President Donald Trump's return to power is a damning indictment of American society, according to a political theorist.
And his prosecution of the war in Iran is a demonstration of his bottomless unfitness for office.
Alan Elrod recently published a piece for Liberal Currents analyzing Trump's second presidency and what it means for the future of American politics, and he spoke with The New Republic's Greg Sargent about his findings.
"Donald Trump is a bad person and he didn’t hide that," Elrod said. "He was a candidate in 2016 who bragged about wanting to use force and bragged about his sexual harassment of women and really in every way laid out that he was a terrible human being, and you could write off 2016 perhaps as a blip, as an accident of people thinking Hillary [Clinton] had it in the bag and then some tiny marginal votes here and there in swing states and, you know, the electoral college is weird, okay. And then we did it again."
The 79-year-old president catastrophically mismanaged the COVID-19 pandemic during his first term and then led an insurrection to try to overthrow the election he lost, yet he narrowly won re-election to a second term.
"Yes, that is damning," Elrod said. "It’s damning of the Americans who voted for him, but it’s also more generally damning — and I’m sure you want to get into this — of just where the country is as a whole, that this kind of person has been able to dominate our politics for a decade, and that so many Americans are in a place to be, I think, persuaded and seduced by the politics he’s offering."
Trump's business and political career has been characterized by his own immoral view of deal-making, Elrod said, describing his strategy as "subterfuge and bullying and gaining usually some kind of maybe even illegal leverage over someone," but he said those tools won't work against Iran.
"Iran’s leverage in the strait isn’t short-term — geographically they’re there forever," he said. "I mean, they have it as long as they can apply military force, and it’s clear that we haven’t been able to take that capability away. Again, I guess if he wants to use just massive destruction, if he wants to nuke Iran, he can do that."
"I don’t encourage people to talk about Trump sort of TACOing on this," Elrod added. "One, it’s not settled — he’s president for another, you know, more than two and a half years, and two, he clearly is a psychopath and a narcissist and I don’t put it past him to unleash millions of deaths on Iran. He doesn’t have any understanding of the limits of raw military force and neither does his secretary of defense.
Trump has shrunk the U.S. government down to himself, Elrod said, and he lamented the conditions that led voters to grant him that power.
“We cannot pretend that we are well as a nation," Elord wrote in his essay. "No morally healthy country would put this man in power twice. We have become a morally insane, civically disordered, and self-regardingly decadent country.”