The New Evil Empire
PARIS — The view is clear from across an ocean that is suddenly a whole lot wider: Donald Trump, trying to remake the world in his own hateful image, has aligned himself with Vladimir Putin and fellow despots. It seems that was his plan all along.
France is readying its tactical nuclear force to defend Ukraine. Its army now drills to fend off attack. The government distributes "survival manuals" and emergency kits. Families are urged to stockpile food, water and essentials to shelter for at least 72 hours.
Britain's Foreign Secretary David Lammy speaks diplomatic niceties to mollify Washington. Privately, he echoes what he said of Trump six years ago as a Parliament backbencher: "a tyrant" and "a woman-hating, neo-Nazi-sympathizing sociopath."
Denmark's prime minister minces no words. She says as many Danes died per capita as Americans to support U.S. military operations. A Greenland invasion would trigger Article 5 of the NATO treaty, making America the alliance's first wartime adversary.
And Germany's likely new chancellor warns NATO may be gone by June.
China prepares for potential hot war while winning a cold one across the global south, moving in as America cedes ground. Trump's punitive, insulting tariffs sparked harsh ripostes that could cripple world economies for years to come.
The Chinese think in decades and centuries, not four-year terms. "Losing face" is cultural anathema. An official told foreign reporters in Beijing that China remembers humiliating 19th-century opium wars when Western powers occupied its ports.
At home, Trump is taking America back 95 years, heedless of crippling immediate hardship among citizens he is sworn to protect. His tariffs are higher than those in 1930 that deepened the Great Depression and led to World War II.
Time remains to stop the Republican juggernaut before it implants itself permanently with rigged elections and voter suppression. Americans are waking up with nationwide peaceful protests and pressure on legislators. But there is not a day to lose.
A third of eligible voters opted out in 2024, including 21 million who cast ballots for Joe Biden in 2020. America's survival and the world's future depend on how citizens grasp the looming danger.
Franklin Roosevelt revived a sound economy largely with the Civilian Conservation Corps. Volunteers helped by military logistics earned basic wages by protecting the environment, farming fields and building vital infrastructure.
Today, America depends on a different CCC: Congress, courts and courage.
————
Trump has yet to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue as he boasted he could in 2016. Yet since then, he has been directly responsible for incalculable needless Covid deaths. Now, halting vital foreign aid, his worldwide toll is headed high into the millions.
If he succeeds in blocking international cooperation to mitigate climate collapse while doubling down on fossil fuels, eight billion people face soaring temperatures, rising seas and devastating storms while hunger outpaces food supply.
Vitriol aimed at Trump's America dwarfs anything I've heard during a lifetime abroad. Much of it centers on Elon Musk. Here is an email from a South African friend who often visited the United States and steeped her daughters in what she admired about it:
"Musk is a shameless disgusting racist just like his maternal grandparents. Most South Africans would like to set him alight with a tire round his neck. I am so sorry your country has ended up to be the biggest shithole the world has ever seen!!"
That is at the extreme, but she is hardly alone.
Neither Musk nor his money are going away. He wants to rule the galaxy from Mars, whatever the cost to Earth. Trump needs his twisted genius to get richer at the expense of human values, social safety nets and bedrock principles that made America great.
Musk acts as a self-appointed secretary of state. He courts hardline "illiberal democracies" — read, dictatorships with sham elections — that control the press and stamp out dissent, contemptuous of the hewers and haulers they exploit.
At home, the facts are plain. A wealthy few await a $4.5 trillion tax cut. Others with meager 401(k) accounts watched the Dow nosedive 6,500 points in three days after Trump announced "liberation day" tariffs — a valued-added tax on domestic consumers.
World markets followed. Hong Kong's Hang Seng dropped 13.1 percent in one session. European shares fell in the 6 percent range. In stressful times, stock prices fluctuate like blood pressure. They may stabilize. Or they may reveal a serious underlying malady.
Despite so much turmoil, Trump spent the weekend as he usually does. "President Trump out on a golf cart while people's retirements go up in frames," Sen. Adam Schiff of California remarked. "That may end up the most enduring image of his presidency."
————
For now, political parties are beside the point. Democrats squander their advantage over narrow issues and wishful thinking. But like most independents, they support rule of law. Trump's faithless Republicans are committing crimes against humanity.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, nearly vice president in a close race, defines the paradox at rallies in districts where Republicans shun constituents: Trump says the right things to address angst but does the opposite. He is funded by billionaires who create that angst.
His followers fall for his duplicity, time and again, like rubes buying snake oil. They won't be convinced, but they can be outvoted.
Illegal executive actions and firings by fiat already outpace Project 2025. Even if Trump implodes before his term ends, an April 3 excerpt from the redoubtable Heather Cox Richardson's "Letters From an American" sounds the alarm:
"The plan, as Vice President J.D. Vance explained in a 2021 interview, is to destroy the current government, business, educational, cultural, and scientific pillars of the United States in order to replace them with a new system, although there is tension between the Project 2025 wing of MAGA and the technocrats’ wing over whether that new system will be a theocracy or a technocracy. In either case, it will be an authoritarian government in which power and money concentrate in a very few hands."
————
Breathtaking grift and graft in plain sight are far beyond anything in modern memory. And despite so much muzzled, misled or prostituted "news media," principled journalists shed light into dark corners that reveals a terrifying tableau.
In the 1970s, reporters exposed the Watergate burglary, a crude precursor of today's ubiquitous electronic "opposition research." Judges forced Richard Nixon to hand over secret tapes. He resigned rather than divide the nation — or risk impeachment.
Trump simply stonewalls, counting on Americans' inattention to news that matters and slavish partisan support to escape accountability.
The Atlantic detailed not only a devastating top-secret breach that endangered U.S. aircraft crews over Yemen but also the cruel glee among inept imbeciles entrusted with national security and intelligence.
Strikes on Houthis and their families spurred yet more attacks on Israel and ships in waters vital to oil exports. The Associated Press and BBC said 53 people, including five children, were killed. The Pentagon had no confirmed fatality reports of Houthi leaders.
Karoline Leavitt, the Bad-Barbie White House press secretary, read another stilted script: "It's important to remember why this powerful action took place in the first place: because of Joe Biden's incompetence and pathetic weakness."
Jon Stewart showed a montage of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other top Trump aides making similar remarks, all but high fiving, like cocky bros on a Fox "News" weekend show.
In fact, U.S. and allied aircraft struck Yemen 260 times during 2024 with pinpoint targeting, but the military was careful to avoid publicity. Biden's strategic plan averted war across the Middle East, which Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu nearly provoked.
Trump won partly because many swing-state voters thought Biden did too little to stop the onslaught on Gaza. Now Netanyahu has pulled out all stops, blocking relief aid, with a mounting death toll that includes medical teams and journalists.
When the rubble is cleared and Palestinians are displaced, Trump may get his new Mediterranean Riviera.
Attorney General Pam Bondi refused to investigate the Yemen breach. She likened the use of Signal and private cell phones to Hillary Clinton's emails. That is the difference between a mountain peak and a molehill.
Leavitt blamed it all on Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic's respected editor. She called him a lowlife leftist reporter known for inventing conspiracy theories in a failing magazine.
Soon after, another travesty revealed how detached America's self-anointed monarch has gotten to be, insulated by sycophants whose vocabulary revolves around, "Yes, sir."
Laura Loomer, the 31-year-old bigot attached to Trump's belt loops, sat in on an Oval Office meeting. She said Air Force Gen. Timothy D. Haugh, head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, should be fired for disloyalty.
He was, along with his deputy. America lost the expertise of a 30-year decorated veteran at a time when a few errant sparks can set the world ablaze. Small wonder that close allies no longer trust the United States.
————
The big picture is too vast to synthesize, but a few aspects are enough to impel even apathetic citizens out in the streets. The more Trump gets away with, the more his excesses increase.
His polling on the economy is plummeting, but a majority supports his bogus "border emergency." Few consider how his arbitrary measures — draconian and illegal — trammel their own constitutional rights.
In 2012, Allan Bloom updated his 1987 bestseller, "The Closing of the American Mind." He showed how insular school curricula had curtailed interest in the wider world. People are easily led to fear societies they don't understand.
Back then, photographer Gary Knight and I took Tufts University students on summer trips to Kashmir, Kosovo, Cambodia, Vietnam and Argentina. Sherman Teichman, a remarkable educator with a nuanced worldview, ran the program.
I went to Medford, near Boston, to meet him. The Marriott near the campus had no newspapers. I tracked down a copy of USA Today, minus the sports section. Even in America's academic heartland, interest in the outside world was waning fast.
Tufts just made the news. Unidentified goons grabbed a Fulbright doctoral candidate from Turkey on the street. They seized her phone and purse and tossed her, cuffed, into an unmarked car for a flight to an ICE detention center in rural Louisiana.
She had been to pro-Palestine rally and expressed her views in the school paper. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had an explanation: "She raised a ruckus." Rumeysa Ozturk's case, now before a judge, is only the tip of a grim iceberg.
At one extreme, Andry José Hernández Romero, a gay makeup artist, fled Venezuela in fear of death only to be sent to El Salvador because of two plainly innocuous family tattoos. His life is again at risk among tough macho prisoners in a crowded cell.
At the other, there is everyone else: tourists, Green Card holders and even U.S. citizens who somehow trigger alarms because of social media posts or ill-defined circumstances in a nation that now deports first and asks questions later.
Like many foreign correspondents, I've been turfed out by truth-averse authoritarian governments — usually with a few days' notice but sometimes with a harrowing wait before being put aboard the next plane to anywhere.
Travelers and residents declared persona non grata routinely get an explanation and time to pack their bags. For a sense of why so many people avoid America, spend some time with the attached link to The Guardian.
The headline is enough: "‘I was a British tourist trying to leave the US. Then I was detained, shackled and sent to an immigration detention centre." Rebecca Burke had money to buy a ticket back to England, but she was kept for nine days behind bars.
She is a graphic designer who went last year, legally, to check out the American dream. It was a lifelong ambition. Back in England, she recounted her ordeal on ICE with detail and drawings. If anyone is thinking of going to Trump's America, she wrote, don't do it.
————
Random, capricious tariffs based on flawed calculations intensify revulsion against an economic power that the rest of the world is learning to circumvent. And the new Washington regime slams the doors to a world it bullies and shamefully exploits.
Trump gets away with it because so many people refuse to verify his outrageous distortions. And so many others react reflexively to the present, ignoring the past.
At every turn, he blames the Afghanistan debacle on Biden despite his own almost total responsibility. Inevitably, the Pentagon fought with the State Department. The Taliban blitz caught everyone off guard, and the Afghan president fled.
Biden quickly organized an airlift. He had opposed the war from the outset and was elected on a promise to end the war. Trump insists he would have evacuated every Afghan at risk, dependents included. With only 2,500 hunkered-down troops?
Trump had blocked visas for Afghans before he left office. Now he refuses asylum to people who remain at risk, even those whose visas were in process before his inauguration.
There is much more to say about universities, news organizations, law firms and big businesses that kowtow to Trump. He files frivolous lawsuits for astronomical amounts, then mocks them for abandoning principles to beg for favors. We all know the pattern.
For me, one vignette makes the point. Arriving in Paris, I found a digital booth instead of a usual bored agent to stamp me in. I faced the camera, put fingers on a pad and fed my passport into a reader. A screen flashed "WRONG" in big letters with a X through it.
I found a friendly guy who sorted out the glitch. Whatever France's faults, the laws work, and overreaching authorities are held to account.
A judge convicted Marine Le Pen of using public funds for her National Rally party and banned her from seeking public office for five years despite her shot at being elected president in 2027. As expected, she called that a political maneuver.
Trump chimed in. "That sounds a lot like the United States, a lot," he said. Not really. Prosecutors amassed thick dossiers going back years. Past presidents have been found guilty of misusing what amounts to chump change by U.S. standards.
Le Pen will appeal before election day, and she may yet be on the ballot. That is how rule of law works in functioning democracies. When a politician yells, "witch hunt," judges attempt to determine if there is a witch to hunt.
But I had a queasy feeling after leaving the airport. What if something got entered deep into computer software when I returned to America, and ICE swooped in? Not likely, but possible.
For the first time in 65 years of breezing past U.S. immigration desks without a second thought, I now plan to have someone make sure I get to baggage claim the way I used to do in Moscow during those Soviet Evil Empire days.
————