Looking Backward

Alexander Tockeville of the University of Auckland introduces his new book on the causes and casualties of America’s downfall

Preface

In the past 30 years, volumes have been written about how the United States of America tumbled from its position of world economic, political, military and technological dominance to its current status as a second-rate power behind China and the Atlantic Union, with a gross national product behind those two and India.

Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024 is often considered the start of America’s decline, but as this book will argue, it is better defined as the moment when the once-powerful nation’s fall became visible and impossible to ignore.

What the late Humphrey Hubert in his 2029 treatise called “Toying with Tariffs” broke the post-World War II international financial and trading system, provoked capital flight and in time allowed the Chinese yuan to replace the American currency, long called the dollar but in 2030 renamed the Trump, as the world’s reserve currency.

Rather than reviving America’s rusted manufacturing industry, the combination of constantly changing tariffs and the permanent uncertainty they generated eventually led a number of companies and consumers to look elsewhere for predictable prices and reliable suppliers.

By 2040, German, Japanese and Korean automobile and auto parts companies had brought some of their manufacturing home or moved it to China or India, whose high-tech industrial infrastructures and authoritarian regimes offered greater stability and predictability than America’s neomonarchy.

America’s neighbors also benefited from the Trump regime’s national narcissism. Mexico expanded its auto and parts manufacturing capacity, as did Canada, which became an important supplier of cars and parts to Asia, Western Europe and the Gulf States, especially after 2035, when Ottawa joined what had been called the European Union but was renamed the Atlantic Union.

The Trump family regime’s combination of isolationism and imperialism (“i squared = 0,” opponents joked until the joke was declared a crime against the state) also led to a previously inconceivable alliance among China, Russia and the Atlantic Union.

They joined forces to shorten the time and the cost of shipping goods from Asia to Europe by improving the Northwest Passage trade route that global warming, accelerated by an end to American environmental and energy regulations, was opening year-round.

NATO was irrelevant: It was dismantled in the wake of America’s withdrawal and Russia’s seizure of all of Ukraine and then Moldova and the Baltic States.

The most visible symbols of how the first President Trump’s open lust for Greenland and Canada (“I never knew they were female,” one late night comic joked, inviting an income tax investigation.) backfired was when Chinese, Russian and West European military and civilian personnel took over an abandoned American military base on the island and a joint Chinese-Danish-Canadian mining company began exploiting its mineral wealth.

America’s declining birthrate; shrinking federal support for education, housing and health care; and unending tax increases on the bulk of society in a half-hearted attempt to pay for a parade of new loopholes for the wealthiest two percent of the population slowly decimated the U.S. market.

Without the United States, China and India cultivated new markets in Latin America, the Mideast and Africa with combinations of investments, humanitarian aid, security assistance and financial aid to fill the chasm left by America’s abrupt exodus from what the first President Trump had dismissed as “shithole countries”.

”The Americans did everything but conduct an exodus across the Red Sea,” one African leader said.

To make matters worse, the Trumps’ on-again, off-again tariff wars with China, often tied to American election cycles, boosted the cost of auto components, especially the advanced semiconductors and other electronics that were essential to self-driving automobiles (“They finally lived up to their name,” another comic joked.) and other autonomous vehicles.

That decimated the U.S. market for new cars, among other things, and by 2039, auto repair shops had surpassed manufacturing in employment, growth and economic output.

Massive investments in semiconductor manufacturing begun under President Joseph Biden during what Trump and his supporters called “the interregnum” between his first and second terms helped close the gap, but China’s reserves of some rare earth elements and its conquest of Taiwan, which Central Committee members in Beijing called “our little Ukraine” more than offset the American gains.

Not everyone suffered. One of the prime beneficiaries of the changes in the auto industry was the Trump dynasty’s largest financial supporter, Elon Musk, who first wisely reduced his dependence on Chinese components and later moved his manufacturing facilities there. Those gains, however, were obliterated, as were his other business ventures, by the ongoing war of succession among his 18 proven male offspring.

Other industries that had powered the United States to economic dominance, notable technology, medical devices and pharmaceuticals, also reduced their American presence or evacuated entirely.

In their case, the main cause was a combination of tariffs; bans on immigration; unpredictable regulation; shrunken government support for scientific research, which all the Presidents Trump called “immigration reform”; and in some cases outright hostility to immunization.

By 2038, halfway into Ivanka Trump’s second term in what her father had renamed “The Gold House” and had it painted to match, much to the horror of the White House Historical Society, there were more American doctoral and post-doctoral science students in Europe, Israel and China than there were in the United States. More than 70 percent remained where they had studied, their research supported by government and corporate funding.

The new breakthroughs in the war on cancer came not from Harvard or Johns Hopkins Universities, exhausted by endless legal battles with the Trump administrations, but from a collaboration between Fudan University’s Shanghai Cancer Center and Heidelberg University.

In addition to their other investments and aid, the wealthier countries stepped in to address the disease outbreaks and rising death rates that followed the end of American aid by selling at discounted prices medicines they had developed and manufactured.

Referring to China’s sputtering economy, falling birth rate and largely failed first attempt to expand its global political and economic reach, called the Belt and Road Initiative, one Chinese leader, echoing Confucius, said: “The Trumps rescued China. They are governed by anger and never consider the consequences.”

American immunological research took a similar hit after the third Trump administration refused to revive the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases despite a global tuberculosis pandemic, which President Donald Trump, Jr. blamed on “DEI music”. “The easiest cure,” he told a Gold House press conference, “is listening to Jason Aldean or Kid Rock, or maybe Kanye if you got it real bad.”

For all the first President Trump’s manufactured machismo, even the American military lost muscle during his family’s tour of duty. Reviving shipbuilding capacity proved difficult, especially after Donald Trump ruled out giving business to the Bath Iron Works or Huntington Ingalls Newport News shipyard “because Maine and Virginia didn’t vote for me”.

To compound the problem, a revolving door of national security officials and the practice of doling out contracts to defense firms deemed loyal to Trump proved to be an even worse way to ensure quality than the habit of handing them to firms in important congressional districts.

The new StarStruck global communications system, built by one of Musk’s firms, proved so vulnerable to Chinese monitoring and interference that critics called it “Mao’s Ears”. The Air Force’s F-47 stealth fighter, numbered for Trump I’s second term, was initially crippled by collapsing landing gear, which led critics to dub it “Call Sign Bonespurs”.

The most crippling blow to the military, however, wasn’t muscle or manpower. It was brainpower, not just in the Defense Department, but also throughout the U.S. intelligence community. Within the first year after Donald Trump took office, more than 35 percent of the field-grade or equivalent officers quit or retired, many in rebellion to the administration’s unrelenting domestic surveillance demands, which remained tied up in the courts for years.

They took their expertise and education with them. When a Defense Department press release went out calling the Sea of Japan the “North China Sea”, a few surviving journalists, using pseudonyms, counter surveillance techniques and constantly changing encryption, called it another bow to Beijing. It wasn’t: It was a symptom of stupidity, not submission.

America’s longtime allies in Europe and Asia lost faith in the United States and began expanding their own modest defense industries and alliances, notably with China, at America’s political, economic and national security expense.

The final blow to American world dominance, written about endlessly now, was a combination of political, economic and military collapse, and as the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev had predicted, it came from within.

In 2050, 275 years after the start of the American Revolution against Great Britain, three New England states, Massachusetts, Maine and Vermont, began exploring pathways to secede and join Canada as the Province of New England.

Their schools, state governments, legislators, businesses, journalists and even hospitals, had suffered targeted and politically motivated funding cuts, contract cancellations, lawsuits, tax increases and FBI, Customs, Internal Revenue Service and other investigations by successive Trump administrations.

By the time the 275th anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord rolled around, the New Englanders once again had had enough. Their motto, typically drawn from 18th Century American history, was by Thomas Jefferson: “When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty.”

President Barron Trump later said he would not have tried to stop them. “It wouldn’t be worth risking a single loyal American’s life to keep their poison in our pure blood. Harvard, Bates, Middlebury, Amherst, Williams, The Busted Glob — the real America is better off without them,” he said.

Two years later, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Hampshire joined what the young Trump called “the Terrorist Trio”.

The Southwestern states never considered a similar move to rejoin Mexico, and Alaska has not tried to resell itself to Russia, nor Louisiana to France. “Our languages are too different,” one Cajun explained.

The rebellious states never left, but the shock of their even considering it awakened even many Trump supporters to reality. America was running on empty.

Opposition to Donald Trump began to appear less than 100 days into his second term as his economic policies began to bite. But the attempts to derail the speeding Trump train in time for the 2026 congressional elections came to naught, hampered by a persistent devotion to an opposition Democratic Party that was as discredited as the Trumpublicans, less unified and lacking both a single charismatic leader and a united network of online influencers.

The news media, which had played a large role in earlier conflicts, was decimated by the rise of online news and in some cases intimidated by financial and legal threats from the Trump camp. Perhaps worse, most of the action took place at the local level, unnoticed or ignored by the remaining national news organizations that, as one critic put it, were “more interested in polls, pundits and predictions than people”.

In addition to purging federal and some state and local election, regulatory and law enforcement agencies, the Trump camp poured money into local elections for judges, election supervisors and others. If any American election was rigged, it was in 2026, not 2020, and it was done in advance and largely by legal, if dubious, means.

Finally, almost everyone made the fundamental mistake of analyzing the Trumps’ political, economic and even social power as a conventional political movement powered by policy and ideology.

In retrospect, as Stanford University’s Francis Fukuyama argued just months after Donald Trump took office for the second time, his presidency was largely driven by psychiatry — the country was run by a clinical narcissist from a neglected outer borough of New York City with an unquenchable hunger for attention, deference and power. That was revealed in a single quotation, when Donald Trump said, “. . . I run the country and the world.”

Such braggadocio notwithstanding and much like his businesses, the Trump family was never the enduring empire that Donald Trump sought to build. His successors — Donald, Jr., Ivanka, Eric and Barron — had no more interest in running, much less reforming, the country than their father and grandfather did.

All of them left that task to Stephen Miller, an America First advocate whose America was white and who was quietly nicknamed “The Executor”. He was named the President’s chief of staff during Trump’s second term and remained in that position until the New England rebellion finally broke the wannabe dynasty’s back.

The purpose of this book, however, is not to blame one family and its sycophants, admirers and enablers in Congress, the courts and the news business for America’s downfall.

It will argue that, their lust for power and attention notwithstanding, the Trumps were not the cause of America’s decline. They accelerated it and they profited from it, but they were merely symptoms of deeper, longer and persistent rot in the tree of liberty.

Chapter One: Education

The first chapter is devoted to the decline of the American public education system as schools increasingly prioritized rote memorization over reasoning, critical and innovative thinking and problem-solving. That, this chapter will argue, was in part a product of two things — an increasing reliance on test scores and decreasing (in real terms) public investment in public education at all levels.

Almost 40 years ago, Richard Arum argued in an interview with America’s National Public Radio, which was shut down 15 years later by the Trump administration, but the records of which are still available in university archives outside the U.S.:

“Our country today is part of a global economic system, where we no longer have the luxury to put large numbers of kids through college and university and not demand of them that they are developing these higher order skills that are necessary not just for them, but for our society as a whole.”

The disappearance of civics from elementary and secondary school curricula and the successive Trump/Miller administrations’ ban on better educated foreign students and their campaign to rewrite, whitewash and censor American history compounded the problem.

Among the targets, along with museums and state and local historical societies, were the minutes of the American Constitutional Convention in 1787, perhaps because they included Virginia delegate George Mason’s argument that “[i]f strong and extensive powers are vested in the Executive, and that Executive consists of only one person; the Government will of course degenerate . . . into a Monarchy.”

Chapter II: Vanishing Communities

More than 200 years ago, in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville traveled around a young America and concluded that the new nation’s exceptionalism was not a product of political, economic or military power, of which it had little, but of the sense of community that bound its citizens together.

By the time Donald Trump hatched into demi-celebrity, many of America's communities had begun to deteriorate, victims of internal migration in search of work; longer workweeks; and the demise of trade unions, veterans’ associations, political parties and other organizations, all accelerated by the COVID pandemic in 2000. Robert Putnam had seen the problem in his 2001 book, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community.

Declining participation in organized religion, which for better and worse had played an important role in the establishment of the new nation, was both a symptom and a cause of the problem.

America’s churches were beset by intolerance and by scandals that in earlier days they had been able to conceal. At the same time, concerns about jobs and public safety were hard for many Americans to square with a belief that there was a God or Yahweh or Allah, or for that matter any moral code that trumped a growing belief that life was the zero-sum, winner-take-all game the Trumps played.

Chapter III: Technology

The rapid rise of new technologies, notably social media and artificial intelligence, compounded both problems.

As early as 2014, when Naomi LaChance, reviewing Brown University fellow Marc Dunkelman’s book The Vanishing Neighbor: The Transformation of American Community, in the late U.S. News & World Report, she wrote: “Communities have been replaced with networks in which you keep in touch with only with your closest friends and family . . . .”

The Trump camp, its Christian Nationalist and other true believers built their own networks to reinforce and expand their popular base and characterize those who did not share their faith in Trump as enemies of truth, justice and their version of the American way.

Plato, in his dialogue Phaedrus, had foreseen another problem, arguing only somewhat facetiously that writing was harmful because it replaced the need to learn and remember things.

Google and other search engines compounded the problem by making answers — not always the best or even accurate ones — available with a keyboard and later with Musk’s Neuralink brain implants. (Trump’s attempt to make them mandatory for all federal employees failed.)

Algorithms, especially the crude ones in the late 20th and the first quarter of the 21st Century, only made matters worse, often telling users only what they wanted to hear from the same sources.

A study by Michael Gerlich at SBS Swiss Business School found that “increased reliance on artificial intelligence (AI) tools is linked to diminished critical thinking abilities”, Justin Jackson reported on phys.org on January 13, 2025, when AI was still emerging from its cocoon.

Worst of all, perhaps, artificial intelligence further blurred the line between reality and make-believe, increasingly diminishing many people’s trust in what they saw and heard with their own eyes and ears.

Farhad Manjoo saw that one coming. In his 2008 book True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society, he explored among other things why punditry had overtaken news and why spin had become so successful.

With special mentions to Trumpocrats Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, Henry Farrell discussed that phenomenon in his 2025 article “We’re getting the social media crisis wrong”. In it, he argued that: “Many of the problems that we are going to face over the next many years will stem from publics that have been deranged and distorted by social media in ways that lower the odds that democracy will be a problem-solving system, and increase the likelihood that it will be a problem creating one.”

Tom Wheeler, a former chairman of the since-abolished Federal Communications Commission, identified the final problem in his 2023 book Techlash: Who Makes the Rules in the Digital Gilded Age. Attempts to devise effective boundaries and regulations for AI never got much beyond bans on artificially generated pornography, perhaps because all the Trump administrations were allergic to government regulation or because they found AI a useful tool to glorify themselves and demonize their opponents.

Conclusion

The lesson of America’s decline is a simple one, embodied in the country’s creation and in its struggling return to normalcy after its experiment with narcissistic authoritarianism: Democracy and the political, economic and social institutions it requires must be built and sustained not from the top-down, but from the bottom-up.