"The Arrogance Is Staggering"

 HCR takes on JD Vance's bomb throwing speech in Munich, where the US basically walked away from 80 years of support for global liberal institutions. She provided the following quote:

Political scientist Stathis Kalyvas posted: “There is now total clarity, no matter how unimaginable things might seem. And they amount to this: The U.S. government has been taken over by a clique of extremists who have embarked on a process of regime change in the world’s oldest democracy…. The arrogance on display is staggering. They think their actions will increase U.S. power, but they are in fact wrecking their own country and, in the process everyone else.”

He continued: “The only hope lies in the sheer enormity of the threat: it might awake us out of our slumber before it is too late.”

This is the conundrum faced by our putative allies. Trump is constitutionally barred from re-election, and he's old and will die one day. The movement that has emerged around him has embraced a truly awful set of policies both domestically and internationally. I was texting with friends last night about whether this was Nazi Germany in 1933. I thought it wasn't. I think MAGA wants to drag us back to 1900. They want a tiny government that serves only the wealthy; they want Jim Crow and the suppression of minority rights; they want an America that bullies its neighbors.

A lot of that can be undone by subsequent governments - with the obvious caveat that the most extreme elements around Trump have no intention of letting democracy thwart their plans. Will we have elections of real consequence? I think so, but I cannot say for certain.

The damage done to America's international standing, however, might never be undone. Europe and our allies in Asia should rightly call into question the sanity of American electoral politics. Trump 1.0 was a fluke; Trump 2.0 was not. A plurality of Americans elected a felon, a gibbering moron, a man incapable of growing into the importance of the office. 

I don't think, despite his sweaty neediness, that JD Vance can harness that same cultish following that Trump has. I don't know if anyone can.

But if I'm Europe, I can't take that chance. Not with the Russian bear being aggressive as it has turned out to be.