I'm going to echo @johnquiggin here - the USA is now basically a dictatorship that its public doesn't really want to believe is a dictatorship:
https://johnquigginblog.substack.com/p/the-end-of-us-democracy
I remember reading someone commenting in 2014, I think, about how there would be no obvious sign that the USA's democracy was failing at the time, but the signs would only be obvious in hindsight. Historians would point to some event or person and say, "This was one of the key decisions that caused the USA to slip into an authoritarian dictatorship".
Remember, this was the time of the Tea Party, of unrelenting opposition to everything Obama did. It was a time where the Republican party pushed the USA to the brink of failing to pass its budget simply to make it look like the Democrats were 'the baddies'. It was a time where the Republican party showed that it had abandoned any semblance of co-operation, and was only interested in destroying anyone and anything it disagreed with.
I work for a company with its headquarters in the USA. I talk to those people living there. And the thing that disappoints me, to be honest, is that they keep on going and hoping that 'this all won't affect [them]'. Any half competent student of Germany coming up to WWII can see exactly how that attitude played out for the German public: ignoring the killings and the imprisonments and the regime setting itself up with no opposition and no supervision.
To the people in the USA who I know I say: get out while you still can.
Because you think you'll have plenty of time. You think you'll be able to find another country that will take you on your time-table, when you need to leave. You think you're never going to need to leave because you're as American as anyone else, or you live in a nice town, or you have good friends, or it's going to be so difficult.
I don't think we're going to end up at another world war as the end-point; I don't think the USA is going to seriously invade Canada or Greenland or China or Mexico or anyone else.
I think the end point is that the vast majority of USAdians will find themselves struggling to earn enough to keep themselves clothed and fed, while they watching the Republicans and its cronies enriching themselves. They'll discover that protest is illegal and that people they know have 'disappeared' into prisons or worse. They'll find that they - as immigrants or as same-sex couples or as mixed-race families or as just ordinary citizens who don't slavishly follow the Trumpublicans - are targeted for vigilante violence.
The real problem for the USA is that all the real money is going to already flee. Bezos and Musk and Buffett and Gates and so on will just move to New Zealand or Lichtenstein or a Caribbean island; their money will already be in international banks and trusts and funds that the USA can't touch. The Republicans will squeeze the poor people tighter, but the rich people will have already have left.
