Trump, Capitalism & the Decline of Empire.

This essay appeared in the Aug. 6, 2026 edition of UNFTR’s premium newsletter. Become a UNFTR member to receive our bonus newsletter each week and for other perks.

So this is what the beginning of the end looks like, huh?

The U.S. Empire is in complete and utter disarray, both at home and abroad, with its downfall expedited by a dithering and historically incompetent president who boasts the mental temperament of a 4-year-old boy.

I’m sure we would all love a collective “I told you so,” if the ramifications of Trump’s disastrous war of choice with Iran (with an assist from his boss, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) weren’t so widespread and jarringly destabilizing—never mind the fact that the geniuses behind the controls slaughtered more than 120 children at the outset of the war and, most recently, dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on a home in Iran’s Qeshm Island, killing a 2-year-old and his parents (his two other siblings somehow survived).

The war, as we’re all well aware at this point, has roiled global energy markets, financially harmed every American, made the United States look simultaneously incompetent and vulnerable (its actual rivals must be licking their chops) and cost the lives of U.S. service members for absolutely no reason.

What’s more, it has further solidified the crumbling Empire as a hegemonic wrecking ball, sowing chaos for chaos’ sake, all to pacify a wannabe strongman who can’t count how many missiles his military has in its own stockpiles.

It’s not difficult to understand why. Trump himself is the living embodiment of the American Empire—bloated, arrogant, reckless, and cartoonishly corrupt.

So it shouldn’t come as a shock that his presidency has spelled the beginning of the end of the United States as the world’s leading superpower. Are we being reactionary?

• How can you claim to be an imperial juggernaut when your so-called Gulf allies want you to wind down the war because you can’t protect them?
• How can you claim dominance when a country you’ve destabilized economically and attempted to tear apart has more strategic moves remaining in its arsenal than you do?
• How can you project power when you can’t even properly defend your own service members in the region?
• Or, perhaps more embarrassing, how can you fail to prevent your supposed rival from doing the most obvious thing in response to your aggression—close one of the key energy corridors through which one-fifth of oil and petroleum passes?

Horrifyingly, the Empire can still end the conflict by deploying a nuke (or the tactical kind), but that would only further underscore the point that Iran bested Trump at nearly every turn, while also turning the United States into a global pariah.

In recent days, Trump was back to hurling hyperbolic threats against Iran before yet again backing down. That he’s repeatedly launched such metaphoric grenades at Iran’s leadership confirms that there’s little Trump can do to forcibly steer the tide in the United States’ favor. And for what it’s worth, this isn’t even a case of Trump TACOing—there are literally no other chess pieces on the board for him (aside from the worst of all bad options).

Trump is spiraling, and the Empire with him.

Of course, we can’t give Trump all the credit for supercharging the descent of the world’s most formidable Empire. There’s plenty of forces at play, not the least of which is the capital-subsumed duopoly, which has been instrumental in America losing its way over the last two decades. America’s forever wars and its obsession with conquering the Middle East has spread its resources thin, spawned various rounds of blowback and made us less prosperous at home.

Ironically, it’s the most pro-interventionist hawks (Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and George Bush) that, in their lust for world domination, have put the Empire on its current downward spiral. There’s an entire generation of Americans whose lives have been defined by endless war and the so-called “trade-offs” that come with global disorder: militarized police, mass surveillance, “predictive policing,” and more. Over this same time, the economy has tilted dramatically and potentially permanently in favor of the mega-rich. Meanwhile, as the United States has been fighting forever wars, the number of billionaires has surged while inequality has widened.

Given all that, it should come as no surprise that a record number of Americans identify as political independents—with the rise attributed to younger generations increasingly eschewing party labels. Such unburdening dovetails with sinking favorability ratings for the Republican and Democratic parties over the last two-plus decades—with the former down 21 percent from 2002 to 2025 and the latter down 24 percent since 2000. And as it turns out, people aren’t that fond of capitalism, either. One poll found that respondents who identify as politically independent or Democratic are increasingly holding negative views of capitalism. And as far as Democrats are concerned, a CNN poll found that nearly one-third now identify as democratic socialists.

For regular Americans, the Empire has been an albatross hanging over nearly every aspect of life—and increasingly people are less inclined to say they’re proud of being an American. And the numbers are startling—in 2002, when Americans bandied together in the wake of 9/11, 92 percent said they were “extremely” or “very” proud of being an American; in 2026 such sentiment has dropped to 53 percent.

Of course, America remains one of the most powerful and wealthiest countries on the planet—with vast amounts of resources and individual talent. The Empire is on the descent, but it took more than two decades to get to the point where the facade has begun to chip. No doubt, its decline will be a slow burn. But in some ways, the beginning of the end may bring about something entirely new. This election cycle has already shown that people are fed up with the status quo. Outsiders are on the rise. The old guard is falling. Even the most nihilistic among us can see it. And there’s no doubt the Empire feels it.

Image Source

• Daniel Torok, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.