JokersUpdates.com: Current Affairs - lecting Trump the first time could have been seen as an aberration, a quirk of US politics that would not be repeated. But electing him a second time sent a clear signal to the rest of the world

that it is imperative to reduce military and economic dependence on the US because it is unstable.

Everything Trump has done in his first year plus in office--Venezuela, tariffs, Iran, Cuba, and just the entire tone and culture of wildly unstable reactivity based on personalist whims--has eliminated trust in the US that can simply never be regained. It's one thing to elect a rogue president once.

But when you see that he's rogue, corrupt, and wildly unstable, and then you elect him again, what you've actually said then is that the political decisions made by the people of the US can no longer be trusted, and that means the US as a whole can no longer be trusted if we elect such people.

Trump's second election is the herald of a managed decline of the US as a global leader. The US will still have the largest economy and military in the world, and will likely still for the next many decades, but the rest of the world extricating itself from US dependence will have significant costs.

MAGA thinks that you can overcome this distrust through basically holding people hostage and using that whimsical violent instability to enforce compliance. But however well that may work in the short term, and I don't think it will, it definitely won't work as a long-term IR model.

https://bsky.app/profile/danteatkins.bsky.social/post/3mfyygwpiec27