The Self-Sabotage Doctrine

Trump’s America torches its farmers, raids its firefighters, abandons its allies, and still finds time for a Navy boat parade.

Good morning! Donald Trump loves to brand himself a “winner.” But this week, America looks like a country sabotaging itself on every front, torpedoing its own farmers, raiding its own firefighters, abandoning its allies, and bankrupting its own economy. It’s less America First than America Self-Immolated.

China, the world’s biggest soybean buyer, has finally stopped even pretending to care about American farmers. They’ve booked zero U.S. soybeans for the fall quarter, the most important sales window of the year, and instead signed up record hauls from Argentina and Uruguay. That’s up to 10 million tons for 2025/26, twice last year’s levels.

U.S. farmers, already hammered by collapsing demand, are left with silos full of beans and a government bailout that never seems to reach the family farm. Trump boasts of “beating China,” but the scoreboard says Beijing 10, Midwest 0. South America cashes the checks while the heartland files bankruptcy papers.

Washington State is battling its largest wildfire of the year, the Bear Gulch blaze, which has scorched 9,000 acres since July. Fire crews, including Native volunteers from the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Walla Walla tribes, have been on the line for weeks. Their thanks? A raid by Border Patrol.

Yes, federal agents stormed the fire camp, lined up exhausted firefighters, demanded IDs, and arrested two of them, costing crews three critical hours while flames spread. This in blatant violation of rules barring enforcement at disaster sites. One firefighter put it plainly: “You risk your life out here to save the community… this is how they treat us.”

If you were looking for a metaphor for Trump’s America, here it is: ICE sabotaging firefighters while the forest burns.

Europe has stopped whispering and started shouting. Portuguese President Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa called Trump “objectively a Russian asset,” and he’s not wrong. Trump has made big threats of sanctions but delivered none, staged a “peace” summit in Alaska that gifted Putin a propaganda win, and left Ukraine and Europe out of the room.

While Kyiv endures its heaviest bombardment in years, Russian state TV mocks Trump as the “joker” who bluffs and never follows through. America’s credibility burns right alongside Ukrainian cities, and Trump looks less like a negotiator than an unpaid Kremlin intern.

In Gaza, Trump once promised he could end the war “in 24 hours.” What he actually delivered was permission for Netanyahu to “do whatever the hell he wants.” That means bombing, blockades, and atrocities, with famine growing and international recognition of Palestine gathering steam. Millions of Israelis are in the streets protesting Netanyahu, but Trump’s America is too busy playing the world’s worst enabler.

The rot at home is impossible to miss. Trump and his wellness guru RFK Jr. are so far gone into voodoo pseudoscience that they didn’t just drive out their own CDC director after barely a month on the job, they triggered a mass exodus of career staff along with her. Picture the nation’s top disease fighters stampeding for the exits while the Health Secretary claims he can diagnose mitochondrial problems by staring at kids in airports. If that’s not the definition of “we’re screwed,” I don’t know what is.

Even FEMA is in open mutiny, warning that under this regime the next hurricane could make Katrina look like a drizzle. And then there’s Senator Susan Collins, furrowing her brow and declaring herself “deeply concerned,” which is Republican code for I’ll clutch my pearls right up until I vote for it.

The economy isn’t doing much better. Bankruptcies this year already outpace the entire totals of 2021 and 2022 combined, which is saying something given those years weren’t exactly boom times. Caterpillar, a company so large it usually shrugs off global shocks, is openly admitting that Trump’s tariffs will cost them $600 million. If that’s what happens to the giants, you don’t want to know what’s happening to the mom-and-pop shops, unless you enjoy the smell of boarded-up storefronts.

And through it all, the Commander-in-Chief has found a priority that really matters: demanding the U.S. Navy stage a massive boat parade to lift his mood because the last Army parade didn’t flatter him enough. Forget economic collapse, forget institutional breakdown, this is government by toddler temper tantrum, except the toddler has nuclear codes and a fleet of destroyers to turn into his personal floating birthday party.

From soybeans to wildfires, from Kyiv to Gaza, from bankruptcies to boat parades, Trump’s America is a study in self-destruction. The farmers are broke, the firefighters are raided, the allies are abandoned, the kids are fed conspiracy theories, and the US Navy is reduced to a floating therapy session for one man’s ego.

It’s not just sabotage by Trump’s enemies. It’s sabotage from the inside, gleefully carried out by the man in charge. The question is no longer if America can survive three and a half more years of this, it’s more about whether America can survive four more weeks.

Marz and I will be heading out for a photo shoot today, he is almost back to his very handsome self.