We’ve become a failed nation-state in 150 days

Donald Trump made his personal transformation of the White House nearly complete Wednesday morning.

He already announced his intentions to add a ballroom — “the biggest and best ever” — to the East Wing and has begun paving over the lawn of Jackie Kennedy’s iconic Rose Garden. (“It’ll be like nothing anyone has ever seen before,” he promised.) Now he’s installed two giant flagpoles, one on the North Lawn and the other on the South Lawn.

The two flagpoles, he posted on Truth Social, are “tall, tapered, rust proof” and of the “highest quality.” On Wednesday he said they were “beautiful poles” and “the best poles anywhere. . . in the world actually.” A few reporters, members of Congress and even some White House staff made the obvious snarky comments about “over-compensating” and “wishful thinking.” But the observation offered by a few who said that, with the oversized flags, Trump had turned the White House into a “used car lot” seems most accurate.

At this point, your honors, the prosecution humbly suggests we are a failed nation-state — not because of the erection of the flagpoles, but because of everything Trump, the courts, Congress and the press have done during the last 150 days of the new Trump regime. (A reminder that we still have just over 1300 days left.) 

Iran is the latest debacle. That nation-state has been a thorn in the side of the United States since 1953, when the CIA toppled a democracy to install the Shah. During the Obama era, it looked like things might finally take a turn for the better after the former president’s negotiating team worked out a deal in 2015 that promised to keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Trump canceled the deal during his first term, and since his inauguration in January, he has been trying to put nearly the exact same deal back into place. He says Iran “can’t have a nuclear weapon. It’s unacceptable.” 

Yeah. That’s why Obama negotiated a deal that kept it from doing so.

With little incentive to restrain itself after Trump blew up the 2015 deal, Iran proceeded to enrich uranium. Israel got nervous and, over the weekend, despite the Trump administration’s ongoing negotiations with Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu launched missiles at the Islamic Republic. That caused the whole world to get nervous. Trump blamed Iran and defended Israel’s right to exist, bowing out of the G7 Summit in Canada on Tuesday so he could return to D.C. and ostensibly deal with the “growing crisis,” that is mostly his fault.

Aboard Air Force One, he gaggled with reporters and would not confirm what he would do about Iran. Instead, he posted “Unconditional Surrender” on Truth Social, without any explanation of what that meant, leading some wags in Washington to hope he had just resigned.

But that wasn’t the case, and he instead blasted Iran, saying he could kill that country’s “Supreme Leader” anytime he wanted. “We are not going to take him out (kill!) at least not for now.” He also claimed credit for Israel’s prowess, posting that “we now have complete and total control” of the skies over Iran because of “American made, conceived, and manufactured ‘stuff.’” But other than that wonderful bit of negotiation on social media, his early return to Washington led to little or no results by midweek. That led to speculation by press and staffers that he simply got bored at the G7 and used the Iranian crisis as an excuse to come home.

As the flagpoles went up on the White House campus on Wednesday, Trump said he had a hand on things and teased that America might join Israel in striking Iran. “You don’t know that I’m going to even do it. I may do it. I may not do it. I mean, nobody knows what I’m going to do.”

I think he said the quiet part out loud again. He has no idea what he’s going to do. As he admired his flagpoles, he admitted that he wouldn’t know what he would do until “a second before the deadline.”

Whatever that means.

Trump again blamed Iran. “Why didn’t you negotiate with me two weeks ago? You could have done fine.” 

If you’re living in Iran you might not think so – especially after Trump sabotaged the last deal the U.S. government put into place. But logic has little place in Trump’s world.

All of this is evidence of why the U.S. is a failed nation-state. The chief executive officer is a convicted felon, 34 times over, and has been held liable in civil court for sexual abuse and defamation. He has issued executive orders that eliminate due process. He has ignored the Posse Comitatus Act and has considered invoking the Insurrection Act. He has deployed the military as police against American citizens. He is systematically purging from the federal government anyone perceived to be disloyal to him. He has hired clearly and provocatively unqualified people for some of the most important jobs in the administration. He has vowed recrimination against his “political enemies” and calls the press “the enemy of the people.” He won’t allow anyone to hold an opinion contrary to his own and lies so often that scores of fact-checkers owe their livelihood to researching his continuous, mind-bending deceptions. His foreign policy is a hot mess. He and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller screamed that “No Kings” protesters across the country were insurrectionists while he commuted the sentences of, or gave pardons to, 1500 people who engaged in insurrection on Jan. 6. because they supported him.

His administration has threatened, harassed and arrested Democratic lawmakers, including a U.S. senator, and a New York Comptroller. 

Trump is a symptom of the problem and also a catalyst. The most telling piece of recent evidence of our failed nation-state status occurred Saturday, when two Minnesota Democratic state lawmakers and their spouses were horrifically targeted and shot in their homes. Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, were victims of what U.S. Attorney Joseph H. Thompson called “a political assassination” and “a chilling attack on our democracy.” 

The MAGA crowd showed no empathy for the victims. A little more than 24 hours after Hortman was assassinated, Utah Republican Sen. Mike Lee mocked the attack in a pair of social media posts. “This is what happens when Marxists don’t get their way,” Lee wrote on his personal X account. An hour later, in a post that  showed a picture of the suspect, Lee wrote: “Nightmare on Waltz Street,” referencing Tim Walz, Minnesota’s Democratic governor.

Trump upped the ante. In the same gaggle on Air Force One where he rambled incoherently about Iran and Israel, Trump also insulted Walz. The governor is “slick” and “whacked out.” “I’m not calling him,” Trump said. A courtesy call would be a “waste of time.”

These divisive and deplorable actions by Trump have created imitators in both parties. While Sen. Lee’s comments were disgusting, so too were the recent actions in New York City by Mayor Eric Adams. He banned a New York Daily News reporter from his weekly news conferences after calling the reporter “disruptive” and “disrespectful” for shouting questions without being called on first. Trump tried the same thing with me in the White House. Spoiler alert: He lost three times in court trying to make that stick.

Further evidence of our failure includes the entire Democratic party which continues to eat its own. The Democrats are plagued by Democratic National Committee Chairman Ken Martin, who couldn’t manage a 26-year-old activist — David Hogg — nor apparently anyone else in the DNC. Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, and Lee Saunders, the president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, recently declined offers to stay on as at-large members. Weingarten cited disagreements with Martin. Part of the Democratic party wants to hire consultants to find out what America wants, while another part wants to force its progressive agenda down the throats of a country that leans more centrist-right. How pathetic can the opposition be if it cannot defeat a party led by an autocrat allowing oligarchs to dismantle a democracy so the rich get richer and the poor will “die” anyway, according to Iowa GOP Sen. Joni Ernst. 

Welcome back to chaos in a blender, the daily Donald Trump show that features endless madness, freaks, creeps, bumblers, tumblers, several royal curses and at least one trojan horse. And a really funny thing happened on the way to the forum; we don’t know if there’s a happy ending of course. But as Trump often tweets, “Stay tuned.” He is bound to get his. He’s now selling gold cellphones. Just imagine if Barack Obama or Joe Biden had done so.

And there you have it. One could mention how Congress has failed to provide checks and balances, but that once reputable branch of government is so ineffective as to be inconsequential in the telling of the tale. The judiciary is only marginally better, with even odds that anything positive done by a lower court will be reversed by Trump’s Supreme Court.

Meanwhile, the Fourth Estate has failed spectacularly, with reporters fired, lawsuits settled and apologies made that should never have been made. Rare is it these days that Trump is even asked a decent question. 

If the United States before, during or immediately after World War II, had been presented with the fact of any nation-state behaving the way the U.S. has in the last 150 days under Donald Trump, the president, supported by Congress, would have taken action.

Now, the eye rolling, interruptions and damning with faint praise the G7 leaders gave Donald Trump is about the only indication of how little this country is respected internationally.

But it was a federal judge appointed by Ronald Reagan who nailed it when he blocked hundreds of  cuts Trump had initiated for NIH grants. “I’ve never seen a record where racial discrimination was so palpable. I’ve sat on this bench now for 40 years. I’ve never seen government racial discrimination like this,” said U.S. District Judge William Young of Massachusetts. “You are bearing down on people of color because of their color. The Constitution will not permit that…Have we fallen so low? Have we no shame?” 

Apparently not.