Obvious examples include endangering democracy and the rule of law at home; forging new de facto alliances with authoritarian rulers such as Russian President Vladimir Putin; pursuing a world order of empires based exclusively on power, without binding rules or multinational institutions; and destroying longstanding alliances and trading relationships.
What had always distinguished the United States, from its founding through its rise as a global superpower, was its deep roots in the values of the Enlightenment. The Founding Fathers were fully committed to Western humanism and a rationally constructed constitution. The institutions they established made the US more successful than any other state founded in modern times. The preamble to the US Constitution begins with “We the People,” a pluralis majestatis (“royal we”) that had previously been reserved for monarchs. The claim of popular sovereignty that those three words implied was a deliberate provocation and a powerful symbol of the nascent American democracy’s revolutionary challenge to absolutist rule everywhere.
Of course, during its historic ascent – becoming first a North American continental power, then a world power, and finally the global superpower of our time – the US always displayed the dual character of an imperial power and a democracy rooted in the values of the Enlightenment. Its initial acceptance of slavery in its southern states was in permanent, irreconcilable tension with the commitment to equality and inalienable rights announced in the Declaration of Independence and enshrined in the Constitution.
But whatever its flaws, at least the US never stood only for hard power. Its rise to global hegemony certainly owed much to its economic dominance and its geographic position between the two largest oceans – advantages that factored into its military victories in the two world wars and its triumph in the Cold War. But it was the combination of material strengths and the universal appeal of Enlightenment values that proved decisive in enabling America’s ascent.
With his reliance on naked power and rejection of all constraints on his authority, Trump represents the opposite of everything that made the US great. Under his misrule, a superpower with immeasurable economic and military power is sinking into irrationalism, egocentric nationalism, and official violence.
As the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence approaches, the world’s oldest democracy faces an existential challenge from a single man who would prefer to impose absolutist rule. At stake is nothing less than the American republic and everything it has ever stood for. It is being replaced by a corrupt oligarchy dominated by billionaires with imperial fantasies of world domination and fever dreams of colonizing distant planets and achieving immortality.
Constitutionally protected civil liberties are giving way to comprehensive surveillance and control, administered by private companies like Palantir. Those who protest and resist face the risk of execution by masked federal enforcers who are effectively immune from prosecution. World-leading universities and research institutions are under increasing financial pressure, and freedom of speech belongs only to those in power.
“The land of the free” increasingly feels to travelers like the former Eastern Bloc. In foreign policy, America’s closest, most loyal allies – such as Denmark – are being turned into adversaries, simply because they are resisting imperial claims on their sovereign territory. For Trump and his circle, aggressive warmongers like Putin are not the problem. Europeans are – especially the European Union. It sounds absurd, because it is.
Trump is pursuing a great revision of everything that has long made the US great: a functioning separation of powers, an open labor market, a university system that attracted the best minds from around the world, and a value system based on tolerance, reason, and universal rights. MAGA is destroying not only the transatlantic West, but the foundations of US power.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world will continue to need the US to manage some of our biggest shared challenges. Unfortunately, the US itself may be one of them.
