Category: Columnists

As we approach the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, I can’t help recalling my 1999 visit to the Central Asian republic of Turkmenistan, whose dictator had a fetish for white marble architecture decorated with gold.

As I drove around the dusty capital of Ashgabat, it was impossible to escape Saparmurad Niyazov’s face.

It was emblazoned on banners hanging from government buildings and appeared on every denomination of paper currency. Statues of the dictator (I learned there were more than 2,200 of them in a country of 4.2 million people) loomed all around the city. The oil fields of this desert backwater funded Niyazov’s whims. Much of the country’s budget went into his private slush fund — all while he slashed resources for healthcare and renamed the months of January and April after himself and his mother.

What sticks out most vividly among my memories, as President Donald Trump turns our nation’s Semiquincentennial into a celebration of himself — festooning government buildings with huge banners of his face and holding a political rally on the mall Wednesday to kick off July Fourth events — is Niyazov’s arch.

The three-legged arch, sitting in the center of Ashgabat, supported an observation tower that, at 226 feet, soared higher than the nearby presidential palace. The structure was topped by a 36-foot gold plated statue of the Asian potentate that rotated constantly to face the sun. Perhaps if the planned 250-foot high “Arch de Trump” ever gets built, and blocks the view of Arlington National Cemetery, the face on the gold winged figure atop the memorial will look familiar.

It seems all dictators and wannabes have the same instincts: to build grandiose monuments of marble and gold, the bigger the better, in order to impress their subjects with their magnificence. Back in Ashgabat all that seemed bizarrely amusing. Whoever thought it could happen here?

Instead of honoring the country’s founding values and documents in this year’s celebrations, Trump is performing like a wannabe Niyazov of Turkmenistan.

The main point of the Declaration of Independence was that governments “derive their just powers from the consent of the governed,” i.e., the people. The 13 colonies were quitting the British Empire because they refused to submit to a monarch who tried to rule by decree, rather than respect the elected representatives from the colonies.

Trump, who disdains any restraints on his powers and wants to rig election rules so they guarantee GOP victories, is turning the meaning of the Fourth of July on its head. I find it personally painful how this distortion has changed attitudes toward the United States all around the world.

For decades I’ve reported on the struggles of other countries to achieve the kind of free elections that most Americans have taken for granted for decades. I had the privilege of bearing witness to struggles for some form of democracy in the Soviet Union and China, in new post-Soviet nations, during the 1980s upheavals in the Philippines and South Korea, during the Arab Spring revolts, in post-Saddam Hussein Iraq, and during the post-Taliban interval in Afghanistan.

Those who struggled for the right to choose their leaders often paid a terrible price. More often than not, their struggles failed or have been reversed after brief periods of freedom.

Throughout those struggles, the U.S. election system was a lodestar – even though reformers abroad may have opposed specific U.S. foreign policies or the U.S. exercise of overweening power. That admiration was especially evident in the ’80s and ’90s inside communist countries that were trying to break away from their past.

Russians listened to Voice of America (now nearly shuttered by Trump) and would eagerly query me about U.S. politics on my yearly visits to Moscow during those decades.

In 1989, I shadowed then-President of the Soviet Republic of Russia Boris Yeltsin for a day when he visited the room where the Declaration of Independence was adopted inside Independence Hall. He asked the National Park ranger how the American colonies apportioned power between states and central government after independence. I realized only later that he was preparing to take Russia out of the Soviet Union and wanted tips on how the Founding Fathers managed their exit from the British Empire.

In May 1989, Chinese students erected a 33-foot-tall Goddess of Democracy statue in Tiananmen Square inspired by the Statue of Liberty. I was in Poland at the time, observing that country’s first free parliamentary elections on June 5 that were won by Lech Walesa’s Solidarity movement. But on June 4, I watched with horror on television, along with Polish colleagues, as the Chinese army sent tanks into Tiananmen Square.

Yet, despite hundreds to thousands of deaths (the exact figure is still unknown), Chinese democrats didn’t give up. In the 1990s, I reported on their efforts to press the central government to permit village, and then town, elections. I interviewed law students at top universities who traveled to small villages to instruct peasants on their rights according to Chinese laws that were ignored by officials.

This progress has been totally reversed by China’s hard-line dictator Xi Jinping, who also crushed democratic institutions in once autonomous Hong Kong. But as recently as 2023, it was inspiring to hear Hong Kong high schoolers, who were protesting the ongoing crackdown by Beijing, recite from memory their rights under law as they had learned in civics classes. Since then, such classes have been banned, and students must memorize rote lessons on “patriotic education” or “Xi Jinping thought.”

It saddens me now to hear self-exiled Russian liberals or Hong Kong democrats or visiting Chinese who once worked for some form of democracy at home, express shock at Trump’s attacks on America’s democratic institutions and efforts to rig elections. Repeatedly, I get the same questions expressed with genuine bewilderment: Why isn’t it possible to stop him from doing this? How is it possible that this can happen in the United States?

Ukrainians, who have fought bravely for more than four years to save their independence from Vladimir Putin’s imperialism, ask me how a U.S. president can back a dictator who hates the West, and wants to restore the Soviet empire. As Independence Day approaches, POTUS continues to ignore the parallel between Ukraine’s courageous struggle for freedom and ours long ago against the imperial British.

Europeans have given up on Trump, and I understand why, having watched Vice President JD Vance at the 2025 Munich Security Conference praise far right, neo-Nazi parties and demean Europe’s democracies. Trump, Elon Musk, and other MAGA acolytes continue to support extremist Europeans whose values would make the Founding Fathers gag.

So it isn’t surprising that a new Pew Research Center poll reveals a steep decline in the popularity of the United States worldwide, especially over the past year. Only a median of 37% of adults polled across 36 countries hold a favorable opinion of our nation. Only 23% express confidence in Trump’s leadership of world affairs, ranking him behind Putin and Xi.

But what is even more striking is that only 39% believe the U.S. government respects the personal freedoms of its own citizens. This is how the world now views a country that was once seen as a beacon of democracy.

During July Fourth celebrations across the country, in places far away from Trump’s pollution of the capital, I hope Americans will reflect on what the Founding Fathers bequeathed to us 250 years ago. For inspiration, reread the Declaration of Independence and brainstorm with friends, colleagues, and family on how to prevent the president from desecrating its principles at the polls come November.

“You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” That maxim is often attributed to Abraham Lincoln, but it’s occasionally credited to the great American circus showman P.T. Barnum. It has special relevance when applied to Donald Trump, who has outdone Barnum in self-promotion.

The president has had astonishing success in fooling some of the people all the time, from his foundational lie that the 2020 election was stolen through his daily blast of falsehoods about everything from the economy to the financing of his ballroom.

Yet, with his blatant efforts to bamboozle all the people about his Iran deal, Trump may have finally reached the point where most Americans realize he is a fraud.

For starters, Trump’s claim that he has reached a “Great Deal [that] will bring Peace and Security to the whole Region” is flat out fraudulent. The Iran war has laid bare the incompetence of a U.S. leader who assumes that force alone produces victory.

The U.S. and Israel may have destroyed much of Iran’s military, but Tehran has denied them a geopolitical win, which all the world’s leaders (except for Trump) recognize.

And most Americans will soon see this for themselves.

Until the U.S. joined Israel in the February attack on Iran, Tehran’s religious and military leaders had never tried to close the Strait of Hormuz for fear of arousing American wrath. But after Trump openly called for regime change, they had nothing to lose.

Despite its military losses, Iran has proved (as has Ukraine) that a smaller country using unconventional means (drones, mines, a willingness to absorb pain) can hold off a superpower.

Moreover, Tehran is still insisting it will charge ships fees for transiting the strait after the 60-day ceasefire extension expires, contrary to Trump’s claim that the strait will be “toll free.” And the world knows that, if pushed, Tehran can close the strait again.

Trump now looks like a chump.

He has alienated Mideast allies, including Gulf states, which took the brunt of Iran’s military revenge. He has encouraged America’s adversaries, including Russia and China, by revealing his lack of any long-term strategy.

Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping had only to watch as the U.S. military squandered huge numbers of precious missiles against Iranian drones, leaving them in such short supply that the U.S. military is exposed in the Indo-Pacific.

Moscow can only toast Trump’s blindness, as the U.S. cancels promised sales of mid- and long-range missiles to Europe for defense against Russia and to pass on to Ukraine. This has left Ukrainians defenseless against Russia’s rain of cruise missiles on civilians — and on a thousand-year center of Orthodox Christianity, the Kyiv Pechersk Lavra monastery and its golden-domed Dormition Cathedral.

Not a word of protest by Trump or MAGA’s white Christian nationalists who admire Putin’s religiosity. Instead, POTUS has bizarrely praised Putin’s help with Iran. Could he possibly be referring to Moscow’s sharing of intelligence on U.S. targets with Tehran?

But never mind. Let’s get to the document Trump signed electronically on Sunday. It was not a peace deal. Rather, it was a so-called Memorandum of Understanding — “about a page and half … a very general document,” according to Vice President JD Vance.

Contrary to Trump’s grandiose claims, this memorandum kicks all the main questions about dismantling Iran’s nuclear program down the road to future negotiations over the next 60 days.

By keeping the document secret at least until Friday, the president is relentlessly trying to frame his defeat as an astounding victory in hopes this will shape the thinking of the MAGA faithful.

From Trump’s own words, however, and those of his henchmen, it’s already clear he has abandoned most of the stated goals of this war.

Let’s look at what we already know.

1. There will be no regime change, as POTUS called for on the opening day of the war, urging the Iranians to rise up. Trump now bizarrely calls Iran’s new leadership pragmatists in a New York Times interview, labeling them “smarter” and more “rational” than those who were assassinated. Yet the Revolutionary Guard’s military commanders now running the show are more hardline and more confident about defying the U.S. president.

2. As so far revealed, the negotiating framework to end Iran’s nuclear program sounds no better than President Barack Obama’s 2015 agreement. POTUS bragged in the Times that the agreement would ensure Iran “cannot develop or purchase a nuclear weapon.” But Tehran has asserted for decades that it would not do so and made the same pledge on the first page of Obama’s deal, known as the JCPOA.

Although Trump promised to eliminate Iran’s nuclear program entirely, he appears to have backtracked significantly, now saying that Iran “can never go beyond a certain amount” of enrichment that could be used for military purposes. Again, this echoes the JCPOA, which limited enrichment to 3.67%, an amount that can be used in power reactors but not for a bomb.

As for how long Iran would have to limit enrichment, Trump hinted that he might settle for a 15-year suspension, which is the same time limit the JCPOA required. (But in a contradiction, he said the limit would be “forever,” although there is no sign Tehran would agree to this.)

If POTUS hadn’t pulled out of the JCPOA in 2015, the 15 years would have extended until 2030, and Iran would now have no highly enriched uranium.

The flaw in the JCPOA was the 15-year sunset, after which Iran could have restarted enrichment, but Trump seems headed toward a similar limitation.

As for the 11.5 tons of enriched uranium Iran produced since Trump junked the JCPOA — including a half ton of nearly bomb-grade nuclear fuel — the president has talked about reducing its purity level (known as downblending), possibly inside Iran. A far cry from previous demands for removing it entirely.

In the Obama deal, 97% of Iran’s stockpile was removed outside the country to Russia. No sign that Trump’s deal will do as well.

Moreover, the joint Israel/U.S. 12-day war against Iran in 2025 had buried Iran’s enriched uranium, and as Trump has recently admitted, U.S. satellites could see if the Iranians tried to remove it. Negotiations in February, mediated by Oman, were reportedly headed toward a better deal than Trump will ever achieve, if he achieves any deal at all.

Trump killed those talks by starting the war.

So, if you parse Trump’s own admissions, there was no need for his four-month war, which has cost America 13 dead and hundreds of billions of dollars — not to mention 3,000 Iranian dead and severe damage to the global economy.

Yet the outpouring of Trump lies this week designed to disguise his failure roll on.

While the president insists that Iran will get no economic benefits until a deal is concluded, it appears that Tehran will be able to immediately restart exporting oil during negotiations. And there are reports that other Gulf states such as the United Arab Emirates or Qatar may release Iranian funds held in their banks immediately, enabling Iran to benefit economically before any nuclear deal.

Moreover, a future Trump deal doesn’t cover an end to Iran’s missile buildup, or the end of support for proxies, sins for which Trump never stops excoriating Obama. Also, Israel and Hezbollah aren’t party to the deal and are likely to keep fighting.

When the details of Trump’s non-deal are revealed, he will try to paper over his failure with more prevarications. But as Barnum noted, “you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”

When I was a kid, my father told me something I’ve never forgotten. When you dislike someone, he said, it’s often because you see a part of them in yourself.

I’ve been thinking about Dad’s comment during the recent slugfest between Sen. John Fetterman (D, Pa.) and Graham Platner, the Democratic Senate nominee from Maine.

Noting Platner’s Nazi tattoo (since covered up) and reports about sexually themed messages he sent to several women, Fetterman called Platner a “bona fide dirtbag.” Platner fired back, labeling Fetterman an “a-hole” as well as a “stooge” for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

The two men have important political differences, especially about the Middle East. But here’s what they have in common: They’re both pretending to be rough-hewn, working-class guys.

In fact, both of them were born into significant family wealth. And so were almost all of America’s political leaders, past and present. We just don’t want to admit it.

Consider Andrew Jackson, supposedly our first common-man president. In high school, I learned that the first six presidents included four wealthy Virginia planters (Washington, Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe) and two prosperous New England lawyers (John Adams and his son, John Quincy Adams). But then came Jackson, who grew up in hardscrabble circumstances.

Not quite. Jackson was raised on a Carolina farm with a gristmill, a whiskey still, and enslaved laborers. To be sure, he lacked the elite pedigree of his predecessors. But he was hardly poor or working-class by the standards of his time.

Ditto for Abraham Lincoln. Supporters celebrated him as a “rail-splitter” who did hard agricultural work as a young man. Lincoln fed that myth, declaring that his childhood echoed the famously sad line in Thomas Gray’s poem “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”: “the short and simple annals of the poor.”

Again, not quite. When Lincoln was born in 1809, his father owned two farms and several town lots. Five years later, Thomas Lincoln was in the top 15% of taxpaying property owners in his rural Indiana community.

The only early American president who arguably came from poverty was Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson. At 14, Johnson was indentured to a local tailor. He ran away two years later and opened up his own tailor shop, where he earned enough to purchase a modest house.

Lyndon Baines Johnson (no relation to Andrew) liked to say that he had grown up poor, too. But his father owned a chauffeur-driven car, a newspaper, and the only hotel in Johnson City, Texas. And Johnson’s dad was elected to several terms in the state legislature, which was itself a mark of wealth: Lawmakers earned a nominal salary, so only well-to-do Texans could afford to serve.

Likewise, Ronald Reagan trumpeted his humble roots. “We didn’t live on the wrong side of the tracks, but we lived close enough that we could hear the whistles,” he quipped. But his family was rich enough to send him to college. And after Reagan graduated, his father was put in charge of a New Deal work-relief program in their Illinois town.

As historian Edward Pessen wrote in The Log Cabin Myth, refuting Reagan’s claims, anti-poverty programs “are not normally directed by men themselves poor.” Pessen’s 1984 book should be required reading for anyone who still believes that our leaders come from the working class. They just pretend to.

In that sense, Fetterman and Platner are the latest chapters in a story as old as America. In his 2022 Senate campaign, a TV ad for Fetterman called him a “blue-collar tough guy.” But Fetterman grew up in a “cushy” suburb (as he has called it) and received large payments from his parents during the 13 years he served as mayor of Braddock, Pa. The hoodie and shorts say working class. But the financials say something else.

Likewise, Platner recently told a Maine television station that he’s “a working-class guy that lives a working-class life.” But his father was a prominent local lawyer, and his grandfather was an architect who built a family estate modeled after chateaus in France. Platner briefly attended Hotchkiss, one of America’s most prestigious boarding schools. Yes, he has operated an oyster farm. But his biggest client was a restaurant owned by — wait for it — his mother.

So both of these guys are scions of privilege who present themselves as working folk. No wonder they don’t like each other. They are more alike than they would care to admit.

We want to believe that every American can become anything they wish — a senator, or even a president — if they try hard enough. That’s why we’re attracted to figures like Fetterman and Platner, who enact this dream for us. They play the part, and we play along. Maybe it’s time we woke up.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Whose America? Culture Wars in the Public Schools.”