Recreating the Fall of Rome — will president-elect Trump be just as bad for the United States, as Biden has been?

© 2025 Peter Free

 

07 January 2025

 

 

'We the People' seem to be missing a cranium of brain marbles

 

In 2020, we Americans (allegedly) elected the most US-damaging president in American history, Joe Biden.

 

And in 2024 — evidently having learned almost nothing from that searing experience — we re-elected Donald Trump.

 

A man who had, four years previously, demonstrated his passion for flaunting (at least arguable) incompetence.

 

Not the least of which included repetitively appointing administration members, who openly undercut his announced plans.

 

 

And now . . .

 

. . . Trumpian megalomania joins the flaw stew.

 

From the Associated Press:

 

 

President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday said he would not rule out the use of military force to seize control of the Panama Canal and Greenland, as he declared U.S. control of both to be vital to American national security.

 

“I’m not going to commit to that,” Trump said, when asked if he would rule out the use of the military.

 

“It might be that you’ll have to do something. The Panama Canal is vital to our country.”

 

He added, “We need Greenland for national security purposes.”

 

Greenland, home to a large U.S. military base, is an autonomous territory of Denmark, a longtime U.S. ally and a founding member of NATO.

 

Trump cast doubts on the legitimacy of Denmark’s claim to Greenland.

 

The Panama Canal has been solely controlled by the eponymous country for more than 25 years.

 

The U.S. returned the Panama Canal Zone to the country in 1979 and ended its joint partnership in controlling the strategic waterway in 1999.

 

© 2025 Will Weissert and Zeke Miller, Trump refuses to rule out use of military force to take control of Greenland and the Panama Canal, AP (07 January 2025)

 

 

In other words . . .

 

. . . soon-to-be president Donald Trump openly announced that the United States will seize whatever territories it wants, from whichever unfortunate souls that it wants to rob and oppress.

 

And that includes attacking our NATO allies in the same manner that President Biden (almost certainly) did, when he ordered the destruction of Germany's Nord Stream gas pipeline.

 

How Trump's brand of Enemy-Making Megalomania differs from Biden's is difficult to parse.

 

We seem to be emulating Rome's decline and fall by simulating that deceased empire's self-terminating penchant for abandoning its public (and its realm) to the control of crazily incompetent emperors.

 

Notice especially that — as American economic and military clout visibly decline — we are, nevertheless, recklessly provoking others to take self-defending shots at us.

 

With, incredibly enough, all of this occurring, during the self-instigated destruction of our own (once morality-based) soft power.

 

 

The moral? — Combinations of megalomania and witless lunacy . . .

 

. . . never-ever result in anything good happening.  

 

Except, perhaps, a peculiar form of suicidal entertainment.

 

Circuses, without the bread.