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.