They Wrecked Eisenhower’s World

By Kevin D. Williamson

Friday, October 23, 2026

 

Sometimes, the god of metaphors smiles on a writer.

 

I am an Eisenhower man. I would write “an Eisenhower Republican,” but I am not a Republican, and Eisenhower Republicans went the way of Chelonoidis abingdonii many years ago. I once made the case for Eisenhower as a political role model in a cover story for National Review, the conservative magazine that was launched in opposition to Eisenhower-style Republican politics as much as in opposition to the New Deal and postwar progressivism. I like Ike.

 

The contrast between Dwight Eisenhower and Donald Trump—and his coterie of fools, cretins, incompetents, drunks and drug addicts, grifters, deviants, and seditionists—could not be sharper.

 

Before D-Day, Eisenhower quietly composed a handwritten note taking personal blame for the operation’s failure—he was smart enough to know that success was uncertain and that he might not be in a position to talk about it afterward; Donald Trump, a dog-ate-my-homework guy if ever there were one, takes personal responsibility for precisely nothing. Eisenhower led Allied forces to victory in World War II and at the time of his retirement outranked George Washington (who received a posthumous promotion in 1976), but he was buried in a standard-issue soldier’s coffin and lay in state with no decorations on his field jacket except his two distinguished service medals and the Legion of Merit; Trump is a draft-dodging coward currently hard at work building himself a triumphal arch like some kind of limp Caesar.  

 

Eisenhower was a mediocre student at West Point but excelled in math and history and had serious intellectual interests throughout his life, reading everything from the Greek and Roman classics to Carl von Clausewitz; Trump cannot write a grammatical sentence in his native language. Eisenhower was a first-rate card player; Trump went bankrupt, more than once, owning casinos. Eisenhower was a serious negotiator whose greatest diplomatic triumph came not during his presidency but during his military career, a miraculous exercise in “managing up” to keep Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt, and Charles de Gaulle more or less on the same page; Trump cannot get any meaningful legislation through a Congress controlled by his own party and instead tweets contemptuously at the Supreme Court when the justices remind him that, unlike de Gaulle, the U.S. president cannot quite rule by decree. Eisenhower was a model of duty and patience, spending 16 years as a major unable to win a promotion to higher rank in peacetime—the same number of years it took him to go from his next rank to being elected president of the United States; Trump has the discipline and attention span of a toddler who has just swallowed a two-pound bag of pure sugar. Eisenhower sent the 101^st Airborne to Little Rock against his own political interest in order to bring lawless segregationists to heel; Trump sent lawless masked homicidal goon squads to Minneapolis to terrorize the city for the crime of electing Democrats. Eisenhower was modest about his intellectual endowments but served ably as president of Columbia University; Trump thinks that he is an expert on artificial intelligence (and everything else) because he had an uncle who taught physics. Eisenhower presided over several budget surpluses and an average federal deficit of less than one-half of 1 percent of GDP; Trump’s first term saw the largest deficit ever recorded, which might be explained away as a COVID-era exigency, but his second term has seen deficits climbing back toward COVID levels and exceeding those of any year of the pre-COVID era going back to World War II.

 

And, of course, Eisenhower was served by able, patriotic subordinates who made the wrong call from time to time but were serious men: John Foster Dulles, Herbert Brownell Jr. (architect of the Civil Rights Act of 1957), Walter Bedell Smith, etc.; Trump is served by the likes of television personality Pete Hegseth, who cannot quite decide whether his next gig should be social-media influencer or president of these United States—and who may not understand at all that those are different jobs.

 

Hegseth, the hilariously incompetent, imbecilically strutting secretary of defense who imagines a testosterone-enhanced military that looks like something dreamt up by Tom of Finland, would like to be thought of as a great commander on the order of Eisenhower. To help him along in his preposterous Generalissimo Walter Mitty fantasy, he requested that a globe that had belonged to Eisenhower be moved to his office. (God knows what he planned to do with it.) The globe was old and fragile (like Hegseth’s boss) and the specialists who would normally handle relocating such an artifact had been furloughed by the administration Hegseth serves. But Hegseth imagines himself to be a man of action—though not in Iran, not in Ukraine, not really anywhere beyond the cushy wall-to-wall carpeting of his natural environment—and so he sent people who didn’t know what they were doing over to move the globe like a couple of college students loading up a secondhand sofa on a U-Haul, ripping a hole in the globe in the process.

 

Maybe Hegseth just wanted to make the map of the world more semiotically accurate by giving it a big ugly gash made by clumsy Americans.

 

The postwar global order was in no small part the creation of Dwight Eisenhower, who secured the U.S. victory in World War II, served as the first supreme commander of NATO, and helped to implement the Marshall Plan before expanding on it as president. Trump has helped to fan the flames of war in Europe by his shameful sucking up to Vladimir Putin, wrecked NATO by threatening repeatedly to invade the sovereign territory of another NATO country, and heedlessly gutted U.S. support of allies and programs serving U.S. interests around the world. As secretary of defense, Hegseth has helped to advance an approach to the world that veers from the criminal (kidnapping the Venezuelan dictator, murdering seafarers in the Caribbean and elsewhere) to the catastrophic (Iran, Ukraine, etc.) The Trump administration has been reduced to begging (“like a dog,” as Trump would say) Moscow to help the president buy a few midterm votes with the promise of cheap Russian diesel. Eisenhower helped to rebuild a world crippled by war and economic catastrophe; Trump et al. have undone the better part of a century’s work securing American interests and prosperity by bringing war, inflation, humiliation, and dishonor to everything they touch.

 

As a literary matter, it was practically inevitable that Hegseth would tear up Eisenhower’s globe. The god of metaphors is not mocked.