MARCH 30, 2026 – Participation in Saturday’s flagship “No Kings!” rally in St. Paul bolstered my faith in humanity—at least the local on-site version of it, where I could rub elbows with fellow Minnesotans who’d endured the most severe winter in collective memory, and I’m not referencing the weather. Today, however, when I read a Bloomberg opinion piece by Max Hastings, I found myself facing up a steep incline and in the path of an out-of-control dump truck hurtling toward me, us, America—the world order.
Max Hastings is a serious historian, and a military historian at that. His Inferno, which I read a couple of years ago, is one of the best surveys of World War II I’m likely to find. It’s just one of 30 books he’s written, not to mention countless papers and articles he—a journalist by training and background—has published over the decades.[1] In other words, he knows whereof he speaks: war, the fog of war, and the power of truth in war.
In today’s piece he spoke of America’s burgeoning fiasco in Iran and concomitant degradation of the truth. Every sentence was like a slice of history at work as a sliver of broken glass jabbing straight into my insteps as I walked mindfully through his cautionary essay. The venerable journalist-historian signaled trouble ahead for our country.
This latest warning is no surprise. We who’d had more than our fill of Trump by November 2020 could see four years later, the reign of chaos and corruption, tyranny and retribution that awaited the nation beginning January 20 of last year. The die was cast in the script of Project 2025. A day into the new regime, we already witnessed the Great Unraveling: in combination, Trump’s words, his actions, his appointments, his executive orders were the equivalent of an overloaded dump truck with a dummy at the wheel and a cement block on the gas pedal. This mess of things was headed downhill and gaining moment with each passing day.
On the foreign front alone, we saw . . . the “Fart of the Deal” over Ukraine, now all but abandoned by us, it seems; admiration for our adversaries, and contempt for our allies; murder on the high seas so many times it’s no longer news; the night-ops mission in Caracas, with a vacuum in its wake; Greenland—Greenland!—with a gaggle of sycophantic rightwing pundits and Republicans saying for the first time in their lives, “We absolutely must control Greenland—and grab it if need be,” simply because Trump said so—on a whim or a dare?—not realizing we’ve had a long-standing treaty in place to serve whatever security needs were now being conjured. Then came the war against Minnesota, and now, on a pretext of lies and falsehoods, Trump has up-ended the global order with his war on Iran.
The dump truck plunges faster down the hill toward catastrophe. Amidst this frightful scene, we’re told the dummy behind the wheel is “bored.” But of course: It’s a dummy, after all. At its breakneck speed the truck has obliterated . . . the truth in its path; what Max Hastings rightfully regards as a weapon greater than our now depleted munitions: “[B]elief in the truth of what the leader of the U.S. tells the world about the war, peace and everything else.”
He then writes:
The White House’s standard-bearers would say — privately at least — that we now live in a post-truth world; that their MAGA people neither expect to be told what is real by their leaders, nor mind that they are lied to. A defiant Florida woman told a British reporter last month: “Who cares if what Trump says is true?” She loved him anyway.
What now rises at the bottom of the hill is the ancient land of Persia; a barrier so large, so formidable, so inscrutable, it is by nature positioned to shatter . . . whatever remains of our self-made, home-grown myths of invincibility and exceptionalism. Will the “defiant Florida woman” still love Trump when American ground troops are forced to make the ultimate sacrifice?
How, exactly, will this Great American Catastrophe play out? For years the seeds have been sown, the grains have grown, the crops have been reaped, season upon season, generation upon generation. Plowed under are the lessons of our hubris, the culture of our excess, the blind faith in our power, the price of our arrogance, now mortgaged to the hilt of Hegseth’s sword.
Trump as one “screwed up” human being is nothing new nor is the ascension of a mad man to power. Once upon a time, a group of guys assembled a framework for self-governance (of propertied white men), a central objective of which was to restrain executive power, not monopolize it. Over the course of 200-plus years, that framework was expanded—grudgingly, here; against violent opposition, there—to include women and people of color. But so too was executive power broadened, often by intention borne of necessity, but also incrementally by the lack of vigilance and in the current era, by grand Congressional negligence and complicity.
Responsibility isn’t limited to those who hold office and authority. It rests too on us who were given the right but eschewed the duty to play our most powerful card, once it became universal: our vote. We had 1,001 excuses, some lame, some valid, for our failure to learn, to think, to pay attention, to consider the public good ahead of private gain, and ultimately, to vote responsibly. This despite the odds we faced: cumulative disparities; the use of big money to effectuate big manipulations of outcomes. In the end, a sizable majority of us bought into our own myths or didn’t care to participate in what was billed as democracy.
As the war drags on, so will Republican House and Senate prospects in November dim, slide and crash. Meanwhile, Trump and the people who bear direct responsibility but have thus far avoided accountability for the runaway dump truck, will be forced to recalibrate. But we must be prepared. Cornered beasts with fangs and who have no morality “except their own” are the most dangerous of political creatures. In any event, we’re a long way from the end of the story—just as we’re a long way from achieving war aims we can’t describe in a war we’ve picked without a compelling reason against a country we can’t easily defeat or control.
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© 2026 by Eric Nilsson
[1]He also happens to be among the alumni-fellows of the long-running annual fellowship program sponsored by the World Press Institute, of which for years I’ve been a board member.
2 Comments
I wholeheartedly agree with Mr Nilsson’s article. It states facts those of us (Canadians)who do not live in the US have known for centuries. But speaking the truth, speaking out, and protesting do not seem to have any effect on Trumpty-Dumpty or his power-happy psychotic minions. What will it take to remove him? Can the US and the rest of the world wait until the Mid-Term elections in November? That gives Trumpty 7+ more months to wreak havoc and amass more billions to his private off-shore (Russian) bank accounts. What can be done to remove him now before it is too late?
Shirley, all of us are grappling with the question you pose. A wrecking ball that never sleeps can do untold damage in seven months’ time.