The Trump regime has been in power for 15 months now, and its actions are becoming increasingly damaging for the country and the world. The start of the Iran war by rogue states US and Israel, in which a girls’ school has already been bombed (170 children dead) and U.S.-Israeli airstrikes on oil depots caused ‘acid rain’ poisoning the population, is only the latest in a long list of scandalous crimes and human tragedies.

There is certainly a loud call for Trump to be impeached, but despite a lot of talk of a rupture in the MAGA movement, he still has full support of MAGA and the Republican Party. That is despite all the campaign promises he has broken and crimes he has committed, including his name being mentioned in the Epstein files a million times.

What does that tell us about the state of the country? In short: America is cooked. A recent post by a MAGA canal really drove it home for me:

The post refers to a recent scandal in which it became known that Secretary of War Crimes Bourbon Pete Hegseth went on a mad spending spree at the Pentagon blowing millions on lobster and steak.

The way this message is framed is that if you are opposed to over-spending at the Pentagon, you are against American troops getting decent food. Even worse, if you’re against American soldiers getting fed lobster and steak, you are obviously in favor of spending huge amounts of money on insurance premiums for illegals.

The debate over public spending on undocumented immigrants is completely unrelated to Pentagon spending, but the division in the USA paints everything in a toxic black and white picture. Trump has amplified these tensions through persistent misinformation, inflammatory rhetoric, and the promotion of unfounded conspiracy theories.

A recent poll indicates how deep this distrust in American society goes:

A whopping 53 percent of Americans see their fellow citizens as immoral, and this is obvious from how they are portraying each other in the media. MAGA is condemned for supporting an obviously criminal and completely immoral president who is destroying democracy, while democrats are seen as evil people who want to overflow the country with illegal criminals and rapists. This has become such a widespread belief among a large part of the country that it will be hard to get them back from this – even if Trump would be gone.

And that’s the heart of the problem: Americans are now living in entirely separate realities, each shaped by fundamentally different value systems. Democrats generally believe America should strive to be a force for good – flawed as it may be – working to improve lives and promote democracy around the world, even if the execution isn’t always perfect. In contrast, the ‘America First’ ideology pushes for a vision rooted in white, Christian, male dominance, where the U.S. operates as an unapologetic superpower, taking what it can with little or no regard for others. Under this worldview, immigrants are not just excluded but actively demonized, treated as threats to be expelled or erased.

How do you convince the MAGA crowd that Trump and his party are only in it for personal gain, and their actions are severely damaging to the country in the short and especially the long term?

The media are a big part of the problem. Mainstream channels have chosen for Trump (like FOX ‘News’) or a middle of the road approach, which really doesn’t work in this environment. A newspaper headline, like ‘Trump wants to acquire Greenland’ really doesn’t reflect what is really going on: ‘Dictator Trump wants to aggressively annex Greenland with military force’.

So the media is not doing its job, and even worse, many Trump supporters now own all major media, especially after the recent acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery by Trumper Larry Ellison.

And this is one of the reasons I am so pessimistic about America’s future prospects. The media is extremely important to turn the tide, but the legacy media are not doing their job and social media (owned by Trump’s billionaire cronies) that monetize conflict are making things much much worse.

But it is far from the only problem. These are other major issues that make a turnaround in the short term very unlikely:

● The Republican party are the only ones who could really stop Trump, but they are not doing it. The old party – yes, they were assholes, but at least they had some independent thinking going on that would definitely be opposed to much of what Trump is doing – is dead. Trump has destroyed it, and they are now in it for 100 percent. No matter how insane their leader is, they won’t stop him.

● The democrats – while they have some good people – are far from united and they are not speaking with one voice. Take the Iran war, where is their reunited condemnation of this illegal war?

● The corporate political donor system is still very much in place. That means that not the American people, but the big corporations decide which policies will be implemented. At the same time, the concentration of wealth and a non-level playing field for the middle and working classes are turning American democracy into an oligarchy.

● The current U.S. Supreme Court is widely seen as both a reflection and an amplifier of the country’s deep political polarization. The Court now has six conservative justices and three liberal justices. This ideological split is the most pronounced in decades, and the Court’s rulings increasingly break along these lines. In recent terms, the number of cases decided by a purely partisan vote has tripled, while unanimous decisions have declined sharply. The Court’s rulings on issues like abortion (Dobbs), campaign finance, voting rights, and executive power have not only reflected, but also deepened political divisions. The Court’s growing alignment with partisan politics has led many Americans to view it less as an impartial legal institution and more as a political actor. This shift is evident in public opinion polls, where favorable views of the Court are near historic lows, especially among Democrats and younger Americans

What America needs is a huge turnaround, a systematic change in government and how it functions. I currently see no evidence of this happening. The focus is now – understandably – on winning the Mid Terms by democrats and then winning the 2028 election in order to stop Trump. And it will certainly be a relief to see Trump removed. If they can, and this is a huge if.

However, the problems mentioned above will still be there. Which democratic leader will really solve this mess? Bernie Sanders was that leader, but the dems thought nominating him was too risky. A new leader of that calibre has not yet emerged.

We have been here before. When Biden won the election in 2020 we were relieved. But 74 million people still voted Trump in 2020 even after his disastrous first term. Just as worrying: about 89 million eligible Americans did not vote in 2024, while the country was under threat by a fascist takeover by MAGA. That means the trust in politics to solve problems has sunk to rock bottom in the US.

Optimists note that the U.S. has navigated previous existential threats – including the Revolutionary and Civil Wars – suggesting a capacity to overcome deep crises.

That may well be, but I currently see no way out of the polarization, so my current analysis is that the American crisis is terminal. We, as Europeans, have to steadily derisk from the USA and realign ourselves with reliable partners, such as Canada.

Let’s hope that in the long term, the crisis is an opportunity for the US to address long-standing flaws (such as economic inequality or political dysfunction) and create a ‘new Renaissance’ or a more inclusive society.

But for now, this is unfortunately the status of the country:

😅