“I’m not sure most Americans appreciate the monumental damage President Trump is doing to the post-World War II order that is the wellspring of American global leadership and affluence.” NYTimes Nicholas Kristof
There is a growing outcry over the “monumental damage” emanating from the bromance of two ‘straight’ (and white) men on a tear of petty vindictiveness settling old scores, which can have far greater consequences.
It is tearing apart our closest alliances that protect Americans and other democratic countries from the depredations of autocrats and dictators, such as Vladimir Putin, who must imagine himself Czar Ivan the Terrible killing hundreds of thousands of his own people in attempting to conquer Ukraine to make it a part of a new Russian Empire (350,000 dead Russians at last count, per NBC’s Morning Joe).
“We have Trump and his oligarchy of ignorant shoe shiners vandalizing the network of organizations, agreements and values—largely put in place by America since the Second World War—which have given most of us, including America, on the whole an extraordinary degree of peace and prosperity.” Chris Patten, former UK Tory Chairman cited by Nicholas Kristof.
The level of ineptitude that Elon Musk’s DOGE team shows is breathtaking, as are the attempts to hide it.
“All in all, what we’ve just witnessed is a stunning display of incompetence, dismissal of critical federal workers by people with no idea of what they do and why it matters. Musk and Trump have, of course, apologized and promised to do better in the future.” Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman
Why the petty vindictiveness of our Bromancers? In a frightening insight by Timothy Snyder, Author of On Freedom, they are really ‘straight’ men trying to appear strong. But that can only be done by weakening the strong that actually stand in their way.
“Trump is a strongman in the sense that he makes others weak. He is strong in a relative sense; as Musk destroys institutions, what remains is Trump’s presence. But other sorts of power meaning vanish, as Musk takes apart the departments of the American government that deal with money, weapons, and intelligence. And then the United States has no actual tools to deal with the rest of the world.”
Dr. Snyder explained what he meant in a recent New Yorker article. Trump and Putin are both fascists, which by definition means masters of propaganda that twist words such as ‘communism’, or ‘deep state’ into meanings that feed their MAGA followers’ paranoid fantasies.
Hitler’s Goebbels, and Russia’s Stalin were masters of such propaganda that led to World War Two. It is detailed in Snyder’s bestselling book, “Bloodlands,” which describes the hideous period in the 1930s and ’40s when as many as 14 million people perished at the hands of Hitler and Stalin, with Ukraine a “particularly awful” mass grave.
And Trump is using the same fascist vocabulary today in branding Ukraine’s Zelensky the dictator, when it is Vladimir Putin.
That is why Trump and Musk’s actions threaten world peace and our own domestic order. They accomplish it by weakening the military alliances that have protected us such as NATO, while eliminating whole government departments that protect our health and safety and more environmental catastrophes, while weakening the FBI and DOJ that protect Americans from domestic and foreign terrorists.
In fact, settling old scores is an attempt to protect themselves from their own mistakes (i.e., Trump’s convictions, Musk-Tesla’s auto-drive accidents) by putting the blame on others. That is why Trump says he does not know what Musk is doing, when asked. He can therefore blame Musk or his lieutenants when said mistakes are uncovered.
Both Democrats and Republicans must now find a way now to counter Trump and Musk’s biggest mistake of all, their preoccupation with vengeance to and masks their own weaknesses that could lead to another war.
It is weakening our own strength and ability to stand up to Russia and China, where a larger war is most likely to start—because they have become emboldened by our growing weakness.
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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