My view is Trump is last call for drinks.
The hangover is when the Chinese decide to dump a few trillion in treasuries back onto the bond markets.
Debt doesn't matter. Until it does.
The US is like an overgrown teenager. The Civil War was less than 80 years before WW2 and it's been more than 80 years since.
At the time of WW2, much of the population are either recent immigrants, or descended from immigrants since the Civil War. So WW2 became the greatest public works project in the history of this country. Making the military the golden child. The big hammer in the tool box.
All countries need militaries, but they also need a healthy and viable society to defend in the first place. Otherwise it is like a turtle shell with a dead turtle inside.
The Ancients devised debt jubilees 3000 years ago, as a circuit breaker to the feedback loop of compound interest, but because wealth and power always finds ways to leverage ever more wealth and power, especially when there is no strong sense of social identity to balance it, so we find ourselves in the same doom loop.
As for all the Nazi crap, Nazism, Aryan nation, was a throwback to a primal tribalism, as European monarchy collapsed, as the organizing social principle of the West. Germany lost both the Kaiser and WW1 around the same time.
What is happening in the US is not the same. It will eventually be more of a fragmentation. When they blow up the dollar, then states and regions will have to start both issuing and policing their own forms of currencies and foreign policy will be between Texas and California. When the big tree falls, saplings grow up in the space.
That Donald Trump, the Kim Kardashian of the 80's, managed to become the Great White Whale of the establishment, only goes to show how shallow and fleeting all this really is.
Those countries in the old world have been through these cycles of ups and downs for thousands of years, making them what they are today. That we presume to know better is like the average teenager thinking how dumb the parents are.
