Monday, September 21, 2026
Sunday, September 20, 2026
The Felon and the End of American Exceptionalism
To be honest, I have never been a fan of what I view as the myth of American exceptionalism. Under the Felon's second regime, the reality that America is not exceptional has been writ large and worldwide opinions of America have plummeted even as the Felon claims other nations respect him and his faux "golden age" of America. Yes, America has done good things in the world, but it has much that is ugly in its history - slavery and genocide against Native Americans to name but two. Under the Felon, the perception of America and the Felon have changed in very negative ways. As a piece in New York Times reports, America's image has cratered and while individual Americans traveling overseas may still receive friendly and respectful treatment in most countries, perhaps the majority of the world now views America as a threat rather than a "shining city on a hill":
Last spring, Pew Research Center released its annual survey comparing how Americans and others around the world view the United States’ global role. It wasn’t pretty. They reported, “In most countries, majorities say the United States does not promote peace and stability around the world and does not take other countries’ interests into account on matters of international policy.” Views within America’s traditional allies, the countries whose leaders Trump claims “stand up” to honor him, are particularly negative. The Pew poll registered huge declines in the belief that the U.S. is a reliable partner since Trump took office for the second time.
Results were even more devastating when it came to global views of Donald Trump in particular. In the countries surveyed, 76% of respondents said they had no confidence in his leadership of world affairs. Majorities above 70% disapprove of his policies on immigration, Venezuela, Ukraine, Iran, Gaza, Greenland and tariffs. Maybe Trump believes that equals respect.
Driving this perception are the Felon's assault on democracy on the home front while decades long allies are maligned and undermined and brutal dictators - think Vladimir Putin in particular - are coddled and given deference. The days of America leading and inspiring others by example are over - at least until America is rid of the Felon. A long piece at The Atlantic by a professor of international affairs looks at the erosion of any basis for the claim of American exceptionalism. Here are highlights:
America’s days as the exceptional nation seem to be over. At home, President Donald Trump is weakening the foundations of representative government. In the rest of the world, he has set aside democracy promotion and seems more inclined to work with autocracies like China and Russia than with America’s traditional democratic allies.
While Mr. Trump’s assault on American democracy is both without precedent and dangerous, he is right to hold off on the promotion of democracy abroad and to reach across ideological dividing lines. Improving relations with China, as Mr. Trump will aim to do at his summit with its leader, Xi Jinping, on Thursday, is a must in an interdependent world.
Yet Mr. Trump’s dismissal of democracy promotion is flawed and out of step with U.S. history in one critical respect: By compromising America’s own democracy, and backing illiberal populists in other democracies, he is extinguishing the nation’s founding mission to change the world by example. The version of exceptionalism that long guided the nation mandated pragmatism abroad so that Americans could focus on advancing their democratic experiment at home. The settlers of the New World were to build a “city upon a hill,” as the Puritan leader John Winthrop put it in 1630, ultimately changing the world, but only by serving as a democratic model that others would follow. This is the version of U.S. statecraft that urgently needs to be resuscitated.
We are in a worldwide battle for hearts and minds. The future of republican government in the United States, and globally, hangs in the balance. As Mr. Trump oversteps executive authority, weaponizes the Justice Department and tries to cow the media, private sector and universities, the citizens of China, Iran, Russia and other autocracies are watching America’s democratic beacon flicker. . . . .The United States is squandering its ability to bend the arc of history toward more freedom.
Americans embraced a democratic messianism from the get-go. As Thomas Paine put it in 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” But for the next century-plus, the United States sought to foster the spread of republican government by serving as an exemplar rather than by intervening abroad.
This patient approach to spreading democracy was the product of three main considerations. First, Americans were acutely aware of the fragility of their own experiment in self-government. President George Washington explicitly warned in his 1796 Farewell Address that ambition abroad, by centralizing power and requiring an oversize military, risked compromising freedom at home. Adams was also concerned that foreign wars, even if fought for the republican cause, risked changing “the fundamental maxims of her policy … from liberty to force,” tempting the nation to become “the dictatress of the world.”
Second, the nation’s leaders believed that republican government had to emerge organically and could not be imposed from outside. As Americans in the 1820s decided not to intervene in Latin America to support countries breaking away from European empires, Adams asserted that he saw “no prospect that they would establish free or liberal institutions of government” — a view that would prevail for decades.
Third, America’s leaders appreciated the need to navigate the world as it was, not as they might like it to be. As President James Monroe explained in 1823, U.S. policy toward Europe’s monarchies was “not to interfere in the internal concerns of any of its powers; to consider the government de facto as the legitimate government for us; to cultivate friendly relations with it.”
By the late nineteenth century, this pragmatic and transactional brand of statecraft contributed to impressive results at home; Americans not only kept their republic, they turned it into a world power. The results abroad were more modest; only a handful of countries were beating a path toward liberal democracy by the turn of the century. But as the founders had hoped, the success of the American experiment set an example that others were starting to follow.
Beginning in 1898, America’s growing power and ambition lured it into the trap that Adams had warned against: Its idealist aspirations began to outstrip its strategic interests.
President William McKinley launched a war to expel Spain from Cuba and went on to annex Spanish possessions in the Caribbean and Pacific, asserting that he was acting “in the cause of humanity.” Less than two decades later, President Woodrow Wilson ordered a succession of military interventions in the Caribbean and Latin America, reportedly vowing that he would teach “the South American republics to elect good men.” He also guided the nation into World War I, declaring that “the world must be made safe for democracy.”
Americans quickly soured on these more costly efforts to export their ideals. The annexation of Spanish territories turned the nation into a colonial empire; the United States became an occupier, not a liberator. And despite victory in World War I, many Americans regretted entanglement in Old World rivalries, and the Senate rejected U.S. participation in the League of Nations, Wilson’s brainchild to keep the postwar peace. So began America’s interwar retreat and the abandonment of its idealist aspirations in favor of a stubborn isolationism.
During World War II and the Cold War, the United States finally arrived at a stable equilibrium between its strategic interests and its lofty ideals. To do battle with the Axis powers, Washington set aside its ideological misgivings to ally with the Soviet Union, but after vanquishing Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, it went on to democratize both countries.
Amid the Cold War, Washington formed sturdy alliances with fellow democracies while also working with autocracies as needed to contain communism, at times compromising its ideals. Yet the West ultimately prevailed not by defeating the Soviet Union on the battlefield, but by demonstrating the superiority of free societies and open markets, patiently waiting for the Soviet bloc to collapse from within.
As had happened roughly a century earlier, America’s idealist ambitions again began to outstrip its strategic interests after the Cold War ended. . . . At the same time, the triumph of capitalism stoked excessive confidence in the benefits of the unfettered marketplace.
These idealist illusions produced a succession of major setbacks for the United States. After 9/11, regime-change missions in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya cost trillions of dollars and produced little good. The United States integrated Russia and China into global markets, expecting the expansion of their middle classes to liberalize their politics and tame their foreign policies. Nothing of the sort happened. Both countries have become more autocratic and more hostile to the United States.
In the meantime, a combination of automation and free trade has undermined the industrial-era social contract, hollowing out middle classes and political centrism across Western democracies. Mr. Trump and the world’s many other populists are a symptom more than a cause of the resulting anti-establishment anger.
We have come full circle. As during the founding era, American democracy is under threat from within. Meanwhile, republican ideals are in retreat; the world is becoming decidedly less free. And since managing an interdependent globe necessitates broad international cooperation, the United States again needs to navigate the world as it is, not as it would like it to be. . . . Mr. Trump’s Iran debacle will hopefully reinforce the due caution that Washington should exercise when it comes to trying to change regimes by force.
[I]n threatening democracy at home and supporting illiberal populists abroad, Mr. Trump is corrupting, not reviving, the original version of American exceptionalism. By imperiling the American experiment, and encouraging fellow travelers to do the same in their own democracies, Mr. Trump is certainly setting an example, but one that will decidedly darken the course of history.
Americans must urgently rescue their democratic experiment. Their ability to do so is critical to reversing the illiberal tide that is rising globally. Only if Americans get their own democratic house in order and demonstrate that democracy can outperform autocracy will they be able to ensure the arc of history again bends toward more freedom.
Saturday, September 19, 2026
Defeating the Felon's Effort to Reshape Civil Society
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Since returning to the White House, the Felon - aided by congressional republicans only too happy to prostitute themselves - has perhaps done more damage to America's national security and economic strength than any foreign adversary. Meanwhile, he has ushered in a level of corruption and greed driven self-enrichment never before seen in an American president. The Felon, his family members, and his circle of oligarchs and billionaires have displayed previously unimagined greed and self-dealing, much of it at the expense of the American public (particularly poor children), many of whom will lose health care access, food benefits and subsistence benefits so that the already obscenely wealthy can become even more wealthy. And then there is the gratuitous cruelty in the mass deportation effort where non-criminals immigrants are abused, families separated and de facto concentration camps established. Add in the never ending lies and untruths and slander aimed at critics and we have a scene akin to the early days of Hitler's rise to power. Despite this onslaught of lies, corruption and cruelty, as a column in the New York Times argues, the Felon's grip on society appears to be slipping and more and more Americans are rejecting the Felon's and the ever enabling Republican Party's agenda. Here are column highlights:
The frantic pace of the Trump presidency makes days seem like weeks and weeks like months — if not years. Finding rhyme or reason amid President Trump’s erratic conduct is impossible. Even so, while 2026 has not brought calm, it has brought more clarity.
Twenty months into his second term, Mr. Trump has remade the presidency and changed what Americans will tolerate from their government and from one another. Yet that transformation, sweeping as it is, may prove less important than what Mr. Trump and his allies could not do. They failed at the most ambitious project that they brought to his second term: using the state to remake American society. That failure is a central fact of the past 20 months, and it is why the country is in a less dangerous place than it was a year ago.
When Mr. Trump took office for the second time, he arrived with several overlapping but distinct agendas. The one he cared most about would convert the executive branch to a form of government that scholars call patrimonialism, in which the state is run as the leader’s personal property and family concern. In a patrimonialist system, expert bureaucracies and neutral rules are replaced by — or subordinated to — the head of state’s will. Where they can, patrimonialists personalize and weaponize law enforcement, pardons, programs and grants, appointments, promotions and all the other aspects of state power.
Patrimonialism is manifest in Mr. Trump’s enrichment of himself and his family, reportedly by several billion dollars — and in his effort to extract almost $1.8 billion from taxpayers by means of a sham legal settlement.
He uses his Justice Department to wage personal vendettas and his pardons to indemnify his cronies. He has staffed the department’s senior ranks with his own criminal defense attorneys, and the F.B.I. with a fierce political loyalist whose chief qualification was a career spent attacking the investigators who had scrutinized Mr. Trump. And he has purged the government’s internal checks on corruption, including by firing inspectors general, career prosecutors and F.B.I. agents whose offense was to follow the rules.
The re-norming of political standards is another area in which Mr. Trump has made a lasting imprint. By “re-norming,” we mean the deliberate degradation of what is considered acceptable in American public life.
Examples are far too many to enumerate . . . . Beneath it all is the normalization of lying on an industrial scale: tens of thousands of documented false claims as president, including false accusations against Americans and false representations to courts.
Many Americans are sick of wading through the sludge and understandably want to look away. That is what Mr. Trump is counting on. He wins not by persuading us that the conduct is acceptable, but by wearing us out until we no longer object. Each violation makes the next easier; each unpunished transgression resets the baseline. What is being broken is not this standard or that one; it’s the idea that standards apply. . . . . It is no longer clear what a president could say — about a dead man, about a murdered family, about women he has abused, about incitements to violence — that would cost him anything.
So why, despite all that, does the second year of Mr. Trump’s second term seem less menacing than the first year? Because the patrimonialism and the re-norming, damaging as they are, were only part of what he and his followers set out to do. The largest of their ambitions was something else: the remaking of American society itself.
The Trump administration’s cultural reset was ambitious. While it had the president’s support, it was devised and pursued mostly by people around him. They included top officials such as Stephen Miller, Russell Vought, and JD Vance on the inside of the administration, plus Elon Musk for the four months he worked in it; outside activists such as Christopher Rufo of the Manhattan Institute, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation, and Steve Bannon of the “ War Room” podcast . . . . This group saw Mr. Trump’s second term as their best chance to block and reverse the left’s takeover and makeover of the country’s culture and institutions. By deploying government power against the commanding heights of the culture, they sought to supplant liberal hegemony not just in Washington but throughout society.
Every administration tries to shape the culture. What sets this one apart is not the ambition, but the means and the scale — not persuasion but coercion, and not on one front but everywhere all at once, in ways that were unprecedented and found by courts to be unlawful. Mr. Trump and his administration sought to bully and commandeer private institutions, to redirect the culture, and to remake society from above by force and fear.
In a few ways, the Trumpian social revolution succeeded: by slowing, and even reversing, the momentum of so-called D.E.I. (diversity, equity and inclusion) in elite institutions and of what conservatives called “gender ideology” . . . . On the whole, though, the administration’s effort to remake the culture in its image has failed.
History may one day judge that the tide turned in Minneapolis. In January of this year, Operation Metro Surge made mass arrests, invaded homes, fired pepper balls and shot dead two American citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, without plausible cause — and then, after their deaths, defamed them.
The architect of the operation, Stephen Miller, one of the most powerful presidential aides in modern history, was explicit about the method. He ran Operation Metro Surge through daily calls with the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security, wielding the authority of the president — reportedly directing agents to “force confrontations” with protesters to win the “P.R. battle”
The people of Minneapolis answered with disciplined, peaceful resistance: tens of thousands marching in Arctic cold, luminaria spelling “ICE Out 4 Good,” a statewide “economic blackout,” a state lawsuit in federal court, citizen networks that tracked ICE and documented its activities, and a population that refused every provocation.
The administration backed down . . . . By demonstrating that they could face the spectacle of force and win, Minnesotans shook off their despair and found that they were not powerless. The moment became a catalyst far beyond the Twin Cities. The mass public saw what was being done in their name and many were repulsed by it. What they glimpsed was that a country can, in fact, be lost, and that theirs had come nearer the edge than they had believed.
The president and his forces lost other key cultural battles, too. From outside his home country, but speaking pointedly to it, the first American pope not only defied Mr. Trump but transcended him, demonstrating a moral authority against which the president had no power. Within the United States, No Kings marches staged some of the largest single-day protests in American history, deploying anger and humor without fear. Lawsuits on behalf of Harvard, U.C.L.A. and law firms fought and won key rulings. Federal judges, including some of Mr. Trump’s appointees, blocked action after action. Mr. Musk’s demolition crew disbanded in failure and disrepute.
At the same time, and equally important, the president’s approval rating collapsed. Voters wanted an orderly border and criminal immigrants removed, not a culture war waged brutally in the streets. Mr. Trump’s unpopularity — abetted by his twin fresh failures on Iran and high prices — reached near-record lows for a second-term president.
His efforts to bully the culture have not stopped; he is still menacing universities and attacking free speech. No one should be relaxed about that. But his preoccupations have shifted away from intimidating and dominating civil society and toward building monuments to himself.
Revolutions can fail but still scar the landscape. And Mr. Trump, with just under two-and-a-half years left in his second term, might emotionally and psychologically blow apart. But things are different than they were. The 80-year-old president is losing his grip on power and even his own base. The MAGA movement is fracturing. And the president no longer inspires the fear he once did. We know something today that wasn’t altogether clear a year ago: America’s civil society is harder to intimidate and rewire than MAGA’s cultural revolutionaries hoped.
Conservatives have every right to influence and change the culture, as progressives assuredly have done. But they should do it Ronald Reagan’s way: by moral inspiration and persuasion, not force majeure. Progressives have something to learn, too. Mr. Trump and his culture warriors lost by moving too far out of the moral mainstream; Democrats should claim and occupy that mainstream, not lurch well out to the left, as they seem tempted to do.
Those who played a role in Mr. Trump’s rise to power have acted not just unwisely, but culpably. Even so, it is now apparent that many Americans — probably enough Americans — are determined to live within the truth rather than the lie, to fight for their civic and political self-respect, to return a sense of humanity to a nation that has grown too cold, too callous and too cruel.
Friday, September 18, 2026
The Felon: Making America Dirtier, Poorer, and Less Safe
At last week’s GOP midterm convention in Dallas, Vice President Vance painted a bleak picture of American life before the second Trump administration:
“Two years ago, we have to remember, our nation, ladies and gentlemen, was tired. We were tired of seeing our factories close. We were tired of our neighbors dying of drug overdoses. We were tired of not being able to afford anything. We were tired of seeing the cartels and the criminals given free rein over our great country,” Vance said. “And we were tired of being called racist for noticing that our country was becoming dirtier and poorer and less safe and less prosperous.”
Who is responsible for this terrible state of affairs? The opposition party and immigrants, apparently. . . . . But this account represents a preposterous inversion. Almost every problem Vance lists, the Trump administration has made worse.
The administration’s environmental policies have made American water and air dirtier. Its health-care, tariff, and tax policies have worsened inflation and increased the financial burden on most American households, even as incomes have grown. And its public-health policies have led to outbreaks of contagious disease.
The Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump has revoked regulations on air pollution—including those on particulate matter that can cause heart and lung disease—after being intensely lobbied by the fossil-fuel industry. It has repealed limits on “forever chemicals” in drinking water, which are linked to cancer and other health problems. The Trump Justice Department scrapped a settlement compelling Alabama to provide adequate sanitation systems to residents living with raw sewage, describing it as “DEI.”
Although Trump won the 2024 election largely because of Biden-era inflation, he has done everything in his power to make inflation worse. Trump’s arguably illegal and certainly ill-advised war in Iran has led to the closure of strategic shipping waterways, which has provoked a rise in energy prices, which has in turn raised the prices of other goods. Trump’s tariffs worsened inflation by raising the price of imports, and wages seem to be falling behind inflation. To make matters worse, health-care costs are rising rapidly, in part because of the Trump administration’s repeal of Affordable Care Act subsidies in its One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
Crime is down. But that’s not because of the Trump administration’s mass-deportation program, whose brutal and indiscriminate tactics have weakened the economy rather than strengthened it. The reality is that immigrants are far less likely than native-born Americans to commit crimes, and crime has been falling steadily since the pandemic-induced spike in 2020 and 2021. Absent significant changes to the space-time continuum, Trump cannot claim credit for a decline in crime that began before Trump even took office, . . .
Vance called out two women, one of whom was born in Somalia, who defrauded Medicaid of $46 million. But the Trump administration has been happy to pardon fraudsters such as Lawrence Duran, who was sentenced to 50 years in prison for defrauding Medicare of more than $200 million, or Robert Harshbarger Jr., the husband of Republican Representative Diana Harshbarger, who pleaded guilty to health-care fraud. Last February, Elizabeth Oyer, a former U.S. pardon attorney, told The New York Times that Trump’s pardons had “essentially wiped away about $1 billion in penalties and restitution secured by federal prosecutors in fraud cases.”
the Trump administration has tried its best to make the federal government worse at protecting Americans from foreseeable problems. Cuts to public agencies have coincided with outbreaks of infectious and foodborne diseases, to the point that the administration is trying to manipulate numbers to hide measles deaths. I don’t know about you, but I felt safer when I could eat lettuce without thinking about whether it would make me sick. Or berries. Or beef.
In fairness, however, not everyone is getting poorer—the top 1 and 0.1 percent of American households have seen their income grow considerably, thanks to the OBBBA’s slashing of taxes on the wealthy; the bottom 50 percent, not so much.
To the extent that anyone should be happy with the Trump administration’s policies, though, many of its extremely wealthy backers are getting all they paid for and then some.
As for everyone else? The country is almost certainly dirtier, poorer, less prosperous, and in some ways less safe than in 2024. But that’s not because of Democrats or immigrants. It’s because of the people currently running the place. They’re really hoping you’ll blame someone else.
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