>This article is bad. Instead of focusing on the actual topic of the book, it immediately jumps into an absurd comparison between the fall of the Roman Empire and today's America.

It's a coatrack to justify a claim that "Trump is destroying America, and maybe that won't be as bad as that sounds". Which, in turn, leads to Fallows's related article (linked at the bottom), "Trump is so bad that he is destroying America, which is justification to actually destroy America (in terms of dissolving the Union)".