Every cloud, they say, has a silver lining, and as I try to find one in Trump’s America, all I can come up with is that it serves as a distorting lens which draws our attention to things which otherwise might be overlooked. Maybe a more appropriate analogy would be a fun-house mirror (minus the fun part) which, by mangling and exaggerating our forms, makes us aware of ourselves in a new way. We recognize our features in the grotesque reflections presented to us—it’s us but not us. The image before us is not how we normally see ourselves, not how we want to see ourselves, but it nevertheless still contains information worth considering. Since America has become trumpified, I’ve frequently heard it proclaimed, This is not who we are. The benefit we derive from the distorted image provided by trumped America is that it tells us something about who we are and have always been.

Let’s start with the Iran War. Of course, this is a war in the way it’s a fight when a big kid picks on a smaller one who then has to defend himself as best he can as he’s being pummeled. They are acts of aggression, the same way Israel’s “wars” with Palestine and Lebanon and Russia’s “war” with Ukraine are. They are conflicts intentionally initiated by one side. The Iran conflict was started with the flimsiest of excuses, to the extent that an excuse was even offered. Are we supposed to believe that trumped America is concerned about human rights abuses in Iran while it is, itself, in the process of depriving its own citizens of their basic rights? The real motives for Trump’s attack on Iran surely have more to with a desire to deflect attention from the Epstein scandal and an expectation that it would spur an explosion of patriotism that would restore his popularity. He must have believed it would make him a hero for being the one to defeat evil Iran while demonstrating his unstoppable power and maybe satisfying a sadistic desire to cause misery.

This conflict is neither rational nor justifiable. It is immoral, senseless, miscalculated and catastrophic, an utter fiasco, bad for everyone except those making a killing(!) on the wildly fluctuating stock market. But is it all that different from previous wars and actions we have been involved in? Previous wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam, to name a few, and countless adventures in Latin America, Asia and Africa, seem every bit as reckless and feckless when viewed through the distorting lens of trumped America. (Michael Parenti and others might insist that all those adventures were successful in that they accomplished precisely what they were meant to by those behind them—increasing their wealth and power.) The biggest difference is that the earlier forays were presided over by serious and somber people clothed in a semblance of respectability, not by an orange clown and his entourage of shameless sycophants. The distorting lens reveals that lies, deceit and propaganda were used to promote those wars just as they are being used to promote this conflict.

A rationale (rationales aren’t necessarily rational) for the Iran conflict that I failed to mention above is often expressed with the words “Iran must never be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon.” Our credibility is strained when we hear a psychotic sociopath who presides over a nuclear arsenal that can obliterate human life on earth, proclaim that Iran is too dangerous to have a nuclear weapon. Nor is the claim made more believable when it’s echoed by Israel, our partner in and probable instigator of the conflict. Israel is not a party to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons although it is believed to possess about a hundred nuclear warheads, and since becoming a state has waged numerous wars with all of its neighbors, is currently conducting a genocide in Gaza, and has recently attacked Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, but it insists that Iran is dangerous and irresponsible.

The point is that it’s easy to see that this is a bonkers war waged by a bonkers administration, but the idea of bombing Iran has been on the US agenda for decades, cheered on by warmongering neocons and seriously considered by moderates and liberals. John McCain memorably sang “Bomb, bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ Barbara Ann as a joke. America-centric attitudes are so deeply ingrained in us, and so certain are we of our moral infallibility, that the notion that we get to decide what other countries are allowed or not allowed to do doesn’t strike us as absurd.

The Iran fiasco is only one instance of Trump’s brutal and incoherent foreign policy. The attack on Venezuela, bombing of boats in the Caribbean, assassination of foreign nationals and support of repressive regimes all demonstrate an underlying belief in the idea that might makes right, but the distorting lens informs us that this has always been the case. We helped depose many democratically-elected leaders over the years and replaced them with tyrants we deemed more acceptable. Trump admires dictators, but we’ve regularly supported the likes of Batista, Marcos and Pinochet.

Trump’s domestic policy is at least as damaging and unhinged as his foreign policy, designed to make life worse for most citizens in as many ways as possible, including depriving us of rights and freedoms, impairing our health and health care, and making everything less affordable. But the differences between what is happening now and what has happened in the past may be more quantitative than qualitative, that is to say, our elected leaders have often had a penchant for making our lives harder, not easier. There are limitless funds available for an immoral, illegal war of choice, for tax cuts and subsidies for the wealthy, for a secretive armed force commissioned to brutalize citizens, for demolishing public structures and replacing them with expensive and grotesque eyesores, and on and on. What we cannot afford, and as our distorting lens shows, never could, are ways to provide healthcare or a decent living for all, improvements in infrastructure and public services. Such things were always deemed too expensive.

Please don’t misunderstand. In no way am I suggesting that the Trump administration is like others that preceded it. Far from it. Just cataloging the ways in which it has damaged this country and the world would be an undertaking beyond my abilities. We have never seen the likes of this administration and we may not survive it. But it is noteworthy that just about every deranged action it has taken has some precedent in our history, some echo from the past. The distorting lens shows that the deeds of so-called “responsible people” are not completely dissimilar to those wrought by lunatics. It reminds us that corruption, deceit, incompetence, and immorality are not new inventions and that our vaunted institutions fall apart without trust. If we ever get out of the mess we’re in, we can’t go back to where we were before. We yearn for the good old days, but the distorting lens shows us that they weren’t always that good, and we need to re-assess what was acceptable before to create something better.

April, 2026