[surgical_fire]

What I find almost satisfying to watch is how the US throws away the soft power it spent nearly a century building for very little benefit in return.

The thing is that soft power is extremely effective. Many other countries, including China, try hard at acquiring a fraction of the soft power US naturally had.

Trumps administration, sooner or later, will pass. Whether it is voted away, or if it turns into a form of dictatorship, at some point in the future it will not be there anymore. The US won't be able to return to "how things were" when that happens. New trade deals, new alliances, a different ordering of things will be in place.

[pendenthistory]

Trump not being a factor will help, but this whole ordeal shows that Europe cannot count on a reasonable person always being in power, and a single bad president can cause this level or mayhem. Even if the next administration backtracks on all this and apologizes profusely, it's too late.

[BLKNSLVR]

Exactly. This administration has exposed the fragility of the very structure of the US form of government, and building a new, better structure is, in my opinion, practically impossible without revolution.

It appears to me that the US will continue to iterate downhill.

I'd prefer it weren't the case, but that's what my intuition is telling me.

And if it can start to restructure on the fly, it's going to be a long, difficult process. But it's still better than revolutionary structural / regime change.