America in 2025: When the Cosplay Became Real
For years, America’s slide toward authoritarian politics could be dismissed as performance: ironic fascism, meme politics, men in red hats playing at being strongmen. Loud, ugly, but unserious.
In 2025, that alibi no longer works.
The Republican Party is no longer flirting with extremism — it is structured around it. What once looked like cosplay has hardened into an organised movement openly hostile to liberal democracy, operating inside the institutions of the world’s most powerful state.
A Republican Party That Lost Control
The Republican Party has been flooded in recent years by extremists, and it now seems unable — or unwilling — to contain them. Worse, it cannot even agree whether containment is desirable.
A cadre hostile to liberal democracy, with an agenda more radical than Trump’s own instincts, has worked deliberately to capture conservative institutions from within. In the process, they have normalised white supremacy, antisemitism, eugenics, and overt bigotry — not as fringe beliefs, but as live political currency.
This is no longer a movement flirting with authoritarianism for shock value. It is a movement preparing for it.
People often ask how America could normalise having an orange-faced racist crook as president. The answer is simpler than we like to admit. A country that has normalised crowdfunding for life-saving medical treatment, and accepted school shootings as a routine feature of life, can normalise almost anything.
The assassination of the CEO of UnitedHealth was not an aberration. It was a symptom of a society that has drifted into a state of moral unreality.
Trump’s Autocrat’s Dilemma
Trump now faces the classic autocrat’s dilemma.
In stripping away checks and balances so he can rule by whim, he has also stripped away the structures that prevent someone else doing the same to him. Power personalised is power made fragile.
As Trump looks older and frailer, others will start to think about making their move. The loyalty he commands is real, but it is also transactional and fear-based. When fear weakens, so does loyalty.
Unless he can designate one of his children as heir apparent — and enforce it — the post-Trump period inside MAGA will be chaotic, vicious, and deeply destabilising.
A Second Term That Is Already Failing
Donald Trump’s second term is going no better than his first.
He has failed to end the war in Ukraine, failed to produce a healthcare plan, and failed to cut government spending. Inflation is higher, unemployment is up, and GDP growth has slowed.
His tangible achievements are depressingly familiar:
- tax cuts for the wealthy, deepening America’s debt problem
- brutal, highly publicised raids on migrants across major cities
- an arbitrary tariff regime that has triggered endless trade disputes while raising prices for consumers
His foreign-policy theatrics — including a late and fragile Middle East ceasefire — barely register with the American public.
Unsurprisingly, he is unpopular. His approval rating has fallen to around –15%, mirroring the collapse seen during his first term. It is negative in 39 states, including every swing state.
Losing the Young, Losing the Economy
Trump’s support has fallen most sharply among young people and minorities.
Much commentary around the last election fixated on a supposed “realignment” of these groups away from the Democrats. That narrative has already collapsed. On every major issue except border security, Trump’s approval is net negative — and on prices and inflation, the single most important issue, it sits around –33%.
This discontent translated rapidly into electoral punishment.
Recent state-level elections were disastrous for Republicans:
- Democrats retook the Virginia governorship with a 15-point margin
- liberal supreme court judges in Pennsylvania were defended by margins exceeding 20 points
- Democrats won their first non-federal statewide race in Georgia since 2006, again by around 20 points
Voters whose primary concern was the economy swung decisively back to the Democrats.
The Republicans’ Faustian Bargain
None of this need have been existential for the Republican Party. Parties often struggle after winning the presidency, especially in second terms. Historically, they distance themselves from unpopular presidents and reassert independence.
But Trump changed that calculation.
Republicans have gone all-in, sacrificing autonomy on the MAGA altar. Many criticise Trump privately, but fear retribution more than association with failure.
That is starting — tentatively — to change.
Four House Republicans signed a petition forcing the release of the Epstein files, compelling Trump to back down. One of the signatories, Marjorie Taylor Greene — once MAGA’s loudest cheerleader — has since had a very public break with Trump and resigned from Congress.
Elsewhere, Republican officials in several states are refusing to support aggressive gerrymandering ahead of the midterms. Indiana has proven particularly resistant, despite escalating threats from the White House.
This is not collapse. But it is fracture.
The longer the party remains a personality cult, the harder it will be to survive Trump’s eventual departure.
Epstein, Redaction and Distraction
The release of the Epstein files should have been a moment of reckoning. Instead, it became a case study in how power now protects itself.
The documents were published, but heavily redacted — so aggressively that they raised more questions than they answered. Names were obscured, timelines blurred, connections severed by thick black ink. Trump, forced into releasing them, immediately reverted to form: distraction through spectacle. Suddenly Venezuela was back in the headlines, alongside renewed talk of border crackdowns and foreign threats.
The pattern is familiar from every authoritarian playbook. When accountability looms, manufacture noise. The point is not to convince, but to exhaust. Not to refute allegations, but to bury them beneath a churn of outrage, nationalism and crisis.
In that sense, Epstein has become less a scandal than a symptom: proof that in Trump’s America, even exposure no longer guarantees consequence.
America Starts to Look Like a Developing Country
The United States remains the most powerful and prosperous country in the world, with mature institutions and enormous underlying strength.
And yet, economically, it is beginning to behave like a developing nation.
Like states with weak tax systems desperate for revenue, Washington has imposed sudden, sweeping tariffs on external goods, followed by a Swiss-cheese pattern of exemptions granted arbitrarily to favoured sectors. All of this has happened while deficits continue to balloon.
At times, US economic policymaking now resembles the worst instincts of mid-century Latin American populism more than the stewardship expected of the world’s dominant economy.
Capital outflows are beginning to appear. External investors are increasingly hesitant. Concerns about central-bank independence — once unthinkable — are now openly discussed.
This is not normal.
Evangelical Christianity as a Different Religion
American evangelical Christianity has drifted so far from the teachings of Jesus that it now resembles an entirely different religion.
It is rigidly socially conservative, obsessed with hierarchy and punishment, and centred not on compassion or humility but on the proclamations of a prophet — Donald Trump.
In that sense, it resembles the most authoritarian strands of political Islam more than any recognisable Christian tradition. It is a political identity masquerading as faith.
The Collapse of American Soft Power
Perhaps the most under-reported change is the near-total destruction of American soft power.
USAID has been gutted.
Voice of America has been hollowed out.
Outside the United States, the overwhelming majority of America’s media image now consists of Trump’s daily scandals: the insults, the tantrums, the absurd announcements that prompt outrage, ridicule, or cringing laughter.
This is almost exactly how Kremlin propaganda has portrayed America for decades — vulgar, chaotic, unserious, and dangerous.
Trump’s bonkers announcements about Canada, Greenland, Venezuela, and his failure to end wars anywhere have erased what little moral authority remained. He asked for the Nobel Peace Prize and was turned down. He will almost certainly ask again.
He did, however, win the FIFA Peace Prize — proof that participation trophies are still very much part of life.
Where This Leaves America
Trumpism is not a stable governing ideology. It is personal, brittle, and corrosive. It consumes institutions faster than it can control them, and replaces authority with fear.
America will survive Trump — it has before. The danger is not that the country collapses overnight, but that it emerges hollowed out: poorer, more violent, more distrustful, and less capable of acting collectively when the next crisis arrives.
The great mistake of the last decade was assuming this was all a joke that would burn itself out. In 2025, that illusion is gone.
The cosplay is over.
The consequences are real.
On your point about religion, Islam and Christianity are not so different, and I can’t help wondering whether the rise in recent times of authoritarian and apocalyptic variants of these two faiths has a common origin in the coming end of the age of suburban car culture.
Just as much of the world is now going through an obesity crisis (which may only now be easing thanks to Ozempic and similar medications) due to our evolved craving for calories and the development of addictive ultra-processed foods, the rich countries of the world were also ensnared into a way of life based around suburbia and cars, seductive because of the pleasure in speed, acceleration and engine power that is also enjoyed (in another way) by theme park goers, but which is inherently unsustainable because cars simply take up too much room to be the main means of mobility in functional cities.
Nowhere was the suburban dream more powerful than in the United States, where the “American Dream” had originally been literally the dream of owning land, which had lured millions of Europeans to her shores in the 19th century. In the 1920s a marriage was made in hell about a century ago between a car industry determined to sell as much of its product as possible, and white racist city-dwellers (note that the KKK’s power peaked in this decade, and not just in the ex-Confederacy) freaking out over the Great Migration.
California was the canary in the coal mine: it was the first US state to be ruined by traffic jams and (in Los Angeles) air pollution from cars, and (as a secular state) its cultural response to this was the rise of an elitist and misanthopic form of environmentalism which aimed to protect the state’s natural environment by controlling its human population. This took the form of NIMBY activism and lawfare, as well as anti-nuclear-power activism. And when the threat of climate change entered the popular consciousness, these elitist environmentalists decided to make “Big Oil” their bogeyman rather than the automotive-industrial complex that it fuelled: no doubt they wanted to preserve car culture for themselves while denying it to the hoi polloi (which is after all the only way in which the spatial limitations of cars can really be dealt with).
As the supply of commutable land on which to build sprawl ran out, housing costs skyrocketed in California and turned it from a red state to the blue state that it is today. Today’s red states (especially those in the South) liked to mock California and other blue states for their unaffordable housing, but they themselves were just a few decades behind the curve. Their hot and humid climates meant that they began to urbanize much later (when air conditioning became widely available) and it is only now that the limitations of the suburban car-oriented model have started to hit them too, as commutes begin to become problematic as they exceed “Marchetti’s constant” of 30 minutes each way.
And while California’s response to the unsustainability of urban car culture was misanthropic environmentalism, the South’s response was climate change denial (especially natural to them, as they were already uncomfortably hot and in the firing line from hurricanes) and a mutation of their (already fundamentalist) Christianity that posted that it didn’t matter if the earth’s natural environment was wrecked as the world was going to end shortly anyway!
And if the car-oriented lifestyle that has spread across the Western world (but especially the US and other English-speaking settler nations) were to come to and end, the biggest losers of all would be the Middle Eastern societies whose population had exploded (such as Saudi Arabia, with 3 million people in 1950 and 38 million today) as they had become entirely dependent on the profits made from feeding the West’s addiction to petroleum to buy the basic necessities of life.
As Bryan Woodman put it in the 2005 movie “Syriana”:
Twenty years ago you had the highest GNP in the world, now you’re tied with Albania. So, good job. Your second largest export is secondhand goods, followed closely by dates for which you lose five cents a pound. You know what the business world thinks of you? They think a hundred years ago you were living in tents out here in the desert chopping each other’s heads off and that’s exactly where you’ll be in another hundred years- so on behalf of my firm, yes, I accept your money.
So perhaps it is no surprise that they formed violent and apocalyptic variants of their own traditional religion of Islam? How much difference is there really between American gunmen in pickup trucks flying Trump flags, and Arab gunmen in pickup trucks flying the piratical banners of ISIS?