Trump isn't just retreating from the world — here's how he's helping to end it
Ours would be the normal story of imperial powers rising and falling on Planet Earth — nothing new there, of course — if it weren’t for one thing: the fact that this world, too, is now falling.
Unfortunately, nothing is truly normal about this planet of ours anymore, as the slow-motion equivalent of atomic weaponry goes off in our already distinctly overheating atmosphere. And though he’s seldom thought of that way, President Trump, the — who would once have believed it? — second time around, should be considered an all-too-literal embodiment of some mad human urge to turn this planet into a (once almost unimaginable) disaster zone. He would, in fact, be truly unbelievable, if what’s happening to this planet at this very moment weren’t even more so.
We’re distinctly in a 21st century from hell and yet “our” president continues to act as if this were still the 20th (if not the 19th) century. Under other circumstances, it might seem little short of amusing, but not on this planet, not in 2025, not in a world drying out at a remarkably rapid pace, not on a planet to whose atmosphere we humans have “added about 200 billion more tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent greenhouse gases” just between 2020 and 2024. (And if you’re already sweating, I don’t blame you!)
If you want to know what century Donald Trump is in, check out his recent visit (his second!) to — yes! — Great Britain to meet King Charles III and Queen Camilla. And what a dinner the king and queen threw for him with “some of the wealthiest, most influential, and best connected people in the world all together at one long table inside a nearly-thousand-year-old castle.”
It was so wonderfully 20th, if not 19th, century! Of all places to pay the only visit of his second term in office so far, Trump chose to travel back in time, which is, of course, no small thing, to an era when Great Britain and its royalty mattered globally in order to offer an imperial bow to a planet that functionally no longer exists.
But honestly, you shouldn’t have been surprised. Though you might not have noticed — few have made a point of it — Trump is indeed living in the wrong century. In his brain, I suspect, he’s still in the era when, after the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, this country became the planet’s sole superpower. He’s still in the century in which Elvis was king. He’s still in the time when tariffs (“I am a Tariff Man“) actually mattered.
Oh wait, wasn’t that the 19th century of President William McKinley who, as Trump has claimed, “made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent”?
Admittedly, the president did go to Great Britain accompanied by AI executives, and that certainly made him look reasonably modern, but don’t be fooled, not for a second. Strange as he may be in some deeper sense, he distinctly is Donald J. (Been There, Done That) Trump. And in retrospect (if, of course, there even is a retrospect), I think it will be all too clear that, by identifying with Big Oil, Big Gas, and Big Coal, and turning his back on climate change and the 21st century, while putting tariffs from another age on much of other nations’ economic dealings with the United States, he will have turned this very planet of ours over to the place — China — that’s producing twice as much green power as the rest of the world combined and madly developing the equipment to produce more of it (not to speak of electric vehicles), while already starting to sell its green products around the world. Phew!
Trump, on the other hand, has essentially declared war on green energy and, in doing so, has in his own strange fashion declared war on the American people, modernity, and the future of this country, not to speak of this planet. And yet, all too sadly, doing exactly that got him elected president a second time.
After all, he ran his winning presidential campaign in 2024 on, above all else, a slogan that couldn’t have been blunter about his vision of the future — “drill, baby, drill“ — and he now seems intent on ensuring that the world-record profits of the five big oil companies and the estimated investment by banks of almost $7 trillion in the fossil-fuel industry since the Paris Climate Agreement went into effect in 2016, will indeed remain a, if not the, crucial part of our future, not our past. (Only recently, at the United Nations, he called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” while praising “clean, beautiful coal.”) And that should be considered his way of turning that very future over to China.
He’s also using tariffs from another age, in his own striking fashion, to reject and cut the U.S. off economically from much of the rest of this planet, while giving China the economic edge it needs to thrive — at least to the degree that anyplace can thrive on a world that’s literally going to hell in a handbasket (even if in relatively slow motion). Long ago, in 2017, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggested, however tongue-in-cheekily, that Trump might actually be a Chinese agent. He pointed out then that, in his first weeks in office, the president had already taken his “Make China Great campaign to a new level … by rejecting the science on climate change and tossing out all Obama-era plans to shrink our dependence on coal-fired power.”
Drill Baby Drill
Now, more than eight years later, Trump seems, if anything, intent on doubling down when it comes to rejecting any thought of dealing with climate change, while still focusing remarkable energy (and I use that word advisedly) on helping the oil, natural gas, and coal industries prosper.
Think of the drill-baby-drill president as, in his own way, a satanic force (since the result will be heat of an unparalleled nature). China, on the other hand, continues to put striking amounts of money and (again, excuse the word) energy into the creation of a green-energy economy. Yes, I know that it also continues to produce and use staggering amounts of coal at record rates (though its use of carbon energy is expected to peak soon), but it’s already beginning to sell green-energy equipment — wind turbines, solar panels, and electric cars — globally in a fashion not faintly equaled by any other country.
In that sense, it visibly represents the future (if there is to be any future) on planet Earth, while Trump’s version of America represents an increasingly devastating past. Typically, for instance, while doing his damnedest to get rid of wind power in this country, Trump only recently made a deal with the European Union in which he forced those countries to agree to buy another $750 billion of American natural gas and oil by the end of his second term in office (and while such sales may, in the end, prove something of a fantasy, the point remains).
If the American people had declined Trump the second time around, we might be in a somewhat different situation, but (explain it as you will) no such luck. Whether we realize it or not, we Americans are, it seems, still living somewhere in the 20th century in energy (and perhaps other) terms.
Yet you may not even know it, since he’s so intent on making the free press into the freeze press, both by working hard to restrict what information reporters can get from his world and by suing anyone who writes something that displeases him. Add to that his functional takeover of the Justice Department (which past presidents had given a certain level of independence) and you know that we’re in a new world in a sense that no one who once used that phrase to describe America would recognize.
So, welcome to an American present and future that’s functionally a terrifying version of the past, Trump-style. In fact, get used to it, since over (minimally) the next three years and three months, if you’re living in the United States, we’re going to have quite a ride ahead of us. (And remember, he’s never ruled out a third term in office. To hell with the Constitution!)
Who Knows What’s Ending?
Give us all the credit we deserve. We humans are distinctly strange creatures. We’re creative in so many ways and yet, historically speaking, we seem to have been and continue to be incapable of not making war on one another. And bad as that may have been once upon a time, it’s even worse today, since militaries, even at peace but especially when making war, pour startling amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. (Keep in mind, for instance, that a 2024 study indicated “the U.S. military’s carbon output as of 2022 exceeded that of nearly 140 national governments.”)
And don’t think that Trump is an exception to the rule (any rule) on planet Earth right now when it comes to creating future atmospheric chaos. After all, at this very moment, there are three major wars occurring that have relatively little to do with the United States. There’s Russia’s war on Ukraine, Israel’s war on Gaza and surrounding areas (admittedly, heavily supported by the Trump administration, which is now planning to send another $6.4 billion in weaponry to that country), and a disastrous civil war in Sudan (largely ignored by the rest of the world).
Worse yet, none of them show any signs of ending any time soon. Only recently, of course, India and Pakistan also briefly went to war with each other. And if you want to ensure that this planet grows ever hotter ever faster, there’s hardly a better way to do it than by making war, since such conflicts pour greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at a remarkable rate.
And of course, Trump is cementing his singular power in place in ever more significant ways. They range from deploying at least 35,000 National Guard and other troops to American cities and the border with Mexico to going after seemingly random ships in the Caribbean Sea and blowing them to smithereens, while gathering American naval and air power there in preparation for a possible war on Venezuela — and who knows where else?
In short, in a remarkable fashion, in significantly less than a year of his second term in office, Trump has succeeded in steering what not so long ago was the greatest power on planet Earth to the planetary margins in a big-time, possibly even historically unique fashion. And count on this (but take a breath first): with at least three-plus years to go, he (or do I mean He?) is only beginning. Yes, this is just the start of … well, who really knows what? The only thing you can truly count on is that, whatever it may be, it’s already guaranteed to be a historical disaster of the first order for this country (and, unfortunately, the rest of the planet, too).
It’s hard even to imagine having a president at this very moment who is literally incapable of taking in the most dangerous and devastating thing that may ever have happened on or to planet Earth. I mean, honestly, just try to take that in yourself for a moment.
Think of Donald Trump (though he’d hate it!) as the Surrender President who, in his own striking fashion, is turning the U.S. into a distinctly declinist power on a distinctly declinist planet.
And all of this is indeed and all too literally something new under — yes! — the sun (and nothing but the sun). Welcome, in short (or, given the nature of climate change, do I mean “in long”?), to Donald Trump’s (ever)hot(ter) world. Think of him, in fact, as both the surrender and the hell-on-earth president.
- Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Type Media Center's TomDispatch.com. His books include: "A Nation Unmade by War" (2018, Dispatch Books), "Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World" (2014, with an introduction by Glenn Greenwald), "Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050"(co-authored with Nick Turse), "The United States of Fear" (2011), "The American Way of War: How Bush's Wars Became Obama's" (2010), and "The End of Victory Culture: a History of the Cold War and Beyond" (2007).