House Democratic lawmakers reportedly used a closed-door meeting earlier this week to vent their frustrations with progressive advocacy groups that have been driving constituent calls and pressuring the party to act like a genuine opposition force in the face of the Trump administration’s authoritarian assault on federal agencies and key programs.
Luckily, if the world survives Trump the Democrats won’t matter anymore because America won’t matter. The rest of the world was pretty pissed off at the USA before, but still allowed America to keep its leverage because challenging it would be too much effort. Trump, however, is actively destroying that leverage through his trade wars and his cancelling of foreign aid at the same time that he’s stripping his own government of its ability to function through his purges.
The only pillar of American influence that Trump isn’t destroying directly is the country’s media exports, and they were already in the process of collapsing before Trump was re-elected.
You got your high position in the world in the first place due to the fact that you were the only major power left standing after the world wars. Those circumstances won’t happen again (well, world wars might, but not ones that leave the USA unscathed.)
I don’t think Trump nor President Musk understand how much power the US weilds, just purely on foreign aid. By gutting all of it, we removed a large portion of the US’s foreign power (Which, IMO, is a pretty good result).
The US has been going all-in on hard power while soft power declines. There’s a lot of rich individuals who benefit from military contracts but don’t care as much about actually maintaining the empire. The big risk is that Americans are going to recognize this disparity and start WWIII in an effort to leverage the one area that the US has an advantage to retain hegemony.
A big military is an expensive military, and if the American economy collapses it’ll be hard to maintain that military.
Sure, but it can still cause a lot of destruction in the meantime if it decides to go out with a bang.
Same foreign policy, same bullying strategy, but now they are: 1) public about it, 2) Targeting countries that help them being who they are for the last 70 years.
That’s great for the rest of the world, be we still have to deal with this mess somehow.