I didn’t vote for Trump, this is not a justification for anything he is doing, this is purely me trying to find any crumb of hope in this abysmal situation.
The country was in decline for at least a decade before Trump took office. So far everything has been a slow boil and we Americans just take it imo.
Maybe Trump will make everything so awful so quickly it will force actual change. Basically we were slowly heating the water and when it turned lukewarm Trump just cranked the heat up to max, maybe the frog realizes this and jumps out.
Well 4 years of that decade was Trump being in office, and 4 other years was the result of people being willing to vote in literally anyone who wasn’t him. So really 8 years of that decade was Trump’s fault. And the other two years? Not bad.
As for the rest, Trump is cutting funding for research like crazy. That won’t just affect things today, that’s going to make stuff shitty for decades. And that’s exactly the kind of harm that the emotion-laden American news and social media simply won’t cover. So I don’t think there will be a backlash, rather the opposite - politicians will realize bullying scientists, government agencies, immigrants, and other voiceless Trump targets is just good politics, and keep doing it.
Of course future prediction is hard, so who knows what will happen. But I’m not seeing the path for this to turn around anytime soon. The same media that created MAGA, and made it even more popular 4 years after it proved itself to be a horrific disaster is the same media we have today. Democrats will probably win the next two elections because people can see what Trump is doing in real time, but after that I have no hope for America. If I have to predict the future, I’d guess the EU becomes the new global leader, driven by relatively high democracy and pro-science policies compared to the rest of the world. This could even occur in a relatively short time frame, like 5 years.