It is a mistake to consider all the doomsday comments of those expressing alarm at America’s strategic deterioration as just the usual election-year hyperbole. A continuation of the Biden administration’s principal policy initiatives will steadily reduce the comparative standing of America in the world and ultimately forfeit its leadership of the West, the western preeminence in the world, and any right of America to claim to be the leader of the democratic world.

This problem of simply dismissing such alarmist statements as routine election-year politics has been compounded by the hysteria of President Trump’s enemies, in comparing him with Hitler, having greeted virtually every prior aspect of his political career with responses of outright hysteria.

The national intelligence director, James Clapper, flatly stated as a fact that Mr. Trump was a Russian intelligence asset and that Russian intervention had tipped the election to him in 2016. Speaker Pelosi said that his tax bill of 2018, which reduced taxes for 83 percent of American taxpayers, was “the worst thing that has happened in the history of this country.”

There is some merit to the claim that Mr. Trump himself inaugurated this era of skyrocketing hyperbole with his tendency to exaggerate both his own accomplishments and the shortcomings of opponents. Culturally, this comes from the distinctive techniques of the New York real estate promotion industry, as well as the presentation of great sporting events, and other spectacular promotions that comprised Mr. Trump’s business background, and at which he was very successful.

Perhaps the blame for this popularization of ludicrous and destructive partisan hyperbole should be shared between the parties and their different leaders. Practically every president after Calvin Coolidge has been prone to exaggerate his own accomplishments and the shortcomings of his opponents. 

Yet comparing a man who recently served a four-year term as president in which he produced a full-employment, minimal-inflation economy, practically ended illegal immigration, turned the country into a net exporter of petroleum products, and avoided wars, while greatly contributing to stability in the world and improving peace prospects in the Middle East, with Adolf Hitler is indicative of a paranoid psychosis among his opponents. 

Claiming to find any similarity between Hitler and anyone who has ever served as President of the United States is so monstrously defamatory that it is not sane.

With all that said, the present administration is on a course whose logical conclusion is the destruction of American strength, influence, and even significance. While not all of these trends can be laid entirely at the door of the Biden administration, it has, in every case, accelerated them. Many of the world’s greatest universities and American higher education, in general, are being reduced to indoctrination centers and vastly overpriced academies for producing graduates in subjects from which they could not possibly earn a living income.

The immigration policy of this administration, an authentic policy original for President Biden, is to allow into America as many people as can humanly reach and cross its porous southern border. Other than a very belated response to some political realities, there is no indication that the administration envisions anything less than a vast transformation of the nature of America and its steady inundation with multi-ethnic unskilled people whose presence in ultimately overwhelming numbers will create a high level of social chaos and sharply reduce the standard of living of all Americans. 

The goal is presumably a desire to assure permanent, Democratic, electoral victory, hyper-charged with the Americophobic vehemence of the racist extremists that were welcomed into the Democratic Party in the summer of rioting and arson of 2020 that was blamed on “Trump chaos” while Democratic-governed cities defunded the police.

This complies, conveniently, with the far-left Democratic view that theft and robbery are a semi-legitimate form of income distribution: self-help of a refreshingly efficient kind compared to recourse to the bureaucracy of the social safety net. It is, again, a particular innovation of the Biden administration to invoke thoroughly unproved claims and wild scenarios of climate change to inflict high energy prices on Americans, while reducing America to the importation of energy from self-declared enemies, such as Venezuela. 

This administration is the chief beneficiary of the fusion of the permanent state with most of the national political press, which has been reduced to a morally bankrupt propaganda outlet for failed policies and failed public people. This administration has carried to unprecedented extremes the intermittent past practice of using the prosecution system to torment and intimidate political opponents. The red ribbon Mr. Biden has put on the whole package is the Sisyphean burden of a federal debt bomb of about 120 percent of gross domestic product.

Both parties are responsible for the disgraceful and dangerous impasse afflicting  aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Free China. Some compromises are necessary in Ukraine, and if they are not made, and Russia occupies Ukraine, Russia will have substantially rolled back the West’s great bloodless strategic victory in the Cold War, and Russia will move on to the next item on its menu, confident that even if eastern European resistance is strong, western support is weak. If Israel is effectively discouraged from eliminating Hamas, it will be a victory for terrorism, and a confirmation that ultimately terrorism is invincible, and that Israel will never know days of real peace. This cannot be allowed to happen.  

If preemptive assistance is not given to Taiwan, it will be a material encouragement to Communist China to strangle that island until it capitulates. The alliance that we have been trying to assemble in the Far East and South Asia will then disintegrate as everyone makes the best deal they can with China since they will then know that America, for the first time since Commodore Perry opened the Japanese ports in 1853, is a wash-out in matters of security in the Pacific.  

This is not hyperbole; this is the course America is now on. It is time to set aside snobbery and minor irritations with Mr. Trump’s style infelicities and adopt the course and the political choice that will spare America and the world the consummation of these terrible policy errors.