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A new fundraising email to his MAGA faithful has exposed President Donald Trump, according to a new breakdown from The i Paper, revealing how much he is "panicking" about their support.

Writing for the outlet on Sunday, veteran D.C. correspondent Simon Marks argued that Trump "knows he is in trouble" as the midterms creep closer, citing "one of his final fundraising pitches to supporters," which featured "a picture of the MAGA leader boarding a train and waving goodbye from a railway station’s platform."

"In just 1 week, we might have to say goodbye to each other forever,” the email pleaded. “Do not make me say goodbye... [On] day 1, Democrats will file the Articles of Impeachment against me for the THIRD TIME. But this time they will have the votes – the votes to lock me out of the White House and throw away the key.”

As Marks argued further, however, "nothing in that fundraising plea is true," noting, first and foremost, that Democrats largely remain "skittish" about the prospect of going after Trump with another impeachment effort, due to the two-thirds vote that would be needed in the Senate to actually remove him from office.

"Not even the most optimistic of Democratic strategists believes that the party will come close to that kind of landslide electoral outcome on 3 November – election day," Marks explained.

He added later: "There is no evidence that Trump writes any of these emails himself. But they reflect a last-ditch Republican effort to get out the vote in the midterms by intimating that his presidency might end if Trump’s loyal grassroots supporters sit on their hands and stay home. It also comes after recent campaign appearances by the President for Republican candidates in traditionally red states including Texas, Kansas and Ohio, an acknowledgement of serious fears that they could be ousted even in these Republican strongholds."

Another similar email recently warned Trump supporters that a Democratic Congress would "reverse everything I’ve done to Make America Great Again over the past two years," another dubious claim that falls apart in the face of reality.

"In reality, the Democrats would be constrained in power, even if they win majorities in both houses of Congress," Marks added. "Trump, as President, will retain veto powers over any legislation they send to his desk, and it is highly unlikely that enough Republicans in the House and Senate would turn against him to provide the two-thirds majority needed in both chambers to override their use."

He concluded later: "The President himself is already offering a preview of what his presidency might look like after the votes are counted next month. His threat to launch intensive fresh air strikes on Iran could be the first chapter of his post-midterm presidency, and an indicator of his determination more broadly to go for broke. Unless, of course, his fundraising email is trying to tell us all something, and he really does have a train ticket to convey him out of Washington in his breast pocket."

President Donald Trump could continue to "push the envelope" so much that even Republicans become sick of him enough to back impeachment, according to one of his former first-term aides.

Anthony Scaramucci famously served as White House Communications Director during Trump's first term in the White House and was fired after a week and a half on the job, after comments critical of his colleagues emerged. Since then, he has become a vocal critic of his former boss, making countless media appearances to offer his unique perspective on the Trump political machine.

On Sunday, he was a guest on the latest edition of The Daily Beast Podcast, where he predicted to host Joanna Coles that, after the seemingly inevitable midterm blue wave, the numbers in the House and Senate could end up in the right place to actually remove Trump from office via impeachment. He also argued that Trump himself is making this possibility even more likely as his unhinged actions continue to make life miserable for elected Republicans.

A third impeachment of Trump has seemed inevitable, given his almost unending list of offenses and the virtual certainty that Democrats will retake the House of Representatives in the midterms. Given that a two-thirds majority is needed in the Senate to actually convict and remove an impeached president, that prospect has largely been dismissed as impossible despite the increasing odds that Democrats will win that chamber as well.

Scaramucci, however, thinks that possibility remains a live one. He made the argument after also suggesting that a proposed trilateral meeting between Trump and the leaders of Russia and China would mark the ultimate death of the Republican Party.

"And so Trump should be very careful with that, because, you know... probably he's going to push the envelope where he may be asked to leave the presidency," Scaramucci said. "So, you know, people say, 'Oh, that's crazy.' Not crazy, because the Democrats are going to take the House. Let's say they split and they go fifty-fifty [in the Senate]. You need 17 Republicans that have had enough of him. And you're a good journalist. They hate his guts. Michael Wolff knows that, okay, I listen to you guys."

He added: "You know, they hate his guts — [and] he hates them, by the way. And they hate him. And so, you know, keep pushing and keep doing this sort of nonsense that they all hate."

Scaramucci gave the example of Trump shutting down the bipartisan sanctions against Russia, passed in honor of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, as a prime example of the sort of behavior likely to turn Republicans against him.

"Lindsey Graham puts out the sanctions, he dies unceremoniously and tragically, and they vote 86-to-whatever, bipartisan commitment on the sanctions," Scaramucci explained. "Trump revokes the sanctions. So okay, keep doing that and you're going to get a you're going to get cross-traffic to the Democrats who, say, 'Impeach him in the House, I'll pull up 17 votes and we'll knock him out of the presidency.' And by the way, people can say, oh, that will never happen. That is on the table, ladies and gentlemen; that is on the table. That's how much these people hate him."

President Donald Trump currently finds that "he is as isolated and as out of it as ever," according to longtime political advocate Robert Reich, who cited "two moles" within the White House telling him what they are seeing, who also warned that "he's going to explode."

Reich — who previously served as secretary of labor under Bill Clinton and has since emerged as a vocal liberal activist and advocate for income equality — made the claim during his latest "Coffee Klatch" podcast with his co-host and former student, Heather Lofthouse, during a conversation about the grim outlook for Trump and the Republicans in the midterms.

Reich argued that voters were beginning to turn on Republicans in a big way as they realized that the chaos and corruption of Trump's second term was having a direct material impact on them, making their quality of life worse. Lofthouse added that the MAGA movement was overcome by "hubris" after Trump's reelection with their claims of a "mandate" from voters, comparing it to a balloon that is now sagging as the air is let out gradually.

All of that despair and negativity, Reich claimed, was reflected in Trump's private demeanor, based on information he was given by sources supposedly in the White House.

"I still have my sources in Washington and I still have a couple of moles in the White House," Reich said. "And these two moles in the White House — I'm not going to give you their names... Donald Trump, you try to get their names out of me, well, you just forget it, you can torture me, I'm not going to give you the names — but here's what I'm hearing. My moles in the White House are telling me that Trump, he is as isolated and as out of it as ever; he's also losing it in the way we all know and we see that he is losing it."

He continued: "But he is steaming... He does begin to understand — he goes out, and the crowds are not as big as they used to be, there are a lot of empty seats — that he knows that he's losing. He hears the pollsters and he knows that he's unpopular and he feels that somehow the Democrats are maybe going to have a blue tsunami. I mean, he is going to, my moles tell me, he's going to explode. He's on the verge of exploding, and they are a little bit anxious in the White House. They don't know quite how he's going to explode."

President Donald Trump's Attorney General attempted to defend the administration's latest bombshell election lawsuit, prompting a thorough roasting from observers across social media, with one prominent New York Times columnist calling his argument "total gobbledygook."

The Justice Department this week filed a lawsuit asking a federal court to block the certification of Alaska's Senate race if incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan loses by a small enough margin. The agency alleged that too much confusion was being created by the presence of another third-party candidate also named Dan Sullivan on the ballot, despite the fact that the state's Supreme Court allowed the situation to play out months ago.

Critics warned that this was an effort to meddle with the lawful results of the race, where polls show Democratic nominee Mary Peltola poised to flip that seat, despite Alaska's red state reputation.

Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared on CBS News Sunday, where he was pressed to defend the DOJ's Alaska suit. He argued that the agency is "asking the court to step in where the Alaska Supreme Court didn't, which is to look at federal law and, if necessary, to allow a process for Alaska to decide who should be certified as the winner," despite the fact that elections themselves are what decided who gets certified.

Blanche's excuse was met with more scrutiny from critics, with liberal NYT columnist Jamelle Bouie arguing on BlueSky that his explanation was complete nonsense and further exposed the Trump administration's midterm desperation.

"This is total gobbledygook? The process to decide who should be certified as the winner is the election, and there is no federal law that says the courts get to decide who that is," Bouie posted. "This interview is a real sign that they are just throwing s—— and desperately hoping that it sticks."

Bouie also later responded to a clip from Blanche's Sunday appearance on CNN, where host Dana Bash asked what the crime is that they are targeting in Alaska. Blanche argued only that there could potentially be a crime, and that Alaskans being confused was the main issue, to which Bash stressed that the state Supreme Court had already litigated the issue.

"You know, I think this guy might be bad at the law," Bouie added.

Former Republican media consultant Matthew Scheffield responded to Bouie's thread, adding: "It's even dumber since ranked choice voting, which Trump says is a scam even though it led to him winning in Alaska 3 times, eliminates any confusion over Dan Sullivans since you can just rank the other one second. This rhetoric is not supposed to make sense. It's supposed to create confusion."

Bradley P. Moss, a lawyer based in Washington, D.C., also responded to a clip of Blanche's argument on CNN, saying that it reveals how much "They have nothing" to work with when it comes to meddling with the midterms.

President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, despite frequently being at odds with each other over prosecuting the war in Iran, are nevertheless far closer to one another politically than they are apart. Perhaps for that reason, Netanyahu is now calling on Trump to help him in his ongoing reelection campaign — a sign that insiders say points to "desperation" from the key politician.

"Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — fighting for political survival in Tuesday's elections — has pleaded with President Trump in recent days to show more public support for his campaign, according to a U.S. source with knowledge and an Israeli source briefed on the matter," reported Axios' Barak Ravid on Sunday. He argued that Netanyahu's requests to the Trump administration are perceived in Washington as a "sign of desperation" and indicating that Netanyahu fears he is behind his main opponent, Gadi Eisenkot.

"Neta Molcho, a spokesperson for Netanyahu's Likud party, denied the prime minister asked Trump to support his campaign 'in recent days or before his endorsement statement,'" Ravid wrote. "The White House did not respond to a request for comment. Trump said in an interview with Newsmax two weeks ago that people in Israel asked him to get involved in support of Netanyahu."

"After weeks of hesitation, Trump endorsed Netanyahu last Sunday," Ravid reported. "He went so far as to suggest his defeat would have consequences for U.S.-Israel relations."

He added, "Trump has never worked with an Israeli prime minister other than Netanyahu, and doesn't personally know any of the other candidates. The two have forged a close but often turbulent relationship. All three projected just 50 seats for Netanyahu's bloc in the 120-member Knesset — 17 fewer than his current coalition holds. His Likud party, which currently holds 32 seats, was projected to win just 20."

Writing for AlterNet earlier in October, Terry H. Schwadron, retired as senior editor at The New York Times, broke down exactly why it is significant that Netanyahu is reportedly beseeching Trump for a political bailout.

"For Donald Trump to endorse Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for reelection to a seventh term exacted no price, resurfaced personal loyalty over the issues at hand, and likely will prove to have little outcome on an already close election on Oct. 27," Schwadron wrote. "To have done so with as much enthusiasm as Trump mustered is of note, however, a signal as much for U.S. voters as for any Israelis harboring misgivings about returning Netanyahu, even as a coalition government leader, to office."

He added, "It is Trump’s signal of aggressiveness against Iran, against Muslim restiveness and for the perpetuation of authoritative government figures who simply should be rewarded for telling others what to do."

Arguing that he had "never seen a viler" attack ad in political history than the one that blew up this week, a prominent conservative New York Times columnist thrashed President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement for continuing to prove they have no rock bottom to hit when it comes to ethics and morality.

David French is a columnist for the Times who previously worked as a staff writer for the conservative National Review, as well as a former attorney. He has been critical of Trump since his entry into politics during the 2016 presidential race, and continues to express revulsion at the moral depravity that his MAGA movement is capable of, as he explained in his latest column on Sunday, ripping into Ohio GOP gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy widely denounced attack ad against his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton.

As French wrote, the ad, which featured Acton's estranged mother calling her a liar, exploited the "evil" family history that Acton managed to escape, with Ramaswamy making the betrayal of a parent towards their child all the worse by using it to score political points.

All the while, French argued, the sordid incident showed the moral rot at the center of the MAGA movement.

"Long ago we learned that there is no bottom for MAGA, and there is still no bottom to this scandal. If Ramaswamy had a molecule of decency, he would take the ad down and apologize. Instead, he attacked Acton," French wrote.

He later noted how Trump praised the ad, commending Acton's mother for her "courage," while Vice President JD Vance called it "adacious."

"This perversion of the concept of courage is central to the MAGA ethos," French argued. "In MAGA’s account of history, the Republican Party before Trump was a collection of cowards and quislings — people who knew the right thing to do but refused to do so because they were desperate for the approval of progressives."

He added: "That’s the origin of the famous (in conservative circles) 'D.C. cocktail party' smear — the idea that conservative convictions crumble the instant that conservatives get access to elite institutions or the moment that they get the first taste of elite approval. I’ve faced this accusation for more than a decade, ever since I said I could never support Donald Trump as the Republican nominee. In other words, there are no genuine arguments about policy or morality, there are only two kinds of people: the strong and the weak..."

French explained further that, to many MAGA Republicans, merely being attacked and despised by the political left is a sign of righteousness, an idea that also has roots in the persecution complex ingrained in evangelical teachings.

"Given enough time, every institution takes on the character of its leader," he concluded. "Trump is a cruel man, he leads a cruel movement and only the total defeat of both can free the nation from their malign control."

President Donald Trump has betrayed, or "left out in the cold," a group of key workers that he once encouraged to trust him.

"The new, chillier approach includes a nearly six-month-long delay in a congressionally mandated pay hike for the nation’s 15,000 air traffic controllers, which the Federal Aviation Administration granted only recently while demanding concessions on work hours," reported Politico's Oriana Pawlyk on Sunday. "Meanwhile, the Transportation Security Administration has provoked a union grievance by requiring its document checkers at airport checkpoints to stand throughout their shifts."

Pawlyk continued, "At the same time, Congress has spun its wheels on efforts to ensure that controllers and TSA workers get paid during future shutdowns, despite pleas from unions and the industry."

Daniel Horowitz, legislative director of the American Federation of Government Employees, told Pawlyk that "when there were shutdowns, these workers were hailed as heroes, and when they’re being paid again their modest wages, their needs and interests seem to be forgotten."

Airlines for America Christopher Sununu, meanwhile, told Pawlyk that he believes matters can be worked out, "given how difficult the legislative environment is — most things just die on the idea stage — It does seem to resonate with folks, and I think we can find a path for at least one of these things to kind of come to fruition.”

Sununu also told the Politico reporter that "even with lawmakers out of Washington and on the campaign trail for the midterms, lobbying efforts have not slowed, he said. A4A and its umbrella group, the Modern Skies Coalition, are engaging with lawmakers 'every day' to stress the importance of the effort and push for results, he said."

As Sununu explained, “I think folks understand that shutdowns erode confidence in government, and both sides of the aisle need to — especially post-election — hopefully move something forward."

Trump's Department of Transportation has faced a number of controversies. Earlier in October, Trump's deregulatory policies spanned to allowing airlines not to reimburse customers for a number of offenses, including cybersecurity attacks, medical emergencies not caused by the airline, the removal of unruly passengers, a baggage or cargo delay not caused by the airline's own bag system, government shutdowns, airport closures due to natural events like ash or wind or wind shear, aircraft cleaning needed after the death of a passenger, aircraft damage caused by extreme weather or foreign object debris or sabotage, overheated brakes that cause emergency procedures and unscheduled maintenance.

President Donald Trump's former press secretary, Katie Zacharia, left the administration in disgrace earlier this month after she was accused of falsifying her law background and bellyflopping her first press conference. Yet as Zacharia wishes for the world to clearly know, she is still very fond of the president who so unceremoniously gave her the boot.

Katie Zacharia is showing not-so-subtle hints that she is still fully on board with President Donald Trump even after she was forced out of the White House," reported The Daily Beast's Annabella Rosciglione on Sunday. "Zacharia, who lasted just five days in her role as Trump’s White House press secretary, responded to a news story asserting that she was still “ruthlessly loyal” to the president with one affirmation."

As Roscioglione reported, Zacharia responded to the tweet by reposting it with one word, "Facts."

"She has previously shown she has no ill feelings toward the man who fired her, as she Trump as 'kind, wonderful, gracious, thoughtful, enthusiastic, and the most hardworking man' on social media, just hours after she got the boot," Rosciglione added. The Daily Beast reporter later added, "Two disastrous interviews on Fox News in the following days also didn’t help her case, as anchor Sean Hannity pressed her hard about her credentials and her first performance on the job. And her follow-up interview the next morning with the Fox & Friends crew didn’t go over much better either."

Indeed, after her two Fox News appearances, Trump reportedly told Zacharia regarding her holding the press secretary job, “Honestly, if I were you, I’d reconsider."

Dr. John Paul Garrison, a clinical and forensic psychologist with a specialty in reading body language, argued in October that Trump began to sour on Zacharia when he first heard her claim she interned for her law degree in China.

"That double take right there was the moment," Garrison said. "President Trump doesn't like surprises, and he doesn't like being embarrassed. And when she just said that, when they asked when she passed the bar, when she said it was when she went to China, that was it."

He later said that her smiling was obviously fake, as she herself claimed.

"It's a very effective tool to hide how you actually feel because doing this and keeping the corners of your mouth up, not that hard to do," Garrison said. "Now, obviously, there's no wrinkles next to her eyes, which is exactly how you'd see when somebody is actually feeling good or feeling happy. But you can see that her strategy, in order to give a specific impression for impression management, is to just maintain a smile whenever you're uncomfortable."

He added, "The first day for every White House press secretary doesn't have to go incredibly well, but the disaster that we saw with Katie Zachariah made it very clear that this was not going to last long. Once the question started coming up about whether or not she was actually an attorney, because she had apparently used that word through tweets and so on and so forth, it seemed like it was really only a matter of time."

The executive-dominated political landscape in which President Donald Trump has reigned in the White House is a far cry from how the Founding Fathers envisioned the U.S. running, and according to a new breakdown from The i Paper, he will soon face a harsh lesson about who is really supposed to run the country.

On Sunday, veteran D.C. correspondent Nick Bryant published a new piece explaining how warped the structure of the U.S. government has become, culminating in Trump's ruthless second-term power grabs.

"This is not how the Founding Fathers intended the power dynamics of Washington to work," Bryant wrote. "Knowing George Washington would be the first incumbent, they granted the president significant authority – greater prerogatives, paradoxically, than those wielded by King George III in Britain. Congress, however, was supposed to be the dominant branch of government. The drafters of the US Constitution gave lawmakers on Capitol Hill the power of the purse, the authority to raise taxes, to advise and consent on international treaties, to approve presidential nominees, to conduct investigations, to impeach and remove a president and even to decide the outcome of a disputed presidential election."

He added: "The power ranking was clear. Congress would be first, the presidency would be second and the Supreme Court a distant third. Now, we have witnessed an upending. The executive is the most powerful branch. The Supreme Court, with its present six-to-three conservative majority, is second. Congress trails a distant third."

Bryant noted that the U.S. being engaged in a near-constant state of military conflict since 9/11 has made the concentration of power with the president even worse. The overwhelming obstructionism of Republicans during Barack Obama's presidency also worsened things, pushing him to exercise greater executive authority in order to get anything done at all.

Trump, though, has been the worst offender by a mile, engaging in wars, approving destructive new building projects and upending decades of federal policy on a whim, all without any attempt to get congressional approval.

Now, however, with Democrats poised to retake the House, and even possibly the Senate, in the midterms, Trump could soon face a tough lesson in the real power structures in Washington.

"All this could change, of course, if the Democrats win back the control of the House of Representatives, which seems likely, and the Senate, which now seems possible," Bryant wrote. "They would use the subpoena powers of Congress to investigate alleged corruption in the Trump administration. They could block new Trump Cabinet appointees, and haul existing administration officials more regularly before congressional committees. With a majority in the House, they could even impeach Trump for a third time, although the chances of removing him from office at the conclusion of a Senate trial, where Senators serve as jurors, is next to impossible. That needs a two-thirds majority vote, and would require Republicans to turn on the President."

He concluded: "Democrats are not only battling for control of Congress. Something larger is at stake. They are fighting to reassert this embattled institution’s constitutional relevance."

President Donald Trump and his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, are increasingly at odds, a fact brought to light by the disastrous response to the late hiring of his now-former White House press secretary, Katie Zacharia.

"The first hint of trouble came after Trump hired the disastrous Zacharia as his press secretary to replace Karoline Leavitt," reported The Independent's Alex Hannaford on Sunday. "This was apparently against Wiles’s wishes and seen by many insiders as Trump deliberately undermining his chief of staff’s decision-making. In the end, Zacharia lasted just five days as White House press secretary, making her the shortest-serving person in the role’s history. While Wiles seems vindicated, the unilateral decision by the president reveals a much bigger power struggle playing out at the heart of the West Wing."

He added, "As a midterm blowout for the Republicans beckons, the mood is turning darker by the day, with everyone jostling for position in terms of what comes next and “finger-pointing” already happening, according to officials’ comments seen by CNN. Trump’s reported disapproval with Susie Wiles can be traced back to his open displeasure over business dealings involving her daughter Katie and other members of Wiles’s inner circle with a far-right, pro-Russian government in the Balkans."

Hannaford then talked with a journalist who has dug deep into the stories involving Trump's relationship with Wiles.

"It is a story that journalist Chris Whipple, who wrote the explosive Vanity Fair article on Trump’s inner circle in December, has been following closely," Whipple told Hannaford. "His story, Susie Wiles, JD Vance, and the 'Junkyard Dogs,' was the result of extensive interviews with Wiles that took place over days, so he is familiar with the inner workings of the president’s closest team."

Hannaford added, “I think Trump is annoyed and probably p*ssed off,” Whipple tells The Independent. “And I’m sure he’s made that clear to Susie – and I’m sure Susie’s not thrilled by it either. Here's Trump in dire political straits heading into the midterms and one of his key political advisers is on the other side of the world trying to elect a Russian-learning Bosnian.”

This is not where the story ends either.

Hannaford wrote, "But though the Republika Srpska story – and the Wileses’ involvement in it – apparently did not sit well with Trump, Whipple doesn’t think it’ll ultimately impact his chief of staff."

Whipple told Hannaford, “I don’t think Susie Wiles is going anywhere – at least not any time soon. I think the ‘chief is dead’ story is this perennial favourite that the press corps loves to gin up. I just think Susie Wiles has a kind of magic over Donald Trump that no one else has. He trusts her in a way that he trusted none of her predecessors.”

Despite the tension between them, Wiles is widely regarded as a salutary influence on the president.

The Bulwark's Andrew Egger recently described Wiles as Trump's "secret weapon" for "running the tightest managerial ship that Trump has got to enjoy. So, even though Trump has got to enjoy [running] on this insane kind of flattery system where it's all about social currency in the eyes of this one insane man, the president, and just remaining in his good graces by bringing him good news and paying him a compliment, and all of those sorts of things. Even though that is all true, it is also true that, functionally, the White House runs better, more tightly, with less knocking in the engine than it ever did in his first term. Less infighting, less leaking. A lot of that is down to Susie Wiles."

As always, the Trump administration is setting ever stranger records for public “entertainment,” and yes, I certainly do have to put that word in quotation marks.

Only recently, Secretary of—you choose—War or Defense (I certainly know which I’d choose) Pete Hegseth made it clear that Nidal Hassan, a former US Army psychiatrist and American-born Muslim, who killed 13 people and wounded 32 at Ft. Hood, Texas, in 2009 (claiming to be waging jihad “for what he called the illegal and immoral wars in Afghanistan and Iraq”), would be executed by a military firing squad on December 3 and that the killing would—a first—be “live-streamed” for—obviously!—public entertainment. (The last time a member of the US military was even executed by firing squad was for desertion in France on January 31, 1945, only months before World War II ended in Europe.)

And just to put such a plan in perspective, these days, on this planet of ours, the only other two countries that regularly carry out public executions of capital sentences are Afghanistan and Iran. Even Saudi Arabia has stopped doing so (which should tell you something about the company the United States is now keeping).

Executioner-in-Chief Donald Trump is also now in retreat on almost every front imaginable, from global politics to the American version of the same.

In this country, nothing quite like this has happened since the public hanging of Rainey Bethea, a Black confessed rapist and killer, in Owensburg, Kentucky, in 1936, witnessed by an estimated 20,000 onlookers. Ever since then, execution as a public spectacle has been forbidden. But evidently, in the age of Donald Trump, nothing, however grim, is truly forbidden anymore, though, of course, the president did finally have to break down and, while not stopping the firing-squad execution, cancel its public screening.

In fact, in some strange sense, that public firing-squad execution, had it actually happened (and there certainly was opposition to it, even among congressional Republicans, though not, of course, from the president of the United States), would have been all too symbolic of the age of Trump and of a country that is distinctly going down, down, down on a planet that is, in fact, doing the same.

This may simply no longer be a Trumpian planet in any sense of the term. Give him full credit, of course. He’s been nothing short of amazing (or rather amazingly bizarre) during one and a half presidencies (so far), especially since, once upon a time, the very idea of him as president of the United States would have been the most ridiculous joke imaginable—or do I mean unimaginable? He should, in fact, be all too literally considered the living definition of imperial decline.

And yes, it’s true that Executioner-in-Chief Donald Trump is also now in retreat on almost every front imaginable, from global politics to the American version of the same. Don’t doubt for a second, for instance, that his party is likely to get clobbered in the upcoming November congressional elections, even though American billionaires are spending a fortune to help Republican candidates. After all, it looks like all too many of his potential voters might simply stay home, a phenomenon already labeled “the red undertow.”

Decline at Sea?

Globally, once upon a time, who would have even believed this version of the United States? Admittedly, there was that disastrous Vietnam War in the previous century, but still, this country remained a power beyond compare as its competitor, the Soviet Union, collapsed. These days, however, in the age (or do I mean the aging?) of Donald Trump, it’s down, down, down, and down again.

In fact, retreat now seems to be distinctly the name of the game. As a recent New York Times headline bluntly summed it up: “Trump’s Retreat: From the Gulf to Britain, American Forces Pull Back.” That, of course, was in relation to the war he launched against Iran which, if you happen to remember, was going to be victoriously ended within weeks. Seven months later, he’s talking about pursuing it yet again in a big-time fashion after the November congressional elections. Here’s how he explains it: “I stated, numerous times, that it would take 4-6 weeks to get rid of THE IRAN NUCLEAR THREAT, and I did it in one night!... the rest of the time is just to make sure it stays that way.”

It all makes sense now, right? And give him credit: Seven months later, there indeed is no Iranian nuclear threat (not that there ever was). In that sense he couldn’t have been more successful or, as he put it, “I am ensuring that Iran will never have a nuclear weapon. We had no choice because we can’t let them have a nuclear weapon.”

His very existence (twice!) as president of the United States suggests that decline has new meaning on a planet that itself may be going down in a big-time fashion.

Oh, now I understand, of course. (Who wouldn’t?) And under the circumstances, what a success his war has been!

Success and yet... once upon a time, “our” president certainly never would have guessed that, so many months after he launched his war, for fear of an Iranian attack, his administration would actually have pulled back a set of B-1 bombers from... no, not Saudi Arabia or Jordan (not faintly!), but Great Britain. Yes, those bombers were withdrawn from a base in England to bases in the United States, which couldn’t have been more victorious of him, could it? It fits perfectly with that TV show he (and I) once watched as kids about the US Navy in World War II, Victory at Sea.

And that tells you all too much about this increasingly strange planet (and president) of ours and just how Donald Trump and crew are taking down possibly the greatest imperial power ever in a big-time fashion.

It should also give you a sense of just how disastrous Trump’s war on Iran, which he claimed last spring would end “I think within maybe two weeks, maybe a couple of days longer, to do the job,” —and (it goes without saying) in victory, of course—has proven to be. These days, in fact, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are both suggesting that the war might last all the way through his second presidency.

Yes, Donald Trump is finally being pummeled on this planet of—well, is it ours or his?—and he’s undoubtedly soon going to be pummeled again, right here in the United States, a country with staggering numbers of nuclear weapons, in the upcoming November congressional races, where it will be beyond surprising if he and his party don’t go down, down, down.

Yes, whether he even knows it or not, he is now in retreat in a big-time fashion, including on that public execution. That includes, of course, his retreat from his recent comments about Los Angeles and San Diego being potentially lost to (assumedly) an Iranian nuclear weapon (that, of course, doesn’t exist) and that, were such a thing to happen, really wouldn’t matter to him. Yes, who among us would truly care if two West Coast, pro-Democratic cities were lost to Iranian nukes? Not “our” president, that’s for sure!

And let me just suggest that, after this November 3, President Trump is likely to find himself in retreat big time in American politics, too.

Here’s the truth of the matter: When the president of the United States (and some of his top officials like Pete Hegseth) are in retreat mode, whether we know it or not, we’re in a different world.

Honestly, the coming of Donald Trump as president of (not so long ago) the most powerful and dominant country on the planet gives imperial decline new meaning. Honestly (yet again!), once upon a time, it would have been hard to imagine any great imperial power, no less the United States of America, having someone like Donald Trump as president even in its era of decline.

His very existence (twice!) as president of the United States suggests that decline has new meaning on a planet that itself may be going down in a big-time fashion. Perhaps a future TV series about the US military in his presidency will be called “Decline at Sea.”

Retreat, ho!