Trump faces foes that make the Washington crowd look like child’s play.
President Trump has announced he will speak with Robert Mueller under oath. He’s waving the victory flag. By allowing Mueller’s probe to proceed despite substantial irregularities and bias that would have justified a “You’re Fired!”, Trump has decisively faced down the opposition. The tables are turned and they’ll be on the run for years. If he does talk to Mueller (and he says that’s subject to his lawyers) it will be an exclamation point on Trump’s repeated contentions that there’s nothing to the Russiagate investigation.
Having vanquished the foes he could vanquish, Trump faces an enemy he has little hope of defeating: the economics of empire. It’s felled countless regimes. Empires always take more energy and resources to maintain than what they can steal from their subjugated provinces. They incur debts they can’t repay and levy crushing taxes. Then they collapse.
At its zenith after World War II, the US provided Europe’s defense against the threat of Soviet invasion. In exchange, behind the veneer of sovereign states, elections, and other trappings of democracy, the US ran Europe.