America the Dangerous

How violence at home and belligerence abroad is defining Trump’s second term.

There is a temptation, when living through political decay, to believe that the worst moment has already passed. That instinct has repeatedly failed during Donald Trump’s second term. What is happening now—on American streets and on the international stage—suggests not a peak of chaos but a normalization of menace. The United States is no longer merely polarized or dysfunctional. It is increasingly violent, unaccountable, and reckless, and it is behaving like a country that has lost both moral authority and self-control.

Start at home. In 2026, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has become something closer to a roaming domestic security force than a civilian law enforcement agency. Eight people have died in encounters with ICE this year alone. Among them were Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good, both Minneapolis residents, killed in separate incidents less than three weeks apart. These were not secretive or ambiguous events. They happened in public, were recorded, and were followed by a state-sponsored smear campaign against the dead.