Author: Tom Engelhardt

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I don’t know why people (including Karen Greenberg today) get so down on Donald Trump about women when he’s such a pussycat of a guy. You remember, right? When he was discussing his failed attempt to seduce a married woman (“I did try and fuck her. She was married,” he read more

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What Planet Are We On? How Did I End Up Living in Donald Trump’s Suicidal America? By Tom Engelhardt

As 2026 begins, what a strange planet we find ourselves on. The two great empires of my youth, the Soviet Union (now Russia) and my own country, are clearly experiencing some version of imperial decline, even if Vladimir Putin is acting otherwise in Ukraine (as is Donald Trump in his own strange fashion in the read more

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Every now and then, I try to imagine telling my dead parents about — yes! — President Donald Trump (twice, no less!). They died long enough ago that, though they, too, lived in New York City, I’m not sure they would have known who he was in his pre-presidential days. Still, to anyone of their generation, such a president would have been literally inconceivable. read more

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Only recently, the Trump administration released its 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS), its look at global “security” at this very moment. As it happens, that document’s view of our planet right now was missing read more

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Once upon a time, the first thing I would have done on picking up the New York Times in the morning was turn to the sports page. And the last thing I would have done at night was watch or listen to a Mets or Knicks game as I was preparing for sleep. From the time I began going to Ebbets Field as a kid in the early 1950s to see the Brooklyn Dodgers, I was a fervent read more

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Speak of the devil! Or do I mean give Pete Hegseth credit? Once upon a distant time, today’s secretary of defense — sorry, my mistake! Secretary of war (and more and more read more

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Hold on a minute! I’ll get to this introduction to TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon’s latest superb piece as soon as I take the garbage down to the basement. Oh, wait, I can’t carry a Somali (no less congressional representative Ilhan Omar!) even to the elevator read more

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How inconvenient! What in the world was the New York Times thinking about when it assigned a man, Dylan Freedman, to help reporter Katie Rogers write a piece about the aging Donald Trump read more

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Climate-Change Summer or Nuclear Winter? A Child Today Is Being Born into the Slow-Motion Equivalent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki By Tom Engelhardt

What self-destructive creatures we turn out to be!

Can you even believe it? Only recently, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP30, met in Brazil for two weeks. While 194 countries were represented there, the historically greatest fossil-fuelizer on the planet, Donald Trump’s United States, was, of course, missing in action (for the read more

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Give the New York Post full credit. That paper seems to have invented the term “the Donroe Doctrine” for a front-page story it ran last January, based, of course, on that classic phrase for the historic expansion of U.S. power read more