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Juan Cole, Trumpocalypse

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Consider it no happenstance that Donald and dystopia both begin with a “d.” Sadly enough, they have all too much in common. Right now, the big D is clearly intent on creating a little d globally. After all, before he was even sworn in as president again he had already launched a dystopian imperial version of foreign policy that seemed to tie the Panama Canal, Canada, and Greenland (“MAGA. MAKE GREENLAND GREAT AGAIN!”) in a knot. And count on this: that’s only the beginning of what he’s planning to try to do that could, in the end, leave this planet heading for an almost literal hell on Earth.

In fact, if you’re in a dystopian mood, think of those record-breaking burning lands around Los Angeles of recent weeks as an introduction to the future Donaldtopian world of the president who doesn’t believe climate change is anything but a “hoax” and “one of the greatest scams of all time.” He’s already eager on his first day in office, in fact, to reverse Joe Biden’s latest climate gesture of banning offshore oil drilling along much of the U.S. coastline. It’s going to be, he insists, another of his many promised “day one” acts, while he dreams of launching the most massive oil and gas drilling program imaginable. Honestly, if this were fiction, I don’t think you’d believe it.

Given our world, were this indeed a novel and not the life we’re all now leading, you would undoubtedly consider it the wildest sci-fi imaginable. Only 40 years after George Orwell’s classic novel 1984, no such luck, of course. So, let TomDispatch regular Juan Cole, who runs the must-read Informed Comment website, take you on a little journey into what indeed might be “our” future in — no, not 2084 but 2048, thanks to — yes! — The Donald. Tom

A Time Capsule from 2048

What Turbocharged Carbon Will Do to Our Children

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My name isn’t important, only what I have to say. I’m writing with a pencil because I need to conserve my batteries tonight. It’s Year 24 of Our Trump (though he himself, of course, is no longer with us, just his kids who are running things). I feel like I should try to explain our era to whoever opens this time capsule a century from now, though you may need scuba gear to get at it. A lot of records could be lost by then. The Chinese climate hoax was less of a hoax than we thought at the time. Forgive me, Donald, but despite what the New Evangelical Church says, you were anything but infallible -- even if I still can’t say so publicly.

I’d like to move away from the coast, maybe even go north. But real estate in the interior is too pricey, especially at higher elevations away from the flood plains. Looking on the bright side, though, my bunker has held up alright so far, even during the usual Cat 7 hurricanes, and I’ve stocked plenty of canned soup. I do worry, though, about being submerged by a storm surge. No one wants to end up like those poor people in Galveston.

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Andrea Mazzarino, Donald Trump’s War on Migrants

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From its very first moments, this country was a nation of immigrants. In fact, Native Americans aside, what could the first settlers in North America, no less the “first” Americans, have been but immigrants?  And who in this country can’t trace his or her roots somewhere in the past, recent or distant, to immigrants? My own grandfather was born in what’s now Ukraine and, after many adventures, arrived in this country from Germany in the early 1890s with the equivalent of 50 cents in his pocket. Donald Trump’s grandfather, “a 16-year-old German barber, bought a one-way ticket for America, escaping three years of compulsory German military service. He had been a sickly child, unsuited to hard labor, and feared the effects of the draft. It might have been illegal, but America didn’t care about this law-breaking — at that time, Germans were seen as highly desirable migrants — and Trump was welcomed with open arms.”

Had Donald Trump been president back then, it seems that he would, in essence, have tossed his own grandfather out of the country. Of course, this is the man who, running for office in 2024, threatened to “carry out the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” This is the man who, once again president, has labeled the present immigration situation “an invasion of our country” and has threatened to declare a national emergency, using the National Guard and the military to handle mass deportations of “illegal” immigrants and — before he’s done — who knows who else. “On Day One,” as he put it, “I will launch the largest deportation program in American history to get the criminals out.” (Of course, Defense Department officials have already privately called such a program “unrealistic and unserious,” or simply “insanity,” but who cares about their opinions?  Not Donald Trump, that’s for sure.)

But here’s something that neither our next president nor anyone else I know of has even suggested: that our military forces are, in their own strange way, migrants (and, if you think about it, given this country’s grim Global War on Terror, in much of the world distinctly illegal ones at that). With that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Andrea Mazzarino who, as a military spouse, has seen the migrant life of American forces in an up-close-and-personal fashion, introduce you to the other “migrants” in America. Tom

American Troops as Migrants

Or Launching a War on America Itself

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This country, once a haven for immigrants, is now on the verge of turning into a first-class nightmare for them. President Donald Trump often speaks of his plan to deport some 11.7 million undocumented immigrants from the United States as “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Depending on how closely he follows the Project 2025 policy blueprint of his allies, his administration may also begin deporting the family members of migrants and asylum seekers in vast numbers.

Among the possible ways such planning may not work out, here's one thing Donald Trump and the rest of the MAGA crowd don’t recognize: the troops they plan to rely on to carry out the deportations of potentially millions of people are, in their own way, also migrants. After all, on average, they move from place to place every two and a half years -- more if you count the rapid post-9/11 deployments and the Global War on Terror that followed, often separating families multiple times during each soldier's tour of duty.

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Andrew Bacevich, It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over

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As one politician, all too sadly, returns to Washington — and you know just who I mean — another, all too sadly, is leaving. Call it, if not the end of history, then at least the end of something that matters (and, of course, the beginning of who knows what else). Departing is Congresswoman Barbara Lee. She will be remembered forever (at least by me) for, in the immediate wake (and that’s an all-too-appropriate word) of the 9/11 attacks, casting the only vote in Congress — yes, the only one! — against the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, or AUMF, that the rest of the House and Senate passed (420 to 1). It essentially turned the constitutional right to war-making over to the president just as what came to be known as the Global War on Terror began.

For refusing to give George W. Bush and the presidents who followed him a blank check when it came to disastrous rounds of future war-making, she suffered much criticism and abuse. She was called a traitor, even a terrorist. One newspaper labeled her “a long-practicing supporter of America’s enemies.” As she said, looking back years later, “It was a very difficult decision, but I knew that I couldn’t vote for that. And also I knew that, based on my background in psychology, you don’t make hard decisions when you’re upset, when you’re in mourning. You have to think through the implications of any type of major decision. And then I was concerned about the issue of forever wars. It set the stage, and I knew it was going to do that. The military option could be the first option before we tried any other option to settle disputes, to respond to terrorist attacks.”

In some sense, you might say that the vote to send us into that Global War on Terror would end the moment in history following the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, when American officials came to consider the U.S. the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth. And you might even say that, so many years later, it also helped set the stage for Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again movement and his first presidency. With the departure of an antiwar congressional great and the return of Trump to the White House — you know, the man who, on January 6, 2020, tweeted to his followers, who had stormed Congress in the wake of his electoral loss, “We love you. You’re very special!,” then adding, “Remember this day forever!” — let TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich, author most recently of the novel Ravens on a Wire (a vivid look at the post-Vietnam American military), consider what History may now be signaling to us. Tom

Surprise!

What I Learned After “The End of History”

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"The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice." So declared Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Ah, if only it had proved to be so.

Although my respect for MLK is enduring, when it comes to that upward-trending curve connecting past to present, his view of human history has proven to be all too hopeful. At best, history's actual course remains exceedingly difficult to decipher. Some might say it’s downright devious (and, when you look around this embattled planet of ours today, from the Ukraine to the Middle East, deeply disturbing).

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