Fabricating Dangers, Ignoring Real Threats
As the military descends needlessly on another American city, we cannot let Trump's angry delusions distract us from genuine crises
Once upon a time, America had presidents who assessed the real dangers facing the country, then developed ideas and policies in order to solve them. They had their own biases and blindspots; their plans were often wrong or didn’t work. But for most of our nation’s history, Americans could assume that the occupant of our White House was taking the job of governance seriously and genuinely wanted to confront real threats.
Not anymore.
Donald Trump operates on whim, ego, grievance, vengeance and sadism. He’s not looking to make things better for America. He’s looking to serve himself. That includes creating problems that don’t exist and ignoring real problems that don’t interest him.
It puts a city like Portland in jeopardy because he decided over the weekend to call it “war ravaged” and plan a military occupation to confront “domestic terrorists” and protect federal ICE facilities “under siege from attack by Antifa.”
Except that Oregon’s largest city is not ravaged by war. The city streets are quiet. There are no actions by protestors at federal facilities that local law enforcement cannot manage. And there is no such thing as a singular organization known as “Antifa.”
It would be laughable if it weren’t so dangerous, if it weren’t such a waste of time and energy, so anti-American to deploy the military to occupy another American city, so ugly and unconstitutional to pit our troops against peaceful American citizens.
This is the obnoxious way this so-called president of the United States talks about Portland: “I don’t know how anybody lives there. It’s amazing. It’s anarchy out there.”
This is a city of over 635,000 people. Trump’s untethered picture—yet another version of the “American carnage” he emphasized in his first inaugural address—is far from the reality of Portlanders who enjoy local cafes, farmers markets and other pleasant activities on safe city streets.
What are Oregonians to make of the White House authoritarian who tells his “Secretary of War” that he can employ “Full Force if needed”?
“There is no insurrection, there is no threat to national security, and there is no need for military troops in our major city,” Oregon’s Democratic Gov. Tina Kotek said Saturday. “We do not need or want federal troops in Oregon, stoking fear, creating conflict and, frankly, escalating a situation that is under control.”
Sunday night, the state of Oregon and the city of Portland filed suit to stop the military intrusion. “Our nation’s founders recognized that military rule—particularly by a remote authority indifferent to local needs—was incompatible with liberty and democracy,” their filing noted.
Of course, escalation is just what Trump wants. Clearly, he is looking for more ways to stoke fear and appear powerful—and distract the country from his refusal to release the Epstein files. Why wouldn’t Trump—who acts on whim, ego, grievance, vengeance and sadism—add the myth of Portland under siege to his growing list of manufactured troubles?
That list includes—just to name a few—the military occupation of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., both of which he claimed were out of control and besieged by violence despite evidence to the contrary, as well as his foolish trade war which has only inflated prices and harmed global alliances.
To what end? We see the pattern over and over: Invent a crisis, fake a solution, then claim victory so he can stroke his fragile ego. Note Trump’s bogus claim at the UN that he ended seven wars (it was not the first time he said it), which he ridiculously imagines entitles him to a Nobel Peace Prize.
But despite this ongoing onslaught of fantasies, we must challenge ourselves to not lose sight of the many real threats facing humanity. That effort just got harder as Trump’s Director of National Intelligence (DNI), Tulsi Gabbard, has shuttered the DNI’s Strategic Futures Group and stopped publication of its latest report.
Every four years, this unit is supposed to produce a comprehensive “Global Trends” report that chronicles the larger threats facing America and the globe, typically with a time horizon of several decades. This public document is meant to assist the intelligence community, the military, businesses and other organizations seeking to better understand and prepare for the serious challenges ahead.
The reason for deep-sixing the newest report? In short, it was deemed too political. In other words, it addressed real threats that the regime found politically inconvenient.
And I think I know why; I had the opportunity to contribute to the report in a small way. More on that later.
Here’s the bureaucratic language used by Gabbard’s office: “A draft of the 2025 Global Trends report was carefully reviewed by D.N.I. Gabbard’s team and found to violate professional analytic tradecraft standards in an effort to propagate a political agenda that ran counter to all of the current president’s national security priorities.”
Uh-huh.
Consider the last one, published in 2021, entitled “Global Trends 2040.” It addressed critical threats such as climate change, aging populations, mass migration, rising nationalism and polarization, deepening inequality, failed international cooperation. The analysis was broad and designed to help guide public policy decision-making.
“Trends in demographics and human development, environment, economics, and technology are laying the foundation and constructing the bounds of our future world,” it began. “In some areas, these trends are becoming more intense, such as changes in our climate, the concentration of people in urban areas, and the emergence of new technologies.”
It did not avoid hard problems or strictly serve the interests of powerful elites. It sought to provide big-picture analysis, without fear or favor. For example:
Large segments of the global population are becoming wary of institutions and governments that they see as unwilling or unable to address their needs…At the state level, the relationships between societies and their governments in every region are likely to face persistent strains and tensions because of a growing mismatch between what publics need and expect and what governments can and will deliver. Populations in every region are increasingly equipped with the tools, capacity, and incentive to agitate for their preferred social and political goals and to place more demands on their governments to find solutions.
And here is how that 2021 report introduced the factual threats emerging from climate change—a topic and policies that are treated as “a con job” by Trump and his regime that reduces everything to a political threat against its power. “In the environment, the physical effects of climate change are likely to intensify during the next two decades, especially in the 2030s,” the report summarized. It continued:
More extreme storms, droughts, and floods; melting glaciers and ice caps; and rising sea levels will accompany rising temperatures. The impact will disproportionately fall on the developing world and poorer regions and intersect with environmental degradation to create new vulnerabilities and exacerbate existing risks to economic prosperity, food, water, health, and energy security. Governments, societies, and the private sector are likely to expand adaptation and resilience measures to man-age existing threats, but these measures are unlikely to be evenly distributed, leaving some populations behind. Debates will grow over how and how quickly to reach net zero green-house gas emissions.
You get the idea. Serious engagement with real threats that will impact our world for decades. Not gaslighting. Not calling facts that are inconvenient a hoax. Not ignoring the global nature of our challenges nor pretending that problems contained within our borders or likely to reach our borders can be wished away by pretending they don’t exist.
These are the kind of assessments that Trump and his sycophantic miscreants are systematically stripping away. As if by eliminating knowledge and dulling thought, they can exert greater control.
Let’s see how that works our as regions across America face catastrophic storms or other major natural disasters; an increasingly ill-prepared and uninformed intelligence community faces a major (and real) terrorist attack; or public health officials struggle to respond to the next epidemic after the scientists and other experts have been replaced by anti-vaxxers and other crackpots.
Gregory F. Treverton, the chairman of the National Intelligence Council under President Barack Obama, was among those lamenting the axing of the report. “Obviously, they didn’t like it, didn’t find it necessary,” he told The New York Times. “Obviously, they don’t find much intelligence necessary.”
And while Gabbard’s office casts aspersions on the teams that prepared the report, I can tell you that I was one of several university professors who shared thoughts on the state of climate change, its potential impact in the coming decades and how to communicate about the deepening dangers.
That conversation was less than two hours, but it was enough to know that these federal employees were serious about their work and didn’t arrive with a political agenda. They were smart, thoughtful, sincere—and they genuinely came to listen. They made clear that they aimed to provide information and insights that could be helpful in shaping productive policy to confront our tumultuous world.
Just the kind of serious, non-partisan and professional work that Trump despises if it doesn’t serve his purposes.
But here’s the thing: This combination of pushing fake dangers and ignoring real threats demands each of us to keep clear about which is which.
That means speaking out when the Trump regime tries to persuade the public that there’s an emergency when there is none. It also means keeping clear and sharing what you know about the real dangers that beset us, even as we’re all bombarded with daily distractions.
That’s one of the ways we fight back. And that’s how we get through this with our sanity and capacity for rational thought intact.
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Truth is the first casualty of war…the corollary to that is data and facts are the first casualty of authoritarian power grabs. We cannot be silent on the threats. We the people cannot be buried in some fantasy reality that will leave us all exposed and unprepared individually and collectively. It is impossible to prepare for a major threat if it is ignored as if it does not exist.
“A draft of the 2025 Global Trends report was carefully reviewed by D.N.I. Gabbard’s team and found to violate professional analytic tradecraft standards in an effort to propagate a political agenda that ran counter to all of the current president’s national security priorities.” In other words: 2 + 2 = 5.