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Comment by iso1631 | Hacker News Reader

> This is not about a single President or party

I've seen roughly two types of American commentators over the last year. The ones that cheer this stuff going on, which HN has plenty of, and the ones that think "come the midterms/2028/impeachment everything will go back to normal"

The latter are massively mistaken, it would take decades for the US to rebuild its standing in the eyes of the world, and there is no evidence that it even wants to.

Trump is a symptom of what America truly is, not the cause.

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He is also a singular political figure. I don't think things will go back to normal, but they won't stay the way there are now.

If it wasn't Trump it would be someone else.

There are very few people in history that are that pivotal individually. Had Franz Ferdinand not been shot, something else would have sparked WW1. Had Hitler not existed, then someone else would have emerged.

Maybe Churchill was more of a pivot than most, had the UK gone for Hastings after Chamberlain then perhaps the UK would have sued for peace, allowing Germany to fully concentrate on Russia, but it's still a stretch to have Germany ultimately prevailing over Stalin.

Had the US not won independence in 1776 (which is unlikely to be the sole cause of a single person), it would have been gained anyway, just like the other new world colonies from Canada to Brazil.

The conditions that exist are far bigger than one man

I haven't seen almost anyone suggest that everything will go back to normal post-2028? Every Democrat I know is expecting a painful and protracted fight for the soul of the country.

I think Naval is right when he was making the observation that history has alternated by being determined by either individuals (think Genghis Khan, Napoleon) or larger forces at play (think socio-economic reasoning to many historical events). In this, I would say Trump is Trump (the individual) making his moves that very much go against the larger forces at play that was "business as usual". So equating him to a symptom of America is true in the sense that sooner or later America was bound to have someone like him deviate the course of history, and I also believe post-Trump America is not going to reverse course.

Neither Genghis Khan nor Napoleon were democratically elected. The fact that Trump was makes it harder to see him as the root of the problem. He may have been a catalyst, but the root cause is something else.

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