It's way deeper than that, though. It's stuff like US businessmen choosing to literally move the US's rare-earth magnet production capacity to China, teaching China how make them in the process (https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/31/business/china-rare-earth...). It's the US knowing about it's rare-earth vulnerability for a decade or more but being completely unable to do anything about it. It's the US losing other strategic capabilities like large-scale electronics manufacturing capacity, and people being totally fine with that because "cheaper iPhones, more margins, good deal!"

But the singular focus on destruction of what is a cornerstone of the stability of the Western hemisphere is absolutely unprecedented. And to see so many people falling for it, hook line and sinker. They are so blasted with crazy things that they no longer see anything strange at all about each and every day's happenings and they even jump to defend the absolutely indefensible, something that probably would have been - rightly - horrified by less than a decade ago is now perfectly normal.

> But the singular focus on destruction of what is a cornerstone of the stability of the Western hemisphere is absolutely unprecedented. And to see so many people falling for it, hook line and sinker.

IMHO, that short-term thinking over such a long span laid the groundwork for that destruction.

I read this the other day, and I think it's an interesting take that rings true:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/06/opinion/trump-presidentia...:

> Instead of comparing what is happening under Trump with the situations in Hungary, Turkey and Russia, Goldstone argued that conditions in the United States are,

>> ironically, more like what happened in Venezuela, where after a century of reasonably prosperous democratic government, decades of elite self-serving neglect of popular welfare led to the election of Hugo Chávez with a mandate to get rid of the old elites and create a populist dictatorship.

>> I find that decades-long trends in the U.S. — stagnating wages for non-college-educated males, sharply declining social mobility, fierce political polarization among the elites and a government sinking deeper and deeper into debt — are earmarks of countries heading into revolutionary upheaval.

>> Just as the French monarchy, despite being the richest and archetypal monarchy, collapsed in the late 18th century because of popular immiseration, elite conflicts and state debts, so the U.S. today, despite being the richest and archetypal democratic republic, is seeing its institutions come under attack today for a similar set of conditions.