It is, oftentimes, easier to gain perspective when looking at events from afar.
Having spent the past two weeks traveling in Europe, I find that when I read about what is happening in the US by the day it seems stranger and more irrational.
I open up my news apps and find that one day Trump is attempting to undermine the independence of the Brazilian legal system by slapping 50 percent tariffs on the country in response to the ongoing criminal proceedings against ex-president Bolsonaro; and the next day he is off on a tear declaring that Canadian goods will be subjected to at least 30 percent tariffs. One day Congress is busy passing an entirely regressive “big, beautiful bill” that, among its numerous noxious provisions, imposes punitive taxes on clean energy companies, while further subsidizing fossil fuel industries; and a few days later hundreds of Texans are swept away to their death in apocalyptic flash flooding probably worsened by accelerating climate change.
Rachel Mills
Over Macarthur Park, in the heart of Los Angeles’ Hispanic immigrant community, military helicopters hover and federal agents turn up on horseback and in armored vehicles in a demonstration of military force on US soil that looks bizarrely, offensively, similar to how the Tsarist governments in Russia deployed Cossack horsemen against protestors and, through the Pogrom, against Jews more than a century ago. Days later, federal agents driving armored vehicles deployed against immigrants at a cannabis farm in southern California, resulting in repeated clashes, serious injuries, and the use of chemical agents against protestors. A continent away, Florida is busy building and populating a massive detention center in the Everglades, made up of chain link cells, stacked one atop the other, each one packing in dozens of individuals caught up in immigration raids, that it has, with a flair for the flamboyant, titled Alligator Alcatraz—and Trump has mused, fondly, on the prospect of would-be escapees being savaged by alligators, pythons, and other aggressive critters.
Meanwhile, estimates by the American Association for the Advancement of Science show that cumulative spending on science, as requested in the Trump Administration’s latest budget proposal, shrink federal science spending to its lowest point in the 21st century, thus further ceding the ground on scientific research to other countries and economic blocs. At the same time, Health Secretary Kennedy has put on hold meetings of the preventive health committee that issues recommendations on what preventive health medicines and tests are routinely covered by insurance companies.
Of course, given that Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” strips millions of people of access to health insurance, while channeling not far shy of $200 billion into the immigrant-hunting-and-incarceration complex, that may end up being the least of the country’s worries when it comes to quality health care.
These past weeks, too, Defense Secretary Hegseth apparently made a unilateral decision to withhold weapons from Ukraine; Trump complimented the president of (English-speaking Liberia) on the quality of his English; he also pledged to open up the grounds of the White House for a mass-audience United Fight Club event. And the MAGA president, who has tried to break major universities through using the cudgel of allegations of anti-Semitism against them, publicly derided “Shylock” lenders who exploit borrowers—and then denied he had ever heard that this was a classic anti-Semitic slur.
At the Supreme Court level, a solid majority of the justices have now made it harder to stop clearly unconstitutional actions by the federal government, including that of denying the fundamental concept of birthright citizenship; have given their stamp of approval on the truly barbaric practice of deporting people to Third-World Countries, such as South Sudan, with some of the most violent, impoverished, and corrupt conditions on earth; and have allowed for the wholesale dismantling of federal agencies and the firing of tens of thousands of federal employees, without any input from Congress.
Close to home, much of this may just come off as the white noise of a publicity-hungry, cruel, and frequently incompetent, administration, backed up by the morally bankrupt rulings of a politicized Supreme Court. From a distance, however, it looks and sounds both insane and extraordinarily depressing. America used to be a country the world looked to for inspiration and decency. Now it is a country one would cross the street to avoid; a country that would lead one to hold the hands of one’s children a little tighter when passing by. It is a country that looks to be off its meds and hungry for trouble.
Of course, Europe isn’t a Shangri-la. It has its fair share of problems and its fair share of angry political disputes. But its leaders still come off, in the main, as rational, intelligent beings and its politics as being deliberative rather than all about the authoritarian spectacle.
Sure, Trump keeps winning at the Supreme Court, but the wins simply further his irrational, isolationist agenda. And the deeper that agenda takes root, the more likely it is that the rest of the world will ultimately simply turns its back on what has become a deeply tainted dream.
