"Trumpian Incompetence will provoke a counterreaction, which will prove to be an opportunity and rebirth. When that happens people will be ready to hear the truth that Trump will never understand—that when you turn America into a vast extortion machine, you will get some short-term wins as weaker powers bend to your gangsterism, but you will burn the relationships, at and abroad, that are actually the source of American’s long-term might.” David Brooks NY Times
I wonder what Republicans expected when they allowed Donald Trump to choose the least-qualified candidates to run his government and carry out their agenda of deregulation, tax cuts and tariffs?
Republicans made the same mistake with GW Bush when his tax cuts and deregulation push led to the first $1 trillion budget deficit, liar loans, the housing bubble and Great Recession.
Why has the stock market fallen 10 percent from its post-Biden high, in what is called a “correction”, and in danger of falling further into recession territory? Because it is becoming obvious to Wall Street that the Trump administration, once again, doesn’t know what it is doing.
Only this time they are doing it on steroids by adding Elon Musk with his chainsaw into the mix. The result has been the destruction of whole agencies that protect us against diseases and pandemics, climate disasters, and health of the economy, since Trump’s tariffs are making no economic sense.
It is the natural consequence of President Trump wanting to destroy our closest alliances with a trade war and allying himself with the Putins and Kim Jong un’s of the world that kill their citizens with impunity, where the only law is might makes right.
He is attempting to bring back the Law of the Jungle in installing a government with those that will only obey him, an impossible situation in the modern world that can only precipitate another Great Recession, or even Great Depression.
President Biden did the right thing with his New, New Deal legislation by working with congress to modernize our infrastructure and manufacturing that has brought back 700,000 manufacturing jobs.
Foreign governments are already retaliating against Trump’s tariffs, creating a trade war that no one can win. The aluminum and steel tariffs will drive a hole in the US auto industry, say their CEOs, when the Great Recession had once before bankrupted them so that President Obama and congress agreed to bail them out.
Trump was able to fool American voters into a second term because of their wholesale ignorance of the US economy and its position in the world. The US is still the world’s wealthiest country that recovered most quickly from the COVID-19 pandemic yet has also the most unequal wealth and income disparities in the developed world.
When I last wrote about our wealth gap in 2017, the U.S. was in 106th place of the 149 countries in income inequality as ranked by the CIA’s World Factbook. The Gini Index compiled by the CIA measures and compares living standards.
The U.S. had a Gini inequality index on the level of Peru and Cameroon. Whereas Finland and the Scandinavian countries are at the top of equality rankings, Germany and France are 12th and 20th, respectively. The higher the index, the greater the income gap between the wealthy and poor citizens of a country.
It is why we have such a partisan divide between Democrat-led blue states and Republican-led red states that Republican tax cuts and record budget deficits most harmed.
Donald Trump has always wanted tax cuts because he has barely paid any taxes himself. But this is only because he has extorted, stiffed and lied to so many people and institutions when running the Trump Organization. Why would he behave differently as president?
We are already “hearing the truth” about the havoc his “extortion machine” is wreaking. When will we be ready for “a counterreaction, which will prove to be an opportunity and rebirth ?“
When the damage is so great that Americans become “as mad as hell and are not going to take it anymore.”
Harlan Green © 2025
Follow Harlan Green on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarlanGreen
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