The US century of American economic and political hegemony is collapsing right before our very eyes. Like so many of history’s past empires, petty idiocies and hubris appear to be accelerating this inevitable decline. The real winner in all this chaos is China.

Xi Jinping only has to follow Napoleon’s famous advice: “Never interfere with an enemy while he’s in the process of destroying himself…”

Our only hope is that Trump does not bring down the rest of the world with him.

America has become a banana republic ruled by gangsters and con men in shiny suits and baseball caps along with their tech-bro nihilist death-eaters. But Trump is not an aberration; he is simply a sign of the times. America is heading towards Big Brother and the Thought Police, straight out of George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Trump will soon set up a Ministry of Truth in the form of Kash Patel’s FBI, which will hunt down internal “enemies of the state” via blanket surveillance of citizens in order to eliminate any signs of opposition to the government’s agenda.

The US economy is imploding, along with our social cohesion and our entire political system. None of this can conceivably be recovered any time soon.

And BTW, there will be no next electoral cycle. King Donald will create some crisis and declare a ‘National Emergency’ in order to consolidate his power. This is not oblique prophecy. Anyone who cannot see the Trump administration’s plan for 2026 to render future elections redundant hasn’t been paying attention.

People will simply start to disappear into privately-run Gulags or fall mysteriously out of windows. This program of repression will be supported as ever by the relentless propaganda pumped out by state-controlled media and a rewriting of history to favor the new Trumpian view of the world and his exalted place in it.

The US is becoming a giant walled-in compound governed by fear of the twice impeached felon’s personal Schutzstaffel, whose aim is to humiliate, impoverish, pursue, imprison and punish the general population. A few billionaires will thrive, but the vast majority will live in subservient deprivation. Not so much a new ‘Gilded Age’ as a return to the Stone Age.

Everything the Trump administration is doing – the militarization of law enforcement; the profound corruption; a foreign policy dismissive of international law; the removal of citizen and worker rights and protections; the rooting out of any independence in the civil service or judiciary; the targeting by law enforcement and intelligence services of peaceful domestic activists – is a continuation of trends in American politics that have existed for many years. They are just much more brutal and vulgar about it.

Since the 1920s the Federal Government has used political violence as a tool to benefit the Oligarchs. If it wasn’t machine gunning striking miners, it was beating up Jews, Blacks and Communists. From the very start of the 20th Century, violence and oppression have been used at all levels of society to keep the riff-raff in line. Rights and freedoms of the working class have consistently been eroded, even with ostensibly “progressive” democrats in charge.

‘The War on Drugs’ was followed in short order by the ‘War on Terror,’ the Patriot Act and CITIZENS UNITED. More freedoms flushed away for temporary security, and even under two Democratic presidents nothing was rolled back. Time and time again we’ve sold away our own freedoms for the promise of more “security.”

Trump is just the latest manifestation of America’s apparent desire to be oppressed.