Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

America abdicates as global superpower — and it’s about time

Trump's foreign policy has been a disaster. There could be an upside: A more realistic role for US in the world

Published June 21, 2026 6:45AM (EDT)

On a sweltering summer night in Cleveland 10 years ago, I witnessed Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the 2016 Republican convention — the “I alone can fix it” speech — and realized for the first time that he was likely to be elected president. Like many people in this business, I have too much ego invested in not being surprised by anything that happens, no matter how dire or ridiculous. But that was without a doubt one of the most traumatic experiences of my career: As I wrote at the time, it hit 7.5 on the Nuremberg scale.

I also began to understand Trump’s rise as something more than an aberration or a flukish detour from the normal back and forth of regular-order democracy. (It has taken the Democratic Party until approximately right now to figure that out, if it has.) It was more like a dark epiphany, a moment of revelation in which unsavory but unavoidable truths about America were laid bare before America itself and the wider world. It might be the most American thing ever that we needed to experience the epiphany twice — with equal doses of tragedy and farce on both occasions — before we began to grasp its message.

If I and many others assumed that the primary lesson of the Trump years concerned the decadent and corrupt condition of American democracy — which straight-up barely deserves that term these days — a decade onward it seems more far-reaching. Trump vowed to restore American “greatness,” without ever defining that in a way that didn’t sound both sinister and ludicrous. He has now destroyed the illusion that America was either great or good, and has entirely abandoned the nation’s role as self-appointed leader of the so-called free world. The way that happened has been........

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