An Empire’s End of Days

The 2024 election and its aftermath merely mark another court hearing in the ongoing national divorce due to irreconcilable differences

“We’re back to the days of Crips and Bloods, blue and red, Americans wanting to kill each other on the street over the color of their cap.”

         — My wife Julianne, on the reaction to Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House

By Mark Cromer

The dissolution of the national marriage that has held the United States together since 1865—the year a rather messy preliminary break-up was finally resolved and a reconciliation-at-gunpoint smoothed things over for a bit—is now continuing apace, with Trump’s return to the White House marking another court appearance on the docket as the litigation contesting disputed properties and entitlements drags on as an epic divorce for the ages.

It is a staggering social unraveling, but hardly a surprise ending.

The American marriage has been a strange charade for years now, with the parties occasionally putting on pleasant airs during occasional public appearances for visitors and guests. But increasingly, Americans have been retreating into different rooms where a cold detachment competes with a burning fury that ultimately leaves both parties exhausted from their manic bouts of mutual hysteria, glowing animus and explosions of rage.

It was not always this way, of course, nor was it necessarily destined to be so by divine providence.

The blushing young country that was America as it emerged on the world stage in a post-war mid-20^th Century with all of its dashing vigor, intellectual heft and military might was an electrifying presence and some of that lightening was bottled by John Fitzgerald Kennedy and his exquisite wife Jacqueline; their mutual beauty, style and acuity offering a fine light that illuminated the nation’s honeymoon as a superpower.

Contrasted with the battered and bombed out remnants of the Old World colonial powerhouses that had more or less run the global show for centuries, America was the new kid in town who had saddled up at the international bar with a glint in his eye, a pair of shiny new smoke wagons hanging off his hips and looking confidently around the saloon with an unmistakable confidence that broadcast: ‘Yeah, that’s right. What about it?’

Those were the glory days of Americana and an ascendent middle class across the nation sensed and celebrated their moment with such cultural snapshots as The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver that served as broadcast billboards heralding the triumph of the nuclear family in the Television Age.

But the sea of single-family homes that arose with suburbia and all of those intact families anchored by a working father and happy homemaker mother who were content in their roles and responsibilities would ultimately prove to be the highwater mark of a society that took 150 years to achieve as it shifted from a rurally-centered country to an urban-driven nation.

By 1920, more Americans lived in cities than in the countryside and by the 1950s and 60s those city-dwellers were migrating out of the urban cores in significant numbers to communities being created on the outskirts of the urban hardscape in order to enjoy some breathing room while still remaining within comfortable commuting distance of city jobs, services and cultural amenities such as eateries, playhouses, museums and clubs.

The twin peaks of NASA’s moonwalk in July of 1969 that was followed just weeks later by the Woodstock Music and Art Fair heralded the era’s pinnacle, a very American coalescing of arts and sciences that were the first of their kind and showcased stunning ingenuity and collaboration on so many different levels. And yes, walking on moon and rollicking in the mud on Yasgur’s Farm were absolutely culturally interwoven events, as Joni Mitchell seemed to grasp.

We were stardust. We were golden. And we still had to get back to the garden.

It has been pretty much all downhill from there, albeit one that occasionally offered a nice ride along various stretches of our long descent into national divorce court. The underlying feature of the half-century that has passed since 1975 has been an accelerating cultural disintegration and civic decline.

It might be argued that the beginning of the end of the American construct had actually got underway with a bang on November 22, 1963, when JFK’s head exploded in Dealey Plaza, a gory horror forever preserved on 480 frames of 8mm Kodachrome II safety film.

But no matter how many snipers fired however many shots from however many different positions in Dallas that fateful day, Camelot wasn’t truly blown to smithereens until October 3, 1965, when LBJ affixed his presidential signature to the Hart-Celler Act, a neutron bomb of legislation that would deliver the sustained waves of mass migration that its authors desired to remake the demographic composition of the country and refashion it as a more politically pliable population that is reliant on government programs and the leverage they provide.

It was JFK’s little brother, the soon-to-be less-than-esteemed gentleman from Massachusetts, Sen. Ted Kennedy, who was one of the immigration bill’s staunchest advocates and in true blue blood fashion he dismissed his fellow Americans’ widely held concerns that the legislation would prove to be a complete relandscaping of the national population. It’s important to remember that in 1965, Ted Kennedy was not yet permanently marred by the horrific stain of leaving Mary Jo Kopechne to slowly suffocate to death in the back of his submerged car after he drove it off Dike Bridge in Chappaquiddick during that fateful summer of 1969.

Still unencumbered by a reputation for deadly drunken rampages and perpetually high from the social altitude that Hyannis Port afforded him, Ted Kennedy was free to mock Americans’ fears that the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 (as the Hart-Celler Act was alternately known) would lead to the nation’s Great Cities being overrun and rendered unrecognizable as they were converted to violent annexes of the Third World and garrisoned by ruthless refugees hellbent on planting their dysfunctional cultures on American soil.

Of course, that’s precisely what has happened.

Virtually every major city has been rendered utterly unrecognizable over the past half-century and not just through ever developing skylines but rather as a result of rivers of humanity that have flowed onto the streets of America and into a confluence of progressive politics that venerates migrants who have just arrived over the remnant legacy population that shrink ever further into the shadows, drowning in disbelief as they are swallowed in the churn of the misery and despair that now devours them.

Social observers and historians can argue that America has seen far more violent periods of civil unrest and still emerged intact as a going concern that still had a future as a functionally coherent national construct. Taken at face value, that may well be true. There’s no shortage of violent social upheavals across American history.

But this time is different and fundamentally so.

The differences are far deeper and more profound and the resulting dysfunction is far more pervasive than at any other time in Post-War America. As 2025 gets underway, the schisms are no longer contained to disputes surrounding the tax code, the environment, abortion or gun control and have veered far off competing arguments for pathways to sustainable economic growth or the necessity of foreign intervention.

The battle lines in 2025 have been drawn over existence itself, not co-existence.

The progressive movement that has mutated throughout the Democratic Party and has effectively seized control of over much of its operational function, just as it has throughout the cultural power centers of academia, public education, the media and the entertainment complex that include Hollywood and professional sports leagues, suffered a setback of sorts with the November 2024 reelection of Donald J. Trump.

But the election was only a setback for the progressives, it was nowhere close to a deathblow.

Trump rolled up comfortable electoral and popular vote margins in his rout of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, which despite a multibillion-dollar effort to instantly rebrand the duo as ‘The Crime-Fighter & The Coach,’ the often bizarre and bumbling pair were clearly viewed by a majority of voters as the most radical Left campaign ever mounted by a major American political party. Yet Trump’s victory has merely served to further highlight the inescapable differences that simply cannot be bridged, smoothed over or put behind us.

Across social media platforms, the progressives and their tagalongs unleashed a blizzard of somewhat hilarious (unintentionally so) ‘statements’ decrying the election’s outcome and offered up faux official declarations of grieving and introspection. Facebook became littered with Lefties staging their own press readouts to their rather intimate digital followings, announcing things like: “As a result of the November election, my husband and I have decided that we need to retreat to a Tucson desert resort for some much-needed respite before considering next steps. To all of you who are grieving with us, we hear you and we share your pain. Please stay safe as the inauguration approaches and remember; hope and joy will endure, we retain our agency and we will not go back!”

Others still posted more ominous advisories on Mark Zuckerberg’s flagship enterprise, deeply embittered digital utterances that were intentionally transparent threats, with one user stating that she had been walking along the beach in the week after the election—she had apparently blacked-out when the race was called for Trump and didn’t come to for several days—and when another woman jogged by her on the beach and smiled, she reported that it took everything in her power to refrain from violently attacking the jogger.

Why? Because she was wearing a red baseball cap.

The sociopolitical chasm spiderwebbing across the American landscape is as deep and dangerously volatile as at any time since the ‘Bleeding Kansas’ era in the runup to the Civil War and in many respects far more profound.

Trump’s immediate executive order declaring that the United States government would only recognize two genders—male and female—was seen as a potent victory in the culture wars by most rational people, but the fact that an American president would even have to issue such an order is itself revealing how much has already been lost. The executive order does nothing to change the underlying fact that tens of millions of Americans now believe that a person can wake up on Monday as a man but decide by Tuesday afternoon to start living their ‘authentic life’ as a woman and rightfully demand that everyone else not just accept and acknowledge this whiplash-inducing transformation but celebrate it as ‘an ally’ as well.

And if the Frank who declared himself to be Franchesca on Tuesday decides by the following Friday to ‘transition’ herself back to Frank again, well, progressives insist everyone else is expected to not only play along with he/her/its whimsical (delusional) gender morphs, but are absolutely obligated to accommodate and support it in every expression of public life. Progressives have warned Americans in no uncertain terms that at the workplace, in the public square and throughout bathrooms, locker rooms and spas across the country that a dude wearing a wig and decked out in a miniskirt and knee-high gold lame boots while packing a double-digit kielbasa between his legs is expected to be welcomed by actual women everywhere as a sister no different than they are, save for perhaps the unusually large clitoris they could hang laundry from.

Trump’s executive order was an articulation of another competing fact: at least 200 million Americans think this radical gender ideology is the Bandini Mountain of the 21^st Century and many of them suspect that worse still it’s an insidious if relentless attempt to destroy the most basic principles of life, complete with Satanic overtones: the inversion of fundamental truths for the purpose of reveling in the sheer obscenity of it.

Despite the mass public appeal of Trump’s policies that acknowledge two genders and the revulsion that most Americans feel toward the grotesque genital mutilation of children and teens—often by parents suffering from Munchausen-by-Proxy (a population primarily consisting of middle-aged white women sporting neon purple hair)—the fact remains that tens of millions of others believe the horrific reassignment surgeries are ‘gender-affirming care’ and are deeply committed to ensuring it continues everywhere across the land.

And simply put: Transgender activists and their allies aren’t going anywhere, except to war in every social arena. They will not back down. They will not change their minds or recover their sanity, turn tail and give up. Transgenderism is not just a fashionable social statement for them, it’s not a fad that they will tire of or a phase they will outgrow. No, transgenderism is their essence and their religion, both informing their daily lives and encompassing the very basis of their existence.

The gender reassignment treatments and surgeries that most of America still look upon as a terrifying descendant from Josef Mengele’s horror show ‘medical experiments’ at Auschwitz-Birkenau are conversely celebrated and promoted by progressives as a glorious destination. Alongside its racial dogma that’s espoused in the visceral hatred of white people, encoded in its Critical Race Theory and carried out in its DEI campaigns, the dual track of transgenderism is today the progressive movement’s wellspring.

It is their North Star.

The resulting top-to-bottom reassignment surgeries for children are their Holy Rites; as sacred to progressives as the Eucharist is to Catholics, the Shabbat is for observant Jews and as the Quran is to Muslims.

Progressives don’t expect mere tolerance or acceptance of the mental dysphoria, the butcher shop gore and the carnival freakshow outcomes of transitions; they demand celebration of it and conformity to it.

There is no middle ground to be had here.

The chasm runs just as deep on issues such as crime and punishment; with tens of millions of progressives chanting ‘Fuck the Police’ and painting law enforcement as a schematic that was drafted by slave owners at the birth of the nation even as they deify garden variety street thugs with saintly street murals. Civil society’s need for quality-of-life ordinances—a broad spectrum that encompasses car registration requirements to banning offroad vehicles on city streets to noise pollution and littering and loitering prohibitions—are caustically dismissed by progressives as oppressive expressions of ‘white fragility’ that must be erased along with ‘whiteness’ itself. Progressives maintain a straight face as they insist traffic laws are synonymous with colonization and argue that public defecation is unfortunate but symptomatic of racist wealth inequality, not mental illness or inebriation.

They believe that pooping on the pavement is an outcome to be remedied with increased budgetary allotments for NGOs, not an aberrant act to be punished.

While there seems to be some residual consensus on foreign policy, most of that remaining overlap occurs in the stratosphere of self-declared elite circles and is thus reflected in power structures that serve them. When Russia rolled into Ukraine more than three years ago—following decades of repeated red-line warnings from Moscow that NATO’s eastward march would not go unanswered—American lawmakers already dope sick from the humiliating collapse of the empire’s franchise in Afghanistan went big in fixing a fresh rig to mainline the heroin of war in Ukraine.

As more than 20 million migrants from every corner of the globe marched into America during the Biden Administration, the imperial power structure in Washington poured hundreds of billions of dollars and advanced weapon systems into the combat zone of Eastern Europe in its latest proxy war with Russia, further bleeding the treasury as American debt reached a crushing tonnage of $36 trillion and climbing while nearly a million of its own citizens sleep on the sidewalks, under the overpasses and in the parking lots of collapsing businesses.

When Hamas launched its massive terror attack against Israel in October 2023, the Ukrainian banners that were ubiquitous throughout Imperial Washington were immediately supplemented with the Star of David and some congressmen donned Israeli Defense Force uniforms as they strolled about the halls of congress. Calls for the annexation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip into a ‘Greater Judea’ could be heard alongside the chilling chortling over the death of any remaining hope for the Palestinian statehood that seemed briefly within grasp three decades and a lifetime ago.

As Imperial Washington convulsed with rage against Moscow and simultaneously peacocked its unconditional support for Tel Aviv, tens of millions of Americans continued their daily struggle through a landscape long forsaken by their rulers on the Potomac. Whipped into a frothing frenzy over battlelines halfway around the world, the accelerating collapse of the American Empire’s homeland has yet to hold the attention of the ruling elites inside the Beltway for anything longer or more meaningful than worthless soundbites on television or a podcast.

Meanwhile, the divorce-turned-demolition continues.

The remnants of the nation’s once powerful manufacturing base that had stretched coast-to-coast continue to import foreign replacements for what is left of the American factory workforce and the captains of the high-tech industries have gone all out in their effort to wipe their workforces clean of American STEM grads with ever greater visa allotments peeled off for foreign replacements and guarantees of Green Cards for foreign students who graduate American colleges.

Imperial Washington simply no longer cares to conceal its disinterest and distaste for the American worker and the American graduate and even enjoy the guilty satisfaction of young Americans despair at their intentional disinheritance from the future they were once promised.

The nation’s K-12 public education system that once produced—alongside engaged parents—a reliably bright population of students with diverse intellectual interests that were further honed by its colleges and universities before joining the workforce is long gone. It has been subjected to a controlled demolition and rebuilt into a sprawling network of government camps that are primarily operated as social service centers and political indoctrination hubs. In 2022, the Illinois Department of Education revealed that 55 schools in the Chicago area alone could not produce even a single student who was proficient in either math or reading. Not one single student could be found across those 55 schools who could meet even the barest of minimum proficiency standards in core studies.

Fifty-five schools plus thousands of students equaled one grim goose egg in even basic proficiency. In 2024, Chicago’s chronic student absenteeism rate had surpassed more than 40%, which explains the thousands of teens prowling the streets and wildin’ out in the Windy City.

Across Greater Los Angeles, public education’s collapse turned into a lucrative grift years ago as hundreds of thousands of students are ushered through commencement ceremonies as semi-functional illiterate teenagers, handed a diploma they didn’t earn and probably can’t read but advised nonetheless that college is a great way to keep the ‘financial aid’ and associated benefits flowing even if they can’t clearly articulate a thought or properly enunciate their hybrid vocalizations of the English language.

And math or science? Fuh-get about it.

Mass migration and failed schools are powerful tributaries that feed a river of chaotic dysfunction that has flooded across and into complex societal features that took more than a century to build in America but is now unraveling much faster. The chronic disorder and endemic corruption that is the hallmark of failed states and Third World countries has taken root in regions across the United States and is now spreading like a cancer of incompetence and malfeasance that is creeping ever deeper into the vital organs of the country. Its symptoms can be glimpsed everywhere; from the drive-thru window at the local burger joint all the way up to the C-Suite management offices at corporations riddled with DEI initiatives that are often employed as a concealer or distraction for corporate misdeeds or rank greed.

Two decades ago, I wrote a column entitled ‘Disconnected: The Government You Have Reached Is No Longer In Service’ that I was reminded of as I read journalist Ezra Klein’s recent assessment in The New York Times of the perpetually polluted stasis that California’s high-speed rail system has floated in for four decades. Poisoned and deformed in utero by Sacramento’s bureaucratic malaise and systemic incompetence, billions of dollars have been funneled into a massive and worthwhile undertaking to benefit residents of the Golden State that has delivered Californians, as of 2025, a miscarriage that’s shedding fragments of what could have been.

The smattering of construction of the bullet train that was to whisk riders from Los Angeles to San Francisco in just a couple of hours has sprouted in tumorous blips and warts between Merced and Bakersfield, appearing more as grim detritus than a successful delivery of a critical infrastructure project after a long and painful labor that would make proud parents of Californians across the state.

The fate of highspeed rail is indeed, as Klein asserts, a prime exhibit in the showcase of evidence of governmental failure and, more specifically in deep blue California, Democrats inability to deliver even basic services as promised. It is a glowing example of the failure to make things work, the impotence of not being able to produce an upgraded rail system at all, let alone one where the trains run on time. In a state that is a wholly owned and operated concession of the Democratic Party, California’s high-speed rail project is the little train that not only couldn’t, but is actually the choo-choo that never was or will be.

Does anyone seriously believe that’s going to change now in California or throughout much of the rest of the nation and particularly in the urban cores of America’s once Great Cities? As a result of what, Trump or Sacramento’s reaction to his adminsitration? I think not.

Many of Trump’s supporters seem keen on clutching the fantastical idea that a great restoration of America is now underway as a result of the transactional-focused real estate developer’s return to the Oval Office for a final performance as the Grand Poobah. They are exhilarated as he orchestrates what they view as the long overdue annihilation of the ruling elites’ Deep State infrastructure and as he seemingly rolls back—or at least pauses—the demographic recarpeting the has covered much of the country.

But a sober assessment of Trump’s rapid fire ‘Shock & Awe’ campaign can only conclude that no matter how sensational many of his actions have been for so many Americans and despite the very real impacts some of his actions have actually had in various areas such as border controls, the fact remains that the national divide simply cannot be undone, smoothed over or reconciled with an attempt at a fresh start. There is precious little common ground remaining, if any at all, to regroup on.

The progressives coordinated and escalating attacks on all things Tesla is another telling symptom of how the divide in America has reached a violent point of no return.

Progressives have been emboldened by the success of the radical Left terror attacks that were unleashed across the United States in 2020; a coordinated blitzkrieg that set city centers ablaze, saw drivers dragged from their vehicles and beaten in the street, saw pedestrians and passerby pummeled and businesses looted to skeletal shelves as the Berserker shock troops of the Democratic Party danced triumphantly in the glow of destruction as police stepped back, stood down and in some jurisdictions even took a knee in humiliating submission for the news cameras.

Trump has tasked his road dog and primero bro Elon Musk to direct his own blitz across the target rich environment of the Deep State and Musk’s teams arriving at government departments and agencies must appear much like waves of Junkers Ju 87 filling the skies above moments before rolling into their deadly dives marked by the wailing of sirens as the Stukas rain destruction on the targets below.

In response for the sweeping budgetary strikes on entrenched government bureaucracy and its associated powerlines that feed the radical Left’s cultural grow houses, progressives have set their sites on Tesla in an escalating guerrilla campaign aimed at nothing less than the wholesale destruction of the company in retaliation. It’s a campaign that sends the primary message that the radical Left retains the capacity to quickly inflict painful consequences on powerful adversaries.

While the number of Tesla dealerships, service centers and charging stations that have been firebombed, shot up or otherwise attacked remains somewhat low—perhaps a dozen or more across the country, out of more than 270 locations in the U.S.—a much larger number of Tesla drivers have had their vehicles attacked and vandalized and by all accounts this appears to be the opening salvo, not a one-and-done barrage from progressives.

The impact from the attacks, at least in part, have had the desired effect in the short term, leaving Tesla drivers nervous that they will be targeted and giving pause to prospective buyers that they may be sinking serious five-figures or even more into an instant advertisement for harassment or physical harm.

Tesla’s stock has plummeted and the company has lost an estimated $565 billion in market value.

Musk seems oddly out of touch with the harsh reality of the progressive movement in America today, telling Fox News Channel’s Sean Hannity in an almost childlike bewilderment: “It comes as quite a shock to me, that there’s this level of hatred and violence from the Left. I thought the Left, the Democrats, were supposed to be the party of empathy and the party of caring and yet they are burning down cars, they’re firebombing dealerships, firing bullets into dealerships, they’re smashing up Teslas.”

For someone as intuitive as Musk, how can it possibly come as “quite a shock” that a movement predicated on the destruction of the republic and committed to the proposition that its legacy population must be replaced as its values are ritualistically defiled and its cities put to the torch is able and willing to target Tesla for violent retribution?

Was Musk so stoned in 2020 that he missed the BLM arson mobs and Antifa terror squads that the progressives unleashed with the Democrats cheering heartily as they inflicted billions of dollars in damage and destroyed jobs and lives? Is he unaware that Tip O’Neill and Walter Mondale have left town, departed the planet and no longer influence let alone lead the Democratic Party? Is he so perpetually zonked that he continues to reach out to Michael Dukakis to see what might be done to deescalate the situation with ‘liberals’ who no longer exist and is confused why Dukakis hasn’t gotten back to him?

Perhaps his chronic THC inhalation has collided with his frenetic spearheading of DOGE and turned the actual sociocultural landscape around him into something of a confusing blur that has concealed the actual facts on the ground, hallucinations that are admittedly a common occurrence in Imperial Washington.

Musk’s disbelief as expressed on FNC, whether feigned or genuine, is ultimately immaterial when considered in the context of the real question: What happens next?

And not just with Tesla, but the fate of the United States.

Undoubtedly many still harbor the optimistic hope that somehow, someway, these troubling times marked by such division and strife will simply fade away, burning out like a fire that flared past its sustainable fuel requirements and finally succumbed to a change in weather.

From their prayers to God’s ear.

But many others see the unmistakable hallmarks of societal collapse and are no longer so fearful of the cold fact of America’s impending date with destiny that they can’t bring themselves to articulate it and assess what’s the best way forward in this accelerating contested divorce.

What should the dispersal of community assets look like and how might the geographic allotment be shaped between America’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts and along the Gulf of Mexico (it was, is and will always be the Gulf of Mexico, just as Myanmar will always be Burma), who gets what and where?

The alternative to divvying up America’s assets and parting company into two or perhaps even three new autonomous states that emerge within the old boundaries of the no longer United States is not difficult to envision.

Civil war will descend upon the land, but it will not be a conflict shaped and decided by the horrifically epic clashes of field armies of yore, such as the Union’s Army of the Potomac or the Confederacy’s Army of Northern Virginia. No, it will be a spiraling descent into a tribal conflict with sectarian overtones, an American-scale rendering of Northern Ireland during The Troubles, Lebanon during the 1970s-80s and the so-called Democratic Republic of Congo today, where millions have been killed in endless civil war between myriad parties.

Without a final civil divorce settlement and a reasonable reset of national groupings into more culturally cohesive regions and neighborly relations established between them rather soon, what once was America will disappear completely down the drain of its own making.