After the NATO Summit, from LA to NYC, with the SCOTUS in Between: The American Storm Still Rages
- john raymond
- Jun 27
- 2 min read
While European leaders toasted what they believe to be a successful summit—Trump reaffirming Article 5, Zelensky receiving applause, and NATO pledging 5% GDP defense spending by 2035—the reality beneath the optics remains sobering. Trump is not rehabilitated. He is rearmed.
From Los Angeles to New York City, with the Supreme Court in between, the internal corrosion of American democracy has only accelerated. At home, we do not have stability. We have rot masked as order, decline masked as ceremony, and militarized calm masking a regime at war with its people.
In Los Angeles, the National Guard is still deployed. Not as a last resort, but as a normal feature of life now. Civil protest is no longer treated as a right but as a threat. The line between domestic policing and counterinsurgency is gone. This is not a healthy republic—it is a frightened one, increasingly reliant on force to manage discontent rather than reform to address cause.
In New York City, Mamdani’s rise represents a real and meaningful rupture—but also signals just how unstable our political equilibrium has become.
And how do we know something is off? Because Cuomo refuses to go away.
Establishment funded Cuomo, GOP Sliwa, and the chaos of three-way race to come shows that we are no longer a functioning two-party democracy, but a fragmented arena where no narrative holds and no party controls its future. Power is dispersing, not healthily, but frantically.
And then there is the Supreme Court, which continues to advance Trump’s long game: the legal dismantling of liberal governance. It is not one decision. It is the cumulative momentum—attacking the administrative state, undercutting checks and balances, and laying the groundwork for a judiciary-blessed coup against democratic governance.
The NATO Summit did not change this. In fact, it made it worse. By flattering Trump, Europe may have defused one short-term threat—but in doing so, it fueled his domestic mythos.
And now, Trump returns home not as a man rebuked, but as a man coronated. That praise, broadcast on every screen, has undermined the moral clarity we need here at home: that he is still dangerous, still compromised, and still aligned with the Kremlin’s long game.
Let’s be honest: NATO's wager isn’t just about whether Trump will keep his word to the alliance. The deeper wager is whether America will still be a democracy by the time NATO needs us again.
Because from LA to NYC, with the SCOTUS in between, the storm hasn’t passed. It’s just gotten worse and more dangerous to the Republic. And to the wider world as a whole.
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