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Making America Weak: The Plan [1]
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Date: 2025-04-17
During the 2024 Election, then candidate Donald Trump announced time and again that America was a “failing nation.” He had been employing language like this since the moment he announced his 1st run for President in 2015 which led to the mystifying “American Carnage” inaugural address in 2017. All of this bizarre rhetoric was and is intimately bound together with the primary catchphrase of the Trump political phenomena — “Make America Great Again (MAGA).” Supporters of Donald Trump still refer to themselves as MAGA.
This is perhaps the most extraordinary use of language by the Faux Populists in America since “America First,” (during the 1930s and early 40s). This post is the latest in my Words Matter Series and MAGA is the single biggest success by the Populists to date in using language to distort reality. The phrase does have some foundation in traditional Republican Politics, mainly harkening back to Reagan and his Morning in America lines (Prouder, Stronger, Better). But it also represents a striking departure from that rhetorical history, because it requires those who believe in it to do two very extraordinary things:
1 — To accept that America is not just flawed, but that it is failed.
2 — To ignore an amazing amount of evidence to contrary (to that premise).
When the phrase was first introduced (in 2015), America had already come out of the Great Recession and was indisputably the world’s number 1 economy and number 1 military presence. And that has remained the case during the entire time (although it may not last much longer) that “MAGA” has been used by Trump supporters as a catchphrase for self-identification. In other words, as a prerequisite for supporting Trump, you have to assume that everything you know to be true about our country is in fact false. That’s pretty powerful stuff . And not just false, but false in a very negative way — you have to begin almost hating the United States and what it stands for in order to to truly belong to MAGA. Only someone who was seriously confused could call the US a failed nation and in the same breath refer to themselves as Patriots. Yet that’s what happened, not to a few people, but to many millions.
Why is all of this important? It’s not merely a great example of how language can be used to galvanize political movements in seemingly non-intuitive ways; the acceptance of the premise behind MAGA is absolutely critical to the plan that’s always been associated with the Phrase. If we consider Making America Great Again as doublespeak code for Making America Weak, then it becomes clearer who in fact was behind all of this from the start.
In countless speeches and propaganda pieces over the past 15 years, the Kremlin has promoted a vision of failing Western Liberal Democracies while sponsoring Far Right Populists across the globe. This is Word Warfare at its core (e.g. political destabilization w/o the use of arms). And the plan to Make America Weak as part of that larger conflict is now in full view here in the form of the Trump 2.0 Agenda being rolled out at a breakneck pace.
The Plan is not just the 900 page Project 2025; it’s more expansive than that and in fact the two plans might be considered more complementary than unified — although where the MAGA stops and where the Kremlin begins is no longer easy to determine. The main thrust of the plan can most easily be viewed in outline form (and all parts are facilitated by the lexical foundation I describe in the Words Matter Article):
Economic Destabilization Breaking Alliances Stifling Trade, wrecking markets (including the dollar, bonds etc.) Creating Uncertainty (e.g. ruining our good reputation with everyone)
Political Destabilization Undermine and destroy government institutions Weaken the military (starting with Cyber), eliminate all military alliances Erode public confidence and end Democracy (while supporting dictators)
Cultural Destabilization Renew old divisions, create new ones Change reality through language (matching it to a controlled central view) Create fear and uncertainty at the personal level
Much more detail could be provided of course, but everything that’s happening now falls within the upper level categories — and it’s all happening at something close to warp speed. There’s a certain desperation on the part of the folks really driving this policy to knock America out of its number one spot as quickly as possible. That desperation is tied to Russia’s near societal collapse after 3 years of war with Ukraine and 10 years or more of economic sanctions. Wrecking the United States though means wrecking the existing world order — while that may sound like a satisfying form of revenge, it’s unlikely to remedy the situation that’s led to this level of desperation.
In the meantime, a growing number of actual MAGA supporters are going to finally recognize the cognitive dissonance associated with the term they’ve chosen to self-identify with. Unfortunately, by then it will be too late to avoid the chaos and pain that will visit them (and all of us) as the United States is knocked out of its preeminent world position. Hopefully, it’s a lesson we won’t soon forget and people in future will pay closer attention to the language that they’re using and supporting.
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