1. United States
2. Texas
3. Letter

Today celebrates Presidents’ Day in America. So let’s see what we can find to celebrate in the current administration. Just for starters, Trump has violated his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution. He leads an administration that has killed two American citizens for exercising their First Amendment rights. It has harmed countless other people, while arresting grandmothers, five-year-olds, and many whose presence in this country, though undocumented, largely benefits America. It has fomented civil war in its citizenry with words and actions. It is attempting to subvert our most basic right as a citizen to vote. It has ignored court orders. Trampled on due process under the law. It uses the power of the federal government to threaten and punish. It has enriched the pockets of the president’s family and cronies with gobsmacking corruption. It has cozied up to dictators while publicly declaring democracy as we knew it around the world is dead. They will usher in a new golden age where might makes right. Oh, and there’s Epstein. Always Epstein. Is this what our Founding Fathers fought so hard for? To have a president they endowed with the trust of the country, who has benefited from a country led by democracy, to destroy it all for…what exactly? Luckily we as a country, and the world, finally see things as they are. Trump has no road back now. We are finished with him. Our global alliances, based not on trust, but mutual interest, are being reconfigured. He’s assured that a post-Trump world order won’t be dominated by the US. Our current president has dealt a serious blow to our power abroad. But the might-makes-right view he shares with Putin and Xi is not the wave of the future. The next generation of leaders on both sides of the Atlantic will work well together again. The world is done with his brand of destruction. A report the organizers of the Munich Security Conference released before this past week’s meeting summarized, “The world has entered a period of wrecking-ball politics. Sweeping destruction—rather than careful reforms and policy corrections—is the order of the day. The most prominent of those who promise to free their countries from the existing order’s constraints and rebuild stronger, more prosperous nations is the current US administration. As a result, more than 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction.” Trump is leading that destruction, the report says, but it’s not clear that he is clearing the ground for new policies that will secure Americans’ safety, prosperity, or freedom. It warns that Trump is building a world based on private transactions that privilege a global elite and replace international cooperation with a few powerful countries. “Ironically,” it says, “this would be a world that privileges the rich and powerful, not those who have placed their hopes in wrecking-ball politics.” German chancellor Friedrich Merz warned the Trump administration that “[t]he leadership claim of the U.S. is being challenged, perhaps already lost,” and that the world of great-power rivalry the U.S. is trying to set up will leave the U.S. alone and weakened. “ “We Germans know a world in which might makes right would be a dark place,” he said. “Our country has gone down this path in the 20th century until the bitter and dreadful end.” “The culture war of the MAGA movement is not ours,” Merz said. “Freedom of speech ends here with us when that speech is turned against human dignity and the constitution. And we don’t believe in tariffs and protectionism, but in free trade. We stand by climate agreements and the World Health Organization.” That’s the world-view the majority of America will share this day. The Trump presidency is one we’re already looking to turn the page on.