It does not take decades to ruin something. In the example here: scientists can go somewhere else and never come back. Even if the next administration vhanges course you will never know if there wont be constant flip-flopping. That's bad for business, science and life. People want predictability.

You don't need to wait for a hypothetical collapse of the autocrat for it to inform your personal decision-making and long-term planning.

There's already been a decade of trumpism (Trump in the republican party, and in american politics). In that time, people (politicians) who are not interested in trumpism have by and large adapted (pretend that they do) or left. This partly explains why this presidency is different from his last one.

Oh no, I don't expect Trump to leave the White House unless it's in a box. He' s about to splurge $100M of his own money on a ballroom, so clearly he's planning on being king for a while. No, the comfort is that the US won't be bossing the world around for very long. Russia says a lot of things, but the only people they can bully at this point is their next door neighbours. The US can currently glass pretty much anybody anywhere within 2 hours. Trump is just making sure their influence on the rest of the world becomes minimal within a decade or two.

Isn't that a bit too optimistic? Even before Trump, neoliberalism has wrecked the lives of the majority of Americans for decades at this point. See healthcare, housing, food safety, water supply, electrical grid, public transportation, broadband access, worker protection, wealth gap, and I'm sure I'm missing a lot more.

Is the reason we're in this situation.