Do the Dems have another Obama ready to go though? Seems like they only have the regular cabinet of uncharismatic ghouls, they don't have someone who can even pretend to promise America will be different this time baby, I swear!

I think the re-election of the Trump admin after an interregnum of "reasonable liberal governance" dealt a terminal blow to the idea that American electoralism fundamentally moderates the USA's behavior. And because Trump is throwing shit everywhere, other countries can't help but gain some first-hand experience of the downsides of that situation, and will act accordingly.

Also, the USA's internal cultural landscape is fracturing, and there is no-longer an implicit coordinate between the USA's cultural exports, and the goals of the USA's political leadership. And so, even if the USA remains a cultural export juggernaut (I think it will), that aspect of it's soft power will no longer be such a direct tool for it's leadership. And so I expect that the USA will become a lot more hard-edged in the way it interacts with the rest of the world, simply because the cultural influences will not subtly steer other country's decision making towards outcomes that the USA favors.

US hegemony is basically over at this point. The country is completely unstable and no one is gonna be able to hold meaningful power for more than 4 years at a time. The US is going to continue flailing around and lashing out, getting weaker and weaker every time. On top of that, American industry is so completely gutted out and the economy is based entirely on moving money from one excel sheet to another.

god remember how Obama won the nobel peace prize in 2009 simply for not being Bush? even tho he didn't do much of anything by that point and continued most of his worst foreign policies. godawful.

I could easily see imperialist leaders rallying around a decorum dem, but I can't see the public doing it in the same way as before unless it's a serious reformist (like actually doing substantial reforms, not doing lip service and then nothing substantial). Admittedly, I was pretty apolitical/uninformed during the Bush years, but based on what I've picked up about it, this situation seems pretty different even if there are some similarities. For one, China is rising in a way that the empire has been unable to stop. The empire has tried to make Iran kneel and is getting kicked out of the Middle East in the process, which also involved using a lot of arms that are hard to replace, if not impossible depending on the access to rare earth materials that they can achieve - and as I understand it, some of it is locked behind China, who is not going to want to hand them over just so the empire can attack more people. Similar has been happening for years with Russia and NATO-Ukraine. Lot of weapons used, Russia is still standing and taking the slow and steady approach to whittling down the regime's territorial power, which is also weakening NATO-EU indirectly.

And this is not even getting into the internal problems with the US. The attempted gutting of federal that is hard to undo, especially without serious changes to administrative mindset. The statements implying that Trump may not even cede power if the votes say he has lost. The decaying infrastructure. The poor/lacking internal industry, due to so much outsourcing over decades. The shit going on with ICE, flock cameras, data centers. And all of this while climate change gradually gets worse, which means more intense and more frequent weather events.

Oh and that's not even mentioning the specter of fuel costs, which could balloon even while Trump is still in office, with them continuing to pull from limited reserves and refusing to find a resolution with Iran.

In other words, I don't see how there would be a perception of a "return to normal" at this point without substantial changes in the material. Hell, I don't know if we will even reach a "normal" 2028 election without chaos/unrest first. If fuel costs get out of control, that could break things in a way that no propaganda can smooth over.