I find myself often asking the perplexing question, “How can half the voting population of the United States in 2024 vote for Trump?” The polls say that this will likely happen, and that the election remains a tossup. We now know what Trump is like—narcissist, braggart, egotist, perpetual liar, and one who like Biden is wrestling with nagging intellectual frailties of old age. His  term as president was saved from complete disaster by having at least some competent advisers who provided guardrails that kept him—and our country—from plunging over the cliff. Another term will not have such advisers, and Project 2025 lays out in excruciating detail how our country could become closer to a dictatorship if Trump is reelected in November. If he wins, there will be no excuse for arguing that the country was not forewarned. A second presidency of Donald J Trump could mean the end of the world’s oldest continuing democracy.

The reason I have trouble understanding why Trump remains popular with half the country is because I do not believe half of us Americans are “bad people.” Half the voters in our country can’t be “nuts.” And a huge majority of evangelicals—who are among Trump’s most ardent MAGA followers—can’t all be crazy. What is going on?

What is going on is this: Trump is a symbol rather than a cause of “America’s Great Discontent.” When he ran and unexpectedly won in 2016, Trump sensed the anger and anxiety that many Americans felt and exploited that. He sensed that many people were struggling to get by and were resentful of others who seemed to have had it easy and who they believed looked down on them. The most vocal supporters of Trump then and now are white men with no college degree, many working in blue collar jobs. For many of these people Trump is their hero because he is a thorn in the flesh of America’s elite—intellectuals, professionals, academics, scientists, business people, and anyone who is of a liberal bent.

 Make no mistake: Many of these grievances are legitimate. They are the cause of the basic grievance fueling old fashioned populism—the little guys versus the big guys.  The irony in this case is that Trump’s policies in his presidency provided tax cuts for the ultra-rich and large corporations and did not address class and income disparities.  Rather, they exacerbated them. And Trump’s contempt for programs like Obamacare, Child Tax Credits, and supportive services that have helped the working class and lower income people prove that he is a “faux populist.” In other words what he has done is less important than what he has said.  If he calls out the “liberal elite” as enemies of his base, this is enough for him to hold on to his supporters. As the saying goes, “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” He is the symbol of grievance and has said so himself: “I will be your retribution!”

This is not to say that the white working class and evangelical MAGA supporters are the only ones who will vote for Trump on November 5. There are lots of others, many of whom are wealthy people who have benefitted from Trump’s tax cuts in 2017 that benefitted the wealthy and large corporations. Those cuts are responsible for  more than  $1.5 trillion of the deficits our country has experienced over the past eight years  and are due to expire early 2025. Many who have benefitted from the tax cuts will hold their nose and vote for Trump anyway both to preserve the cuts they have benefitted from for the last eight years and the additional cuts that Trump has promised. And surely there are many more who have their own reasons, many of whom are part of Trump’s  cult of personality.  It is hard to deny that the powerful persona of Donald Trump casts an ominous   shadow over election day 2024 and the actions that will follow.  

Whether Trump gets reelected or not, this should be wakeup call that there is something wrong in our country which needs to be addressed. Besides the income and social class disparities, there are three other controversial issues where Tump’s proclamations carry weight with his followers—race, immigration and abortion. I do not believe that Trump himself really cares about any of these issues. He only cares about himself. What he looks for, however, is an issue which divides Americans and then calculates which side of the issue will help him win votes. His white, working class followers have opposed progressive initiatives like “Black Lives Matter,” “DEI,” and a woman’s right to choose. Reading the tea leaves, Trump has sided with those who oppose these progressive initiatives. And top on the list, of course, is immigration, which many in his base believe has threatened their jobs and their fragile position in our society. Trump has made immigration his centerpiece policy initiative and has pledged to close the border and expel millions of immigrants. His ranting and raving on this issue keeps the fire going among his base, even though what he proposes to do would make America seem more like Nazi Germany than the country we now know.

So, yes, I am apprehensive and fearful. I am a big fan of Harris and Walz and pray they will eke out a win, but if they do win, that also raises the issue of another rebellion like January 6, this time on steroids.

Oh, I have not mentioned foreign policy. The good news is that Trump would likely keep us out of a nuclear war with Russia. The casualty, of course, would be Ukraine, which he would abandon, probably along with  NATO and perhaps even the United Nations.

This is certainly the most consequential election in my lifetime. The stakes have never been higher. But the other takeaway is that these issues–income and social class disparities, lingering racism, abortion, and immigration–are issues which will continue to haunt the United States regardless of who gets elected. We Americans must address these challenges and make our country kinder, gentler, and fairer. If not, another faux populist is likely to take Trump’s place four years from now, if not sooner.

 

 

 

 

Here are my two recent letter-to-the-editor submissions to the Washington Post regarding supplying long range missiles provided by NATO to destroy strategic targets deep into Russia. So far neither has been published.

In the David Ignatius op-ed on September 16 on the Russian Ukrainian War, he describes a high level meeting in Europe supporting Ukraine war efforts with the theme, “The Necessity to Win.” Ignatius correctly questions whether this initiative could lead to a dangerous escalation. The current Biden Administration policy of fully supporting Ukraine “as long as it takes” is now front and center as Biden contemplates whether to approve the use of NATO produced, long range weapons that could strike deep into the heart of Russia. Putin responded over the weekend that this approval would in effect be a declaration of war between NATO and Russia. He also has assembled tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus and has stated that he will use them if the security of Russia is threatened. Some say that Putin is bluffing, but what if he is not? This could put the world on the edge of a nuclear war, which would end life on Earth as we know it. There must be a peaceful solution to this conflict, which neither side will be able to “win,” and it must happen soon.

Risking World War III

In a Washington Post editorial published on September 23, the Post argues that Biden should lend his support to allowing Ukraine to use long-range missiles to destroy strategic targets 155 miles into Russia and supports delivering long range tactical bombs (“ATACMS”), since “Ukraine urgently needs all the weapons it can get to continue to stave off Mr. Putin’s aggressions.” The Post does not mention that Putin has declared that the use of these weapons would result in a declaration of war between Russia and NATO. The Post, however, does acknowledge Putin “issuing ‘red lines,’  implicitly threatening nuclear war.” The Post dismisses this as an empty threat noting that Putin has not “followed through on his threats. There is no reason to think that he would risk a wider war with the North American Treaty Organization at a time when his forces are already severally depleted.”

There is no mention in the editorial of the need to bring this war to a negotiated end, given the risks associated with further escalation. Nor is there any indication that the editorial writers have considered the consequences to the world as we know it should Russia declare war on NATO and should Russia follow through on Putin’s threat to use nuclear weapons. The depletion of Russian troops is not the reason for NATO to escalate against Russia but rather a warning that when a ruthless dictator is pushed into a corner and threatened with defeat, he will use whatever weapons he has at his disposal to strike back.

Should the unthinkable happen, game over for the planet Earth as we know it.

 

I got a lot of thoughtful feedback from my last blog post urging Biden not to approve the use of NATO long range missiles against Russia. The consensus was that appeasement never works and that the risk of nuclear war is probably not that high given that it would destroy most of the planet. In other words, the risk is worth it.

I respectfully disagree. It is exactly in times like this when no one believes any nation could be so foolish as to start a nuclear war that we are most at risk. Friends, do not deceive yourselves. Nuclear war could happen. Read Jacobsen’s book, Nuclear War, and then let’s continue the conversation. Does anyone believe that these weapons will never be used, ever? The only way that we can assure that they won’t is to outlaw them and dispose of them. If they remain an option, at some point in the future, odds are they will be used. Maybe by accident, maybe by design. Go to the internet and see what AI has to say about it.

Some will conclude that as has been the case before, I am simply over reacting. I hope they are right. But I also must say that  given what is happening in Ukraine and in Palestine, Israel, and now Lebanon, this is the most apprehensive I have been since the fall of the Soviet Union that calamity will befall our troubled planet. 

 

 

 

President Biden, do not allow NATO long range missiles provided to Ukraine to strike targets deep into Russia. The only viable alternative is to work out a truce followed by a peace agreement. This horrid war must stop. Yeah, I know, good luck on that, but the alternative could lead to the end of the world as we know it.

Of course, I am talking about the nuclear option that I wrote about in my previous blog post. The Jacobsen book, Nuclear War, still haunts me. If you read that post you know that I believe that we are dangerously close to a miscalculation that could lead to Nuclear Armageddon. Putin has said two things, first that he is prepared to use “tactical” nuclear weapons in the Ukraine War if he believes Russian security is threatened and, second, that if long range weapons provided by a NATO country strike deep into Russia, he will consider this an act of war between Russia and NATO. This puts us one step closer to World War III.

There was an article today (September 14) buried on page 6 of the New York Times with the headline, “Putin Warns Ukraine’s Use of Western Weapons Means War With NATO.” Advisors and others shrug this off as just another empty threat. Same old, same old. At the same time the article and other reporting by CNN and NBC point out that Putin’s tone and demeanor were noticeably different in this announcement than in past times when he was ranting about one thing or another.

And this article did not even make it to the front page!

Is Biden or anyone in the White House asking the question what if Putin is actually serious this time? That he will use nuclear weapons to “protect the security of Russia” if long range missiles provided by a NATO country are used against Russia.

Friends, this madness must stop. This war–and the war in Palestine–must come to an end before they spiral into a conflict which is out of control. I understand that the natural reaction will be to conclude that I am naïve and unrealistic, that there is nothing ordinary people can do about it, and that nuclear war will not happen because of the MAD theory: No country would initiate a nuclear war because ultimately it would result in the destruction of that country. So why worry if there is nothing we can do about it? Valid comments, but still….

Here is the latest from Wikipedia on the Ukraine nuclear threat:

 

“During the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there has been constant speculation about whether Russia‘s president Vladimir Putin will use a tactical nuclear weapon either against Ukraine or in a demonstration strike over unpopulated areas, given that the course of the war does not seem favorable to what the Kremlin anticipated, and several members of the Russian government have threatened the use of nuclear weapons.^{[28][29][30][31]}

On 25 March 2023, President Putin announced the stationing of tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus. Russia would maintain control of the weapons. As of May 2023 the weapons are a small number of Iskander missile warheads. Russia plans to finish a “storage facility” for tactical nuclear weapons by July 1. President Putin told Russian state television: “There is nothing unusual here either. Firstly, the United States has been doing this for decades. They have long deployed their tactical nuclear weapons on the territory of their allied countries.”^[32] In December 2023, Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko announced that the nuclear weapons deliveries were completed that October.^[33][34]

In May 2024, Vladimir Putin announced that Russia would be holding drills with tactical nuclear weapons, days after responding to comments from senior Western officials.^[35]”

 

Type into Google the following: “What are the chances of nuclear war happening in the future?” and see what you get from AI. The estimates range from around 50% to 80% in the time frame from now to 2100. Good heavens! These odds are high!

Also check out the Wikipedia article about the chances of nuclear war where you will find that we are closer to nuclear war now than we have been in decades.

Biden must resist this escalation and use this as a wakeup call to work harder toward negotiations resulting in a lasting peace between Ukraine and Russia. Naïve? Perhaps, but think about the alternative. The pathway to our survival as a species and as a planet requires eliminating these weapons and other weapons of mass destruction, not producing more lethal weapons as now is the case.

If we Homo sapiens on the planet Earth can’t figure out how to resolve conflicts without using the  deadliest weapons we have, eventually it will be the end of us.

Don’t do it, Joe. Not on your watch. You have only got a few more months to go. Do not give Putin the opportunity to unleash nuclear weapons!

Yes, this is true. Scientists now agree: In 1.3 billion years when the Sun begins to expand into a red giant, it will become too hot for any life to survive on this wonderful, blue planet. Plants may start disappearing as soon as 600 million years from now. And in about seven billion years the entire planet will cease to exist along with the Sun and the entire solar system.

Are you worried?

Well, I am. Not so much for my own sake since it is unlikely that I will still be around 1.3 billion years from now. (Hey, like many octogenarians, I am thankful for every day that I wake up and discover that I am still here.) It is because that at this moment it seems that forces that could destroy life on our planet are lining up against us and that in the long run, the future could be bleak. Let’s examine the two scariest threats: climate change and nuclear war. (There is not enough known about AI at this point to fully understand its impact though it seems likely that it too could become a major existential threat.)

Climate Change 

Despite objections by many elected Republicans and other climate change deniers, climate change is real and will eventually destroy life on the planet as we know it if we do not meet the challenges of global warming. We are trying hard and making some progress, but still there is so much farther to go, and winning this battle will require the cooperation of Russia, India and China along with Europe, South America, and most other countries. We humans may have the technical ability to tackle this but do not appear to have the will or ability to do what scientists tell us we must do to reduce carbon emissions and win this battle.

And if temperatures continue to rise, the Greenland Icecap will eventually melt. The oceans will rise some 30 feet. Game over. Of course, that is still aways off, but if we are not able to reduce carbon emissions, we will continue along a projectory for it to happen.

And here is the thing. While doing research on another recent obsession of mine (on “the evolution of the universe”), I learned that the planet Earth since its beginning some four billion years ago has experienced five mass extinctions, which wiped out between 85 percent and 95 percent of all plant and animal life on the planet at that time. These extinctions have happened routinely on average every 60-100 million years and were caused mainly by climate change. The last mass extinction happened 66 million years ago when a giant asteroid hit the Yucatan Peninsula causing most of the giant dinosaurs to die within hours. Smaller ones may have survived months or even years longer, but the debris in the air reduced sunlight destroying the habitat which supported these creatures.

The timing is about right for another mass extinction and do-over for the planet Earth.

The good news about the Fifth Mass Extinction is that this gave an opening for us mammals to evolve and thrive. The bad news is that the king of the mammal world, we Homo sapiens, for the last century and a half have been trashing this delicate planet at an alarming rate. Because of our actions many scientists believe the planet has already entered its Sixth Mass Extinction. This is because we humans are destroying the habitats of other animals. Scientists and those who keep track of such things estimate that during the last 500 years almost 900 species have ceased to exist. One in four mammals and one in eight birds face a high risk of extinction in the next few decades. In just the last 50 years the human population on the planet has doubled. The population of all other animals has declined by 70 percent. The existential question is this: If the planet is now already in a Sixth Mass Extinction, will we humans be part of it?

This question leads to the other big existential threat.

Nuclear War

Why have we heard so little about this threat in recent times? I have just finished reading two very good but very disturbing books—Nuclear War by Annie Jacobsen and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The first book is a fictional account about a theoretical nuclear war, which happens so fast that it is impossible to avert total disaster–sort of like what happened to the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. The book presents a compelling story of how a full scale nuclear war could happen at any time, either by a miscalculation or accident or if a bad actor uses this weapon. The second book is about a deserted world where a father and son hunt for canned food left over following an unnamed–but most likely a nuclear disaster–while trying to escape bands of roaming human cannibals. These books will scare the bejesus out of you.

Jacobsen is a reporter for The New York Times who has specialized in writing about national security issues for many years. For this book she interviewed scores of experts and former officials in the government and the private sector involved in national security and nuclear weapon development. While fiction, the book provides extensive footnotes and documentation that what Jacobson is writing about could happen. Of course, it is unthinkable and beyond our comprehension. Yet she makes a compelling case that the threat of nuclear holocaust is real and more of a threat now than at any other time since we dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Lord have mercy!

Following the explosions of the two atomic bombs, in the late 1940s and early 1950s there was a huge uproar led by Bertrand Russell and other intellectuals warning the world of dire consequences. “Ban the bomb” was a common mantra around the world. Then there was pushback and a counter argument that we really need not worry so much about a nuclear war because of a theory called MAD or “Mutually Assured Destruction.” In other words, the consequences of a nuclear war are so dire and extreme, no leader would initiate an action which could ultimately result in the destruction of one’s own country. Well, since we are still here and except for Hiroshima and Nagasaki no nuclear war has happened, maybe the theory is correct.

But what if it isn’t?

There are now nine nations that have “strategic nuclear arsenals”—the United States, Russia, China, France, the U.K., Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea— and the number continues to grow. Iran is likely to be next. And one nation—North Korea—is a rogue nation with an unpredictable leader, who many label as a nutcase. In Jacobsen’s book, North Korea is the bad actor that starts the war which leads to the massive annihilation of human life on Earth.

The total number of warheads that these nine nations have is a tad over 12,000. One average size nuclear weapon exploded in New York City would cause about 600,000 deaths, wounding many others. Do the arithmetic. Humans currently have the capacity to kill 7.2 billion people, which is 80 percent of all humans on the planet. And as Jacobsen’s book describes, this could happen very quickly.

As scary as this is, actually we have made progress because of the numerous nuclear treaties between the US and the Soviet Union beginning in the 1960s with the latest with Russia in 2010 (“START”). At the height of the Cold War, the Soviet Union had 40,000 nukes and we had 30,000, enough to destroy all life on the planet many times over.

Note that the reduction in the number of nuclear warheads applies to strategic nuclear weapons and not to the so called “tactical nuclear weapons,” which Putin has already threatened to use in his war on Ukraine. Some of these less powerful weapons, however, have twenty times the power of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yes, progress has been made. But friends, this is madness!

What the Jacobsen book convincingly portrays is that just because a full scale nuclear war has not happened yet does not mean it will never happen. And if it does, it will mean that we humans will be part of the Sixth Mass Extinction, that the next do-over will begin, and that the Earth will continue to experience extinctions until our Sun becomes a red giant a little over a billion years from now. If the past is any indication of the future, before life on Earth perishes, we can expect more mass extinctions. If one happens, say, every 70 million years on average, there would be 14 more of these “wipe the slate clean” do-overs.

These questions lead us from the world of science to the world of spirituality and religion. Where does God fit in to all this? And what is the meaning and purpose of life in our fragile world as we humans stagger through our lives trying to play the cards we have been dealt as best as we can?

Read these two books. Then mix yourself a stiff drink and pray that nothing like this will ever happen—even though the odds are that unless we rid the planet of these horrific weapons—along with other weapons of mass destruction– it will happen, probably not soon but sometime. And according to Jacobson the timing could well be sooner rather than later. The fuel is in place waiting for a rogue nation or bad actor to strike a match which starts the fire that completes the Sixth Mass Extinction on the planet Earth. God help us.