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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An Insane President and a Cowardly Congress

Posted on July 20, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 20, 2026

It must be clear by now to everyone who isn’t being criminally enriched by Trump and his cronies that Donald Trump is an existential threat to the United States and the world. Until now, the potential nightmare scenario of the Trump administration’s legacy has been shrouded in rhetoric, opinion, and bluster. But Trump appears to be heading down a road we all feared he would take, and only bold, immediate action by Congress can avert a global catastrophe.

Trump’s very obvious mental illness is on display in his conduct of the Iran war. Only a narcissistic incompetent could have let himself be drawn into a war with no endgame by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a war Netanyahu unsuccessfully attempted to sell to Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. Those presidents rejected it because they believed their intelligence experts that its intended goals were unachievable, and that if prosecuted, it could easily spiral out of control.

Instead, the Obama administration in concert with nearly twenty other nations negotiated a deal with Iran to stop their production of enriched uranium, which if allowed to continue, would have created an untenable threat of nuclear war. That threat exists even more so today as Iran’s hardliners and Trump’s need to win at any cost are expanding the war. Not for the first time, Trump is crossing the line defining war crimes as he orders attacks on water supplies and power plants in a region where those things are necessary to the survival of millions of civilians.

Add that to his relentless pursuit of a coup that would replace our republic with a fascist oligarchy, and subjugate the rights of women and people of color, and the threat to America’s future is undeniable. The 100,000 people who booed Trump at yesterday’s World Cup final got that, and the entire world saw and heard their response on live television. Knowing Trump’s ego as we do, he had to have left Met Life stadium humiliated and enraged, more determined than ever to compromise the midterm elections, so he can retain power.

Consider this irony. When Iran’s counterstrikes against American assets in our allied countries in the Persian Gulf region killed three American service people, Trump and his equally irrational Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, treated their deaths as a call to more violent military action, as though Iran had committed an unthinkable war crime. But when Trump’s Gestapo-like police force, ICE, killed three innocent civilians on the streets of American cities, Trump referred to those deaths as just rewards for criminal acts committed by illegal aliens, despite the fact that all three were innocent victims of Trump’s push toward white supremacy.

Here’s another. The war began as the United States and Israel launched unprovoked strikes against Iran despite both nations’ security professionals’ assessments that Iran presented no immediate threat to its neighbors, and by all acounts from international inspectors, Iran was abiding by the deal it agreed to more than ten years ago. We were told the conflict would last four to six weeks, the evil Iranian regime would be overthrown by its citizens, and Iran would no longer be a threat. The reality is that as we approach the five month anniversary of the intial strikes against Iran, the war appears to be expanding beyond anyone’s control. And instead of involving three nations, it has now ensnared nine more: Lebanon, Jordan, Qatar, Oman, the UAE, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Yemen. Beyond that, the assets of several European nations in the region and the world’s energy supply are under threat.

The war in Iran has enabled Russia to increase its attacks throughout Ukraine, and only the staunch support of NATO, without America’s assistance, has enabled Ukraine to hold its own and strike back at the aggressor in its home territory. Our already seriously depleted supply of weapons is being further reduced by the current strikes in Iran, with the threat of a ground war looming. The real benefactor of Trump’s madness is China, who will come out of this in a strategically stronger position with respect to the rest of the world.

The time has come when the MAGA cowards in the Senate must act to avoid what can only be devastating harm to America’s economy and long-term security. The War Powers Resolution must be passed now to stop this war before Trump destroys everything. Serious conservatives in both houses of Congress must face up to their responsibility as their counterparts did in 1974. Trump fears he will be impeached if Democrats take over the Congress in November, but if there is any integrity left in the Republican Party, it is they who must inform Trump that his days of autocratic rule are over.

Only Trump’s own party can remove him from office, and the time has come to seriously consider that. The nation, all of us, cannot afford to wait and hope everything will work out. It won’t as long as Trump is in charge, and we’re all at risk.

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The Unraveling of Trump II

Posted on July 13, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 12, 2026

We’re watching Trump Administration II unravel before our eyes. President Donald Trump, whose principal governing philosophy is extracting personal profit and power from the chaos he is adept at creating, is slowly drowning in a different kind of chaos. Most of it is of his own making, but the difference is that this chaos was unintentional. This time, it’s the natural consequence of Trump’s incompetent decisions and planning.

It’s interesting, too, that Trump and his idol, Vladimir Putin both appear to be succumbing to their own overreach and errors in strategic planning. Both started wars they believed would be walks in the park. In 2022 when Putin massed huge armies along Ukraine’s border with Russia and Belarus, he believed Ukraine and Kyiv would fall within days. When Trump let his ego be seduced into attacking Iran, he announced, repeatedly, that the conflict would last four to six weeks and would obliterate Iran’s capability to develop a nuclear weapon.

Both seriously underestimated their enemy and largely for the same reason. They both surrounded themselves with yes people and advisors who understood disagreeing with the boss could be fatal. Shooting the messenger when you don’t like the message is a leadership style that invariably self-destructs.

Putin’s and Trump’s failures have striking things in common. Both overestimated their military’s ability to achieve their stated objectives and seriously underestimated the punishment their adversaries  were willing to absorb to preserve their sovereignty. But perhaps  the most shocking similarity was that both the Russian and American military advisors totally failed to anticipate the role of drones, which turned out to be assets both Iran and Ukraine have successfully used to hold back and in many important ways, defeat their much larger and more powerful opponents.

Drones have become the “David’s slingshots” in their war against world superpowers, and both Trump and Putin are paying a heavy price for their mistakes. Ukraine estimates that Russia has lost almost 1.5 million combatants and  more than 620,000 units of military equipment, including everything from naval ships to artillery to missiles. The American military publication Stars and Stripes, supports these estimates, and points out that Russian losses in Ukraine over four years are eight times as great as American losses in Vietnam in twice that time.

American personnel losses in the Iran War remain extremely low because to date, Trump has eschewed a ground invasion of places like Kharg Island. But both Ukrainian and Iranian drone and missile attacks have been quite effective in destroying billions of dollars worth of military infrastructure and oil refining capabilities. When the full cost of Trump’s invasion of Iran are tallied, including the dangerous dilution of American precision weaponry, the shock to our economy will be enormous, further dividing us politically, as warring American political factions compete for scarce dollars. There is no way we can re-build our military assets and maintain our social safety net without reversing the Trump tax cuts. The resulting political strife will weaken the United States’ standing as a world power and hurt millions of Americans, most of whom opposed this war from the outset.

With fifteen weeks to go before our midterm elections, the loss of Senator Lindsey Graham and the indefinite absence of Senator Mitch McConnell, combined with Trump’s alienation of four key Republican Senators has effectively taken away his Senate majority. That means he has virtually no chance of getting his voter suppression bill passed into law, and as he ramps up hostilities in Iran, with no ability to prevent the war from escalating out of control, it becomes far more likely that Congress will unite in a new war powers resolution that forces him to get approval from Congress to continue the war.

With much of the oil refining capacity in Russia and the Gulf states damaged by the two wars, any hope of gas prices coming down, even if oil prices don’t rise precipitously is also vanishing. And with China showing signs of needing to increase its oil imports, the increased demand can only have an upward impact on prices. And what’s Trump’s answer? He wants to build new coal plants and he plans to extort a fee of twenty percent of the value of every ship’s cargo for the American Navy to escort them through the Strait of Hormuz, after declaring that the Strait was an international waterway, and ships of every nation should be able to freely use it.

Given all that, Americans are asking what we got out of the war with Iran. To date, the answer is: NOTHING. A better question is how much we’ve lost, and the answer in terms of both dollars and America’s standing around the world is staggeringly. Trump knows he will be impeached if he loses his majorities in Congress. What he may not realize, is that his own party may determine that their survival depends on removing him from office, too.

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Trump is Losing His Mind

Posted on July 10, 2026 by alanpzendell

Alan Zendell, July 10, 2026

We don’t need influencers and pundits to tell us. We can see with our own eyes, hear with our ears. Everyone here and around the world can see Trump’s mental illness turning him into the kind of irrational monster who can do serious damage to everything around him. That he is Commander in Chief of the world’s most lethal military makes that far worse.

He is obsessed with power and driven by greed that has led to corruption by a president on a scale we’ve never seen before, not to mention shocking incompetence, incoherence, and a complete disregard for the needs of the American people. What little confidence I had in Congress in 2025 has sunk to frightening levels, because there are only two lawful ways to stop this maniac from destroying everything we’ve spent 250 years building, If you ever wondered how great civilizations die, we’re watching it now in excruciating slow motion.

History taught us that most great civilizations die because of rot from within. The ancient Greeks, Romans, Persians, and every other civilization that dominated its region probably thought they would last forever. I believed that about America for most of my 83 years. The first time I doubted was when things looked grim after Vietnam and Watergate. For a while, it looked like Richard Nixon’s lust for power might undo us, but when faced with the obvious reality of a president out of control and apparently going mad in the White House, we were saved because the people sworn to uphold the Constitution had enough integrity to act, no matter what the consequences.

Attorney General Elliot Richardson and Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus resigned in protest when Nixon fired Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox who was investigating the Watergate cover-up. When it became clear that Nixon had became dangerously dysfunctional, his own party prepared articles of impeachment and said he’d be convicted if he didn’t resign. Honor, integrity, and placing the good of the nation ahead of self-interest saved us in 1974.

 

When Nixon was losing his mind in the White House, General Alexander Haig was installed as his Chief of Staff to serve as a firewall between Nixon and everyone else. It was the political equivalent of creating an isolation ward to avoid the spread of a deadly disease. If Haig were in the White House today, he would immediately confiscate Trump’s computer and shut down Truth Social. The entire world is desperately searching for an off-ramp to the Iran war, but Trump keeps undermining all of them. And his imbecilic comment at the NATO summit that Russia attempting to destroy Ukraine is Europe’s problem, not ours because “we have an ocean” illustrates how dangerous he has become.

I’ve taken several intensive seminars on negotiating techniques. I never heard anyone suggest that when you’re trying desperately to get out of a war you’re losing and never should have started, that it’s a good idea to call the negotiators on the other side scum, or assert that you don’t intend to speak with them again. The only kind of off-ramp that can lead to is a wider, more dangerous war that runs the risk of becoming nuclear.

An equally inept but less impactful decision by our off-the-wall president was his decision to not sign the strongly bipartisan housing bill, which might have put a dent in voters’ anger over Trump re-igniting inflation instead of bringing prices down as he promised. The decision was nonsensical and spiteful, since the law will take effect tonight without his signature. Given Trump’s obsession with controlling the outcome of the midterm elections by any means possible, he just obliterated any chance to claim he reduced voters’ cost of living. Would a sane president do that just to express his anger at the Senate for not passing his voter suppression bill?

I and many others have been writing things like this since January 2017 when Trump was first inaugurated. But the problem we face today is that Senators like Mitch McConnell have been quietly packing federal courts with right-wing extremist judges for twenty years, and Trump has been enriching his friends and key members of Congress with crypto and insider trading tips. That kind of outright bribery combined with his threats against any sitting Congressperson who fails to obey him shows how vulnerable an open democratic republic like ours is. With money, threats, and the encouragement of neo-Nazi militia groups ready to take up arms in open rebellion if the election goes badly, it’s easy to see how a determined, relatively small minority can bring down even a nation like the United States.

Instead of Eliot Richardson, we have loyalist and sycophant Todd Blanche leading the Justice Department. And instead of Senator Barry Goldwater, who authored The Conscience of a Conservative, we have John Thune who lacks the courage and backbone to take Trump on. And those two lawful ways to rid ourselves of the Trump nightmare? Impeachment requires a convincing defeat for the MAGA Republicans in the House, and a few Republican Senators to grow a pair and remember what they were elected to do. If that fails we’d have to depend on Vice President J. D. Vance and Trump’s corrupt Cabinet to exercise the 25th Amendment.

This is a time when Americans need to shut down their Facebook and X feeds and think for themselves. Is this what you want for your children and grandchildren?

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