The "Hoax" with Vastly More Global Credibility than Donald Trump

 

The “Hoax” with Vastly More Global Credibility than Donald Trump

When you realize that we are fighting another “oil war,” which we are destined to lose one way or the other, and realize our President is using large payments of taxpayer dollars to stop alternative energy projects right here in the United States (in favor of oil and gas), you have to wonder if Trump’s retro “Make America Great” has become more of a luddite cry. Push the United States out of modernity, stifle university research, elevate the antivax mantra and watch hitherto diseases like measles return, reject the progress of a transition away from fossil fuels, reject the data revealing the harsh increase of expensive and fatal damage from cumulative climate change, and spend trillions on super-sophisticated weapon systems that can be brought to a standstill by cheap drones and extremist regimes willing to sacrifice their population to maintain power.

We now eschew allies, insist on bullying tactics in all of our domestic and international polices, watch MAGA leaders suggest we’d be better off as a monarchy, as the only other superpower is grateful for our self-destruction. Or as the May 4th The Economist puts it: “In late January, as Donald Trump completed his first year back in the White House, a group of scholars in Beijing penned a report thanking the American president. Their gratitude was sarcastic, not an endorsement of Trumpian policy. But the sentiment behind it was genuine. Thank you, they wrote, to President Trump for driving away America’s traditional allies. Thank you for showing the world that China is more trustworthy and stable. Thank you for putting economic pressure on China and thus pushing it to innovate. And thank you, most of all, for illustrating that America is in its ‘imperial twilight’, a decaying and hypocritical power.

“This report by Wang Wen and his colleagues at the Chongyang Institute for Financial Studies at Renmin University was at the strident end of Chinese discussions about America. Mr Wang, a cheerful nationalist, is known for his punchy language. But he is not an outlier. Many of China’s leading intellectuals and officials believe that American power is terminally on the wane. This has been expressed most authoritatively in Xi Jinping’s dictum that ‘the East is rising and the West is declining’. (He has been diplomatic enough not to say explicitly it is China versus America.)…

“[It] would be a mistake to doubt the sincerity of China’s verdict that America’s best days are past it… Donald Trump’s two election victories have only hardened this conviction, taken as evidence that American democracy is malfunctioning, too, in producing an agent of chaos as president.” China is hardly misjudging Mr Trump as the accelerant of our decline, as our once most powerful allies are jumping ship. “Swaths of the public in Canada, Germany, France and the U.K. have soured on the U.S., driven by President Donald Trump’s foreign policy decisions, according to recent results from The POLITICO Poll…

“The POLITICO Poll — in partnership with U.K. polling firm Public First — found that respondents in those four allied countries believe it is better to depend on China than the U.S. following Trump’s turbulent return to office… That appears to be driven by Trump’s disruption, not by a newfound stability in China: In a follow-up question, a majority of respondents in both Canada and Germany agreed that any attempts to get closer to China are because the U.S. has become harder to depend on — not because China itself has become a more reliable partner. Many respondents in France (38 percent) and the U.K. (42 percent) also shared that sentiment.” Politico, March 15th.

China, sensing US weakness internationally, is about to deploy countermeasures against US sanctions, as noted by Lingling Wei in the May 5th Wall Street Journal: “Since the trade war Donald Trump opened in 2018, during his first presidency, Beijing has been quietly building a counter-sanctions arsenal: a blacklist for foreign firms it deems hostile, a law authorizing punishment of any company that helps enforce U.S. sanctions on Chinese targets, a rule ordering Chinese parties to ignore those sanctions outright, and expanded powers for its antitrust regulators to kill cross-border merger deals on national-security grounds.” The world now knows Trump is more a loud noise than persuasive international leader.

With the Iran “Oil War” in progress, fact-averse Donald Trump also touts his massive failures as success. Yet, the Strait of Hormuz is closed, Iran keeps targeting regional American allies, and global prices for oil, gas, fertilizer and shipping continue to rise. Even oil and gas states are being supported by alternative energy. Texas, with an aging grid and power generation system, would not have made it through this winter without a massive local increase in solar and wind power. We are so out of step with the rest of the world.

“Low-carbon sources of energy (including nuclear) accounted for all the increase in the world’s electricity demand last year and by a long way, according to a new chart from Our World in Data based on insights from Ember's Global Electricity Review. Much of the increase is from China (and even the solar panels and windmills installed in other countries are very often made there). It shows the dramatic global shift away from coal and oil although there was a rise in the use of gas, which is also a fossil fuel.” Newsweek’s Geoscape, May 5th, also published the above chart.

We’re fighting wars under the old-world assumption that readiness to combat superpowers, with big weapons, is our only hope to protect the United States. Even as the last battleships were phased out decades ago as archaic large targets, Trump believes in a new class of “big, bad battleships” – labeled as “Trump class” (of course)… firing the Secretary of the Navy because he could not build one fast enough. Meanwhile, $400 drones have brought us to our knees… and the Strait, even with US naval escort vessels, is still blocked. Money is pouring out of our treasury, sending the federal deficit into the financial stratosphere, and still Major Pete, Secretary of Defense/War, wants more than half a trillion dollars more. A majority of Americans are adjusting the quality of their lives to pay for these Trump-caused increases, watching medical benefits and Social Security increasingly in Trump’s crosshairs for serious reductions.

I’m Peter Dekom, and as Donald Trump becomes increasingly aware that his extraordinary unpopularity would certainly tank the GOP’s control of both houses of Congress, he is enlisting local red state legislatures and a pliable Supreme Court to rig future elections to ensure that Democratic candidates, who have generated a clear majority in every recent special election, can never win a major election ever again.