Crescent International assigned me to write about “two old men competing to rule a decaying empire” for their August issue. The deadline was July 22. That was the day Biden dropped out. So I had to hastily rewrite the piece, since we’re now witnessing “one old man and one postmenopausal woman competing to rule a decaying empire”. -KB

Americans like to pretend that they live in a democracy brimming with youthful fun-loving energy. President John F. Kennedy embodied that image. His presidency (1960-1963) coincided with the apogee of the American empire’s long parabolic trajectory. But a gang of corrupt old men had Kennedy shot, and the USA has been going downhill ever since.

Today, America is a declining geriatric empire, like the USSR during the era of Leonard Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov. The American president, 81-year-old “Genocide Joe” Biden, is so cognitively incapacitated that he doesn’t know he’s cognitively incapacitated. After his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump on June 27, Biden spent 25 days fending off an ever-growing chorus of oligarchs and Democratic bigwigs calling for his resignation, before reluctantly stepping down from the presidential race—but not the presidency itself—on July 21.

Prior to Biden’s withdrawal, the US presidential race pitted an 81-year-old incumbent against a 78-year-old former president. And while some octogenarians are in remarkably good condition, that isn’t the case with Biden and Trump.

While Biden, unlike Trump, exercises and controls his weight, his mind isn’t quite keeping up with his body. “Genocide Joe” obviously should be playing with his grandchildren, not running a powerful but troubled nation. As Dr. Peter McCullough writes of Biden: “We can add sleep apnea to his list of neurodegenerative determinants including advanced age, two prior craniotomies, permanent atrial fibrillation, and six mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. It is getting more difficult every day for Dr. O’Connor to deny Biden’s cognitive decline.”

Trump, for his part, is shrewd and charismatic but far from intellectually gifted. Though his fans might say Trump is as sharp as he ever was, that’s not saying much. The former president has a history of heart disease and obesity. He drinks 12 diet cokes a day, regularly visits McDonalds to wolf down “a Big Mac Filet-o-Fish fries and a vanilla shake,” and refuses to exercise, “arguing that a person like a battery is born with a finite amount of energy.”

Despite his less than stellar physical condition, Trump apparently has miraculous superpowers when it comes to avoiding head injuries from bullets. On July 13, we are told, Trump was shot in the ear by a 5.56 millimeter assault rifle bullet. Normally, if such a bullet, surrounded by its lethal shock wave, passed close to a human ear (even without impact) the ear would likely be ripped off and the person would suffer a horrendous concussion due to the shock wave.

As the Associated Press reported:

Former Secret Service agent Rich Staropoli said the AR-15-style rifle used by the gunman fires a 5.56 millimeter bullet at such high speeds — over 2000 miles an hour — that just the air pressure as it passes can cause extensive damage. “The shock wave alone could have ripped his ear off” Staropoli said of Trump. “It’s amazing the bullet nipped him” and didn’t do any other damage. “It’s a one-in-a-billion type of thing” he added.

(Note: After doing further research, assisted by my always-helpful Substack subscribers, I have concluded that Staropoli likely exaggerated the amount of ear damage expected from a “graze” with an AR-15 bullet. Even so, it seems incredible that per the official story, the bullet hit enough ear to produce plenty of blood for the photo op, but not enough ear to leave any sign of damage two weeks later.)

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Then consider that no photos or bona fide medical reports were produced documenting the alleged ear damage. Had there been any, Trump would have been repeatedly flashing it at the world. Instead, he hid the ear under a bandage for two weeks, then unveiled his perfectly intact, obviously-not-shot ear during his meeting with Netanyahu

After his one-in-a-billion “magic ear nick” miracle, Trump was allowed by the Secret Service to expose himself to more potential bullets by freeing himself from his protectors, raising his fist, and staging an iconic “fight fight fight” photo op. Clearly the man must be in amazing physical condition if a bullet that would rip the ear off any mere mortal, while inflicting a tremendous and possibly life-threatening concussion, barely had the impact of a mosquito bite. What’s more, a man who survives such an ordeal without any visible damage, then manages to defeat several burly secret service agents (and one DEI woman) by shaking them off and raising his fist to the skies and his head and torso to potential assassins, deserves to be immortalized in a Marvel comic book series.

The supposed bullet (supposedly photographed against million-to-one odds) that supposedly struck Trump may have missed its supposed target, but it certainly killed “Genocide Joe” Biden’s candidacy. The alleged Trump shooting, perfectly timed for coronating Trump at the convention, provided Republicans with such a massive PR bonanza that the Democrats quickly lost all hope of Biden defeating the apparently superhuman Trump, who now sported a heroic nick on his ear to signify his brush with death. A mere eight days after Trump’s impossibly lucky miracle in Butler, Pennsylvania, Biden was forced to resign by his “donor class,” meaning the oligarchs who own and run the Democratic Party. Those same oligarchs then instituted an obviously pre-scripted spectacle of Party unanimity surrounding their new pick, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Will the Democrats’ choice of the 59-year-old Harris, and Trump’s vice presidential nominee 39-year-old J.D. Vance, inject some youthfulness into the Geriatric States of America? Not likely. Let’s begin with Harris, who has always seemed a cipher for “Genocide Joe” Biden. If she has any ideas of her own, it isn’t clear what they are.

In all fairness, we have seen one possibly good sign: Harris boycotting Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on July 24. Rumored to be less avidly pro-genocidal than her boss, and with a Jewish husband to help her fend off the inevitable shrieks of “antisemitism,” Harris could conceivably change America’s horrific pro-zionist-genocide policy if she wanted to. Such a move would win her accolades from Gen-Z Democrats, including young Jews, even as it earned her the enmity of the genocidal Jewish oligarchs who largely fund both parties. And that, of course, is why she probably won’t do it. Harris is likely to follow Biden in bemoaning Palestinian suffering without doing anything concrete to stop it.

As for Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance, he would, if elected, be the second-youngest vice president in US history. That is presumably why the obese and elderly (though superhumanly bullet-proof) Trump picked him. It’s all about image.

But what about substance? Vance would probably play a limited role in a second Trump regime, just as Harris has had a minor role in Biden’s. The front man for the geriatric empire—Trump—would still be geriatric. Unless Trump choked on a McDonalds french fry or drowned in Diet Coke, putting Vance in the White House, the fact that the vice president was relatively young would have little relevance.

But the real issue isn’t Trump’s senescence, it’s the senescence of the American empire. And that problem won’t be fixed by installing a younger front-man. As Oswald Spengler famously wrote in The Decline of the West, civilizations, like living organisms, follow a trajectory of growth and decay, and American civilization is obviously well past its peak.

Quoting a terrific essay by Ron Unz on the parallels between the 1980s USSR and the 2020s “USSA”:

“For Americans such as myself who came of age during the 1970s or early 1980s, the Soviet Union always carried the whiff of a decaying ideological empire ruled by a decrepit political leadership class that had long since lost the trust of its own people… We can only hope that the efforts (of dissidents like Seymour Hersh, Michael Hudson, Ray McGovern, and Col. Douglas Macgregor) help ensure that the looming collapse of our doomed American Empire involves as little bloodshed as did the disintegration of the equally doomed Soviet Empire more than a generation ago.”

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