the repudiation of international rules of the road (like the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) in order to drive a dagger into economic globalization. In such respects, Trump’s approach resembles North Korea’s path of import substitution and defiance of the international rule of law.
In North Korea’s case, such an economic strategy has been partly born of necessity, given the economic embargo imposed on it after the Korean War of the early 1950s. Trump, however, is steering the US economy into a tailspin without provocation. If you add together the costs associated with his kamikaze tariffs, the follow-on effects of the Iran War and boosts in military spending, the gutting of government programs investing in the economy, the watering down of environmental regulations, and reductions in government revenue because of tax cuts, Trump is guiding the United States toward the kind of triple whammy that hit North Korea in the 1990s, when environmental disasters and political criminality combined with rising energy prices to bring its manufacturing and agricultural sectors to a virtual halt, while killing an estimated 1 million people.
But, you might point out, Wall Street is still on an upward ascent. The US economy is still growing, however modestly, and, while US food insecurity is rising, famine isn’t on the horizon. To return to the airplane analogy, the in-flight experience has become more uncomfortable for those who can’t afford business class, but that doesn’t mean a crash is imminent.
Or does it?
A Soft vs. Hard Landing
Whether he is consciously modeling his efforts on North Korea or not, Donald Trump wants to make an indelible imprint on the United States. He aspires to fundamentally change the demographics of the country, the structure of the economy, and the nature of its politics. To do that, he aims to ensure that his MAGA personality cult, his anti-government crusade, and his self-defeating economic policies outlive his own tenure in office. That will certainly require a substantial dismantling of democratic safeguards given that such policies don’t attract majority support.
In other words, much as Kim Il Sung destroyed anything that could have challenged his authority—the church, the intelligentsia, landowners, rival political factions—Trump has now launched a scorched-earth policy to ensure that his successors can’t undo his damage. If the Democrats regain Congress in November and even the White House in 2028, they will inherit an enormous bill for Trump-era damages (and count on a chorus of Republican voices improbably blaming them for the disaster).
Any incoming reformers will face an uphill battle to convince the public to restore funding for infrastructure, whether green or otherwise. And they will have to deal with a terrifying erosion of faith in government, resulting from the incompetence, lies, and malpractice of the Trump administration. At the international level, US allies will think twice about concluding any deals with this country, given the possibility of another political swing in subsequent elections.
If Trumpism can be likened to a devastating depression (which it could still precipitate), the obvious recourse for any successor would be to embark on an immediate course correction comparable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.
Trump’s tactics, in other words, are designed to make a soft landing ever more difficult. An inveterate gambler, he is betting that his extreme approach will enable Air America to climb into the very stratosphere, even if he is far more likely to force an emergency landing.
Nightmare scenarios have long haunted American consciousness. The sheer size of the US debt—at nearly $40 trillion, it’s the highest absolute amount in the world—could put the country into receivership if the dollar slips from its status as the global currency. Default could tear apart an already polarized society. Such a hard landing could look like what analysts of North Korea have often predicted for that country.
But North Korea hasn’t collapsed. With its considerable resources, surely the United States, too, can avoid such a scenario.
True, no one is going to make any money at Polymarket predicting the imminent fall of the Kim regime. But North Korea is not exactly following a recipe for long-term success either. Even if it limps along for another decade or two, with leadership passing to Kim Jong Un’s teenage daughter, any country that follows its policies of personality cult, autarkic economic policies, massive corruption, military-first approaches, and ruthless suppression of dissent is not likely to prosper over the long term. Just look at how Vladimir Putin has steered Russia into a terrifying nosedive.
Substantial reform could head off such a scenario for the United States. If Trumpism can be likened to a devastating depression (which it could still precipitate), the obvious recourse for any successor would be to embark on an immediate course correction comparable to President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. Whatever it’s called—not a Green New Deal, given the irrational resistance of a large section of the US electorate to anything “green” except greenbacks—such an American renewal plan would need to restructure the US economy to favor the bulk of American workers rather than the current generation of robber barons. Implemented with a much better promotional campaign—led perhaps by future Chief of Reconstruction (and now New York Mayor) Zohran Mamdani—it would link concrete benefits to identifiable government programs and services. It would offer a striking real-life illustration of your tax dollars at work.
Such a reform plan would have to restore trust in government by punishing corruption, enlisting the public as watchdogs, and taxing the super-wealthy into semi-submission. By shifting away from war and aggressive military spending, such a project of renewal would also have to work with partners overseas to promote policies of cooperative prosperity and sustainability in order to restore a measure of trust in US actions globally. Soft landings require soft power, leaving hard power to those determined to crash and burn.
The North Korean case is a reminder that awful policies may not themselves precipitate collapse. Trumpism will not go away simply because it is on the verge of winning multiple Darwin Awards for its counter-evolutionary policies. Having hijacked American democracy, Trump and his cronies are under the impression that they are flying ever upward, but they have not been blessed with a good sense of direction. Sheer inertia could keep Air America in the air—though with steadily deteriorating conditions on board (as in North Korea). Such a “MAGA ‘til we drop” option would not be much of an improvement over a hard landing.
In 2016, arch-conservative Michael Anton published a piece in the Claremont Review of Books arguing that it was Hillary Clinton and the Democrats who had hijacked America. In “The Flight 93 Election,” Anton imagined that Trump, aided by an energized electorate, could rush the cockpit—just like the passengers on Flight 93, hijacked on September 11, 2001— and save the country. (It was certainly an infelicitous analogy, given that Flight 93 crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.) Trump’s 2016 victory, however, turned Anton into a dark prophet and vaulted him into the subsequent administration, despite (or because of) the absurdities of his arguments.
In yet another stomach-churning reversal, Anton’s analogy has now finally become all too applicable. Trump has gained the cockpit not once but twice. Having failed to crash Air America the first time around, he seems determined to put his Flight 93 doctrine of heroic self-destruction into practice today. There is no guarantee that a hard landing can be avoided either now or after his departure from office. But this country, its egalitarian ideals, and its democratic traditions (if not much of its dismal history) are certainly worth fighting for.
We’re losing altitude fast. Elections approach.
Let’s roll.
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