US Power Will Decline Under Trump, Says Futurist Who Predicted Soviet Collapse

[ltlee1]

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/d7ykxx/us-power-will-decline-under-trump-says-futurist-who-predicted-soviet-collapse

"Johan Galtung, a Nobel Peace Prize-nominated sociologist who predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union, warned that US global power will collapse under the Donald Trump administration.

The Norwegian professor at the University of Hawaii and Transcend Peace University is recognized as the 'founding father' of peace and conflict studies as a scientific discipline. He has made numerous accurate predictions of major world events, most notably the collapse of the Soviet Empire.

Back in 2000, Galtung first set out his prediction that the "US empire" would collapse within 25 years.

Galtung has also accurately predicted the 1978 Iranian revolution; the Tiananmen Square uprising of 1989 in China; the economic crises of 1987, 2008 and 2011; and even the 9/11 attacks—among other events, according to the late Dietrich Fischer, academic director of the European University Center for Peace Studies."

[wakal...@yahoo.com.sg]

I doubt Trump will have enough time and power to cause lasting decline to the US.

With the endless coup attempts against him by the media, politicians and others, he'll probably be a one-term president.

Wakalukong

[ltlee1]

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/will-donald-trump-destroy-the-presidency/537921/

"Will Donald Trump Destroy the Presidency?
Jack Goldsmith
34-44 minutes

Donald Trump is testing the institution of the presidency unlike any of his 43 predecessors. We have never had a president so ill-informed about the nature of his office, so openly mendacious, so self-destructive, or so brazen in his abusive attacks on the courts, the press, Congress (including members of his own party), and even senior officials within his own administration. Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.
“Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm,” James Madison wrote in one of the Federalist Papers during the debates over the ratification of the Constitution. He was right, but he never could have imagined Donald Trump.

At this point in the singular Trump presidency, we can begin to assess its impact on American democracy. The news thus far is not all bad. The Constitution’s checks and balances have largely stopped Trump from breaking the law. And while he has hurt his own administration, his successors likely won’t repeat his self-destructive antics. The prognosis for the rest of our democratic culture is grimmer, however. Trump’s bizarre behavior has coarsened politics and induced harmful norm-breaking by the institutions he has attacked. These changes will be harder to undo.

Trump, in short, is wielding a Soprano touch on American institutions. “I’m fucking King Midas in reverse here,” Tony Soprano once told his therapist. “Everything I touch turns to shit.”"

[wakal...@yahoo.com.sg]

Will Trump destroy the presidency? Absolutely not. The media and other coup plotters might.

Wakalukong

[ltlee1]

When Tony Soprano lamented to his therapist, he did not mean he himself destroyed everything, especially those he loved. Rather everything he touched got destroyed because of him. Action or reaction, destruction is still destruction.

"Citizens’ trust in American institutions has been in decline for a while. That’s one reason Donald Trump was elected. His assault on those institutions, and the defiant reactions to his assault, will further diminish that trust and make it yet harder to resolve social and political disputes. The breakdown in institutions mirrors the breakdown in social cohesion among citizens that was also a major cause of Trumpism, and that Trumpism has churned further. This is perhaps the worst news of all for our democracy. As Cass Sunstein lamented in his book #Republic, “Members of a democratic public will not do well if they are unable to appreciate the views of their fellow citizens, if they believe ‘fake news,’ or if they see one another as enemies or adversaries in some kind of war.”

[ltlee1]

BTW, "Jack Goldsmith is a professor at Harvard Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He is a former assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration."

I don't trust US media on a lot of things. But on things America, writers like Jack Goldsmith are the best experts.

[wakal...@yahoo.com.sg]

Don't put all trusts on experts.

Wakalukong

[wakal...@yahoo.com.sg]

If Nixon and Watergate didn't destroy the presidency, Trump couldn't.

Wakalukong