It's Not That Hard to Understand

                                                It’s Not That Hard to Understand 

January 19, 2025 

Tomorrow the American fascist Donald J. Trump will be inaugurated as President of the United States of America for the second time. Talk about not learning from your mistakes! This time he actually won the popular vote though he got only 49.8% of it. He had a clear electoral college victory over his Democratic rival Vice President Kamala Harris. Nearly half of this country’s voters voted for Donald Trump last November. Enough of them in enough states voted for him to make him president-elect, and tomorrow he will become president once again. I have never understood how anyone with half a brain and even a dim awareness of who Donald Trump is could possibly vote for him once let alone twice.  

After all, these are just a few of the undeniable facts about Donald J. Trump. He is an unsuccessful businessman who has somehow made himself rich (though he won’t disclose documents that would tell us just how rich) despite having had to file multiple bankruptcies. He has been married three times and has been unfaithful to all three of his wives. He thinks women are just people he can “grab by the pussy” because he’s famous. He has been found civilly (though not criminally) liable for sexual assault that has been called rape by some of those who know the facts of the case. He has been convicted of thirty-four counts of fraud. The Department of Justice has found grounds to prosecute him for mishandling classified documents as he left office in 2021. It has found grounds to charge him with four criminal counts of violating federal law in his illegal attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. He has said he won’t be a tyrant “except on Day One” of a new presidential term. He does not believe in the rule of law. He makes it clear that he wants the Department of Justice to abuse its power by prosecuting his political opponents and those who have charged and prosecuted him though there is no evidence that any of them did anything illegal. He is a megalomaniacal narcissist who cares nothing about anyone but himself. He has no understanding of economics or of foreign affairs. He gives not one good God damn about this country’s traditional allies, especially those in NATO. He loves tyrannical world leaders like Vladimir Putin and wants to be like them as president. He does not believe in or support our country’s history of democracy or the civil rights of anyone who is not like him. He claims that he will end “birthright citizenship” though the 14th Amendment makes that way of becoming a US citizen a constitutional right. He says he will impose large tariffs on imports from countries as diverse as China, Canada, and Mexico and denies that American consumers will end up paying more because of them though that effect of them is undeniable. The truth means nothing to him. He lies about something or other essentially every time he opens his mouth. He has vowed to repeal essentially every federal environmental regulation. He has promised to reduce taxes for rich people even more than they have already been reduced, a move that will have disastrous consequences for poor and middle class Americans. He wants to cut Medicaid and Social Security to pay for those tax cuts. He wants to undermine if not repeal the Affordable Care Act. He understands the US Constitution hardly at all and cares about it less. He has at least suggested that once he is again in office he will refuse to vacate it at the end of his term. 

Yet a plurality of American voters sufficient to win the election voted to make him president for a second time, and one thing seems clear to me. Trump is as much a symptom of what’s going on in this country as he is a cause of it. Only a disordered electorate would ever elect Donald Trump to the most modest office on any ballot much less to the American presidency. The American electorate has never made anyone nearly as unqualified and as dangerous as Donald Trump president.  

What could possibly explain the disastrous decision the American electorate made last November? Part of the explanation is that relatively undereducated white American men resent the advances toward equality people of color, women, and sexual minorities have made in recent decades. They long to return to an imagined past in which they were the privileged, and they won’t vote for anyone who wants to move forward not backward, especially if that candidate is a woman of color like Kamala Harris. Part of the explanation is that voters care more about the price of bread than they do about bigger, more significant issues. All of those things matter. 

But there is, it seems to me, a deeper, more powerful, and more important dynamic at work here. Every empire there has ever existed has declined. Rome is the classic example of this dynamic but is hardly the only one. Every empire that has ever existed has eventually gone out of existence. The US is today’s world empire. I believe that we are entering that phase of our imperial existence (or may already be significantly advanced in it already). A plurality of Americans have lost faith in democracy. They have ceased to care about anyone but themselves, not that they ever cared all that much about anyone but themselves. Empires decline. We are declining. 

Democracy is fragile everywhere. The French Revolution may have been waged in the name of liberty, equality and fraternity , but it produced the massive, continent-wide destruction of the Napoleonic Empire. In the 1920s, Germany had a democratic constitution. It produced the far, far worse continent-wide destruction the Nazis inflicted. In the early 20th century, Japan had a more or less democratic government modeled to a considerable extent on Bismarck’s Germany. It produced the horrors of the Japanese Empire in the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s. Democracy died in all of those instances. It is dying in the United States today, and Donald Trump is the most visible manifestation of that death. 

Hardly any Americans are aware that their country is an empire and that it is dying, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a dying empire. That doesn’t mean that the country known as the United States of America will disappear any time soon. After all, it took Rome centuries to fall. Powerful forces in this country will try to keep it going. Most Americans will still call it the greatest country in the world, which it is not and never has been. We will be the world’s greatest military power for a long time to come. The world will not be able to ignore the US for a long time to come. 

None of which changes the truth that the US is an empire in decline. No solid, healthy country would ever elect Donald Trump to anything much less elect him as the country’s leader twice. That the US has done that is all the proof we need they we are declining. We’d do well to do what Great Britain has done—recognize its loss of status and, more or less, learned to live with it. But Americans won’t do that. They’ll keep on proclaiming us the city on a hill everyone else should imitate when we are in truth no such thing. They will keep spending obscene amounts of money on the military to prop up our power around the world. Yet our decline will continue over time. The decline of empires always does. That we have elected Trump is all the proof we need that this country’s end is coming. It won’t happen soon, but happen it surely will.