The app for independent voices
I don’t think this will work. Trust in the bubble of benevolent American exceptionalism (RIP) was 3 layers:
Trust that the mechanism actually functions by design and is sufficiently capable (unclear)
Trust that it is applied consistently over a long period without egregious sovereign exceptionalism in the pattern of deviations (broken for 10 years, and in more benign ways for 25)
Trust in the narrative vibes/aura shrouding the raw enforcement log, the “brand premium” of the legal dispensation and the story it suggests (dissipated like a century old fart — the illusion is broken)
It took perhaps a century to build up this 3 level trust to the state it was around say 1999. It’s been lost in 10. One prosecution/show trial, of the pot by a presumptive kettle, will do nothing.
It’s not just the Trumpist streak in the American psyche. It’s the fecklessness of the rest of it. To regain even an “at least as moral/good as the rest of the world” trust level, let alone an exceptionalism brand, you need a new track record of god-tier positive deeds, like the Marshall plan etc. This is vanishingly unlikely. The halo is gone for good, and along with it any ability to sermonize or champion any sort of idealism.
The current state is worse than the median country or even terrible ones. You have to be spectacularly badly behaved to make the world forget Iran’s bad behavior and make it look like the victim. Relatively ordinary leaders of ordinary countries without much pretension to moral high ground are looking at this and going “if I had that much military-economic power I’d probably have behaved better with it.”
The average human, political leader or not, is no saint. We’re all weak and morally dubious in behavior under stress. But Trump gang has shown itself to be significantly worse than the rest of us imagine we’d be if we were in their place.
