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.
