Insider trading as a service. No one is going to take the US seriously for the next 50 years.
I think one of the greater risks to a power like the U.S. is getting old enough where it's felt like things always were, and therefore always will be. When there is no-longer a grandparent at the dinner table who can even tell you when his grandparent at the dinner table spoke about the before times.
The whole Hunter corruption scandal in Ukraine + the laptop made it quite clear to me back then. And I can go on.
the only exception now is not the corrupt administration, but the one being the most inept and blatant at being corrupt as opposed to its predecessors
Just the crazy partisanism that's going on in the states blinds people to the fact that they are not ruled by one part of the other, but that the parties are the smoke and mirrors of the non-democratic, unelected, unaccountable, unseen actual govt.
What was the absolute worst thing from the laptop?
Biden–Ukraine conspiracy theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biden%E2%80%93Ukraine_conspira...
Hunter Biden laptop controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunter_Biden_laptop_controvers...
2019 Trump–Ukraine scandal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_Trump%E2%80%93Ukraine_sca...
The "what changed in the 1970s?" meme graphs are the kinds of timescale for forgetting what is and isn't "normal" for your grandparents, and the Great Depression for your grandparents' grandparents.
Eternal growth? Nah.
Even the worst of times will be shortly followed by a recovery, soon enough you survive on savings? Pft.
The President surely wouldn't consider to order the removal of protesting veterans, with the Army Chief of Staff implementing this order with a contingent of infantry and cavalry, supported by six tanks, burning the belongings that the veterans had left behind after being cleared from where they had been protesting? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army
Conscription? Concentration camps? These are also in the "grandparents' grandparents" timescale in the USA. Go back only a one more generation and you get lynching *postcards*.
Most Americans wouldn’t remember that, and yet we pulled, and continue to pull, an epic Hold My Beer in comparison.
What would it take to get a Million Man March again? One that occupied the lawn?
Is there actually any good analogue for this era that caused a previous empire or great power to collapse?
> The Roman Empire lost the strengths that had allowed it to exercise effective control over its Western provinces; modern historians posit factors including the effectiveness and numbers of the army (check), the health and numbers of the Roman population (check), the strength of the economy (check), the competence of the emperors (check), the internal struggles for power (check), the religious changes of the period (check), and the efficiency of the civil administration (check). Increasing pressure from invading peoples outside Roman culture (check) also contributed greatly to the collapse. Climatic changes (check) and both endemic and epidemic diseases (check) drove many of these immediate factors.
Every time I hear people praise the stoic Emperor Marcus Aurelius I am reminded of the fact that he failed in his most important duty: To plan well for his succession.
Not many people could name, or recognize the name of, any emperor from the last hundred years of the Western Roman Empire.
So I don't think Rome is a good analogue for the suggestion that the Trump era is going to kill the USA.
Most collapses start slow, and I tend to doubt this one is finished.
Sure, and before COVID-19 pandemics often took years/decades to spread around the globe. Agriculture took thousands of years to develop; iPhones were invented twenty years ago.
Things move faster in a world of eight billion people who can get anywhere on the planet in 24 hours.
Based on what metric?
The health care cost one is so dumb I won't even bother with it.
There's… substantially more than one chart on that page.
I would assume that you can take virtually any society that goes through rapid change over the course of a few decades and make all manner of cherry-picked charts like this. Just ignore all the charts with shapes that don't fit your hypothesis (like they show divergence way outside 1971, or gasp, they show positive changes!).
Honestly, I find the attitude that the best times in America were 50-60 years ago to be baffling.
So let me ask it this way: you can be born at a random place as a random person in America. You can't control your gender, your race, your sexual orientation, your intelligence, your socioeconomic standing, your family, your health, nothing. The only thing you can pick is the year.
What year are you going to choose?
I'd love a serious answer too. I never seem to get one that supports the idea that America's best days are behind us, but maybe you'll provide some reasoning.
2012, as long as I can bring some news articles with me, to convince people that https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/10/473709316... was, if anything, understating things.
I said that historians would consider the start of the decline was 1969 or 1973 or similar.
Declines start in the second derivative -- progress is positive, but the rate of progress increases is decreasing. It takes a long time with a negative second derivative to make the first derivative negative, but the decline started when the second derivative turned negative. And the second derivative made an obvious turn around 1970.
And it's also measured relatively. It 1969 it was obviously way better to be an American than a European or a Korean or Japanese. Even than a Russian, although it wasn't as obvious at the time. In 2026 I'd rather be born in Europe than the US if I don't get to choose to be born to rich white parents.
What? Since when?
"My health is declining" = "Actually, my health is improving, but not quite as rapidly as it once was."
If you want a lesson in what to avoid to maintain dominance, it's internal conflict, that's what wrecked the European empire.
Good luck with that. Trump and Co will dig in. When they fall, there will be blood.
Go on? WW1 and its consequences?
Consider the Oppenheimer movie. The majority of physicists depicted there are people who left Europe around that time.
There are many episodes in Roman history that people would have experienced as decline or even collapse within their lifetimes, including multiple sackings of the city of Rome itself. But in most of those cases things actually did bounce back and the Empire continued to dominate. That's kind of the point I was making. Empires would seem to be far more resilient than contemporary observers would think if one only looked at Roman history. But the problem is that the Roman Empire is a bit of an outlier in that regard. Ancient cultures of Central America would be interesting to study there (there were far more than just the Mayas, Inkas and Aztecs, most of them relatively short-lived, hence good case studies for the question of collapse). Unfortunately much less is known about them than about Romans.
Also, let's not forget that the Trump admin is a problem of 2.5 years at most.
Trump has greatly stressed the safeguards in our system, but I don't think that he has broken them. That is actually an optimistic instead of a pessimistic signal -- an anti-statesman even in the highest office couldn't meaningfully damage the country.
His sentencing for 34 felonies was voided because the justices he personally appointed to run some of those safeguards decided he should be immune to them. Come on.
If he invades Greenland, the US not only loses all NATO allies, but may be at actual war (rather than merely trade war) with them; the Asian allies are also getting worried because of how he's interacting with China. This administration is also somehow managing to piss off Israel despite having gone into a war as a co-belligerent with them against Iran, also pissing off all the other American allies in the middle east, and the Iran conflict is currently making people question the benefit of even having the US as an ally in the first place because the US can't keep them safe from Iranian counterstrikes, but even more broadly the US don't seem to be able to keep Iran from charging tolls on Hormuz so everyone else with a similarly strategic strait may be wondering if they can do the same.
The administration also has problems with re-emergence of diseases due to a combination of cutting funding and chaos (e.g. while screwworm may have come back anyway, the government response was suboptimal), and in some cases actively promoting disinformation (e.g. vaccinations). It takes a lot more work to eradicate some disease than to keep it away.
And this is without any of the current, justifiable, concerns that Trump may use ICE or similar to interfere with even this year's elections, let alone the end of his term.
Trump may not kill the US outright in just this term, the ships of state are slow to turn let alone sink, but he may do a Great Leap Forward.
Yeah, we heard that about climate change, too.
We may be Cassandras, but that doesn't make us wrong.
Who is this supposed to be?
The UK’s decline has taken centuries, though, and there are many events that one can point to. I think I agree with the grandparent’s comment about grandparents, about the arrogance of how things will continue to be a certain way.
Didn't the UK's empire notably collapse quite rapidly?
But the US was never really an empire in the traditional sense, no? More of a cultural hegemon / terrorist petrostate.
That's pretty fast, historically.
> But the US was never really an empire in the traditional sense, no?
Sure it was/is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism
Now that I peruse a bit, I guess scholars use the term “imperial power” to get away from the colloquial baggage of the term “empire”.
Turns out the US has just been a bully all along with no real ability to project power sufficiently to actually wage a war where it matters. China and Russia have both had front row seats to this embarrassment and have surely come to their own conclusions.
After all that post cold war hubris and 'end of history' nonsense. To think that the West's the old communist foes might come out on top. I have a strong feeling that we aren't just witnessing the decline of US imperialism, but liberal democracy itself (or at least the neoliberal flavour of it). This is the decline of the Western empire - led by the US. And self-inflicted to boot.
Yes, this is just my opinion.
Ragnarok is an existential issue mainly for the ruling class. Collapse is a change in the social order more than everything just suddenly being on fire.
E.g. We developed a nice little niche during the dotcom boom, and the subsequent bust was a goldmine for us. From my perspective the sole effect of that "collapse" were cheap Ducatis and Herman Millers on Craigslist.
What do you think the collapse of rome looked like to a farmer or blacksmith in some remote hamlet?
I don't think that's accurate. I'd put the peak of the British Empire at just before WW1 and the obvious end of it somewhere between independence for India, Wind of Change, and Suez.
You could point to errors made before then, and IMO the Potato Famine was so egregious it was probably a contributing factor to the invention of literal Communism, but I'd say the actual collapse began with the Pyrrhic victory of WW1.
I would also deploy Adam Smith's "there is a lot of ruin in a nation". The US can withstand a few bad years provided it corrects.
I like to read Bret Devereaux (from the frequently HN posted https://acoup.blog/) takes on this in his Bluesky (https://bsky.app/profile/bretdevereaux.bsky.social)
In short the argument is: can the US still win in any sense?
I would have agreed until the Iran war, the US used up so much of the missile stock that even the army isn't fully intact anymore
That was plenty of reasons to take the country seriously! Also, the US has been the most powerful cultural exporter for a very long time. It’s still the case, whenever anything becomes huge in the US we get our local version in each European countries. Our far right parties are parroting American right politics, even copying the terminology as is
It's not all US, but as you said things start in the US and trickles down across the rest of the world, so that's also true for its decadence.
Lets start with movies: Most top grossing movies are still American based and centric. I was reminded of this recently when Obsession came out and I tried to get my German friends to watch it. They missed so many subtle 'Americanisms' in the movie that it really gave me a new perspective on how ingrained the culture is. 10 years ago living in Europe I was amazed at how much American music French people listen to and sing to. Even on random French shops its nothing but American music playing. I don't believe they suddenly switched to French music. (Is there some pop artist in France stealing the charts right now? Im curious to learn). And this is the country with Académie Française.
The Chinese are trying: Ne Zha 2 was quite nicely animated and it grossed an impressive amount but that seemed more like a one trick pony given that it really attracted massive Chinese audiences and they seem to know how important the film was. This is just an opinion but it was not a memorable film like I'd expect from a Disney classic.
Then there is food: Its fascinating how Luckin had its massive comeback and has forced Starbucks to retreat in China and other markets. Mixue might do something similar to chains like DQ and Baksin Robbins, (lets see what happens). I have yet to see the Chinese Mcdonalds but maybe its in the shadows waiting for the right moment like a lot of Chinese companies.
In terms of Gaming, it still seems like despite all the BS, the market is still treating Western game publishers as the gold standard (and mainly American ones at that). The market dynamics are different for Gaming vs others because gaming is so diverse. Maybe there isnt really a leader given the ease of competition. Same goes for music. Streaming seems like what the market wanted or else they would have stuck with physical media.
Enshittification is culture too, and it's certainly spreading.
"An army marches on its stomach"... If things at most soldiers homes aren't as good as they could easily be (financial prospects, opportunities..), maybe they don't have the same drive to fight with the same vision and discipline as they used to? I hope they will employ good vision and discipline.
Science is gradually getting gutted too...
The world order was reset after 1945 and designed largely by the US for the benefit of the US, particularly the financial system. People will often mistake cause and effect. A common one is the petrodollar. The US dollar isn't strong because oil is traded in it. No. Oil is traded in the dollar because of demand fo the dollar. The world oil market could switch to Euros or RMB tomorrow and the net effect would be that people would hold USD and trade it for whatever currency as needed and convert any such currency immediately back to dollars.
But underpinning this has been the appearance of integrity in the US financial system and, in particular, the Federal Reserve and the SEC. That trust and that system is being rapidly destroyed for a few billion dollars in personal profit. All of this was enabled by an ideological Supreme Court who invented out of thin air the concept of presidential immunity to make the president a king in a country that rebelled against a monarchy.
We're living in times that will be written about in history books as the end of the post-1945 era, particularly with the Iran War. I, for one, called this the most disastrous US strategic defeat in the entire of US history and it's not even close back in April. And I stand by that.
There was a time when corrupt heads of state kept up appearances of not being corrupt. It was done in secret through layers of secrecy. That's gone now. The corruption is very much out in the open.
It's not to see this as anything other than China's rise to global prominence and the irony is they just had to do nothing while letting the US commit suicide.
It was a global order built by the US to place the US in positions of power and privilege in every way imaginable.
And the MAGA group looked at it and said "we are being taken advantage of! We have to spend a rounding error worth of money on food aid and Voice of America?! I don't want soft power, I want rock hard power!!!"
They looked at a game with unfair rules that were written by them to benefit them and said "this is unfair.... to me!" Then went about dismantling nearly a century of work that unfairly stacked the deck in America's favor.
The US-Israel-Iran War is an interesting inflection point. They pulled out of every soft-power play, putting every chip in on hard-power military strength and now they are getting wrecked by cheap drones and Iran just being willing to stick it out and not fold. Venezuela will probably go down as the point in which they believed their world view was winning, no need for any diplomacy, just go in and abduct the president and take the oil. Iran showed them the limits of that kind of thinking, if they were more introspective they could learn from it.
Iran isn't stupid, they know there's not much point in building massive arms factories to make complicated weapons. The factories will just get bombed, and the weapons will probably still be inferior. They can just sort of stand there, though. We don't have the appetite for a boots on the ground invasion, and even then they can just kind of wait til we leave and go right back to it. We don't really have a winning hand here without resorting to war crimes, and the costs of that vastly outweigh any successes. We'd be international pariahs to a degree that I don't think most Americans realize is possible.
Its really sad how the US has acted these past few years. Its an insult to the sacrifices of those that came before us. But time is long and it appears China has to do a lot of soul searching to see where they really want to be. I don't feel confident the more I look. They have serious problems that dont seem solvable anytime soon.
The WB/IMF playbook is to pressure or bribe leaders into taking on debt that forces policy changes. Somalia is the posterchild for this. They force the country to produce export crops and the result is the country ends up being unable to feed itself and then the currency inevitably collapses and the country can no longer service its debt. They did the same to Haiti and elsewhere. It's economic colonaialism. The WB/IMF are a tool for American foreign policy.
China offers a significantly better deal [1]. US influence ("exploitation") in Africa is fading [2]. It's such an issue that the US Africa Command is headquartered in Germany.
China's foreign policy is largely offering to build ports, airports, roads and power plants. You know, infrastructure that actually helps and doesn't just enrich the leader and drown the country in debt.
[1]: https://gga.org/china-vs-the-imf/
[2]: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/the-us-is-losing-africa...
No, that’s a canonical example of insider trading: acting on pre-release inside information before it’s made public; it doesn’t matter if it’s days, hours, or even minutes before it goes public.
People have been convicted for executing trades when they saw or handled earnings reports in-person hours before they’re released[1].
[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-edny/pr/employee-securities-fil...
It's right in your own link, the filing-agent employee was convicted because he stole information he was contractually obligated to protect. Remove that obligation and there's no case. Truth Social owns the posts and is selling them with the source's blessing, nobody's stealing anything.
As much as I hate to say it, what they're doing with Truth social is very likely legal. The president does not have any contractual financial obligation to these companies, if he posts "everyone sell Intel, I'm going to regulate out of existence" to a group of people who paid him for this post early... there's no breach of contract anywhere.
Companies aren't saying "hey we want you to manipulate the market for us" — the president is just outright manipulating it, telling people he knows ahead of time, and reaping the profits that way. There's no fiduciary duty involved at all, so it won't be considered insider trading... you don't even have to believe me, this is literally how it's playing out...
This situation is completely untested by the courts.
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF11966
> Despite the attention insider trading attracts, legislators have not enacted a statutory definition for the offense.
But in any event; the sitting US president certainly has a “fiduciary duty” and responsibility to all Americans; whatever he’s doing now is not that.
> But in any event; the sitting US president certainly has a “fiduciary duty” and responsibility to all Americans; whatever he’s doing now is not that.
it's debatable which is why there's no mechanism allowing courts to shut it down immediately, a big part of the issue is that the information is also released to the public and the short window of time between privileged and public access hasn't been tested this way before
https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/203...
Seems pretty clear to me
the crux will lie here, the information is made public, and access is only restricted temporarily (possibly seconds)... this may be enough to circumvent the law as written
it's not clear at all legally speaking
And it becomes self-reinforcing, with people simping (to use that word again) for whichever thing they've invested in. I have serious doubts people actually believe in $product, but they believe other people will at the very least invest in it. And they all believe the masses are stupider (and have more money to invest) than they do.
Finally, it's the wild west. Regulation and consequences have failed, because the people enriching themselves are running the show now. At least in the US, but thanks to open financial ties, they can get money from more regulated countries as well.
I hate this obvious pay-for-access thing as much as anyone, but this isn’t going to define the US for the next 50 years. The second the next president is in office every other country will adapt to working with them, just as been happening every 4-8 years.
As am I.
At a certain point, you get bitten enough times that you decide the angry cobra isn't a great pet. It may be really cool, sometimes! But sometimes it hurts you, a lot.
> If you’ve spent some time traveling the world every country has older generations who have some grudge against other countries for events that happened prior to most people being born and the younger generations don’t care.
Some end this way, sure.
For an alternative, see Gaza.
That may well be, with one big difference.
Nobody and no country will trust the US or their commitments ever again.
How do you explain all of the people and countries who are currently trusting the US and their commitments?
This is always a strange belief to hold when the current evidence is so overwhelming against it. The rest of the world and the people making decisions know that this administration will come to an end. Something about each new headline convinced a small number of people that this one event is actually the end of the entire country for the next 50 years, against all visible evidence
You've never seen a crime flick where the soon-to-be-murdered victim goes "I won't call the cops, I swear! Don't hurt me!"
Who's genuinely trusting US commitments right now? Our most stalwart allies sent troops to Greenland as a tripwire force! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Arctic_Endurance
The Greenland drama was dumb, but there is zero reason to think it’s a next 50 years thing. Is the force even still there, or are they gone? Nobody takes the Greenland thing seriously already, and 50 years have not passed.
I don't trust a wood chipper or angle grinder or fireworks on the Fourth of July, so I'm extra careful around them. Doesn't mean I don't use them.
> Is the force even still there…
Yep.
You loan a friend $5k. They promise to pay it back. They don't.
You may still hang out! But you may never loan them money again unless they give meaningful evidence they've changed.
The US probably has one concrete chance left to prosecute, convict, and jail these folks to rebuild trust. My vibe from the Democrats is that they'll whiff that opportunity.
Don't get me wrong, I loathe Trump and what his band of nutjobs has done to this country. The damage is deep and long-lasting.
But we're not quite yet a global pariah that no one will touch with a ten foot pole, nor are we (as some other commenter hilariously suggested) a failed state. Not yet. Not really even close.
Honestly, these discussions usually look more to me like what people wish was true, probably because they're both angry and powerless, than any kind of sober assessment of reality.
All that said, it'll be interesting to look back on this moment in a decade or two and see where it was going. History is notoriously difficult to predict.
EDIT in response to your links below: of course these all have been impacted!
We're talking about the claim that "Nobody and no country will trust the US or their commitments ever again."
Which is nonsensical, as proven by all your handy stats showing that many, many people, companies, and countries still trust the US.
Some of them to protect against us! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Arctic_Endurance (Which, for the record, is pretty new, at least for NATO.)
> they're visiting the US
Staggering dip in US tourism is a troubling sign for the future: https://www.cnn.com/2026/05/25/travel/analysis-tourism-fewer...
> they're sending their kids to school here
https://time.com/article/2026/05/12/us-university-higher-edu...
"Foreign student enrollment at U.S. universities for the 2026 spring semester fell by 20% from last spring, according to a new report by organizations including U.S.-based international education nonprofit NAFSA."
> they're buying real estate here
https://www.newsweek.com/foreign-buyers-flee-u-s-housing-but...
"Foreign buyers continue fleeing the U.S. housing market, with their activity falling 14 percent between April 2025 and March 2026 to the second-lowest level since the National Association of Realtors (NAR) started tracking purchases in 2009."
> Honestly, these discussions usually look more to me like what people wish was true…
Indeed! See above.
> Which is nonsensical, as proven by all your handy stats showing that many, many people, companies, and countries still trust the US.
Hurr durr, yes, it's not an instant process. You slayed the strawman, saving you from engaging with the points everyone's making!
The collapse of the USSR took decades, too. Were they trustworthy? Is the used car salesman trustworthy, or do people just need used cars still, for now?
Hell, you don't trust my links, yet you engage (well, sorta) with me here. Right?
It's been repeatedly demonstrated that this certainly isn't true now, so you're moving the goalposts to some indeterminate point in the future where it will be true, with no idea of when. "Decades", apparently.
So I guess the claim has now been watered down from "nobody will trust the US again" to the idea of a gradual decline of the US over decades. Hardly a unique insight, or one worth really discussing. It's near impossible to predict what will happen in the world over the coming decades.
What we can definitely say right now is that the claim as stated is bullshit. Perhaps it's a strawman from what you actually meant, but I can only respond to all the words and arguments you actually provided.
EDIT: for fun, I clicked on your link about the "staggering" drop in tourism. It's down a whopping 5.5%. Only 68 million visitors in 2025 vs 72 million in 2024.
Time to pack it up and go home, the US had a good run, but we're clearly a failed state and no one wants to come here anymore.
Yes, that's what "will" means.
(Nor have you demonstrated this, as you continue to act like doing business with a used car salesman is evidence of trusting said used car salesman.)
Keep winning that battle against unmade assertions, though. We believe in you!
> EDIT: for fun, I clicked on your link
Ah, so you're not engaging in good faith in an actual discussion. I do appreciate the confirmation.
Makes sense.
And the goalposts keep moving. You’re proving my point by admitting that you still use it.
A lack of trust does not mean an immediate cessation of use, but it does meaningfully change the relationship.
"I use x" is not evidence of "I trust x". Sometimes it's evidence of "I have no choice but to use x for now".
If you put in your notice at a job, and they desperately double your salary to keep you, do you trust that they're happy to keep paying that, or do you reasonably assume they're probably gonna start interviewing for a cheaper replacement?
> And the goalposts keep moving.
Falsely conflating usage with trust is a goalpost move.
If you'd posted "people still trade with the US", I'd have heartily agreed. But that wasn't the question.
Trust is a complex term. You can work and trade with parties you don't trust, like so many countries do already. But a process has definitely begun, and it will without any doubt have very real implications for the US.
>Nobody takes the Greenland thing seriously already
I can assure you that Denmark still takes this thing extremely seriously.
Unless of course you're hoping this is the outcome, that the bad behavior persists. In which case I'm quite confused on your position.
After all not everyone has Trump as President who thinks the only way to work with allies is to bully them. Will this particular thing going to define US for next 50 years? Probably not. Will countries say fuck it and stop working with US? Definitely not.
But will they ever have same amount of fear or trust or reverence for the US? Absolutely no.
That is now lost. While Iraq and Afghan war wasn't exactly a win for the US, the Iranians have shown that Americans can be had if cards(hands) are right. They now know Americans are completely blind to a president who would sell his mother for the right price and still defend him because they feel invincible and instead of offering a seemingly innocuous job to President's son like Burisma they can now blatantly bribe a jet, pay for access openly and no one in America will care because they believe they are infallible.
Trump 2 is a breakdown of the separation of powers and checks and balances that were supposed to give the US continuity. With that no longer functioning any deal you make with the US is really a deal with the current President which future Presidents may or may not honor.
It doesn't matter how reasonable the next President is because just electing a good President doesn't fix the underlying system. If other countries don't see that fixed so that another Trump cannot happen they will not consider the US to be reliable for long term things.
Should just be legalized at this point so we can all take advantage if they're all gonna get away with it.
Is this satire?
Statements like this are worthless without examples. Surely you can provide some? Hard mode: Don't mention Pelosi or Clinton.
"Argue with me but don't mention these things that prove your side correct"