Trump Is Doing Real Damage to America
President Trump is doing damage to America that could take a generation or more to repair. The next election cannot fix what Trump is breaking. Neither can the one after that.
To understand the gravity of the harm Trump has inflicted on the United States in the first month and a half of his presidency, a comparison with the Cold War is helpful. Republicans and Democrats often had sharp differences in their approach to the Soviet Union — very sharp. The parties would differ, for example, on the amount of military spending, on the approach to arms control and on American military interventions against Soviet allies and their proxies.
Deep disagreement over Vietnam helped drive American political debate, both within and between parties, for more than a decade. During the Reagan era, there were fierce arguments over the MX, a powerful intercontinental ballistic missile, and over the deployment of intermediate-range missiles in Europe.
These differences were important, but they were less important than the many points of agreement. Both parties were committed to NATO. Both parties saw the Soviet Union as the grave national security threat it was. For decades, both parties were more or less committed to a strategy of containment that sought to keep Soviet tyranny at bay.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/02/opinion/trump-ukraine-zelensky-usaid.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1U4.64W8.XgXIpdFtnsc0&smid=url-share
Trump and his Republican quislings: "We have to destroy America to save it!"
Making America great again by demolishing what made America great.
And it's only taken six weeks to do so, with worse to come.

Aristus
(69,639 posts)Hopefully, I think it may not entirely factor in the human capacity for rebuilding and restoring.
I was reminded of a photo in one of my (many, many) books on World War II. Russians helping to re-build Stalingrad after one of the most horrifyingly deadly and destructive battles in history got the city going again in an astonishingly short period of time. The picture is of a telephone lineman testing a connection he has just restored. The phones in Stalingrad were working again within just a few days after the German surrender. There was a lot more to it, obviously; but people will work very hard to return to a sense of normality after a period of devastating chaos.
Paladin
(30,087 posts)Golly gee, David French: What was your first clue? Have you divulged your findings to the rest of your fellow NY Times opinion scribblers? Trust me on this---some of them will be surprised...
creon
(1,478 posts)The old fool is gaga.
He wants to wreck the country