The 'USA' brand was 250 years in the making. It took just 100 days to trash it

[Zorro]

Ken Griffin, one of the billionaire donors who’d convinced themselves that President Trump wouldn’t do some things he campaigned to do, finally got it right last week. Griffin inadvertently identified the irony of Trump’s presidency so far: The man who made a brand of his own name (“TRUMP,” all caps) — and a fortune licensing it as a signifier of success on products from hotels to sneakers — has all but wrecked the United States’ brand in 100 days.

“We’re eroding that brand right now,” Griffin lamented at an economic forum. Everything that “USA” has long stood for — financial stability, military strength, cultural prestige and more — undermined. “It can take a very long time,” Griffin warned, “… to remove the tarnish.”

A related sad irony: Trump has rivaled President Franklin Roosevelt, who popularized the “first 100 days” marker, for swift, decisive action out of the gate. But where FDR rescued a crashed economy and envisioned a social safety net that’s endured nearly a century, Trump took what economists considered a “stellar” economy and crashed it, while deputizing minions to tear holes in the safety net and take chainsaws to the federal government and the rule of law.

Lawsuits against the Trump administration proliferate at the rate of two a day, according to trackers, especially over billionaire Elon Musk’s assaults on federal workers and spending laws, and against Trump’s immigration crackdown. The president continues to defy a Supreme Court ruling to “facilitate” the return of a man wrongly deported to El Salvador’s gulag. As J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a federal judge named by President Reagan, wrote for the 4th District Court of Appeals on April 17, “The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process.”

Internationally, Trump is wrecking the legacy of Roosevelt’s last days, the global structure of alliances that has been a force-multiplier for the United States against Russia, China and other adversaries. The dollar and U.S. Treasuries are diminished as safe harbors. The toxicity of the Trump-U.S. brand was dramatically evident in elections on Monday in Canada: Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Liberal Party came from way behind to win, as voters took out their disgust with Trump’s Canada-bashing on conservative candidates.

https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-05-01/donald-trump-100-days-tariff-immigration-rule-of-law

[stopdiggin]

1. Two remarks

1) anyone that has been running around trumpeting "USA!" over the last 150 years (or 250 if you prefer) or so - was a bit of a blithering numpkin in the first place.

and 2) the TRUMP 'brand' has been essentially a sleazy con from the very first. And any that ever mistakenly thought it denoted 'value', 'class' or 'business success' ..... I refer you back to 1)

[DetlefK]

2. The US destroyed their brand 60 years ago by installing dictators.

What do you think why countries like Iran and Cuba hate the US? Because the US overthrew their democratically elected governments and installed murderous dictators to do the US' bidding.

Don't you people remember your own history?

[Midnight Writer]

3. After spending trillions of dollars to construct history's mightiest war machine,

we get taken down by a conman, some greedy aristocrats, and a 250-million-dollar campaign buy-in.

It wasn't the foreigners, it wasn't the gays, it wasn't the blacks, or the Jews, or affirmative action, or the communists, or the fluoride in the water.

It was rich, incompetent, greedy white men.