Time for the rest of the world to shut America out… and maybe down.

As much as Trump personifies the very worst of the U.S., the time is long overdue to break the news to you, America, that you are the balloon baby, you’re the soul-sucking, constantly attention-seeking, self-absorbed monstrous Id that won’t shut up and interprets everything as how it affects you.

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I had an interesting exchange a couple of days ago or so on Bluesky which was another reminder why certain white liberals, especially American ones, are infuriating and next to useless. No surprise that this individual ended up blocking me, which is her right, of course, and I block folks all the time on X. What struck me was her reasoning.

This person wrote a snarky line above an article, mentioning how Trump wanted to go to war against its “(former) ally, Canada.” I think she even had an eyeroll emoji or something. And I wrote in her replies that if Trump did so, I expected the smart, nice people in the States to stay home while we up north would have to reduce their number of stupid people.

This prompted the American to get defensive over their military and reply that those who ran it were not stupid and that the rank and file were often recruited from “poor and minority communities.”

I couldn’t believe what I was reading. There are Americans who can’t go five minutes without relentlessly proclaiming that their armed forces “are the best in the world,” but here was a bizarre new kind of defensiveness, a liberal defensiveness: You want to tell me the top brass are smart while conceding that an invasion against us would be stupid, and you also want to infantilize your ordinary soldiers as too dumb to realize the risks in joining up.

And you obviously also want to excuse them of any personal responsibility on the part of the military — from generals to grunts — if they attack a sovereign nation and long-time ally.

Which brings us to our problem. Trump was once wonderfully satirized as a huge balloon baby that went on tour in Europe, flown to jeers of laughter.

But as much as he personifies the very worst of the U.S., the time is long overdue to break the news to you, America, that you are the balloon baby, you’re the soul-sucking, constantly attention-seeking, self-absorbed monstrous Id that won’t shut up and interprets everything as how it affects you.

This same self-absorption was once on display with the British Empire and prompted an old joke the Brits know well, a newspaper headline that supposedly read, “Fog in Channel, Continent Cut off.”

It seems to be an attitude that Americans can’t shake, that despite showing the world the most horrific face of their character through a Felon-in-Chief, they are somehow still entitled to tell the world how to conduct its affairs. In late February, Michael Kimmage of the Wilson Institute offered a contradictory, muddled mess of a critique in Foreign Affairs, claiming, “Analysts often wrongly trace the origins of Trump’s foreign policy to the interwar years.”

Well, no, they don’t — not when the demagogue quotes Mussolini and keeps a book of Hitler speeches on his night table. Especially given that he uses the same autocratic tactics. Kimmage then makes the case that the root of Trumpism lies in a certain conservatism of the 1950s, which surprise! Just happens to be the subject of two of his books. And he’s still wrong for many reasons, not the least of which is that Trump has no ideology beyond criminal profit while borrowing whatever his moronic devotees want to hear. Just as Mussolini did.

But more to our point, Kimmage ends his column on this astonishingly delusional assertion: “But even in a world without a stable structure, the Trump administration can still use American power, alliances, and economic statecraft to defuse tension, minimize conflict, and furnish a baseline of cooperation among countries big and small. That could serve Trump’s wish to leave the United States better off at the end of his second term than it was at the beginning.”

Where to begin with this rubbish? It presumes a global influence that is not simply eroding by itself thanks to Trump’s buffoonery and loutishness but because nations in Europe and elsewhere still have their own agency and don’t want you anymore.

Trump has shown the terrifying flaw of dependency on the United States that Europe, and indeed Africa and Asia, can no longer afford. Because his word is worthless. It’s with good reason that Canada — now tired and bored with the threats and lies of the stars-and-stripe baby — intends to partner with Australia for an Arctic defense system. It’s with good reason that European nations are scrambling to find ways to have NATO without the U.S.

And they should. If cutting ties and even trade with America reduces dependency, that can only be a good thing.

What still annoys is the fact that Big Media betrays its phony liberalism as it pretends to cover Trump’s international misadventures. I don’t mean “phony liberalism” the way conservatives might sneer — I mean these media outlets have never been truly liberal in the first place.

I have seen story after story after story bemoaning the fall of USAID, an organization that is dirty up to its ears. While it might do some good, I know for a fact while reporting in Ethiopia on the Tigray war that it was used at least once as a front for U.S. intelligence, and as I’ve often reminded folks, director Samantha Power tried to brainstorm with staff on how to embarrass the Ethiopian government.

And yet you have to root around the Internet to find candid references to the fact that USAID has been involved for decades in skullduggery and attempts at regime change, such as in Bulgaria.

I’ve seen story after story bemoaning the fall of Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, treating these networks as if they are somehow hallowed public broadcasters like PBS — except they’re not. They were started as propaganda networks during the Second World War, continuing on through the Cold War. I once knew a reporter who worked for the VOA in Italy for years — he was bluntly open about how it was for propaganda messaging.

You can jump and down and shout all you like that these networks supposedly give the real news on what’s happening in authoritarian regimes and give platforms to political exiles, etc. and my response is: Okay, but why do you need to provide these services? Why do you need to vet them, edit them, broadcast them?

In my own experience, no one — and I do mean no one — was listening to the Voice of America as the Tigray People’s Liberation Front attacked Ethiopian federal forces in late 2020 and then laid waste to infrastructure and created thousands of homeless far beyond Tigray. Nor did it help that reporters who were shamelessly sympathetic to the TPLF tried to smear the VOA, claiming it backed the Ethiopian government. (As if any Ethiopian cared.)

In point of fact, Ethiopians listened and watched their own media — they didn’t need Washington’s perspective and outright resented it. And today, diaspora Ethiopians certainly don’t give a damn what the VOA has to say; they can monitor their own expatriate media outlets and ones based at home.

So, it is quite enlightening to watch any American sputter and claim, But these are needed, when the peoples of the world in Asia, Africa and South America can get along quite nicely without you. After all, aren’t you supposed to be about self-determination? Shouldn’t these peoples decide directly on their own stories to be reported? Shouldn’t they own and run their own media channels? Then why the hell are you sticking your nose in to shape their messages?

While there is a great deal of handwringing over how Democrats should respond to the darkening clouds of fascism — and they are failing spectacularly to rise to the moment — liberals haven’t even begun to figure out how their hypocrisy and condescension helped destroy America’s credibility.

They won’t take responsibility — and worse, they don’t even recognize — their role and active participation in keeping the Great Colonial Machine going. They expected it to run forever, especially those in Biden’s administration, and they can’t even see that there is a huge portion of the world beyond the States that hates them. There are Africans who love Trump’s plain speaking, who have forgotten his “shit-hole countries” remark and have no clue that this man used to bar Black people as residents of his buildings. They might not even care. Because to some, an open bigot is preferable to the creep who speaks out of both sides of his mouth, promises aid and strings you along, keeping you poor and dependent.

His fans in Africa will be disillusioned soon enough when they realize the full scope of his nihilistic white supremacist vision, one that comes for the minerals and steps over the bodies. But my anger is with sanctimonious liberals who have insisted that their nation’s involvement — whether welcome or not — is always benign. They’re simply neocolonialists of a different stripe.

Liberalism is not dead, but as it’s practiced today — more like performed — its exponents appear intellectually bankrupt. The brands in Europe that supposedly stand for protecting the weak leave a bitter taste as well. Having always backed Ukraine, I was buoyed by the fact that France’s Emmanuel Macron is still firm and tweeted out on the day I write this, “Once again last night, Russia showed that it sincerely does not want peace. Full support for the Ukrainian people.”

Now consider this: In the wake of some African nations telling France to get out their countries, Macron said back in January, “I think they forgot to say ‘thank you.’” Then he added, I say this for all the African governments who’ve not had the courage in the face of public opinion to bear it that none of them would be in a sovereign country today if the French army had not been deployed in this region.”

How is this much different from when Trump and Vance boorishly demanded that Zelensky thank them in front of live TV cameras?

I suspect for many Africans and Asians, they don’t see a difference. Because white liberals have misdiagnosed the age. They have leapt on Musk’s now infamous quote, “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Which reinforces the equally well-known Adam Serwer line, “The cruelty is the point.” But these liberals see a heroic clash between the selfishness and cruelty of Trumpism and the supposed empathy of liberals and Democrats.

White liberals have lost sympathy and support in Africa and Asia because they always had a ranking index for their compassion. And the whole world is wise to it now.

It’s been told over and over, We care about the nice, blonde, white people in Ukraine first. We care about the nice middle class Israeli hostages first, and we’ll even turn the English language into knots so we can avoid saying the IDF is bombing the shit out of Palestinians and committing genocide. We care about Black Africans only so far as regional terrorism can earn headlines, and it might interfere with shipping.

Why, Africans and Asians are entitled to ask, should we give a damn about how your democracy is collapsing when you actively interfered in our political affairs?

And you, America, your response to your own creeping fascism is not to give any care for how you might pose an urgent threat to other countries such as Panama and Canada — how people there feel and worry if they’ll have a country next year. No, you still stare at yourself in the mirror like a teenager searching for pimples, endlessly self-absorbed, and worry most about your image on the global stage. For crying out loud.

So, no, I fully endorse cutting trade and defense ties with you. If your lunatic of a leader sends in an army to capture Panama, I would cheer on a coalition of South American and European forces to wage war against you. Sure, it might lose, but it would hurt. If you try to annex my country, as others have noted, you will have an insurgency you could never imagine that will make Americans’ lives a living hell.

The fact that no one who used to be a “friend” and ally has talked to you like this before doesn’t make it any less true.

You still haven’t woken up to the fact that your growing fascism isn’t the ultimate climax of the nightmare. Other nations will not tolerate it forever, in the same way that you once demanded everybody gang up on Saddam Hussein, Gaddafi, the Ayatollah, and every other enemy of the week. And since your retired generals and think tank analysts like to speculate so much on “interventions,” I invite you to consider how far-fetched a coalition “intervening” in America really is now, given that the Felon-in-Chief keeps blathering away about taking places.

You’re not the nation of Normandy and Jonas Salk anymore. You’re the nation that fires its own veterans and puts an idiot in charge of health care who doesn’t believe in vaccines.

And you are definitely not in charge of the world. It’s high time you realized that.

Too bad that an oaf stuffing himself with McDonald’s on the Resolute Desk has to be the one to make it clear.