Part III: The Global Damage

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink"

The Last American President: Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Part III: The Global Damage

The Beginning: How Trump Lit the Match

Remember that all through history, there have been tyrants and
murderers, and for a time, they seem invincible. But in the end,
they always fall. Always. —Mahatma Gandhi

So far in this book, we’ve explored the making of a young Donald Trump, from the Queens mansion where Fred Trump taught domination as virtue, to Roy Cohn’s ruthless tutelage in shamelessness, to the golden façade he constructed that (with help from NBC and Mark Burnett) masked a lifetime of business failures. We’ve exposed the machinery that propelled him to power: a Republican Party that back during the Nixon and Reagan years first abandoned principle for tribal loyalty, the billionaire donors who funded extremism for tax cuts, and a series of billionaire-funded right-wing media empires that amplify outrage over truth on an hour-by-hour, day-by-day basis into tens of millions of American cars and homes.

But Trump’s assault on democracy hasn’t just been confined to the territory within America’s borders. His presidency is far more dangerous to nations across the world who embrace the ideals of our Founders; it represents a tragic and disastrous surrender of America’s role as the leader of the free world and the planet’s number one defender of democracy.

In these chapters, we’ll see how Trump’s embrace of dictators from Putin to Mohammed bin Salman to Kim Jong Un wasn’t just embarrassing or even incompetent diplomacy; it was the betrayal of America’s foundational promises going back 250 years, and touched off a green light for autocrats worldwide. We’ll see how he and the true believers in his administration actively sabotaged America’s capacity to deal with crises by attacking expertise, purging scientists, rewriting history, attacking the weakest among us, and politicizing every institution he could get his hands on.

This damage goes far beyond routine diplomatic embarrassments or simple policy disagreements. When Trump stood beside Putin in Helsinki and sided with the Russian dictator over America’s own intelligence agencies, he didn’t just commit political malpractice; he signaled to every struggling democracy in the entire world that America was done standing in the way of the expansion of authoritarianism and neofascism.

When his people (and Elon Musk’s teenagers) systematically dismantled the EPA and he abandoned the Paris Climate Agreement (for a second time), he didn’t just set back climate progress; he actively and maliciously accelerated planetary destruction in exchange for profits for his fossil fuel supporters, with consequences that will echo down through generations of human suffering.

Just like when his COVID-19 response degenerated into a performance of denial, magical thinking, and forced Blue states to compete for PPE and resources, he’s again revealing how quickly a government hollowed out by a cynical, profit- and corruption-driven sabotage can collapse into dysfunction that hurts (and even kills) its own citizens.

These failures—including his bizarre performance with tariffs in early 2025—aren’t accidents or simple incompetence (although they contain elements of both): they’re the predictable outcomes of an administration that views the American government and its civil service as an enemy to be subdued, expertise as a threat to be discarded, and the historic norms of democracy that generations of Americans shed their blood for as optional.

In Part IV, we’ll confront the nightmare scenario of Trump’s second term: the machinery he built, the norms he shattered, and the alliances he damaged that have led to a systematic destruction of democracy itself here in the land of the free.

What happens in this twilight of American democracy impacts every person on Earth. The global damage of Trump’s presidency has only just begun.