"The wall did not fall to a triangle. It fell to a missing army."
A profound, thought-provoking take on what really causes systemic change. The point about the divergence between Denmark and Germany on that same fateful day in January 1933 drives the message home even more.
How well does this model apply to what happened in America in 2016, and again in 2024, in reverse? What was the crisis that opened the door to a 'rough [orange] beast, slouching in from Bethlehem?' What, precisely, was waiting to be born that most of us couldn't or wouldn't grasp, at the time? Would be curious to hear the reaction of others.
Thank you, this is exactly the right question to ask of the model, and I think America is the cleanest test of it in reverse.
Look at 2016 through the seesaw. The crisis was real: 2008 and its aftermath, four decades of deindustrialisation, wages flat while asset owners got rich, life expectancy falling in whole regions, trust in every institution collapsing. The door was blown wide open. Then ask the model’s question: who was organised enough to write the response?
Not the left. Union density had been ground down from a third of workers to a tenth. The movements existed, Occupy, then Bernie, but they were young, underfunded and outside the state. The other side of the beam had been stacking weight for fifty years. Donor networks, the Federalist Society with a judge pipeline ready to go, Heritage with policy on the shelf, an entire media infrastructure built to shape the story of the crisis before anyone else could tell it.
And here the German parallel gets uncomfortably precise. Trump was not the organised power. He was the figure the organised power decided to walk through the door with. Establishment conservatives, the donor class, the party apparatus, most of them despised him and backed him anyway, because handing the crisis to him was preferable to letting the other side shape the response. They believed they could control him. That folder again.
By 2024 they had stopped improvising. Project 2025 is the Scouts’ motto written down: nine hundred pages of prepared response, staff lists included, waiting for the door to open. The beast did not slouch in from nowhere. It was carried through the gap by the heaviest coalition at the weigh-in.
So what was waiting to be born? Nothing mystical. Whatever the strongest organised side had prepared. That is the whole model, and the whole warning. If America want to survive this they must organize like never before.
Appreciate the response. I think most get that 2008 was the background (or perhaps the metaphor) for what Pete Buttigieg likes to talk about on his red-state grand tour -- the hollowing out of the industrial heartland, urban failure and flight, the loss of confidence that things would get better from one generation to the next -- someone else described it as the coming of "Walmart and oxycontin" amid the departure of the general store.
And the analogy of the figurehead coming through the door backed by a conservative class that hated real democracy more than fascism (I have long held that former Speaker Paul Ryan was a kind of modern doppelgänger for Franz von Papen -- the cynical Chancellor who approached von Hindenburg to basically say 'I will become Vice Chancellor to Hitler -- but don't worry about Herr Hitler -- I will see to it he's kept in line.') Both these parallels seem strong.
But what was the immediate crisis in 2016? In Germany, it was the sudden global Depression of 1932 (not that Germany was doing great during the 1920s but many observers note it had stabilized after the immediate postwar collapse and currency devaluation). Yet in America, the price of gas was stable and low, about $2.50-75, with a spike in gas prices often considered a harbinger of change. Unless my memory's gone blank, nothing per sé leaps out that would have suddenly triggered a movement of people mistaking the antics of a carnival-barker for a serious response to problems in the heartland. And by 2024, those who'd been fooled once had all the information they needed to know better. Yet they still cast millions of votes for a lunatic screaming about Haitians eating cats and dogs on prime time TV. Because of...what? 'Joe Biden is old' memes?
You propose a thoughtful rubric for understanding how generational change actually transpires. But as a political scientist, I'm tempted to say something like 'necessary but not sufficient.' Or perhaps we just need a stronger differentiation between the background and the crisis. Thanks again.
The Paul Ryan as von Papen parallel is going to stay with me. That is exactly the folder I meant.
On your real question, I think the disagreement dissolves if we stop looking for the crisis as an event and start looking for it as a betrayal. You are right that 2016 had no crash, no gas spike, no single rupture you could timestamp. But the door had already been opened by something slower and in some ways worse: Obama was the response to 2008, and the response failed the people it promised to save. Hope and change was the biggest legitimacy cheque written in modern American politics. What got delivered was bailouts for the banks, foreclosures for the homeowners, and a recovery you could see in the stock index but not on your street. Nine million families lost their homes and not one banker went to prison. That is a crisis. It just runs in slow motion, and it detonates not in the economy but in belief. By 2016 the crisis was that millions of people had extended trust one last time and concluded the system was not going to answer, no matter who they voted for. When both parties manage the same decline, the door is standing open permanently. It only takes someone willing to walk through it.
And 2024 is the same mechanism with the volume up. The immediate crisis was the oldest one in the book: the cost of living. Rent, groceries, insurance, interest rates. Households doing the maths at the kitchen table and coming up short every month, while a centrist administration pointed at GDP charts and told them the economy was historically strong. When people say prices are crushing me and the answer is actually the data says you’re fine, you have not calmed the crisis. You have confirmed the betrayal. The votes for the man screaming about cats and dogs were not votes for the screaming. They were votes against the people who kept insisting nothing was wrong.
So yes to your differentiation, with one amendment. The background is the hollowing out. The crisis is the moment people stop believing the existing order will address it. Gas prices measure the first. Legitimacy measures the second, and it had been draining for years. Which brings the model back to the beam: the tragedy of 2016 and 2024 is not that a crisis was missing. It is that only one side had organised to name it.
The danger I think is to misidentify the crisis. In my opinion, the actual crisis was and is a Growth Crisis with what you detailed being the symptoms of the Growth Crisis.
I name it a Growth Crisis because deep down in the thermodynamic architecture of advanced economies is the problematic of insufficient energy surplus (or insufficient energy return on energy invested) with diminishing returns felt through society leading to the complexification of debt instruments, a subprime crisis and quantitative easing.
Thus on the one hand we have the Trump Coalition trying to reduce down debt whether through cuts or devaluation measures, reduce down trade deficits with tariffs and reshoring, as well as trying to destabilise and thwart the globalising economic conditions that allows China to thrive.
The Let's response, Wokeism!!!!
The Growth Crisis is still live hence the hopism of the AI Industrial Revolution with increasing corporate debt acting as the stimulus but still shrouded with Trump Coalition ideas. Thus the business as usual response to the Growth Crisis is technology and debt.
If the Left responds in an affirming way to the Growth Crisis then the only alternative is open borders, mass immigration and a globalised society with Wokeism essentially being the precursor to this worldview which has already failed twice. Not only in America but across advanced democratic societies too.
Obviously repeatedly calling people fascists, racists and xenophobes isn't a serious response to the Growth Crisis and is ultimately divisive and weakens power, not strengthens it.
From a negative perspective, the response is sufficiency economics. Not only as a response to the negative consequences of Growth (ecological overshoot, biodiversity loss, pollution, climate change and ecosystem dysregulation) but as a means of reorganizing economies to ensure the maintenance and sustainability of essential goods and services.
This programme of (degrowth) ideas has not been systemically worked out, only superficially, with a deficit of ideas around how to deal with a contracting tax base being the main deficit. Thus how will State pensions be paid, how will State services and functions be paid, how will Society remain orderly within scarcity conditions.
This would require a radical restructuring of Society in which the Civic body replaces the Civil body so that much more of essential services like social care for example are done by communities themselves. In other words there would need to be a radical restructuring around self help.
So far the evidence isn't great. Communities that were given the opportunity to transform towards self help in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protects instead turned to self hate with community organising pivoting towards criminality not sufficiency.
Perhaps only Cuba is the only living example of success in this regard in relation to US embargoes and sanctions.
So as yet, the Left haven't made their mind up regarding how to deal with the Growth Crisis with ideas straddled across an affirmative response and a negating response whether that is in the US or across Western societies with the main contradiction being immigration. In the affirmative, immigration (population growth) helps to resolve the Growth Crisis but creates the negative consequences of ecological overshoot, biodiversity loss, pollution, climate change and ecosystem dysregulation. In the negation, how will immigration (population growth) be supported under conditions of a contracting tax base and the need for unprecedented peaceful community cooperation in order to restructure societies towards self help especially in relation to ethno-religious balkanisation.
In terms of a final consideration, arguably the Growth Crisis is also created by the inability of capital formation to keep up with population growth, both nationally and globally, with declining energy surplus being a vector rather than a primary cause. In this respect, the actual crisis is a Population Growth Crisis with economic growth primarily being in service to population demographics.
If this is the case, then the Left is in real trouble because population ecology is a deeply taboo subject for the Left and so to compensate for an enormous ideas deficit will need a corresponding level of power to fill that gap. Filling that ideas gap with logical fallacies and an enormous level of (hard) power may work temporarily but will soon descend into anarchy and chaos because essentially forced conformity will rest on True Fascism, not the False Fascism that the populist Right are presently accused of, who are essentially responding to the Population Crisis and the Growth Crisis in a contradictory way like the Left.
Under conditions of population degrowth but with an affirmative set of ideas regarding the Growth Crisis, then the populist Right need to embrace technology in the form of an AI industrial revolution. Hence Elon Musk! Under conditions of population degrowth but with a negating set of ideas regarding the Growth Crisis, then the populist Right needs to embrace community self help and a deep need for community cohesion.
Arguably, their current framework seems to point towards the latter but I'm not sure how fully they appreciate the consequences of a contracting tax base. When they do I anticipate they will embrace the AI industrial revolution but I might be wrong.
This article is not about what the crisis is but how change happens. If you want to see the root cause read my article on power- it outlines the true crisis and it has nothing to do with growth but all to do with Ludable surplus.
I think your model is still too simple - particularly for the US. There isn't a single fulcrum (power). The two-party, FPTP system, (both backed by big money), placed towards the ends of the beam, prevent it from tipping. You don't have a seesaw. You have this:
______________________________
. . . . . . ^ . . . . . . . . . ^ . . . . . . .
It's a win-win for money/power. And a completely neutered electorate, who's "choice" is extreme fascism vs watered down fascism.
No the model is especially true for the US. The reason why the US is failing is that both the Republican and the Democrats are business as usual there is no alternative organized power. But Zohan Mamdani proved how it could be done.
I think your "power fulcrum" gives the impression that the beam is unstable - and therefore, easily moved. And that's not the case. Money is now too entrenched in politics, across the board.
And, with regard to Mamdani, (in my diagram/alternate reality!), he succeeded by removing the "pseudo-left" support.
P.S. I love your posts; agree with (almost), everything you say; and think your diagram was much nicer than mine.
A very well written article. It's been obvious to me in my own country (New Zealand) that legislation 40 years ago to essentially weaken the union movement, has been effective beyond belief from the perspective of the right wing. Today, with our Labour party being essentially just another conservative group, there is almost no voice for a collective resistance to capital. It has led to a fracturing of middle class and working class hopes and where now some of those who would be best represented by leftist views actually align with capital. They are aligning with a false narrative that has been "sold" to them by way of propaganda essentially.
Socialism / communism doesn’t work . How many failures do you need before you understand this ? Try basing your ideas on country , community and Christianity and practical measures to improve the national economy . Aim for prosperity .
Instead of any kind of positive reforms coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, we had the government bail out the financial institutions that were primarily responsible for it happening in the first place just because they were considered "Too big to fail."
Then the individuals who still had capital to invest (mostly from funds recieved from the bailouts) were able to swoop in and take advantage of all of the mortgage forclosures and buy properties at a reduced rate. Most of those who did so are now some of the wealthiest people living in the US today. Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans (a Trump donor and ally) bought about 1/4 of the commercial property in downtown Detroit, Michigan. There are many examples of similar things happening in other states throughout the country at the same time. Now home ownership is out of reach for many people, and they can only afford to rent from corporate property owners.
The situation has only worsened from then until now. The Republican party, who falsely labeled themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility, have almost doubled the country's debt since then. Them choosing Trump, a conman and failed businessman, who has only ever succeeded at owning golf courses and a few hotels and failing at everything else to lead them, made things much worse because he seems to love spending other people's money. Especially tax dollars.
The country only now seems to be waking up to the fact that Trump is the worst mistake ever made by American voters. It took him putting illegal tariffs in place, economic fallout from him starting a war of choice with Iran because Netanyahu promised him delusions of future glory, and him completely ruining our country's reputation upon the world stage for it to happen. The damage done and the debt incurred will probably take a generation or more to recover from. That's if we recover at all. No politicians seem to have the genuine courage to put forward the economic solution that will begin to solve the country's massive debt, which is to make the wealthiest individuals and corporations begin to pay their fair share in taxes. All they seem to want to do is protect the status quo and find more ways to ensure that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.
The midterm elections could result in some kind of positive change if they go the right way, but even if they do, there is a big fight to be had and a long road ahead that must be navigated properly for there to be any genuinely positive long-term results.
All we can do is hope, and try to inspire people enough people to vote so we have a chance for positive changes and wise choices to be made in the future.
"The wall did not fall to a triangle. It fell to a missing army."
A profound, thought-provoking take on what really causes systemic change. The point about the divergence between Denmark and Germany on that same fateful day in January 1933 drives the message home even more.
How well does this model apply to what happened in America in 2016, and again in 2024, in reverse? What was the crisis that opened the door to a 'rough [orange] beast, slouching in from Bethlehem?' What, precisely, was waiting to be born that most of us couldn't or wouldn't grasp, at the time? Would be curious to hear the reaction of others.
Thank you, this is exactly the right question to ask of the model, and I think America is the cleanest test of it in reverse.
Look at 2016 through the seesaw. The crisis was real: 2008 and its aftermath, four decades of deindustrialisation, wages flat while asset owners got rich, life expectancy falling in whole regions, trust in every institution collapsing. The door was blown wide open. Then ask the model’s question: who was organised enough to write the response?
Not the left. Union density had been ground down from a third of workers to a tenth. The movements existed, Occupy, then Bernie, but they were young, underfunded and outside the state. The other side of the beam had been stacking weight for fifty years. Donor networks, the Federalist Society with a judge pipeline ready to go, Heritage with policy on the shelf, an entire media infrastructure built to shape the story of the crisis before anyone else could tell it.
And here the German parallel gets uncomfortably precise. Trump was not the organised power. He was the figure the organised power decided to walk through the door with. Establishment conservatives, the donor class, the party apparatus, most of them despised him and backed him anyway, because handing the crisis to him was preferable to letting the other side shape the response. They believed they could control him. That folder again.
By 2024 they had stopped improvising. Project 2025 is the Scouts’ motto written down: nine hundred pages of prepared response, staff lists included, waiting for the door to open. The beast did not slouch in from nowhere. It was carried through the gap by the heaviest coalition at the weigh-in.
So what was waiting to be born? Nothing mystical. Whatever the strongest organised side had prepared. That is the whole model, and the whole warning. If America want to survive this they must organize like never before.
Appreciate the response. I think most get that 2008 was the background (or perhaps the metaphor) for what Pete Buttigieg likes to talk about on his red-state grand tour -- the hollowing out of the industrial heartland, urban failure and flight, the loss of confidence that things would get better from one generation to the next -- someone else described it as the coming of "Walmart and oxycontin" amid the departure of the general store.
And the analogy of the figurehead coming through the door backed by a conservative class that hated real democracy more than fascism (I have long held that former Speaker Paul Ryan was a kind of modern doppelgänger for Franz von Papen -- the cynical Chancellor who approached von Hindenburg to basically say 'I will become Vice Chancellor to Hitler -- but don't worry about Herr Hitler -- I will see to it he's kept in line.') Both these parallels seem strong.
But what was the immediate crisis in 2016? In Germany, it was the sudden global Depression of 1932 (not that Germany was doing great during the 1920s but many observers note it had stabilized after the immediate postwar collapse and currency devaluation). Yet in America, the price of gas was stable and low, about $2.50-75, with a spike in gas prices often considered a harbinger of change. Unless my memory's gone blank, nothing per sé leaps out that would have suddenly triggered a movement of people mistaking the antics of a carnival-barker for a serious response to problems in the heartland. And by 2024, those who'd been fooled once had all the information they needed to know better. Yet they still cast millions of votes for a lunatic screaming about Haitians eating cats and dogs on prime time TV. Because of...what? 'Joe Biden is old' memes?
You propose a thoughtful rubric for understanding how generational change actually transpires. But as a political scientist, I'm tempted to say something like 'necessary but not sufficient.' Or perhaps we just need a stronger differentiation between the background and the crisis. Thanks again.
The Paul Ryan as von Papen parallel is going to stay with me. That is exactly the folder I meant.
On your real question, I think the disagreement dissolves if we stop looking for the crisis as an event and start looking for it as a betrayal. You are right that 2016 had no crash, no gas spike, no single rupture you could timestamp. But the door had already been opened by something slower and in some ways worse: Obama was the response to 2008, and the response failed the people it promised to save. Hope and change was the biggest legitimacy cheque written in modern American politics. What got delivered was bailouts for the banks, foreclosures for the homeowners, and a recovery you could see in the stock index but not on your street. Nine million families lost their homes and not one banker went to prison. That is a crisis. It just runs in slow motion, and it detonates not in the economy but in belief. By 2016 the crisis was that millions of people had extended trust one last time and concluded the system was not going to answer, no matter who they voted for. When both parties manage the same decline, the door is standing open permanently. It only takes someone willing to walk through it.
And 2024 is the same mechanism with the volume up. The immediate crisis was the oldest one in the book: the cost of living. Rent, groceries, insurance, interest rates. Households doing the maths at the kitchen table and coming up short every month, while a centrist administration pointed at GDP charts and told them the economy was historically strong. When people say prices are crushing me and the answer is actually the data says you’re fine, you have not calmed the crisis. You have confirmed the betrayal. The votes for the man screaming about cats and dogs were not votes for the screaming. They were votes against the people who kept insisting nothing was wrong.
So yes to your differentiation, with one amendment. The background is the hollowing out. The crisis is the moment people stop believing the existing order will address it. Gas prices measure the first. Legitimacy measures the second, and it had been draining for years. Which brings the model back to the beam: the tragedy of 2016 and 2024 is not that a crisis was missing. It is that only one side had organised to name it.
The danger I think is to misidentify the crisis. In my opinion, the actual crisis was and is a Growth Crisis with what you detailed being the symptoms of the Growth Crisis.
I name it a Growth Crisis because deep down in the thermodynamic architecture of advanced economies is the problematic of insufficient energy surplus (or insufficient energy return on energy invested) with diminishing returns felt through society leading to the complexification of debt instruments, a subprime crisis and quantitative easing.
Thus on the one hand we have the Trump Coalition trying to reduce down debt whether through cuts or devaluation measures, reduce down trade deficits with tariffs and reshoring, as well as trying to destabilise and thwart the globalising economic conditions that allows China to thrive.
The Let's response, Wokeism!!!!
The Growth Crisis is still live hence the hopism of the AI Industrial Revolution with increasing corporate debt acting as the stimulus but still shrouded with Trump Coalition ideas. Thus the business as usual response to the Growth Crisis is technology and debt.
If the Left responds in an affirming way to the Growth Crisis then the only alternative is open borders, mass immigration and a globalised society with Wokeism essentially being the precursor to this worldview which has already failed twice. Not only in America but across advanced democratic societies too.
Obviously repeatedly calling people fascists, racists and xenophobes isn't a serious response to the Growth Crisis and is ultimately divisive and weakens power, not strengthens it.
From a negative perspective, the response is sufficiency economics. Not only as a response to the negative consequences of Growth (ecological overshoot, biodiversity loss, pollution, climate change and ecosystem dysregulation) but as a means of reorganizing economies to ensure the maintenance and sustainability of essential goods and services.
This programme of (degrowth) ideas has not been systemically worked out, only superficially, with a deficit of ideas around how to deal with a contracting tax base being the main deficit. Thus how will State pensions be paid, how will State services and functions be paid, how will Society remain orderly within scarcity conditions.
This would require a radical restructuring of Society in which the Civic body replaces the Civil body so that much more of essential services like social care for example are done by communities themselves. In other words there would need to be a radical restructuring around self help.
So far the evidence isn't great. Communities that were given the opportunity to transform towards self help in the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protects instead turned to self hate with community organising pivoting towards criminality not sufficiency.
Perhaps only Cuba is the only living example of success in this regard in relation to US embargoes and sanctions.
So as yet, the Left haven't made their mind up regarding how to deal with the Growth Crisis with ideas straddled across an affirmative response and a negating response whether that is in the US or across Western societies with the main contradiction being immigration. In the affirmative, immigration (population growth) helps to resolve the Growth Crisis but creates the negative consequences of ecological overshoot, biodiversity loss, pollution, climate change and ecosystem dysregulation. In the negation, how will immigration (population growth) be supported under conditions of a contracting tax base and the need for unprecedented peaceful community cooperation in order to restructure societies towards self help especially in relation to ethno-religious balkanisation.
In terms of a final consideration, arguably the Growth Crisis is also created by the inability of capital formation to keep up with population growth, both nationally and globally, with declining energy surplus being a vector rather than a primary cause. In this respect, the actual crisis is a Population Growth Crisis with economic growth primarily being in service to population demographics.
If this is the case, then the Left is in real trouble because population ecology is a deeply taboo subject for the Left and so to compensate for an enormous ideas deficit will need a corresponding level of power to fill that gap. Filling that ideas gap with logical fallacies and an enormous level of (hard) power may work temporarily but will soon descend into anarchy and chaos because essentially forced conformity will rest on True Fascism, not the False Fascism that the populist Right are presently accused of, who are essentially responding to the Population Crisis and the Growth Crisis in a contradictory way like the Left.
Under conditions of population degrowth but with an affirmative set of ideas regarding the Growth Crisis, then the populist Right need to embrace technology in the form of an AI industrial revolution. Hence Elon Musk! Under conditions of population degrowth but with a negating set of ideas regarding the Growth Crisis, then the populist Right needs to embrace community self help and a deep need for community cohesion.
Arguably, their current framework seems to point towards the latter but I'm not sure how fully they appreciate the consequences of a contracting tax base. When they do I anticipate they will embrace the AI industrial revolution but I might be wrong.
This article is not about what the crisis is but how change happens. If you want to see the root cause read my article on power- it outlines the true crisis and it has nothing to do with growth but all to do with Ludable surplus.
Can link the article you are referring to or provide the title. Thanks.
I think your model is still too simple - particularly for the US. There isn't a single fulcrum (power). The two-party, FPTP system, (both backed by big money), placed towards the ends of the beam, prevent it from tipping. You don't have a seesaw. You have this:
______________________________
. . . . . . ^ . . . . . . . . . ^ . . . . . . .
It's a win-win for money/power. And a completely neutered electorate, who's "choice" is extreme fascism vs watered down fascism.
Apologies for crap ascii "art". Which looks worse than it did when I typed it. Substack, "kindly" reformats when you hit "post".
No the model is especially true for the US. The reason why the US is failing is that both the Republican and the Democrats are business as usual there is no alternative organized power. But Zohan Mamdani proved how it could be done.
I'm sticking with my really crap diagram! :-)
I think your "power fulcrum" gives the impression that the beam is unstable - and therefore, easily moved. And that's not the case. Money is now too entrenched in politics, across the board.
And, with regard to Mamdani, (in my diagram/alternate reality!), he succeeded by removing the "pseudo-left" support.
P.S. I love your posts; agree with (almost), everything you say; and think your diagram was much nicer than mine.
The reason why it’s not evenly moved is almost anywhere in the world the weight is leaning towards buisness as usual.
A very well written article. It's been obvious to me in my own country (New Zealand) that legislation 40 years ago to essentially weaken the union movement, has been effective beyond belief from the perspective of the right wing. Today, with our Labour party being essentially just another conservative group, there is almost no voice for a collective resistance to capital. It has led to a fracturing of middle class and working class hopes and where now some of those who would be best represented by leftist views actually align with capital. They are aligning with a false narrative that has been "sold" to them by way of propaganda essentially.
Socialism / communism doesn’t work . How many failures do you need before you understand this ? Try basing your ideas on country , community and Christianity and practical measures to improve the national economy . Aim for prosperity .
Instead of any kind of positive reforms coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, we had the government bail out the financial institutions that were primarily responsible for it happening in the first place just because they were considered "Too big to fail."
Then the individuals who still had capital to invest (mostly from funds recieved from the bailouts) were able to swoop in and take advantage of all of the mortgage forclosures and buy properties at a reduced rate. Most of those who did so are now some of the wealthiest people living in the US today. Dan Gilbert of Quicken Loans (a Trump donor and ally) bought about 1/4 of the commercial property in downtown Detroit, Michigan. There are many examples of similar things happening in other states throughout the country at the same time. Now home ownership is out of reach for many people, and they can only afford to rent from corporate property owners.
The situation has only worsened from then until now. The Republican party, who falsely labeled themselves as the party of fiscal responsibility, have almost doubled the country's debt since then. Them choosing Trump, a conman and failed businessman, who has only ever succeeded at owning golf courses and a few hotels and failing at everything else to lead them, made things much worse because he seems to love spending other people's money. Especially tax dollars.
The country only now seems to be waking up to the fact that Trump is the worst mistake ever made by American voters. It took him putting illegal tariffs in place, economic fallout from him starting a war of choice with Iran because Netanyahu promised him delusions of future glory, and him completely ruining our country's reputation upon the world stage for it to happen. The damage done and the debt incurred will probably take a generation or more to recover from. That's if we recover at all. No politicians seem to have the genuine courage to put forward the economic solution that will begin to solve the country's massive debt, which is to make the wealthiest individuals and corporations begin to pay their fair share in taxes. All they seem to want to do is protect the status quo and find more ways to ensure that the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor.
The midterm elections could result in some kind of positive change if they go the right way, but even if they do, there is a big fight to be had and a long road ahead that must be navigated properly for there to be any genuinely positive long-term results.
All we can do is hope, and try to inspire people enough people to vote so we have a chance for positive changes and wise choices to be made in the future.
SANCTION AND SEIZE