The fossil fuel industry got what it wanted – a Presidency entirely pliable to their agenda, if only because he was only interested in pursuing his own robbery and selloff of America.
But the cost has been staggering. None of us would have believed it could happen so fast.
Trump has done what Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, 9-11, Iraq, and Covid failed to do – crush the American Brand, as a cultural touchstone, the aspirational ideal, the world’s best hope of a better life, rule of law, and the prospect of a rules based order.
A friend in Iceland once said to me, “We’re all Americans now, after all, aren’t we?”
Because the world looked to America as a gold standard for governance, for democracy, for the best science and universities, and for a system that, for all its flaws, would eventually find the right way – they gave us grace, and enough confidence to make our currency the global reserve standard, the refuge for capital that for decades underwrote our profligate national debt.
If you thought this was just politics of the moment, if you thought this was not going to have a long term effect, you’re in for a nasty surprise.
Good essay here, it’s long, so I am just excerpting the first part.
There’s a moment many of us remember—standing in a Tokyo 7-Eleven at 2 AM, cracking open an ice-cold Coca-Cola. Or queuing outside an Apple Store in Berlin, giddy with anticipation. Or watching Friends reruns in a Melbourne apartment, laughing at jokes that felt universal. America wasn’t just a country then. It was a feeling. A promise. The place where anything was possible, where justice prevailed, where the underdog could win.
That America is dead.
And we need to talk about what killed it—because this isn’t about politics as usual. This isn’t about left versus right, red versus blue. This is about watching a nation that once exported hope now export shame. And the world is responding in the only language that truly matters: they’re walking away.
The Numbers Don’t Lie: Billions Lost, Trust Shattered
Let’s start with the cost, because Americans respect a balance sheet. They worship GDP and twerk for it.
Tesla’s European sales collapsed by over 40% in multiple quarters of 2025. Not because the cars got worse—because the CEO became synonymous with an administration that Europeans view with barely concealed horror. When Elon Musk stands beside Donald Trump, every Tesla on the Autobahn becomes a political statement people no longer want to make.
Starbucks lost more than $20 billion in market value in 2025. The green mermaid, once a symbol of cosmopolitan coffee culture, now carries the stain of association with American foreign policy decisions that much of the world finds morally bankrupt.
Apple, Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, Nike—brands that once represented the pinnacle of global cool—are now actively avoided by consumers from Toronto to Tokyo. Not boycotted in angry protest, but quietly set aside. Replaced. Forgotten.
Nike’s collapse is perhaps the most symbolic. The swoosh that once meant athletic excellence and “Just Do It” defiance now feels tainted by association with a country that can’t even protect voting rights. French brand Hoka has surged to replace Nike in the premium running market across Europe and Australia—because their shoes are dramatically better, and because they don’t carry the baggage of American dysfunction. When athletes lace up Hokas instead of Air Maxes, they’re not making a political statement. They’re simply choosing a brand that doesn’t make them feel complicit.
The same pattern repeats across categories: European alternatives rising not through superior marketing, but through the simple advantage of not being American. That’s the quiet brutality of this shift—American brands aren’t being beaten; they’re being discarded. The difference matters. You can recover from competition. You can’t recover from irrelevance.
According to the 2026 Global Soft Power Index, the United States has experienced the steepest fall in cultural influence of any nation in recorded history. Not the steepest fall among Western nations. Not the steepest fall among democracies. The steepest fall, period. Beating out every dictatorship, every failed state, every pariah regime.
In surveys across Canada, France, Germany, and Australia, 30-50% of consumers now say they are actively less willing to purchase a product simply because it is American. Think about that. Being American—once the ultimate selling point—is now a liability.
Anybody familiar with the hard-core evangelicals will know that they don’t value the opinions of people in other countries (Jesus was American, you know, and white). Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, for instance, holds his religio-cultural beliefs above the US Constitution or the United States, and Republican Congresswomen seem to be surprised that he never appoints women to head committees.
And, more generally, MAGAs are generally suspicious of foreigners, especially those speaking another language.
Except people speaking in tongues 🙂
A nodal point in history. Seriously, The initiation of the decline of the American empire. Replacement options?
Hagiography won’t help. Remember Native American genocide? Slavery? (kept legal longer than any country in the world except one) The big stick strategy: invading more than a hundred countries over more than a century. Racism over more than 4 centuries, to the point of frequent murders, virtual apartheid, and concentration camps.
40+ years of duopoly party climate denying delayalism which threaten global civilization’s short-term survival.
The US is the cause of more suffering than any country in history.
I see it less about hagiography than about recognizing the advancements and improvements, both of US behavior and global society in general. I was born in 1960 and saw definite improvements on the way we did things both domestically and internationally. The status of black Americans, women, gays and non-Christians, through hard-fought shifts in social norms, has improved dramatically.
We still had too much policy driven by the oil industry (e.g., wars) and religious bigots, but we’ve been eroding that, too.
Then Trump 2.0 came along and undid every decent policy of the the US government. We notice how bad Trump is because things had gotten so much better and he is turning back the clock.
Yes, for a couple of very brief times things were getting better, sorta, a little bit in some ways for some people. During the 30s to 60s, financially, things got better for some white men, the “left” building things onto one end of the New Deal even as the right wing dismantled it at the other end. The dismantling was sending the US back into depression until the business of killing fascists put everybody back to work. Democrats ditched Wallace, took on…Truman??? The GI Bill expanded education…to more white men.
The right captured the media (how do you think the phrase “liberal media” got repeated so much it’s as familiar to you as it is?) and used it to spread far right (materialistic, acquisitive, individualistic, hierarchical…) memes through advertising and every channel and mode even as the war on poverty ran into the invasion of Vietnam and Southeast Asia (and Iran, in 1953, and Central and South America, for centuries, and Africa (Lumumba, eg.) And Detroit, and Watts, and the South Bronx. McCarthyism.)
Some groups in the US and abroad forced their way onto the edges of acceptable—the civil rights movement, Stonewall (just dislabelled) plus, women’s rights, ecology*, independence movements from India to the Congo and South Africa, and Nicaragua.
The Democrats, including all the party rulership, carved out a constituency from those rejected by the far right (IOW, all of 1 party and most of the other). They’ve embraced pseudo inclusion while keeping empire and capitalism intact, joining the right’s kleptocracy, stealing from the 99%. Ultimately and inevitably, as surely as the end stage of capitalism is fascism, the warlord hierarchical family, hierpatriarchical religion, didactic education, business model, militarism, and financial/economic policies of the oligarchic duopoly party will exclude the 99, too, and form just the post-industrial medieval industrial pseudo-christian fascist monarchy junta they crave, til it destroys itself with the conditions they and it create.
Eisenhower’s Military Industrial was only the start; the intertwined psycho-industrial complexes that came out of it create—with the far right—conditions of partly fulfilled, mostly unfulfilled needs and desires that provides the complexes’, and the oligarchy’s, profit and control. They manipulate in and with the psychoid, so are addicted to fossil fuels for their lead, mercury, cadmium, arsenic, PM2.5… and their IQ-lowering, aggression-causing, cognition- and emotion-twisting properties as well as the cancer, asthma, emphysema et al that weakens bodies.
After Goldwater lost in 1964, the far right reorganized and recommitted to taking over the US and the world. Democratic semi-embrace of civil rights sparked the Southern Strategy and Nixon’s wins. The Clintons led a successful attempt to head off universal health care. Obama won, finishing that and triggering massive backlash pushed by the far right’s racial lies. Obama and Biden left climate action until the end of their terms, when it was too late and too reversible—which they knew—and intended? Impulses to do good and do destruction are complexly intertwined in everyone and everything.
By the time Reagan won, we were well on the way to where we are now. We’re farther along into the Nazi’s program than the Nazis were at the same stage of power-securing. The Republicans are rushing it, I think partly because of their awareness of the impending ecological collapse and demographic shift that threaten to result in progressive, wise, and practical action and threaten the far right’s power and wealth. And they’re further rushed because the Mango Mussolini’s malignant narcissism—Narcissistic and Anti-Social (psychopathic) Personality Disorders—low IQ and dementia, fear, rage and hatred (and thus nihilism), shame, crushing inferiority and resulting addiction to being worshipped, to domination and sadism, have compelled him to rush the process, blurt out the end game, and thus make it policy. He was selected by the oligarchy because he’s the perfect focusing mirror, intensification and excuse for their mental illness complex, but he’s fucked it up for them, too.
They are compelled to kowtow to their disease and are driven by the nihilistic symbolism of domination and destruction, burning things and smashing atoms for energy. Until we recognize our problem as entirely psychological, and begin to heal it, even if the Chinese and Indians solve the superficial/logistical aspect of climate catastrophe, we’ll continue to sink. AI driven by the manifestations of the right’s illness will use fuels, the nuclear twinity of weapons and reactors, and the psychoid toxicity of the civilization the far right created and warped, to end us.
*a combination of nature rights still 99% not recognized, and recognition of ecological science, the science of the sort of relationships acknowledged by Margaret Mahler and the psychological field of intersubjectivity, or Martin Buber. The institutional instruments of that science are also now being dismantled even as it advances—people, satellites, organizations being defunded while the punishment and coercion arm of government is being expanded and extended and the marrow of the New Deal is sucked out of the world by mbillionaires.
My father, who was 3/4 white, did enjoy to fruits of GI Bill (his half-Filipino father was an illiterate laborer, and dad got a master’s degree in engineering). As a woman, I appreciated having the vote and a career. As an ex-Catholic (atheist), I appreciated the waning dominance of cultural Christianity (including the court cases won against Creationists). As a mongrel-American (diverse ancestry), I appreciated not having to shoe-horn myself into a narrow cultural mindset (and I pity people—especially girls—who are obligated by the constraints of their “traditional” cultures lest they be shunned by their families).
I don’t know how much more I could have expected in any but a few low-population countries.
Good penetrating essay. I just spent 10 minutes on Gemini AI trying to figure out the source for this article. All to no avail. I have a hard time believing that a rational articulate person would first post it on Twitter.