A Superpower Commits Suicide and Fascism Triumphs Part 4
Introduction
The first three parts of this series I wrote after the 2024 US election to speculate on how quickly America would decline as a great power and just how dead American democracy would be after Trump got reelected. Part 4 is being written in early February 2025, a couple of weeks into Trump’s second “4” year term. It’s still early days but as it stands right now I’d say I was pretty spot on with what I guessed. I’m not trying to boast, policy plans like Agenda 47 and Project 2025 had been public talking points long before the election, and they made it very clear what the goals of Trump and his cronies would be when they retook the White House. It’s an indictment on the people who voted for Trump and didn’t know any of this would happen, since it was extremely obvious and they only had to look or pay any attention at all to learn this stuff.
I’ve read a lot of accounts of incompetent, corrupt, and malicious regimes reducing a great power to a shadow of its former self in history. It’s one thing to read it, it’s quite another to witness it happening. I’ll go into more detail below now that some of the exact contours of what is being done has become more clear, but the sheer speed at which the second Trump administration is either unwittingly or deliberately eroding America’s power and influence is both shocking and hilarious. The old adage of shooting oneself in the foot doesn’t quite capture the width and breadth of damage. A more appropriate metaphor would be shooting oneself in both arms and legs and then tripping neck first into a noose that’s also on fire.
Trump’s cabinet picks when he was inaugurated included a white supremacist and alcoholic TV personality to be secretary of defense, a dog murdering governor to head law enforcement agencies, a person who is basically a Russian asset to run US intelligence agencies, an anti-vax conspiracy theorist to manage public health, and a South African Nazi to head an advisory department whose sole purpose appears to be to fuck everything nine ways to Sunday. The kind of corruption and incompetence that Trump’s tenure in power will create will slowly help turn the US into an irrelevant backwater. All the while Trump promises a new American Golden Age replete with express mentions of manifest destiny and renewed imperial expansion. The eventual destruction of the US as a serious player by the Trump administration while they promise greatness through more explicit colonialism is probably connected in some psychologically incongruous way. If the reader is about to tell me that makes no sense, you’re right it doesn’t make sense, and that doesn’t matter. People in the aggregate are stupid and irrational. If aliens ever write a biography of the human species they should call it “If Only They Did Things That Made Sense.” I think people sometimes mistakenly think that those with power must be operating in a coldly calculating and rational mindset. That can be true, and those seeking power could have a carefully planned agenda. Agendas don’t have to make sense or be ideologically coherent, though, even to the people creating them. People can wield power with a ruthless rationality, they can also be consumed by nonsense. Sometimes both of those qualities can be present in the same person. There is no rule saying that people have to be consistent or intelligent to acquire and to keep power. So, it’s not at all surprising that people can outwardly promise to make a country great while they dismantle it with breathtaking speed (another possibility is that they were just using the language of American greatness while secretly wanting to do the opposite, because people can lie too).
As for the fate of American democracy, Trump’s administration apparently wants to break the Nazi’s record in 1933 for destroying an already shaky democratic system. Violating democratic norms, blatantly breaking the law, and engaging in flagrant corruption is not new for Trump. The speed and scale of the attacks on institutions and norms in January and February 2025 was rather astonishing however, as was the widespread chaos and confusion that was created. In case this isn’t obvious, attacking institutions and creating chaos is not the way to recapture a fictitious lost greatness. When this is being written it isn’t entirely clear how much foreign powers played a hand in either directly controlling members of the Trump administration or indirectly through the dissemination of misinformation and propaganda. Even if they played no part at all, anyone wishing for the downfall of America could not have asked for better.
Measles and Powdered Wigs are Making a Comeback Part 3, and Death to all Science
I’d like to repeat the point of how damaging the second Trump administration will be for global health. It was already bad enough in 2020 when Trump and his first admin completely botched the response to the COVID-19 pandemic and likely got hundreds of thousands of people killed that might otherwise have lived. The consequences of Trump’s second time in office could be even greater. Along with the attacks on basically every institution and function of government, Trump’s creatures also perpetuated and spread anti-vaccine conspiracy theories. It’s still not clear at the time of this writing, but an avowed anti-vax promoter might become the head of the Department of Health and Human Services. To say that this could be a disaster is an understatement. Vaccines, even with their flaws, might be one of the greatest achievements in human history. With so many other technologies and inventions in human history, the best that can be hoped for is that they achieve something good along with all the bad. Imagine something like human flight as just one example. The capacity to take people and cargo across the globe in a short time has revolutionized global society, and has helped connect the globe in ways unimaginable beforehand. All of which is good, but there is so much harm that is tied inextricably to the good. It would be a challenge to count all the people that have been killed by aircraft both in warfare and in accidents, not to mention the environmental cost. Vaccines are arguably one of humanity’s inventions that has done the most amount of good for the least amount of harm. To deliberately undermine or discontinue vaccine research or production because of baseless conspiracy theories is remarkably stupid. It would make Trump and his cabinet not only the stupidest people on the planet at the time, but contenders for the stupidest people to have ever lived.
Trump’s assault on public health and science as a discipline is not limited to vaccines, however. In the beginning weeks of Trump’s reign in 2025 he created widespread confusion by signing an executive order that eventually led to a brief halt in distributing federal funds for scientific grants. The point of this order (among others) was to try and eliminate all mentions of trans people in government agencies and even scientific papers being published by government workers. That in of itself is upsetting and alarming (and will be discussed more below). Trump and his cronies were so committed to their assault on trans people that they were willing to torpedo the entire system of federally sponsored scientific research. Even if this chaos is resolved and the machine of federal grants for research continues (something that is in no way guaranteed), immense damage has still been done. How much scientific research will not be done because people are afraid of upsetting our fascist overlords who don’t want to be reminded that diversity is a fact of life? How many people who would have come to the United States to pursue a career or collaborate in scientific endeavors will avoid the US because of government bigotry? Trump’s second time in power is the death nail for America as a scientific powerhouse. While the US government closes its eyes and ears to reality, the rest of the world will move on while they whistle past the graveyard of former American achievement.
Tariffs are a Tax on the Brain Part 2
As of this writing in early February 2025, the tariffs that would be placed on Canadian and Mexican imports had been delayed, while the tariffs on Chinese and many European imports were still in place. Even if Canadian and Mexican imports wind up never being imposed, the fact they were proposed at all is remarkably dimwitted. Many of Trump’s supporters tried to spin the threat of tariffs as a negotiating tactic to extract concessions, but the real outcome will be an economic downturn that was totally avoidable. It would be like the builders of the Titanic getting a warning about an iceberg on the maiden voyage a year in advance and the ship still crashes into it. I’m not a fan of capitalist economics, and the cycle of perpetual economic growth is literally killing us and the planet. While I don’t like capitalism I am writing this trapped in a capitalist system, and I’d prefer not to see an economic collapse because Trump and his sycophants were too stupid or too committed to avoid the iceberg.
From my current vantage point it’s unclear how bad the impact of the current and any future tariffs could be. It might range from slightly higher prices on a range of consumer goods that people grumble about but otherwise tolerate like all the other injustices that are foisted on working people. Or, as I said a moment ago, a recession, depression, or straight up economic collapse is not out of the question. As with everything else, Trump’s second chance at power brought nothing but chaos, confusion, and fear. What’s so disconcerting to me is how unavoidable all the chaos and fear is. There are a lot of examples in history where leaders are forced to choose between a lot of bad options, and it’s up to their judgment to decide the least worst option. This isn’t one of those examples. To abuse the metaphor one more time: This would be like a lookout on the Titanic telling the captain there is an iceberg ahead, but the ship will avoid it if they do nothing and remain on course. Instead of doing nothing, the captain orders that they ram the iceberg at full speed. Maybe there’s a new golden age at the bottom of the Atlantic.
Concentration Camps in America, Again
While (not nearly enough) people were justifiably outraged at the way migrants seeking asylum and undocumented immigrants were treated in both Trump administrations, outrages that included concentration camps, this also isn’t a new phenomenon. In the early days of 2025 there were a lot of understandable but flawed comparisons to the beginning of the Nazi concentration camp system, with people saying that Nazism had finally come to America. What the people making this comparison either didn’t realize or wouldn’t admit is that America never needed the Nazis as an example. By 2025 the United States had a history of building concentration camps that was more than a century old. Trump’s immigration policy was exceptionally cruel and inhuman, that much is indisputable, but it was also frightfully average.
What infuriates me personally so much about Trump, the people who work with him, and the people who voted for him is that they have a shield of ignorance and arrogance that protects them from any self-reflection. They will never be swayed by arguments appealing to their humanity to be less xenophobic, but they will never be swayed by any cynical arguments against anti-immigration policies either. The day that America becomes so hostile to migrants that they stop fleeing to the US and start fleeing from it is the day that the US is fucked. Immigrants metaphorically and literally keep America alive. Not only do they work critical jobs in every single sector of the economy, but in the early 21st century they kept the US population stable and or growing. Like so many other post industrial countries at the same time period the US birthrate would be in decline if not for the influx of immigrants. What I’m about to say isn’t a moral judgement, but empires have always flourished when they welcome new people and get them to buy into the imperial project in some way. If Trump and the people surrounding him had any sense they would want to welcome people who wanted to make their home in the US. Unfortunately for so many would be immigrants, and for America, Trump and all the people he represented were too blinded by their racism to see that the path to American greatness lied in incorporating new people. Instead, they embraced the strain of nativist hostility that has always been present in American history (and in a lot of other empires throughout history). Racists throughout the ages have been hell bent on isolating themselves to death.
Pick a Fight with Reality and Everyone Loses
Along with the persecution of migrants, the Trump administration’s attacks on the LGBT community and the very idea of diversity is the most frightening to me, for a lot of reasons. The basic inhumanity should be enough to trouble everyone, but there are plenty of selfish reasons to find state sponsored persecution unsettling. To start with everyone should be reminded of Martin Luther King Jr’s famous quote that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. If the government can trample over the inalienable rights of one group, what’s to stop them from targeting other groups? Another reason is that diversity exists, period. There will always be different people with different views, experiences, beliefs, lifestyles, and customs. You can’t decree diversity away. Reality won’t bend to match anyone’s fantasies. That doesn’t mean people haven’t tried. Violence and oppression are the only tools people have in their effort to make fantasy match reality. The only result of the Trump administration’s attempts to erase entire groups of people will be unnecessary suffering felt by the people they are trying to erase.
What’s even more depressing about attacks on the LGBT community in the United States is how quickly America backpedaled into reactionary state violence. I’m not the first to point this out, but there are people who were born in a time when their fundamental rights were ignored and they were persecuted for who they were. They lived long enough to see some of their rights recognized, and for some of the persecution and bigotry to be pushed back. Then they live long enough for those rights to be taken away again, and for the discrimination to roar back into life with the full force of a hostile state behind it. If only another famous MLK quote about the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice were true. History seems to prove the opposite, that the moral arc of the universe is tilted so far towards injustice it takes superhuman effort to push it even a teeny bit towards justice for even five minutes.
Conclusion
This likely will not be the last part of this series, and as long as I’m able to write freely I’ll always have more to say about America’s descent into instability and decline. As I write this, events are moving so quickly it’s hard to catalog the ways the US government is being dismantled and power is being concentrated in the hands of the president and his unaccountable cronies. The other branches of the government that are supposed to check the power of the president are either unable to do so or are cooperating and willingly giving away their power instead of protecting it. Tariffs and the threat of tariffs will cause chaos in the global economy and threats of imperial land grabs are alienating allied nations and driving them away from the United States. Rather than working with the United States, a lot of nations of the world are likely trying to contain the damage that the US can cause to them. It’s as if the US is an aging and increasingly violent and demented bear, and the rest of the world is locked in a cage with this demented bear. The rest of the world still doesn’t have the strength to kill this demented bear (yet), but they can speed the bear’s decline, and try to limit the damage the bear can do before it mercifully expires.
There doesn’t appear to be enough opposition in the United States to wrest control back from those who want to dismantle it. The democratic party appears to have learned absolutely nothing from their failures, and are likely too timid and too obsessed with maintaining a fiction that things can go back to the way they were. Outside of an extended general strike I doubt any protest will be able to accomplish anything meaningful. Then there is a fact that has likely always been the case, as much as half of everyone anywhere doesn’t give a damn about politics. They don’t pay attention to what those in power are doing, and they react as if the decisions made by governments are unavoidable and inscrutable like an unpredictable turn of fate. Often this is portrayed in a positive way to encourage a sense of slight optimism: “Most people just want to be left alone and live their lives.” I don’t find that optimistic and I’d interpret that attitude to mean: “As long as bad things aren’t happening to me in a way I can understand then I don’t care about the rest of the world.” I know we can’t all pay attention to all the world’s problems all the time. We have stone age brains in a digital world, and we can only pay attention to so much lest we go mad. I also understand the impulse to try and shut out the world’s problems out of an overwhelming sense of powerlessness. That attitude of “I might not actively encourage rapacity and violence from my government, but I also won’t do anything to stop it once it happens” isn’t enough though, it never has been. We need to be better than that. I have no idea how people can better themselves, or if it’s even possible. All I know is that humanity has needed a lot more empathy and wisdom, and we’ve needed them for, oh, a few hundred thousand years, give or take.