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!)

Americans Deserve Better Than What This Horrific GOP Budget Will Impose on the Sick, Hungry, and Poor

As House Republican leaders work to advance a reconciliation bill to the floor, their agenda couldn’t be clearer: stripping health care and food assistance away from millions of people and raising families’ costs, breaking their promises to help people on the margins of the economy — while showering ever larger tax breaks on the wealthiest households.

House Republicans’ extreme SNAP cuts would take some or all food assistance away from millions of low-income people and families who struggle to afford groceries. This will drive up hunger, deepen poverty, and leave more people unable to afford basic needs.

House Republicans are trying to hide much of the impact of the SNAP cuts by slashing federal funding and then passing the buck to states. When a state can’t come up with the money to backfill for the large federal cuts totaling billions nationally, it will have to choose how to cut the number of people getting help or whether to opt out of having a SNAP program entirely. With this scheme, the plan walks away from the 50-year, bipartisan commitment to ensure that poor children get the help they need, whether they live in Alabama, Missouri, or California.

Proponents want to shift blame for the cuts to states, but the blame game won’t matter to children, families, seniors, people with disabilities, veterans, small business owners, and others when they are hungry and can’t afford food. (Republican portrayals of who gets helped by SNAP and Medicaid are selective at best — about 1 in 4 veterans and 1 in 4 small business owners live in a household getting help from SNAP, Medicaid, or CHIP at some point in the year, Census data show.)

This plan is replete with proposals that will add red tape, making things more cumbersome, more bureaucratic, and less user-friendly — and ultimately designed to fail families in ways that will leave people sicker, poorer, and hungrier.

At the same time, at least 13.7 million people would lose health coverage and become uninsured under the House Republicans’ Medicaid and Affordable Care Act marketplace agenda that deeply cuts Medicaid, erects new barriers to coverage, and allows the enhanced premium tax credits (PTCs) that help low- and middle-income families and small business owners afford health coverage to expire, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates. Some Republicans argue they shouldn’t be blamed for the 4 million people projected to lose coverage due to the PTCs’ expiration. That’s frankly absurd: they wrote a bill that extends all of the expiring 2017 tax cuts — and even expands provisions that benefit the wealthiest people in the country — yet chose not to extend the enhanced PTCs for people who need help affording coverage. That’s their agenda and they need to own it.

Like their approach to SNAP, House Republicans seek to obscure the impact of their health care cuts through complicated proposals, like limiting the ways states can fund Medicaid and adding lots of red tape and paperwork that makes it harder for people to get and keep health coverage. But here, too, there’s no hiding the outcome: millions of people, including children, will lose coverage and access to care for life-threatening and chronic illnesses as well as preventive care.

The House Republican plan targets some of its harshest attacks on people who are immigrants and their families. It would take away Medicare and marketplace coverage from certain immigrants, including people granted refugee and asylee status after proving they face persecution in their home countries, victims of trafficking and domestic violence, and people with Temporary Protected Status. The plan also takes away the Child Tax Credit from U.S. citizen children if both parents don’t have a Social Security number (even if one parent is a citizen), and strips access to SNAP benefits from people granted asylum and refugee status and other vulnerable groups who are living and working lawfully in the U.S.

Proponents of these cuts often falsely claim that they are restricting access for people who lack documentation, when the reality is that people without a documented immigration status already do not qualify for these benefits, and the cuts will largely impact lawfully present immigrants and U.S. citizen children in immigrant families.

Despite House Republicans’ rhetoric about supporting the “working class,” the plan targets working people and their families, making it much harder for them to get help weathering life’s ups and downs. Workers may need help because their employer lays them off or cuts their hours, or because they get sick or have to miss work to care for a sick loved one, and the House Republican plan takes help away from people in exactly these situations.

And for all of the rhetoric coming out of DOGE about making government work more efficiently, that commitment doesn’t seem to apply to working families who need help. This plan is replete with proposals that will add red tape, making things more cumbersome, more bureaucratic, and less user-friendly — and ultimately designed to fail families in ways that will leave people sicker, poorer, and hungrier.

Moreover, the House Republican plan would deny as many as 20 million children in working families from receiving the full $2,500 Child Tax Credit because their parents — who work important but low-paid jobs — don’t earn enough. The 17 million children who currently don’t get the full $2,000 Child Tax Credit would get nothing from the credit’s $500-per-child increase, even as families earning up to $400,000 would get the full increase. Last year 169 House Republicans voted to help most of the families they are now leaving out.

In contrast to its disdain for people whose budgets are stretched thin every month, the plan showers more tax cuts on the wealthy, extending the highly skewed provisions of the 2017 law and adding permanent expansions for wealthy households. In 2027 it gives households earning more than $1 million a year an annual tax cut of roughly $90,000, while low-income households receive an average of just $90 from the tax cuts — the same households who will then bear the brunt of cuts to Medicaid and SNAP.

This agenda won’t create a future of shared prosperity and economic opportunity, which is what’s required to build a country that’s truly great.

The plan’s tax cuts would cost nearly $4 trillion through 2034 — and over $5 trillion if one sees through its timing gimmicks like turning off tax cuts for middle-class families after four years while making some of its most top-tilted tax cuts — like the cut in the estate tax and the deduction for pass-through income — permanent. Moreover, the House Republicans cut more than $500 billion in clean energy tax credits — which would worsen health outcomes for communities facing high rates of pollution, and the plan’s health cuts would make it harder for them to access health care.

It’s been clear for some time that House Republicans were headed down this harmful path, but to see the contours of this bill emerge is somehow still shocking: that they would hurt so many people who struggle to afford basic needs and whom they have promised to help. And they continue to pursue this agenda at a time when the President’s tariffs, chaotically crafted and applied, have caused increased uncertainty and raised the risk of a recession, higher unemployment, and surging prices.

Whatever Republican policymakers may think, these policies aren’t popular with the public because they aren’t consistent with core American values, which include helping people when they fall on tough times and expecting wealthy people to pay their fair share.

This agenda won’t create a future of shared prosperity and economic opportunity, which is what’s required to build a country that’s truly great. There’s a better path forward, but it requires tearing up this legislation and replacing it with a plan that lowers costs and invests in people and families, while raising the revenues from the wealthy to make those investments and reduce economic risks associated with high debt.

GOP Medicaid Cuts Are a Dagger Pointed Directly at Our Most Vulnerable

The numbers are clear. Nursing home residents depend on Medicaid. According to the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation, fully 63% of nursing home care in the United States is funded by Medicaid. Some states are even more dependent on Medicaid than the national average. For example, in West Virginia fully 77% of nursing home care is funded by Medicaid.

Politico reported on the morning of May 15 that after a marathon markup session lasting 26 hours, the House Energy and Commerce Committee advanced legislation that “would slash Medicaid spending by hundreds of billions of dollars.” These cuts would directly impact nursing home residents and their families. The Washington Post reports that:

“Their [nursing home residents] coverage will be at risk,” said Katie Sloan Smith, president and chief executive of LeadingAge, a Washington lobbying association for operators of nonprofit senior-care facilities. “Either the home itself will have to make up for that loss in some way or they will simply have to say, ‘We can no longer support people on Medicaid’ and close those beds.”

While the Medicaid cuts would hurt nursing home patients, they would also severely impact those who receive care at home (often referred to as home and community-based care). According to National Public Radio, Medicaid pays for care at home for roughly 4.5 million Americans.

The Medicaid cuts that passed the Energy and Commerce Committee would devastate America’s family caregivers as Medicaid also funds caregiver respite programs and caregiver training. The cuts would hurt our most vulnerable and their families.

Where are our citizens on the question of Medicaid cuts? The evidence clearly shows that the American people oppose Medicaid cuts. In fact, there is support for more spending on Medicaid. Polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation published in March of this year found that 42% want to see an increase in Medicaid spending. Just under 3 in 4 (73%) of respondents say that Medicaid is important to their local communities. Democrats (83%), Independents (74%), and Republicans (61%) all see Medicaid as very important to their local community.

Late Thursday May 15, the fate of the measure that passed the Energy and Commerce Committee was in doubt as the legislation moves to a vote in the House of Representatives. There will no doubt be more twists and turns before the measure heads to the Senate. Every moment that activists can delay the passage of these Medicaid cuts is more time to mount an opposition. Republicans might not want to admit it, but support for Medicaid is strong and deep.

This is the greatest threat to Medicaid since its creation in 1965. The GOP legislation is a dagger pointed directly at our most vulnerable. Many of those who would be impacted by Medicaid cuts are not able to raise their voices. Therefore, it up to those of us who can, to raise our voices and tell our elected representatives to reject these cruel proposals that would devastate our families, friends, and neighbors. The stakes in the debate over Medicaid are far too high for any of us to stay silent.

Trump Attacks Leading Export Sector: Tourism and Universities

Six Quick Thoughts on First Quarter GDP Report

Trump’s Attack on NIH Will Mean Fewer Drugs and Likely More Expensive Ones

Looking at What People Do, Not What They Say

The Deportation Drive: Trump Promised Millions of Dangerous Criminals

‘Devastated’ and ‘Hopeless.’ Researchers Speak Out on Funding Cuts

Voters Reject President Trump's Dystopian Plans for "Public Safety"

Your Questions Answered: Trump’s First 100 Days

We Are Defending Freedom in the Courts — And Still Winning

Medicaid Work Requirements Don’t Work — They Harm People with Disabilities

Democrats Exaggerate Estimated Impact of GOP Bill on Uninsured

A preliminary Congressional Budget Office analysis said that a Republican legislative proposal that makes changes to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act would leave "at least 8.6 million" people without health insurance by 2034. But many Democrats have exaggerated the figure, claiming that 13.7 million would lose their insurance under the proposal.

The post Democrats Exaggerate Estimated Impact of GOP Bill on Uninsured appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Q&A on Trump’s Prescription Drug Pricing Executive Order

In signing an executive order aimed at reducing U.S. drug prices, President Donald Trump said some prices would be cut in half or more "almost immediately." But the order is light on details of how the plan would be implemented.

The post Q&A on Trump’s Prescription Drug Pricing Executive Order appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Unwrapping Qatar’s $400 Million Winged Gift to Trump

President Donald Trump announced that the Persian Gulf emirate of Qatar was giving the United States a Boeing 747-8 jet to replace the aging Air Force One aircrafts used by the president. But the proposed gift has raised a maelstrom of legal questions from Democrats, who say the gift would need the approval of Congress.

The post Unwrapping Qatar’s $400 Million Winged Gift to Trump appeared first on FactCheck.org.

Candidíase – Conheça as causas, sintomas e tratamentos

Cirurgia Plástica não tem idade

Com que roupa eu vou? Dicas de qual roupa usar

Cuidados com a pele – Aprenda a fazer limpeza de pele caseira

Visão embaçada e distorcida nem sempre é miopia: fique atento aos sinais do ceratocone