Way To Go, MAGA.
Is this the great America you were hoping for?

Adam Kinzinger (Substack)
Mar 20

Yesterday, the president of the United States made a Pearl Harbour joke to the Japanese prime minister. Not in a private moment of breathtaking social incompetence, but on the world stage, in a diplomatic meeting, where the entire point of the exercise is to convince our most important Pacific ally that we are a serious, reliable partner in an increasingly dangerous world. Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi responded the way any seasoned diplomat responds when trapped in a room with a man who just stepped on every rake simultaneously—she offered the polished, glacial smile of someone checking her watch and calculating how many minutes until she could escape.

Then, because the moment clearly needed more texture, Trump led her down the “Wall of Presidents”—a proud American tradition—and made sure to point out, with evident satisfaction, the spot where Biden’s autopen photo had been replaced. A diplomatic masterclass. Truly. The Japanese delegation flew thousands of miles for a hallway tour and a WWII call back.

Brilliant. Just brilliant.

Here’s the thing about “Making America Great Again”—at some point, you have to reckon with the scorecard.

It’s been roughly one year. Let’s check in.

We are now an unreliable ally. The nations that built the post-World War II order with us — nations that sent their sons and daughters to fight beside ours, that opened their markets, their bases, their intelligence networks to us — are quietly, urgently making contingency plans that don’t include Washington. Not because they want to. Because they have to.

We are a non-threatening adversary to Russia and China. This is a sentence that would have been considered treasonous fever dream fiction five years ago. Today it’s foreign policy. We have provided Russia with effective sanctions relief despite documented evidence that Russia supplied targeting intelligence to Iran, which used it to kill American troops. Read that again slowly. And yet here we are, apparently decided that the real enemy is a trans activist in Vermont.

We have started, or accelerated, a conflict that is holding the global energy market hostage, with no coherent exit strategy, no clear diplomatic framework, and no apparent adult in the room with a whiteboard. The economic ripple effects are slamming against the shores of every nation on earth, and we’re the ones who threw the stone.

We have threatened to invade Canada. Canada. Our largest trading partner. The country that shares the longest undefended border in human history with us. We have also, for variety, rattled sabres at Colombia, Cuba, Greenland, Panama, and presumably anyone else who looked at us funny on a Tuesday. NATO allies are not quietly reassured by this energy.

China—and this is the part that should make every American, regardless of party affiliation, sit down and breathe into a bag—is being considered by the international community as a more reliable strategic partner than the United States. China. The authoritarian surveillance state that imprisons ethnic minorities in camps and jails journalists. More reliable than us. We did that. We handed them that gift, wrapped it in a bow, and personally delivered it.

And China, watching us shred our alliances like a raccoon who got into the filing cabinet, is quietly accelerating their internal timeline for Taiwan. Why wouldn’t they? The cavalry just announced it’s not coming.

Here’s the part that really stings, beneath the geopolitical catastrophe and the economic whiplash and the international humiliation: we did this to ourselves because Fox News successfully convinced a significant portion of the American electorate that the real existential threat to this country wasn’t Russia, or China, or climate change, or crumbling infrastructure—it was your neighbour who voted Democrat.

The White House communications operation—which was once the most powerful messaging apparatus on the planet—has been handed to people whose primary credential is posting on X at 2 AM. Governance has been replaced by content creation. Policy has been replaced by the performance of policy. The hard, grinding, unglamorous work of actually running a country has been outsourced to a reality television production that has apparently never heard of a second act.

And while all of this is happening, while the world is reorganizing itself around our absence, while our allies are building new arrangements and our adversaries are growing bolder, this administration is actively working to keep the Epstein files sealed. The party that ran on draining the swamp is apparently very concerned that you don’t get a good look at what’s in the swamp. Funny how that works.

The base was told the elites were hiding something. They were right. They just voted for the cover-up.

Here is the geopolitical truth that is not complicated, even if it’s been made to seem so:

Alliances are the source of American power. Not our aircraft carriers — though those are nice. Not our GDP — though that matters. What made America the indispensable nation was that we built, over 80 years, a network of relationships, treaties, shared institutions, and mutual commitments that no adversary could match. NATO. The Pacific alliance structure. The WTO. The international financial architecture. The basic credibility that when America said something, it meant it.

That is what we are burning. And unlike aircraft carriers, you can’t build alliances on a procurement schedule. Trust, once broken, takes a generation to rebuild — if it rebuilds at all.

We didn’t lose our strength by being outcompeted. We walked into the room, pulled the pin on a grenade, and set it on the table ourselves.

Here is where I refuse to join the doom choir, because doom is a luxury we can’t afford right now.

America has survived catastrophic failures of leadership before. We survived the Civil War. We survived McCarthyism. We survived Watergate. We survived every preceding era in which people in power decided that their grip on that power was more important than the republic itself.

We will survive this too — but only if we treat it as the clarion call it is.

The Democrats will win Congress. The arithmetic of backlash is not subtle. When you torch the economy, terrify your allies, embolden your enemies, and run the country like a particularly chaotic episode of a failing streaming show, the voters who stayed home or held their noses or convinced themselves it couldn’t be that bad—those voters show up. They’re already showing up. The 2026 midterms will not be a gentle course correction. There will be a verdict.

And when Donald Trump finally leaves the stage — removed by term limits, by elections, by the weight of history — America will do what it has always done with its worst chapters: it will process, reckon, and move on. The Trump name will join the ranks of historical cautionary tales taught in classrooms, cited in poli-sci papers, referenced as the inflection point when the country looked into the abyss and decided, collectively, that it preferred not to fall in.

History has a long memory and no mercy for those who mistake a moment for a mandate.

The lesson, if we’re paying attention, is not that democracy is fragile — though it is. The lesson is that democracy requires maintenance. It requires coalitions of people who believe in it to remain active, engaged, organized, and frankly a little bit angry.

The answer to the unravelling of American alliances abroad is the building of alliances at home—across party lines where possible, across demographic lines certainly, unified not by ideology but by the simple conviction that the American experiment is worth preserving.

Large, durable, pro-democracy coalitions. That’s it. That’s the whole strategy.

We don’t need to out-meme them. We need to out-organize them, out-vote them, and then — once we have the keys back — rebuild, slowly and unglamorously, the institutions and relationships that made this country worth fighting for in the first place.

And hold them to account legally when appropriate. Not for retribution, but for the future. So lessons learned will stick. Jail has a way of doing that.

America is not going to be great again because someone told us it would be.

It’s going to be great again because enough of us decided to make it so—the hard way, the only way that actually works.

The toilet of history awaits. The rest of us have work to do to flush it.