Goofs, Graft and Gifts Erode US Global Standing
By Tom Kagy | 13 May, 2025

The Trump Show has turned the US into a global laughingstock even as much of the world kowtows in dread of his irrational ire.

Just when you think Donald Trump has outdone himself with some incomprehensibly destructive move, he raises the bar by doing something even more unthinkable.

For a US president to accept a $400 million luxury jet from Qatar's royal family is akin to announcing that the United States of America is fast descending from superpower to  banana republic.  Trump has made satire impossible because the reality has become whackier than anything that can be conceived by even a gifted humorist.

As Trump continues to see himself as cutting the figure of a powerful leader and statesman, the world can only respond with incredulous laughter as the sole recourse to a clown who wields, for now, the power of an emperor who can destroy economies, businesses and lives on a whim by raising tariffs to crazy levels only to bring them down to merely destructive levels, threatening elite universities because they refuse to bow to arbitrary demands, deporting legal residents for traffic tickets and international students for free speech, threatening reporters with imprisonment for daring to criticize him and his policies.

Setting up namesake crypto tokens so those desiring an audience can make multi-million-dollar purchases as a way to buy dinners with Trump is not only a gross violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause, but an invitation to see the US as the lawless domain of a robber baron.

Trump appears to believe that the world respects and admires him because, naturally, they want to avoid becoming targets by wounding his vanity.  Accordingly he continues to cut a destructive path as he carries out the impulses of a semi-literate person who sees the world through the eyes of his grandfather, with the US the bastion of all things worth preserving.  Even as the United States is able to maintain its wealth and technological superiority thanks largely to the energy and talents of non-white immigrants, Trump sees the nation as belonging to Whites, with other peoples merely tolerated until they aren't.

Of course this travesty can't go on much longer, if only because even MAGA supporters will soon start feeling the economic effects of a nation in decline as its currency dwindles in purchasing power and its productivity shrinks from the crippling uncertainty engendered in its enterprises as well as the loss of hard-working migrants.  

If GOP senators and congressmen continue to cower and evade their constitutional duty to impeach a president who has figuratively torn up the Constitution and used it to wipe his a** (one of his favorite words), its up to us to vote them out of office and install more courageous replacements.