Everything Trump Touches Dies Goes Global
Under Trump, we have become the ugliest Americans — louder and more unhinged than anyone imagined possible.
When I tell you that everything Trump touches dies, some of you still try to find exceptions. Little limited-case counterexamples. Tiny lacunae of denial where the Rule somehow does not apply.
You are, as always in those cases, quite wrong.
I am famously not a ray of sunshine when it comes to the impact and outcomes of Trump’s corruption, cruelty, ignorance, and moral rot. My expectations for the damage he can do are generally high, and in fact, asymptotically approach infinity.
But something has been haunting me for the last two days. It was a thought that sprang to mind during a livestream on Friday. I did not articulate it then because it felt too dark even for me.
The Rule has expanded.
Everything Trump Touches Dies now applies not just to people, institutions, and political careers. It now applies to the world.
ETTD has gone global.
Donald Trump has blundered us into a war that will carry blood and tragedy across the Middle East and the world not for a day, not for a month, not even for a year, but for decades.
The only path that might have changed this outcome is the one Trump would hate most.
Iran desperately needed to be free of the shackles of the ayatollahs, the morality police, and the medieval clerics who have strangled that country for nearly half a century. It needed the slow pressure of the outside world. It needed time, openness, commerce, and the gradual corrosion of authoritarian power.
Those students and young protesters in the streets, willing to die for their country, looked to America for hope. For a lifeline. For an example. For a hand reaching out in solidarity.
Instead, they got bombs.