U.S. President Donald Trump in Washington, D.C., U.S., April 11, 2026. REUTERS/Annabelle Gordon
President Donald Trump has repeatedly described America under his watch as a “golden age,” but a respected journalist pointed out a different trend — experts noting Trump’s presidency as causing a great American decline.
A Sunday New York Times editorial by conservative commentator Christopher Caldwell is remarkable because it describes Trump as causing an American decline, a position neither the Times nor Trump supporters usually take, wrote The Nation's national affairs correspondent Jeet Heer on Monday. For these reasons, Heer noted that it is significant that Caldwell and the Times are now arguing that Trump caused America to decline.
“A cosmopolitan and literate writer, Caldwell shares the core MAGA belief that liberal elites have damaged the United States through lax immigration, the promotion of cultural diversity, and economic globalism,” Heer wrote. “Caldwell seems to have taken Donald Trump’s ‘America First’ rhetoric more seriously than the president himself. Giving credence to Trump’s criticism of neoconservative-regime change war, Caldwell hoped for a new foreign policy of restraint in Europe and the Middle East, coupled with a redoubling of US power in the Western Hemisphere.”
As such, although Caldwell could find “coherence” in Western Hemisphere-oriented military actions like invading Venezuela, Cuba or Greenland, it is more difficult to find consistency between America First ideology and declaring war against Iran.
“The invasion of Iran undermines this project of hemispheric domination, and Caldwell knows it,” Heer wrote. “In mid-March in The Spectator, he decried the Iran War as ‘the end of Trumpism.’ In his latest Times column, he correctly notes that the war has shown the limits of US coercive power, especially since the depletion of cruise missiles in the conflict means the American Empire is now forced to cannibalize weapons deployed in Europe and Asia.”
In addition to demonstrating America’s military weaknesses, Trump’s Iran war is raising prices on essential goods like oil and fertilizer, placing great strain on the US economy.
“The dangers the war poses to the world economy are so great that the status quo can’t last forever,” Heer wrote. “Right now, we’re watching a large dam start cracking under pressure. We don’t know when the dam will break, but the break is coming.”
He ultimately concluded, “It’s safe to say that an orderly retreat is not how the US Empire will end. All the evidence points to a much more apocalyptic destiny."
Heer and Caldwell are not alone in raising the alarm that Trump is exposing and exacerbating America’s weaknesses. In February Heather Digby Parton, a Hillman Prize-winning journalist, wrote for Salon that Americans are feeling pessimistic despite Trump’s protestations to the contrary.
"He genuinely believes he can change reality simply by relentlessly stating something as fact in the face of all evidence to the contrary," Parton wrote. "His repeated insistence, though, that the country has never been as successful as it is today has so far landed with a thud. We are, in fact, living in an historic time: Americans have rarely been more pessimistic about the future. According to the Gallup National Health and Well-Being Index, Americans who believe they will have high-quality lives in five years declined to the lowest level since the organization began asking the question 20 years ago."
She continued, "Those who believe that both their current and future lives are good enough to be classified as 'thriving' dropped to 48 percent. If this is America's Golden Age, it doesn't appear to be that people are seeing it. In fact, the right-wing polling organization Rasmussen asked the question outright and found bad news for the president: Only 27 percent of those surveyed see this as the country's 'Golden Age,' as compared to 58 percent who do not."