Donald Trump is trying to erase the 20th century.
For those of you too young to remember back that far, he is also going after what we’ve gone through in the past two and a half decades as well.
With a thoroughness that is surprising for a man who barely seems to know where he is at any given moment, Trump is rapidly eliminating many of the United States’ most important accomplishments during the period that marked our rise as a superpower.
It is almost as if he wishes to reverse that rise.
In just the first weeks of this year, we have seen him attack the foundations of our international leadership. He has threatened to annex Greenland—to take arms against a NATO ally, if required, and thereby destroy the North Atlantic Alliance that has been one of the world’s most important stabilizing forces for nearly eighty years.
He has withdrawn the United States from 66 international organizations, further weakening the global order we have sought to maintain since the end of the Second World War. In so doing, he undermines vital initiatives with regard to culture, the environment and the spread of democracy.
He has also threatened our neighbors with U.S. “domination” of the region, a violation of all the principles that underpin hemispheric relations, not to mention the United Nations Charter, a binding treaty to which the U.S. was not only a signatory but the principal author.
He has announced further tariffs to go along with a sweeping assault on the international trading system (also a key product of post-war international economic policies). And should the Supreme Court decide that these tariffs were imposed illegally, the White House has promised to reintroduce them via other mechanisms, reverting to the protectionism of the prior century.
If there was one foundation of strength that helped underpin the rise of the U.S. as the richest and most powerful nation in the world, it was the faith placed in the U.S. dollar. That dates to the establishment of the U.S. Federal Reserve in 1913 as an independent central bank, an effort to provide stability following financial panics that had plagued the economy in prior years.
Trump’s decision to turn the ill-named U.S. Department of Justice against Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell is, then, the latest and most egregious effort to undo the Fed’s independence, and to turn it into a political weapon for the White House to wield—an approach that has resulted in monetary disaster in country after country that has tried this.
It was a move so unsettling that central bank governors from across the world spoke out in protest. Powell was moved to put out a video explaining precisely what was going on and why. It even produced the rarest of events: Peeps of criticism from the usually silent GOP ranks—even, reportedly, from Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent.
Other great triumphs the United States brought into being during the 20th century included the defeat of fascist and other authoritarian threats targeting our way of life and the passage of legislation establishing and protecting fundamental civil rights for all Americans.
This year, meanwhile, has already seen a masked, rogue force of armed thugs acting on behalf of the president and his minions attack Americans in the streets. These attacks have been fatal, including the cold-blooded murder of 37-year-old mom Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis. When asked if the lethal force was warranted, Trump replied that Good was being “disrespectful”—apparently asserting that protestors, exercising their First Amendment rights, could now get the death penalty for daring to be critical of his administration.
In further keeping with the actions of police states, the White House has again this week renewed its efforts to scrub key U.S. institutions of any thoughts or ideas that they conclude embody “improper ideologies,” targeting the Smithsonian Institution and the National Portrait Gallery.
At the same time, Secretary of Beer Pong Pete Hegseth held an event at SpaceX, a company owned by noted white supremacist sociopath Elon Musk. There, he announced that the Department of Defense will embrace AI usage—and Musk’s controversial Grok chatbot in particular—in the military that is is anti-woke and anti-DEI—code for racist, sexist and pro-MAGA. It’s precisely what Hitler or Stalin would have done with the technology had it existed in their day, seeking to ensure that the entire massive apparatus of their military would only be exposed to a worldview consistent with their own (and the cultists surrounding them).
And that’s just the first two weeks of the year, ladies and gentlemen. (Events swirl faster the closer you get to the drain. If you don’t believe me, flush your toilet and see.)
In other words, don’t think the only way Trump is commemorating the 250th anniversary of the birth of this great country is with a wrestling match on the South Lawn of the White House. He is also working hard to erase our history. What better way for a country to feel young again than to pretend parts of its past and the progress of time didn’t take place? And to just look at those shiny gold things on the wall instead?
It’s almost the same as an old man spray tanning sagging skin, blow-drying his last remaining hairs, making gross comments about the young women on his staff and slowly sinking into a dementia-aided delusion—becoming a person he never was in a country that never actually existed as he remembers it.
