Trump’s Alienation of Canada

Posted on August 22, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 22, 2026

Donald Trump has committed countless unforced errors in his second administration, but none worse than how he has convinced Canadians that they can no longer trust the United States. Actually, he has convinced most of the world that the United States can’t be trusted, but the situation with Canada is more egregious than most.

Until Trump came along with his indomitable ego and his bullying approach to everything, Americans and Canadians loved having each other as neighbors. Like any neighbors and extended families, we had our differences, but they were just bumps in the road because the leaders of both countries recognized that being neighbors along a 3,000 mile border across which people and trade goods passed freely was extremely beneficial to both.

When I lived in the Pacific Northwest, people in Washington and British Columbia treated each other like friends and family, crossing the border as if they were crossing into another state or province. It’s difficult to overstate what a wonderful experience that was, and people on both sides of the border revered the relationship. I’ve always had great respect for Canadians and their values, so I feel particularly offended by Trump’s attempts to belittle Canada into a vassal nation.

Donald Trump is a soulless predator who treats anyone he perceives as weaker than he as a target to be manipulated and taken advantage of. He’s also crossed another important invisible line. Even when national leaders disagree it’s rare that average citizens get involved in their disputes. Americans hear that whenever they travel abroad. Europeans rail about how awful Trump is, but average people throughout Europe do not hate Americans. Rather, they shake their heads in dismay and sympathize with us. They all understand that we’ve been taken over by a relatively small minority of craven power seekers, racists, and greedy wannabe oligarchs in the Russian style – that is, completely unfettered by rules or ethics as long as they suck up to their leader.

Until Trump, millions of Canadians wintered in the United States. In Florida alone, Canadians owned more than a half million properties, differing from American “snowbirds” only in their ingrained politeness. In recent years, as badly as they have been treated by Trump, I have never heard a harsh word directed at Americans by a Canadian. I feel awful for my Canadian friends who are being severely hurt financially, not to mention outrageously inconvenienced by Trump’s policies. Many are desperately trying to sell while there’s still a market for their properties.

But there’s another issue we would be remiss to ignore. Trump’s gangster-like instincts have had a steamroller effect both in the United States and around the world. His ability to bribe and threaten people into doing his bidding has had a stunning impact on all of us. We act shocked asking each other how this could possibly have happened, but we all should have known better.

The world has seen Trumps before. Trump himself has been emulating the worst of them all along, modeling everything about his governing to the playbook Adolf Hitler used to destroy the Weimar Republic and throw the entire world into bloody conflict. America’s problem was complacency born of relative prosperity and decadence, the same things that destroyed every great empire that has ever existed on Earth.

The reason people like Hitler and Trump are successful, at least until they’re finally brought down, is that their most valuable skill is creating division and chaos. Thus, anyone who attempts to speak out against the potential autocrat finds themselves isolated and unsupported. It takes someone of enormous courage, intelligence, and integrity to defy a mob boss mentality like Trump’s. It’s not clear that there is a single member of the Republican Congressional Caucus that still possesses those qualities, if they ever did.

Even most of our allies caved to pressure at first. It was only the way Trump approached his war with Iran that truly emboldened them to stand united against his madness. No sane president would initiate an open-ended war with no clear achievable objectives without consulting our military alliance partners, then expect them to jump on board the war train without complaint.

As far as I can tell, only one foreign leader had the stomach and love for his own people and country to go toe-to-toe with Trump and eventually walk away from negotiating with the bully. I have the utmost respect for Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who clearly cares more about average Canadians than he does wealth or power. Imagine that! A leader who stands up for his nation’s sovereignty and the general well-being of its people who can’t be bought or intimidated by Donald Trump.

Canadians are fortunate to have him, and painful as it is to watch, it’s impossible not to admire the way Carney has led his nation out of it’s near-total economic and military dependence on the United States. People on both sides of the border will pay a heavy price for the mess Trump has made, but I look at Carney’s defiance as a positive thing for the entire world. I wish we had someone like him among the prospective candidates for our 2028 election.

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Trump’s Ego and Vanity Undermine the World Order

Posted on August 18, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 18, 2026

Anyone who aspires to be president of the United States would have to possess a large ego and extreme self-confidence. Donald Trump has both, to great excess. But a president requires other characteristics to be effective and successful, among which are sound judgment, a moral center, empathy, and a general regard for the things he swears to defend, namely, the basic rights of all Americans and the Constitution. Donald Trump does not possess any of those things.

Trump is driven almost entirely by vanity and a desperate need for adoration if not worship. In the midst of a war he wrongheadedly started with Iran that threatens to spin out of control and has already exposed frightening shortcomings in our military preparedness, what grabs Trump’s attention? First, there are his vanity projects: his ballroom, which he began touting as a luxury icon in 2010, the reflecting pool, plastering his name on every monument he can find, and imposing his view of history on the Smithsonian Institution.

Then there are his personal vendettas against anyone he deems insufficiently loyal; his treatment of foreign leaders that resembles an adolescent ego-driven schoolyard competition more than competent diplomacy; and politically motivated indictments which distract the Department of Justice from its primary mission, which according to Gemini AI, as codified under Title 28 of the U.S. Code, is to enforce federal laws, provide legal counsel to the federal government, and oversee federal law enforcement and prosecutions.

He showed his true colors with respect to average Americans last week, charging in a childish whining voice that Americans complain too much about inflation and gas prices, which he said were a small price to pay for Trump’s courageous war to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon. He finally spoke the truth, that the plight of average Americans struggling to pay for housing, food, and health care for their families was “a yawn.”

Here at home his mafia-like gang of billionaires, sycophants, and enablers have established a pattern of threat and intimidation that has been extremely effective at silencing political opposition. But internationally, Trump is frustrated that he can’t have his way. Like a four-year-old, he throws a tantrum whenever he doesn’t get what he wants, but the worst a four-year-old can do is kick holes in walls. Trump’s ill-advised communication style can destroy alliances, upset the world order, and risk massive wars and destruction. He seems intent on all of the above.

He has spent his entire second term attacking our staunchest ally, Canada, with crippling tariffs and slanderous rhetoric. A few months ago, he announced that he was reducing our forces on the ground in Europe, because not a single NATO country offered to help him defeat Iran, while he simultaneously boasted that he didn’t need their help. Last week, furious over leaks about our rapidly decreasing inventory of strategic weapons and the appallingly bad conditions aboard several U. S. Navy vessels deployed to the Persian Gulf, including the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln, he ordered the carrier George Washington to leave its station in the western Pacific where it was the principal bulwark against Chinese aggression to the replace the Lincoln.

And yesterday, he attacked two more staunch allies while praising a brutal dictator who is sending tens of thousands of ground troops to aid in Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine. In the midst of ongoing joint war games with South Korea, Trump announced that he would be scaling those games back because his friend Kim Jong Un, the North Korean Dictator, considered them threatening to his regime. When asked by reporters why he was doing that, Trump responded as he did when asked about reducing support for NATO: when we asked for help with Iran, which of course, we don’t really need, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung said he wasn’t interested.

Perhaps the most absurd thing Trump said yesterday was that if another reliable ally, Oman, got in the way of his dealings with Iran, he would “bomb the shit out of them.” Oman not only must deal with Iran, across the Strait of Hormuz, but it has been a dependable intermediary attempting to help Trump negotiate an end to the war he has trapped himself and all of us in. Beyond that, his outrageous threat to Oman raises the spectacle of attacking the tiny nation with bombs and missiles against which Oman would be defending with missile systems purchased from the United States and Europe.

It becomes more apparent every day, in the contradictory way that almost everything Trump says, that Make America Great Again actually means the systematic dismantling of everything that has made America what it is since World War 2. I  don’t know if America qualified as “great” before Trump came along, but we were surely the most prosperous, generous, and successful nation in the world as well as its best hope for the future. The America Trump projects to the world is mean-spirited, uncaring, and self-destructive.

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The Expiration of the Iran Memorandum of Understanding

Posted on August 17, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 17, 2026

The Memorandum of Understanding Donald Trump signed with Iran last June officially expired today. The key word in that sentence is “officially,” since it was apparently dead on arrival, according to today’s Wall Street Journal. Even in June, when the Trump administration touted it as a major achievement that would eventually lead to negotiations that would remove any chance of Iran having a nuclear weapon, it was obvious that its vague language energized Iran to close the Strait of Hormuz, demonstrating in that single act that it possessed enormous leverage Trump had failed to account for.

Not surprisingly, Iran viewed the MOU quite differently. Its new leader, Mojtaba Khamenei, never trusted Trump’s intention to negotiate a fair settlement, instead viewing the sixty day paused called for in he MOU as an attempt by Trump to take pressure off the world economy after it became clear that bombing Iran was not leading to a capitulation. It’s quite apparent that Trump badly misjudged Iran, ignoring his own advisors and Intelligence in favor of his gut feelings. Iran’s leaders see Trump’s approval ratings at home plummeting and can smell his fear over the upcoming midterm elections.

From Iran’s point of view, the sixty day grace period was a reprieve that allowed them to ramp up production of missiles and strengthen the Revolutionary Guard’s hold on power. Rather than lay the groundwork for negotiations, Iran never had any intention of conceding its right to develop nuclear weapons. Instead, its leaders recognized that when the MOU expired, less than eighty days would remain until Trump was likely to lose his majority in Congress, making him a lame duck as far as the war was concerned. They believe they have the upper hand long term, and it’s difficult to argue that they’re wrong.

Trump’s hands are tied by having burned through the U. S. military’s inventory of interceptor missiles at a terrifying rate and a hostile political environment at home. The entire world understands that the United States no longer has the capability to aggressively pursue the war with Iran without severely weakening our positions around the world and essentially leaving Ukraine defenseless against Russian missiles.

Trump tried to paint the cul de sac he’s trapped us in as a strategic switch to economic warfare. He tweets that he can cripple Iran’s economy and force them to capitulate, but Iran is used to economic hardship, and is apparently prepared to ride it out for as long as it takes. Trump’s latest prediction that his new approach to the war will bring Iran to its knees is no more credible than his predictions that Iran would surrender by the middle of April.

The WSJ article reports that Iran used the sixty day MOU waiting period to plan a long-term war. They are prepared to maintain their stranglehold on the flow of oil, and plan to go on the offensive against American interests. They already showed that they could hack into municipal water systems in American cities and they have caused enormous destruction to our infrastructure in American bases throughout the Persian Gulf states, destroying aircraft on the ground and injuring more than 600 American service personnel while killing seventeen. They are confident that their virtually limitless supply of cheap missiles is sufficient to maintain their hold on shipping in the Strait and continue to harass the Gulf States that host American bases. They caused great damage to oil production in those states with their missiles reaching as far as the Aramco oil facilities in Saudi Arabia.

The Gulf States realize that American forces will not protect them indefinitely, and that is causing them to seek accommodations with Iran. Our so-called alliances throughout the Middle East are as transactional as everything Trump does. They know Trump will abandon them the moment defending them becomes inconvenient, just as he is threatening to abandon Europe, Ukraine, and South Korea. They know he overplayed his hand, and as Trump famously said to Volodymyr Zelensky, he no longer has the cards to pursue a military victory.

The Journal claims Iran is preparing to go on the offensive executing preemptive strikes against American interests including a possible ground invasion of Kuwait. Its missiles cannot reach the American homeland, but its cyber warfare can. Our power grids and transportation and communication systems are at risk, and there’s very little we can do to defend against determined continuous attempts to infiltrate them. Trump was caught with his pants down fighting this war from the start. He calls Iranian leaders crazy for refusing to negotiate, but either he fails to understand the damage Iran is capable of inflicting on our infrastructure and economy, or he knows he’s caught in trap of his own making, and all his tweets are simply bluster.

What did Trump do in response to the expiration of his MOU? He vowed to fight on to build his ballroom, forced the Kennedy Center Board to engrave his name of the face of the complex, and threatened to nationalize our election. Pure insanity.

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Do Trump Supporters Have Regrets?

Posted on August 13, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 13, 2026

Some days, I wonder how Trump loyalists feel watching the president turn everything he touches into manure. Trump loyalists come in many flavors. Some are rabid, treating him like the cult leader he is. In their eyes he can do no wrong, because either they profit from his misadventures or they’re too angry or dimwitted to see past the ends of their noses. They’re a lost cause, so I’ll ignore them for now.

Hilary Clinton’s description of Trump supporters as “a basket of deplorables” was a great punchline, but it was also a gross exaggeration. Many Trump supporters had legitimate reasons to support him back in 2016. Many middle and upper-middle class people felt overtaxed, and while Trump’s tax laws mostly enriched the extremely wealthy even further, a lot of us whose homes and investments had increased in value during decades of hard work and saving found some tax relief, too. Many people I know said they’d vote for anyone who promised to decrease their taxes.

Many others believed affirmative action, while well-intentioned, had gone too far and needed to be reeled in, a sentiment that aligned perfectly with Trump’s racist and misogynistic attitudes. Still others, like military and foreign service personnel who lived and worked abroad and were frustrated by previous administrations’ inability to defeat Islamic radical terrorism, including people who prioritized Israel’s security, bought into Trump’s boasts that he would solve the problem. Then there was our southern border, which the seven presidents who preceded Trump had mishandled so badly that people were susceptible to Trump’s lies and exaggerations.

Does anyone actually believe that undocumented aliens in our country are primarily murderers, rapists, and escapees from insane asylums? Do any of Trump’s supporters who drank his xenophobic Kool Aid realize that the primary reason state officials in California and the Southwest did little to enforce our immigration laws was that their economies would have crashed if the “illegals” disappeared? Trump distorted an extremely complex issue to appeal to people who were struggling economically and falsely offered them a common enemy.

Today, many Trump voters feel the economic harm resulting from his attempts to turn America back into a whites only nation of privilege as farmers lose crops, health care providers lose the low-end employees they depend on, and many of us have to do our own gardening. (What a scandal!) Supporters who bought into Trump’s whining about the rest of the world ripping us off and needing to be punished with tariffs finally realize that a tariff is a tax on all Americans, and all Trump really accomplished was driving our best trading partners, like Canada, to seek other markets.

It’s the Trump supporters who were driven by the need to support their families rather than the anger and divisiveness Trump engenders whom I wonder about. They’re not bigots or white supremacists, just people struggling with the rising costs Trump promised to reduce  who were taken in by his self-serving lies. Now that anyone who retains any degree of objectivity can see what a disaster Trump really is, how almost every major initiative he has pushed in his second term undermines our constitution, our alliances, or our military preparedness, how do the millions of Trump supporters who think for themselves feel about him now?

How do they feel about the corruption of Trump and his family and Trump’s despeate attempts to suppress the Epstein files? How do they feel about the dismantling of the social safety net tens of millions of Americans depend on? How do they feel about the incompetent debacle his Iran war has evolved into, that now threatens to spill over past the boundaries of the Middle East, seriously damaging American and world economies, and putting the world at risk of a nuclear holocaust? How do they feel when they see the rest of the world conclude that the United States can never be trusted again as long as someone like Trump can arise every four years, even after we rid ourselves of his MAGA movement?

Are the Trump supporters who can think for themselves concerned that Trump has so badly weakened our military that we can no longer defend our positions around the world? Are they angry about his promises to end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine on Day 1 when nothing has been resolved and innocent civilians are still dying by the thousands nineteen months later, not to mention the war he started that has strengthened Iran?

If you haven’t been paying attention, Trump’s approval rating dropped to 33% in a new poll yesterday. Two out of every three Americans now realize that supporting Donald Trump can only lead to disaster for the United States. Perhaps his latest threat to nationalize the November elections, was the final straw, as people recognized the next step in the Hitler playbook that Trump’s backers are using to turn America into a fascist oligarchy.

We can only hope so.

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Flawed Human Nature is the Real Existential Threat

Posted on August 10, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 10, 2026

I’ve been reluctant to admit it to myself, but during the entire eleven year nightmare since Donald Trump came down that escalator, it has become more apparent every day that events are spinning out of control, and there’s little reason to believe that there’s a Franklin Roosevelt or Winston Churchill waiting in the wings to save us from self-destruction.

Trump’s entire political career has been a slow motion coup to undermine the basic principles our nation was founded on. The Tea Party never went away. It simply morphed into the Heritage Foundation horror known as Project 2025. Future historians will scratch their heads asking how a nation as wealthy and powerful as the United States could have descended into decadence, greed, intellectual indifference, and divisiveness so quickly. For most Americans, the euphoria generated by Barack Obama’s acceptance speech in Grant Park after winning the 2008 election turned out to be a self-imposed delusion.

We who had grown up during the era of enlightenment that saw the Civil Rights, Social Security, and Voting Rights Acts pass really believed that Obama’s election was a metaphor for the maturation of America. We had finally grown past our heritage of slavery, the genocide of the native American nations, and the unbridled greed of Capitalism to create a society with a fairer, more level playing field. It wasn’t about Obama himself, but what the election of a black man with the middle name Hussein symbolized.

Suddenly, the fact that throughout history there has never been a civilization that survived very long after reaching its peak didn’t just seem like history anymore. It was happening here, to us. At some level we all felt it, but instead of recognizing where we were headed and coming together to find a middle ground that worked for most Americans, we withdrew into the social media of our choice, everyone finding an influencer voice that fit their comfort zone. But what was really happening was that we were succumbing to the toxic mindset that drives people like Trump.

I’ve been asking myself why for several years. I had been naively assuming that in the end Americans would get their act together and fix things, just like we always had, just as I was raised to believe we always would. Wasn’t America where the good guys lived? Weren’t we better than everyone else like we’d been taught?

Apparently not, and I’ve come to wonder if the problem is simply that human nature is so flawed that most of us are easily seduced by the kind of self-serving rhetoric that Trump and his followers spout. They are about exploiting all of our flaws and weaknesses and using them to divide and conquer. They are about wealth, power and privilege, and now that Trump has removed his masks and made it painfully clear that he couldn’t care less about average Americans, about health care, science, unbiased education, or economic opportunity, I wonder if it’s too late.

Our only real hope to rein Trump in is that Democrats gain a majority in at least one house of Congress. But that hope is rather thin, because I have very little faith that the Democrats can unite themselves much less the entire country. They are as politically corrupt as the MAGA crew, their only real virtue being that they are not united by greed and lust for power. Since Ronald Reagan was elected, we’ve been fighting domestically over the massive redistribution of wealth that progressive policies require, and that has brought out the worst in all of us.

That’s bad enough, but Trump has turned this into a true existential crisis. Even if his power is neutralized in November, he has left us dangerously weak on the world stage, entangled in an ever-expanding war that appears to have no good outcome, and may, in fact, wind up destroying us, which brings me to the real point of this piece. Human nature is badly flawed, and if we expect to avert the catastrophe that has destroyed every empire that preceded us, it’s those basic flaws that need to be addressed. I realized this when I found myself re-reading a book that has influenced my thinking more than any other.

Walter M. Miller’s classic 1959 novel, A Canticle for Liebowitz, tells the story of a post-nuclear apocalypse in which America and the world gradually pull themselves back from almost total destruction. The story is masterfully told with seductive dark humor mixed with the hope that we’d finally learned our lesson. Civilization recovers and thrives, but we no sooner reach the levels we had previously attained, when those same basic flaws in our nature take over again.

Miller’s frightening message was that whenever human brings achieve the ability to destroy their world, they will use it. Of course, that was obvious all along if only we’d paid attention. No wonder I re-read that book whenever we appear to be approaching the brink as we are today. And no wonder, that after spending most of my life optimistic about our future, I now struggle to imagine any path forward that will save us.

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No Way Out

Posted on August 8, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 8, 2026

No, this is not about the 1987 Kevin Costner/Gene Hackman film of the same name. But President Trump seems to have no more options than Costner did when struggling to survive as the target of a corrupt general. Trump has gotten himself into a pickle that only an irrational narcissist like him could have. Since starting his war against Iran, Trump as usual ignored the recommendations of military professionals and national security experts, claiming he could make better decisions based on his gut feelings and what he described as his morality, of which there is little or no evidence.

If it were only Trump’s pickle, there would be some justice in it. I can’t think of a politician who more richly deserves to be entangled in his own web of lies and insanity. But the problem he has created is and will continue to put all Americans at grave risk. Trump’s total failure to understand his enemy and his disregard of our allies, NATO in particular, has caused him to blunder time and again since the first bombs landed on Iran more than five months ago. His desperation to retain Congressional majorities in November, his irrational focus on vanity projects and prosecuting political enemies, and his unprecedented corruption in office has caused his approval ratings to drop to a level not seen since the days before Richard Nixon resigned.

Trump started his war with three demands whispered in his ear by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: Iran was to completely dismantle its enriched uranium program and turn over all of the uranium it weaponized after Trump tore up the JCPOA, otherwise known as the Iran nuclear deal of 2014; an end to Iran’s state sponsored terrorism; and a regime change from the extremist ayatollahs to a genuine republic. The last goal is particularly ironic as he is attempting to destroy the American republic he swore to defend. Not one of his goals is close to being achieved, and it is now Iran that is issuing demands, confidently and patiently.

Iran’s leaders understand Trump far better than he understands them. Trump’s severe mental illness makes him extremely predictable, and in war, that’s unacceptably dangerous. Because the only way Trump knows how to interact with people is what he learned from his mafia friends, he thinks over-the-top threats that no one takes seriously will win in the end.

The madness of his social media posts whose principal by-product is chaos does not frighten Iran. But worse from America’s point of view is that Trump assumes Iran’s demands and threats are as invalid as his. He’s completely wrong about that, and he is paying a huge price for his arrogance and ignorance. That would be fine with me if he weren’t dragging all of us down with him.

Iran realizes it has the power to disrupt the entire world’s economy, and it is using that power ruthlessly. In addition, Trump committed a serious error when he promised the Iranian people at the outset of the war that he would free them from the despotism they have lived with since 1979. The very protestors who might have attempted to overthrow the regime in the middle of a war now feel betrayed, as Iran’s Revolutionary Guard continues its campaign of public executions.

Trump also miscalculated Americans’ reactions to the war. He knows we won’t let him mount a land invasion, and by now everyone has heard our military leaders warn that this war cannot be won by air power alone. Joint Chiefs Chairman Daniel Caine has reportedly been making the rounds of people close to Trump to underline our arsenal’s dangerously low inventory of strategic weapons. Caine understands that no single messenger can influence Trump and retain his job if Trump doesn’t like the message, so he is attempting to stage a unanimous intervention by senior members of Trump’s Cabinet and advisors.

Caine also warned that each of the military escalations Trump threatened is likely to backfire, not to mention the risk of a widening conflict that places the entire world at risk. The elephant in the room is that if Caine is correct, and I’d put my money on him over Trump in a flash, Trump’s failed diplomacy leaves him nowhere to turn except admitting defeat and withdrawing from the field. That is about as likely as Vladimir Putin apologizing to Ukraine, except that Putin is in far less danger in Russia’s domestic political landscape.

As the days count down to the midterm elections and it’s clear that Senate Republicans are unwilling to pass the Save America Act that would unconstitutionally abridge states’ control of elections, Trump knows that if he loses the House and Senate, he will almost surely be impeached and removed from office, as he should be. The problem we face is that the only obvious way out of the mess he has created is for his own party to neutralize him, but that doesn’t have a chance of happening.

My question is: where does that leave the rest of us? I haven’t heard any answers that give me hope.

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Bend or Break

Posted on August 2, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, August 2, 2026

For eleven years, I lived in a beautiful forest on a mountainside near Bellevue, Washington. The forest was comprised of fir, cedar, maple, and alder trees. It was magnificent. The cedars stood 150 feet tall, the firs and maples nearly matching them, but we learned that the forest could be dangerous, too.

The topography of Puget Sound, which lies between the Olympic and Cascade mountain ranges, occasionally results in hurricane force winds when atmospheric pressures north and south of the sound differ sharply. Whenever that happens, the foliage-rich trees sway violently, whipping back and forth as the wind gusts. The firs, cedars, and maples are flexible and strong, bending with the wind, but the alders are different. They’re basically eighty to a hundred foot poles with all their foliage at the top, and their trunks are brittle compared to the others.

Whenever the alders’ foliage caught the wind like a sail, they whipped around, terrifying us; we all knew that one day they would snap, and that’s exactly what happened one Thanksgiving morning as eighty mile per hour winds sprang up virtually without warning. As we watched in horror, an eighty-five foot alder in our back yard broke with the sound of a rifle shot six feet above the ground. The tree hit the ground five feet from the roof of the master bedroom of my neighbor’s house, barely averting a disaster.

Those trees are a perfect parable for the present state of American politics. Successful politicians know when to bend with the wind. Bill Clinton did it so well, the opposition labelled him a waffler. I have always respected and admired leaders who were big enough to admit they were wrong and change course, as Lyndon Johnson did over Vietnam and the legacy of pending social legislation he inherited after President Kennedy’s assassination.

In President Trump, however, we have a leader who has never publicly admitted to an imperfection or error. When he is forced to back off from a position he’s taken, he always invents a fantasy villain to blame. In other words, whenever he fails, which happens with alarming frequency, he lies, and his stable of spineless sycophants applaud him as they did at this week’s embarrassing Cabinet meeting.

He did it yesterday, when his hand-picked U. S. attorney for the District of Columbia, Jeanine Pirro, debunked his claim that radical left “Dumocats” vandalized the reflecting pool, which had been incompetently repaired by a no-bid contracting firm owned by a large Trump donor who charged the government nearly ten times the contracted amount. On the same day he tried to pin the blame for serious hacks on several water systems on Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, although our intelligence services reported that the culprit was Iran.

Those things are awful, especially when twenty-four hour news services broadcast them around the world. But Trump has been conducting the war in Iran the same way, and that is more than awful – it’s dangerous. The war has created a violent storm of opposition both at home and among our allies around the world. It never had the support of a majority of Americans, and now, two-thirds  of us strongly oppose it. NATO wants nothing to do with it, and individual European countries’ reactions run the spectrum from shocked ambivalence (France, Germany, and the U. K.) to outright condemnation (Italy and Spain.)  As our allies in the Middle East come under attack from Iran, they’re beginning to turn elsewhere for economic and military support.

Whether or not the war was justified in the first place, (most of the world believes it wasn’t,) the issues that sparked it, Iran’s support of terrorism throughout the region, it’s determination to destroy Israel, and its pursuit of nuclear weapons are extremely tough to resolve. The only way to avoid dangerous escalation and expansion is through sound diplomacy. Trump, however, believes in the madman theory of diplomacy and thrives on the chaos it creates.

Back to those magnificent trees. Professional diplomats understand that carefully chosen words and flexibility are what solves difficult problems between nations. Wild, inconsistent rhetoric and rants on social media only make things worse. But Trump disregards what any competent diplomat knows. His violent swings of mood and insane threats, his inconsistency and the fact that foreign leaders know they cannot trust anything he says have put the Middle East and the entire world at great risk.

Most frightening is that his violent mood swings and inability to be forthright look very much like those alder trees whipping in the wind. As Trump violently flails and uncompromisingly whipsaws back and forth, he and the entire diplomatic apparatus of the United States are in danger of collapsing the way my rigid, unbending alder tree did. If that happens, it’s impossible to overstate the damage our country and the world will sustain.

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Trump’s War is Out of Control

Posted on July 30, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 30, 2026

At first glance, today’s announcement that Saudi Arabia had formed a military coalition with fourteen other nations to protect shipping in the Red Sea sounded like it might be a good thing. Donald Trump had clearly gotten the United States into a quagmire that he has no idea how to climb out of, but at least the other Middle Eastern Countries were starting to take responsibility for their own defense.

As Trump’s four (six at most) week war with Iran entered its sixth month and involved seventeen countries as of July 29th, it was obvious that U. S. forces couldn’t keep defending them all on their own. We should all be thankful that our generation has its own version of Daniel Elsberg, the man who blew the whistle on how the Pentagon was mishandling the Vietnam War. Whoever they are, and I’m certain there must be more than one, leaking the concerns of Joint Chiefs Chairman Daniel Caine might be the act that saves us, assuming it’s not already too late for that.

It is now accepted fact throughout the news media that the United States military is expending it highly sophisticated munitions and missile interceptor systems at a rate no one had planned for. If you’re not sure how important that revelation is, all you have to do is listen to Trump rage about executing the leaker. We have already had to relocate munitions from other commands to re-stock inventories around the Persian Gulf. If that’s not a warning siren, I can’t imagine what is. Another warning siren was the emergency supplemental budget request of $88 billion, which is intended to fund rapid remanufacture of the munitions in short supply. But the delivery window for some of the more sophisticated weapons is as long as four years.

Trump’s incompetent handling of the war would be comical if the consequences weren’t so serious. We’re at this juncture because Trump allowed his delusions of grandeur to direct his actions, and the spineless Republicans in Congress won’t lift a finger to stop him. That’s beyond shocking, because regardless of their public pronouncements, most of them are pretty sharp. They can’t fail to see that Trump is leading our country and likely the entire world down a path to destruction. Trump is badly stuck between a dozen rocks and hard places, and all his bluster over massive attacks on Iran was shown to be empty by the revelation that if we don’t start conserving weapons, we risk our military positions all over the world.

Viewed in that light, the new Saudi-led military alliance takes on a different appearance. More than anything it demonstrates that Trump has completely lost control of the Iran War. His obsession with holding onto power after the November elections, to the extent that he is exhausting every legal weapon to try to control the outcome, is visible to the entire world. So are the polls that show Americans want out of this war by nearly a three-to-one margin, and that their disapproval of every aspect of Trump’s presidency is at an unprecedented level. Iran’s leaders know this. Russia and China’s leaders know this. Europe and the rest of the Middle East know it, too. Now Iran can go on the offensive, knowing that every cheap missile and drone they fire at American or allied interests will mean another barrage of Patriot Missiles fired to intercept them. Iran doesn’t care about hitting their targets. They’ve found Trump’s soft underbelly, and they’re going to attack it every way they can.

The greatest risk is that if Trump no longer can control the outcome of hostilities, he also has no control over either their escalation or spread. That made me re-think my reaction to the new Saudi coalition. One of the fourteen nations that have agreed to join is Turkey, which is a NATO member. Does that mean that NATO could be dragged into the conflict if Iran strikes at Turkish interests? NATO has made it extremely clear that they want no part of the Iran War, and while everyone is watching Trump choke on his own bile, Russia and Ukraine are greatly escalating their own war, which yesterday spilled over into Poland in the form of a misguided Russian missile.

To date, Chinese leader Xi Jinping had remained publicly neutral about the war, which increases China’s standing each day it continues. But behind the scenes, China is supplying Iran with critical military equipment, and was planning to deliver several hundred shoulder-mounted missile launchers this week. Those weapons can make a lot of difference for Iran because they’re entirely mobile and thus impossible for our military to track.

As I said, earlier, every Republican in Congess can see what I see. They’re all smart enough to understand where it’s leading. Just ask your favorite science fiction writer: this is the most likely way World War III starts. Why is there no formal action to remove Trump from office before it’s too late, assuming it already isn’t?

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Trump’s Legacy: the Destruction of America

Posted on July 26, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 25, 2026

In Donald Trump we have a president who, contrary to the Constitution he swore to defend, told us he can do anything he wants to, limited “only by my own morality.” That statement alone should strike terror in the heart of every American. Trump’s morality includes groping and assaulting women, enriching himself and his family at the expense of American taxpayers, and causing enormous economic harm to every state that cast its electoral votes for Kamala Harris in 2024

Donald Trump does not possess any morality in terms most of us relate to. He libels and slanders anyone who displeases him. He considers promises to be nothing more than tactical maneuvers. He has said publicly that he’s smarter and knows more about military operations than all of his generals combined and he believes women and persons of color should never have senior command roles in our military. Worst of all he treats our multi-trillion dollar military as his own collection of toy soldiers and lethal weapons to be used whenever his ego requires it.

Trump’s morality also does not recognize every American’s right to vote, to have access to adequate food and medical care, and to love and live with whomever they choose. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that his notion of “making America great again” means undermining the democratic principles we grew up revering and replacing them with a fascist oligarchy that he and his friends control without opposition.

As most of us understood from day one, Trump’s only real skill set is gangsterism. He behaves like the mafia dons he worshipped and befriended as a young man. He ran his businesses the way they ran their criminal empires, and he’s trying to run the country like one. Combined with the fact that he and his administration show themselves to be more incompetent every day, our country approaching the midterm elections looks like a slow-motion train wreck.

Americans must stop listening to extremist influencers and face reality. Since our Congress, specifically House Majority Leader Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune have neither the stomach nor the balls to stand up to Trump and defend our Constiution, we, the voters are democracy’s last line of defense. We have one and only one opportunity to stop Trump from destroying our country in November. If we don’t use it, our future is bleak. Look at the facts and decide for yourself.

Seizing on the single idea that we all agree on, that a nuclear weapon in the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard would likely result in the obliteration of Israel and possibly lead to World War 3, Trump ignored his own intelligence estimates that Iran was abiding by the deal Barack Obama and twenty other world leaders negotiated with Iran in 2014, and launched a war he claimed would end Iran’s threat within a month.

It is now apparent to the entire world and the great majority of Americans, that Trump entered this war with no strategic plan for ending it if his boasts failed to materialize. He is now as badly stuck as Lyndon Johnson was in Vietnam, but with far worse potential consequences. He demonstrates, daily, that he is totally incompetent as Commander in Chief. His words and actions grow more erratic and irrational, and the people who best understand military preparedness are desperately trying to rein him in.

Three months ago, Trump was warned by Joint Chiefs Chairman Dan Caine that the first two months of Trump’s war against Iran had already squandered half of all our missile interceptor systems, worldwide. That is shocking and horrifying, because it is those systems that have successfully protected all of the Gulf states and Israel from Iranian missiles. They are also deployed at American and NATO military installations around the world, and have been depleted, as of late July, to dangerously low levels according to General Caine and our national security experts.

The war is severely damaging our once dominant economy and reigniting the inflation Trump promised to end. His negotiating strategy in the Middle East appears to have more to do with multi-billion dollar deals for his family and friends than any rational approach to achieving a stable peace in the region. Worse, Vladimir Putin and Xi Jingping recognize that Trump has spread our military readiness so thin in their theaters of operation, that if and when the dust settles in Iran, we will be dangerously vulnerable in Europe and Asia, specifically in Taiwan and the former Soviet states that are now part of NATO.

This isn’t hyperbole. The upcoming midterm elections are the only weapon we the people have to combat Trump’s insanity and incompetence. There’s no cavalry coming to rescue us. Americans have one last opportunity to peacefully take matters into our own hands in November and populate Congress with people who believe in the principles on which we were founded and have the courage to say NO to Trump.

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Total War

Posted on July 21, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 21, 2026

New York Times columnist Thomas Edsall quoted George Washington University political historian Matthew Dallek’s summary of the Trump administration this morning. If you’re wondering why we’re involved in a war that’s spinning out of control and our economy is spiraling downward while your cost of living is spiraling upward, Dallek’s response explains: “Governing via conspiracy theories, personal whim and wish-casting, Trump has taken his place as the most consistently inept president of this century…the administration’s culture is dominated by incompetence.”

How else can we explain initiating a war with a highly sophisticated, determined enemy (Iran is nothing like Venezuela) with no real game plan except bombing military assets and expecting complete surrender in a month? How else can we explain ignored intelligence estimates that predicted Iran would use the Strait of Hormuz as a weapon that would affect the entire global economy? How else can we explain that the war Trump claimed was a total victory in April is escalating daily and dangerously approaching a point of no return?

Dallek simply stated what most of us understood from the start. Governing according to the whims of a dangerously incompetent narcissist couldn’t possibly lead to anything good, and so far, it has cost us seventeen lives and more than 400 injuries to American military personnel. It has cost us a complete disaffection from Europe and NATO, strengthened Russia’s position in Ukraine, and seriousy hurt farmers and Americans who had to pay for Trump’s ego-generated, illegal tariffs.

After embarrassing himself and every American who was watching at the World Cup medal ceremony and having Iran, whose military Trump claimed had been destroyed, declare it is now involved in “total war” with the United States, a frustrated Trump lashed out (again) at Canada, the staunchest ally we’ve had for over a century. This time Trump’s claims go beyond the absurd to the ridiculous. He’s imposing a 50% tariff on Canada because smoke from wildfires in northern Ontario is polluting American cities with “filthy air.”

As Ontario’s Premier Doug Ford responded, when American wildfires spread clouds of smoke across North America, Canada responded by sending hundreds of firefighters, aircraft, and other firefighting equipment to help extinguish them. Global News reported that Canada assisted in fighting the California wildfires in 2020 and 2025 and in 2000, when fires raged from Texas to Montana, Canada sent more than 1,200 personnel to assist.

This is madness of the worst kind. Trump continues to undermine everything he touches, and America is weaker for it every day he remains in office. Things got much worse, today, when Iran activated its Houthi allies in Yemen to blockade the southern approach to the Red Sea. The move was directly intended to hurt Saudi Arabia, a sometime ally of the United States which is a sworn enemy of the Iranian regime – the enemy of my enemy is my friend?

But a look at a map of the Red Sea reveals something far more ominous. A successful blockade of the Red Sea would effectively shut down the Suez Canal, affecting worldwide shipping, reducing the global flow of oil by an additional seven percent, and severely damaging Egypt’s economy. It also threatens to involve all the countries that border the Red Sea in Trump’s war with Iran. That makes seventeen nations that could all be firing drones and missiles at each other within days.

All of this is the result of Trump’s incompetent decision making and leadership. He has repeatedly said he has the power to do anything he wants as president, which means he will continue to run amok until someone or something stops him. The body best positioned to do that is the United States Senate, which has two golden opportunities before it. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth asserted that the U. S. military will run out of funding for the war in August, and they’re asking the Senate to approve an additional $87 billion to fund continued the escalation.

Republican Senators have two opportunities to demonstrate that they care more about the American people and our declining relationships with the rest of the world than loyalty to an insane president with autocratic ambitions. They can refuse to fund the war unless Trump abides by his constitutional responsibilities to obtain Congressional approval and they can revisit the War Powers Resolution they passed and then revoked when Trump called key Senators traitors.

If the Senate fails to do its job and impose limits on Trump’s war powers (the Supreme Court has already curtailed his authority to levy tariffs) the consequences for all Americans could be dire. As the Iran war expands and becomes more dangerous, Trump’s prospects for the midterm elections worsen. As his desperation grows, what will he do next? Declare a state of emergency and cancel the election?

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