Empires all do end and when they do they often fracture because of a built up of social discontent, but they are predicted to be ending 1000x more often than they end. Eventually someone calls it correctly though, and generally you only know who in hindsight.
It's like predicting someone's death: undoubtedly one day that person will die, it's just quite hard to predict it accurately. As devil in a certain book jested, "Yes, the man is mortal, but that's half the trouble; it's that he sometimes is abruptly mortal, that's the trick!"
The collapse of the USSR in 1991 came as quite the shock to everyone, including both the Soviets themselves, nevermind the Americans. Yes, the West have been spelling "doom and gloom" for the USSR since November of 1917 and yet it never came to pass... until one day, it suddenly did. And BTW, spelling the imminent doom of the Russian Empire too has been quite in vogue in Europe during the XIX century, and still it came in as quite a surprise to everyone in 1917.
The USSR had alternate models to move to. What alternate model does the US have? The only ones that are somewhat successful are Russian and Chinese style authoritarianism, neither of which are palatable to the US population.
Since before day one. Jefferson supported the former while Hamilton supported the later. This disagreement lead to the first political parties inside of GW's administration. This led to a dire warning in his farewell address:
"However [political parties] may now and then answer popular ends, they are likely in the course of time and things, to become potent engines, by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion."
The take away isn't to always listen, but to not always exaggerate/lie. The reader never got impacted by the wolves, the speaker did. So in the end, maybe the ones impacted will be the media, not the readers.