The headlines this week are wild: Trump is threatening nutso tariffs against America’s traditional trading partners (although none for Russia, of course), demanding that our allies proclaim their willingness to go to war with China, and — along with his billionaire buddies — looting our government while immiserating small business and the American middle class.
As a result, America stands today at an extraordinarily dangerous crossroads economically, politically, and geopolitically. We’re talking a second Republican Great Depression, fascism, and the very real possibility of a third world war.
As the Trump administration abandons manufacturing and building out America’s infrastructure in favor of financial speculation and deregulation, we’re hollowing out the very foundations of real wealth. Simultaneously, the GOP is doubling down on policies that have repeatedly crashed our economy, stripped support from working families, and handed more money and political power to the morbidly rich.
Now, with economic stagnation looming and international tensions escalating, Trump’s erratic and belligerent approach threatens not just recession but war. If Democrats and people who love America and democracy don’t find their voice — and fast — we may be sleepwalking not only into a massive economic disaster, but into a global conflict that could define the rest of this century or even bring about the end of western civilization.
There are a few basic principles that undergird this argument. I’ll walk through them here, building the case brick by brick, and ending with the most important task before us.
First, let’s get back to basics. There are only two primary ways to grow a nation’s wealth: by extracting resources from the earth or by manufacturing goods, adding value to those resources. Everything else — lawns getting mowed, nails getting done, stocks getting traded — may move money around or improve quality of life, but don’t grow the actual wealth of a nation.
For example, I wash your car and you mow my lawn. We exchange $20 bills. It’s nice, it’s neighborly, but it didn’t grow our nation’s economy at all.
Now, suppose you go into the ground and mine and refine iron ore, and I use some of it to make an ax. You’ve turned rocks into raw material. I’ve turned that into a tool that can build homes, cut timber, or create more tools.
That is real wealth creation. That ax becomes part of the wealth of our country; that’s what Adam Smith meant in The Wealth of Nations when he pointed out that economies grow when labor transforms nature into value, as I explained in detail on the Hartmann Report.
A third, indirect way to grow national wealth is through government investment in the infrastructure that supports those two main drivers. Roads, bridges, rail, and ports move goods. Broadband and schools cultivate talent. Green energy projects power the nation. Free college, health care, paid sick leave, and maternity leave make for a healthier, more well-educated, and thus more productive workforce. Strong regulation prevents scammers, monopolists, and fraudsters from distorting or hijacking markets.
Without these supports — especially when the bulk of national income is being siphoned off by the morbidly rich — productivity slows, innovation stalls, and economies become brittle. History is replete with examples of this type of collapse from ancient Rome to Europe stumbling into World Wars I and II.
The Democratic Party has largely understood this since the industrial revolution, as did the first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, who oversaw construction of the transcontinental railroad and funded over 70 free “Land Grant” colleges like MSU across the nation.
From FDR through Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton, Obama, and Biden, Democratic presidents have consistently invested in the physical and human infrastructure that powers wealth creation. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, the GI Bill, the WPA and CCC, the Clean Air and Water Acts, and most recently, the Inflation Reduction Act and CHIPS Act all fit this pattern.
Even Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, got it, although he was his party’s modern exception. He built the Interstate Highway System and warned Americans against the possibility that the military-industrial complex could corrupt Congress. His vision was of a balanced, productive America, not one dominated by war profiteers and Wall Street gamblers.
But the Republican Party since the 1920s (with the exception of Eisenhower) has marched in the opposite direction. From Coolidge and Hoover to Reagan and Trump, they’ve pushed a different story: that government is the problem and taxes are theft. Reagan kicked off the insanity with his massive tax cuts and neoliberal rhetoric. He didn’t just demonize government; in 1983, he legalized stock buybacks, something previously considered felony criminal stock manipulation. This move transformed American corporations from engines of productivity into tools for enriching shareholders and executives.
This launched a massive shift in our economy. Financialization began to replace manufacturing as the central engine of growth. Instead of making things, our largest corporations became obsessed with gaming markets, flipping debt, and enriching insiders. Wall Street and monopolies (also allowed by changes Reagan made in our law) overtook and then devastated Main Street, and the real wealth of the nation thus started to stagnate.
At the same time, Republicans attacked the very institutions that supported productivity. They gutted unions, fought to privatize Social Security and Medicare with their “Advantage” scam, deregulated the banking and energy sectors, and worked tirelessly to cripple the regulatory state. When Obama created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to prevent another financial crisis, for example, Republicans moved swiftly to kneecap it. Under Trump, they’ve largely succeeded.
Now Trump is back, and he’s doubling down on Reaganomics with a vengeance. He’s illegally refusing to release funds from Biden’s infrastructure and manufacturing initiatives. He’s gutting environmental and workplace protections. And he’s promoting speculative financial schemes like Bitcoin, an unregulated, easily manipulated asset class that benefits insiders like his children and wealthy friends.
Ten of the last 11 recessions occurred under Republican presidents. That’s not a coincidence. The Financial Times recently pointed out that today’s America under GOP leadership now resembles a country suffering from “Dutch disease,” a term coined when the Netherlands’ economy was distorted by a single natural resource boom.
Instead of natural gas, our export is debt and the dollar itself. Our economy has become addicted to issuing Treasury bonds while cutting taxes for the morbidly rich.
In a healthy economy, windfalls get invested in productivity: roads, R&D, education, healthcare for working people. In today’s GOP-run economy, however, they’re getting funneled into yachts, stock buybacks, and political influence. Economists call this the “voracity effect”; a dynamic where powerful groups extract so much from the economy that they ultimately destabilize and then crash it. It’s economic cancer.
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” a $4 trillion giveaway to the wealthy, exemplified this perfectly. It wasn’t tax reform: it was looting.
But the biggest potential crisis is that this isn’t just bad economics: it’s dangerous geopolitics.
History shows that when working people lose access to opportunity and stability, populism and extremism rise. They demand scapegoats and embrace demagogues. In early 20th-century Europe, economic collapse and inequality paved the way for authoritarian regimes. The result was two world wars.
We’re now staring into the jaws of what political scientists call the Thucydides Trap: when a rising power (China) threatens a dominant one (the U.S.), and conflict becomes almost inevitable. Combine that with economic unrest, and it’s a recipe for disaster.
Trump is already stoking this fire.
According to the Financial Times, his administration is pressuring Japan and Australia to pledge support for a potential war over Taiwan. His undersecretary of defense, Elbridge Colby, is demanding troop commitments while simultaneously throwing U.S. alliances into chaos.
Worse, Trump is floating bizarre geoeconomic weapons: charging allied nations for access to U.S. financial markets, forcing them to buy long-term Treasury bonds, and tying military protection to economic tribute. He killed our main source of soft power, USAID, and has silenced the Voice of America.
This isn’t diplomacy: it’s shakedown politics dressed up as strategy. As the Financial Times reported, it’s part of Trump’s wider attempt to abandon cooperation in favor of coercion.
These are the hallmarks of an empire in decline, and that amplifies the danger of both domestic fascist takeover and a third world war.
When a nation abandons real wealth creation, concentrates power in a corrupt elite, abandons its public infrastructure, and pursues reckless foreign policy, the mass of people become outraged.
They rarely understand who did this to them — giving autocrats like Putin, Hitler, Orbán, and Trump the opportunity to assign blame to minorities and attack their political enemies — but they do know they’ve been screwed.
As public sentiment boils over and billionaire-owned media like Fox “News” and billionaire social media owners like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk use invisible, secret algorithms to increase their own profits by promoting and amplifying raw hate and rage, the outcomes, as we’ve seen throughout history, are predictable:
This is the road Trump and his toadies in the GOP have put us on.
Trump is poisoning our economy while destabilizing international diplomacy. He just fired 1,200 career professionals from the State Department, crippling our ability to engage in diplomacy and maintain peace.
He’s wrecking the low-wage workforce and our food supplies through immigration crackdowns and ICE raids.
He’s slowing growth and destroying small businesses with tariffs and erratic trade policies.
All while planning to expand ICE into an unaccountable, masked, nationwide secret-police-style paramilitary force that is already being used to suppress dissent and attack Democratic politicians, while it continues to terrorize immigrant communities.
Democrats and people of conscience must do more than hope the courts will stop this; the courts will not save us. We must speak out with moral clarity, economic fluency, and relentless courage.
We must call this what it is: a full-scale assault on our economy, our democracy, and the world order that’s prevented a third world war for nearly 80 years.
We must make it clear that Biden’s investments were beginning to rebuild our productive base, and Trump is trying to salt the earth.
And we must act. Talk to your neighbors. Write letters. Post on social media. Show up to town halls. Demand that your representatives speak the truth.
If we don’t, the noise machine on the right will define the narrative. If we wait, it may be too late. July 17th will be another huge opportunity; please show up.
The 2026 midterms aren’t just another election, and neither are the hundreds of state and local off-year and special elections that’ll be happening this year. They may be our last chance to change course.
We could lose more than our democracy. We could lose the very idea of America and, with it, the peaceful world we’ve anchored since 1945.
Tag, we’re it.
