Donald Trump and the Decline of American Empire

 

Donald Trump and the Decline of American Empire

July 18, 2022

 

This is a relatively long essay by my standards. It probably says more than it needs to say to make its point. So before I start I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version: A healthy nation would never make Donald Trump its president. The United States of America made Donald Trump its president. Therefore, the United States is not a healthy nation. It is an empire in decline, and Donald Trump is a symptom of that decline. You can stop reading here if you don’t want to follow my wanderings toward an explanation of that truth. You’ll still have gotten the main point.

 

The United States of America is an empire in decline. It has been an empire for most of its existence, and it has been in decline at least since the 1960s. It reached its imperial peak after World War II. By then it had conquered and suppressed (and worse) the Native Americans whose land it stole and occupied. It had taken what became the American southwest in an imperialistic war against Mexico. The country had imperial outposts in the Philippines, Samoa, Guam, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. As the strongest western victor in World War II, it had positioned itself as and proclaimed itself to be the major opponent of the Soviet Union, that totalitarian state that was more responsible for the defeat of Nazi Germany than the United States or any other nation had been. The country masked its imperial status and ambitions so effectively behind a claim of standing for freedom and fighting Communism that few Americans even realized that they were citizens of an empire, but they were. So are we.

No empire lasts forever. The history of what we call the west (west of course being a relative term) can be seen primarily as a story of the rise and fall of empires. The Assyrian Empire rose, then fell to the Babylonian empire, which rose and fell to the Persian empire, which rose and fell to a Greek empire, which rose and fell to the Roman Empire. The Egyptian empire rose, lasted for a very long time, but eventually fell to the Greeks and the Romans. In the eastern part of its realm the Roman Empire morphed into the Byzantine Empire, which rose and fell to the Ottoman Empire, which lasted until 1918, then disappeared from history. After the space of a millennium or so in which they amounted to essentially nothing, the western European nations Spain, Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Great Britain, and to a lesser extent Germany and Belgium, established empires in lands far removed from Europe. In eastern Europe, over the centuries, the Russian Empire conquered and absorbed Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, part of Poland, the Belorussian and Ukrainian people (who did not have their own nation states at the time), Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, and vast territories in central Asia. It stretched as far from the Russian homeland as northern California. The Russian Empire rotted internally to the point that it was conquered by its own Communists. Those Communists turned most of the former Russian Empire into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which rotted internally to the point that it too collapsed. When the USSR was dissolved on December 25, 1991, Russia lost the remaining non-Russian parts of its empire. Elsewhere, the overseas empires of the European powers gradually disappeared as non-European people around the world demanded and eventually got their political independence from their European conquerors.

After World War II the United States filled the power vacuum created as those European empires disappeared. It became the world’s dominant economic power. It stationed its military all over the world to protect its economic interests and political power. It claimed that its military was defending American freedom, but for the most part it wasn’t doing that at all. It was extending and protecting American empire. It still does. Now America is an empire in decline. The future is of course uncertain, but there is good reason to believe that America’s imperial position in the world, which it is losing, will be filled by China. Vladimir Putin’s Russia would love to replace America as the dominant world empire, but, unlike China, it lacks the ability to do so.

Although most of the European powers lost their empires without major internal decay, they are the exception not the rule in that regard. Rome is the classic example of an empire that rotted from within even as it was regularly attacked by foreign peoples. In the west, the culture and political structure of Rome survived only in the form of the Roman Catholic Church, which is essentially imperial Rome present in today’s world nominally at least as a church not an empire. When a people loses its empire, that people virtually disappears from the face of the earth. Today there are no Assyrians or Babylonians. The secular culture of Rome continues to have influence in Europe (and Louisiana) primarily through law codes derived from Rome, but there are no ancient Romans around. Rome’s impressive physical infrastructure fell into decay and ruin as the Roman people lost their ability to maintain empire.

As I’ve already said, the Untied States is an empire that has been in decline at least since the 1960s. The Vietnam War is evidence of that decline. The US fought an imperialistic war against North Vietnam and much of the population of South Vietnam. It lost. Another major and related symptom of decline was the election of Richard Nixon as president in 1968. He was a deeply flawed human being, and by 1968 it was obvious to anyone who would look at the evidence that he was. The American people made him president because he represented their reactionary response to the movements for freedom and justice that were afoot at the time.

One characteristic of most if not all empires is that there is in them an immense wealth gap between a small number of very wealthy people and everyone else. That certainly was true of the empires of the ancient world. It was true of Great Britain in its high imperial stage. It has been and is true in many parts of the world formerly ruled by European empires, which empires did nothing to address it. It was true in the United States in the age of the great industrialists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It became less true after the reforms of the New Deal in the 1930s. After World War II it was less true because of an income tax system that had the wealthy paying significant amounts of tax. The top marginal tax rates during the Eisenhower administration were very much higher than they are now. The middle class benefited and grew.

Then came Ronald Reagan and his tax policies. He began the practice, followed essentially every president ever since, of slashing taxes for the wealthy but hardly at all for the rest of us. Reagan’s “voodoo economics,” as George H. W. Bush called them before he became Reagan’s vice president, with its “trickle-down” theory, claimed that “a rising tide lifts all boats.” What is did was lift all yachts. Income distribution in the US today is grossly uneven. The country’s income tax structure is grossly unfair to the middle class and the poor. It benefits only the rich. Such it ever is with empire.

Nations often turn to authoritarian and even totalitarian politicians when those politicians promise to reverse the process of change that the people experience, if perhaps only subconsciously, as decay. Classic examples are Russia’s turn to the Communists in 1917 and thereafter and Germany’s turn to the Nazis in 1933. Both Communism and Nazism, in their separate ways, promised the people either the creation of an ideal world of peace and justice or a renewed and expanded dominance for their nation. Both were reactionary responses to internal decay and national decline. Richard Nixon wasn’t a totalitarian nor even as much of an authoritarian as perhaps he wanted to be. Nonetheless, he represented a reactionary step in response to a changing world. He wasn’t so much a cause of America’s decline as a symptom of it.

The American people have turned to conservative presidents ever since in a vain attempt to hold on to what they know they are losing. Since Nixon we’ve had an ineffective but quite conservative Democrat, reactionary Republicans with Ronald Reagan being Exhibit A, and more conservative Democrats as president. Clinton adopted many Republican policies, and even Barack Obama, in whom so many of us put so much hope, was nowhere near as progressive as we thought he would be or as he needed to be. At least since Nixon, America’s political culture has been trying desperately to apply the brakes, with limited or no success, to worldwide change that we know is a move away from American hegemony, from American empire.

Which brings us to Donald Trump. Although he lost the popular vote to Democrat Hillary Clinton, this country’s federal system, which gives disproportionate power to small population states, made him president in the presidential election of 2016. He was president until January 20, 2021, when Joe Biden, who had beaten him in both the popular vote and the electoral college vote in the 2020 presidential election, became his successor in office. Donald Trump was easily the worst president in American history. He was, and is, so bad that it’s hard to know where to start to list the ways in which he damaged this country and the world. The only good thing one can say about him is that he didn’t get us involved in another unwinnable, imperialistic war the way some of his predecessors did. That’s no small accomplishment, but everything else about him was, and is, so bad that he fully deserves the title of worst American president ever. Because my focus here is on the decline of American empire, I’ll concentrate on the ways in which Trump was and is a symptom of that decline and the ways in which he accelerated it.

We start with the fact that no healthy nation would ever make Donald Trump its president. He was by far the least qualified person ever to assume that office. He was a New York real estate wheeler-dealer who claimed to be a genius at business but who had declared bankruptcy more than once. He was a con artist who bilked people out of their money with scams like “Trump University,” which wasn’t even close to being a university and which offered people essentially nothing for their money. He had a reputation for not paying contractors who had done work for him. He had been married three times and had cheated on all three of his wives. It was obvious that he was a sexist and a misogynist. There was good reason to believe that he was a racist too. He had no political experience whatsoever. He had become famous mostly through a TV show in which he was able to keep shouting at people, “You’re fired!,” something he obviously enjoyed doing. Trump was and is a buffoon, a swindler, a cheat who cared and cares about nothing and no one but himself. That he became president of the US is in and of itself evidence that something is seriously wrong with this country.

Trump and the Trump phenomenon were reactions against the way the country was changing. We see that fact in the slogan he used for his 2016 presidential campaign and continued to use thereafter, namely, “Make America Great Again.” He and his supporters used that slogan so often that MAGA became shorthand for the Trumpist movement. It isn’t at all clear what Trump meant by “great,” but this slogan clearly points backwards rather than forwards. It calls not for creating a new, better future but only for recreating a past that actually never existed except in our national imagination.

The demographics and culture of this country are changing in significant ways. They have been changing for quite some time now. America is become more diverse not less. For its entire existence up to the 1950s, and to a considerable extent for decades thereafter, white, Protestant men ran this country and virtually everything that happened in it. That is no longer as true as it used to be, and it becomes less true all the time. White men are losing the unjust dominance they had, and many of them feel threatened by that loss. It used to be true that poorly educated men could make a decent living as unskilled or only slightly skilled laborers in manufacturing and mining. That is for the most part no longer true, and a great many poorly educated, mostly white men long for a return to the time when it was true. Trump promised them that time was possible and that he would make it happen. It wasn’t possible, and there was no way he could make it happen, but desperate, gullible people in their millions took Trump’s bait and voted for him though he was a man who never should have been allowed anywhere near the levers of power.

Racism played and plays a big role in Trump’s appeal. So did and does xenophobia. So does cultural and religious prejudice. The first things he said he’s do were ban all Muslims from entering the country and build a wall along the entire length of the US-Mexico border to keep undocumented people out. That’s 1,954 miles of fence, assuming that you even could build a wall along all of the border. In reality Trump could do none of those things, and building his wall would not improve our immigration issues on our southern border. Moreover, both of those things are culturally and morally despicable. They did however appeal to a great many Americans of the formerly dominant demographic because of the unease they feel about a changing world.

Trump’s racism shows how he is both a symptom and an accelerator of America’s decline. Racism is America’s original sin. This country has been racist to the marrow of its bones from the beginning. It still is, but since roughly the 1950s we have made at least some significant progress in atoning for that sin. Trump brought American racism, which had become less apparent but still existed, into the open. He made overt racism more socially acceptable in some parts of American society than it had been for a long time. Once a bunch of white supremacist thugs marched through Richmond, Virginia, chanting “Jews will not replace us!” A group of people demonstrating for equality and justice met and opposed them. Trump said that there were decent people on both sides. There weren’t, but Trump’s blessing of the violent racists appealed to the racism and xenophobia of so many Americans. Trump accelerated America’s decline by affirming negative aspects of American culture that many of us were trying, with some success, to overcome.

As bad as that was, it wasn’t the worst thing Trump did as president. All through his presidency he showed that he has no respect for or appreciation of American’s constitution, the governmental structure it creates, or the rule of law. He tried to make the Department of Justice his personal law firm. He resisted the Mueller investigation into his campaign’s connections with Russia and his efforts to obstruct that investigation. He put in a compliant Attorney General, William Barr, who quite happily and effectively lied to the American people about what was in Mueller’s final report. Trump claimed that the report exonerated him. It didn’t.

Yet the worst of Trump’s contempt for the constitution and the rule of law didn’t become fully evident until the presidential election of 2020. As early as his presidential campaign in 2016, Trump claimed that he could lose the election only if it were “rigged” against him. His enemies could steal the victory from him, but he could not otherwise lose. Of course, he won the electoral college vote (though not the popular vote) in 2016, so that election wasn’t rigged enough to keep him from winning. Because he became president, the supposed theft of his popular vote victory didn’t matter so much.

Then came Trump’s campaign for reelection in 2020. Again, long before any votes were cast, Trump claimed that the only way he could lose was if the election were rigged against him. This time he lost both the popular vote and the electoral college vote. Under the US constitution and other election law, his term as president would end on January 20, 2021, when former vice president Joe Biden, who won both the popular vote and the electoral college vote, would be inaugurated as Trump’s successor in office. So of course, according to Trump, his landslide victory had been stolen from him by despicable Democrats and “never Trump” Republicans. He refused to concede the election. A political candidate’s refusal to concede an election loss is legally meaningless. There is no legal requirement that a losing candidate concede, and their conceding has no legal significance when they do. So it’s wouldn’t have mattered much that Trump didn’t concede if that were all he did.

It wasn’t. After he lost the election in early November, 2020, Trump began an assault on the American constitution and system of government by seeking in various ways to have the results of that election overturned. He filed something like sixty-one lawsuits in state and federal courts in an effort to get the courts to void the election results in their states. He lost sixty of those suits, and the one he didn’t lose has had no significant legal effect. The courts often chided his lawyers for having filed cases with no evidence to support them. That’s a breach both of court rules and a lawyer’s ethical duty. One of those lawyers, the formerly respected but now thoroughly discredited former mayor of New York City Rudi Giuliani, has had his licenses to practice law suspended in both New York state and Washington, D.C. He should and perhaps will be disbarred.

Trump did a lot more than file frivolous lawsuits in his effort to reverse his election loss. He asked the Republican secretary of state of Georgia to “find” him the votes he needed to reverse Biden’s narrow victory in that state. In several states that Trump lost, his supporters, certainly at least with his blessing if not at his instigation, had people who were not the state’s properly chosen electors make up false certificates saying they were the state’s electors. One or more of the states where that was done submitted those fake certificates to Congress, a clear violation of federal law. Trump tried to get the Department of Justice to seize the voting machines of the swing states he lost. The Department of Justice refused. Nothing worked. Joe Biden was still going to be inaugurated as the next president.

So Trump and his team of advisors who some in the Trump orbit came to call “the crazies” turned to an aspect of American election law few Americans know about. That law provides that on January 6 of the year after a presidential election both houses of Congress shall meet in joint session to receive, count, and certify the electoral votes of the several states and the District of Columbia. In his role of president of the Senate, the sitting vice president presides at that joint session. Trump’s “crazies,” including Giuliani, came up with the bogus theory that the vice president had the legal authority to reject the electoral votes of any state. The vice president has no such authority. Nonetheless, Trump began to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to do just that. Pence, thank God, refused to do it.

Trump kept up the pressure on Pence. He called for his supporters to come to Washington, D.C., on January 6, telling them it was going to be “wild.” Thousands of people responded. On the morning of January 6, 2021, Trump and his “crazies” held a big rally down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol. Giuliani and others whipped up the crowd, many of whom Trump knew were armed. Trump told them he hoped Mike Pence would “do the right thing,” saying he wouldn’t like Pence so much if he didn’t. Trump sent a mob of his frenzied supporters down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol. He said he would be there with them. News reports say he really did want to go to the Capitol, but the Secret Service took him to the White House instead.

Then at the Capitol all hell broke loose. Trump supporters, engaged in insurrection against the government of the United States, erected a crude gallows outside the building and began to chant “Hang Mike Pence!” The mob included a group from the white supremacist group the Proud Boys, who came in military-style gear. They marched through the crowd in a single line that, we’re told, was a tactic the United States Army used in certain situations. They and other rioters broke into the Capitol, smashing doors and windows in the process. The Secret Service rushed the vice president out of the House chamber where the joint session was held. They took him to a parking garage where they told him to get in a vehicle. He refused. Representatives and Senators fled or hid behind furniture in the House chamber. The Capitol police, who fought the mob bravely but were vastly outnumbered, told the congresspersons to put on the gas masks that were stored under the seats in the chamber. Who knew there were gas masks under those seats?! The Capitol police shot and killed one rioter as she tried to break into the House chamber. Rioters ran amok through the building. At least one of them carried a Confederate battle flag, something that hadn’t even happened during the Civil War. The riot just went on and on. The rioters said they were there because Trump told them to be there.

Meanewhile, back at the White House, Donald Trump sat watching the insurrection on television. Numerous supporters of his, his staff, and even his family pleaded with him, mostly by text messages, to go on television and tell the rioters to go home. Yet for more than three hours Trump did nothing. There has been testimony that he said he agreed that Mike Pence deserved to be hanged. Eventually Trump did tell the rioters to go home, in the process calling them patriots and repeating the lie that the election had been stolen from him.

In the aftermath of the January 6 riot the House of Representatives impeached Trump for a second time, this time for his involvement in sparking the riot. Once again the Senate acquitted him in a vote that was clearly political not legal. There have been hundreds of criminal prosecutions of the rioters. A “select committee” of the House of Representatives, made up mostly of Democrats but with two Republicans brave enough to sacrifice their political careers by standing up to Trump, has been investigating the January 6 riot and Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of a free and fair election. This committee has held several public “hearings” in which they have made effective presentations of damning evidence against Donald Trump. As of this writing they have one more such hearing scheduled. They may or may not have more hearings after that one.

What does all this have to do with the decline of the American empire? Here’s what. Donald Trump is the first American president ever to attempt to overthrow the US constitution and the rule of law. He has millions of supporters in that effort. Not since the Civil War has there been a fascistic movement like Trump’s that was anti-democratic, that was willing to use force to control the American national government with no regard for the law or the will of a majority of the American people. Fortunately, though there are many of them, Trump’s supporters remain a minority of the American people. Yet their disdain for constitutional government and the rule of law is a symptom of America’s decline. When empires are thriving few if any of their people seek to overthrow them. When they are in steep decline things change. We get things like the Russian Communists and the German Nazis, who use every tool imaginable to overthrow the government, undermine the rule of law, and impose tyranny on their people. Trump and his supporters have not committed crimes against humanity the way the Soviet Communists and the Nazis did, but they have tried to overthrow the US constitution and subvert the rule of law in a way that is at least a faint echo of Soviet and Nazi tyranny and terrorism. No such thing happened in this country when it was at the height of its imperial power.

Trump and his supporters are both a symptom and an accelerant of American decline. They try frantically to reverse that decline, which is impossible. Empires in decline eventually cease to exist. The American empire still exists, but its days are numbered. Numbered perhaps in decades not years, but numbered nonetheless. That Trump and his insurrectionists nearly succeeded in their attempted coup d’état is evidence of just how weak the American empire has become. It is not much threatened by external enemies. It is threatened from within by people whose desperation is causing them to abandon traditional American values like the rule of law. The Russian Empire was never conquered from without. It collapsed from within. The German Empire, the “Second Reich,” was conquered from without in World War I, but it was economic and moral collapse from within that produced the Nazis. The American empire is declining from within in a similar way. Under Trump if very nearly collapsed.

The decline of the American empire can’t be stopped, but it could be managed. The United Kingdom is an example of how a nation can cease to be an empire without completely collapsing. After World War II, England let its empire go. The country’s law and unwritten constitution survived. Empires that resist decline collapse. Empires that manage decline can survive. What would a managed American decline look like? It would be a complex operation to be sure, but a good place to start would be drastically to reduce America’s military footprint around the world. One major manifestation of American empire is precisely the enormous size and reach of the American military. Military spending was a major cause of the collapse of the Soviet Union. It isn’t yet causing a collapse of the United States; but as US dominance in the world wanes, maintaining immense armed forces around the world will become even more economically irresponsible than it already is. A declining empire means a declining economy. We need to manage our decline in a way the minimizes the harm the decline could cause. Reducing military spending could be a big part of doing so.

Beyond that, we must stop playing the role of world cop. Why do so many nations and peoples in so much of the world look to the United States to get involved in their internal problems? It’s because we are still the dominant world empire. As we cease to be the dominant world empire, as we inevitably will, we will have to let peoples and nations in other parts of the world handle their problems without looking to the United States for solutions. To manage internal disruption from the loss of empire we will have to establish a just tax system and reduce the wealth gap between a small number of immensely wealthy people and the rest of us. No doubt other measures will have to be taken as well. The loss of empire needn’t be a disaster. Ignoring it will make it one. The choice is ours. May we choose better in the future than we have in the past.