Trust and the End of the American Empire

Without trust, an economy, a government, and a society will cease to function

The American Empire has fallen. We are currently a failed state, listing towards full autocracy, with a clown car of degenerate oligarchs, foreign agents, and cult leaders running the federal government. The damage that has already been done — the abdicating of soft power, the abject incompetence and disregard of national security, and now the preemptive economic nuclear war we have waged on the entire world — can never be undone. Ever.

We must come to grips with this reality and think not in terms of repairing or rebuilding, but of building something new.

I say this for very practical reasons, not as pie-in-the-sky liberal hopium but because the intangible currency of all economics, government, and society is trust. And trust in America is gone now. And our enemies are gleeful about it.

“There were several fundamental events after which humanity as we know it has developed. The first and the most important was the system of trust. With what Trump did yesterday, he destroyed the trust. The trust in the system. It seemed that things were unshakeable. In reality a monument should be erected to him.”

—Vladimir Solovyev, Russian state TV propagandist

[Source: Julia Davis, Youtube]

What does this mean for America? What does it mean for those of us who have no intention of falling into some broligarch’s apartheid Dark Age fantasy and need a constructive approach to getting out of this mess?

Restoring trust, between the American people, of the government, and to our foreign allies is the same project. it means big changes have to be made. It means that we cannot try to cobble together a repair job on the government that is no longer trusted by anyone.

But it’s not just the government, it’s a corporate media that has been providing cover for liars and conmen for far too long.

• January 1987—Donald Trump gets a letter from Moscow inviting him to do business with the Soviet Union.

• July 4th, 1987—Trump lands in Red Square.

• September 2nd, 1987—Trump switches to Republican, buys a full page ad demanding money from our allies, and lies to Larry King, who goes along with Trump’s obvious propaganda and never mentions his very public trip to the Soviet Union.

As I wrote in February, we need to stop being shocked by Trump’s behavior. He has never changed and never will. And neither will the corporate media.

The sad truth is that our foreign adversaries, through assets like Donald Trump, Peter Thiel, Mike Flynn and Elon Musk, eroded trust in our institutions through psychological warfare to the point that America as we knew her, committed national suicide.

So, we cannot hope to reconstruct that same entity and expect anyone to trust it, can we? What Democrat is going to be able to walk into the White House in 2028 and restore trust with the same institutions that allowed this catastrophe to unfold on their watch?

The Executive Branch is simultaneously too weak, and too strong. Put a man in the presidency who adheres to norms and institutions and the worst crime in modern American political history, January 6th, goes totally unpunished — except for the foot soldiers. Put a malignant narcissist in the presidency who has no regard for anything but his own power and you get the unrecoverable disaster we see around us. Neither of these is acceptable.

In order to restore trust to our citizens and our allies, we need to build an American government that corrects for the obvious weaknesses that 250 years of history, and decades of corruption, has created. Otherwise, why should anyone think this will never happen again?

The reason this particular attack has been so effective, as opposed to similar efforts across previous decades is the amplifier of social media. The reality distortion field it creates, and the psychological impact on our citizens is the single biggest unrecognized problem and the singular failure of the Biden administration.

We refused to recognize the deep, wide-scale injury that his been done to American civilians by repeatedly lying to them in ways designed to traumatize them. A massive part of our population lives in an alternate reality that has been constructed out of psychological damage. People can choose their own adventure, as long as the last chapter is destroying themselves, their families and their country.

The people who live in the MAGA-Musk-QAnon+ alternate reality are there because they were told the government is untrustworthy — that they have been lied to. Unfortunately, that much is true. The intelligence apparatus, law enforcement and justice systems were corrupt already, to include Merrick Garland, Christopher Wray and the Pentagon. But the corruption has now taken hold completely. Now the Vice President, Director of the CIA and the Secretary of Defense are complaining about helping Europe while they share operational classified info over a commercial app with a reporter listening in. Now the FBI Director is a Kremlin stooge who sued me for calling him a “chud.” And now Nazi whisperer Laura Loomer is making firing decisions about the Director of the National Security Agency. What is there to trust anymore?

Similarly, the Legislative Branch is half full of people who are professional liars doing the bidding of our foreign adversaries. It’s not a bicameral deliberative body, it’s a propaganda operation. It has the approval rating of lice for a reason, it doesn’t work. This is not to mention the anachronistic leftovers of Senate apportionment that gives Wyoming and California the same numbers of Senators, or the electoral college which has provided nothing more than a surface of attack.

The Big Problem is SCOTUS which simply needs to be erased and started over. 6 out of 9 Justices are Leonard Leo Catholic integralists, meaning they do not believe in separation of Church and State, they do not believe in equal rights, and they do not believe in a multicultural democracy. They’re forcing women to die outside of clinics. They legalized bump stocks before the election. They made the President a king. And all because Donald Trump cheated his way into the presidency — with help from his dear old friends, the Russian government, and stuffed the bench with Federalist plants.

As the United States threatens our neighbors with annexation, reigns economic terror on the world, and abandons our allies to our enemies, what is there to trust anymore?

I’m sorry to say… nothing.

To restore order and confidence in America, we must have trust again. To do that requires making changes. Big ones. And mostly, it requires being trustworthy.

We need an American Democracy Reorganization Plan or, if you will, a Project 2026. Just as our enemies worked to shatter what had been built over 2 1/2 centuries, we need to design and build something much better in its place. And we must have no shame about it.

FDR was a unique man who seized the full power of the the presidency and built trust in America again. He worked within the boundaries of the Constitution but managed to create a new system that has lasted for 85 years while defeating the most dangerous threat the world has ever seen — on the other side of the planet.

Unfortunately, this time the threat is in the White House and our FDR is going to have to come from the outside because the people who seized power will never give it up voluntarily. In order to marshal the forces that must be animated to overthrow this untrustworthy regime, we must have a plan. We must have a better idea, and leaders everyone can trust. If there is no direction, there is nowhere to march.

I do not pretend to be smart enough to create a plan for reorganizing democracy and restoring trust in America again. But if our enemies can cobble together Project 2025 from a bunch of christofascist lunatics, and the “Dark Enlightenment” from Nazi conspiracy theories, don’t we think we can do better if we bring the right group of people together? A new justice system, a more effective and just education system, a better military, and a parliamentary system that works for Americans instead of our enemies. These things are not out of reach.

I refuse to believe that the likes of Donald Trump and Elon Musk are going to be the end of American democracy, but I do believe they have successfully destroyed trust in what was left of the American Empire. So be it. We are still Americans. We get back on the horse and ride again.

Long Live a Free America. Glory to Ukraine.

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