Trump Does Rule the World. And We Might Not Survive Him.

16 months into Trump 2.0, we have disease, poverty, war, and terror. He and his family have plundered the globe for cash, and some Americans think he's doing a great job. What's wrong with them?

By now there is a settled etiquette of looking away. The dinner-party version is “I have stopped reading the news.” The therapy version is “boundaries.” The social-media version is the algorithm pruned of politics. The country has agreed to a kind of national pretending. What follows is what we are pretending not to see.

Picture the scene at Mar-a-Lago on the night of January 2, 2026. The white-and-gold ballroom is humming with the usual mix of hedge fund princelings, OAN talent, and Florida divorcees in Oscar de la Renta. Out by the pool, the president is being briefed on the precise minute his Delta Force commandos will fast-rope onto a Caracas compound to extract a sitting head of state. He approved the operation before Christmas. By 4:30 the next morning Nicolás Maduro, the Venezuelan dictator who once danced at his own televised rallies, will be on a plane bound for Manhattan federal court. About seventy-five people will die in the process. Trump will tell the cameras the United S…