Trump’s stain on America may be permanent

It may be a long time before the United States can look at itself in the mirror and see what it saw after World War II: the proverbial shining city on a hill, a model for other democratic nations.

Then again, we may be given the chance to revisit that time in history sooner than we want.

At least 19 Russian drones violated Poland’s airspace Tuesday night, whether on purpose or by accident. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said his country was at its “closest to open conflict since World War II.”

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte denounced the Russian incursion as “reckless” and vowed renewed support for Ukraine.

At the time America is needed the most, it seems our country has abandoned its democratic ideals. Objectively, we have never lived up to them, but the beauty of this country is that it has never given up on them either. Today our ideals are in shreds. We have Donald Trump.

In less than eight months after returning to the Oval Office, Trump has proven he’s completely inept at his job. The country is burning down around him even as some of his supporters have begun to abandon him.

Our existential dilemma at this moment is that Trump and his irresolute gang of political whores, ex-junkies, avowed racists, former television hosts, QAnon worshippers and faux-Christian grifters lack the brain power needed to ensure their own survival and, by extension, ours as well. “We are not doing the job very well, though the president thinks we are,” a source close to Trump told me.

No, they’re not. They’re riding the four horsemen of the American apocalypse as if they were halftime entertainment at a UFC cage match held on the South Lawn. (Something that will apparently happen.) So much for being the light of the world, the city on a hill. Instead, we’re the village idiots consuming stale mead and suffering from ergot poisoning.

It’s hard to see all this if you don’t get the facts about the Trump administration’s deepening depravity, or the tragedy it portends — and that’s by design. What you get instead is Stephen Miller telling the president he won a Supreme Court decision he actually lost. You get White House “pep secretary” Karoline Leavitt answering self-congratulatory questions from unqualified reporters, in increasingly sporadic briefings. In all of them, the reporters are seemingly racing to discover who can most eagerly press their lips the longest on Donald Trump’s political boots.

The ensuing chaos and violence has consumed our culture, and that’s just the way Trump likes it. Anthony Bourdain once said he didn’t want to eat dinner with Trump, not merely because Trump liked overcooked steaks bathed in ketchup but, more to the point, because Puff Donny never talks about anything except himself.

As Trump’s obvious mental and physical decline heads down a  steep hill to an inevitable destination, we have all become prisoners of his dementia. “We’ve never seen anything like this,” he says. “Many people are saying it.” What is he even talking about? Does Donny even know?. Trump claims that America was cold, cold, cold before he came back to town and now we are hot, hot, hot. “We have the hottest country going. The likes of which have never been seen before.” He sounds like Ruby Rhod in “The Fifth Element.”

Maybe that explains why he’s telling his MAGA minions, in his regular fundraising emails, that he’s trying to get to heaven — and you can help get him there by donating just 10 bucks. Perhaps that heat he feels is not the warmth of success, but the hellfire of the demon’s fury.

Ahem, here’s a note to future generations: Do not allow people to hold political office who have 34 felony convictions and strong ties to a well-known sex trafficker of underage girls.

If 30 years from now my grandchildren look back and wonder what happened, I hope they understand this much: Our hubris and arrogance were indicative of our ignorance and stupidity. Our grandchildren must aim higher than we have, for we have failed miserably. I get bored laughing at all the finger-pointing. Who’s at fault? We all are. The first step in solving a problem, as Jeff Daniels reminded us in “The Newsroom,” is to recognize the problem.

Not only are we not the best nation on earth anymore, we might not be in the top 50 — unless we’re talking about defense spending. Reporters Without Borders ranks the U.S. just above Gambia when it comes to press freedom, at No. 57 in the world. Our health care system ranks last, or close to last, among the most developed nations. Our educational system lags behind other industrialized nations.

What’s the upside? Well, we rank high among nations who believe in elaborate conspiracies, the evil schemes of the deep state and the flatness of the earth. We also rank high in climate change deniers and folks who believe in chem trails and think vaccines cause autism.

The Trump administration began its invasion of Illinois Monday after the Supreme Court ruled it was fine with ICE using racial profiling when rounding up suspected undocumented immigrants. That decision ensures that young Americans with the most melanin in their skin will be subjected to random searches and seizures. Their only hope is to carry the proper paperwork to prove their citizenship at all times. Sounds a bit too much like Germany and Italy nearly 100 years ago.

Trump’s Chicago assault is both a deflection from the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein scandal and a demonstration of how his rising panic and anger lead to displays of force. As he loses control, Trump turns to intimidation, reckless violence and the destruction of the foundations of liberty spelled out in our Constitution. Who better than Stephen Miller and border czar Tom Homan to take the lead in this ugly, racist nightmare. Those guys were born for each other. Both lack empathy, common sense, discretion and any semblance of decency. They confuse cruelty with bravery and kindness with weakness while scraping and bowing before their dark lord Donny.

The stage is set for the exactly the kind of reality show Trump loves most. We’ve seen that play out in the Brady Briefing Room, before the canned laugh track of an audience pretending to be journalists.

Before we get there, a recap is in order. Trump said on the 2024 campaign trail that the Epstein files were evidence of the deepest deep-state coverup ever. He swore to release them. Attorney General Pam Bondi said much the same thing, weeks after taking office. Now? No files have been released and, many stories later, Trump is done talking about it. He told NBC News this week, “I don’t comment on something that’s a dead issue.”

Meanwhile, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson had to retract the lie he had briefly promoted that Trump had actually been an FBI informant in the Epstein case. Johnson can’t lie as adeptly as Trump and looked deeply silly trying to do so.

Lately Trump has turned to calling the entire Epstein scandal a “Democratic hoax.” That led Rep. Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican, to wonder how Trump could be an informant if the whole thing was a hoax. On Tuesday, in the first White House briefing in two weeks, one reporter asked Leavitt to explain what Trump was talking about.

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The Wall Street Journal had reported earlier that Trump allegedly wrote a cryptic letter to Epstein, inside a suggestive drawing of a woman’s body, on the occasion of Epstein’s 50th birthday. Trump denied this, and filed suit against the Journal and its owner, his former BFF  Rupert Murdoch. Then the Epstein estate turned over the birthday book, including the apparent Trump letter and drawing, to the House committee investigating the Epstein scandal.

So Pep Secretary Leavitt told the world on Tuesday that Trump hadn’t signed the letter and hadn’t made the drawing, and told more lies about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. In the administration’s official story, the two men may have bumped into each other once or twice in public, but nothing more than that. You know they were never serious about each other.

So if that’s all true, why not release the information? If Trump didn’t sign the birthday card, or other documents released by Epstein’s estate, a reporter quietly asked Leavitt, why is he in that book at all? “The president has one of the most famous signatures in the world,” Leavitt replied. “The president did not write that letter. He did not sign those documents.”

Trump’s niece, Mary Trump, just laughs at those statements. “Of course it’s his signature,” she said. Not according to Leavitt, who also claims her boss looks forward to a day in court that will never come — because it would allow Murdoch’s lawyers to question Trump in open court about his relationship with Epstein.

Finally, when pressed to explain what part of all this was a hoax, Leavitt said, “The hoax is Democrats pretending to care about victims of crime when they’ve done nothing.”

Which leads one to ask, what has Trump done for Epstein’s victims? He won’t even meet with them.

Finally, on Tuesday night when Trump was stopped by reporters on his way to dinner at a restaurant less than two blocks from the White House, he doubled down on the birthday book. “That’s not my signature, and it’s not the way I speak,” he said. “And anybody that’s covered me for a long time? No, that’s not my language. It’s nonsense. And frankly, you’re wasting your time. All you do is try to get off the great success of D.C. and about 200 other things we’ve done that are so successful. This is a great, great success, and we have so many. I don’t think any president in their first eight months has anywhere near the success that we’ve had.”

Asked whether he’d meet with Epstein’s victims, he said, “I haven’t even thought about that. Thank you all very much. Have a good time. Thank you.”

This from a president who a day earlier had visited  the Bible Museum to support supposed Christian values. “We will protect our Judeo-Christian founding with vigor. . . .We have to bring back religion in this country, bring it back stronger than ever before,” he said. “To have a great nation, you have to have religion.”

On Wednesday afternoon, right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk was gunned down on a Utah college campus, literally while speaking about gun violence. That same day there was a mass shooting at a high school in Colorado. Both shootings came less than three months after Minnesota Democratic state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot and killed in what was described as “an act of targeted political violence.”

Utah Gov. Spencer Cox, a Republican, described Kirk’s killing as a “political assassination.”

All of this is on Donald Trump’s watch. He has stoked the fires of hatred and violence,  and hardened the hearts of the world. He does not care. If he did, he might reach out to political adversaries with an olive branch, instead of invading American cities with the military. That whole project, by the way, is destined to fail. Some members of the military, as reported in the Washington Post, are already speaking out about that.

In measuring public sentiment about Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., the National Guard has assessed that its mission is perceived as “leveraging fear,” driving a “wedge between citizens and the military” and promoting a sense of “shame” among some troops and veterans, according to internal documents reviewed by the Post.

There is palpable fear that Trump will spread more violence, especially in the wake of Kirk’s death. Trump himself said as much Wednesday night when he vowed vengeance against the “Radical Left,” who Trump said had compared Kirk to the Nazis. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country and it must stop right now,” he said. He made these statements before the FBI had identified a suspect or a motive. This is potentially Trump’s Reichstag fire, an event he can use to grab more power, isolate and round up his enemies and finish destroying the country.

This brings me back to what I witnessed, along with millions of other Americans, in 1968. After Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in Memphis, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, then a presidential candidate, appeared at a church in Indianapolis and quoted the Greek playwright Aeschylus in an effort to calm the nation. “In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.”

Trump is not capable of such sentiments, but he is certainly capable of exploiting Kirk’s death to grab more power and destroy the last vestiges of freedom in the United States. I can guarantee you one thing: He has already calculated how he will profit from the recent turn of events. This is to imply nothing more nefarious than restating Trump’s mantra: “What’s best for me?”

How long will it be before Americans can look at ourselves in the mirror? I fear the best-case scenario will be when my grandchildren have grandchildren of their own.

The worst-case scenario? It never happens.

Meanwhile, the Washington Commanders traveled to Green Bay where, prior to the game, a moment of silence was offered to Charlie Kirk.