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That it may be, but its best days are receding, its leaders cannot utter the phrase “Islamist terror,” and while the armed forces are running out of money to carry out their huge worldwide mandate, they are hassled with pettifogging about transgender washrooms and the commander-in-chief lectures the nation that its greatest threat is climate change. Previous administrations required that most mortgages be commercially unjustifiable and the resulting real estate financing collapse gave the world the greatest economic crisis in 80 years. The deficit accumulated in 233 years of American independence has been doubled in seven years and the business growth rate last quarter, after this steroid-bloated efflorescence of the money supply, was an anemic one quarter of one per cent. Successive wars in the Middle East have cost scores of thousands of casualties and trillions of dollars, provoked an immense humanitarian crisis, and the U.S. leads a desultory alliance that is allied with Iran and Russia in what is left of Iraq and opposes Iran and Russia (ineffectively) in the remnants of Syria.

Trump’s infelicities are legend, and are disconcerting, though in some cases they have been exaggerated

Last week in his major foreign policy address, Trump said of the Middle East: “We tore up what institutions they had and then were surprised at what we unleashed: civil war, religious fanaticism, thousands of Americans killed … I challenge anyone to explain the strategic foreign policy vision of Obama and Clinton. It has been a complete and total disaster.” He was careful enough of Republican sensibilities not to mention George W. Bush, but it was obvious he considered him a failure in office also. This is the point — four consecutive terms of presidential failure and congressional failure, in almost every area. This is an American record, surpassing the Taylor-Fillmore-Pierce-Buchanan run-up to the Civil War, and the presidents in the 1920s (Harding, Coolidge, Hoover) who gave the country isolationism, the closing down of immigration, enforcement of Prohibition and the Great Depression. In the circumstances, it is a testament to the strength of American democracy that the leader of the opposition isn’t a rabble-rousing street bully like Mussolini.