By Philip Yeung
In 1989, when Reagan stepped down, he proudly spoke of America as a moral force for good. He praised its greatness in that anyone can come to America and become an American. He warned that if America ever closes its door to the world, its leadership will be lost.
In the Trump era. Reagan's warning has fallen on deaf ears.
Against Reagan's advice, Trump sets out to make America great again by doing exactly that, i.e. closing its door. This semi-literate leader has never learned the bitter lesson from China's Qing emperors who shut China tight against the outside world, with catastrophic consequences, plunging the country into prolonged periods of internal rot and decline.
Today, America is morally adrift, where might is the only right. It is ruled by the law of the jungle, with America as the big beast. Drowning in debt, mired in wars, and busy slapping flurries of sanctions, America, the leader of the lawless, is seeking to profit from chaos.
Today, American exceptionalism is married to American isolationism. Its long-standing open-door philosophy is replaced by "a small court and a high fence"—where the flow of people is bottlenecked by backlogged administrative processes.
America owes its unique greatness to the simple fact that it takes the best from the rest. Trump has turned America inward, fearful of the foreign, and uncomfortable with the multicultural. In certain states, like Florida and Texas, Chinese immigrants are banned from owning property, and Chinese H-1 B visa-holders are barred from entering strategically sensitive occupations or access to certain technology. It has echoes of the old Chinese Exclusion Act.
Led by a book-shy backyard bully, it has become anti-intellectual and anti-science, starving its elite universities into submission. It fiddles while Europe sizzles and Canadian forests burn from an over-heated planet. Under Trump, diversity has become a dirty word. America has clearly lost its moral compass.
Meanwhile, Trump has turned the presidency into an ATM machine, spitting out $2.2 billion profit in a single year from bootlicking tycoons and favor-seeking oil-rich countries. A $100,000 subscription fee entitles anyone to early access to his foreign policy announcements. Now we know that there is a method to his madness in his flip-flops over the Iran war. With each U-turn, oil prices gyrate, creating endless opportunities to pump or dump stocks. Incredibly, a cowed Congress turns a blind eye to these naked acts of unethical profiteering. The Oval Office has been monetized into Trump's private piggy bank.
The international rules-based order is in tatters. Trump abducted the leader of Venezuela, mafia-like, while the world watched, then threatens to annex Greenland, salivates over Canada as its 51ststate, and now talks of seizing the Strait of Hormuz as US territory. He is a big, bad wolf in sheep's clothing.
The world is horrified to see America aiding and abetting Israel's genocidal agenda by starving and slaughtering thousands of civilians in Gaza, wiping hospitals, schools and aid centers off the map, murdering journalists and doctors to deter outside interference. In scandal after scandal, Trump oozes criminality, shielded from the mudflow of his sins only by the presidency. Yet, he sits unmolested at the top of an ugly totem pole.
But karma is coming. With alienated allies and a bull's eye on his back, Trump lives an uneasy life, as Iran has put a price on his head, with constant fear of the assassin's bomb or bullet.
Trump's cabinet is a circus of fools, sickeningly unfit for office, with losers and weirdos like Robert Kennedy Jr. and Pete Hegseth. They are only there to do Trump's bidding. Devoid of China experts, his inner circle is swarming with China-haters fishing in troubled waters. Trump wields the tariffs as a sledgehammer, creating loopholes to escape the US Supreme Court's ruling against illegal tariffs.
One thing is certain. As the US shrinks by self-withdrawal, and China grows with its open-door policy, the Chinese will soon burst the American bubble.
Treating the presidency as his playpen, Trump satisfies his every whim and indulges his greedy impulses. As the world lurks from crisis to crisis, Trump is laughing all the way to the bank. This age feels eerily apocalyptic.
After 250 years, the American experiment is nearing its end. Yankee heroes exist only in Hollywood movies. Reality is populated by plug-ugly bullies. This "wind-swept, God-blessed" land "teeming with people of all kinds, living in harmony, and humming with commerce and creativity" is disappearing. No longer mankind's "best hope", America has become its worst nightmare. The American century is limping to an early exit. And few are shedding tears.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.
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