There’s no way I’m travelling to the US in the foreseeable future. I may never go there again. It’s no longer anything like it was when I lived there in 1995-2000, 2007-08, and 2010. It already used to rank moderately low on international and even US-based rankings of things like freedom, democracy, life expectancy, relative cost of health coverage, and most other things. Its rankings have been far below those of European countries, Canada, Australia, and others.

A new oligarchy/technocracy is firmly in place in the US. It’s dismantling numerous government agencies and social services, raising the cost of almost everything by establishing tariffs on imports (which will not raise one goddamn cent for the US’s coffers), and cozying up to Putin and siding with Russia. It’s also detaining and deporting thousands of people (even foreign graduate students and professors), threatening to annex Canada supposedly because of fentanyl smuggling (in reality, less than one-fifth of one percent of the US’s fentanyl comes from Canada), and so on. So, the US’s rankings are going to fall much, much lower.

MAGA is only going to happen for multi-millionaires and billionaires: the one percent who already have about 30% of the nation’s wealth. Good luck to the remaining 300 million of you.