President Trump might not look smaller, but he is.<\/p>\n
At home and abroad, among a significant majority of Americans that includes increasing numbers of Republicans, as well as in the eyes of foreign leaders, the president of the United States is shrinking by the day into a hapless peacock, a cartoon figure posting comic word balloons at all hours on the falsely labeled Truth Social network or bloviating for the (fewer and fewer<\/a>) cameras by day.<\/p>\n Consider Trump\u2019s losses and humiliations just over the past week:<\/p>\n But for the U.S. and Israeli delegations, formerly deferential diplomats at the United Nations mostly sat on their hands for Trump\u2019s boastful and bullying annual address<\/a> on Tuesday; at one apparent applause line, he seemed to pause for claps that didn\u2019t come. The Federal Reserve raised<\/a> interest rates over his objections (its hand forced by the inflation Trump\u2019s tariffs and war have caused). The usually compliant Supreme Court killed<\/a> his rule against mail ballots for the midterm elections. A federal judge blocked<\/a> Trump (again) from putting his name on the Kennedy Center. Daily it seems, news stories quote once-supportive truckers and farmers breaking with him over the cost of fuel.<\/p>\n There\u2019s more: A long-loyal Florida Republican, Rep. Mar\u00eda Elvira Salazar, aired<\/a> a campaign ad<\/a> telling Trump that his immigration policies have gone too far and Latino supporters \u201cfeel betrayed<\/a>.\u201d Republican Senate candidates in Iowa and Michigan demanded<\/a> that Trump end his stalemated war against Iran. The Republican chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee berated<\/a> Trump on the Senate floor for kowtowing to China\u2019s President Xi Jinping with this week\u2019s state visit. And a Republican senator from Nebraska urged<\/a> an investigation of Donald Trump Jr. over his business dealings and his recent wedding that a Russian oligarch bankrolled<\/a>.<\/p>\n Sure, Trump still has unprecedented control over his party; he only recently ended several Republican officeholders\u2019 careers by endorsing their foes in party primaries. But the primaries are over. More Republicans by the day are trying to distance themselves from a president who\u2019s setting records for unpopularity with just about each new poll<\/a>. CNN\u2019s latest<\/a>, conducted last week, found that two-thirds of Americans disapprove of Trump\u2019s job performance and believe, contrary to Trump\u2019s claims, that the United States is losing the war against Iran. In another poll, from Fox News<\/a>, two-thirds of voters said Trump had made the economy worse.<\/p>\n On the foreign stage, as evidenced by Trump\u2019s failed applause lines at the U.N., leaders no longer compete for ways to play to his vanity. Instead, some are forming workarounds to achieve their policy ends without the conspicuously absent United States \u2014 on defense, trade, climate change and more. They\u2019ve learned to discount his empty hyperbole, which is why there wasn\u2019t a collective eruption at the U.N. on Tuesday when Trump suggested<\/a> he might \u201cannihilate\u201d Iran.<\/p>\n To be sure, many don\u2019t doubt he\u2019s capable of that war crime. In fact, in the same address, Trump included among a number of false boasts one that\u2019s all too real: about U.S. military strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that have killed numerous people \u2014 234 to date<\/a> \u2014 whom the administration claims, without evidence, to be drug-runners. These are illegal extrajudicial killings<\/a> \u2014 actual war crimes.<\/p>\n Alas, as president, Trump might be a smaller man, but he retains a \u201ccrazy\u201d amount of power, as he gushed<\/a> himself last Thursday to an audience in the Mar-a-Lago\u2019d Rose Garden. Why, he could even ban fishing and put Bass Pro Shops out of business, he told the billionaire founder of the chain.<\/p>\n That\u2019s not true, but the wannabe autocrat has done plenty that the Constitution and federal law don\u2019t allow a president to do, besides the Caribbean killings \u2014 like starting a war without Congress, wiping out entire federal programs authorized by law, demolishing a whole wing of the White House and banning specific news organizations because he doesn\u2019t like their coverage.<\/p>\n Also, any inclination to relish Trump\u2019s self-diminishment should be offset by the fact that he\u2019s simultaneously diminishing the country\u2019s stature and leadership in the world, in ways that could well outlast him. Longtime allies in Canada, Europe, Australia and Asia, in a break from the 80-year-old postwar order that the United States built, are forging new ties among themselves, separate from the newly unreliable United States and a president who is often hostile to allied leaders and openly enamored of dictators in China, Russia and elsewhere.<\/p>\n \u201cTo the victor belong the spoils,\u201d Trump crowed to the U.N., in bragging about the United States\u2019 confiscation of Venezuela\u2019s oil and oil revenue since taking over the country in January. The U.S. president thus embraced, before a global audience, the very approach that his country and its postwar allies had rejected in building a new world order that included the U.N.<\/p>\n This week in celebrating China, which along with Russia provides assistance<\/a> to Iran against the United States, Trump continues his abasement of himself and the nation.<\/p>\n After he\u2019d visited Beijing in May, Trump actually declared<\/a> China a co-superpower with the United States. \u201cIt\u2019s the two great countries. I call it the G-2,\u201d he told Sean Hannity on Fox News. Imagine Hannity\u2019s conniption, and Republicans\u2019, had Presidents Biden or Obama so forfeited America\u2019s singular standing as the world\u2019s superpower. And now, Trump is giddy about hosting Xi for a state visit with all the trappings. Rather than wait for Xi at the White House, as he typically greets visiting leaders, on Wednesday the eager Trump insisted on meeting Xi\u2019s plane at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland for a red-carpet welcome.<\/p>\n In May, China\u2019s Communist Party-controlled newspaper said Trump arrived in China as a \u201cgiant with a limp,\u201d<\/a> crippled by an Iran war then in its third, indecisive month.<\/p>\n Four months later, that war drags on, depleting U.S. stockpiles and defenses, including against an expansionist China. And Xi meets a man who\u2019s no longer looking like a giant.<\/p>\n Bluesky: @jackiecalmes<\/a>
Threads: @jkcalmes<\/a>
X: @jackiekcalmes<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Trump might not look smaller, but he is. At home and abroad, among a significant majority of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":858912,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,144,16470,275,362584,11320,801,68940,3,968,2186,3479,107143,21,19,22,20,25,24,1139,1975,53936],"class_list":["post-858911","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-china","tag-country","tag-day","tag-foreign-leader","tag-fox-news","tag-iran","tag-new-poll","tag-news","tag-president-trump","tag-republicans","tag-trump","tag-u-n","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa","tag-war","tag-week","tag-xi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858911","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=858911"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/858911\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/858912"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=858911"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=858911"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=858911"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}