Declining President . . .

Just a partial of an “Informed Comment‘” commentary by Tom Engelhardt.

“A Declining President may take the Planet down with him,” Informed Comment

(Tom Engelhardt Substack) – Iran, Iraq, Irate.

Honestly, just in case you hadn’t noticed, what a truly strange world we now find ourselves in. I mean, from George Washington to Barack Obama, we’ve had presidents of all sorts, temperamentally speaking, but never one faintly like Donald J. Trump. And there have, of course, been endless leaders of powers in decline on this planet, but perhaps never one who so distinctly and personally embodied decline, not at least since ancient Rome’s Caligula or Nero.

President Trump should really be considered the equivalent of a giant piece of green algae from that Washington pool of his, but the pool he’s actually in is the United States of America — or, perhaps even more accurately, Planet Earth. And it seems there’s simply no way to clean him out.

Worse yet, he wasn’t just elected mistakenly once, but purposely twice by American voters (49.8% of them the third time around), who could imagine only him (and no one else) leading this country. What they seem not to have imagined, however, is the most obvious thing of all: where he might be leading the rest of us, which is, of course, directly down the planetary toilet, algae and all. Of course, it’s no news, historically speaking, that all great powers from imperial Rome to imperial Britain to the Soviet Union do go down sooner or later, but to think of Donald Trump simply as the president of American decline on this deeply disturbed planet of ours is to sell him distinctly short.

And unlike the rest of us, he’s getting just what he’s always wanted. Any day you look at the paper (and yes, I’m old enough that I still read a paper paper), his ultimate dream — a Trumpian headline — invariably awaits him. Today’s (as I was writing this) in the New York Times was: “Trump Cut Big Mine Deal, and Sons Stand to Gain, $1.6 billion Pact for Kazakhstan Tungsten Furthers Pattern of Self-Enrichment.” And honestly, you don’t really have to read another word of it, do you? Tungsten in Kazakhstan and his family is going to make a fortune! Well, what’s new? Not much, really.

After all, in some mad fashion, we are now distinctly on a Trumpian planet of billionaires. (Note that I almost wrote “billionaires and a trillionaire,” but of course the first trillionaire in human history, Elon Musk, only recently lost part of his shirt and is once again a mere multi-, multi-billionaire.) And Donald J. Trump would never want his sons or himself to be left out of the action.

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth finishes the installation of a Department of War plaque at the River Entrance in front of the Pentagon, Washington, D.C., Nov. 13, 2025. (DoW photo by U.S. Air Force Staff Sgt. Madelyn Keech). Public Domain. Via Picryl

Imagine Pete Hegseth installing the plaque? Never happened . . .

Nor would he ever want anyone to say to him, “You’re fired” — certainly not the six conservative (or do I mean deeply reactionary) Supreme Court justices who just allowed him by the usual 6-3 margin to freely fire the leaders of independent agencies or commissions any time he pleases. Or as Sonia Sotomayor put it in her dissenting opinion: “The Court gives the President a power unknown even to the English Crown against which the Founders revolted, elevating him above his once-coequal branches by transforming a duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed into a license to act in defiance of those very laws.”

Give him another two and a half years and who knows what this president will be able to do — but the odds are that, by at least a 6-3 margin, he might indeed be able to take this planet down with him. And in doing so, he’ll give that phrase of once-upon-a-time New York Yankees announcer Mel Allen for a batter hitting a home run — “going, going, gone!” — a distinctly new meaning.