In the unlikely event it hasn’t occurred to you already, please allow this gentle Sunday up-to-speed notification.

If any foreign country, any rival government, even any loosely aligned shadow terrorist movement, had done to America what the second Trump administration has wrought within the space of 84 days, we’d be at war.

Right now.

American insecurity

Bombs would be dropping, missiles firing, drones raining death and destruction across some hapless native landscape of anyone we so much as suspected of acting against our national security, our global influence, our domestic infrastructure, our institutions, and our essential American identity.

It’s how we roll.

Not even a quarter century ago, we rolled into Iraq on the mere suspicion that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. That dubious assertion spooked an America still freshly shocked by 9/11.

And then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice went on CNN for the kill shot: “The problem here is that there will always be some uncertainty about how quickly [Hussein] can acquire nuclear weapons,” said Rice, one of the larger brains in the George W. Bush administration. “But we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud.”

So on March 20, 2003, America brought “shock and awe” to Iraq with all the force that foretold a quick end to the crisis of our fears. Just seven weeks in, Bush posed in front of a Mission Accomplished banner, and the war went on for eight more years. More than 4,000 American service members died fighting it, along with hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, most of them civilians.

There was no smoking gun.

Today the threats to America are as real as the actual destruction in progress. Our own government, the one we democratically elected in a national cognitive test we clearly failed, is doing everything in its demonstrably unchecked power to make us dumber, poorer, sicker, and less secure. It’s nothing else but the abject sabotage that makes America haters around the world drool.

That all this would be caused by galloping stupidity and the highest levels of American power is an international disgrace.

Unsafe feeling

Just this week, nutbag MAGA conspiracy monger Laura Loomer successfully lobbied Donald Trump, president of the United States, to jettison General Tim Haugh, who led both U.S. Cyber Command and the National Security Administration, for suspected disloyalty. Not to the country, of course, but to Trump.

That came barely a month after Attorney General Pam Bondi, in one of her first official acts, dismantled the task force that counters secret influence operations by China, Russia, and other sinister actors who might disrupt American politics and American elections. That’ll come in handy now that there is no longer any enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.

Feel safe?

No one outside of Trump’s shrinking pack of lapdogs can feel any safer than Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland father the government mistakenly sent to a Salvadoran prison and then fought like hell when a federal court ordered it to bring him back.

“The implication of the government’s position is (that) noncitizens and U.S. citizens could be taken off streets, forced onto planes, confined to foreign prisons with no opportunity for redress,” was what Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor said about it, adding that America’s laws are designed to prevent that very thing, not give rise to it.

All of this happened as the Trump administration gathered its momentum by chain-sawing the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control, scores of American research universities, the Social Security Administration, US Aid to International Development, and finally put the pedal down with a self-inflicted economic crisis that raked trillions of dollars of stock value from American accounts to ignite a global trade war that’s almost too stupid for words.

If all this were the brainchild of some megalomaniac Chinese oligarch/super spy, how would it look any different?

“Spending relatively small amounts of money to save thousands if not millions of lives is apparently unacceptable to this administration; instead, they are seeking an astounding $45 billion to expand immigrant detention facilities,” said Brandon Wu, director of policy with the social justice organization ActionAid.

American cruelty

“The cruelty, as always, is the point,” he said. “Let countless people around the world die, and lock up countless more for the so-called ‘crime’ of seeking a better life in the United States. Why spend money helping people live better lives, when we could spend it on destroying lives instead?”

One more reminder, unneeded as it is: America, from its 18th century birth revolution forward, could always rely on the help of global allies in its darkest, most challenging hours. In just 84 days, we’ve seriously alienated most of them.

First Published: April 13, 2025, 8:30 a.m.