We share a hatred (to put it mildly) of Trump. But Trump is a symptom of a much larger problem. From Pulitzer Prize winning writer/essayist Chris Hedges: ":...My hatred of Donald Trump is inseparable from my understanding that he could only have risen in a society already in steep decline. Trump is not the cause of America’s unraveling. He is one of its clearest symptoms—an accelerant poured onto a fire that had been burning for decades. Empires do not collapse all at once. They decay. They hollow out. Their institutions remain standing long after their moral authority has evaporated. This is where the United States finds itself. We are living through the late stages of an empire that has exhausted its economic model, militarized its foreign policy beyond sustainability, and severed the social contract with its own people. The signs are everywhere. Endless wars that achieve nothing but enrich arms manufacturers. Crumbling infrastructure. Life expectancy declining. Entire regions deindustrialized and abandoned. A grotesque concentration of wealth alongside mass precarity. A political class that speaks the language of democracy while governing on behalf of corporations and billionaires. A culture drowning in spectacle because it can no longer offer meaning. Trump did not create these conditions. If this country had been functioning—if wages had kept pace with productivity, if communities had not been stripped of work and dignity, if democratic institutions had delivered real power to ordinary people—Trump would have been a sideshow, a vulgar entertainer shouting from the margins. He would never have been elected. Instead, he emerged at precisely the moment when the empire’s promises had been exposed as lies. Trump thrives in imperial decay. He mocks alliances because empires in decline retreat into belligerent nationalism. He disdains diplomacy because failing empires default to force. He glorifies dominance because dominance is the last language empires know how to speak when legitimacy is gone. His cruelty mirrors the cruelty of a system that has long treated both foreign populations and its own citizens as expendable. I despise Trump because he exploits this decay rather than confronts it. He offers no vision of renewal, no structural reform, no reckoning with empire. He channels rage without purpose. He promises restoration while accelerating collapse. “Make America Great Again” is the slogan of every dying empire, a nostalgic hallucination masquerading as a political program. But focusing on Trump alone is a dangerous indulgence. It allows those who presided over this imperial rot to pretend that the problem arrived in 2016. It did not. Trump is the logical outcome of a political economy that gutted labor, commodified every aspect of life, and replaced citizenship with consumerism. He is what happens when people understand—correctly—that the system no longer works for them, but are offered only lies about why. This is the deeper tragedy. Trump speaks to real suffering. But he divorces that suffering from its real causes. He blames the vulnerable. He scapegoats the marginalized. He turns despair into cruelty rather than solidarity. That is why I hate him. He takes the legitimate anguish produced by a dying empire and uses it to fortify the very forces that are killing it. And yet, Trump is also a warning. He tells us how far we have fallen. He tells us what happens when empires rot from within and refuse to reform. Remove Trump, and the decay remains. Another figure will arise—perhaps more competent, more disciplined, more dangerous. History is unambiguous about this. Trump exacerbates the collapse. But the collapse made Trump possible. Empires that refuse justice eventually choose repression. Societies that abandon the common good eventually embrace demagogues. Trump is not an interruption of the American story. He is what the American empire looks like when it begins to fail in full view of its own people—and can no longer hide the truth."