After Trump, America’s mask finally cracked

Watching American democracy unravel since Trump became president is honestly surreal. He didn’t just tear up the rulebook for presidential behavior - he made the highest office in the country a global joke, which, let’s be real, is exactly what hardline conservatives here and even people like Vladimir Putin have been rooting for. It’s wild to trace it all back: when Barack Obama, a Black man, won the White House in 2008 (and then again in 2012), a big chunk of this country absolutely lost it. That outrage never faded. Even now, my own conservative relatives were laughing over ancient racist Obama memes at Thanksgiving like he’s still their boogeyman, while George W. Bush is just “that old guy who paints dogs.” When Bush left, I felt a wave of relief, but after Trump, it’s like he took a wrecking ball to way more than the White House. Internationally, the United States used to be the world’s main hub for money and trade, just by being somewhat stable and predictable. That reputation has been torched in just the last couple years. Now, other countries are scrambling to move their money elsewhere because the US feels way too unstable to trust. And the people steering the ship aren’t even pretending anymore - they’re openly trying to drag us back, not just fifty years, but a whole century or more, pining for some twisted version of the past with company towns, private militias, and unchecked corporate power. The whole “land of the free” and “protecting liberty from tyranny” shtick? It’s a punchline now, because we ended up with a wannabe dictator in charge - and nobody fired a shot to stop it, unless you count the gunfire at the Capitol riot, school shootings, or the police cracking down on protests. That’s just Tuesday in America these days. Honestly, I have no idea how the US is supposed to come back from this, not with a whole political party that’s fully bought into authoritarian vibes and wants to roll out a new Trump every four years. The rest of the world has noticed - allies are bailing, and nobody wants to deepen ties with a country that’s this unpredictable. If this is what “normal” looks like now, it really does feel like we’re witnessing the beginning of the end for the whole “land of the free” myth.