The administration itself is quickly learning that ideology and slogans are no substitute for competence. They are seeing this in some of the departments they decimated. That's why trade deals are so difficult now.. And even the peace deals that he wants. The people with the knowledge of that stuff are gone.
People don't understand how deep this bench was. During by career, I used to admire this about the US. Whatever the topic was. A disease, a new technology, some terrorist group you've never heard of. There was a guy (or gal) somewhere in a cubicle in DC or in a USG research centre whose life mission was to understand it. And at the next meeting they'd bring out this expert.. How much of that will be left after Trump? It's not even the firings. How many if those people will want to work in government still?
So there's zero chance we're going back to what was there before. The question of what comes after is difficult. I do think Trump commands something of a unique coalition which will struggle to survive him and can't be passed on intact to any obvious survivor. We're already seeing fights between the Groypers who hate everything including Israel and the less (relatively) extreme America Firsters who think foreign policy should be isolationist except for Israel and neocon hawks who want to fight everywhere. Then we're seeing fights on immigration between the tech right and the rest. And this is before AI crushes a lot of entry level work. And on top of everything is a growing deficit and debt.. Interest payments are now larger than the defence budget in the US. Historically that used to be a marker of the decline of empires. So you now have fiscal Hawks who want deep cuts in everything (including defence in some cases). They have growing healthcare needs for an aging population and legitimate needs for higher military spending to counter China. How can they do that in a country that doesn't want to pay more? All of the above is about to explode into public crisis by the end of 2028 or shortly after. And it's really hard to tell which faction comes out on top after.
There are days I honestly wonder if this is what it was like to watch the decline of Rome or Persia or even the British Empire which went from "The Sun never sets" to full decolonization, IMF bailout and the end of the Pound as the global reserve currency in about half a century. Partly why so many Brits today still can't accept that they are better off in the EU.
For small fish like us the problem is that the alternatives are horrible. The Putinist view of spheres of influence reduces everyone else to economic colonies to exploit. The Chinese aren't actually far off in this idea either. Only for them we're all export markets to exploit. And since we refused to care about anything other than resources and real estate for decades, can we actually relearn enough to avoid our fate as a resource colony?
