There is no perennial “good country”. All countries have the abilty to be rogue states if the wrong ruler comes to power aided by a political/social shift in the population.

Germany is a good country now, but they spend decades in a warlike posture & had a dictator who destroyed millions of lives that Germans blindly followed out of social fear. That same scenario is playing out right now in America.

America could easily be much like any dictatorship (read: 1940s Germany with Hitler in charge) if the wrong person comes to power. Trump is that person, and the fact that he didn’t take us over the brink in his 1st term isn’t proof that he’s a sane leader as he was simply working on his power base those 4 years & got blindsided by a little bug from China. There are others in the GOP who could be as bad as Trump if not worse.

Trump started by putting 3 justices on the Supreme Court to do his bidding, and was working on his rise when Covid hit & upended his reign. When Covid made it easier to vote, the Left turned out to vote & delivered states no one saw coming like GA & AZ. He then worked to overturn the 2020 election, and he’s been working on getting his people in positions to override the 2024 election if needed, mainly by getting his hand-picked candidates into the Secretary of State positions in battleground states. The SOS is leader of the state elections and can change the outcome if they’re nefarious enough.

Case in point — the 2000 election in Florida. 12,000 minorities were struck from the voter lists without cause leading up the election, and they didn’t find out until they tried to cast their vote. Palm Beach County employed a “butterfly” ballot that was confusing and caused a lot of mistaken votes for the wrong candidate. Bush won FL by 537 votes, but note that Pat Buchanan received 2,000 votes in Palm Beach County, a heavily Democratic county where he should’ve received closer to 200 votes, if that. Those 1,800 votes would’ve made Gore the winner. What about the 12,000 mostly minority voters who would’ve surely voted for Gore who were not allowed to vote in error? Republicans were in charge of the voter purge & the butterfly ballot. Look it up.

I don’t have a big problem with the normal Republican viewpoint. I’m fully against lifting limitations on immigration, against welfare, against public schools (as they’re currently run at least), business limitations & Federal agency rules the Dems install, Covid lockdowns, masks, and at least half of the Dems POV. But the GOP needs to elect leaders who will act sane & work with the other side of the aisle & create compromises. Saying it’s my way or the highway is not a good political stance. We have tens of millions of people on both sides of the aisle, and we have to work together, get along & make compromises that we can live with. The 2008 election is a good example when John McCain said that Barack Obama was not a Muslim & not a bad man — he just had some political differences with him. That was a smart GOP politician, and all pols on both sides should learn from his example.