- Trump’s relative isolationism: big frog in a small pond.
- Walking away from organized religion, for obvious reasons;
- Short takes on the White House ballroom, surging bigotry on the right, and Trump’s alignment with history’s worst dictators.
Count on Fareed Zakaria for some perspective.
Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria, 19 Dec 2025: Trump’s doctrine is ‘Make America Small Again’, subtitled “A hemispheric focus makes little sense for a global economic and military giant.”
If there is a slogan that could be attached to the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy, it is simple: Make America a Regional Power Again. The document begins by lambasting decades of American foreign policy that saw the United States as a global hegemon, tending to its interests around the world, promoting globalism, embracing global institutions and shouldering global burdens.
Instead we are told that the United States should define its interest much more narrowly. While the NSS concedes a few interests in Europe and Asia, it says America’s fundamental interest should be in its neighborhood, the Western Hemisphere, where it invokes the Monroe Doctrine and a “Trump Corollary” — which sounds a lot like the Roosevelt Corollary announced by President Teddy Roosevelt. Marco Rubio recently explained that “America First” means first paying attention to the region we live in.
It all sounds logical, but it isn’t. The U.S. is the most powerful country in history, and that power has actually grown in the last three decades, as its companies and technologies dominate the globe. It cannot limit itself to what is going on in its own backyard without massive consequences, both for itself and the world.
I suspect this derives from a MAGA insularity that disregards everyone unlike their own kind, including half of Americans. Later in the piece:
What the Trump administration is proposing is not so different from what the isolationists proposed in the 1920s and 1930s: Stay out of European affairs and crack down on immigration. Indeed, then as now, skepticism of American engagement in the world went hand in hand with anti-immigration sentiment, as nativists worried that these aliens would not be able to assimilate and enacted massive restrictions on immigration. (The people who were unassimilable then were the Irish, Italians, Southern Europeans and Jews — all people who seem to have assimilated quite nicely.)
The parenthesized comment is key, not just because many of my own ancestors were Irish. Conservatives always need some group to hate, and they never seem to learn from history.
Trump would rather be a big frog in a small pond, than a co-equal frog with others in the large pond of the entire planet. Thus his concerns about Canada, Greenland, now Venezuela and even Cuba, and his disinterest in Ukraine and Taiwan.
This is in contrast to the pattern of global history over the past 80 years, as described by Heather Cox Richardson and others.
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Lately there are articles claiming a resurgence of religious attendance in America, and there are articles like this one that lay out data to reject that claim. Is this all about people seeing what they want to see?
Hemant Mehta, Friendly Atheist, 20 Dec 2025: The real reasons Americans continue walking away from organized religion, subtitled “From anti-LGBTQ teachings to clergy abuse scandals, new research explains the collapse of religious loyalty in the U.S.”
The subtitle suggests a lot, but taking the big picture, I would say that it’s inevitable that religious faith — not just belief in supernatural claims, but support of one’s local religion — are bound to fade as humanity becomes more and more interconnected, as humanity learns more and more about the world as it actually is. Religion is nothing if not parochial. And the world, if we are to survive, must become less parochial. But let’s see what Hemant says.
We already know that roughly a third of Americans are religiously unaffiliated. (I recently posted about how a supposed “religious revival” isn’t seen in the data.) That raises another interesting question, though: Why are people leaving the religion in which they were raised?
When the research group PRRI looked into that question in early 2024, their answers boiled down to logic, anti-LGBTQ bigotry, clergy sex abuse scandals, and the toll it takes on their mental health.
Bottom line:
PRRI found that 63% of “Nones” said they left their faith because they come to their senses and just stop believing all that nonsense.
Self-aware people who have an intuitive understanding of human nature and how the world works, understand how religious myths came into being and thrived for so many hundreds and thousands of years, based on nothing but stories told over and over from generation to generation, through any number of translations and selective editings. The article goes on with several graphs and breakdowns of the reasons why people leave their religions, or identify as “nones.”
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Short takes.
- Salon, Amanda Marcotte, 19 Dec 2025: The White House ballroom will never be built, subtitled “Trump can’t focus long enough, even on his $400 million passion project”
- “The whole thing is a too-perfect symbol of Trump’s second administration: They are very good at breaking things, but they don’t know how to create anything of value.”
- As I’ve said, Republicans are good at destroying things that were built by better people before them.
- NY Times, 29 Dec 2025: Ramaswamy Challenges Conservatives on Surging Bigotry on the Right, subtitled “The leading Republican candidate for Ohio governor is calling out his party for rising intolerance, including against Indian American immigrants and their children, like him.”
- Slate, Paul Finkelman, 20 Dec 2025: Trump Now Shares One More Thing in Common With History’s Worst Dictators
- That is, naming things after himself, this week the Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts.
- This salient comment: “Weirdly, the board of the center, mostly picked by President Donald Trump, does not seem to understand that a “memorial” center is named for someone who is deceased, and thus the new name implies that Trump is dead.”
- Yet here is Trump today, still claiming 800% reductions in drug prices.
