Obama vs Trump : Class vs Crass

Posted on June 19, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 19, 2026

The opening of the Obama Presidential Center, yesterday, was in stark contrast to the daily spectacle of our current president going mad in the White House. It was the Obamas (Michele and Barack) at their best and classiest. They never mentioned Donald Trump, instead relying on media commentators to remind their audiences that Trump wasn’t invited, although Presidents Clinton, Bush, and Biden and their wives were highly visible in the crowd.

I was ambivalent about Obama’s presidency. When the former president burst on the scene as a relatively unknown, highly charismatic orator, I was conflicted. He was obviously brilliant, but I fundamentally don’t trust charisma. As Trump showed us, it can be negatively hypnotic like a cobra’s, leading to things like cults and MAGA. Except for his career-making keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, Obama was a complete stranger in 2008. It wasn’t until John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate that I decided to vote for Obama. 

When he won, I like millions of other Americans felt a surprising elation. It wasn’t about  Obama as much it was the sense that by electing him, America had demonstrated we had matured as a nation. In a single populous wave of inclusiveness, we compensated for decades of slavery, Jim Crow laws, segregation, and racism in general. Unfortunately, that turned out to be only an illusion, as the forces of darkness and exclusionism simply went underground to prepare for the coup that Trump has spent his second term attempting to execute.

I thought some of Obama’s policies as president were mistaken, but the one thing he always got right was preaching love instead of hate, equal opportunity instead of elitism, courtesy and empathy over profanity and tone-deafness. Obama’s was an honorable presidency that treated opposing voices with respect and gentility. He never accused Republicans of either treason or stupidity, never openly molested or disrespected women.

One of the happiest experiences of my life was watching the victory celebration in Grant Park in Chicago after the 2008 election. There was no ego on display, no obsession with crowd sizes, no accusing everyone else of cheating. And after all the verbal abuse Obama has taken from Trump, the most impressive thing about yesterday was that the celebration of the Obama Presidential Center was as classy, positive, and inclusive as the 2008 celebration at Grant Park.

It was a reminder of what we always thought of as presidential dignity, of which there has been no sign in Trump’s White House. Where Trump is obsessed with the word “I,” Obama stresses “We.” While Trump goes out of his way to make enemies so he can play the martyr game, Obama always talks about cooperating and working together. It’s not a coincidence that on the same day as the Obama celebration, a poll was released showing that 57% of Americans view Obama favorably while only 30% have a positive view of Trump.

This is one of those moments when I imagine how historians will view this period twenty years from now. I can hear them all screaming, “How the Hell could America have let this happen? How could we have allowed this egomaniac to completely upend our way of life while running the most corrupt, incompetent administration anyone can remember?”

There are signs that yesterday’s Obama celebration is part of a changing trend, that Americans have had enough of hate-mongering and  divisiveness, of the barely hidden racism and misogyny that characterizes the Trump administration. The massive celebration in New York on the same day that brought literally millions of New Yorkers of every race, color, gender, and religion together to share in the joy of the NBA Knick’s victory was another sign that we’ve had enough of the lies, crudeness, and self-serving policies intended to further enrich Trump and his supporters while average Americans struggle to pay for health care, energy, rent, and food.

We’ve seen the same trend in special elections around the country in which MAGA Republicans have been repeatedly upset by Democrats. Trump continues to hold enormous sway among his own party, but even when the candidates he backed in the primaries won, turnout was low, while voters in Democratic primaries showed excitement and eagerness. Trump and his supporters have set the stage for a historic repudiation in the midterm elections, but that’s only half the game.

To defeat Trumpism, the Democrats are going have to convince people that they can do a better job of governing. They have to present a unified message of hope and inclusion, something they have failed at miserably during the last few cycles. Victory for the great majority of the American people is there for the taking if the Democrats can stop bickering among themselves and prove to Americans that they can be trusted to put the people’s needs first.

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Trump, the G7, and a 60 Day Reprieve

Posted on June 15, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 15, 2026

Anyone but a delusional narcissist like Donald Trump would be mortified. If he were anyone but Donald Trump I would feel empathy for him. Imagine you were in his shoes, heading for a G7 meeting with France, Canada, Germany, the UK, Japan, and Italy. Ignore the formal courtesies and congratulations on achieving a “deal” with Iran, the other leaders despise him and understand full well what a failure his war with Iran has been and how much that has diminished his power and influence.

Trump has spent seventeen months poisoning America’s relationship with all of those countries, and in response, Germany described us as a declining nation, Canada shifted its economic future toward Europe and Asia, Italy accused us of starting an unnecessary war, and the UK government is on the verge of collapse over it. While Trump does a victory lap, everyone else is being very careful to avoid awakening the elephant in the room.

The so-called deal with Iran is simply a sixty-day reprieve from a war which has been a horrific disaster. Every other G7 leader understands that Trump began the war with three objectives, the elimination of Iran’s nuclear threat, bringing down the regime controlled by the ayatollahs and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, and destroying Iran’s offensive military power. None of those objectives has been achieved, and it’s unlikely that any of them will be.

Iran’s massive arsenal of missiles and drones is still largely intact, the regime is now totally under the control of the IRGC, and Iran has consistently insisted that it will not give up its right to enrich uranium. The only thing the memorandum of understanding that extends the ceasefire for sixty days accomplished, assuming its signing isn’t derailed before it happens, was re-opening the Strait of Hormuz which was open to shipping from every nation before Trump ordered the attack.

In other words, as of today, the war has accomplished nothing strategically except burying Iran’s enriched uranium under tons of rubble that can easily be cleared, and Trump’s boast that his “deal” is better than Obama’s is pure fiction. The war cost thousands of lives, a large percentage of which were civilians. Some sources estimate the number of deaths at more than 17,000 with several times that many injuries. We’ve lost aircraft, our bases in the Persian Gulf have sustained billions of dollars in damage, and we’ve dangerously reduced our supply of strategic weapons, which will take hundreds of billions of dollars and years to replace. And that doesn’t count the collateral damage to our economy and to America’s social safety net and tax structure. Someone has to pay for this debacle.

Oil will flow again, gas prices will gradually come down, but as always happens in an oil crisis, profiteering, refinery startups and repairs to oil resources damaged during the war will keep them high for many months. One thing that may have been permanently damaged by the Iran war is America’s support for Israel.

Trump is making Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu out to be a pariah. But that’s typical Trump. Four months ago, Trump and Netanyahu were best buddies, and it didn’t take much flattery on the latter’s part with dreams of a brilliant legacy for Trump to convince him to attack Iran based on evidence of imminent danger that has since been shown to be wrong.

Now, when Netanyahu’s agenda has diverged from Trump’s, he’s treating him the same way he treated everyone in Congress whom he considered disloyal. I don’t know whether Israel’s continuing attacks on Hezbollah are warranted or necessary, but all Trump can see is disloyalty to him. We can all see the fallout, however. Anti-semitism is increasing at a rapid rate in North America and Europe, and polls have shown a sharp decrease in Americans’ sympathy for Israel. Not exactly the legacy Bibi promised his friend Donald.

The destruction and death of a failed war are not the only things Trump is bringing to the G7. There’s also the image, broadcast to anyone on Earth willing to pony up $8.99 to watch it, of Trump’s obscene, tasteless notion of how to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. According to Donald Trump, a nation that throughout the twentieth century was a beacon of hope for the world, a place that welcomed their huddled masses and offered succor to people fleeing tyranny and death is now a nation of martial arts fanatics. Is that the image we want to project of who we are to the rest of the world?

Of all of Trump’s despicable antics, turning the south lawn of the White House into a combat zone may be the most offensive. And that’s before we note that it was a for profit event that netted millions for UFC and Paramount, which is now owned by Trump ally David Ellison. And who footed the bill for the profits to Trump’s friends? The American taxpayers, who spent $60 million to put on the event.

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Regime Changes

Posted on June 13, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 13, 2026

2026 may be remembered more for regime changes than anything else, assuming the wrongheaded war with Iran doesn’t erupt into something much larger and more dangerous. The latter possibility seems frighteningly more likely than it did when Donald Trump realized the war wasn’t going to achieve his goals, but instead was threatening the midterm elections, and declared a cease fire in April. The revelations that Trump was seriously considering putting troops on the ground in Iran to extract that nation’s enriched uranium and invading and occupying Kharg Island, combined with Iran appearing to have no intention of giving up its right to enrich uranium makes everything tenuous.

It’s taking weeks to finalize a memorandum of understanding that would start the clock on sixty days of final negotiations to end the war, and it’s clear that the only thing definitive about the proposed MOU is restoring the Strait of Hormuz to normal operations. But even that isn’t a return to the pre-war status quo, as Iran’s hardline leaders say they intend to control the Strait and charge fees for traversing it.

That position reflects the unpleasant reality that Trump achieved one of the two non-negotiable goals he announced when he ordered the initial attack on Iran, but like most of Trump’s promises, it didn’t turn out the way he intended. He got the regime change he demanded, but he replaced a theocratic regime led by Ayatollah Ali Khomeini, with a secular regime nominally headed by his son but totally under the brazen control of the IRGC, Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps.

Iran expert Stephen Erlanger said in today’s New York Times, that the elder Khomeini, who died in the first attack on Tehran, “had for years banned the production of a nuclear weapon and always worked to avoid a joint Israeli-American attack,” while the younger generation of hardliners who replaced him “no longer feel [the] same constraints.” There is no doubt that the regime change Trump catalyzed has worsened the situation in the region and the prospects for a lasting peace.

Trump achieved a regime change in Venezuela, which was really more of a snatch and grab operation by highly trained American Special Forces against a defenseless country that couldn’t even protect its president. While Trump has claimed this was a brilliant military and diplomatic victory, it was mostly about stealing Venezuela’s oil resources. Trump has repeatedly voiced  his desire to enrich his family and billionaire donors with oil from both Venezuela and Iran.

For months, Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio have talked about regime change in Cuba. It’s impossible to know whether they can pull that off, even with Cuba’s economy on life support, because there is no transparency about any of the administration’s plans, but my guess is that Iran will drag out negotiations until just before our midterm elections, and given Trump’s pre-occupation with vanity projects – keeping his name on the Kennedy Center, building his obscene victory arch and ballroom – Cuba will be turn out to be just an afterthought.

All of which brings us to two potential regime changes that Trump never intended. The coming months will see a long-awaited political reckoning for Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Netanyahu has been under indictment for fraud and bribery since 2019. He has technically been on trial since 2020, but has successfully used his office to delay the proceedings. He also tried to force Israel’s Supreme Court to void his indictment but was rebuffed.

Most Israelis blamed Netanyahu for failing to prevent the attack by Hamas that triggered Israel’s virtual destruction of Gaza, and Israelis’ frustration over the virtually constant state of war from then until the current war with Iran and Hezbollah forced Netanyahu to schedule national elections for September or October. Stay tuned for what could be a decisive regime change in Israel, especially if he and Trump are unable to force real concessions about Iran’s nuclear program.

And finally, the regime change three-fourths of Americans hope and pray for. Donald Trump’s abject failure at governing and his attempts to grab power and undermine our Constitution have made him the most unpopular, hated president in the modern era. His obvious attempts to restrict voting in blue states, gerrymander red states, and install an incompetent loyalist as Acting Director of National Intelligence to rig the election in Trump’s favor, have made a Democratic takeover of the House in November inevitable. And since polling shows that even Trump’s best demographic, blue collar non-college graduates, are abandoning him in droves, control of the Senate is in play as well.

I’m confident that Trump’s full court press to control the election will fail. The last twenty-six months of his term will be spent as a frustrated, totally unhinged lame duck, assuming he completes his term, if his own party doesn’t wind up impeaching him. Not exactly the regime change we desperately need, but close enough to salvage our democracy and restore balance to our place in the world.

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The Full Cost of the Iran War

Posted on June 10, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 10, 2026,

We wake up every morning hoping to learn that our president has finally reached the initial stages of a deal to permanently end the fighting around the Persian Gulf and neighboring countries. Every day that goal seems more tenuous, and today, Donald Trump, who has claimed for weeks that he’s in no hurry to make a deal with Iran, accused that country of dragging its feet and threatened to attack its energy infrastructure to punish them.

Yesterday, he ordered an attack on a reservoir, denying potable water to a nearby town. That sounds like a tone deaf escalation of the fighting and possibly a war crime.

Trump himself is the greatest obstacle to a deal. His social media posts, his daily self-contradictions, his obvious lack of respect for Iran’s negotiators, and his wild threats make already difficult negotiations nearly impossible. Every day this continues, Trump and Congressional Republicans grow more desperate about the midterm elections, and everyone else bears the costs of the war.

Some of those costs are transparent, while others, perhaps the bulk of them are not. The Apache helicopter that Iran took down this week will cost $120 million to replace. Our brilliant military was able to rescue the crew, but even rescue missions cost a fortune. That Apache helicopter we lost cost $10,000 per hour to fly, and an F35 fighter costs $40,000 per hour.

We know about the downed Apache because it was too visible to cover up, but we have no idea, how many of our aircraft have been damaged or destroyed on the ground by Iranian strikes. We have little or no information about the cost of repairing the damage done by Iranian missile attacks on our bases in allied countries in the Persian Gulf, likewise the human cost of casualties on those bases.

We’ve heard various estimates of the alarming rate at which our munitions are being expended. That includes expensive precision missiles and bombs, and the defensive missiles that comprise Israel’s Iron Dome and the defensive batteries protecting all of our bases that are within each of Iran’s missiles and drones. Add it all up. New aircraft, new missiles and drones, reconstruction of damaged buildings and aircraft runways, and the injuries and stress on our troops from having to be constantly on alert for incoming missiles. We could be looking a nearly a trillion dollars in recovery costs when this is all over, just to return our military to the level of preparedness it enjoyed before the war.

To those costs, we must add the disruption to the American and world economies. We complain about four dollar plus gasoline, but Europe and Asia are facing far greater increases in energy costs, and some of our allies, (South Korea, Japan, the Phillipines,) are dangerously close to running out of oil.

The skyrocketing cost of fertilizers as a result of this war increases the price of food and raises the specter of shortages and famines, all of which is exacerbated by Trump killing USAID. The costs, taken together, are staggering, and they’re still rising, largely out of sight of most Americans.

These costs will re-ignite the guns or butter debate we seem to have every generation. How are we going to pay to restore the economy and our military preparedness – Trump asked Congress for $350 billion, today – while millions of Americans are losing their health care, their social security benefits are being threatened, and the social safety net seems to be cut back more each month. Where will the money to pay for all this come from with Trump’s permanent tax cuts on the wealthy in place?

In addition to financial costs, there are other significant costs that can’t be quantified in dollars and cents. The war has severely damaged our relationships with Europe, and Trump has weakened our response capability in the western Pacific so badly it’s almost an invitation to China to threaten Taiwan. Our prestige and the perceptions of America by foreigners are all suffering from this war, too. The number of European and Asian touurists visiting America and spending money here has already dropped significantly compared to before Trump’s second term.

Perhaps most significant is risk, whose cost is unknown. As Trump writhes trying to find a path out of the cul-de-sac he’s trapped himself in, his options for ending the conflict shrink. The last few days have seen attacks by United States forces and Iran on each other accelerate, threatening the tenuous peace negotiations. When Trump runs out of possible exit ramps, our greatest risk is that he will wildly escalate the war out of fury and frustration that things didn’t turn out as he wanted them to.

The chances of the Iran war spiraling out of control grow every day that our incompetent president allows it to continue. But let’s not let Congress off the hook. If our representatives grew a pair and stood up to Trump, this war could be history before summer’s end.

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I Call the Shots!

Posted on June 9, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 9, 2026

If ever there were an epithet that described Donald Trump, it’s the title of this piece. Our arrogant, rude, egotistical president has a desperate need to be in charge, or at least to have all of his sycophants tell him he is. That mostly worked for him until he entered politics. And therein lies the fundamental flaw in his assertion, in 2015, that what America needed was a successful businessman to run the country.

There are multiple flaws in that argument. One is the questionable suggestion that Trump is a successful businessman. Making money is not the only criteria for reaching such a conclusion. Other things, like the respect and admiration of peers and subordinates, the sense that the person in charge possesses a moral center and compassion for the people whose labors are what is actually making the business successful are more important. By those measures, Trump is anything but a model of success. The level to which people who have worked for or with him despise and distrust Trump is remarkable.

In business, a hated leader is tolerated as long as they’re making money for their partners and investors. When profits turn into losses or businesses run into severe protests or legal challenges, corporate boards and shareholders are ruthless. Presidents and CEOs find out quickly that they’re as replaceable as soiled underwear. Corporations don’t worry about fairness, ethics, or the approval of the masses. Make enough enemies and lose your edge, and you’re gone.

It doesn’t work that way in government. In a well-functioning republic, no single individual can maintain the kind of control Trump craves indefinitely. Screw up as badly as Trump does, anger and insult people indiscriminately, and let everyone see his total lack of compassion, and eventually they’ll topple him. It took all of Trump’s first term, which ended in the debacle of the January sixth insurrection at the Capitol, for that to sink in.

But few people are as driven by greed and power-lust as Trump. He spent all of Joe Biden’s presidency plotting to overthrow our rules-based system and undermine our Constitution. That meant accepting the support of right-wing extremists who would prefer that America be a white male Christian oligarchy. In their arrogance, the Heritage Society, which wrote Project 2025, presented it to Trump as his only path to becoming the all-powerful president he dreamt of being, believing with enough money and chutzpah, they could slip their agenda past a sleepy, disengaged electorate and execute a political coup before anyone realized they’d been mugged.

The probability that Project 2025 would succeed was never high, but with an opposition party that constantly tripped over itself and an army of well-financed influencers, this was the best chance the plotters would ever have. For more than a year, Trump and his cronies ran roughshod over everyone, aided to a great degree by a supportive Supreme Court. But as almost often happens when narcissistic leaders, encouraged by their yes-people overreach, Trump’s delusions crashed headlong into reality.

Trump found out that he couldn’t call the shots on tariffs, and even a Republican party cowed by the fear of being primaried wouldn’t stand for the creation of a Nazi-like government police force. Even their craven self-interest had uncrossable red lines, and when Trump’s power-grabbing attempts to neutralize Congress got personal, he learned he was not invincible.

But the die had already been cast for the midterm elections. Independent voters who had swept him into office in 2024 abandoned him in droves, which caused Trump to trigger a gerrymandered redistricting war among the states. But any gains he made as a result weren’t nearly enough to offset approval ratings dropping toward 30%. Thus, as many people predicted he would when his prospects became desperate, he started a war with Iran, or more accurately, he allowed Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to manipulate him into starting one.

Trump obviously thought he could control Netanyahu, and he assumed, in spite of warnings by people in his administration who knew better, that he could bully Iran into a quick surrender. It turned out, however, that Trump couldn’t call the shots against people who were as driven and determined as he was. For Trump, this war is about bravado and showing the world how tough he is. For Israel and Iran, however, it’s about long-term survival, which is a far more powerful motivating factor. Neither Israel nor Iran is about to adopt Trump’s agenda, nor is either willing to let him call the shots.

Trump has crashed into the consequences of his own mental illness and incompetence. When one of his business ventures failed, the collateral damage was limited to places like Atlantic City, New Jersey. But when an arrogant president who is also the Commander in Chief of the world’s most powerful military fails so spectacularly, we all pay a huge price.

We’re going to be paying for Trump’s failures for many years to come. So far, the world’s enmity toward America has been focused on Trump, but it’s clear as he inflicts damage on everything he touches, that if Congress doesn’t take back its constitutional power, the nation that everyone once revered will become a pariah.

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Deal Making and Diplomacy – Trump’s Achilles Heels

Posted on June 6, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, June 6, 2026

Donald Trump believes he is a master deal maker, something he clearly is not. Trump’s idea of deal making during his long career as a real estate developer was always based on the gangster model. He makes deals like a mafia boss armed with expensive lawyers and enforcers. For Trump, making a deal means getting what he wants at the expense of everyone he can successfully bully and punishing everyone he perceives as disloyal.

Anyone who has studied the true art of deal making understands that Trump’s approach, while it sometimes appears to work in the short run, is the worst possible way to forge lasting agreements. It’s a cliché that a good deal is one from which each side walks away believing it won something of value. Deals that endure over time work because each side achieves something sustainable. But Trump’s deals must vanquish the other side, leaving the people he deals with feeling resentful, angry, cheated, and misled.

That’s not the way to conduct diplomacy or trade negotiations. It is certainly not the way to grow lasting alliances based on mutual trust and shared interests. That’s why Trump will never obtain a deal with Iran that his narcissistic personality can accept. Trump cannot  bully the IRGC that now appears to control the Iranian regime. He said at the outset of his war that one of his principal goals was regime change. He seems to have achieved that goal, silencing all the dissident voices within Iran’s government, leaving the hard-liners who hate America and the West in charge.

We abhor the way the Iranian regime treats their own people and sponsors terrorism, but we still must deal with them. To win a lasting peace without first enduring another forever war in the Middle East, both sides must be able to believe and trust each other, which is why Donald Trump’s approach will fail. He ignores the advice of people who know far more about diplomacy than he does, and refuses to understand how the people he must treat with think and what they value. That requires a level of mutual respect that Trump is incapable of. The only way he knows how to deal with potential adversaries is to alternate between the kind of phony obsequiousness that was on display when he fawned over Xi Jinping, and projecting an air of superiority that enrages friends and foes alike.

Therein lies the problem, which can only be solved if the real professionals who have devoted their lives to averting war can somehow control what comes out of Trump’s mouth. Trump’s approach to power is based on lies, misdirection, and creating chaos. In his war with Iran, that can only lead to disaster. Americans, even much of Trump’s base have learned that they can’t trust anything Trump says. He is a serial liar who often seems incapable of distinguishing truth from his own delusions. He reneges on agreements, and considers himself the only trustworthy arbiter of disagreements, and he trusts his own dangerous impulses over facts and expert counsel.

Trump’s approach to governing is to tear up the established order in favor of a world in which he and his imagined co-emperors have free reign to do whatever they please. He wants to reverse the progressive gains of the last century, he has withdrawn from the worldwide efforts to combat climate change and the World Health Organization, and is on the verge of undermining NATO. He withdrew from the JCPOA, the deal that Barack Obama and nearly twenty other countries spent two years negotiating with Iran to prevent them from developing nuclear weapons.

The International Atomic Energy Agency routinely inspected Iran’s nuclear facilities and reported that they were complying with the agreement. So why did Trump tear it up? Simply because of his personal animus toward Obama. He couldn’t stand the idea that a black president could achieve such an important success. In Trump’s mind, Obama’s success was the ultimate Wokism, which he and Project 2025 are determined to eradicate.

Iran’s leaders are smart. They understand how Trump thinks far better than he understands them. They know they can’t trust him, and he reinforces that every time he seesaws threats with disingenuous olive branches. Three quarters of Americans don’t trust their president. Why should Iran? A high ranking leader of the IRGC told CNN yesterday that Trump is the problem in their negotiations, that it’s impossible to negotiate with someone who doesn’t understand the first thing about diplomacy.

I despise the Iranian regime and what it stands for. But when it comes to deal making and diplomacy, they’re far better at it than Trump. They have his number, and as Trump is fond of saying, they believe they hold the cards that give them leverage. Trump is never going to get a deal as good as the JCPOA. Everyone but Trump knows that regardless of how they spin it.

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The Only People Who Fear Trump are MAGA Republicans

Posted on May 27, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, May 27, 2026

Every day, at least one person asks me, “How can Donald Trump ______?” You fill in the blank. I always answer the same way. We can’t possibly know what motivates Donld Trump deep down, because we can’t see everything through the filter of a sociopathic, megalomaniacal narcissist. I know that’s a lot of syllables, but claiming to know how his mental illness influences everything he says and does is like me telling my wife I know what it feels like to give birth. I can’t possibly.

In the sixteen months of his second term, Trump has become even more unhinged. The Republican majorities in Congress and Trump’s hand picked Supreme Court have virtually unfettered him from inconveniences like the Constitution. With the exception of Trump’s illegal tariffs, there has been virtually no oversight of the Executive Branch by either the Legislative or Judiciary Branches. With neither checks nor balances, surrounded by yes-people and sycophants, Trump acts as if he really believes he is not only the King of America but the most powerful and respected leader in the world.

Since Inauguration Day, it’s been extremely painful for Americans who love our country to see Trump parade around like the naked emperor of Hans Christian Anderson’s 1837 fable. He is a laughing stock among world leaders, which is hardly a laughing matter. In Beijing, Trump fawned over Xi Jinping, calling them the G2 and receiving nothing but diplomatic courtesy in return, only to have Vladimir Putin visit Beijing for a mutual love fest with Xi as soon as Trump left.

No one outside his core MAGA base respects Trump. Surely, foreign leaders do not. They see him throw our military around like toy soldiers, putting them at risk and wasting their brilliance on missions whose only real purpose is to salve Trump’s ego. Thus, the leader of America’s staunchest ally, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney politely disengaged from Trump, re-orienting Canada’s trade and even its auto industry away from the United States toward Europe and China. The leader of our next-staunchest ally, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer risked his own leadership when he told Trump where he could stick his Iran War. German Chancellor Freidrich Merz made it clear that Europe and NATO no longer consider America a reliable ally.

Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s Iran War and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a right wing extremist herself broke with Trump over support of NATO and Trump’s criticism of the Pope. Both Denmark and Greenland rejected Trump’s attempt to annex Greenland and other traditional American allies, Australia, South Korea, and Japan, broke with Trump over Iran.

Our allies respect America’s military prowess and they realize that Trump is extremely unpopular with the American people. The whole world saw Trump’s favorability rating at home drop from around 50 percent to 30 in sixteen months. Every foreign leader understands that when Democrats take over the House in November, Trump will be a lame duck, albeit a very dangerous and annoying one. They know Trump fears the exposure of the Epstein Files and that Iran is playing him, stalling for time and betting that Americans will insist on an end to the war before Iran’s economy crashes completely.

Trump isn’t capable of understanding that he has lost. Every since he declared a cease-fire, only to see Benjamin Netanyahu increase his attacks on Hezbollah, many of us have wondered what he would do when it became clear, with the midterms nearing, that Iran is not intimidated by him. He’s certainly capable of inventing his own delusional reality in which he declares victory and walks away. The Obama nuclear deal that Trump tore up was complex enough that most people won’t be able to tell who comes out ahead in the current negotiations, compared to where we would have been in the JCPOA had remained in effect. It seemed like the last thing Trump wanted was to resume full scale war. When Congress returns in six days, it will likely pass a new war powers resolution that asserts their sole authority to declare and pursue war.

Trump seemed to have trapped himself badly, but when a cornered rat finds itself with no good options it attacks wildly, survival being its only motivator. When Trump said at his cringeowrthy Cabinet meeting today that Iran would never wait him out, he didn’t care about the midterms, and that Oman, a major U. S. ally in the region would either behave or we would “blow them up,” everyone but the sycophants in the Cabinet Room knew we might have crossed a point of no return.

Trump is now in full gangster mode, hurling irrational threats at anyone who displeases him, isolating America from the rest of the world. He is so driven to prove his own delusions there is no way to predict what he’ll do next, but there is now a significant chance that he will escalate attacks on Iran into a region-wide bloodbath, not caring if he bankrupts our strategic weapons supplies and detroys our economy. Mental illness can do that to you.

The most important question on the table is what it will take for his captive Republicans to say, “Enough!” and shut him down.

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What Did Trump Accomplish in Beijing?

Posted on May 16, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, May 16, 2026

As I looked through today’s news reports and opinion pieces from CNN, Fox News, and  the New York Times, I was surprised at their consistency. There were no wildly opposed partisan views, which suggests that much of what I read was likely true.

To organize my thoughts and avoid my biases I imagined my thirteen-year-old grandson responding to a school assignment to watch Trump’s encounters with Xi Jinping and report on what he saw. Looking at it as I imagine he might gave me a simple, common-sense perspective.

President Trump arrived in Beijing lavishing praise and adulation on his Chinese counterpart. Trump can be extremely charming when he wants to be, but anyone who’s been exposed to him for any length of time knows his charm is disingenuous. It’s a character he plays. When he invited television personality and Trump critic Bill Maher to the White House for dinner, Maher said afterward that he was amazed at how friendly and charming Trump was. He added, though, that while Trump allowed Maher to criticize his policies, there was no chance that anything Maher said would make a difference.

Xi did not reciprocate Trump’s obsequious behavior. He never praised Trump or said anything positive about him directly, instead addressing the importance of them being able to work cooperatively. While Trump was fawning over him, Xi delivered a stark warning that if Trump interfered in the dispute between Taiwan and China, it could mean war, but unlike the bombastic Trump, whose threats are always exaggerated and bullying, Xi was subtle, especially when he referred to America as a declining power while China was on the rise. My grandson would have gotten the message clearly.

Trump told anyone who would listen that it was all about relationships, and he was building one with Xi. After the summit meeting he told Fox News he considered Xi a friend. No doubt, he was desperately hoping Xi would say something that was at least conciliatory, but Xi only talked about the importance of the United States and China getting along. When a reporter asked Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi if Xi considered Trump a friend, Yi said China and the United States would continue working together.

Coming home on Air Force One, when he could say anything he wanted, Trump bragged about trade deals he made, suggesting China would buy 750 planes from Boeing, for example. But when asked to confirm that, China would only say it was considering buying a few aircraft but there was no deal. It was much easier to agree that China would resume buying soy beans from American farmers, because that is in both country’s interests. But when it came to the three things Trump needed to get China to agree to, he came home with nothing.

About Iran’s enriched uranium, Xi repeated China’s long-standing position that Iran should not have nuclear weapons with neither specifics nor offers of assistance. About the Strait of Hormuz, Xi said it should be open to all shipping, again, without offering to help, and that resulted in Trump telling the media he didn’t need help and wasn’t asking Xi for any favors. Finally, on an issue that has enormous impact on American industries, security, and the competition to develop AI, no one said anything. China processes 93% of the world’s rare earth minerals, which are vital to all three. Trump understands that if China restricts it’s exportation of rare earths it could destroy our economy. Xi had the leverage going in, and he still does.

Trump’s attempts at flattery and his desperate need to be revered by Xi were on full display when he referred to the United States and China as the world’s two superpowers, quipping “I call us the G-2.”

When XI met with Vladimir Putin before Russia invaded Ukraine, he said the friendship between China and Russia was unbreakable, and both China and Russia have strong ties to Iran. Both countries have been assisting Iran in Trump’s war with satellite intelligence and drone technology.

Putin will visit China next week. The pomp and ceremony Xi showed Trump was a skillful play on Trump’s narcissism. That’s what powerful leaders do when they disrespect the person they’re hosting but have to play the diplomatic game regardless because one serious misstep could be catastrophic in the nuclear age. I can’t wait to see how Xi receives Putin. Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall when Putin and Xi mock Trump’s fantasy of a G-2 that excludes Russia?

My grandson is a smart kid who won’t draw conclusions without evidence. The only way he could possibly answer the question, “what did Trump accomplish in Beijing” would be, “nothing of substance.” For all his bombast, Trump’s hanging out there on his own. The rest of the world sees him as a deranged, dangerous clown. There’s no clear exit from Iran, and the likelihood of a deal to remove Iran’s enriched uranium that was as good as the Obama deal Trump tore up is vanishingly small.

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Trump vs Xi

Posted on May 12, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell,  May 12, 2026

A normal person approaching a critical summit with the leader of our most powerful and dangerous adversary, knowing they have no trump cards to play might be nervous. They might suffer extreme anxiety attacks and even cancel or postpone the meeting again. But people who suffer from serious narcissistic personality disorders don’t react or behave like normal people. They have such exaggerated, grandiose images of themselves, they don’t realize they’re mired in quicksand until it’s too late.

I fear that is the fate of our impetuous, out of his depth president. He is so fundamentally unlikable that I have no sympathy for him, but I hope that having billionaires Elon Musk and Tim Cook with him, along with an entourage of people who understand Chinese and have a clue about the way Xi thinks will mute Trump’s worst tendencies. Despite self-promotion as the Master of the Deal, Trump is anything but that. In business, he never negotiated fairly on a level playing field. He always used money and an army of lawyers to intimidate the opposition.

I doubt that Trump has any idea what a fair deal would mean with either China or Iran. He understands neither fairness nor what it takes to be a real dealmaker. All that motivates him is winning, or at least convincing himself that he’s winning, even when everyone around him can see that he’s lost. And that, to our great misfortune as Americans, is exactly the situation as Trump prepares to depart for Beijing.

We’re all aware of the debacle that Trump’s war in Iran has become, and equally aware that he was warned by experts that bringing the Iranian regime to its knees would not be as easy as sending in a few commandos to kidnap Nicolas Maduro. Instead he listened only to Benjamin Netanyahu, who convinced him that the interests of Israel and the United States were perfectly aligned, and undoubtedly played upon his ego. The truth is that Netanyahu, who understands Iranians as well as anyone, was focused on what he believed was Israel’s survival. The fate of things like the Strait of Hormuz were far lesser priorities for him than for Trump and the rest of the world.

Trump allowed himself to be drawn into a war that drastically weakened our ability to confront China. Thanks to 24/7 worldwide news channels, Xi can see everything we see in real time. He sees that our ability to fight effectively on multiple fronts is far more fragile than anyone, especially Trump imagined. He sees that Trump’s trade war is a total disaster, and that in the sixteen months of Trump’s second term he has driven our allies away and forced them to cozy up to China and each other rather than do business with us.

MAGA Republicans continue to live in their oblivious bubble, drinking Trump’s Kool Aid and supporting his attempts to undermine our electoral system to assure that Trump remains in power. Like Trump himself, they are narrowly focused on power and wealth to the exclusion of what’s good for the rest of America and the world.

All that might still be salvageable, except for some realities that Trump and MAGA seem to have overlooked. China is forging ahead of the United States in the production of alternative energy sources, while Trump is spending billions to kill them in the United States, creating a perfect storm of bad outcomes when oil becomes scarce and expensive. China is also on the verge of leaving us in the dust with respect to AI. It wouldn’t surpise me if bringing our most powerful tech executives on this trip actually benefitted Xi in the end. The unpredictable and uncontrollable Elon Musk could turn on Trump in a second if he saw more profit in throwing his lot in with China.

But the thing that may be the determining factor in Trump’s meeting with Xi has mostly fallen under the radar. The demand for rare earth minerals increases every day, and America depends on them to support AI, the IT industry in general, and our strategic weapons systems. The United States is relatively poor in rare Earth ores, while China possesses enough to hold the rest of the world hostage if Xi decides that’s to his advantage. In 2025, China accounted for more than 70% of the mining and 90% of the processing of rare earth elements. The United States was a distant second, with Europe having almost none. Those numbers portend a very negative future if China chooses to use rare earths to dominate his relations with Trump.

I doubt that many American leaders would want to be in the position Trump finds himself, but then, it’s unlikely that anyone but Trump would have managed things so badly that they would find themselves in such a position. Thanks to Trump, the rest of the world sees us as a declining empire. They also note that the U. S. has been the loser in every military venture we’ve engaged in since World War 2, except Ronald Reagan’s heroic invasion of the island of Grenada.

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And The Winner is … China

Posted on May 7, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, May 7, 2026

Project 2025 and Donald Trump’s impossible to control ego have been driving his second term. As we approach the confluence of the crises Trump has put in motion, it’s important to understand that Project 2025 was a Hail Mary. The likelihood that it would replace our Constitution with a Christian Nationalist Manifesto was always relatively small, but it was the best opportunity right-wing extremists had since Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich began preparing for what is happening today, forty-five years ago.

Project 2025 and Trump 2.0 attempted a coup. Their best hope was hitting the opposition simultaneously from every direction, challenging and attempting to either kill or change everyhing they could reach. Trump went all in on the motto, “I’d rather ask for forgiveness than permission,” hitting the ground running with a long list of Executive Actions drafted for him by the Heritage Foundation, most of which had very little chance of getting past the courts. The administration knew that, but they also knew the chaos they created would paralyze any opposition, as it did for most of 2025.

We spent last year watching Trump pick fights and start wildfires everywhere he could. He was never going to win every fight, but he would do as much damage as he could. Doing damage seems to be the one thing the Trump administration is adept at. He began with a double-barreled attack on the federal government and the world economy. Under the auspices of DOGE, a fake federal agency that existed only in the minds of Trump and Elon Musk, under the guise of combating waste, fraud, and abuse, Musk was able to destroy federal agencies that Americans cared about but that the Heritage Foundation disapproved of. And with the stroke of his pen, Trump upended decades of international economic stability with his tariffs.

The tariffs and most of DOGE’s actions, particularly Musk’s theft of huge troves of Americans’ personal information from confidential government computer systems to feed his AI ventures, turned out to be illegal or unconstitutional, but reversals by the courts couldn’t prevent massive harm to 300,000 people whose careers were erased, to the philosophy of free trade and tariff-free borders, and to our alliances. After those opening salvos, Trump went after private law firms that employed people who had opposed him and our elite university system, attempting to control what is taught on our campuses.

To repay his friends in the coal and petroleum industries for their political donations, Trump did everything he could to kill the struggling electric vehicle industry, and terminate all government projects that supported alternative energy production like solar arrays and wind farms, despite massive evidence that carbon pollution is destroying our ice caps, changing our climate, and affecting the health of every person on Earth. Even if destroying our environment weren’t a compelling enough issue, the effect of Trump’s war with Iran on oil supplies demonstrates how wrong-headed those decisions were.

Deciding unilaterally (illegally) to change the name of the Defense Department to the War Department was symbolic of Project 2025’s attitude toward the rest of the world. No more leading the Free World or supporting alliances that prevented another world war, and no longer leading efforts for world peace and cooperation. Instead, becoming the bullies of the world, abandoning our allies and cozying up to autocrats.

Trump’s promises to end wars on day one were his biggest lies. He weakened support for Ukraine against Russian aggression, possibly dealing a mortal blow to NATO and our European allies. And instead of reining in Israel’s destruction of Gaza, he joined Israel in destroying 13,000 military and infrastructure targets in Iran, bogging us down in a war that seems to have been justified on bad or faked intelligence – again!

Trump is desperately trying to end the conflict against an enemy he badly underestimated and does not understand. With his approval ratings at home at record lows for any president, the midterm elections approaching, and committed to a face-to-face meeting with Xi Jinping, Trump will go to China with few cards to play. His actions with respect to alternative energy made China the biggest winner in his Iran war.

China invested billions of dollars in wind and solar energy, ramping up their efforts as Trump’s war has caused severe shortages all over Asia, and placing China in the diplomatic driver’s seat. Moreover, Trump is desperate for some sign of support from Xi. It didn’t bother him when our allies (Canada, UK, Spain, Italy, Germany) criticized and backed away from him. If Xi decides it’s in China’s interest to weaken Trump further, he will have all the leverage if Trump goes to China without an Iran deal that’s better than the Obama deal Trump tore up.

Trump may be about to learn that his delusions of grandeur have caused great damage to his administration, but more seriously to the 350 million Americans he swore to defend. He unnecessarily picked fights with virtually everyone except Xi and Vladimir Putin. With the rest of the world wise to him, and having reduced our supply of strategic weapons to a dangerously low level, his power and influence ebbs internationally every day. He’ll never admit it publicly, but all those chickens are coming home to roost.

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