World leader

I read a funny article earlier, and by funny I mean stupid, I've lost the link and it is unimportant anyway, but the gist of it was how the USA has lost the trust of the world since we elected The Toddler. Now obviously the article was inspired by his recent tweets involving nuclear brinkmanship and so on, but my main problem with it is that the USA never had the trust of the world in the first place, not like we think we do anyway.

Pretty much since inception, the United States of America has done what it wanted, to whoever it wanted, when it wanted, without regard to international opinion or consequence, see, even at the birth of the country our founding fathers realized we were too big, and too rich, to piss off too badly, the world wanted a piece of us, and thanks to our isolation and cussedness, we fought them off and took a vast swath of rich land for our own, we then proceeded to expand that of course, and turn our European colonialist roots into the very American predatory act that dominates the world today.

The fact is, other world leaders don't see the USA as a guiding light, and I would venture to guess that has been the case for quite some time now, what they see is a drunk guy in a crowded room with an automatic rifle, now usually drunk folks are harmless, they embarrass themselves, reveal uncomfortable truths, sometimes are even kind and generous.

Then sometimes they open up with the automatic rifle and everyone dies.

All articles about how the USA has lost the trust of the world are inherently flawed based on the assumption that we ever held it to begin with. We are a world leader sure, but only by virtue of our size, wealth, and population, not by the example we set for the rest of the world, China and Russia are rather large too, have big populations, and at least technically have a lot of money, but we don't look to them as guiding lights for the same reason the rest of the world doesn't look to us.

We can't be trusted, we cant be stopped, we can't even be slowed down, we listen to no one and expect everyone to listen to us, and they do, because we are stroking the trigger in a very unsafe manner, but that isn't the same as being looked to for leadership.

I will allow for that fact that we have lost more respect and trust over the last year, it is possible for it to go into negatives right? You can have negative trust?

Yeah, pretty sure.