We are now 80 years plus one day beyond Hiroshima and 80 years minus two days from Nagasaki, the “Little Boy” and “Fat Man” atomic bombs that killed more than 300,000 people within an instant to a year. We are roughly 80 years plus three months from the 200,000 killed in Berlin over a six-week period that avenged the 20 million killed in the Soviet Union over a five-year period.

Feckless leaders delivered these slaughters. A foursome of terrible men, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Josef Stalin, and Hideki Tojo, pushed Europe, Asia and North America (except Mexico) into the most brutal world war experienced before or since.

The excuses were land grabs, unfair trade, drive for resources, national and racial arrogance and urges to dominate. The four nations with the feckless leaders — Germany, Italy, Soviet Union and Japan — needed to even the score with European nations such as France, Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal that conducted their land grabs, resource monopolies and slaughters in previous years and centuries.

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Apparently some nations haven’t learned feckless leaders make outrageous decisions that turn into catastrophes for the rest of the world. World War II’s evidence on the effect of feckless leaders includes the holocaust; rape of Nanjing among many other places; and massive physical destruction of the Soviet Union, central Europe, Britain, Germany, much of colonized Asia and the south Pacific; and Japan, especially Tokyo, Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Let’s take our nation’s feckless leader, President Donald Trump, as a current example. For Trump, ant-hill sized slights turn into Mount Vesuvius explosions. He continues to re-litigate the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections. He won two out of three, but not by enough. He apparently won’t be satisfied until he reaches Russian President Vladimir Putin’s 87.28% majority in his 2024 fifth-term election victory.

Feckless Putin’s victory meant continued attempts at imperial conquests. Russians live with their president’s nationalist war against Ukraine with its 250,000 Russian battlefield deaths and 1 million Russian casualties including wounds. Ukraine gets to live with feckless Putin’s decisions too, suffering up to 70,000 deaths and 400,000 casualties. Putin wants Ukraine for its agriculture and mineral resources and to liberate its Russian-speakers so they can become part of the Russian Federation, a dressed-down name for Putin’s long-lost Imperial Russia. Do those excuses sound historically familiar?

Trump’s fecklessness shows up in his economic beliefs. He’s put a 39% tariff on Switzerland that will go into effect on the anniversary of Hiroshima plus one, Aug. 7. Trump’s irrational tariff program put a 50% tax on Brazilian goods because our president doesn’t like the judge overseeing the trial of Brazil’s former feckless president Jair Bolsonara who is on trial for running a coup to stay in power.

Feckless Bolsonara is famous for encouraging massive agriculture and resource expansion into Brazil’s Amazon region, burning and polluting millions of acres of wilderness that offer succor to the planet. His policies match Trump’s feckless “drill baby drill” and de-regulation of environmental protections that keep the nation’s drinking water and air at least somewhat clean enough.

Trump initially punched China’s feckless Chair Xi Jinping with 145% tariffs in April. China threw Trump a chop to the knees with a reciprocal 125%. Once the blood was wiped up, Trump lowered his tariff to 30% and China lowered its tariff to 10%. Trump set an Aug. 12 deadline for coming up with a deal, or Hiroshima 80 years plus six days.

Up to now, trade from China has reached a 16-year low. U.S. exports to China are trending down. U.S. importers are attempting to reduce the tariff effect by rerouting their supply chains. The import-export gap has closed, but economists find the shrinkage has occurred due to a large drop in imports, not expansion of U.S. exports.

Feckless Trump’s foreign policy, even though he’d prefer the term foreign deals, has failed to deliver the results he claimed would occur on his first day in office. Obviously his deal-making with Putin has gone nowhere but backward.

More feckless and horrible is his deal-making with the feckless-on-steroids leader of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. Trump says he needs to get food to Gazans because he’s seen starving children on television, as have most of us. Didn’t some courageous person in his administration tell him children were starving in Gaza before they appeared on television? Probably not. Feckless people don’t like courageous people around them.

Meanwhile, Netanyahu’s army spreads across Gaza, pushing Palestinians from one corner of their tiny territory to another. The soldiers are ostensibly searching for Hamas’ hostages. The reality is Netanyahu is collaborating with his most fanatical fellow feckless Israelis to grab Gaza as their territory. He has also institutionalized colonization into the West Bank. Television pictures show Israeli hostages are starving just like the Gazan peoples. Where’s the deal?

Somehow, we the world’s people have gotten ourselves into this mess. Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the last mess of this magnitude. What’s next for us?

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.