I’m an American. I’ve lived sixteen of the last nineteen years overseas. I did two stints in Russia totalling a bit over four years with three years in Dallas in between. The last twelve years I have lived in Poland.

Although it saddens me to say this, there is really no other way to look at things. America as presently constructed is an unreliable and untrustworthy ally. We have gone over to the dark side. We now kowtow to tyrants and try to fuck up democracies.

Having lived in Russia, I can tell you that Russia’s leading export is not energy or metals or phosphate fertilizers or weapons. It is not even Internet porn models. It is corruption.

And Putin is great at finding foreign leaders who are susceptible to corruption. He found guys like Orbán in Hungary and Fico in Slovakia. And he bankrolls far Right movements in places like Germany and France. But he really hit the mother lode with Trump. Few leaders in the industrialized world are as blatantly and unapologetically corrupt as Trump. And few have followers as completely indifferent to official corruption as Trump does. The US is now a banana republic. Putin figured out how much money it would take to induce Trump to betray America and he paid it. And Republicans will not lift a finger to stop this betrayal.

And my fear is that this will not change. Trump is old and in obvious physical and mental decline. And given he was dumber than a bag of rocks even when he was young, he is starting from a low baseline.

But while Trump may soon leave the scene, his delusional followers are not going anywhere. Bear in mind, these people elected a complete sociopath and career criminal after it was abundantly clear that he was a complete sociopath and career criminal. He got more votes after he launched a seditious riot against the Constitution of the United States than he did before. This is not a Trump problem, this is an America problem.

The rest of the world needs to prepare for a post-American world. The America you thought you knew is gone and is not coming back.