Melting Ice, Melting Empire

As ancient glaciers drip away in Cambridge, Trump flees to Scotland, democracy buckles, and America’s climate chickens come home to roast.

It’s been another scorching week on the spiraling death ride we call Earth, with heat domes broiling half the country, wildfires choking the other half, and ocean temperatures cooking up hurricane soup for the rest of the year. Amidst all this, Donald Trump is off for a “working trip” to Scotland, alternating between hacking up the Turnberry rough and hacking up trade deals that will do more for his personal golf empire than for any coherent economic policy.

The world, meanwhile, is not amused. European leaders, having been jerked around on Ukraine weapons shipments, slapped with tariffs, and treated to Trump’s usual word salad of lies and delusion, have had it. France and Italy are pointedly saying, “No thanks” to American arms deals. Germany and the UK have gone full post-Brexit buddy comedy, signing their first bilateral defense treaty since the end of World War II. Australia’s leadership is cozying up to China, not even bothering with the pretense of U.S. alignment anymore, while Brazil’s Lula is outright mocking Trump’s bizarre trade demands. Even Canada’s Prime Minister is cheerfully making plans to future-proof his economy without depending on his rapidly unhinging southern neighbor.

Trump, of course, is spinning fairy tales about NATO bending the knee, BRICS dissolving in fear, and Patriot missiles flowing freely to Ukraine, all while the actual Ukrainian government is on the phone thanking Emmanuel Macron, not Donald Trump, for meaningful military support. This is the kind of global humiliation that would shame a normal human being, but for Trump it’s just another day of delusion, one golf swing away from reality.

And while Trump chases imaginary trade deals and sues anyone who crosses him, the American public seems to be waking up, or at least getting queasy. His approval ratings are tumbling, even among the usual pollsters who fluffed his numbers. Fresh polling shows him scraping along in the low forties, some even worse, while Democrats lead generically for the first time in months. His fixer Pam Bondi is circling the drain with 60% disapproval, and no amount of Fox News babble seems to be plugging the hole. New revelations about his behavior at teen beauty pageants, his Epstein connections, and his increasingly bizarre public appearances, like calling Japan’s Prime Minister “Mr. Japan” while doing racist voices, are shredding the last vestiges of the strongman myth. Even his allies are starting to look sideways as lawsuits pile up, court losses mount, and the walls close in. The international stage may be abandoning him, but back home, the American people appear to be following suit, trading the red hat for buyer’s remorse.

Meanwhile, the flood crisis in Texas continues to expose the country’s crumbling disaster response infrastructure. The Hill Country floods, which left hundreds initially missing, have thankfully seen search and rescue teams, some from south of the border, reduce that number down to just three. Yet the death toll remains staggering, over 100 confirmed dead in Kerrville alone, though Texas Governor Greg Abbott can’t even keep his own numbers straight. One thing is clear: as climate disasters escalate, we are governed by people who are more interested in press conference optics than in climate mitigation or disaster preparedness. It would be easier to stomach if they weren’t simultaneously gutting FEMA’s BRIC program, which was literally designed to strengthen communities before disasters strike.

And as the floodwaters recede, the grift surges. Trump is posturing as a grand truth-teller by demanding the release of Epstein grand jury testimony, hoping it will distract his increasingly agitated base from the glaring fact that his own name is threaded throughout Epstein’s orbit. MAGA diehards are reluctantly waking up to the reality that Trump is not, in fact, the hero who will “expose the cabal” but just another oily billionaire who partied in the same circles. But in true Trump fashion, rather than face the music, he’s filing lawsuits against Rupert Murdoch, throwing tantrums on Truth Social, and jetting off to Scotland for a few rounds of golf while pretending to conduct diplomacy.

And all this unfolds while ancient ice, ice that has endured for 1.5 million years, is being melted in Cambridge to decode the mysteries of the Mid-Pleistocene Transition, because the only hope of understanding how to survive our self-inflicted climate doom lies frozen in the past. Perhaps those ancient ice cores will whisper some forgotten survival trick. Though given our current trajectory, it might as well be Morse code for “you people are idiots.” But hope springs eternal, and with my body temperature finally back under 100 degrees, I’ll be finishing up my flu-delayed climate crisis essay this weekend. Consider this your warning: we’ll be diving headfirst into the uncomfortable truths about what’s coming for this planet, and who’s to blame for accelerating it.

In short: the planet is on fire, the rich are golfing, democracy is circling the drain, and we’re all stuck in a gaslit rerun of the worst reality show imaginable. Onward to Scotland, onward to grift, onward to extinction. Unless, of course, we fight like hell to change course, because nobody else is coming to save us.