Trump's Tyranny, Part 4: Superpower Suicide

This marks my final, and fourth, essay in a series examining the reign of Donald Trump and damage to our country, as we head now into the final hours before the midterm elections — when a lot of decisions about our country’s arc and fate as a democracy will be made individually and collectively across thousands of election races in every corner of the country. As I wrote in the first installment — focused on the rise and reign of terror by Trump’s secret police force — my hope is to emphasize that we’ve already gotten used to a level of fascism, authoritarianism, and corruption that would be unthinkable and shocking to us just a decade ago.

These essays specifically highlight five areas where I fear we’ve lost sight of the sheer scale and horrific departure-from-normality that we’re all living through: (1) The abuses of the regime’s secret police force, a.k.a. ICE and CBP; (2) the day-to-day petty crime and grand corruption infecting the operations of the US government; (3) the political weaponization of the Justice Department; (4) the president’s abuse of our “normal” process of government; (5) the squandering of our nation’s standing around the world.

Today, I want to tackle that final theme — how Donald Trump has, through a whole series of unnecessary choices, weakened the country around the world, likely irreparably. This is a theme I’ve been writing about all year, starting in January when I wrote: “We are watching in real-time as a superpower dies by suicide — an all-but unprecedented choice to self-immolate and torch the country’s remaining global trust and friendships.”

As I said at the time, then about Trump’s insane push to seize control of Greenland, “To watch the push for Greenland is to experience one of the wildest things that any country or head of state has done in the entire history of the modern world, dating back to the very creation of the nation-state era in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. It is hard, in fact, to find any geopolitical parallel. Countries and leaders have certainly made choices and mistakes that ended in ruin—there’s Napoleon setting out to invade Russia or the actions of the Austro-Hungarian empire at the start of World War I—but it’s impossible to think of a single moment when a country so thoroughly set about consciously dismantling its core sources of national strength and influence.”

At the time, I diagnosed the core destruction as: “For the 80 years since the end of World War II, the US model of innovation, trade, and economic hegemony has been built on a foundation of six seemingly inviolable traditions and policies held steady across both Republican and Democratic administrations: (1) easy access of immigrants to the US, particularly its unparalleled world-class schools and universities; (2) rich and steady government support of higher education, medical research, and laboratories; (3) broad and ever-more-frictionless trade access to US markets and, reciprocally, a flow of US products to the rest of the world; (4) a firm, unyielding, and unquestionable adherence to the rule of law at home that made the US a predictable and safe place to create, build, and do business at home; and (5) a similarly firm, unyielding, and unquestionable network of geopolitical alliances abroad that knitted together a security blanket that stretched around the entire globe, backed up by the most powerful and widest-ranging military ever seen in human history.”

All of that has been damaged, destroyed, undone, and deconstructed over the course of the last 20 months.

In the months since I wrote that original diagnosis, we’ve seen the crisis of American standing continue — and even accelerate, particularly after the disastrous and illegal Iran war, which began without even a figleaf of international alliance-building, case-building, or legal pretense.

In March, we saw the headsmacking news that the European Union was beginning to court Canada. I’ve joked in public remarks since: I mean, we’ve all had bad days at work, but have you ever screwed up so much that Canada becomes part of Europe? Carlos Lozada wrote an important essay in the New York Times entitled “America Has Become a Dangerous Nation” that opened with a stark declaration, “We had a good run — some eight decades or so — but it is clear by now that the United States has ceased to be the leader of the free world.” That same month, the US was lowered in a world index of press freedom, losing its status as a “liberal democracy.” Its authors wrote, “The speed with which American democracy is currently dismantled is unprecedented in modern history.”

Robert Kagan wrote in The Atlantic that “America Is Now a Rogue Superpower.” By April, we saw the Wall Street Journal writing about this. Sarah Longwell used the same language that month. No less an authority than Timothy Snyder picked up my exact language of superpower suicide by May. That same month, a former NATO secretary-general asked in a public forum a once-unthinkable question: “Can we trust the United States?”

Then, last month’s UN General Assembly saw a veritable flood of reporting about how the rest of the world was turning away from the United States. As The Atlantic’s Vivian Salama wrote, “America’s Allies Are No Longer Waiting for Trump to Leave. They now figure isolationism and protectionism will be U.S. foreign policy for a long time to come.”

The basics of this problem is clear.

Thirteen presidents of both parties, stretching across some 80 years from FDR to Barack Obama, may have disagreed about all manner of domestic policies and political questions, but all generally agreed upon the basics and fundamentals of American foreign policy — they agreed on the importance of international economic and military alliances, supported democracies around the world against authoritarians, invested in multilateral institutions, and committed itself to protecting international laws and norms and human rights.

Sure, from administration to administration there might have been differences in how much or where, or political differences with places like the United Nations — and sure, you can tell dark chapters of US cozying up to dictators or breaking international law — but by and large foreign countries could understand and predict where the US stood day-to-day internationally, and, just as importantly, where they stood as foreign countries vis-à-vis the United States: Were they friend of foe?

Donald Trump has scrambled all of that. The US dismantled (illegally) USAID, a decision that will result in millions of deaths around the world. Denmark — a country that fought alongside the US in Afghanistan after 9/11 — deployed troops to Greenland with explosives and orders to blow up airport runways if the US invaded. Canada finds itself in an ongoing and inexplicable cold war with its largest trading partner and southern neighbor. Donald Trump is cozying up (again!) to Vladimir Putin. And throughout all of this, there are the capricious tariffs.

It’s easy to focus on the big things like Iran and Greenland, but there have been all manner of smaller headlines — or more niche stories — that collectively underscore to the world that we’re no longer a partner to be counted on. Take, for instance, the US decision to blindside Europe with the sale of euros. Or the way that the US has withdrawn from all manner of international organizations. The Center for American Progress, in fact, has a list of more than 150 actions that the Trump administration has taken that undermine our standing and relationships around the world.

The impact on all of this is being felt in ways big and small. A sampling of the damage we’re doing to America’s future:

•  Tourism to the US is down, both because of genuine pique at the United States and because visitors literally feel less safe as his secret police run wild and rampage against foreigners. The head of the US Travel Association is blunt: “We’re the only major country in the world losing visitation. It’s mind-boggling.”

• International student applications to study in the US are down.

• Scientists don’t want to work here or build careers anymore. Other advanced economies and one-time allies are recruiting away our top talent. As the New York Times reported this weekend in a major piece, “The system that has driven life-altering discoveries and helped make the United States a superpower is now under intense strain.”

All of that adds up to this startling fact: The Trump administration is bragging that the US experienced “net negative migration” for the first time in 2025, at least in modern history and perhaps almost ever. While the administration views this as a “plus” in racial terms, it is a catastrophe for us as an economy and society — and one that will be hard to restart, at least as it was before.

All of this is self-inflicted — to a degree that will be baffling to future generations. As the NYT wrote this weekend in that piece on scientific research:

We underestimate how permanent these shifts are and will be. There were a whole lot of countries and foreign leaders who were willing to give the US the mulligan of electing Donald Trump once — it was a strange fluke, he lost the popular vote, etc., etc., and then we bounced back and elected Joe Biden — but then we elected Donald Trump a second time and he won the popular vote.

Foreign leaders the world over now know that they can’t count on the word of the US government ever again in the same way — we are only ever four years away from the next crazy election and the possibility of the “next Donald Trump.” And it’s not just foreign leaders who will think twice — imagine being a high-level or even low-level US military or intelligence source anytime in the years to come in the wake of the Trump administration’s decision to deport back to Afghanistan all manner of people who risked their lives to help the US there.

Foreign leaders who stand up to Trump are doing great — a political factor that will surely only accelerate after Tuesday’s midterms when Trump becomes an official lame duck. Mark Carney is the superstar on the world stage right now for steering his country away from the US.

Ditto for Volodymyr Zelensky, who David French wrote this spring, “Meet the New Leader of the Free World,” saying: “By word and deed, he’s showing Europe and the world how the post-American free world can preserve its liberty and independence.”

And all the while, the Trump administration continues its illegal campaign of killing innocent people in military strikes aimed at suspected drug smugglers — strikes that the UN itself says appear to qualify as “crimes against humanity.”

And even as recently as this weekend, Trump is continuing his fuckery about Greenland — posting on Truth Social an image, above, of the country as a giant US military base.

MAGA may think that’s a joke — but Denmark and Europe clearly don’t.

We are still realizing the cost of all of this — politically, morally, and financially. The Wall Street Journal has new reporting this weekend about the stunning and eye-popping destruction of US military bases and outposts across the Middle East — damage that has been hidden from the American public by Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon. (The Wall Street Journal had to rely upon European satellite images, because the US is so committed to covering up public access to US images.) As the WSJ wrote, “The latest cost estimate of the Iran war stands at $47.1 billion as of Oct. 16, according to a document viewed by the Journal. That doesn’t include damage to bases, which the Pentagon separately priced at a minimum of $5 billion, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter. That number could potentially be as high as $15 billion, according to a separate person briefed on the cost.”

As I retweeted one writer saying this weekend, “In the aggregate, this war has been by far the worst US FP decision in history. It has dangerously depleted weapons stockpiles, nearly evicted the US from the Gulf, damaged the ability of the US to project power in key areas, destroyed relationships with allies, & will soon wreck the world economy.”

I don’t know that I’d agree — or at least I’d say it’s too soon to judge — but the mere fact that it’s within the realm of debate is an incredible statement.

GMG