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America’s Future Under the Felon: Corrupt, Stagnant, and Impoverished

I find it maddening that far to many Americans never learn from history or the happenings in other nations.  True, much of the MAGA working class base has never traveled outside of the USA and a majority likely never went on to higher education or took history courses in high school seriously. Yes, I will be pillaried as a snob or worse by some, but for work (for an oil company decades ago) and now for pleasure I have traveled abroad quite a bit and as a history major and lover of history - and the lessons it teaches - I read extensively on the mistakes made by both individuals and nations in the past.  The nightmare we see unfolding under the Felon's regime is in actuality nothing new.  He is retreading much of Hitler's play book to turn Germany into a fascist dictatorship and employing the practices of autocrats in other parts of the world, including Hungary (which was always a pain in the side of the Austria-Hungary Empire from which my paternal grandparents emigrated) to consolidate power and subvert democracy.  Sadly, those on the right cheering on the madness, particularly white Christian nationalists, ignore the results past regimes operating on these models suffered.  Germany under Hitler was destroyed, the lives under everyday Russians under Putin have not improved, and Hungary under Orbán is stagnant and much poorer - except for the oligarchs enjoying Orbán's favor.   With the trashing of many American institutions and agencies, much of the MAGA working class base is poised to suffer greatly while the rest of of American consumers will soon be hit with rising prices thanks to the Felon's tariffs - tariffs that will fund trillions of dollars in tax cuts for the super wealthy.  A lengthy piece in The Atlantic looks at America's likely future if the Felon and his enablers are not stopped.  Here are excerpts:

Flashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., mourns Hungary’s lost 19th-century empire. Instead of war dead, the names of formerly “Hungarian” places—cities and villages that are now in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long granite walls, solemnly memorialized with an eternal flame.

But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward. Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. . . . . Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.

Tourists in central Budapest don’t see this decline. But neither, apparently, does the American right. For although he has no critical mineral wealth to give away and not much of an army, Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, plays an outsize role in the American political debate. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Orbán held multiple meetings with Donald Trump. In May 2022, a pro-Orbán think tank hosted CPAC, the right-wing conference, in Budapest, . . . .

Steve Bannon called Hungary “an inspiration to the world.” Notwithstanding his own institution’s analysis of Hungarian governance, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation has also described modern Hungary “not just as a model for modern statecraft, but the model.”

What is this Hungarian model they so admire? Mostly, it has nothing to do with modern statecraft. Instead it’s a very old, very familiar blueprint for autocratic takeover, one that has been deployed by right-wing and left-wing leaders alike, from Recep Tayyip Erdoğan to Hugo Chávez. After being elected to a second term in 2010, Orbán slowly replaced civil servants with loyalists; used economic pressure and regulation to destroy the free press; robbed universities of their independence, and shut one of them down; politicized the court system; and repeatedly changed the constitution to give himself electoral advantages. During the coronavirus pandemic he gave himself emergency powers, which he has kept ever since. He has aligned himself openly with Russia and China, serving as a mouthpiece for Russian foreign policy at EU meetings and allowing opaque Chinese investments in his country.

This autocratic takeover is precisely what Bannon, Roberts, and others admire, and are indeed seeking to carry out in the U.S. right now. The destruction of the civil service is already under way, pressure on the press and universities has begun, and thoughts of changing the Constitution are in the air. But proponents of these ideas rarely talk about what happened to the Hungarian economy, and to ordinary Hungarians, after they were implemented there. Nor do they explore the contradictions between Orbán’s rhetoric and the reality of his policies.

He [Orban]rhapsodizes about family values, even though his government spends among the lowest amounts per capita on health care in the EU, controls access to IVF, and notoriously decided to pardon a man who covered up sexual abuse in children’s homes.

Orbán also talks a lot about “the people” while using his near-absolute power not to build Hungarian prosperity but to enrich a small group of wealthy businessmen, some of whom are members of his family. . . . . Direkt36, one of the few remaining investigative-journalism teams in Hungary, recently made a documentary, The Dynasty, showing, for example, how competitions for state- and EU-funded contracts, starting in about 2010, were deliberately designed so that Elios Innovatív, an energy company co-owned by Orbán’s son-in-law István Tiborcz, would win them. . . . . Other beneficiaries come and go, depending on Orbán’s whim. One Hungarian businessman told me that “you can tell who is in, who is out by seeing whose companies begin growing. If you are in, then your company is growing. If you’re out, your company goes from this big to this small. You see it in a year or two.”

This kind of corruption is, again, mostly legal, because the laws, contracts, and procurement rules are written in such a way as to permit it. Even if this activity were illegal, party-controlled prosecutors would not investigate it. But the scale of the corruption is large enough to distort the rest of the economy.

 . . . . 20 percent of Hungary’s companies operate “not on market principles, not on merit-based principles, but basically on loyalty.” These companies don’t have normal hiring practices or use real business models, because they are designed not for efficiency and profit but for kleptocracy—passing money from the state to their owners.

Not that the regime ever acknowledges the role that the oligarchy plays in the system, or even concedes that Hungary might face a structural crisis. Another Hungarian economist told me that Orbán always predicts “very bright days in the future; success, unimaginable success.”

[A]nnual average inflation in 2023 was more than 17 percent. In 2024, the government predicted 4 percent growth; the reality was 0.6 percent. Anyone who contradicts this messaging is unlikely to be widely heard. Independent economists are rarely invited to appear on public television, or in any media controlled by the ruling party. In February 2024, the regime created the Sovereignty Protection Office, a sinister body that harasses and smears independent Hungarian organizations.

But the truth is not hard to perceive for anyone who cares to look, because the beneficiaries of this corrupt system are not shy about showing off their wealth. When I mentioned the shiny hotels in central Budapest to a Hungarian friend, he snorted. “Of course, that’s where the NER-people live,” he said. “They want it to look nice.” Also, they own quite a few of them.

In many ways, Hungary is about as different from the U.S. as it is possible to be: small, poor, homogeneous. But I watched the film with a sense of foreboding. As Elon Musk, a government contractor, sets fire to our civil service and makes decisions about the departments that regulate him; as the FBI and the Justice Department are captured by partisans who will never prosecute their colleagues for corruption; as inspectors general are fired and rules about conflicts of interest are ignored, America is spinning quickly in the direction of Hungarian populism, Hungarian politics, and Hungarian justice. But that means Hungarian stagnation, Hungarian corruption, and Hungarian poverty lie in our future too.

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We Are Sleepwalking Into Autocracy

With each passing day we see the Felon issuing executive orders attacking everything from law firms handling justified lawsuits against his illegal actions, to attacking media outlets that continue to publish the truth and expose his lies and corruption, and attacking museums and cultural institutions accused of  “improper ideology” - naming showing the arts and history of those other than straight white men. Disturbingly, Democrats seem incapable of getting their act together to try to stop the destruction of institutions and democracy itself. Just as disturbing are the millions of Americans who appear to be paying little or no attention - sleepwalking, if you will - while long standing norms are destroyed or ignored. The end result if something doesn't happen is that America will become an autocracy akin to Hungary or Turkey or possibly something far worse. Right now foreign students are being kidnapped and made to disappear for stances contrary to the party line flowing from the White House, but the time may well come when ordinary citizens who voice opposition to what's happening may also be arrested on made of charges and made to disappear. History is full of examples of the downward spiral that America has entered that underscore that such things can indeed happen. Meanwhile, Republican elected officials at all levels either have bought into the effort to take the nation back to the 1950's if not the 1890's or are only concerned with remaining in office at whatever cost. A long piece in the New Yorker looks at where we find ourselves. Here are highlights:

Chris Murphy, the junior senator from Connecticut, hardly exudes the energy on the stump of the leading populist progressives in his party, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He is preternaturally calm, and, when he says that his “hair is on fire” about the Trump Administration’s destruction of public norms and the rule of law, it is not initially convincing. And yet, in recent months, Murphy has tirelessly argued—on television, on TikTok, on The New Yorker Radio Hour this week—that unless the Democratic Party broadens its coalition with a primarily populist economic message and takes risks to oppose the destruction of democratic institutions, it will fail to mobilize popular support, continue to lose elections, and squander (as in Hungary, Turkey, and beyond) democracy itself.

Murphy, who is fifty-one, was a wunderkind, winning election to the House at thirty-three and to the Senate before his fortieth birthday. He argues not only that Donald Trump and the MAGA movement are threatening myriad institutions and making them bow to executive power but that the midterm elections of 2026 might be rendered undemocratic through the erosion of the infrastructure necessary for opposition to exist.

Long ago, the Republican Party decided that they cared more about power than they did democracy. That’s what January 6th was all about—regardless of who won the election, they wanted to make sure that their person was in charge. They believe, and have long believed, that the Democratic Party progressives are an existential threat to the country, and thus any means justifies the end—which is making sure that a Democrat never again wins a national election. So, this seems pretty purposeful and transparent—this decision to rig the rules of democracy so that you still hold elections, but the minority party, the opposition party, is rendered just weak enough, and the rules are tilted toward the majority party just enough, so that Donald Trump and Republicans and the Trump family rule forever. And, of course, this is not an unfamiliar system. This is Hungary, this is Turkey, this is Serbia. There are plenty of countries, all around the world, that hold elections—it’s just that one party continues to win. And that is, I think, the very concrete, very transparent plan that Trump and his White House are implementing right now.

They do not fess up to the plan behind closed doors. They are living in a self-created delusion. Most of them will tell you that it’s not as bad as you think. Yes, Donald Trump is acting in a way that previous Presidents have not, but we will still have a free and fair election; what he’s doing is not enough to topple essential democratic norms.

They are, of course, also deeply scared of him. They have worked very hard to become United States senators. You’ve sacrificed a lot to get to this point, and you don’t want to stop being a United States senator once you’ve gotten here. And for Republicans, the only thing that keeps you a United States senator is staying on Donald Trump’s good side.

Republicans in the mold of John Thune—and I’m not saying that he personally has said this to me, but people in his mold will say, “Well, if I cross Donald Trump, I’ll get replaced by somebody infinitely worse. And I can try to work behind the scenes to make this better.”

And then the majority of Republicans in Congress are fully on board with the idea that the rules should be rigged so that Democrats never rule again. There is just an exhaustion with democracy among a lot of Republicans.

I do think that over the last four years, those surrounding Donald Trump put together a pretty thoughtful plan to destroy democracy and the rule of law, and you are seeing it being implemented. Just in the last week—and you and others have covered this well—the assault has been trained on academia, institutions of higher education, and the legal community, the biggest law firms in this country. In democracy after democracy, those two institutions—higher education and the legal profession—are, in many ways, the foundation that undergirds the rule of law.  Those are the places where people think about the rule of law, protect it, warn when it is being undermined. The legal profession is the place where people contest efforts to try to destroy the rule of law. And so it is not coincidental that Trump is trying to force both higher education and the legal profession to capitulate to him . . . .

And, of course, what the Administration is doing by taking on these very high-profile institutions is sending a warning to other law firms and to other colleges: if you take us on—if you file lawsuits against the Administration, if you support Democrats, if you allow for campus-wide protests against our priorities—you’ll be next. . . . . This is how democracy dies. Everybody just gets scared. You make a few examples, and everyone else just decides to comply.

We’ve [the Democrat Party] got to be a party that invites people in as long as they agree with us on the basic economic message, and build our party with a little bit more acceptance of people who have diverging views on social and cultural issues.

I don’t know that it really breaks down along generational lines, but I can explain what the basic argument is right now. Is this a normal moment, where you can just keep on punching Donald Trump, and pushing down his approval ratings, and eventually win the 2026 election, and set up a potential win in 2028? Or is there a pretty good chance that we’re not going to have a free election in 2026?

You believe that’s a possibility?  A hundred per cent. Every single day, I think the chances are growing that we will not have a free and fair election in 2026.

It may not even be that the mechanics of the election are rigged. I’m not suggesting that there will be election officials out there stuffing ballots. What I’m talking about is that the opposition—the infrastructure necessary for an opposition to win—will have been destroyed. No lawyers will represent us. They will take down ActBlue, which is our primary means of raising small-dollar contributions. They will threaten activists with violence, so no one will show up to our rallies and to our door-knock events. This is what happens in lots of democracies around the world; the opposition is just kept so weak that they can’t win. That’s what I worry about being the landscape as we approach 2026.

So, to me, the essential difference in the Party right now is that some people think that that has a very low likelihood, and so we should just engage in normal politics—try to become more popular than Republicans. And people like me believe that it won’t matter if we’re more popular than them, because the rules won’t allow us to run a fair election; and so everything we are doing right now, both inside the Capitol and outside the Capitol, should be geared toward trying to make Republicans stop this assault on the rule of law and democratic norms.

Do you think it’s possible that Donald Trump wants to stay in office past 2028? How would he do it? I think it’s absolutely possible. People very close to him are saying that it’s already a foregone conclusion. If he breaks the Supreme Court and breaks the Constitution and pays no consequence for it, we could ultimately be living in a situation in which the President just declares that he will stay in office. He could also hand power to a relative—maybe Donald Trump doesn’t run, but a Trump family member runs and the Trump family just stays in power. I think all of those things are possible.

Trump is giving us this opportunity—because this is the most corrupt White House in the history of the country—to run on an anti-corruption message. But we will only win if we actually run an anti-corruption platform. And so, for me, the two things that matter most are populist economics and government reform. If Democrats run on cleaning up Washington with real, actual plans—to, for instance, get private money completely out of politics; to pass the STOCK Act, to make sure that not a single person inside government can use insider information to trade to benefit them financially—and we run on populist economics, I think that’s a winner, and it’s a way for people to stand up and support democracy, but only a reformed version of democracy.

Trump has been so public about his corruption that it ends up being normalized. . . . . It’s probably the most massive corruption scandal in the history of the country. You literally have an—I guess—legal, open channel for private donations to the President and his family in exchange for favors. And we just think that it’s part of Trump’s right to do business in the White House. It’s gross. It’s disgusting. It’s deeply immoral.

We need to be engaged in risk-tolerant behavior right now. Because ultimately, the only way to save the democracy is for there to be a national public mobilization—of not thousands, not tens of thousands, but hundreds of thousands of people—when the five-alarm fire happens. If the public doesn’t see us taking risks—tactical risks, daily risks—then they are not going to take what will be a risk on their part, standing up to a repressive regime where it’s clear that the government is willing to make you pay a personal price if you exercise your voice.

[I]f you think that democracy is the No. 1, No. 2, and No. 3 story, then you have to act like it, and you need to show that you’re willing to take a political risk, like voting against an otherwise popular bill in order to increase and create leverage to try to save the democracy.

People are ready to mobilize. We just haven’t been organized enough to give them those opportunities. And this speaks to the actual need of the Democratic Party right now. We have to be better when it comes to our tactics inside Washington, but we actually have to build a political infrastructure that can plug people in. And that’s what we’ve been really terrible at doing over the years. The Republicans have a permanent political infrastructure—mobilizing, legal, messaging, intellectual. The Democrats have a very thin permanent infrastructure.

[D]on’t let the right blame your problems on trans kids or on immigrants. Your problems are created by a fundamental corruption inside government. Your problems are created by a government that prioritizes the billionaires and rigs the rules against you.” That is a message that can win. So I don’t think you run away from your defense of those communities. You talk about those communities in the context of a message that is anchored in fighting concentrated economic power, and fighting the billionaire class that is taking over our government.

There's more. Read the entire piece.

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Tariffs, Totalitarianism, and America’s Entrepreneurs

During the 2024 campaign, the Felon promised to lower consumer prices "on day one."  That has not happened and with the Felon's tariffs on autos about to increase car prices by thousands of dollars, a host of other products and materials about to soar in cost, thousands fired from jobs, the stock market down for the 6th week in a row, and consumer confidence plummeting, the MAGA base is being played for fools. If economic issues had truly been what motivated many working class voters to vote vote for the Felon, they ought to be screaming bloody murder.  The silence of so many who whined incessantly about prices under Joe Biden to date is telling - racism against a non-white woman candidate, bigotry, hatred towards minorities, and even contempt for women appear to have been the true unspoken motivating factors.   Putting aside the fact that America's standing in the world is in a shambles, many American businesses are about to pay dearly for the Felon's ugly agenda, and it's not just automakers.  One Nobel prize winning economist described the current mess as follows:

I thought I’d say something brief today about the auto tariffs. There’s lots of economic analysis out there (spoiler: they’re bad). Let me add two observations: what these tariffs say about America as an ally (worthless) and what the response to criticism says about the Trump administration’s mindset (totalitarian).

On the first point, I’ve seen surprisingly little discussion of the legal basis for these tariffs. U.S. law gives the president a lot of discretion to impose tariffs without prior legislative approval, but the process is still supposed to be constrained by rules. There are, or are supposed to be, specific situations in which the president is allowed to impose tariffs, beyond “he feels like it.”

Trump seems determined to treat our allies as enemies, with a special animus toward Canada. And this systematic destruction of any credibility America might have as a trusted partner is a even bigger story than the impact of tariffs on consumer prices or real GDP.

On the second point, the other day Larry Summers declared that administration claims that foreigners will absorb the entire cost of tariffs are “ludicrous.” I’m not sure why this declaration was considered newsworthy; Larry was only echoing what every economic principles textbook and 95 percent of economists say  . . . 

Still, Larry’s statement did inspire some headlines, and got a response from Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary. Did Bessent explain why he thinks the administration is right and almost the entire economics profession is wrong? No: he immediately accused Summers of being, in effect, a paid protestor . . . .

This isn’t how democratic governments respond to criticism. Even if you’re sure you’re right, you’re supposed to acknowledge the possibility that critics are sincere unless there’s clear reason to believe otherwise. But Trump and his minions already have a totalitarian mindset, in which there is no such thing as legitimate skepticism of the Leader’s proclamations. Anyone who expresses doubt, whether it’s Larry Summers or the Wall Street Journal editorial page, must be a corrupt globalist, or a woke radical left-wing Marxist, or maybe both. . . . . Do people in the business world still think Bessent is a sensible guy who will exert a stabilizing influence on Trump policies?

A piece in The Atlantic looks at the real harm many businesses now face as they are caught between the prices of tariffs and American consumers.  Here are excerpts:

Over the past two months, Stuart and Susan Rosen say they have paid nearly $30,000 in tariffs to the American government. Their Burbank–based small business designs costume jewelry, manufactures it in China, imports it to the United States, and sells it to department stores and online boutiques. When Donald Trump took office, he slapped a 10 percent tariff on their imports, and then another 10 percent.

Tariffs cause “a little disturbance” and require “a little bit of an adjustment period,” the president has conceded—and the Rosens confirmed. Their retail partners have declined to increase in-store prices for their necklaces and earrings, leaving their business with no choice but to eat the cost of the levy. “Trump gets online and says, This is great! These tariffs, we’re going to make a lot of money,” Susan told me. “Well, you’re stealing money from me.”

After this adjustment period, Trump has promised, the tariffs will “protect our businesses and our people.” Business owners will dump their foreign trading partners and foreign firms will invest in the United States. Companies will hire American workers, open American factories, and buy American goods. The trade deficit will decline and employment will go up.

It sounds great. But it is not happening. Many entrepreneurs, such as the Rosens, have no practical way to onshore their supply chain. If they managed to do so, their jewelry would cost more than imported jewelry, making their business uncompetitive. If the tens of thousands of American firms relying on imported goods did the same, the country’s rate of productivity growth and consumers’ purchasing power would go down. “If we try to make every damn thing here, it’s a road to poverty,” Kimberley Clausing, an economist at UCLA, told me. “The idea that there’s going to be some sort of long-term benefit is hogwash.”

The White House is not creating a little disturbance in service of making America rich again; it’s creating a huge disturbance in service of making America poor again.

This 21st-century push for 19th-century industry is about hope for the future and, perhaps even more so, fears from the past. From the 1970s to the 2000s, deindustrialization and globalization eviscerated the country’s heartland, the Steel Belt corroding into the Rust Belt. It would be hard to overstate the financial and social ramifications: persistent depopulation, permanent income loss, severe regional inequality, increasing drug overdoses, rising political polarization, ascendant right-wing populism.

A self-proclaimed “tariff man,” Trump has taken these arguments to extremes, bellowing that foreign countries are ripping off Americans and promising to eliminate the country’s trade deficit.

But there is a difference between using trade policy to generate new jobs and to restore old ones, as Trump wants to do, promising to take the country back and make it great again. “Rectifying the bad things we went through in the past—and I am not minimizing that there were costs—this is not going to fix that, and I fear that it’s holding out false promise,” Chad Bown of Peterson Institute for International Economics told me. Tariffs aren’t reparations.

Trump’s nostalgia notwithstanding, the American economy was not more prosperous when a large share of its workers were toiling on assembly lines. Fifty years ago, the middle class was larger and inequality was lower. But wages and household incomes were smaller, and consumer goods were much more dear.

Trade liberalization and automation made most Americans better off.

Trump’s crackbrained understanding of trade economics threatens to reverse those welfare gains, and without aiding the Rust Belt. He insists that tariffs are paid by foreign exporters, when they are paid by domestic businesses and consumers, as the Rosens show. He argues that the United States’ trade imbalances indicate that other countries are taking advantage of us, when it simply means that we sell fewer goods and services to foreign nations than we buy from them.

China’s ascension to the World Trade Organization and decades of automation beforehand did damage the Rust Belt economy. But economists told me that trade policy has no way to reverse the phenomenon. Washington cannot dictate where business executives choose to build new plants; those decisions take into account not just tariffs but tax incentives, labor rules, the location of ports and highways, and local employment conditions.

When companies build plants in the United States today, they look nothing like the Manhattan garment factories and Big Three assembly lines of yore. Automation has diminished the number of manufacturing positions globally; countries such as Ethiopia and Bangladesh have seen most of their job growth in the service sector. Given the high cost of labor in the United States, manufacturing firms tend to invest heavily in robotics, machine tools, and AI systems. In the 1930s, the biggest Detroit auto plant employed more than 100,000 workers. Hyundai’s new electric-vehicle plant outside Savannah is expected to employ 8,500.

Modern factories tend to be not unitary production facilities but nodes in complex, globe-spanning networks. A car finished in Illinois might contain components from Mexico, Canada, Japan, and Germany,  with parts crossing in and out of the United States multiple times during assembly. “If you don’t have tariff-free access to those parts, your car is going to be more expensive than the same-quality car made in South Korea or Germany,” Clausing told me. Tariffs would make it “harder to make things in America, not easier,” . . . . multiple rounds of tariffs on a vehicle produced inside and outside the United States. Tariffs, she told me, “could decimate the U.S. auto industry.”

Trump’s proposed tariffs do not emphasize strategically important or high-tech industries, as prior administrations have done. As a result, “we’re going to reallocate production away from stuff we were good at making and towards stuff that we’re not good at making,” . . . . Other countries that have engaged in this kind of autarky have generally given up, Clausing noted. “You realize that you can’t make everything yourself and it ultimately makes your citizens poor.”

Trump’s enormous tariffs would increase consumer prices and limit the quantity and quality of goods available for American households to purchase. The policies would kill off firms reliant on imported goods or parts. The misallocation of investment capital would make the country less vibrant in the long term.

The Rosens were looking into getting an exemption from Trump’s tariffs, on the basis that they could not find a domestic fabricator for their jewelry. I asked what would happen if the exemption did not come through. “That’s the question,” Stuart told me. “We’re very loyal to our employees. I mean, we’re stupid! What can you do?” They hope that their retailers would agree to raise retail prices. If they don’t, the Rosens might not make it through Trump’s adjustment period. They would go out of business again.