[Swammerdami]

I just read an opinion piece with this title

Donald Trump Is Living Proof of Osama bin Laden’s Success
The US’s militarized and nationalist response to 9/11 has accelerated the decline of the American empire.

I think the title sums up a truth that many of us understand. The article itself is barely worth reading — it meanders almost schizophrenically, much like my own rants do — but here is one paragraph:

And if ... you had told me that, deep into those years of bleeding abroad and increasingly at home, a near majority of Americans would vote to ... send a suicide bomber into the White House, I would have told you that, though Osama bin Laden had been killed by SEAL Team Six in Pakistan and buried in the briny deep in 2011, Donald Trump was his living revenge, and that bin Laden had won twice—once thanks to those ludicrous, murderous forever wars across much of the Muslim world, and the second time thanks to the pandemic from hell and the president from the same place.