Trump Economy Quotes

The new American economy runs on purchased merit, and now we bear the consequences on a national security level.

Our economy takes endlessly from workers, asking more and more from them in ever-tighter time frames, even as employers offer less and less security and lower wages in return.

Extremism, racism, nativism, and isolationism, driven by fear of the unknown, tend to spike in periods of economic and social stress—a period like our own. Americans today have little trust in government; household incomes lag behind our usual middle-class expectations. The fires of fear in America have long found oxygen when broad, seemingly threatening change is afoot. Now, in the second decade of the new century, in the presidency of Donald Trump, the alienated are being mobilized afresh by changing demography, by broadening conceptions of identity, and by an economy that prizes Information Age brains over manufacturing brawn. “We are determined to take our country back,” David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, said in Charlottesville. “We are going to fulfill the promises of Donald Trump. That’s what we believed in, that’s why we voted for Donald Trump. Because he said he’s going to take our country back. And that’s what we gotta do.

There are marriages that never happened, children never born, chances never taken, because the struggle to hang on to what you have is so great that it hurts your heart to hope for more. You can’t afford the literal cost, and you can’t afford the psychic cost. In the postemployment economy, a generation learned to manage its expectations.

The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but who feared that they were losing their economic worth.

Many, but by no means all of us, have been shielded until now from the worst effects of his pathologies by a stable economy and a lack of serious crises. But the out-of-control COVID-19 pandemic, the possibility of an economic depression, deepening social divides along political lines thanks to Donald’s penchant for division, and devastating uncertainty about our country’s future have created a perfect storm of catastrophes that no one is less equipped than my uncle to manage. Doing

The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.

Economic inequality has long been a signature issue of the left, and it rose in prominence after the Great Recession began in 2007. It ignited the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011 and the presidential candidacy of the self-described socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016, who proclaimed that “a nation will not survive morally or economically when so few have so much, while so many have so little.” 2 But in that year the revolution devoured its children and propelled the candidacy of Donald Trump, who claimed that the United States had become “a third-world country” and blamed the declining fortunes of the working class not on Wall Street and the one percent but on immigration and foreign trade. The left and right ends of the political spectrum, incensed by economic inequality for their different reasons, curled around to meet each other, and their shared cynicism about the modern economy helped elect the most radical American president in recent times.

They were and are children of privilege... the privilege taught, learned, and imbibed, in a "liberal arts education" is the privilege to indict. These children have, in the main, never worked, learned to obey, command, construct, amend, or complete - to actually contribute to the society. They have learned to be shrill, and that their indictment, on the economy, on sex, on race, on the environment, though based on no experience other than hearsay, must trump any discourse, let alone opposition. It occurred to me that I had seen this behavior elsewhere, where it was called developmental difficulty.

from shithole countries come here?” He had just met with the prime minister of Norway. Why not more Norwegians? Or Asians who could help the economy? Durbin was sickened. Graham was floored.

manufacturing false hierarchies based on race and gender in order to enforce a brutal class system is a very long story. Our modern capitalist economy was born thanks to two very large subsidies: stolen Indigenous land ​and stolen African people. Both required the creation of intellectual theories that ranked the relative value of human lives and labor, placing white men at the top. These church and state–sanctioned theories of white (and Christian) supremacy are what allowed Indigenous civilizations to be actively “unseen” by European explorers—visually perceived and yet not acknowledged to have preexisting rights to the land—and entire richly populated continents to be legally classified as unoccupied and therefore fair game on an absurd “finders keepers” basis.

McConnell made a decision to make the economy worse to improve his political prospects. People lost their jobs, their homes, and their retirement savings because McConnell opposed any action that would help the economy if he thought it would also help Obama.

Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments.

The ideas in each—from profit-sharing with employees to new approaches to job training, from reform of the financial system to promote long-term time horizons on investment to more progressive taxes and large-scale infrastructure investment—would help create a more just economy.

Trump is the best thing ever to have happened to the new American oligarchy. In addition to his tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks, he stokes divisiveness in ways that keeps the bottom 90 percent from seeing how the oligarchy has taken over the reins of government, twisted government to its benefit, and siphoned off the economy’s benefits. His deal with the oligarchy has been simple: He’ll stoke division and tribalism so most Americans won’t see CEOs getting exorbitant pay while they’re slicing the pay of average workers, won’t pay attention to the giant tax cut that went to big corporations and the wealthy, and won’t notice a boardroom culture that tolerates financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign donations.

Tens of millions of Americans were angry, feeling forgotten by bureaucrats in Washington, derided by liberal elites, and humiliated by a global economy that had sped ahead of their skills and consigned their children to be the first American generation to fare less well than their parents. Trump crowned himself their champion. He promised them he would “make America great again,” a brilliant, one-size-fits-all mantra through which this segment of the country could channel their frustrations. They

Guess what? None of these guys said anything when the Trump administration added $1 trillion to the federal budget deficit by the end of 2019—before a single dime was spent on COVID-19 relief. They were rubber stamps for it in Congress. Many of them who raised huge stinks about TARP were only too happy to let Trump bail out farmers hurt by his trade war with China. These are the same people who were willing to destroy our economy to make their point but went on to suddenly abandon this core principle.

Since President Trump was elected, the economy has added three million jobs. In fact, today there are more jobs available than there are unemployed. That’s resulted in the lowest unemployment rate in seventeen years. The stock market has roared to new highs despite the Federal Reserve raising interest rates five times since Trump’s election.

Electricity, shelter, and a safe place to sleep . . . trump the need to preserve your credit score, or purchase a new gizmo.

The cultural causes of Brexit and Trump are exacerbated by the economic causes—causes that arise from the emergence of an intangible economy.

The crucial lesson of Brexit and of Trump's victory, is that leaders who are seen as representing the failed neoliberal status quo are no match for the demagogues and neo-fascists. Only a bold and genuinely redistributive progressive agenda can offer real answers to inequality and the crises in democracy...We need to remember this the next time we're asked to back a party or candidate in an election. In this destabilized era, status-quo politicians often cannot get the job done. On the other hand, the choice that may at first seem radical, maybe even a little risky, may well be the most pragmatic one in this volatile era...radical political and economic change is our only hope of avoiding radical change to our physical world.

Since the President’s 2016 election, the economy has added over 6.7 million jobs—more than the combined populations of Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Delaware, Rhode Island, and Montana in 2018. Additionally, this total is 4.8 million more jobs than the Congressional Budget Office projected would have been created in its final forecast before the 2016 election. . . . Most notably, the unemployment rate for African Americans reached a new low of 5.4 percent, falling 2.6 percentage points since President Trump’s election.”12 For anyone with a brain, that is a big deal.

The four pillars of Trump’s presidency are these: improving the economy, stopping illegal immigration, defeating Islamic terrorism, and preventing foreign nations from exploiting America financially.

The rage bubbling up from our impoverished and disenfranchised working class presages a looming and dangerous right-wing backlash. I spent two years traveling the country to write a book on the Christian Right called American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. I visited former manufacturing towns where for many the end of the world is no longer an abstraction. They have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged the working classes into profound personal and economic despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of the demagogues and charlatans of the radical Christian Right who offer a belief in magic, miracles, and the fiction of a utopian Christian nation. And unless we rapidly re-enfranchise our dispossessed workers into the economy, unless we give them hope, our democracy is doomed.

Contrary to how I was taught to think about economics, everybody wasn’t operating in their own rational economic self-interest. The majority of white Americans had voted for a worldview supported not by a different set of numbers than I had, but by a fundamentally different story about how the economy works; about race and government; about who belongs and who deserves; about how we got here and what the future holds. That story was more powerful than cold economic calculations. And it was exactly what was keeping us from having nice things—to the contrary, it had brought us Donald Trump. So, I made an unexpected decision. I decided

In another discussion with the president, Cohn unveiled a Commerce Department study showing the U.S. absolutely needed to trade with China. “If you’re the Chinese and you want to really just destroy us, just stop sending us antibiotics. You know we don’t really produce antibiotics in the United States?” The study also showed that nine major antibiotics were not produced in the United States, including penicillin. China sold 96.6 percent of all antibiotics used here. “We don’t produce penicillin.” Trump looked at Cohn strangely. “Sir, so when mothers’ babies are dying of strep throat, what are you going to say to them?” Cohn asked Trump if he would tell them, “Trade deficits matter”? “We’ll buy it from another country,” Trump proposed. “So now the Chinese are going to sell it [antibiotics] to the Germans, and the Germans are going to mark it up and sell it to us. So our trade deficit will go down with the Chinese, up with the Germans.” U.S. consumers would be paying a markup. “Is that good for our economy?” Navarro said they would buy it through some country other than Germany. Same problem, Cohn said. “You’re just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

On a collective level, the stakes are higher. We know that we live in complex times that demand complex thoughts and conversations—and those, in turn, demand the very time and space that is nowhere to be found. The convenience of limitless connectivity has neatly paved over the nuances of in-person conversation, cutting away so much information and context in the process. In an endless cycle where communication is stunted and time is money, there are few moments to slip away and fewer ways to find each other. Given how poorly art survives in a system that only values the bottom line, the stakes are cultural as well. What the tastes of neoliberal techno manifest–destiny and the culture of Trump have in common is impatience with anything nuanced, poetic, or less-than-obvious.

The most powerful country in the world has handed over all of it's affairs, the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of it's water, the viability of it's air, the safety of it's food, the future of it's vast system of education, the soundness of it's national highways, airways, and railways, the apocalyptic potential of nuclear arsenal to a carnival barker who introduce the phrase "grab em by the pussy", into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say "if a black man can be president than any white man, no matter how fallen, can be president", and in that perverse way, the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled. The American Tragedy now being wrought, is larger than most imaged and will not end with Trump. In recent times, whiteness as an overt political tactic has been restrained by a kind of cordiality held that it's overt invocation would scare off moderate whites. This has proved to be only half-true at best. Trump's legacy will be exposing the patina of decency for what it is and revealing just how much a demagague can get away with. It does not take much to imagine another politician, wiser in the ways of Washington, schooled in the methodology of governance, now liberated from the pretense of anti-racist civility, doing a much more effective job than Trump.

I talked to Llewellyn and got a thick briefing packet with the key arguments on both sides. The problem, for those who wanted to stay in the EU, was that many of the arguments for Brexit were built on lies: about how much the UK paid into the European Union; about how Brexit wouldn’t hurt the British economy. Another problem was that the Brexit campaign was tapping into the same sense of nationalism and nostalgia that the Trump campaign was promoting back home: the days of Churchill, the absence of immigrants and intrusive international institutions. The arguments for staying in the EU were grounded in facts, not emotion: The EU was Britain’s largest market. The EU offered Britain a stronger voice in global affairs. Even the name of the campaign—Remain—sounded like a concession that life wasn’t going to be all that you hoped it would be.

The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but who feared that they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

Obama himself, underestimating Trump and thus underestimating the power of whiteness, believed the Republican nominee too objectionable to actually win. In this Obama was, tragically, wrong. And so the most powerful country in the world has handed over all of its affairs—the prosperity of an entire economy, the security of some 300 million citizens, the purity of its water, the viability of its air, the safety of its food, the future of its vast system of education, the soundness of its national highways, airways, and railways, the apocalyptic potential of its nuclear arsenal—to a carnival barker who introduced the phrase “grab ’em by the pussy” into the national lexicon. It is as if the white tribe united in demonstration to say, “If a black man can be president, then any white man—no matter how fallen—can be president.” And in that perverse way the democratic dreams of Jefferson and Jackson were fulfilled.

One man’s real estate crisis is another’s opportunity. All markets work in this way, providing investors with cash the chance to buy—stocks, bonds, real estate, and commodities—when prices are depressed. This reality is devoid of emotional weight and is the basic truth that keeps capitalist economies working.

In the twentieth century, the masses revolted against exploitation, and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Trump might thus demonstrate an opposite trajectory to that of traditional socialist revolutions. The Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital for the economy, but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power, but who feared that they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people, but against an economic elite that does not need them any more.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against

Another State Department representative noted that the central government lacked legitimacy in the eyes of the Afghan public, the lowest in 10 years, according to polling done in the country. He observed that the illicit economy, opium and illegal mining, was the size of the regular economy, and a significant portion was under control of Taliban insurgents.

Chinese people need to realize is that it would serve China’s long-term strategic interests for China to continue opening up its economy even while the Trump administration has been creating more difficulties for foreign businesses to either invest or export to America. Over time, this will mean more countries will be trading and investing more with China than with America.

Trump was determined to impose steel tariffs. “Look,” Trump said, “we’ll try it. If it doesn’t work, we’ll undo it.” “Mr. President,” Cohn said, “that’s not what you do with the U.S. economy.” Because the stakes were so high, it was crucial to be conservative. “You do something when you’re 100 percent certain it will work, and then you pray like hell that you’re right. You don’t do 50/50s with the U.S. economy.

This is not just the story of Donald Trump in 2016; it is also the story of William Jennings Bryan, whom we’ve already met, in 1896. During the Gilded Age, populists like Bryan surged to prominence. They challenged the laissez-faire orthodoxy and appealed to America’s working class, a segment of society that was reeling from seismic shocks produced by the Industrial Revolution and a fast-globalizing American economy.

Everyone in America understands ObamaCare is destroying jobs. It is driving up health care costs. It is killing health benefits. It is shattering the economy. All across the country in all 50 States--it doesn't matter what State you go to, you can go to any State in the Union, it doesn't matter if you are talking to Republicans or Democrats or Independents or Libertarians--Americans understand this thing is not working.   Yet Washington is pretending not to know. Washington is pretending to have no awareness. Instead we have politicians giving speeches about how wonderful ObamaCare is. At the same time they go to the President and ask for an exemption from ObamaCare for Members of Congress.   If ObamaCare is so wonderful, why is it that its loudest advocates don't want to be subject to it? I will confess that is a very difficult one to figure out.   DC

So it's 2019. I'm gonna say the right thing to do is for the US to declare bankruptcy (Trump can do it… done it before…), and dismantle the criminal state of Israel as it exists today. Unfortunately, politicians are so full of shit and AIPAC money, and the economy is so addicted to war, and the US population is so fucking stupid... that we’ll probably have to go and try to fuck up another two or three countries before moving on to a decent, honest life.

Trump is a populist who understands the frustrations of the American people. Illegal immigration affects the least fortunate Americans more than it does anyone else. Those at the bottom of the ladder should not be undercut by cheap, illegal labor. Nor should illegal immigrants be released into the community after committing crimes against American citizens. The president understands that immigration into our country should be based on fairness, the needs of the American economy, and the safety of both American citizens and legal immigrants rather than family unification or proximity to our borders.

At the July Republican Convention, “never-Trump” delegates fought his nomination, only to be outraged at rules changes that gave Trump far more delegates than he had earned. Still, some could be comforted by the 2016 Republican platform, which offered Movement Conservative Republicans everything they had ever dreamed of. The platform chastised President Barack Obama for “regulating to death a free market economy that he does not like and does not understand” (which was manifestly untrue), called for originalist judges who would stop abortion and gay marriage, and insisted on returning federal power to the states.

When people talk about for-profit colleges, they often do so with a lot of disdain. If traditional colleges that take in a fraction of willing students every year annoy you, then you might be disdainful of their "prestige cartel." If you are concerned about vulnerable people making expensive educational decisions with little education, then you might disdain the "predatory" for-profit schools. If you think that a strong work ethic can trump all manner of troubles, you might disdain the "weak" people who go to a "predatory" school. What is interesting to me is how much disdain is spread among students and schools and how little disdain there is for labor markets.

Kevin D. Williamson in a sneering screed published in March 2016 in National Review, a leading conservative journal: The problem isn’t that Americans cannot sustain families, but that they do not wish to. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy—which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog—you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence—and the incomprehensible malice—of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul. For

That’s why, in addition to exposing the vast conspiracy against it, I’m going to tell you about the real Trump presidency, which has accomplished so much despite the dark forces arrayed against it. That includes tax reform, a booming economy, record-low unemployment, and a renewed manufacturing base. ISIS is vanquished, there are historic peace talks on the Korean peninsula, and we are moving toward a more mutually respectful relationship with China. I’m talking about fairer trade with partners who have run roughshod over previous administrations, cared little for what happened to most Americans as long as their Wall Street and corporate donors kept the contributions flowing.

The lessons of post-Communist states can help us to think through some of the difficulty of describing the corruption—or whatever it ought to be called—of the Trump administration. Soviet Bloc countries, with their one-party systems and command economies, fostered a symbiotic relationship between power and wealth (though wealth was not measured in money). In fact, the only way to accumulate wealth was to become a part of the party hierarchy—and at the top of the party pyramid, people could achieve fantastic wealth. These systems served as the foundations for the mafia states of Hungary and Russia, where the party was replaced with a political clan centered on a patron who distributes money and power.

In 2018 the common person feels increasingly irrelevant. Lots of mysterious words are bandied around excitedly in TED Talks, government think tanks, and high-tech conferences—globalization, blockchain, genetic engineering, artificial intelligence, machine learning—and common people may well suspect that none of these words are about them. The liberal story was the story of ordinary people. How can it remain relevant to a world of cyborgs and networked algorithms? In the twentieth century, the masses revolted against exploitation and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Trump might therefore demonstrate a trajectory opposite to that of traditional socialist revolutions.

One of the worst things that was done to us during the year of COVID was the purposeful attempt to divide us and further isolate us from one another. One of the very few mitigating factors of mass trauma is the sense that we are all in it together. In times of war, for example, suicide rates go down because there is a sense of common purpose. Members of the Trump administration made that impossible not because they were incompetent but because they thought it was a winning strategy. Promoting divisiveness among us suited their purposes, just as setting up a false dichotomy between the pandemic and the economy did. In real time it could be hard to gauge how cynical and cruel this ploy was, but in retrospect the extent of the deliberate sabotage is breathtaking. It’s hard to grapple with what was taken from us and even harder to fathom the depth of depravity required to do the taking.

Alexis de Tocqueville warned that as the economy and government of America got bigger, citizens could become smaller: less practiced in the forms of everyday power, more dependent on vast distant social machines, more isolated and atomized--and therefore more susceptible to despotism. He warned that if the "habits of the heart" fed by civic clubs and active self-government evaporated, citizens would regress to pure egoism. They would stop thinking about things greater than their immediate circle. Public life would disappear. And that would only accelerate their own disempowerment. This is painfully close to a description of the United States since Trump and Europe since Brexit. And the only way to reverse this vicious cycle of retreat and atrophy is to reverse it: to find a sense of purpose that is greater than the self, and to exercise power with others and for others in democratic life.

Mattis and Gary Cohn had several quiet conversations about The Big Problem: The president did not understand the importance of allies overseas, the value of diplomacy or the relationship between the military, the economy and intelligence partnerships with foreign governments. They met for lunch at the Pentagon to develop an action plan. One cause of the problem was the president’s fervent belief that annual trade deficits of about $500 billion harmed the American economy. He was on a crusade to impose tariffs and quotas despite Cohn’s best efforts to educate him about the benefits of free trade. How could they convince and, in their frank view, educate the president? Cohn and Mattis realized they were nowhere close to persuading him. The Groundhog Day–like meetings on trade continued and the acrimony only grew. “Let’s get him over here to the Tank,” Mattis proposed. The Tank is the Pentagon’s secure meeting room for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It might focus him. “Great idea,” Cohn said. “Let’s get him out of the White House.” No press; no TVs; no Madeleine Westerhout, Trump’s personal secretary, who worked within shouting distance of the Oval Office. There wouldn’t even be any looking out the window, because there were no windows in the Tank. Getting Trump out of his natural environment could do the trick. The idea was straight from the corporate playbook—a retreat or off-site meeting. They would get Trump to the Tank with his key national security and economic team to discuss worldwide strategic relations. Mattis and Cohn agreed. Together they would fight Trump on this. Trade wars or disruptions in the global markets could savage and undermine the precarious stability in the world. The threat could spill over to the military and intelligence community. Mattis couldn’t understand why the U.S. would want to pick a fight with allies, whether it was NATO, or friends in the Middle East, or Japan—or particularly with South Korea.

The current systems have failed to provide answers for citizens, and people are looking outside of the mainstream political spectrum. These dissatisfactions are now being used by right-wing, nativist, opportunist, corrupted, cynical political players. The same ones who helped create and stoke all of this now offer salvation. That's their game. It's the same strategy as defunding a program or regulatory agency they want to get rid of, then holding up its resulting ineffectiveness as evidence that it needs to be folded. If nationalist aggression, closed borders, exceptionalism of any kind really worked for society, North Korea would be the most prosperous country on earth. They have never really worked, but we keep buying it. That's how we got Trump, Brexit, Le Pen, Orban, etc. In Russia, President Putin is playing these games too: he exploits the complex of rage, pain, impoverishment of the Russian people caused by the shock economy and the Machiavellian privatization and deregulation that took place in the 1990s.

Five years later, the legacy of Trump’s presidency and his promises can be addressed. There never was an infrastructure bill. Trump’s budgets consistently proposed cuts to the social programs he vowed not to touch. He did little to combat the opioid epidemic he promised to end, with deaths rising by the end of his tenure. The national debt Trump promised to erase has ballooned by almost $7.8 trillion. Trump’s failed effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with nothing remains the nadir of his public approval, surpassing even the days following his incitement of an armed attack on the Capitol building in an effort to overturn his 2020 election loss. Trump has the worst jobs record of any president since 1939, with more than three million lost. He is, in fact, the worst jobs president “god ever created,” despite inheriting an economy that had finally begun to boom in the later years of the Obama administration. The promises of better healthcare didn’t materialize, and the job and wage growth from the economy he inherited were crushed by the pandemic he refused to address. Those were not the promises Trump kept.

That hidden economy, which still exists today, is one of love. There is self-interest, certainly, in all of these women's endeavors; for their trouble, they get shelter and food. But you don't do any of that - the mind-numbing care of small children, the endless repetition of cooking and laundry, the indignity of having a mind as fine as any man's and no opportunity to exercise it - without love. Either love for the owners of the dirty underwear and the sticky little hands, or love for people whose survival depends on the pittance you make for doing it. Almost three hundred years after Dam Smith was born, women still dominate the "caring professions" - teaching, nursing, social work - and are scarce in positions of financial or political power. Married women who work full-time still do substantially more cleaning, food preparation, and child-engagement tasks than their male partners. And when professional women's work becomes too time consuming, the care of children and the household isn't shared more equally with male partners, but outsourced to other women, frequently poor women of color. It is men who are raised to participate in a strict economy of self-interest. Most women could never afford that.

With China and Russia, the ideological contrast is clearer. Putin, the commandant of a petro-state that also happens to be, given its geography, one of the few nations on Earth likely to benefit from continued warming, sees basically no benefit to constraining carbon emissions or greening the economy—Russia’s or the world’s. Xi, now the leader-for-life of the planet’s rising superpower, seems to feel mutual obligations to the country’s growing prosperity and to the health and security of its people—of whom, it’s worth remembering, it has so many. In the wake of Trump, China has become a much more emphatic—or at least louder—green energy leader. But the incentives do not necessarily suggest it will make good on that rhetoric. In 2018, an illuminating study was published comparing how much a country was likely to be burdened by the economic impacts of climate change to its responsibility for global warming, measured by carbon emissions. The fate of India showcased the moral logic of climate change at its most grotesque: expected to be, by far, the world’s most hard-hit country, shouldering nearly twice as much of the burden as the next nation, India’s share of climate burden was four times as high as its share of climate guilt. China is in the opposite situation, its share of guilt four times as high as its share of the burden. Which, unfortunately, means it may be tempted to slow-walk its green energy revolution. The United States, the study found, presented a case of eerie karmic balance: its expected climate damages matching almost precisely its share of global carbon emissions. Not to say either share is small; in fact, of all the nations in the world, the U.S. was predicted to be hit second hardest.

Maybe nostalgia is itself the problem. A Democrat I met in Macon during a conversation we had about the local enthusiasm for Trump told me that “people want to go back to Mayberry”, the setting of the beloved old Andy Griffith Show. (As it happens, the actual model for Mayberry, Mount Airy, a bedraggled town in North Carolina, has gone all in on the Trump revolution, as the Washington Post recently reported.) Maybe it’s also true, as my liberal friends believe, that what people in this part of the country secretly long to go back to are the days when the Klan was riding high or when Quantrill was terrorizing the people of neighboring Kansas, or when Dred Scott was losing his famous court case. For sure, there is a streak of that ugly sentiment in the Trump phenomenon. But I want to suggest something different: that the nostalgic urge does not necessarily have to be a reactionary one. There is nothing un-progressive about wanting your town to thrive, about recognizing that it isn’t thriving today, about figuring out that the mid-century, liberal way worked better. For me, at least, that is how nostalgia unfolds. When I drive around this part of the country, I always do so with a WPA guidebook in hand, the better to help me locate the architectural achievements of the Roosevelt years. I used to patronize a list of restaurants supposedly favored by Harry Truman (they are slowly disappearing). And these days, as I pass Trump sign after Trump sign, I wonder what has made so many of Truman’s people cast their lot with this blustering would-be caudillo. Maybe what I’m pining for is a liberal Magic Kingdom, a non-racist midwest where things function again. For a countryside dotted with small towns where the business district has reasonable job-creating businesses in it, taverns too. For a state where the giant chain stores haven’t succeeded in putting everyone out of business. For an economy where workers can form unions and buy new cars every couple of years, where farmers enjoy the protection of the laws, and where corporate management has not been permitted to use every trick available to them to drive down wages and play desperate cities off one against the other. Maybe it’s just an impossible utopia, a shimmering Mayberry dream. But somehow I don’t think so.

OBAMA WENT THROUGH STAGES. That first day, I was in multiple meetings where he tried to lift everyone’s spirits. That evening, he interrupted the senior staff meeting in Denis McDonough’s office and gave a version of the speech that I’d now heard three times as we all sat there at the table. He was the only one standing. It was both admirable and heartbreaking watching him take everything in stride, working—still—to lift people’s spirits. When he was done, I spoke first. “It says a lot about you,” I said, “that you’ve spent the whole day trying to buck the rest of us up.” People applauded. Obama looked down. On the Thursday after the election, he had a long, amiable meeting with Trump. It left him somewhat stupefied. Trump had repeatedly steered the conversation back to the size of his rallies, noting that he and Obama could draw big crowds but Hillary couldn’t. He’d expressed openness to Obama’s arguments about healthcare, the Iran deal, immigration. He’d asked for recommendations for staff. He’d praised Obama publicly when the press was there. Afterward, Obama called a few of us up to the Oval Office to recap. “I’m trying to place him,” he said, “in American history.” He told us Trump had been perfectly cordial, but he’d almost taken pride in not being attached to a firm position on anything. “He peddles bullshit. That character has always been a part of the American story,” I said. “You can see it right back to some of the characters in Huckleberry Finn.” Obama chuckled. “Maybe that’s the best we can hope for.” In breaks between meetings in the coming days, he expressed disbelief that the election had been lost. With unemployment at 5 percent. With the economy humming. With the Affordable Care Act working. With graduation rates up. With most of our troops back home. But then again, maybe that’s why Trump could win. People would never have voted for him in a crisis. He kept talking it out, trying on different theories. He chalked it up to multiple car crashes at once. There was the letter from Comey shortly before the election, reopening the investigation into Clinton’s email server. There was the steady release of Podesta emails from Wikileaks through October. There was a rabid right-wing propaganda machine and a mainstream press that gorged on the story of Hillary’s emails, feeding Trump’s narrative of corruption.

Many models are constructed to account for regularly observed phenomena. By design, their direct implications are consistent with reality. But others are built up from first principles, using the profession’s preferred building blocks. They may be mathematically elegant and match up well with the prevailing modeling conventions of the day. However, this does not make them necessarily more useful, especially when their conclusions have a tenuous relationship with reality. Macroeconomists have been particularly prone to this problem. In recent decades they have put considerable effort into developing macro models that require sophisticated mathematical tools, populated by fully rational, infinitely lived individuals solving complicated dynamic optimization problems under uncertainty. These are models that are “microfounded,” in the profession’s parlance: The macro-level implications are derived from the behavior of individuals, rather than simply postulated. This is a good thing, in principle. For example, aggregate saving behavior derives from the optimization problem in which a representative consumer maximizes his consumption while adhering to a lifetime (intertemporal) budget constraint.† Keynesian models, by contrast, take a shortcut, assuming a fixed relationship between saving and national income. However, these models shed limited light on the classical questions of macroeconomics: Why are there economic booms and recessions? What generates unemployment? What roles can fiscal and monetary policy play in stabilizing the economy? In trying to render their models tractable, economists neglected many important aspects of the real world. In particular, they assumed away imperfections and frictions in markets for labor, capital, and goods. The ups and downs of the economy were ascribed to exogenous and vague “shocks” to technology and consumer preferences. The unemployed weren’t looking for jobs they couldn’t find; they represented a worker’s optimal trade-off between leisure and labor. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these models were poor forecasters of major macroeconomic variables such as inflation and growth.8 As long as the economy hummed along at a steady clip and unemployment was low, these shortcomings were not particularly evident. But their failures become more apparent and costly in the aftermath of the financial crisis of 2008–9. These newfangled models simply could not explain the magnitude and duration of the recession that followed. They needed, at the very least, to incorporate more realism about financial-market imperfections. Traditional Keynesian models, despite their lack of microfoundations, could explain how economies can get stuck with high unemployment and seemed more relevant than ever. Yet the advocates of the new models were reluctant to give up on them—not because these models did a better job of tracking reality, but because they were what models were supposed to look like. Their modeling strategy trumped the realism of conclusions. Economists’ attachment to particular modeling conventions—rational, forward-looking individuals, well-functioning markets, and so on—often leads them to overlook obvious conflicts with the world around them.

How will Trump make America great again? The answer: any way you want it to happen. I might imagine that Trump improves the economy, because that’s what I care about, while you imagine he defeats ISIS, because you think that is the top priority. With Trump, you get to fill in the blanks with your most potent self-hypnosis.

We associate the settling of the country with white colonists. We grow up with those lessons of our history and culture. Although the labor of the Blacks was indispensable to the fledgling American economy, slavery denied them the recognition and rights of equal participation. The result was persistent discrimination, which further disenfranchised them from full civic participation, with each perpetuating the other. White and black cultural traditions came to develop their own idioms, furthering the racial divide.

Since the election of Donald J. Trump, investors have become extremely exuberant about tax reform, deregulation and promises of economic growth. They think of the president as the archetypal billionaire and a magic bullet for all economic troubles. But the President won’t stop business cycles, and has far less control the economy than people believe.

South Korea had a population of 50 million people, the 27th-largest country in the world but with an economy that was the 11th-largest and a GDP of $1.5 trillion, the same as Russia’s.

Although a Black man had helped to right the tilted economy, he was still guilty of being a Black man in the highest office in the land.

Trump’s equally indirect claim to “Make America Great Again” in his 2016 presidential campaign—where “great” is a euphemism for “white.

Yet this natural empathy and connection with other animals is not the final word, and it leads to no predetermined outcomes. There are competing instincts, whether greed, desire, or more a Tavistock and specific I'm pluses like hunting and killing that canight trump our inclination toward more compassionate answer nurturing ways. We can be pulled in opposite directions, and it may be social pressure or conditioning or reason that pushes us down one path or the other.

The Deep State is the big story of our time. It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism and the militarization of foreign policy, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure that has given us the most unequal society in almost a century, and the political dysfunction that has paralyzed day-to-day governance and driven voters to embrace Trump.

Voters in the Republican primary in South Carolina who handed Trump a walkover victory declared terrorism to be their foremost concern, one that eclipsed a low-wage economy; deteriorating living standards that have led to an actual increase in the death rate of the GOP’s core demographic of late-middle aged, non-college educated whites; and the most expensive and least available health care in the “developed” world. So while Trump—a Vietnam-era draft avoider who appeared not even to know what the nuclear triad was—could hardly be considered a product of the national security sector of the Deep State, his demagogic skills and authoritarian demeanor placed him in a far better position than his rivals to exploit the national neurosis created by the war on terror.

But it was really the then-popular right-wing demagogue Glenn Beck who gave Republicans a taste of what was to come as the recession deepened. Beck was an apocalyptic yet strangely ebullient conspiracy theorist who on his daily Fox News broadcasts filled blackboard after blackboard with crazy Venn diagrams exposing the hidden links between 1960s radicals and Barack Obama. But he also broke with many Republican dogmas, particularly on economics and foreign policy, writing in one of his books, “Under President Bush, politics and global corporations dictated much of our economic and border policy. Nation building and internationalism also played a huge role in our move away from the founding principles.” Beck’s economic nationalism and isolationism struck a chord with the public, and many flocked to his sold-out rallies to hear him denounce phantom leftists but also Wall Street and the big banks. He even wrote a bestselling thriller in which all these evil forces join hands to squelch American liberty. For all his bombast, Beck was among the first on the right to report the truth that the American middle class was being hollowed out and that its children faced drastically reduced prospects. That a small class of highly educated people was benefiting from the new global economy and becoming fantastically wealthy. And that vast sections of the country had become deserted, heartbroken . . . and angry. Mainstream Republicans never got the message. Donald Trump did.

Today, Chicago, like London, sucks in the best talent from its interior in the Midwest, where the swing to Trump was strongest. In the past, Chicago acted as a regional locomotive, buying the Midwest’s farm produce and other raw commodities and then converting them into products. The city was linked to its surrounding geography and vice versa. Now it mostly hovers above its hinterlands. In some ways it is also parasitic on them.44 Much like the giant sucking sound of London hoovering up the UK’s talent, Chicago now takes the best and the brightest from the small towns of America and plugs them into the global economy. Chicago’s success is no longer symbiotic with its rural neighbours. It comes at their expense

Here is my recommendation for President Trump and the new Congress. Turn immediately to our glorious national institutions, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine, for a report to the nation on the key areas for science and technology investments in the coming generation. Ask them to recommend an organizational strategy for a science-based scaling up of national and global R&D efforts. Call on America’s research universities to add their own brainstorming to the work of the national academies. Later in 2017, the president and Congress should then meet in a joint session of Congress to set forth a new technology vision for the nation and an R&D strategy to achieve it.

If you want our trade deficit to go down, we can make that happen. Let’s just blow up the economy!

fourth text Kushner advised was necessary to understand Trump was Scott Adams’s book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter. Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, explains in Win Bigly that Trump’s misstatements of fact are not regrettable errors or ethical lapses, but part of a technique called “intentional wrongness persuasion.” Adams argues Trump “can invent any reality” for most voters on most issues, and “all you will remember is that he provided his reasons, he didn’t apologize, and his opponents called him a liar like they always do.” Kushner said that Scott Adams’s approach could be applied to Trump’s recent February 4 State of the Union speech when he had claimed, “Our economy is the best it has ever been.” The economy was indeed in excellent shape then, but not the best in history, Kushner acknowledged.

The television networks would broadcast these sessions live; the newspapers would report on them, and Trump’s other coronavirus-related pronouncements, as though they were the stuff of an intelligible presidency, with positions, principles, and a strategy. As a result, even as hospitals across the country buckled, people died, and the economy tanked, more than half of all Americans claimed to approve of Trump’s response to the pandemic. Some people compared the Trumpian response to COVID-19 to the Soviet government’s response to the catastrophic accident at the Chernobyl power plant in 1986.

Every ordinary person around my age has a secret self from before the crash, one who dared to dream of more than a life of necessities reclassified as luxuries. There are marriages that never happened, children never born, chances never taken, because the struggle to hang on to what you have is so great that it hurts your heart to hope for more. You can’t afford the literal cost, and you can’t afford the psychic cost. In the postemployment economy, a generation learned to manage its expectations. The rage, though—that stays with you.

The doctrine that low taxes on the wealthy are the secret of prosperity has been tested again and again since the 1980s. It was tested in 1993, when Bill Clinton raised taxes, and conservatives predicted disaster; instead, he presided over a huge economic expansion. It was tested under George W. Bush, who cut taxes again, and whose supporters promised a boom; what he actually got was lackluster growth followed by financial collapse. It was tested in 2013, when Barack Obama allowed some of the Bush tax cuts to expire, while raising some other taxes to pay for Obamacare; the economy just kept chugging along. It was, finally, tested by Donald Trump, who passed a big tax cut in 2017 amid promises of another economic miracle; even as late as early 2019, the Trump tax cut was looking like a big fizzle. There were also tests at the state level.

Above all, the president stressed that even though the virus was extremely serious, continuing the lockdowns was shattering people, destroying the economy, keeping kids out of school, devastating small businesses.

Others, including myself, felt Donald Trump’s victory would be a catastrophe. Before the election, I joined with my colleagues at Foreign Policy to publish the magazine’s first editorial in its fifty-year history to ever take sides in a presidential election. On behalf of our editorial team, I wrote that we felt it necessary to make “clear the great magnitude of the threat that a Donald Trump presidency would pose to the United States. The dangers Trump presents as president stretch beyond the United States to the international economy, to global security, to America’s allies, as well as to countless innocents everywhere who would be the victims of his inexperience, his perverse policy views, and the profound unsuitability of his temperament for the office he seeks.

Early in the crisis, many right-wing figures, including President Trump, used traffic deaths—some 37,000 annually—to make the case that some amount of loss of life is an acceptable price to pay for a strong economy. (In the case of the pandemic, we’re talking truly staggering figures.) It was a bad analogy in a lot of ways, but it helped emphasize the strange tolerance we have in our culture for traffic deaths and how they can desensitize us to other forms of cruelty and injustice.

Back in late March 2020, standing in the Rose Garden -- hundreds of thousands of deaths ago -- President Donald Trump said, "I wish we could have our old life back. We had the greatest economy that we've ever had, and we didn't have death." We've always had death. We've just avoided its gaze. We hide it so we can forget it, so we can go on believing it won't happen to us. But during the pandemic, death felt closer and possible, and everywhere -- to everyone. We are the survivors of an era defined by death. We will have to move the furniture of our minds to accommodate this newly visible guest.

But on January 29, Peter Navarro, Trump’s trade adviser, wrote a memo to the National Security Council warning that when the coronavirus in China reached U.S. soil, it could risk the health or lives of millions and cost the economy trillions of dollars.

While market economies are often thought of as money economies, they are still more so knowledge economies…. Economic transactions are purchases and sales of knowledge.”   “After all, the cavemen had the same natural resources at their disposal as we have today…. We are all in the business of buying and selling knowledge from one another, because we are each so profoundly ignorant of what it takes to complete the whole process of which we are a part.”   “‘How could we have gone so wrong?’ … The short answer is that power trumps knowledge.”   —THOMAS SOWELL, Knowledge and Decisions, 1979 (P. 47), AND Basic Economics, 2007 (P. 424)

Do you want to know why the job economy is so bad, why there are so few jobs, why we have the lowest workforce participation in decades in the United States? Small businesses generate two-thirds of all new jobs in the economy, and small businesses have been hammered under ObamaCare unlike ever before.   If

You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people — now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive, hateful, mean-spirited rhetoric. Now some of those folks — they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America. But the other basket — and I know this because I see friends from all over America here — I see friends from Florida and Georgia and South Carolina and Texas — as well as, you know, New York and California — but that other basket of people are people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they’re just desperate for change. It doesn’t really even matter where it comes from. They don’t buy everything he says, but he seems to hold out some hope that their lives will be different. They won’t wake up and see their jobs disappear, lose a kid to heroin, feel like they’re in a dead end. Those are people we have to understand and empathize with as well.

With this election, Vladimir Putin, the former director of Russia’s intelligence agency, sees the election of Donald Trump as the fastest way to destabilize the United States, damage its economy, as well as fracture both the European Union and NATO. These events, which start with the election of Trump, would allow Russia to become the strongest of the world’s three Superpowers and reorder the globe with a dominant Russia at the helm.

The belief that the imperative of growth trumps life itself underlies all corporate and most government policies. Conservatives attack big government, but praise its responsibility to support the private sector through subsidies, infrastructure, and military intervention—all forms of externalizing costs. The result is an economy, writes Hillman, that is “… the God we nourish with actual human blood.

Another small business owner around that table owned several fast food restaurants. She had a problem. She owned enough fast food restaurants that she had over 50 employees. I will mention the restaurant business and the fast food business side in particular is quite labor dependent. I doubt if there is a sector in this economy that has been hurt more than the labor in the fast food business. But her problem was she had enough stores so she was over 50 employees, so that strategy wouldn't work for her. She described how she has already forcibly reduced the hours of every one of her employees to 29 hours per week.   I will tell you this woman almost began to tear up. She was emotional. She was not happy about this, to put it mildly. She said: Listen, we have been in business a long time. Many of these employees we have known 10 or 20 years. These are single moms. These are people--look, if you are working in a fast food restaurant you are not at the pinnacle of your career. You are struggling to pay the bills. These are single moms who are working hard and they can't feed their kids on 29 hours a week. But, you know, they can't feed their kids if I go out of business either. If we are subject to ObamaCare, we go out of business.   Why

Greece, maneuvering for debt relief, is flirting treacherously with Moscow. Recession-hit economies such as Italy seem to believe business as normal with Russia trumps calls for solidarity over Ukraine.

The Democrats like to talk about how wonderful European socialism is, cherry-picking a few statistics from categories where they can show supposedly better results. But what they don’t tell you is that along with their larger welfare states, most of those countries have much less regulated economies. Denmark, for example, scored a 93.9 in the business freedom category in the Heritage Foundation’s 2016 Index of Economic Freedom. The United States scored 84.4. The United States has fallen to seventeenth in the world overall on that index. In 1995, we were fourth.

Yet the rise of Trump—and Bernie Sanders too—vastly transcends ordinary politics. In fact, it reaches deep into a ruined national economy that has morphed into rank casino capitalism under the misguided policies and faithless rule of the Washington and Wall Street elites. This epic deformation has delivered historically unprecedented setbacks to the bottom 90% of American households. They have seen their real wealth and living standards steadily deteriorate for several decades now, even as vast financial windfalls have accrued to the elite few at the very top. In fact, during the last 30 years, the real net worth of the bottom 90% has not increased at all. At the same time, the top 1% has experienced a 300% gain while the real wealth of the Forbes 400 has risen by 1,000%.

This vision of semiconductor independence promised to upend globalization, transforming the production of one of the world’s most widely traded and most valuable goods. No one in the audience of Xi’s speech at Davos in 2017 noticed what was at stake behind the platitudes, but even a populist like Trump couldn’t have imagined a more radical reworking of the global economy.

Months before his Davos debut, Xi had struck a different tone in a speech to Chinese tech titans and Communist Party leaders in Beijing for a conference on “cyber security and informatization.” To an audience that included Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei, Alibaba CEO Jack Ma, high-profile People’s Liberation Army (PLA) researchers, and most of China’s political elite, Xi exhorted China to focus on “gaining breakthroughs in core technology as quickly as possible.” Above all, “core technology” meant semiconductors. Xi didn’t call for a trade war, but his vision didn’t sound like trade peace, either. “We must promote strong alliances and attack strategic passes in a coordinated manner. We must assault the fortifications of core technology research and development…. We must not only call forth the assault, we must also sound the call for assembly, which means that we must concentrate the most powerful forces to act together, compose shock brigades and special forces to storm the passes.” Donald Trump, it turned out, wasn’t the only world leader who mixed martial metaphors with economic policy. The chip industry faced an organized assault by the world’s second-largest economy and the one-party state that ruled it.

I was never burdened by the notion that I was working for a political party that was fundamentally hypocritical on the deficit and economy and one that would proceed to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about sex under the leadership of Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was having an affair with a former House intern himself.

I don’t know about you, but I want the guy who built the greatest economy the world has ever known, against all odds, to get back in office for another four years and do it again.

In any case, once Trump became the nominee, I had no hesitancy backing him over Hillary Clinton. Substantively, he was offering policies I supported. There was no doubt in my mind that he would unleash our economy to achieve the robust growth the country needed; that he would rebuild our military power; that he would pursue a foreign policy that put the interests of Americans first; and that he would stop unfairly scapegoating police and would renew the policies that had succeeded in reducing violent crime in the past.

Wise council, like that of Joseph Chamberlain noted above, has always been that placing essentials like our water supply in private hands is folly. But for forty years, greed has been trumping wisdom. The new Gekkos – or should that be ‘geckos’? – have slithered into every corner of our national life. Water privatisation has been perhaps the most difficult to justify on any moral or societal grounds. It’s difficult to square with the celebrated ethos of competition, that mythical beast beloved of the free-marketeer. The customer has no choice, can’t take their business elsewhere, has to pay the price set by the monopoly provider and thus loses on every count. So much for the benefits of competition. It is absolutely emblematic of what Frank Cottrell-Boyce spoke of when he excoriated the corrupt, effete version of capitalism that now holds sway in Britain. ‘The phase of capitalism that we’re in is not remotely competitive. Where are the dynamic venture capitalists? Who’s in the driving seat of our economy? Is it entrepreneurs? Is it customers? Is it workers? No, it’s hedge fund managers. Ours is an economy run by retired dentists in the Cotswolds. That’s not a lively virile capitalism.

Things changed radically between the early 1990s and 2019. The spread of fracking turned the United States into the world’s biggest oil producer by 2013. The American economy wasn’t dependent on Saudi oil anymore. Now it could pump its own. Then Barack Obama made the nuclear deal with Iran, alienating Saudi leaders. Mohammed had high hopes that Donald Trump, with his visit to the kingdom early in his presidency, would renew the kind of relationship Saudi Arabia had under previous presidents. But as Trump showed Mohammed in that embarrassing White House visit, when the president displayed a poster board showing arms sales to the kingdom, this new White House was purely transactional. The decades-long US-Saudi alliance didn’t mean much to Trump and his deputies, and many of the old officials who kept that alliance going for both sides, men like Mohammed bin Nayef and former CIA director John Brennan, had been sent off to retirement, or worse.

There was a popular notion among my generation—a belief shattered with finality under Trump—that no matter how bad the economy got, the US government would always have jobs and seek out people with regional expertise. As it turned out, my expertise on the former Soviet Union would indeed be of interest to the US government, but not in the way I had imagined.

In the meantime, we would wreck the US economy and actually do little to clean up the environment. The proposal calls for covering hundreds of thousands of acres of land with windmills and solar panels, which would do irreparable damage to land on which wildlife is protected by federal statutes. It also addresses only the United States’ carbon emissions and gives countries like China and India a pass for a decade. I’m no scientist, but I’m pretty sure we can’t keep China’s dirty air from sneaking into the atmosphere over the United States. I am pretty good at economics, though, and economists have a term for that type of thinking: freaking stupid. AOC once said that people her age should reconsider having children because of global warming. Can you imagine? I think the best answer to that ridiculous statement was by my friend, Jerry Falwell, Jr., “People her age should reconsider having children if people like AOC ever get to be in charge of this country.

For my maternal grandmother, who lives with us for a few months every year, that line came as an incredible relief. For her, it was personal. She and my grandfather grew up in Czechoslovakia during the very worst of communism. Unlike most of these new-age Starbucks-chugging socialists in Brooklyn, they knew the horrors that can come from a state-run economy, and the scars of socialism are seared in her memory. I vividly remember speaking with her during the lead-up to the 2016 election, when she was watching neo-socialists such as Bernie Sanders on CNN almost every day. (We’re working on getting her off the CNN train, by the way. But back in the Czech Republic, you pick up CNN early, like a drug addiction. Soon she’ll be watching Fox with the rest of the sane people in the world.) “Don, don’t these people understand?” she asked, her voice quavering, tears coming to her eyes. This is a woman who hid from Nazis in the basement of her farmhouse as a child and lived under Communist occupation for decades. At ninety-three, she’s still stronger and tougher than most. But she feared that her grandchildren and great-grandchildren might go through some of the same things she went through, and the thought of that had scared the hell out of her. “They don’t know how bad it can be. Please do something. Don’t they know this is all lies?

Here then was the basic argument of liberal and progressive politics in the decades leading up to Brexit, Trump, and the populist revolt: The global economy, as if a fact of nature, had somehow come upon us and was here to stay. The central political question was not how to reconfigure it but how to adapt to it, and how to alleviate its devastating effect on the wages and job prospects of workers outside the charmed circle of the elite professions.

The result was that the face of the new economy was increasingly female. The men were stuck in the unpaying state jobs; women were making the money. “Men aren’t worth as much as the dog that guards the house,” some of the ajummas would whisper among themselves. Women’s superior earnings couldn’t trump thousands of years of patriarchal culture, but they did confer a certain independence.

Maria. “Nobody could have predicted” a pandemic that his own Department of Health and Human Services was running simulations for just a few months before COVID-19 struck in Washington state. Why does he do this? Fear. Donald didn’t drag his feet in December 2019, in January, in February, in March because of his narcissism; he did it because of his fear of appearing weak or failing to project the message that everything was “great,” “beautiful,” and “perfect.” The irony is that his failure to face the truth has inevitably led to massive failure anyway. In this case, the lives of potentially hundreds of thousands of people will be lost and the economy of the richest country in history may well be destroyed. Donald will acknowledge none of this, moving the goalposts to hide the evidence and convincing himself in the process that he’s done a better job than anybody else could have if only a few hundred thousand die instead of 2 million. “Get even with people who have screwed you,” Donald has said, but often the person he’s getting revenge on is somebody he screwed over first—such as the contractors he’s refused to pay or the niece and nephew he refused to protect. Even when he manages to hit his target, his aim is so bad that he causes collateral damage.