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Alfred McCoy, The Future According to Trump

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[Note to TomDispatch Readers: Yes, today’s piece is the last one for 2025. I’ll be back on January 4th of — unbelievably enough! — 2026. But let me just suggest that this is the perfect moment to consider sending TomDispatch a Christmas/New Year’s gift to help ensure that I can indeed keep on going into next year. All you have to do is visit our donation page and do your damnedest. And believe me, since I see the names of all donors, I’ll be thanking you in my mind in a big-time way. And with that, let me wish you a distinctly good new year, or at least as good a one as is possible in this ever-stranger world of ours. Oh, and one small reminder: Alfred McCoy, the author of this year’s final piece and a writer who always has a fascinating take on our world, has a remarkable new book, Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage, a history of an era that I lived through and undoubtedly the last Dispatch book ever. To my mind (and I edited it!), it’s an instant classic.  I strongly recommend that you pick up a copy for your new year’s reading. Tom]

Every now and then, I try to imagine telling my dead parents about — yes! — President Donald Trump (twice, no less!). They died long enough ago that, though they, too, lived in New York City, I’m not sure they would have known who he was in his pre-presidential days.  Still, to anyone of their generation, such a president would have been literally inconceivable.  Yes, they had lived through some distinct duds, but also Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, among others.

To them, such an (ir)reality would have been someone’s distinctly mad (and anything but funny) fantasy. And yet here we are in what, despite signs of change — from that striking Democratic victory in the recent mayoral election in Miami to the president’s diving polling numbers to the country’s ominously rising unemployment rate to the MAGA types who criticized him over his grim response to Rob Reiner’s death — is still, unbelievably enough, Donald Trump’s world.

Sometimes, I truly don’t believe that, at 81-and-a-half years old, I’m even living on such a planet or that, more than 24 years after I began TomDispatch, this is indeed the world I now face. And with all of that in mind, let me recommend that you spend some time with that superb historian and TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy as he considers just how the American Dream might indeed end by 2029, when Donald J. Trump is (at least theoretically) scheduled to leave office. Believe me, it’s anything but a Christmas or New Year’s treat. Tom

Ending the American Dream by 2029?

Eye of Newt and Toe of Frog in Trump’s U.S.A.

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For writers, the future has long been a tricky terrain. While the past can prove unsettling and the present uncomfortable, the future seems to free the mind from reality’s restraints and let the imagination soar. Yet it has also proven full of political pitfalls.

Sometimes writers can tweak a trend of their moment to produce a darkly dystopian future, as with George Orwell’s omniscient tyranny in 1984, Margaret Atwood’s institutionalized misogyny in The Handmaid’s Tale, or Ray Bradbury’s book-burning autocracy in Fahrenheit 451. And ever since H.G. Wells's novel War of the Worlds (about technologically advanced Martians invading this planet) was published in 1898, space has been a particularly fertile frontier for the literary imagination. It has given us Isaac Asimov’s seven-part galactic Foundation fable, Frank Herbert’s ecological drama Dune, and Philip K. Dick’s post-nuclear wasteland in Blade Runner, opening us to possible techno-futures beyond our mud-bound presence on this small planet.  

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William D. Hartung, Talking Diplomacy, Promoting Conflict

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Only recently, the Trump administration released its 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), its look at global “security” at this very moment. As it happens, that document’s view of our planet right now was missing just a few passing things, globally speaking. Two of them happened to be Russia and China. Russia is only mentioned in a few paragraphs and the significance of China is distinctly downplayed. And of course, potentially the greatest ultimate danger to global security, climate change, is mentioned but once in this single sentence: “We reject the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threaten the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.” Of course, no one should be surprised by that, not during the presidency of the man who has called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”

But it does turn out that there are a few things on this planet to fear, as that document makes clear. One of them is “civilizational erasure,” something that, if the far-right parties on the European continent don’t soon win the necessary elections, will surely be the fate of… yes, believe it or not, Europe — and the European Union, in particular. That continent, given immigration and other issues, could become “unrecognizable in 20 years or less,” or so the NSS claims.

And that’s just to begin a journey into the distinctly strange and unnerving national security (or do I mean national insecurity?) world of Donald Trump that TomDispatch regular William Hartung, co-author of The Trillion Dollar War Machine, lays out in vivid detail today. Perhaps, in future National Security Strategy documents, President Donald Trump himself will indeed be found responsible for nothing less than “civilizational erasure.” Tom

The “President of Peace” Prepares for War

The Donroe Doctrine Hits Home

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Earlier this month, the Trump administration released its new National Security Strategy, or NSS. Normally, such documents are poor predictors of what's likely to happen in the real world. They are more like branding tools that communicate the attitudes of a given administration while rarely offering a detailed or accurate picture of its likely policies.

The reason documents like the NSS are of limited import is simple enough: foreign and military policies aren’t set by documents but by power and ideology. Typically enough, the current U.S. approach to the world flows from struggles among representatives of contending interest groups, some of which, like the military-industrial complex (MIC), have a significant advantage in the fight. The weapons industry and its allies in the Pentagon and Congress wield a wide array of tools of influence, including tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions, more than 1,000 lobbyists, and jobs tied to military-related facilities in the states and districts of key members of Congress. The MIC -- which my colleague Ben Freeman and I refer to in our new book as the trillion-dollar war machine -- also has considerable influence over the institutions that shape our view of the world, from the media to DC think tanks, Hollywood, the gaming industry, and our universities.

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Robert Lipsyte, Has Sports Been Trumped?

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[Note for TomDispatch Readers: Yes, 2025 is coming to an end and the world hardly seems cheerier than it did when I started TomDispatch not long after the 9/11 attacks on this country. Still, I certainly have kept at it all these years and, as we head into the unknown world of 2026 with You Know Who as president of the United States (again), I hope you’ll consider visiting our donation page and lending us a hand. And while I’m at it, let me remind you that if you want to give yourself (or anyone else) a book this Christmas, think about making it a copy of this site’s most recent Haymarket book (that I happen to have edited), TomDispatch regular Alfred McCoy’s remarkable new history, Cold War on Five Continents: A Global History of Empire and Espionage. I just got my own copy and, believe me, it’s quite something! Tom]

Once upon a time, the first thing I would have done on picking up the New York Times in the morning was turn to the sports page. And the last thing I would have done at night was watch or listen to a Mets or Knicks game as I was preparing for sleep. From the time I began going to Ebbets Field as a kid in the early 1950s to see the Brooklyn Dodgers, I was a fervent fan first of that team (and then of the Mets after the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1957), the New York (football) Giants, and somewhat later the New York Knicks basketball team. And honestly, for a kid from a distinctly nonreligious family, such fandom was probably as close as I ever got to a religious experience.

So, my question (to myself) now is: How in the world did I lose my — can I actually call it this? — faith in sports? Today, endless months pass and, unless I’m at my grandson’s house, I never see even a few moments of a ballgame of any sort. I no longer have the slightest idea what any of the New York teams have done or are doing this year and find I have no curiosity about it whatsoever — and if that isn’t a loss of faith, I don’t know what is!

And then, to my surprise, as I was leafing through the Times recently, a sports story caught my eye and I actually stopped to read it. The Mets, it reported, had lost — I had to look up his position — pitcher Edwin Díaz by offering him a mere (and indeed, let me italicize that!) three-year, $66 million dollar deal (yes again, $66 million!). Instead, he accepted a $69 million offer from the Dodgers. And the Times piece responded to that by suggesting that the Mets “have been curiously cautious in free agency.”

So, in the world I had long left behind, it wasn’t enough to offer a star $66 million. Of course, there were also significant sports salaries once upon a time. Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, at his peak in 1930, made $80,000 a year, the equivalent of about $1.7 million today. As it happens, though, baseball’s average salary at the moment tops $5 million, and the Mets led baseball with a $322.6 million payroll this year.

Now, mind you, I’m hardly against players being well paid. But I think those figures tell you something about a sports world that has entered another universe from the one most of the rest of us inhabit (if you leave aside this country’s 900-plus billionaires). And of course, we’re also in a world where the truly unmissable “sport” of any day is whatever President Donald Trump happens to be doing. And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular and former New York Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte, author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, offer his own goodbye to a sports world that, in so many ways, has entered another universe. Tom

A Farewell to Sports

Winning and Losing Are Not So Clear Anymore

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In the year I was born, 1938, the White Christian males who ruled the sports world considered their various games and pastimes as definers of righteousness, crucibles of character, and a preparation for dominance in business and war. Anyone who played but didn’t look like them was an interloper, clearly operating with some kind of performance enhancers.

That was made clear in a book published that very year by one of the premier sportswriters of his time, Paul Gallico. It was called Farewell to Sport and in it he declaimed that the “colored brother” was so good at boxing because he “is not nearly so sensible to pain as his White brother. He has a thick, hard skull and good hands”; that New York Yankee slugger Babe Ruth, “like all people who spring from what we call low origins… never had any inhibitions”; and that the reason basketball “appeals to the Hebrew… is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging, and general smart aleckness.”

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