Breaking: Welcome to Trumpistan
Julie Roginsky
I read the Trump Administrations National Security Strategy document so you dont have to and hoo boy. Theres so much horror to unpack that it will require a series of newsletters just to hit the important parts.
But in a nutshell: welcome to Trumpistan. On Friday, the White House released a document that will forever transform the way the United States sees its role in the world and the way the world sees itself with respect to us. It is a document that will far outlive Donald Trump and MAGA, for it underscores the fickleness of our nation. American voters saw what Trump was capable of during his first term, lived through the alternative and decided that they preferred a dime-store autocrat to democracy after all. It is a gift to dictators and kleptocrats (but I repeat myself) and a horror to the West, to our allies and to the Pax Americana.
In short, it is a catastrophic nightmare.
A few carefully chosen pages in strategy documents from Cold War playbooks to post-9/11 doctrines can shape the destiny of nations. The 2025 NSS is doing something much more consequential: it is rewriting not just American foreign policy, but the checks and balances that once stood between democratic governance and unchecked power both at home and abroad.
https://saltypolitics.substack.com/p/breaking-welcome-to-trumpistan