Maybe Trump Is Making America Great

A Hopeful View of Depression

Maybe Trump Is Making America Great.

I’m not trying to ragebait you here. On Monday morning, we might see something truly great, or something with that potential, anyway.

A contingent of economists and economics talking heads have been alluding to the idea that we might experience something similar to 1987’s Black Monday – a 22.6% drop in the Dow Jones that wiped out $1.7 trillion. And while the numbers were playing with now are much more substantial ($11.1 trillion over the two-day dip last week), anything monumental allowed to happen before Wall Street flips the breakers and stops trading will have the country freaking out even more. All of this happening because Trump believes America isn’t winning anymore.

If you want a purely economic-minded breakdown of how misguided and insane Trump’s tariffs plan is, I’d recommend reading The Verge’s breakdown on the possible use of AI to come up with numbers so unbelievable that economists struggled to grasp how anyone with a background in economics could allow for something like this to happen. In the most simplistic way I can explain, the rate of Trump’s tariffs have been determined by the trade deficits (or trade gaps) between countries. The White House released a formula that looks complicated, but the math is truly mind-meltingly simplistic. Basically, what Trump is selling as “reciprocal tariffs” is actually retribution against the trade deficits with the world – in other words, we’re going to pay more taxes (buy less things) because we buy more from other countries than they buy from us.

Trump’s America First mentality is wrong. At the most fundamental level, every motivation behind his “Liberation Day” is tinged with racism, and it needs to be said his nationalistic approach to economics will be disastrous for, well, nearly everyone, everywhere. In a post on whatever far-right app Trump haunts, he said “ONLY THE WEAK WILL FAIL!” And Trump’s post perfectly captures the moment. As we’re all reckoning with the Protestant Work Ethic mentality that has created our modern hell, he’s letting us know: salvation is not coming (unless we seize it).

But Trump is wrong in a far deeper level. It’s not simply a misunderstanding of tariffs, but a completely reality-defying misunderstanding of what America is at its core. We are a consumer economy. The reason we run a trade deficit with nearly every country is because we buy everything, and we make almost nothing.

What’s made America Great is that we rose out of the 20^th century as the champion. We won. All the winning Trump wants is simply the greed of a petulant billionaire that lives a life where nothing is ever enough. Becoming a consumer economy is our victory lap for winning. We became a world power when the colonial powers destroyed themselves in the fight over expansionism during WW1. We cemented our wealth through our military and economic victories in WWII. Since the end of the war, we’ve used the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other legal institutions as instruments of enacting inescapable poverty through austerity in the developing world. And for the entirety of the 20^th century, we committed (and funded) genocides and destabilized governments through assassinations and coups whenever workers and socialists attempted to take power. We won, and our prize for winning the the bloodbath of the last century is being able to buy whatever we need and more importantly what we don’t need.

Open TikTok for less than 5 minutes, and you’ll be inundated with bullshit consumerism. Companies like SHEIN, Temu, and AliExpress all exist in order to supply western countries with an endless supply of dopamine hits derived from being able to sit on our couch and buy a new wardrobe for a few hundred dollars. Our inspiration for our fashion, accessories, interior decorations only exist to the level in which they’re all being sold to us through our phone. We don’t want anything until we’re told this eighteenth metal water bottle will cure you of your malaise. That’s what our great colonial victory bought for us.

Our winning exists through genocides and child slavery in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Sudan. It exists in sweatshops for Nike built atop the devastation of napalm carpet bombings in Southeast Asia. Our colonial triumphs should be remembered every single day as the world is paralyzed into to simply watching as our Nazi puppet state murders hundreds of thousands of children in Gaza.

We won.

We won because we bought everything.

Of course we rigged the game. Of course we threw a tantrum and killed millions when they said the game wasn’t fair. But we won.

If Black Monday 2.0 happens, and we can’t buy anything, what do we have? What is America at that point? We are the supreme importer. We buy everything we need and all the rest, and our trade deficits exist because what we’re selling is technology, arms, culture that all derive from foundation of being the victor.

There’s an aphorism that revolution is not possible because life is too easy. This is certainly the case with why our fight against climate change in the United States feels impossible. We simply have too many modern luxuries in order to risk the violence necessary in toppling the capitalist/colonialist system - being able to drive our oversized cars half a mile to get an iced coffee stopping the class consciousness from fully developing.

But maybe this Depression could be a real victory. People need to understand how we got to this point – how our road to becoming the the great importer was paved with death and destruction.

Maybe Trump’s spectacular ignorance for what America is could become our path for a true enlightenment of our empire that we need to reckon with.

Maybe we will simply collapse under the stupidity of our oligarchy. But maybe America’s parasitic capitalism will cannibalize itself beyond our allowable poverty and into a future where the masses will realize what game is actually being being played.

Maybe we will learn . . . “Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win. Workingmen of all countries unite!”