Trump: the moan of the wounded nation

I remember the last July 4th lived in the United States, in 2022, already returned to a certain normality after the long pandemic. The joy with which the neighbors lived that night of celebration, each in their neighborhood with the people close by, was an act full of citizenship. I celebrated it in the Harlem neighborhood, with neighbors from multiple countries, origins, races, and cultural traditions. From the European perspective, we look at it with some indulgence: as an act of alien ingenuity, revealing of a nation as dominant in the last century as it is young in its historical journey. After all, it is a nation that has just turned a quarter of a millennium since its founding. Thus, while nations with more than a thousand years of life like Catalonia survive being part of a state, a nation in its youth like the American one has enough strength in the year 2026 to threaten a country like Iran – the contemporary political form of a civilization with more than two thousand five hundred years of history like Persia. This arrogance is probably the reason why we have a feeling towards the United States of both fascination and antipathy. What makes a creature relate with such virulence against ancient civilizations of continents like the Asian or the European – China, Iran, Germany, to give the latest examples?Trump's United States is unaware of its original sin: being David in the grand narrative of history, facing Goliath with the weight of tradition. Cycles of domination have their limits, and if the Carolingian Empire did not even last a century and the Roman Empire – the greatest example of European hegemonic domination – lasted five, we can think that the path remaining for the great globalization power will be short, no matter how much Trump said the opposite on Saturday, July 4, from Mount Rushmore. There he announced for the umpteenth time a new "golden age" like the one founded by Presidents Washington and Jefferson or grown by Lincoln and Roosevelt – the four, carved into the background stone of South Dakota. The evolution of economic, demographic, and geopolitical data, however, suggests the end of the first great golden chapter – the one that began with the post-World War II agreements.