This viewpoint is flawed and dangerously naive.

The damage is not as superficial as a name or a building. The USA allowed this to happen. The checks and balances that were supposed to be built into the system have failed. The United States of America, it's government, and it's whole social structure is no longer reliable. It does not end with the removal from power or even the death of Trump.

Remember when we repealed the patriot act and got rid of the TSA? Or put the guardrails back in place after that big crash? No, the other crash, the one that happened after the guardrails were removed the second time.

That's not how it works.

In many cases trust is broken and it might never be restored. People won't come back if they know they can be vilified and fired again in a few years. Allies? We will never think of the US as a reliable partner again. Not in my life time.

Americans elected a psycho, a literal psycho. The only thing I will remember is that it will likely happen again.

The world knows that it is not only Trump. We know that there is a broad election basis supporting that policy, that there are billionaires pushing it and that the whole GOP is totally in line with it. We witnessed how Biden tried to fix the damage of Trump1 and then we got an even worse Trump2.

So the world is trying to get out of their dependence on the USA and that will go on, because there will always be the threat of another trumplike president coming from the MAGA swamp

Whatever this person is smoking, snorting, swallowing, injecting, and/or boofing, I want some. I'm already self-medicating with as much pot as I can afford to get through this assclown fuckery we call an administration; I want/need stronger drugs that enable this kind of magical thinking and optimism.

USAmerica - you are going to have a population of fundamentally broken people after this. High schoolers watched their friends disappear. Children in daycare saw their teachers dragged out. Relatives and neighbors were dragged out of their homes. Stores were raided. People are dead; And lives will forever be changed.

This chaos creates trauma, resentment, distrust, hatred. Because in the end -- we let it happen. The people of this nation let this terror happen. We let tens of thousands be massacred. We let our stores and community homes be raided.

And it was done through our core infrastructure. The people were trafficked through federal agencies. Our three branches of government worked together to make this happen. Our corporations and their technology let this happen. Google. Amazon. Microsoft. Apple. They all have had a role. Our neighbors voted for this, cheered for this.

If the next candidate—be it Democrat or Republican—wants to close the book on all this and broadcast platitudes of Democracy and Compassion... whatever candidate(s) those are, I hope they fail.

I'm not kidding when I say it would take almost half a century to restore the damage that has been done to the US and global order...

Hardly. The damage done is not so easily fixed. The US has proved it can't be trusted.

The international community will never trust the US again. Every shred of soft power and trust in the US is gone, and nobody will make an agreement that isn't purely short-term transactional for decades to come.

and other jokes we can tell ourselves, Volume II

You just showed the world that laws don't matter. You can't (or won't) enforce your own laws when a government goes rogue. How do you expect someone believes you when you say that?

This has two problems, because it assumes:

1. the next president will not be a similiar idiot
2. there will still be elections.

It has been looking like Trump is going for a dictatorship for a long time and things are getting increasingly worse recently.

Nothing about ICE in there? All those people in cages?

The Gulf of Mexico is still the Gulf of Mexico. No country other than the USA calls it anything else.

What Trump actually did was hold up a mirror to America so they could see how rotten everything actually was behind the illusion. A painful, humbling lesson but one that has a chance to actually address the rot. There is a future where we all learn from this and move forward after he's gone in a positive way. Removing tumors is dangerous and painful but it's the only hope of survival. The amount of damage doesn't matter if the lessons learnt lead to meaningful progress.

If such a magical thing as an honourable transfer of power could happen, it's pretty rare for fascist policies to be rescinded. Seeing the dems as they are, I almost think they would be disappointed as they will have to pretend to do policy again.

• The US will bomb another several countries for no reason

• We will remain subservient to Israel

• We will get another Republican in four years who will repeat every mistake they've ever made and then some

Trump has already caused decades of harm, some probably permanent. When people warned of irrevocable damage should Trump be elected, this is what they referred to.

A single example: Iran. If they still exist when Trump leaves office or dies, they're not going to jump back into the Iran Nuclear Deal. If we don't want them to have nuclear weapons, Trump shouldn't have withdrew us from the agreement that was working in 2018 just because it was an Obama success! Shit like that is why we're fucked...

Who said the left can't meme?

Anything that Trump has done via executive order can be undone just as easily, but the weakening of U.S. soft power is likely permanent. Nobody can trust the United States to act as a consistent and reliable cohort in any capacity, because we have proven to be unreliable and our foreign policy has been wildly inconsistent, shifting with the whims of the ignorant American electorate every 4-8 years.

I also don't think it's going to be that easy to purge the MAGA corruption from government agencies. They will put their masks back on and pretend to be good little worker bees, but everything that they do will be in service to Trump, not to the nation or the constitution. It will take ten times longer to root them out and oust them than it did for Trump and his cronies to install them.

If we have an unbroken string of left wing progressive presidents for the next 30 years, we might recover. If even one Republican snake manages to slither into office, the work will be undone in the span of a single term.

Those rehirings won't be cheap either

I don't know why more people aren't talking about the fact that he's building a data center under the Whitehouse

Even if this is true and completed it wont be enough for people and governments to trust americans again. I’m not sure what could be done to go back to the way it was. I believe those days are gone for good and we are all sailing into a different and much less friendly and trusting global system, just when our climate is about to whack us hard.

Ah, to be young and dream!

Trump will be "leaving office" when JD Vance exercises the 25th amendment in January. Very little is going to change when Trump leaves office. We'll get significantly fewer incomprehensible rants, but that's the only major change we're going to get.

Yep. Guaranteed.

Also, billionaires are going to be embarrassed and start giving away their money. The pedophiles that were all in charge will demand to be put in prison for their crimes out of pure guilt.

As a European,

It will take a lot more than these, along with plenty of time and pain, to regain the trust of the rest if the world.

Mostly it will require a turn, in behalf of the USA, to a functioning democracy, with checks and balances, a functioning senate and house of representatives, a functioning justice, a functioning administration, a working economy, fair trade and so on.

I m not very optimistic that the USA will do it in my lifetime if ever.