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GELFAND’S WORLD - The president, doing his best to live up to the Dozing Don appellation, did another of his now-famous reversals when he promised not to use force against Greenland. Speaking at the Davos, Switzerland meeting, he went TACO in response to the least little bit of European resistance to his latest nonsensical rantings. Apparently, the Europeans did learn the lesson of Munich and don’t want to repeat the error.
There was also another one of those secret Trump meetings – this time with a NATO official – where Trump could pretend to have won some victory. Of course, the “deal” was no such thing (neither Greenland nor Iceland was turned over to the United States) but it gave Trump room to claim progress in the sense of a way towards victory.
So, the last 48 hours have been like most of our previous days in the past year.
The problem is that each bit of damage to our economy, our international standing, and our ability to lead the world against totalitarianism accumulates. Bit by bit, we are turning into that pitiful helpless giant that Richard Nixon worried about. Only in Nixon’s case, it was an argument in favor of perpetual war, whereas in Trump’s case, it is an undeclared war against our own interests, carried out in the interests of those who would prefer to see us weaker and less influential. Maybe Vladimir Putin read that Nixon speech and decided to instruct his lackey Donald Trump to finish the job.
Whatever the underlying motives, what we are witnessing in Trump’s behavior has weakened us already and will continue to weaken us as long as he remains in charge.
The continuing damage is compounded by Trump’s increasingly bizarre thinking patterns. Law professor and pundit Paul Campos has done a good job of following the development of Trump’s dementia. As Trump goes down the rabbit hole of tariffs, anger pushing his every decision, the need for revenge against those who impeached him and convicted him of felonies, and the malign desire to undo every good thing done by his Democratic predecessors, what remedy is left for the rest of us?
What shall we do?
Let’s repeat the part about what Trump seems to be doing. That’s to undo every good thing that Obama and Biden did during their respective presidencies. The Affordable Care Act? Let it wither. Our unified international defense? Undermine it. Our relationships with other democracies? Be rude and insulting while undercutting previous agreements. And while you are following these policies, lie yourself blue in the face about what you are actually doing.
And of course, there is the domestic policy – the ICE raids and cuts to emergency funding and destruction of science and scientific agencies -- which does not require repeating.
So, what can we do to repair the damage should there be a time when this becomes governmentally possible? Let me offer a scenario.
It is possible to specify the broad parameters. Basically, it comes down to a broad, majoritarian agreement that we will undo the damage as best we can when we finally have the chance. What does this mean in practice?
First and foremost, we vow to repair the damage – as best we can – in our relationship with our European and Asian allies. This will not involve some miraculous return to 2024, because Europe will have moved on over the course of 2025 – 2029. The European Union and the current NATO countries will probably end up strengthening their own military preparedness and they will have learned to work among themselves to be a more independent Europe. (This would probably have happened eventually anyway – witness attempts to build a united Europe in the not-too-distant past), but given the current situation where western Europe is stuck between a belligerent Russian Federation and the just-plain-nutty United States, Europe will be forced by reality to build and unify.
American survivors of the Trump Republic will face this reality. A united, economically strong Europe would not be a bad thing, particularly for them, but it will signify the long-term loss of power and income for American consumers. It will be our job to rebuild the international order by rebuilding the NATO partnership, or whatever is allowed to exist in those future years. We will have to end the tariff tyranny that is currently in existence, but it will require a gradual transition so as not to add additional economic earthquakes to what has already been done. And most of all, the people who will be in charge here will need to begin the process of teaching all of Trump’s former supporters that there is another side to the story.
On the domestic front, we should be thinking about how to undo the damage done by a series of Supreme Court decisions that give too much power to the president, give too much political influence to corporate donors of campaign money, and generally favor the rich. We will need to rebuild the scientific establishment after all the damage done by Robert F. Kennedy Jr and his appointees, and we will have to think carefully about replacing the parts of the federal government that were demolished by Elon Musk and his Doge group. All of this is going to take a lot of time and effort.
And meanwhile, we will need to deal with the issue of extravagantly priced health care and the climate crisis. We continue to lose time under the Trump presidency, and the future world will suffer the consequences. We should be thinking about how to deal with these problems when we finally get the chance.
Addendum: Room taxes and Fourth Amendment rights
There has been a lot of advertising in support of an increased tax on hotel room occupancy. I oppose this measure for the simple reason that it’s not fair. The people paying the tax (tourists, foreign visitors, businesspeople) don’t get anything for their money, any more than you or I would gain anything by paying a high room tax in some other part of the country. You might think of it as taxation without representation. Let’s see the City Council and the Mayor try to put their own affairs in order before they stick it to our visitors. As an additional observation, I notice that a lot of people have been complaining that Las Vegas is pricing itself out of reach of a lot of traditional visitors, due to it applying full retail pricing to a lot of things that used to be inexpensive and promotional. We don’t want Los Angeles to get that same reputation.
Here’s something else that we ought to be talking about and even screaming about. The founders created the Bill of Rights for a reason. These rights included the right to privacy within one’s home and protections against arbitrary searches and seizures. A series of Supreme Court decisions have whittled down some of these protections (just watch any of the crime shows on television) but at least we had a Fourth Amendment. At the moment, the ICE is saying that it can break into your house without the benefit of a warrant signed by a judge. They’ve concocted something they refer to as an administrative warrant, which is just their way of saying that they can write and enforce their own non-judicial authority to break into your house without your permission. This is not what we mean when we refer to the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave
(Bob Gelfand writes on science, culture, and politics for CityWatch. He can be reached at [email protected])
