America is a whole collection of third world countries that work together. A lot of the states would be barely functional, if they were on their own, but they’re not, they have all their family to look out for them, so it’s fine.

The federal government, for its part, is probably many times over the most powerful entity that has ever existed on the planet. It is so massive and so complex that it’s almost impossible to wrap your head around, and almost completely invisible until you interact with one of the tentacles. And, bizarrely, huge parts of it are simply devoted to people working to try to make things better and work on some particular problem for no other reason than that it needs to be done. The very top is pretty corrupt, and the military isn’t always a great thing, but almost all of the rest of the substance is the real deal.

It’s a damn shame, because Trump is about to do his best to wreck the entire thing, because he hates people trying to make the world a better place all day.