EDITORIAL: How the US enters a death spiral

The slow collapse of a superpower

What Would a Collapse of the United States Look Like?

If the United States were to collapse, it likely wouldn’t look like a Hollywood movie with tanks rolling down Main Street. Instead, it would be a slow, chaotic unraveling—one that looks eerily familiar to what we already see today. A little more confusion, a little more stupidity every year until the system becomes completely unsustainable. The collapse would be marked by a decline in trust, an erosion of institutions, and a culture increasingly shaped by spectacle rather than substance. And if that sounds dramatic, just take a look around. It’s 2025. Donald Trump is back in the White House. He may not be the cause of the collapse, but his second term could certainly be an accelerant.

This decline has been happening for decades. The United States has been fraying at the seams for a long time. The erosion of civic trust didn’t start with Trump—it’s been a long process fueled by corruption, political gridlock, economic inequality, and a media landscape driven more by clicks than by truth. We have stopped trusting each other. We have stopped trusting the system. And the people who run the system have stopped caring whether they are trusted at all.

History offers a cautionary tale. The Roman Republic didn’t fall in a single day—it slowly consumed itself through corruption, power struggles, and a loss of faith in democratic governance. Elites hoarded wealth, political leaders stopped serving the people, and eventually, Rome transitioned from a republic to an empire under a dictator. No one was really surprised when it happened. It was the logical endpoint of a long, steady decline. That’s how empires die. And America’s version of this collapse is playing out in real-time.

We can see it in the way basic facts are up for debate. We fight over science. Half the country believes elections are rigged, while the other half believes nothing will ever change. Almost no one trusts the people in charge. This collapse of civic trust is incredibly difficult to rebuild once it is lost. The press, which is supposed to hold power to account, has long abandoned that mission in favor of sensationalism and horse-race coverage. We saw that in the Sunday interview with Bernie Sanders, where substantive discussion was replaced with media theatrics.

A generation has been raised on outrage, unable to distinguish between news and propaganda. Politics has been reduced to a game show, where voters select their leaders as if casting a reality TV competition. It is not an accident that our political culture increasingly resembles entertainment. Plato warned about this thousands of years ago, saying that in a broken democracy, people would eventually choose a tyrant—not because they wanted one, but because they had been conditioned to hate everything else. The loudest, dumbest voices would take over, and people would cheer. If that doesn’t sound familiar, I don’t know what does.

Meanwhile, the country is rotting from the inside out. Wages are stagnant, but the cost of living keeps rising. Billionaires buy politicians like baseball cards. And yet, we are told that the same broken system that caused these problems is also the one that will fix them. The military is bloated, the police are militarized, and protesters are treated like enemies of the state by those who claim to defend free speech. The divisions run so deep that some Americans would rather see the country fail than watch the other side win.

But here’s the part no one likes to say out loud: the collapse won’t come with fireworks. It won’t be a dramatic moment—it will be a slow descent into stagnation and dysfunction. It will feel like boredom. It will resemble Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World far more than George Orwell’s 1984. At some point, people will simply get used to it. We’ll get used to the corruption. We’ll get used to the incompetence. We’ll get used to the nonsense. And eventually, we’ll stop expecting better. The country will still exist. The flag will still wave. But the soul of the nation—the civic project that once inspired people—will have evaporated.

This is not just about Trump. He is a symptom, not the disease. His presidency is a mirror reflecting the state of the country. And if we don’t like what we see, we have a choice: we can look away, or we can face it head-on and try to stop the decline before it’s too late. History teaches us that every empire thinks it’s too big to fail—until it fails. The only question is whether we recognize the warning signs in time.