Veteran journalist and author Alan Friedman joined Mediaite’s Press Club this week to deliver a sweeping — and searing — diagnosis of America’s decline, placing the blame on decades of bipartisan failure and the accelerating threat posed by President Donald Trump.
The article of Kathryn Wilkens on mediaite.com
His new book, The End of America? A Guide to the New World Disorder, offers what he calls “an autopsy of the American empire,” and in his interview, he left little doubt about who’s twisting the knife.
“Trump is doing everything a foreign agent would do if they wanted to destroy America,” Friedman, who has been based in Italy for the last 30 years, told Press Club host Aidan McLaughlin. “And I want to know why.”
In a wide-ranging conversation, Friedman recounted how America’s global leadership, forged in the ashes of World War II, has been squandered by war, hubris, and economic mismanagement. A series of foreign policy blunders, under Democratic and Republican administrations, fueled the steady descent. But it’s Trump, Friedman argues, who has turned the decline into free-fall, especially in the eyes of European leaders.
“Donald Trump is now one of the most hated men in the world,” Friedman said. “Among European leaders, they either make fun of him or see America as a tragedy.”
Friedman, who has written for the Financial Times, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal, and who has interviewed both Trump and Vladimir Putin, argued the former president’s second term is far more dangerous than his first. The guardrails are gone, he said, and the ideologues have moved in.
“There are no adults in the room anymore,” Friedman said. “Trump has surrounded himself with conspiracy theorists, patsies, yes-men, and idiots.”
He cited Trump’s response to the Los Angeles riots — for which he deployed more U.S. troops to the city than are stationed in Iraq or Syria — as a chilling sign of autocratic ambition. “We’re sleepwalking into dictatorship,” Friedman warned. “Like Liz Cheney said, this is not just illiberal democracy — it’s tending toward autocracy.”
“We’ll find out if Trump is out to incite more violence on a national level, and turn America into a blood bath,” he said bluntly. “I don’t see any immediate solution. I think we’re badly damaged and wounded as a nation.”
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