Aug 5, 2019

The Apocalypse President?

That chilling snap the El Paso shooter took of his numerous weapons laid out to spell “TRUMP” brought to mind the title above.

America is now at a veritable tipping point where mass shooters invoke the name of the President of the United States in their nationalist rantings. There is an erie, apocalyptic message there for our country and the world to heed as a matter of survival. 

Left unchecked for even one term, this president could well earn the sobriquet of “The Apocalypse President” if there remains a cogent history anywhere on a bleak and stricken planet.

By his constant and compulsive denials of climate change and his withdrawing of America from any international efforts to stem this all too real and unfolding global disaster, Donald Trump is putting the profits of his fossil fuel allies ahead of the survival of the planet in any civilized, habitable form. 

Dylan Thomas took the Trumpian view that “the business of posterity is to look after itself” but he was a poet and not the most powerful single man on this benighted planet. Trump doesn't look after anybody but himself and – probably – the members of his immediate family in real time and for real here and now profit and if the planet happens to get seriously fucked down the cosmic road, so be it.


The best, most respected, and articulate scientists and environmentalists on this already half-doomed earth can honk and holler until the approaching end of time as we know it, but Trump will not move one inch and every day of our withdrawal is a day nearer to that particular apocalypse. At the least, millions will starve and chaos will abound.

That is a longer term Trumpian apocalypse. On a day to day basis, his slippery and whimsical so-called “foreign policy” relies on his fanboy obsession with various half-crazed mass murderers like Kim Jong Un or unscrupulous plotters like Vladimir Putin, who must wake up every morning and count the blessing of having Donald Trump eating out of his blood-stained hands. 

But Donald Trump, it must always be remembered, has the loyalty of a pit viper. There is the very real  possibility that he and Kim will get into another war of words that will end when either or both hit the nuclear button. Or Trump will finally decide that Putin in fact delegitimized Trump's landslide 2016 victory by his infernal meddling and turn on his buddy to the degree of outright war. 

Trump, with his endless trade wars and tariffs, could well send global financial markets into an apocalyptic death spiral that will leave the planet gasping for financial oxygen, the equivalent of global warming that will also starve millions. 

Another dreaded apocalypse relates again to the nationalist El Paso shooter. In the horrific so-called “ethnic cleansing” of the last century, next door neighbors for generations slaughtered each other with hatchets and axes and sickles over ethnic differences. The hatreds and blindness of peaceful generations lay dormant until they were called to power by unscrupulous and indifferent demagogues.

Like Donald Trump.

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