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 smuggling drugs to 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.
