Donald Trump is an agent of death
The first global war in the long annals of human history began in August of 1914.
The Great War killed 16 million people, among them were 116,000 Americans, in a spasm of violence between 1917-1918.
The outcome of the war destroyed the Austro-Hungarian empire, Ottoman empire, defeated and humiliated Imperial Germany, redrew the boundaries of the Middle East from the Levant to Arabia, and beggared the British and French empires.
The horror of trench warfare and protracted stalemate triggered a search for meaning within the democracies whose societies were being shattered by losses that were incomprehensible.
The cause became a “war to end all wars.”
Nobody could imagine worse, and so the horror at hand — unendurable, unbearable and unprecedented — became the boundary line of what was thought possible within the realm of brutality for the people of that era.
History records that much worse lay ahead, and out of the peace of 1918 came the Nazis and the war of 1939, which ended in 1945. It gave birth to a new epoch of history that is unraveling in 2025 because amnesia and anesthesia have descended over the American people, wiping away memory and feeling from the struggle that saved humanity from slavery.
When World War I ended the American president proposed a League of Nations to keep the peace. Woodrow Wilson’s idealistic dream did not come to pass, and the terms of the Versailles Treaty kept Germany in a state of penury, humiliation and submission.
This collective punishment became the fuel for the rise of great rage, resentments, conspiracies and political extremism.
It produced Adolf Hitler.
The killing of the Second World War made the First World War largely invisible to memory for the last 80 years. Then, suddenly, jarringly, it seems the lessons of the Second World War, which were vivid and plain in one moment, evaporated into the ether at the edge of another abyss.
The lessons of the Second World War begin in Munich.
Professor Laurence Tribe and Dennis Aftergut described Hitler’s achievement this way, and this should be considered when evaluating Donald Trump’s Oval Office shakedown of President Zelensky:
Hitler successfully bargained for something that wasn’t his (a piece of a neighboring nation) by agreeing to yield something that didn’t belong to him (the territory of other neighboring nations, which he agreed not to invade).
Does it remind you of anyone? Might he be pushing a minerals deal?
The events at Munich prefaced humanity’s greatest recorded catastrophe. A global war ended in the destruction of the Axis powers, which embraced a doctrine of racial purity, military conquest, imperialistic nationalism and ideological evil.
Every single aspect of this defeated ideology is represented by Vladimir Putin’s Russian gangster state. Every one. These are the points of contact and connection with the American Christian nationalist movement that reveres Vladimir Putin as a defender of European civilization.
The victory over Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and Imperial Japan remade the world. It established the United States of America as the dominant economic, military and cultural power on Earth.
Yet, the political and military leaders of the United States did not speak about empires and minerals and riches. They talked about values, ideas and ideals. America’s leaders talked about liberty and justice.
Here is what General Douglas MacArthur said to the world in the most listened to radio broadcast in history at that moment from the deck of the Battleship Missouri:
Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won...A new era is upon us.
Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization.
The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concepts of war.
Men, since the beginning of time, have sought peace.
Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn have failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war.
We have had our last chance.
If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. We have had our last chance.
The problem basically is theological, and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of human character that will synchronize with our matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years.
It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.
— Douglas MacArthur
There are few words that have ever been spoken that are more profound. The safety of humanity and the peace of the world is indeed a theological concern. It bears contemplation that the Supreme Commander of a victorious army that had the world’s only nuclear weapons understood that at the moment of ultimate triumph and maximum power the danger had only increased.
This is the wisdom that saved the world.
Let us not pretend that the men and women who saved it were different than us.
They were not.
They simply had different experiences and memories. It was not possible for them to forget what we have. Because we have forgotten what they endured we cannot imagine enduring it. Now we are in danger again, not from the threats that have always been present, but from the forgetting. We have forgotten what summons the furies and brings death to a nation in floods that cannot be comprehended — until when it is at its end, then it can be contemplated and understood, then remembered until it is forgotten again.
They should be considered at a moment when public character has been disintegrated in a vat of MAGA acid, and the US government has been seized by an extremist cause that combines recklessness, stupidity, malice and dishonesty into an ideology of nothing that could cost everything.
The shameful misconduct of JD Vance, Donald Trump and Secretary Little Marco, the national Puta, towards the fighting people of Ukraine and their president is a perfect and vivid illustration of the rising nihilism that is eating away at wisdom that came from rivers of blood and flames of destruction.
None of it is a passive act.
They are lighting a fuse.
There is a simple question that deserves contemplation: is humanity’s most deadly war in front of us, or behind us?
Has the centuries-long escalation of violence come to its end, or will the 21st century become the deadliest of all?
The world is interconnected, and it is spiraling into the abyss again.
When the Second World War ended under a mushroom cloud the future of humanity was deeply uncertain, but there was no apocalypse.
Instead, under the power of American leadership something else happened.
The world saw the greatest expansions of prosperity and freedom in the annals of history. Though there remains great injustice and inequality, there has never been a comparable 80 year period of progress — ever.
The expansion of human rights and dignity, democracy, international cooperation, coupled with stunning scientific, technological and medical advances are astonishing when judged against the sweep of human history.
The pace of progress, change and the disruptions that come with it are continuing to quicken. They have taken us to the brink of a new age of artificial intelligence and powerful machines that will be able to think, decide, act, and perhaps kill.
We live in an era in which the genetic foundation of human beings can be altered in a laboratory, and where space will become a frontier for economic development and exploitation.
Yet, for nearly 80 years the United States has played a singular role, despite all of its many flaws, in holding back an inexorable tide that has risen higher across each century of human existence. It is a tide of death and suffering caused by war. Because of America, there has been a long season of peace and progress that established America beyond debate as the greatest and most important nation in world history.
What was most stunning about this reality are three astonishing features about America:
We were the only nation in the history of the world established by an idea.
We are a young nation.
The United States is the only nation in the world made up of all of the peoples of the world where every language known to mankind is commonly spoken every day.
America is not great because we exist. Our greatness comes from the cause of our existence.
Freedom. Liberty. Justice.
The United States has ceased intelligence cooperation with Ukraine, cutting it off from the information that allows the Ukrainians to kill Russian invaders and protect their children, to seek favor with a tyrant and murderer.
Peter Navarro, a five-star officer in Trump’s wack job government, has claimed that Canada is controlled by Mexican cartels. In a Fox News interview, he used this as the justification of Donald Trump’s unjust and immoral trade war against our closest ally and neighbor, with whom we share a $1 trillion dollar trading relationship and the longest undefended peaceful border in world history.
Pete Hegseth, the accused rapist, certified drunk, and unqualified, unfit, incompetent and embarrassing defense secretary, who is festooned with Christian Nationalist tattoos, made it exactly 41 days in the job before appearing on Fox News threatening the Chinese with World War III.
American defense secretaries of both parties have long understood that the world’s most powerful military doesn’t need to bluster back at political provocations at the Chinese Communist Party Congress because Teddy Roosevelt was on to something when he said, “Walk softly and carry a big stick.”
The United States was the preeminent power in the world at noon on January 20, 2025. The world was far from perfect or just, but in that moment, it was more so than it had ever been since mankind emerged from the caves.
In that hour there was a force of freedom in the world that could be clumsy, wrongheaded, arrogant and misguided. However, it had never been confused about the elemental and sublime issues that constitute the fault line between the free world and the savage one, where might makes right and the strong devour the weak, where mercy has no place and justice has no home.
The United States of America was great because of what we believed in — until there came a moment when a man came along, and said that what makes us great has made us weak. He sold the people an idea that we could be great by abandoning what made us so.
Of course, it is a lie, but lies have strangled the truth and drawn the curtain on the light before.
A great drama is underway.
What role will you play in the great events that are taking shape?
Will you run for an office?
Will you join a campaign?
Will you march?
Will you register voters?
Will you picket?
Will you show grace to the ordinary Americans who have been lied to, deceived by, and then hurt by Trump?
Will you be a good American?
Will you fight back, and make this madness stop?
Things can get much worse. Let’s not let it.
Steve thank you for this concise description of where we’ve been and where we are headed. Please submit this OpEd to every newspaper in America. We must help those Trump supporters understand the cost we will pay for the destruction of the underpinnings of our safety as a nation and influence as a world power!
There is a fraud on the American people being played. Distracting us with hundreds of line item veto “ex post facto” savings, all of which are illegal. I call for Musk’s certifying the cost and pricing data. That must be required. I call for Musk’s testimony under oath before Congress. I call for him to divulge the truth of what he found. Spare me the BS braggadocio crap. I don’t buy crap when we are talking about a $4.5 trillion tax cut. I say Musk’s ploy is all a fraud founded on a bag of smoke and mirrors and a “bury you in paper” con job. Let us see it. Empty the DOGE bag.
https://hotbuttons.substack.com/p/empty-doges-bag?r=3m1bs