A GOP analyst warned on Monday that America is following President Donald Trump's recipe for doom with "depressing precision," and it could accelerate the superpower's decline.
Mike Madrid, co-founder of The Lincoln Project, argued in a new Substack essay that America is already exhibiting signs of decline, from Trump's repeated attacks against foreign allies to his weaponization of the federal government against American citizens. He compared America's current decline to the end of the plantation aristocracy following the Civil War, when plantation owners created a new "fantasy" reality in which they remained in power.
"This is the pattern: when empires decline, those who most benefited from the previous order become consumed by restoration fantasies," Madrid wrote. "They cannot accept that the world has changed. Rather than adapt, they double down on the behaviors that caused the decline. They purge moderates, reject expertise, and embrace strongmen who promise to make them great again. They stop believing in the arc of trajectories and look back to the restoration of the mythological."
"America now follows this script with depressing precision," he continued. "Trump’s appeal lies precisely in his promise that decline is reversible through will alone—that tariffs will restore manufacturing, that taking over our neighbors for their resources is our birthright, that walls will preserve demographics, that rejecting international institutions will somehow restore American dominance rather than accelerate its end."