There are two bright-red warning lights flashing right now on the dashboard of what's left of American democracy. While Donald Trump is hyper-aware of both of them, the media and most of our politicians are ignoring them.

They are War and Crash.

War

War is one of the principal instruments of power-grabs by strong-man governments, and Donald Trump isn't missing a beat. While hundreds of thousands of civilians in Syria right now haven't had any humanitarian aid since November of last year and are literally dying as you read these words, Trump wants to amp up his bombing of that country.

But the biggest threat may be an unnecessary (but short-term politically useful) war with North Korea or Iran.

The day of his State of the Union speech, Trump met with a group of newspaper editors, and apparently harkening back to George W. Bush's strategy, talked about how useful a war could be for a politician who wants the entire nation to love him and unite around him. He said: "I would love to be able to bring back our country into a great form of unity. Without a major event where people pull together. That's hard to do."

Perhaps considering how Americans might react to such a statement from a president, he backtracked a bit in the next sentence: "But I would like to do it without that major event, because usually that major event is not a good thing."

Similarly, while campaigning in 1999, George W. Bush told his biographer, Mickey Herskowitz, that if he became president, he wouldn't make the mistake his father made in having only a short and limited war with Iraq; he'd have a big enough war so he'd become a "war-time president" with enough political capital to do things like privatize Social Security.

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