Trump promises to restore an America that no longer exists. But the America he wants to recover was built for a different economy, a different technology, a different world, and a different strategic environment. Trying to resurrect it means dismantling institutions designed for the world we actually inhabit.
Donald Trump is fighting a war against the future. He has attacked the scientific enterprise, dismantled programs that embody America’s humanitarian values, weakened the social safety net, abandoned promising energy initiatives and damaged alliances painstakingly built over generations. His deeper offense is not simply political or economic: it is historical. He is trying to drag a globally connected, technologically advanced America backward toward a world that no longer exists. He is an American Luddite, vile and venal.
Trump is running against the tide of history. He is a social, political, financial, commercial Luddite who makes the historical British textile workers of the 19th Century look like “avant guardsmen.” Trump has ignored then denied the unalterable fact that the US has stitched itself into a global economy and that, decades ago, became an information, services and technological economy—not the manufacturing behemoth of yesteryear. He seeks to recover a bygone era. He lives and breathes in a historical bubble, landlocked in his own closed mind, and sees nothing of the many great men, women and movements that have spurred the world forward since the Renaissance.
More importantly, Mr. Trump has reversed what one might call the steady if checkered process of enriching the dignity of the human condition.
He has without exception, rolled back or eliminated USAID, PEPFAR (global HIV and numerous AIDS initiatives founded by President GW Bush), and a host of related programs: global maternal and child health programs; global malaria programs; The American Climate Corps; climate and environmental grants; NIH research grants; Alzheimer’s research; Head Start and SNAP funding; major education programs; the fracturing of the federal workforce; the federal scientific research structure; and foreign humanitarian assistance. It’s safe to say that among this American litany of legislated paring, the most important are (1) biomedical and scientific research, (2) the soft power of American foreign aid through AID, and (3) the social safety net of SNAP and medical assistance.
And for his mismanagement of a particularly crucial 21st Century need, Mr. Trump has trashed a number of promising renewable energy initiatives that constitute an urgent public necessity—done against the backdrop of his ignorant denial of the reality of climate change.
This is not to say that many if not all of the above programs did not need a scrub for waste and effectiveness. Certainly they did. But none of this tableau of destruction was done discriminately or diagnostically or with anything but a petulant, malicious purpose. It was a brutal sweep that is costing us the baby as well as the bathwater.
Mr. Trump whimsically reversed the welcome, modern process to correct the insanity by which the world had self-organized, into a multiplicity of competitive states not unlike those that fell blindly into The Great War. Faced with undisguised existential threats from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, Trump has foolishly broken the forward progress that many of today’s right-minded states swore to resist. The harm he has done could be with us for decades to come.
The willful ruining of our relations with our most important friends and allies lies at the heart of a brain-dead political decision; Trump has thoroughly unraveled the reigning logic, shared duty, and the common goals of a safe and productive humanity, one that had been tediously wired together at huge cost and effort to create alliances and mutual goals.
Not just US policy, but the good of the whole planet has been set back by an uninformed, unread amateur power player whose principal weapon is a confused mind wrapped in greed and ghastly amounts of money.
We have learned a great deal about Mr. Trump in the past 10 years, but the harsh focus on how devilishly wrong he is for the times has been especially focused over the past year and one-half. As sad as that awareness has been to take aboard, equally wrenching is what we have learned about ourselves. The US has wrestled with immigration since its earliest days; and we still have not reached the willingness to hammer out a pragmatic solution for the right mix, numbers, treatment and absorption of immigrants that might facilitate how America accepts, honors and welcomes them. Immigration is, after all, our essential building block. How disappointed we must be with the lack of a public willingness to sort this out sensibly.
Americans have every right—a duty—to face the contorted political state of our affairs today. Trump’s unfathomable imposition of economically disproven tariffs, the start of a senseless war, the ruin of useful federal programs and cruel denial of federal assistance to areas struck by natural disasters have all contributed to angry discussion across the country of those painful kitchen table issues that confound so many middle Americans.
But Americans also have a duty to recognize what Mr. Trump is doing to destabilize the unique democratic structure of America, the chassis on which the American character and drive ride, our special, unparalleled American zeitgeist. How paltry the cost of gasoline in the shadow of such profound loss.
William R. Piekney served as US Naval officer for four years and served in the CIA for 30 years in Europe, Africa and the Middle East. He was under deep cover early in his career and later was station chief numerous times, including West Africa, Pakistan and Egypt. As a member of the Senior Executive Service he directed the Agency’s African operations and then East Asia operations, traveling extensively to those regions to maintain and develop relations with host intelligence and security services. Overall he has spent nearly fifty years in the U.S. Intelligence Community and in related national security affairs. He is a member of The Steady State.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 400 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.
All will be set right by the Trump line of early 20th century battleships and redoing our aircraft carriers to meet the necessary trumpian aesthetic. And erasing Black and female officers from Hegseth's Department of Defense also makes a certain kind of nostalgic sense. After all, when the Pentagon was built in Jim Crow Virginia, bathrooms were racially segregated. And slavery was simply a minor blip in our history that needs to be ignored. What could be better than the trumpian time machine that takes America backwards while the rest of the world is watching us self-destruct. Excellent piece, Bill!
Strong words --- solidly supported by undeniable facts and life experience. Historians who see this will strain to understand how more than 70 million Americans voted to put the likes of Donald Trump (and J.D. Vance) into the White House. Meanwhile, how many voters who were swept into believing the MAGA lies will rectify their mistake by voting against the Republican extremists who have enabled this assault on our democracy, come this Nov. 3?