America will never be able to recover from this even after Trump leaves office.

First of all, let’s have no illusion about it: Trump will not leave office willingly in 2028. He did not in 2020 and he will not in 2028. He has openly said that “There will be no more elections” after he is elected; he has repeatedly said that he will be “a dictator from day one”; he is building a hundred million dollar ballroom in the white house (you don’t do that if you are planning to not use it after four years); he has turned the entire white house into a gold-plaquered palace like a tinpot dictator’s seraglio in the middle east; he has repeatedly said that American elections are rigged and that he will “unrig” it, which means he will likely either rig it or suspend it if he can, so there will be serious issues with the upcoming election in 2026.

All indications point to that he will, if he can, rule as the first dictator of America for life. 

But hypothetically, let’s say miraculously America is able to withstand this onslaught against its own democracy from within, and after 2028, we elect a new president, perhaps Gavin Newsom, and we were to hold a Nuremberg trial against the entire Trump administration, put Trump and his entire crime family in jail; indict, convict, and jail all associates of Donald Trump, all the people who enabled his power grab and did his unconstitutional bidding, raze all the Trump towers to the ground, like what allied armies did to the defeated Nazi Germany, completely reverse course on all authoritarian policies that Trump has enacted, re-establish political guard rails, introduce new legislation to prevent the rise of another Trump for the next 250 years.

Even then, in this most optimistic outcome, which is unlikely to be honest, but even then, I don’t think the rest of the world will ever trust America again. Think of Germany. Germany was the center of the world prior to World War II. Germany dominated the world in terms of science, technology, arts, philosophy, music, literature. Nazi Germany completely destroyed this once great civilization and to this day, nearly 80 years afterward, Germany has never been able to recover completely, nor did it ever reclaim its prestigious position in the world it once held; and to this day, Germans live in shame over what happened 80 years ago.

What is happening to America under the Trump administration is very similar. For over 80 years, America has prized itself as the champion of democracy, freedom, equality, rule of law; fighting against tyranny, slavery, oppression around the world; America the freedom warrior, words that were nearly synonymous and as American as apple pie; and yet America today, under the current Trump administration, is turning its back on all those values. And America is now attacking its own staunchest allies, from Canada, to Great Britain, to Japan, to South Korea, to Australia. It took America 80 years to build this trust internationally, and maintaining that trust has been costly and laborious. Once broken, it can never be recovered.

There is an American expression: “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me,” or, as American president George Bush so eloquently put it, “shame … shame … shame on  … fool me you can’t get fooled again.” The rest of the world was fooled for the first time by the election of Trump in 2016. Now, again, in 2024. And this time, it has been much worse. The rest of the world will forever remember America as the country that is capable of electing a dictator-wannabe, not once, but twice. 

The rest of the world will think twice, even if America were to reverse course completely, before trusting America ever again. And that trust is not just as in terms of political and military alliances, but also entails the trust in the American bond market, the U.S. treasury, the dollar as the reserve currency of the world, the global presence of the American military, which were allegedly there to protect the free world from authoritarianism, which America itself is now not just flirting with, but copulating in bed. 

I’m very pessimistic about the future of America. As someone who loved America, it actually brings a tear to my eyes to see the greatest experiment in the world come to a screeching halt. It saddens me profoundly to think of so many people living under dictatorships in other countries who once made the statue of liberty with papers and straws, who openly protested and championed for freedom and democracy, under the threat of torture, imprisonment, and death; who defiantly held banners: “Give me liberty or give me death,” in the face of armored tanks, artillery, and machine guns. 

That kind of admiration for America in other countries, during the heyday of the cold war, is most likely gone forever.