(Dobbs) “Trump’s Kiss of Death"“What Trump destroys with a snap of his fingers will take years to repair, except in those cases where he has broken something beyond restoration.”
Sometimes we only tiptoe around what’s bad about Donald Trump. As direct as we are about his cruel and calamitous policies, we still don’t always just come out and say it: when he touches something, it can be the kiss of death. Top of that list of what he touches and what he ruins would be the United States of America. Columnist Thomas B. Edsall just wrote about it, and that was his title: “Trump’s Kiss of Death.” In a summary— because if anyone were to try at this point to enumerate those kisses, there would be no time for sleep— he said, “Trump’s infliction of harm is not a result of bad luck or malign interference by foreign and domestic adversaries— the common fate of American presidents. In the overwhelming majority of cases, Trump himself initiated the policies and actions that turned belly-up.” There are so many examples, large and small. The small ones like rehabilitating the Reflecting Pool in Washington. He said it would last a century. It didn’t last a week. His promised budget of $1.5 million ballooned to $16 million+, and they’re not even done. And another small one: his inappropriate interference in the World Cup when he asked for a review after a star on the U.S. team got a red card, which would mean he’d miss the next game. After pressure from our president, soccer’s hierarchy did review the penalty and reversed it. The star played. The U.S. lost. Then there’s the bigger stuff. Like Trump imposing punishing tariffs on foreign trade partners on the thinnest of pretexts. A bigger kiss of death. He promised, “Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” They didn’t. All that happened was, prices for American consumers went up, and by last month the U.S. had some 75,000 fewer jobs. He also claimed his “One Big Beautiful Bill” would “slash deficits and the national debt.” It didn’t. Since he came back to the Oval Office, the debt is up by about $3.3 trillion, a more than ten percent rise. And fuel costs? At least partly because of the war with Iran, Americans are spending upwards of $74 billion more than they did for gas and diesel to run their cars and trucks. As of yesterday, Brown University puts that at an average of more than $570 per household, and counting. Finally, the standoff with Iran. Yet another Trump kiss of death. This whole counterproductively chaotic and increasingly costly war is just one man’s fault. Not one country’s, not one government’s, but one man’s: Donald Trump‘s. Thousands of lives snuffed out, including at least 18 Americans’, the world economy perilously unstable, and tens of billions in American treasure spent on the war— the defense secretary says some $37 billion but independent analysts put it closer to $100 billion. And not just incidentally, experts at the Center for Strategic & International Studies say we have left our critical stocks of weapons for war, including a future war, seriously depleted. All the fault of one man: Donald Trump. He’ll tell you it’s Iran’s fault because they have a nuclear program, which he will not tolerate. What he fails to acknowledge— and this is far worse than a simple error of omission— is that the United States and five other powerful countries— China and Russia, Germany, France, and the U.K.— reached the accord with the Islamic Republic known as the JCPOA, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. Even if imperfect, it constrained and monitored Iran. Probably because it was President Obama’s triumph, Trump tore it up. Now, intelligence from negotiations since the start of the war suggests that at best, Iran and the United States will end up back where they started. But Trump is a man who cannot accept blame and cannot admit a mistake, and his loyal lackeys follow suit. The most recent example was a week ago when Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth defiantly testified to Congress. He was pressed many times about statements he has made since the war broke out about how quickly it would be over. It wasn’t. Even in that testimony, with Iran’s improbable survival out there for all the world to see, he called the war “an historic military victory.” Sorry, but Iranian strikes last week on nine U.S. bases in the Middle East, using technical knowhow to hit specific military targets and to kill three more American service members, hardly look like “an historic military victory.” But when asked by Congress if his statements were fabrications, Hegseth wouldn’t answer the question. Because he can’t. Neither can Trump. Trump’s kiss is a kiss of death to U.S. businesses too. Because of his unprecedented arrests of immigrants— he calls them “the worst of the worst” but in fact most have no record of wrongdoing beyond living here without permission— businesses that depended on them are suffering, especially since the rate of arrests has gone as high as about 2,000 people a day. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wrote this month to Congress, “Congress can, and should, exercise its plenary authority over immigration policy to prevent significant disruption to America’s work force and avoid an unnecessary humanitarian crisis.” In his column “Trump’s Kiss of Death,” Thomas Edsall said he asked political and presidential scholars “how they think Trump’s mind works. Most,” he explained, “pointed to his seemingly exclusive reliance on his own judgment while rejecting expert advice.” Political scientist emeritus at Texas A&M George Edwards said, “Instead of careful, informed reflection, he acts impulsively and thinks with his gut, in which he has great confidence. He should not.” Michael Bailey, a political scientist at Georgetown University, said, “He makes rash, reckless decisions; at best, they are based on bar-stool theories of how the world works, and at worst, they are driven by corrupt motives.” Then he added, “Since he ‘just knows’ he is right…. no evidence will sway him.” And from political historian Matthew Dallek at George Washington University, “Governing via conspiracy theories, personal whim and wish-casting, Trump has taken his place as the most consistently inept president of this century.” The most damning conclusion of all came from Edsall: “What Trump destroys with a snap of his fingers will take years to repair, except in those cases where he has broken something beyond restoration.” Putting that in just four words, it’s “the kiss of death.” To be sure, Trump doesn’t plant the kiss of death on everything he touches. His personal financial portfolio has done just fine. Exhibiting his corruption right out in the open, the president since taking office 18 months ago has made billions for himself and for his family. The New York Times compiled a chart, comparing the president’s first year in office during his first term, and his first year this time. His cronies have done well too. But that only helps them. It doesn’t help the rest of us at all. Share Unless you think we are enriched by Donald Trump redesigning the core of the nation’s capital to suit his ego, unless you think we are better served whitewashing the less admirable parts of American history, unless you think his efforts to manipulate our elections are an advance for democracy, unless you think it’s right for the federal government to hamstring a free press, unless you think people living alternative lifestyles deserve to be excluded from the mainstream, unless you think we are better off offending longtime foreign allies, unless you think we are richer losing a part of our workforce and safer because of the war with Iran, then it is fair to say that Donald Trump’s kiss is a hard kiss of death. He shows no signs of making it softer. Leave a comm |