A year after Donald Trump clawed his way back into the White House, America looks less like a republic and more like a family business — and not a very well-run one.
The wealth and security of the United States no longer matter. What matters is the wealth and power of Donald Trump and the clique around him. The rest of America can only hope some of it trickles down.
Economic Insecurity
The United States remains the richest and most powerful nation on earth, with institutions that once looked unshakable. But under Trump, economic policy increasingly resembles that of a developing country.
Like states with immature tax systems desperate for revenue, Washington has erected sudden, high tariffs on imports — then poked holes in them through arbitrary exemptions. The deficit continues to swell regardless.
At times, U.S. policy feels closer to Latin American populism than to anything expected from the world’s leading economy. Investors are nervous, capital is edging for the exits, and questions about central bank independence are no longer academic. U.S. markets, after decades of dominance, stumbled badly at the start of 2025.
The building blocks of investment — returns, volatility, correlation — are as uncertain as they’ve been in decades. The dollar weakens even as yields rise, and even tourist numbers are sliding.
You don’t mess with central bank independence lightly. Add loose monetary policy to inflation and tariffs, and you have a recipe for collapse: a falling dollar, flight from U.S. assets, and spiralling borrowing costs.
America’s economic problems are obvious enough:
- A vast deficit, driven by tax cuts that gutted federal revenue just as an ageing population pushed spending higher.
- Gaping inequality, not only between rich and poor but between red and blue states. A handful of Democrat-voting states — New York, Delaware, California — now fund most of the federal government, while Republican states survive on subsidies.
- And most of all, a shrinking industrial base. The few world-class products the U.S. still designs are made elsewhere, with profits stashed offshore. Yet white American men still expect to be paid more for doing the same manual jobs as anyone else in the world.
Trump’s policies have only deepened the rot. In 2024 the U.S. exported over $12 billion in soybeans to China. This year China bought none. Meanwhile ICE managed to arrest 300 South Korean workers at a Hyundai plant in Georgia — every one of whom went home. Each headline like that kills another round of inward investment.
The only thing keeping the economy out of recession is AI spending. The torrent of cash going into AI infrastructure has masked the slump. But in recent weeks, stock prices have slipped as investors start whispering about a bubble. Without that surge, the U.S. would already be nine months into a downturn.
Homeland Insecurity
Troops are now on the streets of major Democrat-voting cities — an unsubtle attempt to prevent urban voters overturning Trump’s wafer-thin House majority in the midterms. Those cities, ironically, are the same ones whose taxes keep rural conservative America from bankruptcy.
ICE has been transformed into a paramilitary force. Using emergency powers, it now detains U.S. citizens in a parallel penal system operating largely without judicial oversight — a private army overlapping with white-nationalist militias.
The death of Charlie Kirk symbolised the collapse of America’s internal security apparatus. Competent professionals have been purged and replaced with loyal halfwits: Kristi Noem at Homeland Security, Kash Patel running the FBI, and an array of sycophants filling the ranks.
It’s a classic autocrat’s dilemma: surround yourself with idiots to protect your ego, then depend on those idiots to keep you safe.
Health Insecurity
Nothing illustrates Trump’s chaos better than his appointment of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Secretary of Health and Human Services.
American healthcare is the world’s most expensive — and among the least effective. Despite a cultural allergy to “socialised medicine,” most U.S. health spending now comes from the federal government. That’s not a socialist plot; it’s the inevitable outcome of a system built to serve the elderly and the uninsured.
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” of tax cuts and entitlement slashing has already stripped coverage from 12 million Americans. And that’s just the beginning.
Providing care in rural areas was hard enough before the cuts. Hospitals struggle to staff wards; clinicians are in short supply everywhere, and anti-abortion laws have driven many out entirely. Doctors fear that treating a pregnant patient could end their careers.
Across indicators of reproductive health — stillbirths, infant deaths, maternal mortality — the gap between California and rural red states is now as wide as the gap between Germany and Albania.
Costs are soaring, incomes are falling, and hundreds of hospitals face closure. The 12 million who lose coverage are only the start; many more will simply lose access. Congress has thrown $50 billion into a “rural health fund,” another federal subsidy for failing private providers.
Meanwhile, the government’s hostility to science has crippled public health. Programmes for tuberculosis and other infectious diseases are collapsing. Research into cervical cancer and similar conditions has halted. America is now the only industrialised nation with endemic leprosy and bubonic plague.
The last pandemic killed 1.1 million Americans. The next one will be worse.
Global Insecurity
For decades, U.S. foreign policy — however imperfectly — was anchored in the idea of spreading democracy and restraining authoritarianism. Trump has junked that.
His ideal world is one managed by strongmen who treat the planet like a joint venture. Xi, Putin, and Trump compete, but as “smart, tough” equals who share a taste for control. Great powers, in Trump’s mind, must collude even as they jostle. It’s Bismarck and Metternich all over again — an old European vision that ended in 1914.
In practice, it means deals that achieve nothing. He postured over Greenland instead of negotiating sensibly; what he might have had for free now costs billions or is out of reach entirely.
Trump has always been a terrible dealmaker — a man who managed to bankrupt casinos. Only in America could that résumé qualify you for the presidency.
Abroad, the damage is already visible. In the 1980s the CIA could operate from Honduras to back the Nicaraguan contras. Today, after Trump’s needless feuds, neither Brazil nor Colombia would lift a finger to help topple Venezuela’s Maduro. America’s alliances are fraying, and its moral authority is gone.
The Death of Civic Patriotism
Above all, Trump has killed one of America’s defining principles.
For generations, American patriotism was civic. Anyone could become American by belief, not by blood — a loyalty to ideals, not ancestry. That inclusive nationalism built the country’s strength.
Now it’s being replaced by something older and darker: citizenship as obedience, belonging as birthright.
Trump stands in a long line of paranoid right-wing populists — McCarthy, Goldwater, Nixon — but he’s worse than any of them. And when he’s finally gone, what follows him will almost certainly be stranger, and worse.