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Going, Going, Gone!
The World According to Donald Trump
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.
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.
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