The stock market is tanking, the American age is over, and this was all pretty much what those of us who opposed Trump said was coming.
Trump Derangement Syndrome turns out to be a pretty good barometer of reality.
If you’re surprised by what happened the last few weeks and days, you shouldn’t be: It was all entirely foreseeable.
Here’s what I wrote in December:
Trump is — as they say — a chaos monkey. Always has been. Always will be. And while I’m not a businessman, my impression is that chaos is bad for business. But the 1 percenters really wanted their tax cuts and deregulation. Which they’ll probably get. But they won’t get the stable system they need and (I’m guessing) have taken for granted.
You don’t get the “good” parts of Trump without the bad parts. And the bad parts are bad enough to render the good parts pointless. We’re all going to have to live with that now.
Where does it go from here? Here’s what I wrote in July, after the disastrous Biden debate:
The United States is an empire. I'm not going to debate this with you. (People like to debate this.) We have military outposts around the world. We call ourselves the world's superpower. We defend a whole continent that isn't even ours. We try to prevent other superpowers from rising up as rivals. Our economic might moves the world. We are the center of the universe, for now. We are empire. It doesn't look quite like the old empires, but that's because it has a little more self-awareness and better public relations, at least within the empire.
And it's been good to be a citizen of the empire, no doubt. A beneficiary of all the blessings that accrue. Blessings maybe we think we've earned.
When the empire goes away, so will a lot of the fun stuff.
Today was the first day of a lot of fun stuff going away:
“I don’t much believe in schadenfreude,” I wrote in December, “and I really don’t believe in it where Trump’s concerned, because his disaster will be a disaster for all of us.”
That’s still true. We are all going to feel the pain. God help us.