this post was submitted on 25 Jan 2026
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Trump is just accelerating it.
If it wasn't Trump, it would be somebody else similar.
Some guy like him accelerating the speed of collapse is pretty standard at this stage of the Rise & Fall cycle of Empire (of which the US is most definitely in the Fall stage and has been since maybe all the way back in the late 70s).
The whole "elite pillaging" stage of the last couple of decades in an extremelly nationalist nation with a massive myth of national greatness was bound to deliver a populist strongman that promised to "restore the greatness of the nation".
Maybe you'll be lucky and avoid the whole "overextending itself in a war against multiple enemies / a peer level enemy" kind of thing that also often happens at this stage.
We've been doing that for the entirety of the cold war