The Incredible Shrinking Land of the Free: Americans Vacillate Between Hope and Gloom, as People March by the Millions and Trump Doubles Down
The Steady State | by Bill Piekney
Marching in Minnesota Following the Death of Renee Good Canadian PM Carney Strikes Trade Deal in China
Begin with a plea to keep up the marches, the protests, the smartphone imaging, the whistles, the angry shouts, the massive turnout across the nation in cities large and small that make clear that working Americans are fed up with DHS. One is hard pressed to dismiss the impression that more power is represented in those people than in the collective US Senate, House, or the courts. They show granite resolve and, to a limited degree, have actually succeeded in rolling back a wee bit of Trump’s rogue government.
And what to do about the utter devastation of our foreign ties and the very substantial national security that derived in great measure from them? What to do about the enveloping scope of in-your-face, brazen corruption and self-enrichment that so wholly has swallowed the White House? Will millions taking to the streets have some effect on these criminal inequities as well as DHS?
One is compelled every few weeks, in spite of the anguish associated with the effort, to take stock of the soaring damage done to the country and its people. I recognize that doing so will likely mean having to sit still for a repetition of what’s painfully obvious and a rehash of unpleasantness. But do this I must, because the domestic harmony of the nation is in free fall rather than steady decline, and it’s partnered with the near total ruination Trump’s autocratic rampage has wrought on our place in the world and our strategic relationships.
Sweeping over the nation there is anger, a sense of helplessness, the feeling of standing by while a huge, powerful nation is being steadily disassembled and diminished, the daily drugging of the populace with absurd falsifications by the man who would be king in the White House. We are constantly told lies about our economic strength. Stupid, transparent lies on which only willing suspension of disbelief can stand. The wealth on Wall Street is there, as is the squeeze of great numbers of Americans who struggle to put food on the table.
Concomitantly, slick, expensive ads paid for by DHS glorify the actions of CBP and ICE, casting them as patriotic warriors out to save our streets from the ”worst of the worst”. And, in the background, polling tells us that MAGA support is tightening, hardening the polarization that divides the nation. Meanwhile the administration tries to whisk the gratuitous brutality of the immigrant hunt under the rug.
I am not well schooled on international trade. But it takes no expertise to witness that we have driven Canada, the European Union, major South American economies and several Southeast Asian nations scrambling to sign new trade agreements amongst themselves, particularly with China as the next biggest economy to our own. Europe is the largest group of wealthy nations that has reoriented. Their actions in this regard are solely the consequences of Trump’s baleful foreign policy tinkering. Canada has formally declared the United States, yesterday’s paladin, a has-been. Prime Minister Carney appears to strive to replace the American president on the world stage. He may or may not succeed at that, but he has accurately described a new order in which he ordains the US as a junior partner.
What profoundly troubles our former key allies, chiefly the Europeans and Canada with whom we share so many cultural, political and legal values, are two glaring determinations: (1) that Trump is facing none of the normal, expected objections from American institutional opposition that is typically found in a fully functioning democratic republic, that our internal corrective tools are withered; and (2) that something has permanently changed in the American body politic that resulted in the two-time election of an outlier like Trump. They cannot but conclude that we have undergone a complex, obscure shift deep in our marrow, that we are no longer the USA they knew, but a Balkanized country that may lack the confidence to self-restore after another election.
Because Western Europe is also the product of democratic history, they must trust to some extent the recent explosion of the power of our people. The multiplicity of protests, the No Kings marches, the broad expression of fury and intolerance for Trump administration immigration policies have indeed modified some DHS practices, at least for the moment. But those modifications look more like window dressing, the numbers of CBP and ICE in Minneapolis dropping some but the vulgar behavior unchanged. And from afar, Europe’s perception of the Brave New World is still one of disappointment and fear.
These new trade groups may soon expand to build more diverse international consortiums to include mutual defense with more political and regional oomph. They are logically compelled to do so because of Trump’s unprecedented weakening of NATO, capricious tariffs, boorish, crude, ill-bred, loutish manner, and his boneheaded covetousness of other’s lands. We thus become inescapably distanced from the family — friends and former allies — and from what had been so decidedly good for everyone. Gone are the old international ties that had been the incontestable foundation of real, lasting security.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense, and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines, including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs, and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law, and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.
