Autocrats often tell us what they intend to do, and Trump was no exception.

He ran for president on a platform of helping some of the world’s most murderous leaders.

During his campaign, he repeatedly “joked” about becoming a dictator himself,
and declared at a June 2024 rally that
a “smart president” would not consider North Korea, China, and Russia as enemies,
and would “make them do great.”

In case this message was not clear enough, he asserted in October 2024 that America’s
“enemy from within…the people actually running the government,”
—United States Democrats
—were “more dangerous…than Russia and China and other people.”

Then came the blitzkrieg tactics of early 2025.
I spent those months writing essays to help us understand the unthinkable:

America was being wrecked from within, at record speed,
and was shifting from deterrent to enabler of autocratic expansionism.

I forecast a “dialing back of America’s global soft and hard power footprint in the world”
to “create a vacuum of American power and influence in the world that China, Russia, Turkey and other autocracies can fill.”

https://lucid.substack.com/p/trump-sabotaging-america-so-that