When Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, I despaired. The American people had elected a buffoon. I had no doubt this would do some damage, however I never imagined he could threaten American democracy.

Not that I underestimated buffoons. Hitler was a buffoon and he destroyed German democracy and much of Europe as well. But this was America. Its democracy was secure, immune to the siren song of fascism. Its constitution was legendary, its civil society vibrant, its press fearless, its military loyal—no worries here.

But I was forgetting my history. As Trump began to undermine one democratic institution after another—the press, the courts, the military, even elections—my memory stirred.

It harked back to America between the great wars. Fascism, indeed Nazism, was alive and well. In 1939, the German American Bund held a rally of 20,000 in New York’s Madison Square Garden where they booed President Roosevelt and chanted “Heil Hitler.” Prominent Americans such as the radio priest Father Coughlin, aviation hero Charles Lindbergh and industrialist Henry Ford, praised the Third Reich. And then there was the Ku Klux Klan, its support nationwide. On August 8, 1925, 50,000 Klansmen marched through Washington.

Trump, it appeared, was exploiting another time of mass grievance to rejuvenate a latent malignancy in the body politic. I adjusted my attitude toward and expectations of the country and its people accordingly.

In the 1930s the country may have been deterred from following Europe into fascism only by Franklin Delano Roosevelt whose policies put desperate men to work building America for the future. He is credited with saving capitalism. He may also have saved democracy.

President Biden made a worthy effort to do another Roosevelt, but times are different now. His efforts were not appreciated or even understood amidst the sea of misinformation and disinformation that all too often passes for news today.

Now we have a second Trump presidency. This time, unlike the first, the buffers are gone and the king of chaos reigns unchecked. We have more than a new America, we have a new world.

The nation long considered leader of the free world seems to be going over to the dark side. Apparently Europe is now an economic and ideological foe. The new administration seems decidedly more comfortable with authoritarians than with its former democratic friends. Putin, one of the more distasteful autocrats, seems a particular favourite of the president. Is the Republican Party, Trump’s party, turning against democracy? We can’t help but wonder.

Imperialism, something we thought the West had put behind it, has returned with a vengeance. The president has, to date, laid claims of one kind or another on the Panama Canal, Greenland, Gaza and our own fair parcel of real estate. Alex Younger, a former chief of Britain’s MI6, observed, “We are in a new era where, by and large, international relations aren’t going to be determined by rules and multilateral institutions, but by strongmen and deals.”

And this is an America that can’t be trusted. I never thought I’d be saying that about our neighbours. I always considered them solid partners—my word is my bond sort of folk—but they no longer are. We signed a trade agreement with them and now they are arbitrarily threatening us with tariffs that turn the agreement into a bad joke.

And this isn’t an agreement that can be blamed on another president, on Obama or Biden. This was Trump’s agreement, negotiated by his people, signed on the bottom line with his signature.

But then what should we have expected? This president was convicted of fraud, his business history was a litany of bankruptcies and lawsuits. This is not, to put it mildly, an honourable man.

So we do indeed have a different US of A and a different world. My attitudes toward and expectations of the country and its people continue to adjust. Mostly with disappointment and lowered expectations yet not without a small note of optimism.

Somewhere under all the MAGA mischief remains a decent, democratic America which may eventually return the nation to its constitutional values. Or not. If not, a fine experiment in republican government will pass into history.