"United States under Trump is dark, aggressive, and lawless", "a predator nation"

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

A few days later, in an interview with the Times, Trump was asked if there were any limits on his global powers. “Yeah, there is one thing,” Trump said. “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”

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The second reason Trump’s statement is worrisome is that he has changed the United States in fundamental ways. He has not only pried America apart from its ideals; he has inverted them. For a decade, he has been the overwhelmingly dominant figure in American life, and he has reshaped how hundreds of millions of Americans—including the great majority of Republicans and evangelical Christians—think about right and wrong, good and evil, justice and injustice.

Many of the same people who once fiercely supported Reagan and opposed moral relativism and nihilism have come to embody the ethic of Thrasymachus, the cynical Sophist in Plato’s Republic who insists that justice has no intrinsic meaning. All that matters is the interests of the strongest party. “Injustice, if it is on a large enough scale, is stronger, freer, and more masterly than justice,” he argued.

The United States under Trump is dark, aggressive, and lawless. It has become, in the words of Representative Ogles, a predator nation. This period of our history will eventually be judged, and the verdict will be unforgiving—because Thrasymachus was wrong. Justice matters more than injustice. And I have a strong intuition and a settled hope that the moral arc of the universe will eventually bend that way.


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/trump-mistake-venezuela-injustice/685560/