Alan Zendell, September 23, 2026

If you didn’t believe Donald Trump has brought America to the brink of an existential crisis before yesterday, you should now. His speech to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday could have been written by Vladimir Putin, Adolf Hitler, or Attila, King of the Huns. Addressing the leaders of 191other nations, Trump went far beyond his well-known disdain for the U. N. as ineffectual and unfit to deal with the world’s problems. He openly and shamelessly advocated tearing up the U. N. Charter, which was largely written by the United States in 1945, in the same manner that he has been attempting to undermine the United States Constitution.

In the eyes of the rest of the world Trump is singlehandedly transforming the United States from the shining beacon of hope we grew up believing in to the pariah of the world. If nothing else, he embarrassed himself and all Americans, unapologetically posturing himself as a belligerent dictator who intends to claim all of the western hemisphere as his own territory, echoing Putin’s philosophy that Russia, China, and the United States are the only real powers in the world, and that they have right to dominate their spheres of influence.

He spoke in complete disregard of international law and the basic tenet of the United Nations’ main purposes, to avoid future wars, respect the sovereignty of all nations and of all people regardless of race or nationality. His words were as despicable as he has shown himself to be. He asserted his right to decide whether Iran and its 94 million people should be obliterated if they don’t reach a deal he finds acceptable. He bragged about kidnapping and overthrowing Venezuela’s president Nicolas Maduro and his efforts to break the government of Cuba. He bragged further about stealing Venezuela’s oil, from which he and his friends will derive huge profits.

Trump has already turned much of the United States government into a kleptocracy, ignoring ethics laws, disregarding human rights, and using the full force of the United States government to profiteer and enrich himself, his family, and his wealthy supporters by hundreds of billions of dollars. And he has ripped the veil off what can only be decsribed as an overall policy of White Male Supremacy, both domestically and throughout the world.

Here at home, he has left no stone unturned in his attempts to control our elections, instigating a war of extreme gerrymandering and unsuccessfully attempting to restrict mail-in voting and suppress the votes of elements of our population that he dislikes. But polls released this morning show that American voters get all that. His overall approval rating among voters is down to an all-time low of 33% with disapproval of his handling of elections, the economy, the wars in Iran, Gaza, and Ukraine, and his foreign policy in general in the lows twenties.

It was no easy feat to become as despised and unpopular as he has made himself among his own people and among all but a handful of national leaders; that may be the single most impressive achievement of his administration. And despite his attempts to rig the midterm elections in his favor, he is facing what could be the most humiliating political disaster faced by an American president since the Civil War.

The redistricting fight he started in Texas and Florida illustrates both his desperation to retain power and his incompetent political analysis. Both were based on his belief that Hispanic voters loved him. Whether or not that was momentarily true in 2024 however, his disgusting anti-Hispanic rhetoric and his using ICE as an unrestricted attack dog against anyone with a brown complexion has changed all that. I expect Republicans to lose most of the seats they think they gained through gerrymandering.

The aspect of all this that I still cannot understand is that despite Trump’s negative image both in the United States and in allied countries, he has still been able to intimidate his former supporters into not speaking out against him. Even as the midterms approach, the only Republicans who are willing to call him out are those who believe they are certain to lose their seats if they don’t. The once proud Conservative GOP has become a collective kennel of craven lapdogs, and we see the same thing happening at the United Nations. Our allies among the attending nations may actually despise Trump more than we do, but not a single one has spoken up criticizing him by name.

Trump has whined that if the Democrats take over Congress, they’ll impeach him. I hope they do as their first agenda item in the next Congress, but removing him from office isn’t quite that easy. It requires sixty-seven votes in the Senate to convict him of high crimes and misdemeanors. Most Senators do not cling to Trump’s coattails the way House Speaker Mike Johnson does. The only thing that might prevent his removal from office is the prospect that a Vance administration populated by the same sycophants Trump appointed might be even worse.