Despite George W. Bush’s double folly of marching into Iraq and Afghanistan, the United States received a chance to continue its “American Century.”

With the election to the nation’s presidency of Barack Obama, the American experiment in democracy gained an opportunity to prolong its global predominance. In Obama, the United States finally lived up to its promises to citizens. Fairness. Justice. Equality. For all, not just the elect.

Obama’s ascendance to the nation’s pinnacle actually proved that, yes, anyone could become president. Too bad there wasn’t a caveat along the lines of “preferably someone competent and capable.”

Because for the last 10 years, six of them soiling the Oval Office, the least accomplished American ever elected to any office has so thoroughly degraded the United States, no one honest can claim this country retains its shine. During his decade of bumptiously hogging the national spotlight, Donald Trump has so tarnished the United States no amount of buffing by his successors will ever restore America’s luster.

What had been known as “the American Century” got its genesis after the Great War. After “the War to End All Wars,” only the United States of all industrial nations remained untouched and financially vibrant. Although the term wasn’t popularized until the early 1940s, and this by Time Magazine publisher Henry Luce, its sense acknowledged and increasingly pervaded how America saw itself.

One today can only imagine how those nations shattered then remade or created by the First World War regarded America’s immodesty. Nonetheless, in a brutally reordered world whose established societies had been jarred from centuries-long hierarchies and dominance, the feverish, unbridled impertinence of the young United States must’ve astounded what remained of the Old Orders.

And there the USA ruled. Not just in front, but standing above all, astride the planet. From the second half of the last century until the first fifth of the 21st century, America had gone beyond being seen as essential into convincing the world she’d become indispensable. Or at least the world played along with the notion.

Perhaps smarter, more prudent American heads saw the fallacy in such a claim. Saw the fragility of it, too. Although the illusion had the most solid of backing, it truthfully remained just that. An illusion. One requiring and receiving the quiescence of friends, client states, and adversaries.

As long as global order remained fairly stable and financial markets were never seriously disturbed, why not accede the crown to America? The Old World experienced its longest ever stretch of peace. Planetary interconnectedness developed through technological advances made bright minds elsewhere gravitate to the United States, if not bodily then certainly in longing.

Emerging nations looked eagerly towards partnerships with Washington DC. America’s enviable lifestyle, its abundance, widespread and inviting superior educational opportunities, the allure of few creative boundaries, all further promoted by an incessant nearly relentless pop culture that dominated film, television, and music became catnip for the planet’s restless, ambitious dreamers.

Despite outsiders disparaging America as a superficial society, one solely in thrall of coarse materialism, all but the nation’s most committed foreign detractors, their aspersions aside, have at one time or another been intrigued by the USA. Generalizations fail to encompass America’s diversity, and from that her dynamism.

One size fits all declarations fall woefully short here.

Which is one of the nation’s greatest attractions.

Continuance of the American century caught a reprieve with Obama. No, not a reprieve, more a second chance. On January 20th, 2009, the phenomenon was on fumes. Dumb conflicts of choice in South Asia had shaken global confidence in the United States. Amazing how that looks good compared to America having become absolutely untrustworthy and unreliable today.

The United States does not lead in 2026. Through its own misguided actions and pronouncements, America is increasingly being ostracized. It has become that sloppy drunk led by a weakling unable to control his mouth, his actions, or even his bowels.

After Dubya’s two terms of futilely trying to surpass his father’s stature, Obama’s eight years restored American luster. It appeared the United States would enjoy a second century of being global cock of the walk.

The scab’s first term should’ve served as a lasting warning. Even today it’s hard accepting so much of the 2024 electorate ignored the most obvious alarms about Donald Trump. Only electoral defeat in 2020 postponed his disaster until 2025. Who one earth could’ve been so stupid not to have seen he’d hadn’t improved in the least during his “exile”?

How much clearer could he have ordained national dissolution? Voters missing these signs must’ve embraced delusion and denial.

Although at most only having inadvertently watched snippets of his TV show, a lifetime of the Queens mook made it impossible for any amount of editing and retakes to sanitize him. For the overwhelming majority of Metropolitan New York Area residents, he was irredeemable. The city’s tabloids feasted on his fool-about-town antics. These turned him a joke who slid into earned derision. However, the same dailies missed (or concealed) his more disreputable misconduct.

Flimsy a real estate mogul as he was, the local boy was notorious throughout New York construction trades as someone who habitually forced contractors and laborers to settle for pennies on dollars – that was when he wasn’t stiffing them outright. His withholding earned payments made a few of the former so despondent they committed suicide.

In New York, any broadcast of the scab’s campaign ads extolling his high regard for working people must’ve invited sour laughter. Beyond New York, the same clearly further validated him in the eyes of viewers; audiences who again only knew him through the great wasteland of television. These broadcasts made him better than palatable or acceptable. They made the scab look favorable. These proved effective enough to sway watchers of his false bona fides as a hard boss, yes, yet “one who cared for working people.”

Could anyone have laughed harder at that praise than the pig himself? If the liar, thief, sexual abuser, and traitor ever had an honest moment, it may be one of the things to which he’d admit.

America caught a break during the scab’s first term. Americans were spared our present decline 10 years ago when he filled his cabinet with competent secretaries and staffers. Conservatives? Of course! But not into-the-bone ideologues nor self-enriching stooges as there are now.

Then, the president’s men and women sought to serve the nation, not simply fulfill his selfish wishes. Their presences as adults staved off the open criminality and bigotry now rotting the United States from its top.

Nonetheless, his first four years were still close-run things. Those should’ve served as warnings for the future. Particularly since he spent the four years after defeat incessantly manufacturing grievances – his – and stoking deplorables’ red pork resentments whose shortcomings, failures, and disappointments were all of their own making. Or in MAGAs’ cases, their own inaction, their own lack of initiative, their own apathy.

Weak, insecure people find favor in being told their own foundering, flailing, and frustrations are the fault of others. There are surfeits of such losers compiling MAGA legions. No wonder these natural Trump voters were attracted to him.

The scab has always appealed strongly to the simpleminded.

America’s agricultural sector suffered hard under his policies. So much so it needed taxpayer bailouts during his first term. He threw sand into the gears of her manufacturing sector which significantly hobbled the economy. Only through dumb luck alone it wasn’t worse then. Because it would’ve been beyond him to have consciously done so of his own volition, Americans then caught a break when the scab surrounded himself in 2017 with advisers who put the United States first.

As seen today, though, they only delayed the nation’s present drift.

But all the competent people in the world couldn’t have held off the calamity of Covid. That epidemic has tested American medicine as it hadn’t been since the 1918 Influenza.

It’s aggravating how the United States suffered so criminally with Covid. The administration prior to Trump’s first term possessed the sort of foresight that must be acknowledged as miraculous. For today the country stumbles blindly. While none under Obama’s aegis could’ve foreseen Covid’s scourge, their grasp of human development anticipated something horrific waited beyond the horizon. Or maybe the one after that.

Yes, that soon.

The Obama Administration had compiled a playbook to deal with the very threat a Covid-like menace delivered. Imagine that. Meeting Covid head on rather than catching up. Had America availed itself to those remedies, maybe someone readers know or had known wouldn’t have been sickened by or succumbed to it in 2020.

Maybe Americans would’ve been spared morgue trucks MAGA today insist were hoaxes. Or no phony crash manufacturing programs which built respirators for fake patients feigning difficulty breathing.

Had Hillary Clinton been elevated into the presidency even MAGAs who mainline the scab’s Kool Aid must know much of the pain and suffering Covid inflicted here would’ve been severely curtailed. But his animus against Barack Obama so petty, so deep, so destructive, the scab couldn’t help himself in erasing as many traces as possible of his predecessor.

In modern telling of a fable, Donald Trump is the scorpion; the American people the frog ferrying him on its back across the river.
Like the scorpion, Trump cannot control his impulses.

Another’s accomplishments so profoundly paining an old diseased adolescent, a caricature we now know today as a liar, thief, sexual abuser, and traitor, Trump demanded any lingering presence of Obama belittled. Or better, erased. Especially the benevolence or benefits which could’ve comforted or helped Americans.

Though Covid still swirls among us, Americans were spared even worse. We all need to be thankful the scab remained remote from managing the cure. Had he overseen those measures, be assured he would’ve diverted essential health care into profit-making schemes for himself.

Rather than Joe Biden taking satisfaction in being a transitional leader, a la the 11th President, James K. Polk, who entered office intending to serve a single term, the 46th iteration failed resisting the sin of pride. He came to believe himself indispensable.

Polk assumed office with a set of ambitions. These he achieved in four years. For better or worse, Polk can be considered the spur which supercharged Manifest Destiny.

Biden’s 2020 election to the presidency seemed to have saved America from its worst impulses that Trump then would’ve embodied. All Biden needed to do was repair the comparatively minor economic damage left behind by his immediate predecessor. He was not elected to enact grandiose legislation. Nor was he to preside with any insistence the rest of world look upon the United States as vassals upon its liege.
Biden was elected for his levelheaded stability. Not so much a caretaker or seat holder, but a chief who could simply govern soberly. His single term was to have prepared the stage for the next generation of leadership.

Could Biden have acknowledged this to himself and accepted it, whatever man or woman Democrats might’ve properly nominated in 2024 would’ve feasted on Republican nominee Donald Trump, who openly campaigned on revenge.

Two years on, Americans have determined revenge that also bloodies them as well is wrong.

If there is any good to the nation’s predicament it’s most of the dupes who propelled the Queens mook off television and into the White House have been pierced the deepest. While every American except for the wealthy have been diminished, those red cap suckers who mostly populate less dynamic America are being pounded harder.

This wasn’t supposed to happen to them. Just to the others.

The farmers and ranchers whose second term loses dwarf what Trump cost them first time around. The blue-collar types who cheered him on when he promised to hurt “those people” and now discover they are part and parcel of those same people. The xenophobes who wildly cheered his ruthless remedy to illegal immigration, a “cure” that indiscriminately ensnares workers vital to the economy, associates, friends, relatives, and now with greater frequency naturalized citizens as well as landed ones.

Until Donald Trump, America was a beacon. In some respects, it may’ve even been something of “a city on a hill,” though never to any extent as John Randolph proclaimed. Through industry, probity, and comity America was oftentimes so good as to be unabashedly admired.

Luce’s “American Century” was the hyperbole of a confident nation which came into its own far sooner than anyone could’ve expected. Maybe if Americans had achieved stature as a mature society instead of one which has yet to emerge from juvenile attitudes, we could’ve extended our first “American Century” into a second.

Or at least remain atop the pile until some upstart nation knocked us off our perch.

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