Can the USA be Saved?

The United States’ long experiment with democracy ended last year, just months shy of its 249th birthday since it declared independence from Britain. It quickly transformed itself into an authoritarian regime led by the dictator Trump almost immediately following his inauguration. By the 249th anniversary of independence, it was laying the groundwork for a police state. and soon started arresting, then executing its own citizens on the street. The US achieved full-blown fascism within the first year of Trump’s second term.

Can it ever go back? But back to what?

Once hailed — mostly by its own administrations and officials, but sometimes by allies and others — as the “leader of the free world,” and as the moral compass for other nations, the USA simply abdicated its role under Trump. Instead, it has taken up the mantle of the world’s bully, claiming the throne above the two major authoritarian contenders, Russia and China. Trump himself has made increasing threats against neighbours, allies, NATO members, and other foreign states.

I suppose none of this is surprising. After all, when you elect a convicted criminal, a serial liar, a poorly educated and barely literate elderly man in evident cognitive decline, one accused of sexual assault and even rape, and best friends for more than a decade with the county’s most notorious pedophile and sex trafficker, you have to expect it’s a sign of a nation in steep decline, at odds with its friends and allies. And, of course, he gets more aggressive and vindictive as he struggles to prevent his role in the Epstein Files from getting more media coverage.

For recent events, it began in Trump’s first term when he imposed sweeping, hostile tariffs on trading partners including Canada and Mexico (imposed on April 5, 2018), but that escalated into his worldwide trade war in March, 2025 when Trump announced tariffs on almost all of the world’s nations (except, of course, on his beloved Russia, which would have caused distress to the man Trump openly admires and kowtows to, Vladimir Putin), even, ludicrously, on uninhabited islands.

It’s facile to claim the recent attack on Venezuela, bombing its boats and killing the passengers (with no evidence yet presented that they were used for anything more than fishing), bombings its wharves, stealing its oil tankers, and then kidnapping its leader was illegal. Yes, it all was, but legality never stopped the USA from imposing its will, its military, and its policies — often paranoid and arbitrary ones — on other countries and governments, regardless of how they came to power.

As noted in The Conversation, the invasion of Venezuela was also an attack on international law, not merely the “brazen nature of the months-long US military operations against the country based on shifting and shaky justifications, with little evidence.” In a recent interview, Trump scoffed at international law, saying he doesn’t need it and his “own morality” was good enough reason for using brute force.

It is evident to anyone who looks that the invasion of Venezuela was always about the US taking the country’s oil from them. Stealing the oil. No matter how terrible Maduro or his regime was, it was never about drugs. And regime change could have been accomplished more subtly.

The refusal of Trump to immediately install Edmundo González (the legitimate winner of the 2024 presidential election) as acting president (at least until Trump has oil corporations taking over the industry there) shows that, as well. Not to overlook the fact that the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, María Corina Machado, won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize that Trump coveted, so he is deeply jealous of her, and being an outright misogynist, he despises women as leaders. So Trump announced not only would the US — aka himself as its acting president — run Venezuela, it would dictate its future policies to ensure it complied with Trump’s wishes. And then Trump greedily claimed he should be paid the $50 million reward for capturing Maduro.*

No previous US president has publicly declared executive authority over a foreign nation. According to Rawstory, Brian Berletic, a geopolitical analyst and former U.S. Marine, warned Trump’s unprecedented declaration is a “wake-up call to the rest of the world.” Berletic added,

A US president declaring himself president of another nation 1000 miles from his own nation’s borders is unhinged criminality. This is done to prime the US public for wider criminality to come. This is a wake-up call to the rest of the world, nations big and small, that this is no longer a matter of diplomacy, international relations, or deal-making.

And you cannot ignore the blatant hypocrisy of Trump pardoning the ex-leader of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was tried and convicted in US courts of “the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world” while claiming the reason behind his invasion of Venezuela and kidnapping of its leader, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife was because they were “narco-terrorists”. In his first year of this term, Trump pardoned at least eight high-level drug dealers, and granted clemency to the leader of “one of the largest and most violent drug syndicates in the U.S.” It was never about drugs; always about the oil.

(And lest we get sidetrackedand forget, Trump also pardoned several convicted high-level crypto criminals this term, as well as all those involved in the violent January 6 insurrection attempt — Trump’s Brownshirts — so far almost 2,000 pardons of convicted criminals in his first year alone… no crime seems too extreme for Trump to overlook, especially when that criminal donated to Trump’s campaign or one of his own crypto grifts…)

The US has been illegally interfering with, invading, attacking, blockading, and overthrowing governments and nations south of its border almost since its inception. The US motto should not be “e pluirbus unum” (out of many, one), but rather “potentia ius facit,” or “might makes right.” The map above shows some of those incursions into Latin American nations since 1945, but it’s only a partial history, missing Puerto Rico (invaded by the US in 1898 and remaining an occupied colony ever since), invasions of Mexico (1846, 1914), and American interference with the election results in Brazil and Honduras in 2025.

Plus there have been many US interventions and interferences in or invasions of other states, including Iran (1953), Iraq, Vietnam, Guam, the Philippines, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria (2025 and ’26), Egypt, Somalia, (2025), Yemen (2025) Cambodia (1970), Hawaii (invaded January 16, 1893), Nigeria (in 2025)… the USA has always been a rogue state. Or, as some prefer to call it, a gangster state. The USA has aggressively pursued its insular Monroe Doctrine since it was first proposed in 1823, long before anyone could use the threat of nearby socialism or communism as an excuse for it.

Trump’s second national security advisor, Herbert McMaster, called this policy “strategic narcissism…” Seems appropriate, given how much of a blatant narcissist Trump is. McMaster continued,

It’s the tendency to define the world only in relation to us and to assume that what we do or don’t do is decisive towards achieving the desired outcome.

Like forced regime change: a practice the US has long applied, and which generally has failed and resulted in worse conditions than before the US stepped in: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, and Libya being just a few examples.**

The US spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined. Military spending in 2025 was more than $1 trillion, with about the same amount being allocated for 2026. The next highest country is China, spending about $316 billion. Russia spends about $150 billion. (Some figures show China at $224 billion and Russia $109 billion.) It has the muscle to throw around thanks to that high spending, but not enough to provide healthcare, good education, or childcare for its citizens.

Canada has been threatened by Trump, and bullied through tariffs and economic blackmail. Many Canadians believe he will use the military to invade Canada, much like he did Venezuela, but only after his forces invade and occupy Greenland, and possibly Colombia, Panama and Cuba. Plus he has threatened to send troops into Mexico. All of these have been threatened with military action by Trump this term. Not surprisingly, the far-right CPC leader and Trump aficionado, Pierre PoiLIEvre, praised Trump’s actions in Venezuela without expressing concern for the legality of it, nor for any of those killed by US forces when they invaded.***

A recent opinion piece in the Globe and Mail warned Canadians that “We need to prepare for the possibility that the U.S. uses military coercion against Canada.” Coercion is a euphemism for invasion. Bombing Canadian cities. Kidnapping Canadian leaders. The satirical magazine, The Beaverton, published a piece titled, “Mark Carney turns off geolocation on phone just in case,” a reference to the US kidnapping of Maduro. Funny, perhaps, but it reflects the seriousness of Canadian concerns over the behaviour and threats coming from what was once our main ally and trading partner. PoiLIEvre and his Maple MAGA base would no doubt approve of such action.

Can there be any greater hypocrisy than Trump threatening Iran over its treatment of protesters, while in the USA, Trump’s militarized and armed goons (ICE) are beating and even executing American citizens who dare protest the agency’s violent and often illegal actions? But calling Trump a hypocrite is merely a truism.

Can there be any greater evidence that the USA is in fascist mode when it treats its own citizens like criminals for exercising their own Constitutional rights? Trump himself signed an executive order calling anyone who opposed fascism “domestic terrorists.” It labelled the antifa movement a “terrorist organization,” despite it being merely an idea without any organization. Still, the White House promised repressive actions against any left-wing group following the racist hatemonger Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

Immigrants rounded up by the ICE goons are either exiled to gulag-like prison facilities in other nations (nations from which they may not have emigrated) or locked up in concentration-camp facilities in the USA. These latter facilities hold more than 68.000 people (most with no criminal record, including almost 200 US citizens) and have been exposed for their overcrowding, starvation, and medical neglect. Funding to build more camps to house 100,000 detainees was given a $45 billion boost by Trump in mid-2025. More than 327,000 people have already been deported. The parallels with the Nazi regime in Germany, in the 1930s cannot be overstated.

The damage done by Trump and his administration to American institutions, facilities, science, medicine, justice, courts, policies, reputation, allies and allegiances, world standing, and the trust of its citizens in its own government (and the trust of the world at large) is generational. Plus the polarizing distrust his cabal has sown between Americans through the firehose of disinformation, gaslighting, insults, and lies may never heal. The damage is Trump’s lasting legacy. It will take lifetimes to repair, not just decades. If, that is, it can ever be restored.

I am not sure it can be, not, at least, restored to something less hostile and more welcoming. After all, opinion polls show just under 40% of respondents still approve of Trump, still like his policies, still support his racist and misogynist views, still agree with kidnapping people off the streets and deporting them to foreign gulags. Even his removal at the ballot box or otherwise won’t change how a significant portion of Americans view him or change their racist, bigoted views.

Even if it recovers its sense of morality with a full regime change, and Trump’s former enablers and perpetrators have been indicted and charged — and jailed for their crimes — the USA will not be seen as the trustworthy world leader it once was. Allies and trading partners have moved on, formed new relationships, created new agreements, and formed partnerships without the US. And without that regime change, few, if any, other nations will ever trust the USA again.

This is a self-inflicted wound. I don’t think anything or anyone can save the USA from itself.

Notes:

* Trump has long wanted to start a war with a country that couldn’t fight back very well. The invasion of Venezuela by the USA to grab its oil reserves was first proposed by Trump in 2017 who, according to inside sources, claimed Venezuela was “really part of the United States” and said that “That’s the country we should be going to war with, they have all that oil and they’re right on our back door.” Stephen Miller, aka Peewee German, the neo-Nazi behind Trump’s most racist policies, may be appointed to oversee Venezuela on Trump’s behalf.

** McMaster is quoted in New Cold Wars: China’s Rise, Russia’s Invasion, and America’s Struggle to Defend the West, by David Sanger (Crown, New York, 2024).

*** While many patriotic Canadians have been boycotting American goods, products, and services in the face of these ongoing threats, some treasonous citizens — the ‘Maple MAGA ‘ — like Alberta Premier Danielle Smith — support Trump and his aggression. Smith begged Trump to interfere in the recent Canadian federal election on behalf of the rage-farming Trump mimic, Pierre PoiLIEvre. Smith is leading a campaign for Alberta to secede from Canada and become an American appendage. That separatist campaign is helping Trump’s vision of annexing Canada stay alive. As I’ve written before, Trump never meant to make Canada into a US state, but rather into an occupied colonial property where he would allow corporations to strip away our resources and restrict our rights. Puerto Rico has been a colony since 1898, when the US invaded. Despite more than a century of asking, it has never been granted state status. Why would anyone think Canada would fare better? Okay, PR is full of brown-skinned people, and the racists in the US government have long fought against giving the island statehood because of it. Canada, however, has a high percentage of left-leaning voters who would likely vote Democrat and thus end the MAGA regime. So the “promise” of statehood is just another Trump lie.

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