The Plot Against (Within) America

Plus "SNL" music (circa 1964 and 1967) and latest hot cartoons.

Greg Mitchell is the author of more than a dozen books (see link) and now writer/director of three award-winning films aired via PBS, including “Atomic Cover-up” and “Memorial Day Massacre” which are still up at PBS.org. Watch trailer for my acclaimed 2025 film “The Atomic Bowl.” Before all that, he was a longtime editor of the legendary Crawdaddy. At Blue Sky and Twitter: both as @gregmitch. You can still subscribe to this newsletter for FREE.

Never intended to start posting every day this month, but the Trump Constitutional Crisis seems to demand it (although I’ve also kept the music flowing).

So a longish excerpt today, some music, and then cartoons below.

Andrew Coyne, a columnist for the venerable Globe and Mail in Toronto has written some terrific things about Trump, but this one had special urgency:

I wonder if we have underestimated the gravity of the situation the democratic world faces…..The United States, under Mr. Trump, cannot be considered an idle bystander in the great twilight struggle between the democracies and the dictatorships, as it was in the 1930s. It is now on the side of the dictatorships.

The United States that openly threatens to invade Panama or Denmark – or to annex Canada – has not just stepped outside international law, including the basic Westphalian proscription of attempts to alter borders by force. Neither does a country that launches trade wars on a different country every day, including countries with which it has longstanding free trade treaties, reveal a simple lack of commitment to a rules-based approach to international trade. It is engaged in an all-out assault on both. It has become an outlaw state.

And in this regard, too, it is aligning itself with the dictatorships. That is what dictatorships do. It is intrinsic to their nature. Just as they refuse to be bound by law internally so they recognize no law in their dealings with other states.

It is not just that the democratic world can no longer count on America. It is that America, under Mr. Trump, is no longer necessarily part of the democratic world: neither fully democratic in its own affairs, nor committed to the welfare of other democracies, but hostile to both. If the international order is to be preserved, then, it will have to be preserved, in part, from the United States. Certainly it will have to be rebuilt without it.

Which means abandoning all attempts to propitiate Mr. Trump on military matters, in hopes of “keeping NATO together,” that is with the United States in it. Not only will that do nothing to strengthen NATO, an organization to which Mr. Trump is viscerally opposed, but our desire to strike a deal only invites him to use it against us, as an instrument of blackmail.

We need to face some unpleasant facts. NATO, as a transatlantic democratic alliance, is dead. Henceforth the defence of Europe will be the responsibility of Europe. (And the defence of Canada? Wedged as we are between the United States and Russia, with the North an increasingly tempting prize? We better get some allies, fast.)

The same applies to the World Trade Organization, or any of the other instruments of international co-operation developed after the Second World War, in which the United States played such a constructive part: they will have to be reconstituted, de jure or de facto, without it. We will need new defence alignments, different trade arrangements, the works.

That is not our choice. That is America’s, or at least the Trump administration’s. The democratic world must therefore regard and treat it as it does the other non-democracies: not as an ally to be consulted but as an adversary to be contained.

Nice Keith Richards’ cameo, but Paul McCartney is headlining the music part of overhyped “SNL” special tonight (after three surprise warmup shows in NYC this week), but as it happens, on this day in 1964 the shortlived group he was part of offered a few tunes in their second appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, including this little ditty (in a fun mashup):

Show opened with Simon & Carpenter barely getting through “Homeward Bound” but here is how I remember it from 1967 when I saw Paul and his old partner do it in Buffalo.

Really Coup Coup

Michael deAdder:

Steve Brodner: