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From the dawn of civilisation, gold has been a favourite safe haven in times of uncertainty and upheaval. The price of the yellow metal has been not just an indicator of worldwide levels of anxiety, but also a signpost to expected future trouble.
On which basis, this chart seems to be warning that the world is heading for an apocalypse. Many say this frightening prospect is the direct result of Donald Trump’s presidency.
Are they correct, or are there greater forces at work?
To European eyes, at least, America seems to have a truncated political spectrum, with almost none of the liberal or socialist tendencies that have been the keynote of Europe’s development since the Second World War.
Indeed, socialism is a dirty word for most Americans, debased by its persistent long-term use as an insult among even centre-left politicians. For many, it is equated with communism. For some diehards, it seems to be ranked alongside child abuse or serial murder on the scale of human depravity.
This is not new. From the late-1940s and pretty much all through the 1950s, the so-called ‘red scare’ dominated the headlines as the Cold War hardened the US view of Soviet Russia, formerly its wartime ally.
In a classic campaign of fear, Senator Joseph McCarthy claimed that communist spies and sympathisers had infiltrated every organ and institution of American public, corporate, and private life.
Although McCarthy was discredited, eventually, his influence remains pervasive to this day. When President Trump describes unauthorised immigrants as criminals who are “poisoning our country” and “taking your jobs”, he is citing the McCarthy playbook in spirit, at least.
His demonisation of political and other opponents as “the enemy within” takes the comparison closer. It’s very like a central claim in McCarthy’s now-infamous 1950 speech: "When a great democracy is destroyed, it will not be because of enemies from without but rather because of enemies from within”.
Also, like Joe McCarthy, President Trump is now exacting retribution on his declared enemies. Unlike the Wisconsin senator, however, he denies the existence of any list of them.
The rest of the developed world has also had its charlatans who provoked irrational fears and identified blameless ‘enemies’ while promoting themselves as saviours.
Ninety years ago, in Germany, the Nazis demonised the Jews but, more recently, in the UK, there was Enoch Powell. In his equally-infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech in 1968, he warned that, unless immigration was reduced substantially, Britain would see “the river Tiber foaming with much blood”.
Powell was a classical scholar and that was a quotation from Virgil’s Aeneid. It points to a cultural divide between European and American politics. For Powell, it was perfectly natural to make esoteric allusions in a speech to a general audience. It was of no account if his listeners didn’t know anything about Roman literature; they would be impressed by his learning and his oratory.
The result is an isolated, ill-informed, and occluded view of the world among ordinary Americans.
A high proportion of US voters are unschooled in international geography, history, and politics. Knowledge of their own country is shaped by the belief that, as the only nation founded by revolution and a political ideal, America is exceptional.
In 1953, whilst undertaking the process to become Secretary of Defence, Charles Erwin Wilson, a former president of General Motors, a company that also had (and still has), many defence contracts, argued there was no conflict of interest because “what was good for our country was good for General Motors, and vice versa.”
This belief is embedded in the American psyche!
Even the Supreme Court supports it. In a 2010 ruling, it defined political donations by corporations as a form of free speech and therefore protected under the First Amendment.
The result has been to cement the effective domination of US politics by corporations, their founders, and other principal shareholders with no rightful role in elections. This, too, is not new; the cartoon was published first in 1889.
Arguably, these two national tendencies – corporate control of politics and inadequate public education – are cause and effect. The argument has gained traction as the cost of US elections of all types has risen.
The 2024 presidential election was easily the most expensive ever, with Republicans and Democrats spending a combined total of some $5.5 billion in donations. The law limits the sums corporations can give, but ignores gifts from those businesses’ ultra-rich founders and major shareholders. The result has been a bonanza for the Republican Party.
As a group, such donors do not favour an educated voter.
Former president Franklin Roosevelt said: “The real safeguard of democracy . . . is education”. Clearly, there is too little of that in America to be a bulwark against bad political actors.
On the other hand, the USA is proud of the constitutional checks and balances that are claimed to protect its democracy through separation of the powers of the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. How effective is that?
The separation is more apparent than real. The president appoints all of the judges in the Supreme Court and courts of appeal, as well as the head of the FBI. Many local officials, notably, sheriffs and members of school boards, are elected.
The result is systemic politicisation of the courts, law enforcement, and education. While that may not matter so much under a benign and conscientious administration, it makes the entire governance of the United States vulnerable to manipulation and abuse if the president has a contrary agenda.
That vulnerability is magnified when, as now, both the Senate and the House of Representatives are controlled by the president’s party, in this case, the Republicans. Because of that, Mr Trump met no opposition in Congress when, in September 2025, he breached the separation of powers openly.
In a post on Truth Social, his own social media platform, he urged the Department of Justice to investigate James Comey, the former head of the FBI, along with Letitia James, the New York attorney-general, and Adam Schiff, the Democratic senator who oversaw the president’s first impeachment in December 2019.
All of the foregoing suggests strongly that America has been heading for this moment for a long time. That is not to say that the election of a would-be autocrat as US president was inevitable, but history and recent circumstances did help to make it possible, if not probable.
Over the eight decades since the end of the end of the Second World War, those circumstances included, especially, an erosion of trust in the institutions and procedures on which democracy is founded. This was ascribed to the ‘generation gap’ as a new post-war cohort, the so-called baby-boomers, came of age in the 1960s and challenged the prevailing orthodoxy.
That challenge was not confined to the USA. Dismayed at the implicit cynicism of world peace enforced by the nuclear threat of ‘mutually-assured destruction’, the biggest generation in history took to the streets to protest in almost every capital in the developed world. That led to 1968 being dubbed the ‘year of protest’.
Outrages such as the Kent State Massacre, as it became known, undermined the foundations of an already-crumbling respect for authority among boomers. Many of them came to distrust the police, the courts, and even the law itself.
Although this disillusionment was essentially a left-wing response, the sense of mistrust it spawned has proliferated. It even bled across the political divide, giving legitimacy to the rise of Donald Trump and his right-wing MAGA movement as counteraction to what are perceived to be the social and other ‘crimes’ of the leftwards trend in American politics over the past 60 years or so.
Crimes is the operative word. The opposition of left and right is no longer counted as a difference of opinion but, in the president’s own words, as a “war from within”.
This divisive analysis has been the fuel for Mr Trump’s placing of armed troops in US cities that vote Democrat. It is the publicly-declared justification for masked law enforcement officers in full riot gear to snatch lone unarmed immigrants from the street and deport them without due process. It is at the root of his campaign of legal retribution against his perceived enemies.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world sits, bemused and incredulous, as the White House swings a wrecking ball at everything they once admired about America (including, literally, that very building).
Mostly, the media just play along, delighted to have so much material for salacious (and sales-worthy) headlines about the president’s former friendship with Jeffery Epstein, a pimp, or about the First Lady’s absence from public life, or his gaffes, or his lies, or any other personal failing.
However, what about ‘The elephant in the room’, that is not even mentioned?
Perhaps, that is because it is so massive that it cannot even fit in the room!
Is there anything more significant than the world order that has sustained international stability, growth, and prosperity for the past 80 years?
That order has been based on a range of numerous agreements, alliances, and treaties. There being no international police to enforce those (the UN hardly counts), they are ultimately dependent for their success on mutual trust among the signatories.
That trust has always been dependent on the world’s conviction that its guarantor would be America, the hegemon. Not any longer. Confidence has been destroyed by Mr Trump’s embrace of the chaos, disruption, and confusion he seems to love:
Meanwhile, the poor, both at home and abroad, are being abandoned to their fate as national and international financial and other support is curtailed sharply or even withdrawn altogether, without warning or preparation. That is highly significant.
John Stuart Mill, one of history’s most influential political philosophers, argued that a just and moral society is not judged by how it treats the powerful, but by how it protects the vulnerable.
The effects will be profound and long-lasting, not just for the USA but for the rest of the world also.
This article takes its title from a comment made, supposedly, by King Louis XV of France, who died in 1774. It was said to have indicated that the monarch didn’t care what happened after his death. That was just 15 years before the French Revolution.
The same indifference can be seen in Donald Trump. Yet, his term of office will have a long tail of consequences. The effects of his destructive actions cannot be repaired as easily or as quickly as they were undertaken. Some have suggested it could take two generations, or more, to revive the trust of former US allies.
That prediction not only does not allow for the further actions which the president still has three full years to implement, but also assumes he will go quietly. Given the riots and other constitutional breaches that he instigated or fuelled after his election loss in 2020, the omens for such optimism are not good!
Besides, even if the handover goes exactly by the book, Mr Trump’s successor will have to be a politician and statesmen of the very highest calibre if they are to rebuild trust in the institutions and instruments of US liberal democracy. That is, should they even wish to do so.
Looking at the supine current leadership of both political parties, the omens are equally poor.
The whole dispiriting mess has even aroused predictions of the end of American hegemony, with next year’s 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence marked as a fitting terminus.
Even if this possibility has been a long time in gestation, there has been no preparation for a world without the international leadership of a nation that keeps the peace and, thereby, fosters growth and prosperity. In the past, such periods have led to free-for-all national rivalries and, in some cases, major wars.
Louis XV is well known to have said, “After me, the flood!” Was he right?
Part 1: The Trump Effect
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Last updated: 05 November 2025 | © KIS Bridging Loans 2024 | Terms & Conditions