We won't know how much power Xi had until he has to step aside. Saying he's no more powerful than Mao, who ruled for more than 30 years and who ruled until the day he died, is an interesting choice.

The current US admin may be more dangerous and untrustworthy, but I don't think that will hold in a post-Trump world. I don't think the US will get back to the point it was at before Trump, but I think it will dip back below the China line. China is much less chaotic, but they're also much more menacing on average.

For example, as bad as the US is, I don't think it has ever set up police stations in foreign countries.

For the moment I agree that most Western citizens will still prefer the US society over a Chinese one.

We're at the tipping point right now in Europe - I am regularly having the "lesser of two evils" discussion of China vs US (and China gets the win by a hair btw in my circles). Both are clearly a threat to me and my family, the only real difference is I speak the language of one of them.

If we "prefer" the US over China it is purely inertia and avoidance of change.

I actively boycott all the US products I can, I'll only buy US if there is no viable alternative. On the other hand I preference European over Chinese but I don't actively boycott.

The reason is quite simple, one has actively threatened war, has corporations that are actively making my life worse and is actively meddling in the region's politics.

China will probably do the same once the US has been destroyed by the Pumpkin Pinochet and turned into the dystopia he's working towards. But for now one is an active threat and one is a distant threat.

I genuinely doubt most Americans realise just how much you've lost in terms of goodwill.

IMO Trump and co. might have wanted to pull a full coup on the US, but they're so incompetent that they haven't managed to do that. Even though they've had the US house, senate, executive and judiciary on their side, they haven't done what's typically done in a coup which is to secure everything that could allow opponents to resist. Sure, they control the supreme court, but there are plenty of judges in lower courts who keep interpreting laws honestly and finding that Trump broke those laws. A competent coup would have jailed judges who weren't on their side using some pretext, and used fear to keep the other ones in line. Trump routinely breaks the law and then is astonished when lower-level judges find that whatever he did can't go forward because he broke the law.

Because of that, I think there's a decent chance that they won't be able to suppress the outrage in the midterm vote. They're doing all kinds of underhanded things to try to make it harder for people to vote and to have their votes counted. But, people are much more outraged than scared. I think there's a decent chance there will be a big turnout in the midterm elections and that the GOP will lose bigly. That might be enough to put the brakes on what Trump is doing, until the next presidential election in 2028.

There may be people pulling Trump's strings, but if so, it really seems like they're fighting over the strings and getting in each-others' way, rather than acting in some coordinated way to control him. More realistically, I think that there may be people who have tied strings to Trump and want to control him, but he's not going along with it. It seems like the only skill he may have in life is ensuring that people around him are loyal to him personally, and anybody who isn't is gone. It doesn't matter how good they are at their jobs otherwise, the number one thing that matters to him is loyalty. So, he's surrounded by idiots, but idiots who are loyal. That means that people who are trying to manipulate him have to do it with flattery and praise rather than threats, browbeating, etc.

Because of that, I think the US might survive Trump in some way. It will be diminished, and it will take decades to build back the trust the rest of the world had in the US. (And I'm not talking about blind trust, I'm talking about basic things like "The US generally takes its treaties seriously" or "If we negotiate a trade deal with the US it won't just ignore its side of the deal".) I do think that some values, like freedom of speech, will survive the post-Trump US. But, it won't be in a position to police those values around the world.

The VCs and Christofascists are currently on the same side, but have almost no interests in common. The VCs in particular care about the rule of law because it's hard to invest in something that won't start making money for years if you don't know that the laws will be stable through those years. The VCs might like that Trump is removing some burdensome regulations. But, for example, the tariff chaos would have been horrible for them because from one day to the next who knows what the tariffs will be.

Then there's immigration. A lot of the MAGA nazis want the US to be a purely white place with white, christian, men dominate. That means severely restricting immigration. Meanwhile the VCs want to be able to bring in all the cheap foreign labour they can, which means they want H1B visas to be easy to get. Those are directly opposing sides. If one side wins, the other one loses.

It's hardly a coup when the backers all want different things, and they're not getting what they want anyhow because Dear Leader is obsessed with settling personal grudges and doing whatever his dementia-addled brain thinks of on the spot.

Doing nothing is hardly a coup.

Are they though? Stocks are up at the moment, and Trump tends to chicken out of policies that hurt the stock market numbers. But, in the long term a lot of this chaos will probably hurt rich people. For example, the best students are now choosing not to study at schools in the US because of the ICE crackdowns, when they graduate they're much less likely to work for an American company. And then there's the long-term economic damage due to the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. That will probably result in years of higher prices and inflation that will hurt businesses.

Rich people tend to mostly like stability. It allows them to make long-term investments knowing that the rules won't change before those investments pay off. Trump's administration is anything but stable. Backing off of terrible policies when the markets react isn't as good as not risking those stupid policies in the first place.

Yes, they're getting some temporary wins, because Trump has gutted parts of the government that oversee or enforce rules. But, if I were a rich person I'd be very worried about the long-term damage he's doing.