The USA is well and truly...
Fucked.
Even though the Trump administration will probably fall, there is nothing that can slow down US decline. That is exactly why we need to understand what has happened, when and how, because a sickness like this can and has spread all over the world.
Ascendancy
Let's begin with a story about US ascendancy. After independence from Britain, the country had a lot going for them. Vast tracts of arable land, natural resources and a growing population of immigrants who saw a better life than the ones they had in Europe. There was boundless wealth in the soil and toil of immigrants and sadly, of slaves as well.
The geopolitics of the region are also highly favorable. Protected by oceans to the west and east, with virtually no threat from the south and a friendly neighbour to the north. While Russia is relatively close the US, the east of Russia is sparsely populated and largely uninhabited. In Europe countries that had had centuries of war were tightly squeezed together, and even Britain had to be vigilant because Dover to Calais was only 34 km. The mainland of the USA was perfectly in tact after two world wars, while European cities were decimated. This wasn't some amazing US ability to withstand any enemy, it was a geographical reality.
This meant that while the industrial age in Europe was squandered on weapons and attempting to hold on to colonies with tenuous levels of control, the US was free to build as if they weren't being attacked. They could harvest the spoils of war in ways that other countries can't dream of. Refugees fleeing to the USA knew that they would be safe, and the growth and wealth accumulation made it a very easy decision. After world war two this geopolitical position gave the US gifts from a ravaged Europe, because not only were people safe there, money was too. The dollar was the crown on the elected empire.
This created a positive feedback loop. The more wealth and skills the US had, the more people wanted proximity and residence within it. The more skills and wealth they had, the more monumental the endeavors they could undertake. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, the USA had reached its imperial peak.
Greed is good?
As an "american" would say, "Follow the money". The USA was wealthy and they just kept getting wealthier, not because of their political system, but because they were blessed by tectonic plates and old world conflict.
From the very beginning however, wealth did not filter down to everyone and wealth inequality was a norm that became the basis of US society.
“The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colours breaking through.” ― Alexis de Tocqueville
US citizens didn't mind the inequality, because the whole world was like that. The difference was the idea that every man could get rich, and so the wealthy became the heroes, whereas for the most part, they are still considered to be villains in European society.
The importance of money, its role in US culture as being synonymous with success, and attainment of it being seen as a foundation for moral good became baked into their founding mythology. The fundamental philosophy was finally penned by Ayn Rand, a refugee from the Soviet Union who became hopelessly sycophantic in her praise of US society. Her book, "The virtue of selfishness" was not a distortion of US moral grounding, it was an accurate depiction of it.
A very egregious and illustrative true story shows the reality of this moral philosophy of money. Nikola Tesla moved to the US to pursue his scientific pursuits. He needed money to bring his ideas to fruition. He invented the induction motor, transformers, generators, alternating current, radio, flourescent and neon lighting. He died penniless and alone. The man who reaped the benefits of much of his work, Thomas Edison, is a well known hero in the USA. Not because he was smart, but because he made lots and lots of money.
"Americans" commercialized everything. Then they sold it. Then they sold pieces of it. Then they sold pieces of the pieces of it. Then they made loans against those pieces of pieces. Then they sold those loans. And on and on it goes. And the same goes for their industrialist role models. Each successive titan of industry was doing less and making more money out of it. Warren Buffet just moves money around. What has Elon Musk invented? Nothing. Exactly nothing. And yet there is no shortage of fawning sycophants ready to prostrate themselves before their idol. If I had to go through examples of this fundamental culture of the USA, I could do just that for the rest of my life and never run out of examples.
The schism
The USA is very large, so it should be expected that people in different geographic areas would perceive the world differently, especially in historical contexts. While the southern states of the US were dominated by labour intensive resource extraction, the north was built on something much more similar to Europe: industrialisation and manufacturing. Industrailisation has notable effects on society. Industrial manufacturing requires large amounts of people to make it work. New York City alone has a larger population than Houston, Phoenix, San Antonio, and Dallas combined. You also need stronger rule of law, better education and considerably more bureaucracy.
Cities raise different adults. Everyone is a stranger, and the lesson you learn from being strangers is to leave it that way. City life also teaches you that you are a stranger to others.
Extractive labour intensive industries don't need any of that. What they need are robots. Because robots didn't exist, slaves were the answer. This also creates wealth inequality at a gargantuan scale. No matter what you say, a slave is more unequal to a free man than a factory worker and a factory owner could ever be.
Further to that, extractive industries rely on consistency and maintaining the status quo, while manufacturing industries need to keep pace to remain competitive.
The civil war was the bifurcation that seemed to be inevitable, and the settlement of it seemed to be the resolution and reunification. That couldn't be further from the truth. After the reunification of Germany, there wasn't a sizeable portion of east germans who made GDDR flag bumper stickers. The confederate flag can be found everywhere in southern states of the US. The civil war never concluded, there was just an indefinite armistice.
And so too slavery in the USA never truly ended. Black Americans still suffer significant discrimination at the behest of the republican party. Living with the structural inequality that remained after apartheid South Africa, seeing the US for the first time in person felt strangely familiar. Once again, racism in the USA is such a vast topics that whole university departments are based on studying it.
The Crack
Empires don't dissolve, they crack. The cracks keep appearing until everything seems to collapse out of nowhere. That is because whatever made it a single unit with a shared purpose has vanished. The common mythologies and unity of purpose is what makes a nation a nation, just like the molecular bonds in a vase makes it a vase.
In the final stages before the structure gives, it becomes a parody of itself. It's that old chair which looks like you can sit on it, but if you do the illusion vanishes, as does the chair.
Similarly, the USA is a parody of itself. Billionaires that don't make anything new or useful, votes that don't count, courts that don't serve justice, food that doesn't nourish, wages that don't sustain life, healthcare that is neither healthy nor is there care, schools where children can't read, stores where nobody can afford anything, and on and on it goes.
But the farce is because the USA never was what it told itself in its finding mythology. It pretended to praise values but really praised money. Now that people are not becoming more wealthy in general, all the ugliness and destructive truth surfaces. You win an election because you had the most funding. You get to walk away from your crime unscathed because you were rich. The blatant pantomime of the Trump regime is the true face of the USA, and it is as ugly as all its detractors believed and worse.
This civil war restarted after the second world war, and it presented itself as a culture war. It starts being about race, which is so dangerously close to the real problem that instead it becomes targeted at other minority groups. For the republicans as scapegoats and for democrats as martyrs in the culture war. It's like that couple that fights because he drinks too much, but is really about that time she cheated on him. The core of the issue so painful that other ones are argued instead. But you will always hear the same thing at the beginning and the end. Race.
And the farce of the USA as the shield of democracy died not because of a particular party. Clinton, Obama, Bush, Biden and Trump abandoned Ukraine. Now it isn't a fight about bathrooms. Innocent people are freezing to death because the president of the "shield of democracy" is siding with an invading dictator.
The shattering (shartering?)
When the leader of the most powerful country in the world soils himself on international television, then that country is not the most powerful country in the world. The fact that you are wondering which leader I am referring to should itself be a testament to that.
I am no longer convinced that if Trump wouldn't have come along there would have been another Trump. History is a series of contingent events, something or someone else could have done something different, but the likelihood would have been that it would be bad. Trump is just a stage 4 symptom of a disease that has been metastasizing for more than a century.
Nobody wanted to fix it, because there was money and money is good, people with money are better than everyone else and the attainment of money is all that matters. And this is the glue that kept the USA united. The final symptom (Trump) is intentionally squandering all of that and using the culture war as his vehicle to do so. His debasing of the USA on the international stage has marked the end of the US century. Trump is a mirror, not only to republicans, independents or democrats, but every US citizen.
The mobilization against Trump is not nothing. It needs to happen and I believe it will succeed eventually, but getting rid of him doesn't get rid of the sickness that caused him. The citizens of the USA had plenty of opportunities to act, but chose not to, because things were going too well for them personally.
What happens next?
Lots and lots of unnecessary suffering, but the end of the US empire is not the end of USA (although it could be). For the rest of the world, it is about finding new alliances and organisations to trade with and find safety. For the USA it will be a gradual decline of top positions. It is almost certain at this point that the next man to set foot on the moon will be Chinese. Business interests will probably look to the EU for it's strong rule of law and financial infrastructure. Militarily, Ukranians will define the doctrine of the 21st Century. Gradually innovation, protection and culture will start coming from elsewhere.
But what happens to the USA? If it survives, and my guess is that it will, it will depend on what is done now. If radical reform is not undertaken, secession and revolution are on the cards. Without reform, schizophrenic politics and unstable governments will be the norm. If the destructive forces like Trump come into play again, decline will be the least of everyone's worries. Violence is already inevitable, but the scale of the violence will increase.
What should US Citizens do?
You need to fix your shit. We are tired of it. But no, really you need to do it as fast as possible because it's not just you suffering or some country in Asia. This used to be a long paragraph with a laundry list, but there is one thing. One thing that if you do it, things will be a lot better.
Universal enfranchisement.
That means prisoners can vote. That means they can vote in prison. No the crime doesn't matter. No the sentence doesn't matter. And this also means the creation of a federal ID. In most countries people have an ID document that identifies them with their citizenship. ID should be free, universal and there should be a drive to make sure as many people as possible have one, that you can always get a new one cheaply if its lost and so forth. Only when all your citizens can vote can you have a real democracy. Everything up to that point will be for nought.