The Collapse Of The American Empire

The United States is giving us a real-time view into the collapse of an empire.  The 2024 election cycle will determine whether the final failures happen quickly (and soon), or if there will be a slower series of failings that will eventually render the current American Republic neutered. 

Precisely when the collapse begins is a matter of opinion.  I think arguments can be made that point to either the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980, the election of George W. Bush in 2000, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016.  I don’t intend to spend this post making and evaluating those arguments.  Suffice it to say that each of those elections resulted in governments that played a significant role in setting the stage for where we are today.

Where are things today?  Well … we live in an era where evidence based decision making has been supplanted by conspiracy theories and often outright lies.  Conspiracy theories and their proponents are no longer the disheveled guy roaming the streets muttering to themselves. Instead, they are widely disseminated.  News media - the so called “fourth estate of democracy” - is dominated by commercial partisan interests.  

Then there is the political discourse.  What used to be a discussion from different perspectives which could eventually converge on some kind of middle ground has become a polarized “us versus them” war zone.  Trust has been destroyed on both sides of the partisan aisle.  People in the legislatures don’t see each other as colleagues, they see each other as rivals.  

Then we come to the leadership candidates. The United States has come to be governed primarily by old, white, men.  Look at the two candidates running in 2024.  We have an incumbent who is over 80 today, and his rival is well into his 70s. Seriously - when did the US presidency become a geritocracy?  Surely there are hundreds, if not thousands of potential candidates who are a good 20-30 years younger around, yet the parties are coalescing around two people who should be looking to retire and enjoy their last years? I’m not saying that older people don’t have things to contribute, but seriously, there comes a time to step aside and let younger people lead.  

Instead, we have a cult built around the utterly insane ravings of Donald Trump, and well - I’m not entirely sure about Biden - he’s basically “not Trump” in this race.  That’s how bad it is. 
From a “direction of the government” we literally have either “status quo”, or “burn it all to the ground” (the latter driven by conspiracy theories and wild rhetoric to whip up a mob).  There is no “middle ground” here.  Trump convinced his followers that the 2020 election was “stolen from him”, and that the entire apparatus of government is corrupted.  Biden has to find ways to fight that, and I have no idea what that’s going to look like. 

There’s basically 3 possible outcomes for the 2024 election:  

1). Biden wins a narrow victory again.

In this scenario,  I think you will see Trump ramp up the “electoral fraud” rhetoric to his followers.  We’ll see another round of unrest coming up to Biden being inaugurated into his second term.  It will be messy, but ultimately sets the US on a slower path to the collapse of the Republic.  It is possible that during that time, the Democrats will be able to groom a decent successor to Biden who isn’t in their 70s or 80s.  If they do not, then whatever is leading the GOP after 2024 is going to win in 2028.  

2). One of the two contenders dies or is incapacitated during the campaign

Age is a nasty thing this way.  Both candidates are of an age where any number of things could render them unable to finish the campaign, effectively handing a free win to their challenger.  It’s a rare occurrence, but given the ages of the contenders this time, one we have to be prepared to consider.  

3).  Trump Wins

This is the scenario that is far more likely to collapse the Republic very quickly, and in fact is the scenario I will spend most of this post writing about. 

What does a Trump victory look like come January 20, 2025?  Well, Trump has given us a number of clues as to how he plans to act.  In late 2023, in an interview with Sean Hannity, Trump said he'd be a dictator on day 1:

“Yes, we got the bench for it,” Trump associate Kash Patel told Bannon. “We will go out and find the conspirators, not just in government, but in the media…We’re going to come after you.”

This is not empty rhetoric, but a sincere expression of perhaps the only real conviction Trump holds: the belief that he is entitled to the kind of power he’s admired in strongmen like Viktor Orban and Kim Jong Un. “Donald Trump has been telling us exactly what he will do if he’s reelected and tonight he said he will be a dictator on day one,” Julie Chavez Rodriguez, campaign manager for President Joe Biden, said in a statement after Trump’s town hall with Hannity on Tuesday. “Americans should believe him.”

This is quite consistent with Trump's general mentality that "if someone punches at you, you punch back twice as hard".  From the same Vanity Fair article, we get the following observation:

If you don’t find his pledge to limit his authoritarianism to a single day particularly reassuring, that would make sense. There's no such thing as a one-day tyrant, and his authoritarian daydreams go beyond border policies and an expansion of oil drilling, as he and allies have made abundantly clear.

Trump doesn't think in subtle terms such as reshaping government.  I don't think he's capable of that.  He's very much a simplistic, absolutist thinker.  The only way to do this is to undermine the rule of law entirely.  Suborn the courts to the whim of the executive, make the police into your enforcers.  The latter part is much harder, in part because of the sheer amount of organizational inertia in bodies like the FBI and CIA,  but it can be done.

As Andrew Coyne notes in his column "First, Trump tried to overthrow democracy. Now he is attempting to overthrow the rule of law", Trump's claims of "presidential immunity" from prosecution are so wildly out of step with any reasonable understanding of law and the US constitution that it represents a failure to understand how nihilistic Trump actually is, and how willing he is to "burn it all down" for his own benefit. 

On the foreign affairs front, Trump has sent other signals that should worry everybody.  His recent tirades about encouraging Russia to "do as they will" with NATO allies throughout Europe are both chilling and worrying.  First, it's a clear threat to anyone who belongs to NATO that a Trump government is viewing NATO in the same way that mobsters used to run protection rackets - don't pay enough (and I would wager he will start demanding direct payments to the US), and he'll let Russia have its way with them. 

There's a secondary part of this that is more concerning.  Trump's words can be seen as a clear signal to the Kremlin about a future stance towards Russia and its activities.  Whether that is towards Ukraine, or any of the other former Russian Empire territories.  I said "Russian Empire" for a reason.  For a number of years now, I have suspected that Putin's goals are not merely a resurrection of the old Cold War structures, but instead a classical territorial game of empire building, inspired not by Stalin, but by Peter the Great and his successors.  

Further, we cannot ignore the presence of foreign interference in Western democracies any longer.  It's no secret that Russia and China in particular have widespread propaganda and influence networks, and here in Canada we can also put India on that list. Trump benefits from those players enormously.  There is a non-trivial amount of evidence out there that Trump has been a Russian intelligence asset since the 1980s, and since the late 1990s, Russian oligarchs have been laundering money through Trump and his properties.  All of this strongly suggests that Trump is already compromised, and likely to a degree that should disqualify him from holding any elected office in the United States. 

All of this paints a very worrying picture should Trump win in November, 2024.  The question isn't "how will he govern?" - we already know the broad strokes of that.  He's going to govern the same way a mob boss runs their cartel.  He'll surround himself with people to do the dirty work for him, and they will carry out his orders even when they aren't explicitly stated.  

Documents disappearing will be the least of the America's problems.  People will start disappearing, and when Trump can't get his way "quietly", expect him to use mobs of angry citizens to do so.  

The results after 4 years will be unrecognizable.  The apparatus of government that supports the American Republic will be gone - dismantled, collapsed, and largely subverted by a system designed to entrench the power of the Presidency above all else.  The ability of the United States to project power abroad will be compromised, its role as "good cop" on the world stage (already faded by decades cynical foreign policy and wars) will be dissolved, and while its military will continue to be large and dangerous, it will not have the trust of those who once called them allies.