Alan Zendell, May 18, 2025

We’ve had transactional presidents before, but never like this. The President of the United States is arguably the most powerful and influential person in the world. Despite Donald Trump’s America First philosophy there’s a lot more to the American presidency than jingoism. MAGA and America First are largely disingenuous when you examine the details. Is it great for America to raise billionaires to the level of oligarchs and rigidify the lines between economic classes?

The leader of the Free World has an obligation to act responsibly, but Donald Trump has no concept of that. As a businessman, he surely understood that the larger a business entity grows the more it takes on responsibility for all the lives it affects. Startups and small businesses are driven by entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on the American Dream. But as companies succeed and grow, their priorities change. They must be cognizant and supportive of the needs of their employees and customers, even of their competitors.

Modern, civilized nations aren’t solely about fierce competition and the survival of the fittest, either. As a businessman, all Trump ever cared about was loyalty and profit, and even then, there were levels of fealty. He’s worse as president. He throws around words like peace and greatness, but the entire world realizes they can’t take anything that comes out of his mouth, literally. He’s quixotic and unpredictable, which are more about a practiced strategy than personality traits. Everything Donald Trump says and does is aimed at increasing his wealth and appeasing his monstrous ego.

According to our Constitution, governing is a partnership among co-equals. But Trump considers Congress his vassals. He manipulates legislators like a puppet master with no respect for their constitutional role. Our founders thought they were building in guardrails, but they never counted on someone like Trump.

How does attacking our finest universities and trying to control what they teach, destroying public education, placing someone who has no respect for medical research in charge of the nation’s health care, suspending habeas corpus, and treating ethics as something only for losers and sukers make America greater? How does trashing our alliances, trade agreements, and defense treaties while fawning for the support of dictators who laugh at him behind his back improve the lives of Americans – or of anyone except foreign dictators?

Today’s New York Times reported about a Heritage Foundation (the organization behind Project 2025) plan to destroy all support for Palestinians in the United States sheds light on Trump’s reaction to Palestinian demonstrations on American college campuses. Trump charged white steed to protect Jewish students against anti-Semitism, but the truth is, being anti-Palestinian is good politics in America, especially if you pretend to give a damn about Jews or Israel.

Trump couldn’t care less about either, except inasmuch as it increases his power and personal wealth. The notion that Republicans are more protective of Israel than Democrats is a myth that has plagued our politics since 1947, and Trump proved it this week. After touting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as his BFF, and continuing to supply Israel with massive amounts of weapons with no regard to how they might be used, it was clear that neither Netanyahu or Hamas was listening to anything he said. They were all just playing him.

When he realized there was no benefit in remaining engaged, Trump turned his back on Israel and Gaza with covetous eyes on the trillions of dollars looking for investments in Qatar, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, and accepted a half-billion-dollar airplane as a gift from a nation with which he was engaged in trade talks. Ignoring Israel, he unilaterally removed sanctions on Syria suggesting that he wanted to give its new leader, Ahmed Al-Sharaa, a chance to be great, the same Al-Sharaa our State Department labeled a terrorist with a ten-million-dollar bounty on his head. And while all this was going on, Netanyahu continued to pound Gaza in the midst of an alleged cease-fire.

Not coincidentally, another Trump touted BFF, Vladimir Putin, is doing the same thing in Ukraine, violating his own cease-fire by bombing civilians in Kyiv. Trump was going to end that war on day 1, remember? He went so far in sucking up to Putin that he staged a humiliating ambush on Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before a world-wide television audience. I wonder if Zelensky being Jewish had anything to do with that.

The most frightening aspect of Trump’s transactional presidency is that so far, he’s getting away with it. We hear rumblings about deep rifts among Republicans and whispered unhappiness about Trump, but there’s little evidence of anyone standing up to him. Yesterday, Utah Senator John Curtis, who replaced Mitt Romney as the only Senate Republican willing to speak out against Trump, announced that he intended to be an independent voice and push back whenever he thinks Trump is wrong. (He doesn’t like tariffs.) I’ll be waiting with baited breath.