This is an excellent question because our system is in definite need of damage control. My opinion based on what I’ve observed happening is that strength of character is an important element in preventing a president from literally running amok with unbridled executive orders designed to make him as close to a dictator as one can get in this nation.
How do we legislate that? I don’t think one can. I think the character of the American people has to control the character of an American president by NOT voting for candidates who demonstrate that they don’t have any character.
Again, this is just my opinion, but I really feel that a guy like Trump would have been soundly defeated 30 years ago. In fact, he may very well have not been nominated to begin with.
For a long time I was frustrated because I couldn’t understand why, despite all of the awful things he has said and done, people voted for him because they somehow could not see who and what he really is. I was wrong. People CAN see, but they just don’t care, at least enough of them to have voted him in or sabotaged his opponent by not voting at all.
I dunno. Huey Long was a populist proto-tyrant, a petty and personally vengeful demagogue, who was quickly ascending in the early 30s before his assassination. It’s of course entirely speculative whether he would have continued to rise if given the chance, but FDR’s people were privately quite concerned. It seems reasonable that Long’s popularity was fueled by Depression-era stress and resentments, similar to the frustrations and grievances that have energized Trump’s base. I personally think this yearning for simplified rhetoric and strong action is baked into humanity, and surfaces anywhere conditions allow it to emerge. America, in other words, is not exceptional in this.
It never could. That was one of Kissinger’s lines even: “It may be dangerous to be America’s enemy, but to be America’s friend is fatal.”
No one is actually fully trusted. Or should be.
Agreed.
A lesser version. Soft power has been lost. But most of the world is dealing with their own rise of autocracy. A “good cop” to Trump’s bad will be welcomed by many.
Does the GOP win the next election / is it free and fair?
Does the US abandon Ukraine and/or NATO?
Does the US abandon allies in Asia to Chinese pressure/military
Does anyone go to prison?
If 2026 and 2028 are landslide Dem victories, lots of people go to prison, and Russia hasn’t invaded anyone else + Taiwan is still free, I think stature comes back relatively quickly. If Trump wins again with some sort of “actually I’m just the VP, wink wink” or pulls out of NATO then it’s gone for decades.
Economically and scientifically I think a decade of damage is done already.
There’s a difference between not trusting you, and making you a pariah. When you do elect a decent President, Canada will be happy to renegotiate NAFTA again, and reestablish some of what NATO and NORAD will lose over the Trump years. But we won’t want to continue having 80% of our foreign trade going to the US, either. Because of our geographical proximity, we’ll never be completely independent of the US, but we’ll shift as much as we can to other countries, as a buffer against your periodic insanity.
And we’re already leaning towards dumping US military hardware, and buying European. Such a change will be fundamental to our military, and we won’t change back easily. We’ve had our current jets for about 40 years now, for example. If we buy a replacement fleet from Europe, that’s the kind of time line you’d be looking at for us to even consider buying from the US again.
ETA: “not trust any US president” And also note, this is not about trusting your President, it’s about trusting you, the nation of The United States. I have no doubt that in January 2029, President AOC will deal with us on the square, and will truly desire bringing back normal relations with other countries. What I don’t trust is that in 2033, president Eric Trump won’t just trash all that, again.
If and when one really looks at the history of the United States as a while, Donald Trump’s ascension into the oval Office was a long time coming. More and more, I’m beginning to think that Americans, as a whole, have a really vicious streak in them, and are willfully ignorant. It’s sad.
Meh. Rome didn’t collapse after Caligula. Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius were still to come.
The US still has all the money and the military to back it up. Europeans have always thought of Americans as naive hicks, so no real change there.
The world is just a little more scared of us now.
Donald Trump is an overgrown combination of a schoolyard bully and a spoiled brat. Unfortunately, as I’ve posted in another post, if and when one really looks at United States history, Donald Trump’s ascension into the Oval Office has been a long time coming.
“And…cue ‘Ozymandias’!” Giovanni Arrighi has written a lot on the rise and fall of modern commercial empires, from the 1400s to the present, from Florence to the US notably in The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power and the Origins of Our Times. Among other things it notes the transition from productive economies to ones based on finance and that these economies and their accompanying states are established by and for a very small elite that seeks to profit at the expense of others, whatever grand rhetoric is used to buttress them.
Trump 2016 absolutely wouldn’t have had any chance in 1996. I suspect some of it has to do with the fragmentation of the media allowing us to remain in our respective bubbles, shielded from ideas we don’t care for. Back in 1991, a man injured 27 people and killed 23 in what was the United States’ deadliest mass shooting incident in Killeen, Texas. There was nobody like Alex Jones to promote the theory that this was a false flag operation and these were crisis actors rather than real victims. A media personality pushing this narrative would have been a pariah, regulated to the fringe media with few taking him seriously.
Most of us agreed on the facts. We didn’t always agree on why something happened or what the best response might be, but we agreed on the basic facts. I voted Republican until 2016, and I couldn’t vote for Trump because I could tell he was a liar who didn’t really know what he was doing. It was so obvious Trump was a liar, that I could only look on in disbelief as he won the Republican party over. Even today, I don’t know if MAGA really believe Trump or just say they believe him because he’s so obviously wrong.
I’d say the biggest hit to American reputation is that it’s been proven that we can have wild swings in policy and behavior based on who’s in office.
This wasn’t the case historically- typically there were small-ish, incremental changes over the course of a president’s eight year term to things like USAid, PEPFAR, tariffs, trade agreements, etc… Nobody came into office and trashed all that, and set up a whole new set of things in 100 days.
What it means in terms of international reputation is that we now are known to be potentially volatile and capricious based on who gets elected. We were like a relatifvely gentle dog who occasionally growled at, and bit people who clearly provoked them, but now we’re that dog who nobody knows when they’re going to bite and why.
I don’t know that we can realistically earn back our stable reputation. The rest? Probably in a quarter century of good behavior or so, but everyone will always be a bit wary now.
I was in college in central Texas at the time (Texas A&M) and had someone suggested stuff like that, they’d probably have been beaten senseless. It was a shocking thing for everyone around there, and the only thing that really distinguished it was the longer term reaction. Where liberal sorts thought “We need to restrict guns”, the more conservative types thought “We need to be able to defend ourselves.” Both totally valid reactions to the same problem- what to do about armed lunatics. But there was no concept that Kennard was anything other than a mentally ill person who did something abominable.
And you’re dead on about the bubbles. Like I’ve been saying for a while now- it used to be that the truth was evident, and the arguments were about what to do about it, but now with the media bubbles and alternate media ecosystems, what is “true” is where the arguments are, never mind what to do about it. And having opposed media ecosystems means there aren’t actually arguments- just people choosing sides based on what they want to hear.
I think the real problem is the erosion of the separation of church and state. That is something that MUST be corrected, because religious zealotry in office is far more dangerous than the loss of status and influence in the world. Can we reverse this theocratic trend? I don’t know. This scares me the most for our future by far.
One of the dichotomies we often hear about is that individual Americans are typically warm and friendly, but collectively they tend to do stupid things like elect tyrannical dumbasses to be their leader. Aside from a relatively small Trump cult, typified by the Jan 6 insurrectionists, and of course Trump himself, who is a raging asshole, I don’t think there’s much of a dichotomy here at all. Because it’s possible to be warm, friendly, and stupid, all at the same time.
And there’s a massive disinformation network operating in America whose precise purpose is to perpetuate the stupidity that advances far-right interests. You can rarely go wrong following the old adage “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity”. Except when it comes to Trump and Vance. That’s just pure malice. The stupidity is a free bonus.
This seems to be a huge part of the problem and I have no idea how we can even start to change the constant barrage of right wing media that is infecting the country.
Some of the “facts” I hear coming from people who listen to this drivel is truly remarkable. I’ve been hearing some of this insanity for many years in bits and I imagine it’s irrevocably poisoned the well for now.
Did you ever watch the Borat movie he made during the pandemic, where, in character as Borat, he stayed with a couple of redneck guys during the early days of the pandemic?
Because these guys exemplified that perfectly. They didn’t hesitate to open their home to this weird foreign guy who didn’t have a place to stay as society ground to a halt, they put him up and fed him for quite some time. But they also spouted every stupid MAGA talking point and conspiracy theory you can imagine. The dichotomy between their personal actions and their political beliefs was astounding.
Today people get their facts and news from a zillion different places. Print media is dead, and a variety of online publications has taken their place, some more “factual” than others. Same with TV news. Many stations, some trustworthy, some total crap. Remember when Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America? Now anyone with a smartphone can create their own YouTube, TikTok, Substack media outlet and just have at it.
So when you say “we agreed on the basic facts,” back then there were fewer facts and fewer sources and I believe those sources were more honorable and more principled than today’s sources of “fact.”
This is my cue to go re-watch All the President’s Men for the umpty-umpth time and weep over what journalism used to be.
If MAGA is solidly defeated in the 2028 elections, traditional U.S. allies will want to essentially reward the American electorate in hopes we will not go back to authoritarianism next time.
But the longer the U.S. authoritarian slide goes on, the more the rest of the world will have adjusted to an isolationist U.S., and the less interest our former allies will have in going back.
The last few elections, pundits have said that this was the most important election of our life. And they were correct! 2028 will probably be more important than 2024 was.
The biggest known unknown is whether the U.S. will conquer any countries in the next few years. If the U.S. conquers Greenland, will the 2028 Democrat nominee propose simply giving it back? U.S. history suggests the answer is no. And if no, Europe, will be in no mood to reward the Democrats.
