The America (and really, the world) that Donald Trump is seeking to alter becomes, each day, darker, more distressing, more disorienting.
What he has been doing to immigrants in the U.S., for example, is wrenching, in its sense of cold disregard; its cruelty; and the short shrift, in countless instances, given to due process.
And of course, since September, there has been the utter absence of due process in the blowing up of boats in the Caribbean, and in the Eastern Pacific. And--no clear evidence provided to the country as to who has been killed in the more than twenty boat strikes. Were all of the 80-plus people killed drug couriers? Or, maybe, were only some of them?
Then, on December 1st, Trump, the putative drug fighter, gave--mystifyingly--a pardon to the former president of Honduras, convicted in the U.S. in 2024 of being part of an effort to smuggle drugs into America. In a June 2024 statement, Damian Williams, United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said this: "As the former two-term president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernandez had every opportunity to affect positive change for his country. Instead, Hernandez helped to facilitate the importation of an almost unfathomable 400 tons of cocaine to this country..." Hernandez was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. Now, Trump has set him free.
And: this past Thursday, the Trump administration released its 2025 National Security Strategy.
A December 5th New York Times story about the document had this headline: "Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy."
It secondary headline read: "President Trump’s new National Security Strategy describes a country
that is focused on doing business and reducing migration while avoiding
passing judgment on authoritarians."
Times reporter Anton Troianovski wrote this:
President
Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority
to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But
late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a
core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its
long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.
The document...describes a world in which
American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations —
even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the
long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for
freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration
while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them
as sources of cash.
“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the
nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or
other social change that differs widely from their traditions and
histories.”
Russia has already expressed its praise of the document's aims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/us/politics/trump-national-security-strategy.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7E8.PajL.itNpPdazgR7J&smid=url-share
