A culture and society researcher is warning that America in the age of Trump is seeing its “final act” — but says Trump is just the messenger.
“What MAGA voters received,” writes John Mac Ghlionn in an opinion piece at The Hill, “wasn’t renewal, but a grim revelation. The failure was never just Trump. He was the messenger. The problem is that America no longer has the political, economic or cultural capacity to deliver restoration at all.”
Mac Ghlionn says that America under Trump’s second term is worse than under his first: “Not because Trump changed, but because the country has weakened further — and no amount of bravado can reverse structural decline.”
Warning of what he calls “managed decline,” Mac Ghlionn says that the pillars of American dominance — “productive labor, demographic confidence, institutional trust, and cultural gravity” — are “steadily eroding,” while its “social foundations” are “cracking.”
“Fewer young Americans are working,” he writes. “Not transitioning between jobs — simply not employed at all. Many move between credentials and gig work, lacking direction and long-term footing. Marriage rates are collapsing. Birth rates are falling below replacement. These trends are linked. When stable work is harder to find, forming relationships becomes harder, commitment harder still, and raising a family nearly impossible. With AI accelerating job insecurity rather than easing it, the trajectory only points in one direction.”
This may not be the end of America, but America “no longer defines the age.”
“Trump didn’t save America,” Mac Ghlionn observes. “He didn’t destroy it either. He revealed it. And what he revealed is a nation exhausted, indebted, aging, and divided — still powerful, still wealthy, but no longer confident in its future.”
