Ten months from now, America will mark the 250th anniversary of its experiment with democracy. Or we may look back and mark this past summer as the time when the experiment failed.
The president is laying waste to the government of the United States. Many of its institutions are in ruins. Others may seem like they’re still standing, but they’re empty shells. Still more are under assault, as the people inside brace for the next blow from the wrecking ball.
The Voice of America, once a beacon of democratic ideals, destroyed because it angered foreign autocrats. The Agency for International Development, which saved lives and fed the starving, demolished in the name of America First. The civil-rights branches of the government, lopped off in the cause of white supremacy. At the Justice Department, the lights are on but there’s nobody home.
Masked thugs and armed soldiers roam the streets of our cities. A sociopath Kennedy scion is demolishing scientific research. A conspiracy theorist is dismantling the FBI. The crackpot atop the Pentagon is firing generals and admirals right and left, because they’re black, or because they’re women, or because they’re deemed to be woke.
The instruments of the foreign policy of the United States, from intelligence to diplomacy, are being hollowed out. The National Security Council, which steers the ship of state abroad, is a skeleton crew. The State Department is a shadow of itself. Purges at the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the rest of our spy services – an ideological cleansing in the name of MAGA – are blinding us to what’s going on in the world. What’s happening is a “strategic self-immolation,” in the words of Bill Burns, the former CIA director and deputy secretary of state.
Core functions of the government – predicting calamitous weather, warning of dangers from abroad, repairing damage from natural disasters – are on the brink of failure. Not from flaws in their design, or from dysfunction, but by deliberate acts of sabotage by the president of the United States.
A few days after Trump’s re-election, the author and journalist Garrett Graff wondered aloud if one day in the not-too-distant future the government of the United States might stop working. “The darkest vision for the years ahead is that America sees its federalized national government essentially cease to exist,” he wrote. “It’s entirely possible we watch many of the things we’ve come to expect the federal government do simply disappear or fade into dysfunction and paralysis.”
Garrett was dead right. But it may be months, not years, until the machine breaks down.
Or perhaps the wheels will come off Trump’s juggernaut before he lays waste to the whole of government. The American people don’t like what he’s doing. The price of everything is going up, one consequence of his chaotic tariffs. The crops in the Imperial Valley of California will rot in the fields at summer’s end, one cost of his cruel immigration raids. Republican members of Congress are too scared to hold town halls at home, fearing their constituents’ wrath. Maybe, despite the gerrymandering and monkeywrenching, a free and fair election will take place next year and their power to do Trump’s bidding will break.
The fall of America is not foreordained. But no free republic in the history of civilization has lasted longer than three hundred years. And that was the Roman Empire.
If we are going to make it to three hundred, we will need a national renewal. It will require the combined force and foresight of the reconstruction after the Civil War, the New Deal in the face of the Depression, and the courageous civil-rights movement of the 1960’s, which sought to make the United States a true democracy at last, with liberty and justice for all. It’s not too late to take back America. But it will take years to repair the damage that’s been done.
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