I'm just one person in another country (outside the us) who is exposed to the information I'm exposed to. I have the benefit of sitting back, relatively unattached, and being curious about what is going on. I'm well aware that what I don't know far exceeds what I do know.

From speaking to my US friends who span several states and both parties, and are all intelligent, kind, and thoughtful people, it really seems like the US is being ripped apart - and people who are on one side or the other aren't really seeing the full picture, likely by design.

To what degree the leadership is involved in the ripping is really impossible for me to know. I look at one place and it looks one way, I look at another place and it looks another way, and the ways it looks are mostly incompatible with each other.

The one consistency I see no matter where I look is that we as in all of us living in western democracies are being divided, trust is being attacked and game theory lose-lose is being promoted. There are pockets of resistance, but the consistent theme is of dissolution.

So I may ask some question that comes off as weird, it's because I'm skeptical of whatever media says and asking questions I haven't heard anyone else ask - mostly just to poke at reality and see what happens.