Yes, the US government is actively crumbling from the weight of sheer incompetence brought by Trump’s appointees. It and somehow a significant percentage of Americans lust for cruelty and vengeance against a self-manufactured threat.

However I do share the writer’s compulsive optimism, that there is always a way out, if the collective willpower is there:

Is the U.S. past the point of no return?

I don’t know. I will tell you I am congenitally an optimist. I have a Pascal’s Wager thing going with hope and optimism, that it’s probably better to act as if hope can possibly exist than to just say there is none and we’re doomed. So my official answer is, we’re not doomed, and there are ways out of this, because there’s ways out of anything. We’re ingenious little creative monkeys, we can get out of scrapes. We’ve gotten out of scrapes before. Maybe we can get out of this scrape.

I would hate for the takeaway to be that things are hopeless and that we’re just doomed. That just because things look like they’re very bad, and they will end badly, that means that they’re going to end badly. That’s not actually the case and there are always ways to fight and turn things back.