People are starting to ask whether Trump is destroying America from the inside. The evidence says they're right.

How to destroy the world's most powerful nation, one policy at a time, and make sure nobody notices until it's too late

May 08, 2026

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On February 28, 2026, the United States entered a war with Iran that no allied nation had been warned about in advance. Not Japan, which hosts 50,000 American soldiers. Not South Korea, which hosts 45,000 more. Not Australia, not the United Kingdom, not a single NATO member. The most consequential military decision of the decade was made in private, executed in secret, and then -- once the costs began mounting -- the allies who were not consulted were blamed for not helping.

Putin watched from Moscow and said nothing. He did not need to.

I have spent considerable time placing this administration’s decisions side by side, reading them against each other, reading them against the historical record, and reading them against a question I cannot stop asking: who benefits? What I found was not a series of miscalculations. It was a direction. Nearly every major policy initiative of the Trump administration has weakened the United States -- economically, militarily, diplomatically, strategically -- while strengthening the one country that has spent fifty years trying to achieve exactly that outcome without ever firing a shot at American soil.

The data is unambiguous. The direction is consistent. The beneficiary is the same every time.

The most important economic relationship on earth, destroyed deliberately

I want to begin with the European Union, because this is where the scale of the strategic error is most visible -- and most inexplicable if you assume the goal is American prosperity.

The European Union is the world’s largest single internal market. It represents over 450 million consumers, a combined GDP exceeding $18 trillion, and by any measure the most valuable commercial partner the United States has ever had. The transatlantic economic relationship was not charity. It was architecture. American firms earned from it. American workers earned from it. American defense contractors, in particular, earned enormously from it -- because NATO partners buying American weapons systems was not just an alliance relationship, it was a revenue stream.

Here is what I have been told repeatedly by defense industry analysts: the US accounted for 58 percent of major arms imports by NATO’s European member states in the five years through 2025 -- and European nations continued to triple their arms imports following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Europe was rearming. And it was rearming with American equipment. F-35s, Patriots, HIMARS, Aegis combat systems. Lockheed Martin. Raytheon. Boeing Defense. The beneficiaries of a strong NATO were not only European soldiers. They were American shareholders and American workers in Fort Worth, Palmdale, and Marietta. Defense News

Now compare that with the alternative this administration appears to prefer: Russia. Russia accounted for 6.8 percent of global weapons transfers between states in 2021-2025, about a third of its share in the prior five-year period. Russia’s entire economy, for context, is roughly the size of Belgium and the Netherlands combined. The GDP of the country the administration is systematically pivoting toward is smaller than the state of Texas. Defense News

The administration is trading the world’s largest internal market, and the world’s largest defense procurement relationship, for proximity to an economy the size of a mid-sized European country. I have looked for the strategic rationale. I cannot find one. What I can find is a beneficiary.

Trading partners did not wait for Washington’s trade war; they adjusted. They lowered barriers among themselves, redirected commerce, and reduced their exposure to the American market. The long-term consequence is not a negotiating victory. It is the permanent re-routing of trade flows that took decades to build. Every deal concluded without American participation is a brick in a wall. French President Macron has said he would “convince” European allies who have “become accustomed to buying American” to spend their money on continental technology instead. When the allies you insulted start building a European defense industry to replace yours, the revenue loss compounds across generations, not quarters. The Daily Star Newsweek

Trump’s election has raised serious doubts about the credibility of US security guarantees for European allies -- and European nations are now looking to reduce their dependency on the US as threats by the president against allies and a policy shift toward American homeland defense have raised questions about reliability. SIPRI

The customer who doubts you does not renew the contract. And defense contracts, once lost to a competitor, take twenty years to win back.

The country that was America’s closest neighbor, made into an enemy

I have been told, by people who work in border economies from Vermont to Montana, that what happened with Canada is unlike anything they have seen in their professional lives.

Canada was not an adversary. Canada was the United States’ largest trading partner. Nearly 900 kilometers of shared border, 70 years of NORAD, the same intelligence-sharing framework, the same defense commitments, tens of millions of annual crossings. Canadians were, by every measure, the most reliable international visitors the United States had: in 2024, Canadian tourism contributed $20.5 billion to the US economy and supported 140,000 American jobs. CBC News

Then the tariffs hit. Then came the sovereignty jokes. Then came the suggestions that Canada should become the 51st state. I watched the Canadian response with something close to disbelief, because what happened was not a government trade dispute. It was a popular revolt.

In 2025, Canadian arrivals to the US dropped 21 percent. Based on US Travel Association estimates, that translates into roughly $4.5 billion in lost spending and puts approximately 28,000 jobs at risk. Land travel fell 33 percent since April 2025. January 2026 showed a 22 percent year-over-year decline -- the 13th consecutive month of year-over-year drops. In a November 2025 Angus Reid survey, 70 percent of Canadians said they would be uncomfortable traveling to the US. Yahoo Finance The Deep Dive

I want to be precise about what this means economically. Canadians have not stopped traveling. Canadian overseas trips rose 9.2 percent in 2025, with Mexico and Europe the primary beneficiaries. Canadian domestic tourism GDP grew an annualized 4.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2025. Accommodation and dining spending within Canada rose 5.6 percent for the year. The money still exists. The travel budget still exists. The American share of it is simply gone. One travel industry veteran told Forbes: “In my 37 years in the travel industry, I have never seen anything like what the Canadians have pulled off.” The Deep Dive

The city of Palm Springs, which depends on Canadian visitors for $300 million annually, put signs across its downtown reading “Palm Springs Loves Canada.” That is not a diplomatic statement. It is a distress signal from an American city to a foreign country, asking for its economy back.

What one detained tourist actually costs

When I read the account of the German tourist who was held in solitary confinement for six weeks after crossing the Mexican border into California, I spent time thinking about the arithmetic of that decision.

One detention. Six weeks. The story traveled through every German newspaper, every French dinner table conversation, every British travel forum. A Skift survey found that 46 percent of international travelers said they were less likely to visit the United States because of Trump. The administration did not detain 46 percent of international travelers. It detained a handful of Europeans -- and the reputational cost was paid by every hotel, every restaurant, every taxi driver, every souvenir shop, every American who depends on the $176 billion that foreign tourists spent in this country. Fortune

A proposal from US Customs and Border Protection would require would-be travelers to make their social media history from the past five years public when applying for travel authorization. Think about what that means in practice. A German academic, a French journalist, a British activist, a Spanish student -- any person who has ever posted something critical of US policy in the last five years is now a potential deportation target before they even board the plane. The chilling effect on travel is not incidental. It is the mechanism. Euronews

The World Travel and Tourism Council projected that the US would be the only country among 184 it studied where foreign visitor spending would fall in 2025. Its president said: “While other nations are rolling out the welcome mat, the US government is putting up the ‘closed’ sign.” PBS

The FIFA World Cup arrives this summer. It should have been a commercial windfall of historic proportions. Instead, European flight bookings to the US for this summer are down more than 14 percent year-over-year. Hotels in host cities are already reporting lukewarm demand and receiving FIFA room block holds back. The greatest sporting event in the world is coming to a country that spent fifteen months demonstrating, in the most concrete possible terms, that foreigners are not welcome. Euronews

The domestic cost of the immigration war

Here is something I have not seen discussed adequately in most analysis of this period: the ICE enforcement campaign is not only a humanitarian problem. It is a government functionality problem.

When federal law enforcement deploys its resources to sweep restaurant kitchens, construction sites, churches, and hospital waiting rooms in American cities, the communities it operates in do not simply accept the disruption. They go quiet. Local governments stop cooperating with federal authorities. Local law enforcement refuses information sharing. Local officials decline to participate in joint programs. Repeated policy reversals and enforcement actions create uncertainty among allies and undermine trust in American institutions -- and that applies domestically as well as internationally. The machinery of American government requires the consent and cooperation of state and local authorities. That cooperation is now fractured in dozens of jurisdictions. Federal agencies cannot get information. Programs stall. Courts are clogged. The government that is supposed to be making America great cannot make decisions because it has paralyzed the cooperative infrastructure it depends on. Next IAS

This is not hypothetical. It is the lived experience of mayors, school principals, public health officials, and law enforcement chiefs across the country. The noise about immigration dominates every other agenda item. Nothing else gets done. That is not a side effect. It is the effect.

Insulting 1.4 billion people at once

In April 2026, the President of the United States posted an AI-generated image of himself dressed as the Pope while the Catholic Church was in the middle of a mourning period for Pope Francis and preparing for a conclave to elect his successor. Italy’s former Prime Minister Matteo Renzi wrote: “This is an image that offends believers, insults institutions and shows that the leader of the global right enjoys being a clown. In the meantime, the American economy risks recession and the dollar loses value.” Al Jazeera

The newly elected Pope Leo XIV -- the first American-born pope in history -- then openly criticized the Iran war. Trump called him “WEAK on Crime, and terrible for Foreign Policy.” Jesuit priest and author James Martin said: “Pretty much every Catholic I spoke to, from progressive Catholics to traditional Catholics, were appalled.” A September 2025 Pew Research poll found that 84 percent of US Catholics had a favorable view of Leo. Around 20 percent of US adults describe themselves as Catholic, amounting to approximately 53 million people. NPR ABC News

There are 1.4 billion Catholics in the world. They are concentrated in precisely the markets the United States needs most: Latin America, Southern Europe, the Philippines, sub-Saharan Africa. The Pope is not simply a religious figure. He is a global opinion leader with moral authority that no president can purchase. Picking a fight with him, in the middle of a contested war, in the middle of a tourism crisis, in the middle of a collapsing alliance network, is not a strategic error. It is a comprehensive one.

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