The Big 3Ds (or Is It Four?)

Count on one thing: in some almost unimaginable future, no American president (if we even have them anymore) is going to rename a mountain for Donald Trump as he’s recently tried to do with North America’s tallest peak. He wants Alaska’s Mount Denali (to hell with Native American names!) to be called Mount McKinley in honor of President William McKinley, the man who, in the 1890s, launched this country as an imperial power of the first order.

Of course, it’s just possible that someday someone running (or do I mean: walking, hobbling, limping?) this country might rename the Bertha Rogers Borehole, the deepest hole (now plugged and abandoned) in North America, for President Trump. After all, it should be clear enough that, with a helping hand from the world’s richest man, he’s already taking this country down in a remarkable fashion. It seems that we now inhabit an ever more strikingly 3D world and call me D (as in depressed) about it.

Once upon a time, 3D was a form of movie-making in which — I remember this from my youth in the 1950s — something could seemingly fly off the screen and grab you by the throat (or an arrow, spear, or missile could whiz right at you).

Today, 3D (at least to me) has quite a different meaning. The 3Ds of the world of my old age (and believe me they, too, can in some fashion reach right off the screen and grab you by the throat) are The Donald, Dysdopia, and Decline. And yes, I’ve admittedly done a little 3D fiddling of my own with that classic word “dystopia” meant for a deeply negative, apocalyptically horrific future world (think 1984, or do I mean 2025?) — the very opposite, in other words, of utopia. I’ve replaced its “t” with that extra “d” in “honor” (and indeed, that word does have to go in quotation marks) of Donald Trump who is already ushering us into what looks to be the most devastatingly disastrous presidency in this country’s long history.

Denier-in-Chief.

In case you don’t think he’s taking us all for one hell of a ride, think again. After all, he and his family started cashing in on his second presidency even before it began. As the New York Times reported, three days ahead of his inauguration, he announced on his social media account that his family had issued a cryptocurrency called $Trump. And if that stumps (or do I mean $trumps?) you, I’m hardly shocked. Perhaps you won’t be surprised to learn, in fact, that each of its memecoins quickly surged in value from eight cents to $75 before — of course! — dropping off a cliff. It’s now estimated that it made the Trump Organization and its partners an instant $100 million or more, while other crypto-traders lost an estimated $2 billion in the process. And if that doesn’t sum up Donald Trump’s presidency to come, I’ll be surprised.

In fact, I suspect that offered just a hint of the unnervingly dysdopian world we’ve entered. Let’s face it: we couldn’t find ourselves in a more dopily dangerous 3D moment today. After all, Donald Trump and his alter ego Elon Musk, the richest man on earth and growing richer by the hour, possibly even heading for the trillion-dollar mark, seem remarkably intent on stepping off-screen and grabbing us all by the throat, while dismantling the American government as we’ve known it. Their goal is evidently to leave both the courts and Congress, the other two parts of our tripartite form of government, in the dust (the mud?) of history.

After all, Vice President JD Vance has already made it clear that the courts — even the Supreme Court — can have no ultimate power to stop a second Trump administration from running rampant. Or, as he wrote recently in response to the first attempts of various courts to stop Donald Trump and Elon Musk from all-too-literally dismantling significant parts of the government, “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive branch’s legitimate power.” Do tell! (Of course, as Joe Biden’s presidency ended, the Supreme Court granted Trump substantial immunity from prosecution for more or less anything he had done as president and now he may decide he doesn’t even need them anymore.)

Oh, and despite those three Ds, I actually forgot the fourth and most important one of all: denier. Yes, Donald Trump, the elected president of the United States, is a climate-change denier first class and, once again, this country’s denier-in-chief. In the past, he couldn’t have been blunter on the subject. In the wake of Hurricane Helene’s devastating path across the Southeastern U.S. in 2024, he called climate change “a scam.” He’s also dismissed it as a “hoax” invented by China. Worse yet, he ran successfully for president this time around on the phrase “drill, baby, drill” and the promise of a presidency fossil-fuelized to the hilt. It mattered not at all to him and his crew that the planet was experiencing its hottest months and hottest year ever; that his first month in office, this January, once again broke all heat records; and that climate scientists are predicting far worse to come.

Now back in the White House, President Trump has already taken steps to shut off moves made by the Biden administration to put money into green energy and withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement (again), while removing mentions of anything related to climate change from government websites. He’s clearly preparing to advance coal, oil, and natural gas development in any way he can. Consider it a deep irony that the executives of the major oil and gas companies, while distinctly in his camp, aren’t eager to over-drill, baby, over-drill, fearing that the price of their products could fall. Of course, to put all of this in even grimmer perspective, in the Biden years this country was already the historically top producer of oil and exporter of natural gas on this planet. In short, President Trump’s goal, it seems, is simply to turn up the heat even further. (Phew, I’m getting hot just writing this!)

In other words, in more or less every way imaginable, as the oldest president ever to enter the Oval Office, his next four years, fossil-fuelized to the hilt, seem all too intent on taking the planet down with him.

President Decline.

Think of him as President 3D, or if you prefer 4D, or simply add in the Ds of your choice — disaster, dreaded, dumb, or [fill in the blank here].

Once upon a time, decline (even the decline of great nations) usually proved to be a long, slow process. There were admittedly moments — when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, for instance, leaving the U.S. as the “sole superpower” on Planet Earth — when it happened more quickly, but they were rare.

Thanks to Donald Trump, however, it’s possible that the decline of that once-upon-a-time sole superpower could, in this moment, prove uncomfortably closer to the Soviet model than, for instance, to the fading of the British empire. The Big Triple (Quadruple?) D and his buddy, the richest man on Planet Earth, seem remarkably intent on taking us all over a cliff with them.

Admittedly, this country has been on its own trajectory of decline from its status as the planet’s sole superpower for quite a while now. Otherwise, the man once best known for being the host of a TV show, The Apprentice, and for the line “You’re fired!” (as well as for having overseen six companies that went bankrupt — You’re fired!), would never have won in 2016; nor would he be having such an instant blastfiring people and closing down or simply shattering government departments the second time around. And again, it would have been inconceivable for Donald Trump to be elected president again if the American imperial world weren’t already declining at home and abroad.

All he’s really doing now is hurrying along the pace, as he (with a helping hand from the most prominent once-illegal immigrant on Earth) tries to wipe out so much, from the U.S. Agency for International Development to the Education Department. And — count on it — this country’s courts aren’t likely to be able to stop him in the end. Why, only the other day, Vice President JD Vance insisted that “if a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” and obviously the same is true for the president. And in just that spirit, the Trump administration is already beginning to ignore or openly defy court orders on how to deal with parts of the government.

In the end, in his own fashion, Donald Trump may be in the process of closing down this country (at least as we once knew it) and lending a hand to doing the very same thing for Planet Earth (at least as we once knew it). Just what the results of all this will be, we obviously don’t yet know. Count on one thing, though: it ain’t going to be pretty and not just because, with his latest 25% tariffs on aluminum and steel, the costs of products that use either of them (and probably so much else) are going to risegrimly.

No question, though, that decline preceded him into office or, best guess, he never would have been elected in the first (no less second) place. After all, this country was already losing some of its stature globally long before The Donald decided to shut down most aid to the world, while doing his damnedest (with the 13 billionaires he’s appointed to his administration) to ensure that the already wildly wealthy will, in the future, leave the rest of America in a ditch.

And yes, he’s certainly going to be President Decline, Baby, Decline. Don’t, for a second, be fooled by his very open urge, in a strikingly McKinleyesque fashion, “to expand our territory” — to grab, that is, or at least dream about grabbing yet more territory for imperial America, ranging from Greenland and the Panama Canal to that 51st state Canada, and, of course, Gaza. The urge to return to a nineteenth-century version of imperialism, even as he does his best (or worst?) to take this country and this planet down, is striking, to say the least. Especially as, in the wake of the McKinley moment, the American version of imperialism normally involved a far more subtle kind of control over significant parts of this planet, rather than the Trumpian urge to simply grab what you can, bit by bit, island by island, country by country.

Of course, on a planet that itself is beginning to come apart at the seams, such a president, a man focused on himself above all else, is no small disaster. Four more years of Donald Trump should worry anyone, whether your fears have to do with the dismantling of this country or the taking down of our world. In fact, think of Donald Trump’s America as the planetary equivalent of a memecoin. While he and his family may win something significant, don’t count on that for the rest of us, including the 49.7% of American voters in the last election who bought into his scheme.

The Big D — whether you want to think of it as Decline, Dysdopia, Denial, or simply Donald — is now ours for four long, long years.  And that couldn’t be sadder.

Copyright 2025 Tom Engelhardt

First Published on TomDispatch.com.

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