I keep thinking about how Trumpism isn't even pragmatic assholery, a moral tradeoff where warmongering and cruelty leads to better results for Americans. He's just smashing the lose-lose button over and over again, making our country meaner and more violent, but also poorer and worse to live in
@rincewind.runif anything like this actually comes to fruition it is inarguable that donald trump started and comprehensively lost a war in less than a month
this is an absolute body blow to the idea of american hegemony
!["[The story] kind of bought into the greatest lie that fascists ever told: that it is strong. That it is orderly. That it is might and power and deference to might and power. For the longest time, the popular belief about Nazi Germany was that it was an efficient war machine that took a broken people and almost conquered the world. The truth is, the methods they used were inefficient, corrupt, and ultimately self-defeating. They cared more about propaganda and pushing out an image of fortitude than actually doing anything that would truly help themselves. They used scapegoats, bigotry, anything they could to try to get people on board with the programs, even while they suffered under them."
— Linkara in his review of Secret Empire, Atop the Fourth Wall](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:cbtb7ug65pu7hodbgi6vczoi/bafkreibzqvz2xpnuuozvenosath7l2u5xfme4gse274ljbnqmuwbwf5jpm)
