A war against ourselves

August 10, 2026

NOAA satellite image of wildfire smoke across the Pacific Northwest, Saturday morning

How the spell of a con-man throttled American brains. At just the wrong time

When there’s no one with the will nor power to stop you, it’s remarkable what you can get away with.

•You can stage an insurrection based on a bright shining lie about voter fraud, and escape convictions after two impeachments because the party you control needs your loyal voters to say in power.

•You can survive felony convictions because enough voters cast their ballots for you anyway, forcing a state judge to find that an “unconditional discharge” was the only choice available without encroaching upon the powers of the federal executive branch which you head.

•You can target your critics and political foes with prosecution because the highest court in the land contorts the “balance of powers” with an embrace of the “unitary executive theory”—placing the U.S. Justice Department under the absolute control and whim of the presidency.

•You can pardon whomever you like. You can defy an act of Congress to turn over the Epstein files. You can rake in over a billion dollars a year marketing crypto and meme coins, while your Security & Exchange Commission discretely looks away.

•You can also affect the fate of the biosphere in a profound way. You can even be outed making a deal with oil companies to harvest a billion dollars in campaign cash for an understanding that you’ll go easy on fossil fuel regulation in exchange. And you’ll get elected anyway.

“A Point of Defiance” -Elephant Mountain basalt outcrop, Columbia National Wildlife Refuge northwest of Othello, WA

Future historians will have a lot to cover here. They’ll have to come up with their own social toxicology reports on how much of this excursion into autocracy is attributable to Trump’s insatiable power grabs and how much is due to the cultural grievance and gullibility of the voters that put him in power. Twice.

Unfortunately, the planet isn’t waiting for retrospection. When the Spokane fires broke out eight days ago the plume of smoke and embers jetting off the cliffs above the river was a harrowing reminder of the summer tinder box we live in. To be sure, there are factors other than climate change at work. In the Old Trails fire that jumped the river, it was arson. But it was only one of several destructive wildfires that destroyed property and homes and engulfed the region in dense smoke for the past week.

Most recent graph showing steady rise in atmospheric CO2 levels at NOAA’s Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii

This is becoming the new normal and it is line with the warnings and pleas of the vast majority of climate scientists, worldwide, since the 1980s. In the U.S. it is wildfires and a deepening drought resulting from the attrition of winter snowpacks in the western mountains. Across the Atlantic, scientists see the warming climate causing an increase in split jet streams that lead, in turn, to the number and longevity of deadly summer heatwaves afflicting much of Europe.

We know what the President’s answer is to all this. He dismisses climate change as a hoax, wildly suggesting it’s a scheme to weaken the U.S. for the benefit of other nations. He has twice pulled the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords. He regularly scoffs at green energy projects—“they’re a joke, they don’t work”—and preposterously, blames wind turbines for the deaths of whales. What he willfully ignores—and insists every one else ignore—is what the acclaimed writer and climate activist Bill McKibben and other expert observers recognize as a dramatic global shift toward solar and wind power. Despite Trumpism it is happening even here. I imagine most Americans would be surprised to learn that of the five states leading the nation in wind power generation that the top four—Texas, Oklahoma, Iowa and Kansas—are states Trump carried in the 2024 elections. Why? Because wind power makes economic sense.

Yet the incessant drumbeat from Trump’s pulpit (and in the codification of his budget priorities) is that green energy is a “hoax” and a “scam” and only distracts us from the need to “drill baby drill” for more oil.

It’s natural to re-examine our politics and political movements to try to make sense of this betrayal of reality. On the surface it is all about politics and political messaging and, especially in Trump’s reign, the success in the culture war of identifying scapegoats by color, race, creed, sexual orientation, and lack of sufficient fealty to the great one. And then expanding power, and instilling fear, based on that formula.

But there’s something deeper at work and, no surprise, the Russian-born journalist M. Gessen locates it in a New York Times essay. It’s spelled out in a piece published a week ago, “Trump is trying to force Americans to unlearn what we Know”

The opening line is a quote from the Russian experience with its Soviet Union: “We live in a country with an unpredictable past.”

From which Gessen takes inventory of the ways Trump’s regime has taken aim at the Smithsonian and other venerable curators of our past. The purpose is to reshape history in a form that glorifies the manifest destiny of white America and downplays its excesses and abuses. It’s a chillingly honest piece but, as usual with Gessen, one that hits the right nerve at the right time.

It’s a short walk from the denial and manipulation of history to the abuse of science and other disciplines that form the sinew our education systems. For the most part, we’ve been proud to do so and it’s no wonder that families around the world who can afford to do so, send their offspring to U.S. colleges and universities.

But what moment was our vaunted education system built for, if not for a moment like this one? When the very fabric of empiricism is being ripped to shreds?

I recall listening, a few years ago, to the distinguished Harvard scientist Andrew Knoll answering a question from physicist Lawrence Krauss about what lesson the Permian extinction—252 million years ago— holds for today’s planet. The basis of the question had to do with the massive amounts of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere by a massive Siberian outflow of lava (basalt—on a scale even larger than the Columbia River basalt flows of 16 million years ago). It was the carbon dioxide released into the Earth’s atmosphere by the Siberian lava flows that caused the Permian extinction.

Knoll’s answer was matter of fact.

“There’s a difference between the end of the Permian [period] and today in that our ecological crisis is the result of human activities. We can both understand the past and envision the future and, if we have a will to do so, we can do something about it.”

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—tjc