What Happened to Trump…and Why It Explains Everything Happening Right Now

The forces that shaped him didn’t stay in the past: they grew with power, fueling the cruelty and chaos now hitting your wallet, your safety, and America’s place in the world…

When a gentle, thoughtful, holy man like Pope Leo XIV denounces what Trump has done by killing thousands in an illegal and unnecessary war of choice — he called it a “scandal to ​the whole human family” yesterday — the world knows our president has descended into something truly and profoundly evil.

There’s a single through-line connecting everything happening to us right now, and it all has to do with the damaged, broken, deranged man in the White House.

— Our gas prices spiking toward six dollars a gallon and above.
— Masked, anonymous, unaccountable thugs brutalizing brown and Black people, immigrants and US citizens alike, and murdering or killing almost a hundred human beings since Trump was sworn in as they build hundreds of massive concentration camps across the US.
— Trump’s tweets yesterday implying that Democrats may be their next occupants, calling members of the party “America’s greatest threat after Iran” much as Hitler did just before throwing members of opposition parties into camps in Germany in 1933/1934.
— Our grocery bills creeping higher every single week, with price explosions and famine coming as the world runs low on fertilizers now blocked in the Strait of Hormuz.
— TSA officers working without a paycheck snarling our security lines while food banks quietly open at our nation’s airports to feed those unpaid agents and their families.
— American soldiers and innocent civilians dying in an unconstitutional, unauthorized-by-Congress, internationally illegal war crime against a country that posed no imminent threat to us, with not a single ally on the planet willing to stand beside us, as over 20 countries have now been drawn in creating an eerie echo of WWI.
— And now, in one of the most breathtaking acts of strategic self-destruction in American history (it’s almost as if Putin is orchestrating the entire thing), we’re literally paying Iran and Russia billions of dollars every day to kill our men and women in uniform.

That throughline isn’t bad luck or complicated geopolitics: it’s one sick, sick man.

A man forged by a brutal, loveless father who raised his children with contempt instead of care. And a mother who was never there.

A man mentored by Roy Cohn — the most psychopathically ruthlessly and amoral mob-affiliated political fixer of the twentieth century — who taught him that reality is whatever you assert it to be if you say it loud enough and repeat it often enough, that you should never admit fault, never apologize, and always attack.

A nepo-baby who’s moved through seventy-nine years of life without ever once having to genuinely live with the consequences of his decisions, because there was always more inherited money to paper over the wreckage, more creditors to stiff with an army of lawyers, more gullible Republican marks to con, more toady sycophants to exploit, more people so simply in awe of his wealth or afraid of his bullying that all they can do is tell him what he wants to hear.

As I detail in The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink, Fred Trump didn’t raise a president. He raised a wounded child who never grew up emotionally, but learned as an adult to use naked brutality to weaponize his own psychopathy. Who delights in the deaths and killings of others, who loves to watch people’s homes and cities blow up as if he were a ten-year-old playing a video game.

And now that man has control of the most powerful military in the history of human civilization and gleefully running roughshod over the guardrails against such power abuses that our Founders and Framers wrote into the Constitution.

Consider what this man has done to America and the world in just the past year:

He launched the largest U.S. tariff regime since 1932 (which provoked the Republican Great Depression), a chaotic, impulsive, constantly-shifting wall of taxes on our own imports that Harvard economists say have raised retail prices on clothing by more than 17 percent, building materials by more than 10 percent, and on household goods across the board.

The Tax Foundation calculates it as an average tax increase of $1,500 per American household this year (it was more last year). Walmart — not even remotely a progressive institution — reported that inflation on the general merchandise they sell has shot up more than three percent last quarter and said explicitly that Trump’s tariffs drove it. Goldman Sachs economists found that tariffs pushed inflation up by half a percentage point in 2025, and JPMorgan warned that what businesses have been absorbing is now getting passed to you, the consumer, rapidly.

Your grocery bill isn’t going up because of supply chains or some imaginary “global force.” It’s going up because a lifelong grifter who’s never read an economics textbook or the Constitution decided that tariffs were a display of strength, and strength is the only currency the wounded man raised by Fred Trump — a man once arrested at a Klan rally — has ever trusted.

He’s also used tariffs and threats of tariffs to intimidate countries into giving him gifts, bribes, and help for his boys to make billions in crypto and to build foreign hotels and golf courses in the most blatant corruption of the White House since the Republican Teapot Dome scandal (and Albert Fall was a piker compared to Trump and his family).

Then there’s the illegal war he conspired with Kushner, Netanyahu (and perhaps Witkoff’s buddy Putin) to wage against Iran. On February 28th, without a declaration from Congress, without a single NATO ally willing to join us, without any nation on Earth signing on, without going to the United Nations, and without any provocation or attack on America or American interests, Donald Trump lied our military into launching an assault on Iran falsely claiming they were about to attack the US.

This was not a targeted strike like the earlier effort to knock out their nuclear enrichment facilities: this is an actual war. A war that’s now killed at least 13 American service members and seriously wounded more than 200 (and those are the official numbers, which former military officials are already calling deeply under-reported). And thousands of innocent civilians.

A war that has effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of the world’s daily oil supply flows, sending Brent crude to $112 a barrel — up more than 80 percent since January — and pushing retail gas prices up nearly a dollar a gallon, with United Airlines cutting 5% of their flights because they’re already planning for oil to hit $175 a barrel (the result of the destruction of oil facilities by Iranian retaliation) and stay there through at least 2027.

He’s the first Western leader since Adolf Hitler to launch military attacks against multiple countries in rapid succession, without legislative authorization, without genuine self-defense justification, and without a single meaningful ally. That’s not hyperbole or hysteria on my part: that’s the actual series of events compared with very real history.

And the Republican Party — the party that once claimed to stand for constitutional government and congressional authority over declarations of war — has largely fallen silent or, in the case of bloodthirsty fools like Lindsay Graham, cheered on what may well become World War III.

To deal with the oil price explosion his illegal war created, the billionaire who runs Trump’s Treasury Department has now lifted sanctions on Iranian oil currently at sea, freeing up roughly 140 million barrels worth over $14 billion to the government of Iran: the government whose forces are killing American troops right now.

At the same time, Trump’s also quietly lifted sanctions on Russian oil, handing Vladimir Putin — whose drones have been raining down on Ukrainian civilians for years and whose intelligence is helping Iran kill American troops — a financial windfall that European allies called a “betrayal” and that the Kremlin greeted not with thanks but with a demand for more.

An Israeli policy analyst at the Institute for National Security Studies said it plainly to NBC News: “The U.S. is funding a war against itself.”

Senator Richard Blumenthal called it “sickeningly, shamefully stupid.” Former NSC spokesman Tommy Vietor called it “the biggest, dumbest concession ever given to Iran by the US.” Even Republican Congresswoman Nancy Mace posted: “Bombing Iran with one hand and buying Iran oil with the other.”

It’s like the old definition of insanity: we’re paying Russia and Iran — simultaneously — while Americans in uniform bleed and die at their hands in the theater of war that Donald Trump created without permission, without allies, and without a plan.

The families of those 13 dead Americans know that. The 200-plus wounded know that. The families of thousands of dead Middle Eastern families know that. And every American paying five dollars a gallon or more is quickly figuring it out.

This is what a lifelong grifter does when he’s never experienced real consequences for his actions in his entire life.

Not when he bullied people at prep school, not when he used a phony bonespurs X-ray to get out of serving in Vietnam, not when he cheated on every one of his three wives, not when he was accused of raping underage girls with Jeffrey Epstein, not when he ripped off his customers and refused to pay his vendors, not when he bankrupted dozens of companies including two casinos where he was busted for money laundering (who does that??), not when he lied his way into office, not when he solicited Russia’s help to win the 2016 election, not even when he tried to overthrow our democracy on January 6th 2021.

He acts. He declares victory. And when reality pushes back he always finds someone else to blame and then figures out a scheme to monetize the mess.

When Trump kept insisting throughout the first weeks of the war that we’d “won,” even as U.S. bases burned in Baghdad, he wasn’t lying strategically; he was doing the only thing his psychology has ever equipped him to do: bullshit his way through a crisis and wait for the sycophants around him to pick up the pieces.

There have always been people so in awe of his wealth and power that they’re willing to do what he wants no matter how bizarre or destructive: that’s the lesson his mentor Roy Cohn taught him that’s never left him. He’s left a trail of them — people broken by their association with him — behind him; just look at the folks who served in his first administration who’re now looking at financial ruin and even prison.

Meanwhile, here at home, the TSA has been going without pay since February 14th. Over five weeks. These are the men and women who show up every single day to keep weapons off our planes, and they’re sleeping in airport parking lots because they can’t afford the gas to drive home.

A food bank opened at Pittsburgh International Airport to feed federal employees who’re not getting paid. At major hubs like Boston Logan, Newark, Chicago O’Hare, Seattle-Tacoma, and Atlanta the lines are brutal, the sick-call rates are skyrocketing, and at least one senior TSA official warned this week that some airports may have to shut down entirely if the impasse doesn’t break.

Senate Democrats have put clean, standalone bills on the Senate floor to pay TSA officers — and only TSA officers, nothing else — six separate times. No tricks. No riders. No conditions beyond “pay the people keeping our airports safe.”

Six times, Republican senators — by name, Bernie Moreno of Ohio, James Lankford of Oklahoma, and Eric Schmitt of Missouri — walked to the floor and blocked them. Every single time.

The Republican argument is that Democrats won’t vote to fund the entire DHS, including ICE. What they aren’t saying is why Democrats won’t do that: because ICE agents have been operating without visible identification, hiding their faces behind masks, busting into American homes without warrants, and murdering American citizens in the streets with absolutely no accountability.

Renee Good, Alex Pretti, and others dead at the hands of masked goons who refuse to identify themselves and then flee the scene.

Democrats aren’t blocking TSA funding because they’re playing politics: they’re refusing to write a blank check for an agency that a federal judge — a Bush appointee who clerked for Antonin Scalia — found had violated court orders in 96 cases in 74 different situations in January alone.

Republicans are choosing to let TSA officers go without pay rather than agree to require ICE agents to wear a name badge or take off their masks. That’s the actual choice these ghouls have made in service to the madman in the White House.

That’s what’s happening in the United States Senate right now, in plain sight, while a psychopathic man hits little balls around at his shabby golf motel and posts to his failing, Nazi-infested social media site about his imaginary 100 percent approval rating.

This is what the death knell of a republic sounds and looks like when it’s torn to shreds from the inside. Complete with the upcoming gold coin bearing his face, like he thinks he’s Julius Caesar.

Armed, masked, anonymous stormtroopers (Stephen Miller says, “We are the Storm!”) and massive military vehicles with chemical weapons in the streets of American cities, and the steady, deliberate dismantling of every norm and institution and guardrail that stood between a wounded, entitled, pathologically dishonest man and unchecked power handed him by six Republicans on a corrupted Supreme Court.

The tariffs gutting working families. The illegal war with no consultation of Congress or the American people or our closest allies. The sanctions lifted on Iran and Russia to cover for the oil-price chaos the war created. The federal workers going without pay while Republicans block the bills that would help them.

All of it driven by the compulsions of one pathetic man who was broken in childhood, finished off by Roy Cohn, and handed the keys to American democracy by a political party that decided racism and raw power mattered more than our country.

Democracy doesn’t survive with mere passive observation: it requires enough people showing up in the streets, on social media, in the media, and at the ballot box to refuse to let it die.

The No Kings Day march is March 28th. Find your nearest event at indivisible.org and get out there. The general strike is May 1st: go to generalstrikeus.com, pledge now, and then call someone you know and ask them to do the same.

Call your senators today about the TSA, about the war, about the oil sanctions that are paying our enemies to kill Americans, about the criminal corrupt of the White House that the GOP is facilitating.

The Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Call it tomorrow. Call it the day after. Call it every day until someone answers with something other than excuses. Find every official in every state at openstates.org and call them, too.

Governors and state attorneys general have considerable power as well; demand that they open investigations and begin prosecutions of violations of state laws.

This is not a moment for spectating, hand-wringing, or prevaricating. The world’s house is on fire, and we’re all inside it.

My newest book, Who Killed the American Dream?: The Greatest Political Crime Ever Told is now available for presale from bookstores nationwide.
You can follow me on Blue Sky here: https://bsky.app/profile/thomhartmann.bsky.social