The majority of Maltese believe that "the USA Is Going to the Dogs."  A staggering 78% said so in a recent Eurobarometer survey   ̶   a big turnaround from the 48% who had expressed this view seven months earlier.   The Maltese are slightly more critical of the path taken by the United States under Donald Trump than the average European.

This appears to mirror what the Americans themselves think.  Three months ago, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found that a rising share of Americans (61%, up from 43% the year before) said the national economy was on the wrong track.  Moreover, a growing share of Americans (20%) stated that economic concerns were the major problem facing the country.  

Of course, these results were influenced by the evolving Strait of Hormuz crisis.  However, the USA-Iran conflict itself was secondary in Americans' concerns to the economy and their households' financial situation.   Just 27% approved of how President Donald Trump was handling the U.S. economy, and only 21% approved of how he was handling inflation and rising prices. Both ratings represent low points in Reuters/Ipsos polls.

The celebrations of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence have coincided with a period of some embarrassment for the Republic.  Established by the Founding Fathers to overthrow a mad king, the United States of America now has a mad king of its very own.  King Trump is fully intent on emulating the mad follies of Le Roi Soleil, not just with his authoritarian streaks, but also with grandiose projects like the White House Ballroom and the Arc de Trump.

Police brutality, snowballing government debt, racism, demonisation of minorities, destructive monetary and credit-allocation policies, boiling ethnic and religious animosity, and endless foreign wars, to mention but a few, have been a recurring feature of the American past.  There's a lot of ruin in a nation, Adam Smith observed, and the history of the USA has been living proof of this observation.

However, while admitting that the government's policies are appalling and ruinous, some Americans also believe that previous governments had similarly horrendous and destructive ones.  One could say that the USA is going to the dogs as much as it has always been doing so.  Nevertheless, it has survived and often turned back on some of its worst impulses.

Thankfully, we are now seeing the first serious faultlines in the MAGA movement, as decent people conclude that it is not impossible to drag the country back from the self-destruction to which a large segment of the population and its favoured political leaders were pushing it.  Even some Republicans are realising that MAGA has become MADA (Make America Decline Again), if not actually MAD.

The mid-term elections are only four months away.  Although the incredible district gerrymandering instigated by Trump and the Republicans has raised the bar for the Democrats, there is still a chance that they might be stymied.  Whether it will be enough to stop the haemorrhage in America's superiority and credibility in the world is another matter.

Future scholars of history may well research how the richest country in history, backed by the world's most powerful alliance network, and a scientific and research powerhouse fuelled by some of the best talent in the world, chose to throw it all away.

In his 2022 book "The Next Civil War: Dispatches from the American Future," the Canadian novelist and journalist Stephen Marche tried to gauge the underlying causes and structures of the decline.  He argued that the dark dawn was coming.  

Some say it started going wrong in 2008, when the financial crisis crippled the dream of social mobility.  Others blame 1980, when income inequality first spiked, and trust in institutions began to crater.  Yet others attribute it to 1876, the end of the Reconstruction Era.  Those with even longer memories hark back to the Civil War, or to the War of 1812. Then along came Trump 2.

The more intelligent Americans contend that the origins of the Republic contained, within themselves, the seeds of their own destruction.  After all, in his Farewell Address, George Washington predicted, with startling precision, the hyper-partisanship currently ripping apart the nation he founded.  Fifteen presidencies later, Abraham Lincoln then prophesied: "If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher ... as a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."  I would hesitate to say that this prophecy has come true, but if it hasn't, we're pretty close to it.

Any scholar worth his salt will tell you that the beginning of anything also provides some clues to its ending.  Once one separates the events surrounding the Revolution from their myths and fuzzy dreams, the true history can be divined.    

The end of the American project has, in fact, provoked a re-evaluation of the revolution itself.  When the radical critique of U.S. history began in 2020, protestors started toppling down monuments to Civil War generals.  In response, both Florida and Texas rewrote their school curricula on the Revolution to promote more conservative viewpoints.  The influential Heritage Foundation and Hillsdale College have been at the forefront of rewriting U.S. history, much like the Soviets did with the Russian one.  PEN America's database of "educational gag orders" from the past two years includes hundreds of laws, executive orders, and proposed bills aiming to narrow how much children know about the sins of America's past.

Many think-tanks and scholars are fighting back. The RAND Corporation has concluded that the sort of nonsense spouted by the New Christian Right has made the country suffer from "truth decay."  The American Revolution is like many other revolutions.  There were heroes as well as monsters.  As Ken Burns says in "The American Revolution," the founders were men in the maelstrom of history   ̶   they had a goulash of ideals and venality, struggled with mixed loyalties and physical necessities, committed brutalities occasionally, demonstrated bravery from time to time, and at times were stupid or brilliant.

Burns exposes the contradictions of the Revolution.  The founders loved liberty but practised slavery.  While Jefferson was penning the Declaration of Independence, his valet   ̶   the son of his slave and his father-in-law   ̶   served him tea.  Propertied men desired no limit on their property, but their fighting was done mostly by men who owned nothing.  The American Revolution is as replete with contradictions as are most other revolutions.

Throughout the years, America created a sense of the country being unique, an exception to history: 'the United States is the greatest country in history.'  Donald Trump consistently harps on this and recently declared that America is in a "new golden age."   In fact, he boasts about high levels of global respect stemming from his "America First" policies, when the fact is that the whole world abhors them.

But whatever the bombastic Trump claims, the U.S. has declined politically, economically, socially, and culturally.  It has turned back to its origin more than ever before.  America is now a backward-looking country.  A recent Pew Research poll found that 59% of Americans believe its best years are behind it. Like the U.K. after Brexit, the USA is increasingly looking at its past as its defining feature.

Dave Schilling, a Los Angeles-based writer and humourist, recently wrote in The Guardian that "the Americans are slouching back to their origin. Greed and spectacles of punishment define them."  He argues that Americans aren't addicted to liberty itself but get a high from liberating themselves of all international norms, in an attempt to justify their outlandish behaviour.

As Schilling says, they still go about lecturing the world, excusing their military's sport-killing as an instance of their moral right.  Nothing new there, though.  I remember being lectured by the first U.S. Ambassador to Malta, George J. Feldman, when in 1966 I wrote an editorial about the American atrocities in Vietnam.  I could reduce his whole harangue to a single line from an officer during the Tet offensive in Vietnam: "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."   Now it's the time to bomb Iran and destroy its civilisation to save it, much like it was the time to allow Netanyahu to wipe out Gaza to rebuild it as a new Côte d'Azur.

Trump is bent on destroying NATO, the whole post-war international order that enabled U.S. supremacy, the post-war international monetary system that sustained the Dollar, the multilateral rules order, the global multilateral trade system, and what he calls "English civilisation" itself, in an orgy of American exceptionalism.  The irony is that, while Trump says he wants to save English Civilisation, the Brits do not think their civilisation needs "saving" by the Americans, preferring to preserve their distinct institutions, values, and identity, rather than adopting an American pop-corn model.

The other day, Nobel Prize Laureat Paul Krugman wrote that President Trump has completely ripped up the foundations of the Pax Americana, vandalising the world trading system "as casually as he has paved over the Rose Garden," and adopting a foreign policy doctrine that appears to be based on the principle of "let them hate as long as they fear us." 

Krugman argues that not only does the world not fear the U.S., but it increasingly doesn't need it.  America is no longer the dominant economic and military power it once was; measured by purchasing power, China's economy is already 30% larger than America's.  He further argues that America's role in world affairs depends even more than it did in the past on having willing allies who trust our promises.

On the other hand, Stephen M. Walt, the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at Harvard University, dismisses all the gloomy forecasts of American decline.  According to him, although America's relative power has declined from its post-Cold War peak, this trend is not as profound as pessimists maintain.  Given its enormous advantages relative to all other powers, it will remain the most powerful state in the world for many years to come.  He does not, however, exclude the possibility of decline hastened by misguided policy decisions. 

 Frans Camilleri is an economist. He studied at Oxford and University of East Anglia, is a former corporate head at Air Malta, and has served on various public and private boards.