I stopped reading at "Yes, Trump was already president" 'cause I've read enough of such diatribes to know where this is going. As if things were better when Biden was president and 'Big Tech' was used as the censorship organ of the regime. Remember Biden's Ministry of Truth czar Nina Jankovicz? What about Katherine Maher, NPR's CEO who stated that Our reverence for the truth might be a distraction getting in the way of finding common ground & getting things done? Trump is not the cause of the decline in public trust, he is the result of that decline.

Ultimately it all probably goes back to the fall of the Soviet Union and with that the loss of the clear 'good vs. bad/us vs. them' distinction which could be used to distract people on both sides from the rot in their midst. Politicos have always been corrupt no matter their colours or stripes but when the world was a simpler place - the Free West versus the Evil Empire, before that the Allies against the Axis - there was a common enemy for the people to refer to. Yes, some "democrats" already tried to take the side of the Soviets but they were in a minority while most of the Democratic party considered the politics and culture of the USA and the western alliance to be preferable over those of the Soviet Union and its satellite states as well as Communist China. They preferred "our" corrupt politicians over "their" corrupting ideology, i.e. they might be assholes but they're OUR assholes. When the eastern bloc dissolved the western alliance was like the dog which had caught the car: clueless as to what to do next. Fukuyama thought we were at the end of history but as anyone who had read a bit of (real) history could then already see this was a nonsensical idea. We're now experiencing the effects of that lack of vision which led to a 'Free West' which has taken over a number of the bad habits "we" accused the eastern bloc countries of and with that the term 'Free West' deserves to be quoted.

It is up to us, those living in the western alliance countries to try to keep the authoritarians at bay and no, I'm not only talking about Trump. I'm talking about the Communists (who call themselves 'democratic socialists') taking over the "democratic" party, the the "woke right" (for lack of a better term, i.e. right-wingers who adopt progressive-style shaming, tribalism and purity tests to defend distorted conservative values [1]) attempting to make inroads, the authoritarians on all sides who see works like 1984 and Brave New World as instruction manuals, those who read Howard Zinn and believed all he wrote, etc.

[1] https://newdiscourses.com/2025/07/a-beginners-guide-to-the-w...