Unlike every other piece, this one won’t be broken up with section titles for a simple reason: It’s all about US President Donald J. Trump. When it comes to him, in this strange world of ours, no one ever really gets a break.

In that context, here’s my advice to you: Don’t get old. For years, I managed not to do so, but unfortunately that’s all over now and I’m increasingly an old man. In fact, I’m not quite two years older than Trump. I was born on July 20, 1944, while World War II was still ongoing, and he was born on June 14, 1946, in the peacetime that followed but would all too soon become the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

And let me tell you something else: these days, it’s hard enough to maintain my Substack column while also keeping track of our ever-stranger, more confusing, all-too-Trumpian world. But keeping track of things nationally and globally as an 80-year-old president of the United States (with another two-and-a-half years to go) in a world that seems to be coming apart at the — sorry, I can’t help but make a pun! — seams? I simply can’t imagine that. Of course, I couldn’t imagine it for former US President Joe Biden either, and yet he left the presidency when he was a staggering 82 years and 61 days old and will still have been younger than Trump if he makes it to January 20, 2029. (And both of them will have beaten the oldest Roman Emperor, Gordian I, who at 81 only lasted weeks in power.)

It’s hardly news that Trump is now the oldest president ever to take the oath of office (twice!) and, in that sense, he’s been both record-setting and, in his own strange way, remarkable. But in case you hadn’t noticed, while he’s always had his odd moments, they are getting ever odder and more frequent. How many times has this country had a president who mistook himself for (or do I mean confused himself with) Jesus Christ? Oh, wait, how could I be so confused? That image wasn’t of Jesus, but of a lookalike medical doctor. (“I thought it was me as a doctor,” the president said. “Only the fake news could come up with that.”)

And meanwhile, in his own ever stranger fashion, “our” president took potshots at Leo, the American pope, himself a veritable youth at 70 years old, calling him “WEAK on crime” and “catering to the Radical Left.” Oh, and while he was at it, Trump also posted an image of himself being hugged by (yes, of course!) Jesus. And Leo responded to the president’s abuse by all too accurately deploring a world being “ravaged by a handful of tyrants” (including, of course, You Know Whom).

Just in case you hadn’t noticed, as an imperial power (even, historically speaking, the imperial power, the only one at its height to control so much of the planet in some way), this country, too, is growing ever older, and in its own strange fashion, going down, as all great imperial powers do sooner or later. Phew! That was a long sentence for this old guy, but you can’t get too long and complicated (or do I mean confused?) when it comes to the world of Trump. In electing him a second time in 2024, 49.8% of American voters clearly opted to go down in style by giving imperial oldness a startling new meaning.

These days, I’m sure you won’t be surprised to learn that Trump’s approval ratings are heading for the planetary basement. As I was writing this piece, for instance, only 31% of Americans approved of how he was handling the economy. (You might wonder, at this point, why it wasn’t 11% or even 0%.) Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance’s approval ratings, too, have been hitting historic lows.

Mind you, Trump has always given unpredictability new meaning, but these days, a constant version of unpredictability is his aging middle name. Remember the president who was against “warmongers and America-last globalists” and was going to remove them from office in his second term in the White House? Remember the president who was going to “turn the page forever on those foolish, stupid days of never-ending wars?” Hmmm, well, think again now that he’s gone to war (or is it to peace, or even to pieces?) with Iran in an all too strikingly destructive fashion. But that’s today’s news and, in the era of the aging Trump, who knows what tomorrow might hold for any of us — or, for that matter, what might happen an hour from now? Count on one thing, though: the president sure doesn’t know and so, sadly, neither can we.

(Phew! Without section breaks, I’m already exhausted, but who can truly take a break when it comes to Trump?)

And here’s the saddest thing of all (not that all of it isn’t sad as hell, and potentially leading the rest of us all too literally into a hell on Earth): given this country’s military machine, which “the peace president” seems eager to feed an extra $500 billion — that would raise the Pentagon budget by 50% — the US still has the power to turn this planet into a hell on Earth in a fashion no other imperial power in decline has ever been able to do. And I’m not even thinking about this country’s vast nuclear arsenal.

So, here’s our horrifying reality: In the next two and a half years, if he doesn’t keel over tomorrow or somehow grab even more presidency time — remember that, last year in Iowa, which he won in all three of his election campaigns, he asked an audience ominously, “Should we do it a fourth time?” — Trump is genuinely capable of preparing to take not just this country but the planet down with him. Phew again!

And I’m not just thinking about his ability with allies like Israel to turn parts of this world into hell zones of war. I’m thinking instead about the climate disaster to come and the president who has called it “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and a “green scam,” and is prepared in his own fashion to heat this planet to the boiling point. Keep in mind that the US military is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases, even in peacetime, on Earth.

Honestly, I still find it hard to imagine that a near majority of American voters elected such a distinctly disturbed old man as president yet again, one seemingly intent on squashing green energy of any sort and potentially taking this planet down with him the second time around. Consider it truly strange, in fact, that the two oldest presidents in our history (Trump, Biden and Trump again) have occupied the White House consecutively for the last decade, given that this country is now distinctly an aging, even potentially fading, power on a planet that may itself be aging and fading all too rapidly.

I’m old enough to have experienced 15 presidents in my lifetime so far (and that’s not even counting Trump the second time around) and yet he is distinctly, day by day, month by month, year by year, one of a kind in the worst sense imaginable. Consider it odd, in fact, that, as a con artist first-class, he may himself turn out to be the greatest con job ever perpetrated on this world of ours and, in his own eerie fashion, a world-ending figure. Worse yet, whether we like it or not, it seems as if we are all now his apprentices.

Imagine as well that making war and “unleashing” ever more coal, oil and natural gas are the two things he seems to be specializing in during his second term in office, even if, thanks to his conflict with Iran, he actually put a sudden limit on the global distribution of oil and gas via the Strait of Hormuz and helped to clobber the big oil producers of the Middle East.

(Whew! If only I could put a section break up right here and take a break myself! Facing such a world and such a president, this old writer finds himself increasingly out of breath!)

When I was young and the youthful John F. Kennedy was president, if you had even tried to describe Trump’s version of the world to me, I would have thought you not just mad, but one of the worst creators of fiction around. Can there be the slightest doubt, in fact, that President Trump has turned out to be among the worst creations of a planet that couldn’t be in deeper trouble?

I wanted to write “fictional creations” there. If only this were a grim dystopian novel, rather than the actual world, and if Trump himself were indeed some mad fictional creation. What a thrill that would be! After all, such a weird and wild version of a Philip Roth noveI would once have seemed to readers like a mad laughathon. If only…

But when the voters of your very own country decide to make just such a fiction our reality a second time around in the real world, you know that something is truly wrong on Planet Earth.

After this country’s endless decades of imperial war-making from Korea to Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq, and now to Iran (and that’s leaving out plenty of our warring activities), Trump could be thought of as the way we Americans decided not just to make war on the rest of the world, but on ourselves as well. And by reelecting a man who proudly insists that climate change is the “greatest con job ever perpetuated” and a total “green new scam,” we’re obviously involving ourselves in a big-time fashion in what might be thought of as World War III, the ultimate war on planet Earth itself.

I mean, you have to feel anxious when you only have to type “Donald Trump, climate change” into your search bar and up come endless disturbing pieces, including, for me just now, Maxine Joselow of The New York Times writing an article headlined, “Climate Change Denial Sees a Resurgence in Trump’s Washington.” It began this way:

“Climate change is a hoax perpetrated by ‘leftist politicians.’ Fossil fuels are the greenest energy sources. More carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will be harmless. These were some of the false claims made at a conference on Wednesday held by groups that reject the overwhelming scientific consensus on climate change. What might have seemed like a fringe event in years past this time boasted a prominent keynote speaker: Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and one of President Trump’s possible choices for the next attorney general.”

Tell that, of course, to all of us in New York City, who only recently lived through record-breaking 90-degree July weather in early April. Consider it strange indeed that, in response to the never-ending news that we humans have long been turning this planet into a fossil-fuelized hothouse, a near majority of us would indeed opt to again elect a president who makes climate-change denial seem like a far too mild term.

Of all the things that Trump hasn’t done, he’s worked in what, for him, is a remarkably organized fashion to stall or nix any projects that wouldn’t further heat this planet of ours. Utterly unfocused as he so often is, he’s remained strikingly focused on shutting down wind power and solar energy projects, while launching ever more fossil fuel ones. These include opening more than a billion acres of coastal waters to oil and gas drilling and paying a French company almost a billion dollars not to create two wind farms off this country’s east coast, but to invest in oil and gas projects here in the US.

Talk about dystopian! Trump should truly be considered a full-scale dystopian nightmare playing out in real time.

Wait! I have a last urge for this piece. Think of it as a way for me to finally catch my breath. To end it, I want to create one of those missing section heads right here, right now. How about:

The hothouse president on a planet going to hell

And yes, that is indeed the end of this piece, but not for a moment the end of the nightmare we’re now living through.

[TomDispatch first published this piece.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.