I don't think that people realize that this is bigger than just the tariffs now. Even if Trump completely backs down, he's shown himself to be too unstable to do business with. I don't think that I'm exaggerating when I say that American hegemony is in terminal decline because of this. Maybe forcibly removing Trump (which will never happen) can help slow the decline, but the international community is still going to divest from America.
Yeah. Trump 1.0 had a lot of the same mindless flailing but I think a lot of folks were prepared to write it off as an aberration. For him to be reelected after everything (and I mean everything) shows the world that, no, it really is true that a considerable segment of the American populace will gleefully burn it all down as long as they can totally own the libs along the way.
Quite so. JD Vance has shown himself to be at least as xenophobic as Trump, and while one might say it's the job of the VP to help sell the President's ideas it's very obvious that these two individuals are just the incumbent leaders of a much larger American political movement oriented around international isolation and zero-sum transactionalism. The gradual erosion of American supremacy as a safe default assumption in almost every field has led to an intellectual retreat into a geographic fortress mentality which helps to explain the verbal and economic aggression toward Canada and Mexico. It's like a Civ/HOI player cashing in all diplomatic and economic chips in favor of full military mobilization.
The whole Pax Americana/Invisible Empire concept is dead now. Competitive great powers feel liberated from it and erstwhile allies are just never going to believe it again.
