Many liberal pundits and journalists rightly point out the disaster that Trump and his cronies are for the US, climate change or international relations. They focus on Trump’s decision to leave the Paris accord on his Muslim bans and his many sexist, xenophobic racist comments and his enabling of neo-Nazis after Charlottesville. They are obviously right for Trump is a terrible reactionary vulgar TV reality barbarian yet the critique is often just the tip of the iceberg and sidesteps the systemic disaster that started a long time before the narcissistic ignoramus entered the White House.

The opioid crisis, which is, as Chris Hedges aptly calls it a “disease of despair”, and the gun related deaths in multiple massacres and suicides are not phenomena which started after the 2016 election. Rather the election is connected to this despair in the land. The list of issues indicating that for many if not most Americans decline is not a future prospect but a current reality is well-known: crumbling infrastructures and no public commitment to public services, offshoring of jobs encouraged by Walmart and the Chinese Communist leadership, loss of manufacturing jobs to robots, increasingly expensive higher education and terrible K-12 public education, an environmental crisis encouraged by ecological dinosaurs like the Koch brothers.

Many countries like China, France and Germany have invested in fast speed trains; the US has an antiquated railroad system. Most industrialized countries have a universal health care system the US had a much inferior Obamacare that the lunatics in the GOP want to destroy. No healthcare for all has obvious social consequences (the US, a rich country offers the shameful spectacle of people lining up in parking lot to get treatment from generous humanitarian doctors) but also economic ones. Countries that spend more on health and less on weapons do better economically. The military-industrial complex provides jobs but kills the basis of economic security. Germany and Japan, not to speak of Scandinavia, offer their citizens a much higher real standard of living than the US. The discontent, which in part, explains Trump’s popularity and victory, is connected to lack of health insurance and working social services. People who fell ignored become either lethargic or angry. This is not something new as Pankaj Mishra shows in his scintillating book The Age of Anger in which he analyzes resentment (or ressentiment in Nietzsche’s words) across two centuries and many countries.

Clearly Trump is the symptom of a larger malady, the malady that Martin Luther King diagnosed in his 1967 Riverside Church speech often called Beyond Vietnam: “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism”.

Liberals rightly attack Trump for his racism, a racism that was of course not conquered by the election of an African American president in 2008. A racism that is endemic and leads to the murder of countless young African American men by police forces and was in full view among Charlottesville alt-right and neo-Nazi mobs. Yet this racism is also endemic and systemic and the Obama administration has not been very successful at fighting it. Black Lives Matter is therefore absolutely necessary in a political landscape that in effect condones racism.

Racism is also connected to the permanent wars preferred by the military-industrial complex. Minorities are the majority among US soldiers, the cannon fodder of wars that are unwinnable like Afghanistan, unending and also impossibly expensive. A National Priorities Project graph shows that military spending in the US in 2015 was 54% of all US discretionary spending. Trump fought for a $ 54 billion increase of the military budget in 2017 and in September as Forbes brags 89% of Democratic Senators voted for this huge increase (41 out of 46).

The Democrats who vote for permanent war are not members of any resistance to Trump or rather they may dislike Trump but they love Trumpism, permanent war and gutting education and social services whatever they might say in defense of progressive causes. The Democrats who did not denounce (or worse took credit for it) Trump’s decision to violate international law and transfer the US embassy to Jerusalem are also complicit rather than oppositional.

The huge increase in military spending when the US already spends more on defense than Russia (10% the US budget) and China (30% the US budget) combined is coupled with a plan to cut taxes on the rich and therefore increase the deficit by 1.4 or 1.5 trillion. Democrats oppose the giant tax heist but not the waste of resources that the National Security State requires. Sanders is one of the few who are consistent in their opposition to the tax plan and the military gutting of the economy.

Military expenditures and tax cuts by themselves justify the interpretation of an American suicide. The US is becoming more and more like Prussia where it was said that the army had a country, rather than the reverse. Poverty, inequality and racism cannot be fought in country that chooses to spend so much on what is not even “defense” but pure military aggression.

Andrew Bacevich argues that Americans don’t care about Afghanistan or the impact of other wars. His book America’s War for the Greater Middle East chronicles American adventures and defeats and therefore decline.

Americans probably do not realize how much constant wars cost them and do not fully understand that the US is not winning these wars, neither in Iraq nor in Afghanistan. The pockets of the defense sector (which should really be called the offense sector) may be lined but grade school education and the level of air pollution get worse and worse.

Liberals argue that Trump has put an end to American leadership in the world and for sure Trump goes from one disastrous, outrageous statement or action to another. From “fire and fury” for North Korea, to gigantic arms deals with Saudi Arabia, currently involved in massacres in Yemen, to saying the US embassy in Israel will move to Jerusalem in contradiction with international law, he often proves he is ignorant and dangerous. He seems to be unaware of M.A.D (mutual assured destruction) if you use nuclear weapons.

Yet this American leadership, often presented as leadership of the “free world” was not all that benevolent, especially with another incendiary president in America’s past, George W. Bush whom some liberals now shamefully find a valuable ally in their fight against Trump. W. is the very symbol of the fake resistance to Trumpism: he set fire to the Middle east with the 2003 invasion of Iraq based on a huge lie about WMDs. Terrorism was boosted by the insane “war on terror” and the occupation of Iraq, notably at camp Bucca which proved to be a terrorist boot camp. So the early adepts of Trumpism, permanent war and tax cuts twinned with more “offense” spending share in the responsibility for the current disaster.

American decline on the world stage is indeed obvious but not only because Trump tarnishes the image of the US (something he most assuredly does). The rise of China has many causes, one of them is the mercantilism of that country coupled with the neoliberalism of American companies but mostly China has not launched into permanent wars even if it now also increases its defense budget. Alfred McCoy in his book In the Shadows of the American Century explains the rise of China in a very convincing and scholarly way. China, of course, is a tyranny whose anti-democratic régime is brilliantly denounced by artist Ai Weiwei.

So American suicide did not begin with Trump. The Trumpian daily circus may hide the designs of the GOP lunatics or it may be an attempt to paper over the signs of suicide but it mostly makes decline and political stupidity more obvious. Spending fortunes on military adventurism and cutting taxes on the rich is recipe for slow suicide. The US does not win its wars though it kills thousands of people, mostly in the third world but also among its marginalized minorities for whom a military life is a job opportunity.

Resorting to the MOAB bomb (Massive Ordnance Air Blast but also Mother Of All Bombs) is murderous but also a metaphor for idiotic decline: the US bombs but achieves nothing in Afghanistan, if not strengthening its enemy, the Taliban. Blood and treasure spent to kill but not win wars. The murders abroad foster the suicide at home.

Even from a so-called “conservative” point of view US policies of permanent war and constant coddling of the rich are disastrous. US elites are undermining the underlying economic and social strength of what is, at least nominally, their country. Paul Kennedy described this slow erosion of imperial power in his 1987 book on The Rise and Fall of Great Powers. The super-rich can hide their profits in tax havens, they can live in gated communities or on islands not yet polluted or flooded as a result of global warming but they cannot remain rich if they destroy the basis of their money-making activity and practice “ecocide” wherever they are active.

Suicides in the US are on the increase, the New York Times reported a 30-year high. Suicide as Emile Durkheim showed in his 1897 book is a social fact, so an increase in suicides must be interpreted historically and sociologically. Collective suicide must also be explained along the same lines. In the case of the US, political suicide is a rush to destruction led by misnamed “elites” blinded by their privilege and isolated in their bubbles or towers. The conman in chief cannot hide the signs of collective suicide forever. He is the latest version of the Pied Piper of Hamelin leading Americans to the abyss.

The disappearance of American hegemony or of the American Empire would not be a bad thing in itself if a more equitable multipolar world came into being. The US, contrary to what “American exceptionalism liberals” argue, has not been a major force for freedom and democracy after WWII, as interventions in Iran, Chile, Iraq, Vietnam or Afghanistan illustrate. Yet one cannot expect Chinese hegemony to be any more benevolent than US dominance and it probably would lead to even less freedom of expression.

The US will lose its prominent position in the world mostly from self-inflicted wounds but for Americans what matters most of all is not a number One or number Two ranking among major powers, but rather a sustainable and decent way of life at home. American suicide which started long ago with GOP lunacy is taking the US away from the standards of the most equal and decent societies in Scandinavia and toward socio-economic conditions typical of third world or emerging economies. Infant mortality in the ghettos of the US is already on a par with the Bangladeshi rate, the US has more prison inmates than all other countries (714 per 100 000) and things are not improving.

The prison industrial complex is a creature of the military-industrial complex; all political decisions in the past 50 years which combined a bloated military budget with tax cuts for the already ultra-rich have impoverished a more and more prison-oriented society. American geopolitical decline goes hand in hand with domestic immiseration and affects more than just the US.

We, citizens of Western Europe, have lived in the shadows of the American Empire for decades and we suffer from a malady which is only slightly different from the American one: we mostly had to give up our imperial sense of grandeur –though there are currents of post-colonial nostalgia– and our health systems are much better than the hardly existing American one. Our “society of the spectacle” has even longer roots than the US one and the angry and enraged victims of globalization or social marginalization are also tempted by far right populism. American suicide is not something we should rejoice over for the death of anyone is a sad affair and American decline will not make our societies happier, on the contrary Europe is likely to follow in America’s footsteps. Our friends in America could be arrogant when they believed in their “Manifest Destiny” or “Exceptionalism”, their suicide by war and tax gifts to the billionaires is a producer of chaos in the rest of the world. Ideas have no borders, neither has political lunacy. The Doomsday clock is ticking for us too.

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