Trump ruins everything. He’s the biggest threat to the American people.

Russia. China. Iran. North Korea. Cuba. Drug smugglers. Illegal immigrants. National debt. Global pandemic. Inflation. Recession. Global warming. Rising energy prices.

There’s a lot out there to worry about these days. But nothing I’ve listed, or anything else, makes me more concerned than the President of the United States, Donald Trump. He’s the biggest threat both to Americans and the world at large.

Because Trump ruins everything. Like a cesspool King Midas, everything he touches turns to crap. I mean, everything.

In his first term, there were a few exceptions. Well, actually I can only think of one: Operation Warp Speed, which brought us vitally needed covid vaccines in record time.

Now, in his second term, it’s nonstop chaos, fraud, self-enrichment, wars, lies, deception, hatred, insults. No wonder his approval rating has sunk to a dismal 36%.

The only Americans who still like Trump are the most diehard MAGA faithful, you know, the people who thought, Right on, Dear Leader, when Trump said he could shoot someone on a New York street and his popularity wouldn’t drop.

The scary thing is, we’re only 14 months into Trump’s 48 month term of office.

If he keeps fucking things up at his current pace, our country is going to be on life support by January 2029 when, I pray to the God who I don’t believe in, a competent Democrat becomes our next president.

Of course, before that I’m looking forward to Democrats taking control of the House, and maybe even the Senate, in November’s midterm election.

That would raise my spirits considerably. And I need some spirit-raising.

I’m so damn old I was in high school when President Kennedy was assassinated. I was in college when Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were assassinated. I escaped the Vietnam War due to a high draft lottery number. I have memories of Watergate, hyperinflation, fallout shelters, two Iraq wars, 9/11, the economic meltdown, a million Covid deaths.

None of that affected me emotionally as much as Trump’s incompetent malevolence does.

It’s difficult to explain why, but here’s a try: every other president in my lifetime honored our Constitution and presidential tradition even when they acted badly. I could heartily disagree with Nixon, or Reagan, or George Bush. But I never thought that they only cared about their own self, rather than our country and the free world.

Meaning, while their policy decisions might disgust me, I understood that, by and large, they were doing things for conservative reasons. I didn’t worry that they were undermining the future of the United States. I saw these other presidents as simply being a reflection of a temporary rightward tilt in the electorate, which would be followed by a leftward tilt.

Trump is hugely more worrisome.

I can see him trashing our Constitution by using the military and other federal forces to crush dissent and cancel elections. I can see him using a nuclear weapon against an adversary on a whim. I can see him ignoring Supreme Court rulings that challenge his desire for unbridled presidential power. I can see him enriching himself and his cronies to an even greater extent than he already is.

Having been raised by a highly political mother, I’ve been closely following politics since I was 13 or so. In those 64 years (I’m 77 now), until Trump came along I always felt that however bad things were in our country, we would get through it — because we had a leader in the White House who genuinely cared about the American people.

I see no sign of genuine caring in Trump. I just see fake caring, words with no substance. Trump is like a selfish captain of a sinking ship who believes not in “women and children first,” but in ME FIRST.

Part of me thinks that our country has survived a Civil War, two world wars, horrible treatment of Blacks, a great depression, and myriad other crises, so we can survive the Age of Trump. But part of me thinks we won’t. And that’s a new thought for me, because I’ve always envisioned a brighter future for the United States.

That’s much harder for me to do with Trump as president.