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America is Trapped in a Burning Tesla

Currently, America is trapped in the narcissism and megalomania of the Felon and his co-president, Elon Musk, both of whom believe they know everything and are incapable of seeing their own limitations.  Hence the reckless firing of thousands of federal workers - some of whom have had to be chased after and rehired - and on again off again tariffs that are roiling the economy.  Currently, the auto industry was given a temporary waiver on tariffs when industry leaders tried to make clear how devastating the consequences would be.  Meanwhile, Canadians are boycotting American goods and canceling travel plans to America, something that bodes ill for the liquor industry for one and tourism in general - in Tidewater Virginia, the loss of Canadian tourists could hit Williamsburg and Virginia Beach significantly.  .Most frightening is the reality that there appears no escape in sight as the Republican controlled Congress does nothing to assert itself against the Felon and cancels members' townhalls where constituents rage at them. Vladimir Putin must be laughing hysterically watching his asset - Krasnov - make a shambles of America's economy and the federal government's ability to operate.  Economist Paul Krugman looks at the mess with no apparent means of escape:

Just two days ago Steven Rattner published an article in the New York Times describing the mood among big-business leaders, which I would summarize as smug complacency. Donald Trump, they appeared to believe, was basically their guy, someone who would cut their taxes and remove those pesky environmental and financial regulations. He might be saying some crazy things about trade wars, appointing strange people to top policy positions and threatening our allies, but no need to take that stuff seriously.

Are they still feeling smug? Or are they starting to realize that Trump’s ignorance, irresponsibility and whiny belligerence weren’t an act?

Trump has just imposed tariffs on Canada and Mexico that are substantially more extreme and damaging — to our own economy as well as theirs — than anything he suggested during the campaign. By explicitly linking his tariffs to an attack on Canada’s sovereignty — repeatedly referring to Canada’s leader as “Governor Trudeau” is both childish and deeply offensive — he has guaranteed that there will be large-scale retaliation.

I mean, it takes real effort to make Canadians fiercely anti-American, but Trump is pulling it off. And don’t imagine that Mexico, which the U.S. actually has invaded in the past, has failed to notice Trump administration threats of military action. You can expect large-scale retaliation from Mexico too.

Automobile production, which is deeply integrated across our northern and southern borders — there really isn’t a U.S. auto industry, there’s a North American industry operating in all three countries — will be especially hard hit.

One thing that really struck me from Rattner’s piece — something I’ve heard from other sources — is that big businessmen think Elon Musk is doing a good job. I guess this is one of those cases where power and privilege make you blind to things that are obvious to everyone else.

What those of us not cocooned in our corner offices see is that Musk let a bunch of Dunning-Kruger kids — too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent — loose on federal agencies, where they began firing workers without trying to understand what these workers do or why it might be important. These firings have been followed in several cases by desperate attempts to rehire the lost workers, who turn out to have been doing things like, um, securing the nation’s nuclear weapons.

Now, Musk’s DOGE claims that it has already saved taxpayers tens of billions of dollars, but it has provided no evidence to back those claims. . . . and DOGE has already retracted 5 of its 7 biggest claims about cost savings.

Imagine how a private business would react if it hired a supposed efficiency expert who quickly fired crucial employees while making grandiose claims about the money he’s saving, but kept releasing progress reports that were full of ludicrous errors. You wouldn’t keep him on; you’d have security escort him out of the building and immediately change all the locks.

Sooner or later, and probably sooner rather than later, important things are going to break. It could be the U.S. Forest Service, where large job cuts have largely stalled the precautionary work normally undertaken before fire season gets fully underway, and could leave the service short-handed when it comes to fighting fires when they come. It could be air traffic control, where Musk appears set to hand over contracts to renew the system’s technology to … himself.

If forced to guess, however, I’d predict that the first big crack in federal services will come in Social Security. The Dunning-Kruger kids’ ignorance about how the federal government works appears to have been especially acute when it comes to the Social Security Administration. Their inability to understand SSA databases seems to have led to Musk’s false claim that tens of millions of dead people are receiving retirement checks. This claim has been thoroughly debunked, yet Musk is still making it, and Trump repeated it last night.

Most immediately, the key point is that the SSA was already understaffed before DOGE came marching in, and is now facing significant further job cuts. There is now a real concern that the agency will begin missing payments to some seniors for the first time in its history — which will be devastating for the many Americans who depend on Social Security for most of their income. Seniors wondering what happened to their payments might try to visit the local Social Security office — except DOGE is closing many of those offices. And good luck getting the overstretched agency on the phone.

I don’t know who first came up with this metaphor, but it seems to me that America is now trapped in a burning Tesla. If you don’t know this, the doors on Musk’s cars are designed to open electronically; if they have manual releases at all, they’re difficult to get at and use. As a result, there have been multiple instances of people burning alive inside Teslas when the engines catch fire.

Well, large parts of the U.S. economy and government appear to be on the verge of self-immolation. And given the combination of arrogance and ignorance shared by Musk and Trump, it’s hard to see how we get out.

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Trump's Golden Age of Delusion and Chaos

The Felon's long winded speech, if one can call it that, on Tuesday put much of the lunacy of the Felon's agenda in focus: creating chaos at home and abroad while positioning America as a client state of Vladimir Putin.  The "speech was laced with outright lies - e.g., that millions of dead people are receiving Social Security payments - and the only policy initiatives are giving huge tax breaks to the super wealthy while slashing programs and agencies that benefit everyone else, and waging war on all things "woke."  Just as distasteful was seeing congressional Republicans applaud whatever the Felon said.  The Felon could have farted loudly and these self-prostituting individuals would have likely applauded. Meanwhile, the stock market is down, consumer prices are up, and uncertainty surrounds the economy.  The Felon's promised "golden age" is defined by delusion and chaos with of heavy dose of misogyny. With nothing positive economically flowing to the MAGA base other than supposedly "owning the libs" and a rewarmed version of Jim Crow, one has to wonder what it will take for cultists to realize they will be worse off under the glorious leader than they were during the Biden years.  A piece in the New Yorker looks at this age of chaos and insanity:

Six weeks and two days after returning to the Oval Office, Donald Trump headed back to the Capitol, the site of his very recent swearing-in ceremony, to declare victory—again and again and again. Over Joe Biden. Evil foreign gangs. Canada. In his address to a joint session of Congress on Tuesday night, Trump claimed that he had done more in his first wild weeks back in power, with his “swift and unrelenting action,” than any President ever, including George Washington.

A flood of words followed, so many that Trump, channelling his inner Fidel Castro, easily broke the modern record for a Presidential address to Congress: Bill Clinton’s one-hour-and-twenty-eight-minute stem-winder in 2000. And yet there was little news in it . . . . Trump made little effort to explain his disruptive moves to jettison America’s traditional alliances and assault the federal government at home, preferring instead to string together greatest hits from his campaign rallies and brickbats aimed at his predecessor, “the worst President in American history.” Much of what Trump said was inflammatory, radical, and dangerous. But it was also familiar, his by-now-standard mix of braggadocio and self-pity, partisan bile and patently absurd lies.

There’s no doubt that Trump, in just six weeks, has compiled a most unusual list of accomplishments to boast about—much of it a result of allowing the world’s richest man to take a chainsaw to the federal government, cutting hundreds of thousands of federal jobs and unilaterally shutting down federal programs and contracts worth billions of dollars in defiance of Congress. The lawless rampage of the second Trump Administration has already touched everything from rangers at America’s treasured national parks to the very pillars of the decades-old transatlantic alliance.

But you wouldn’t have known it from hearing Trump wind his way through nearly a hundred minutes of mostly standard-issue Fox News culture-war talking points and alpha-male American exceptionalism. (Sample: “Wokeness is trouble. Wokeness is bad. It’s gone. It’s gone,” he said. “Don’t we feel better?”)

Trump’s only major legislative proposal in his second term is to make permanent the tax cuts that Republicans in Congress passed during his first term; his big reveals in the speech were an announcement of a planned “Office of Shipbuilding” in the White House and a pledge to balance the federal budget, which literally no one thinks can be redeemed.

No amount of performative distraction, though, could erase the sense of the world in a state of Trump-induced chaos, whether he chose to mention it or not. The day of the speech, after all, had begun with a Trump-prompted market plunge as his long-threatened twenty-five-per-cent tariffs on Canada and Mexico took effect. In the morning before Trump went to Capitol Hill, the Prime Minister of Canada, Justin Trudeau, made a dramatic televised appeal, “directly to the American people.” “We don’t want this,” Trudeau said. “We want to work with you as a friend and ally. We don’t want to see you hurt, either. But your government has chosen to do this to you.”

Trudeau’s plea captured a bit of the bewilderment of the moment—how is it that one man acting alone could upend so much in the world? And just why, exactly, has Trump decided to turn Canada from America’s best friend to its enemy? . . . . “At the same time, they’re talking about working positively with Russia, appeasing Vladimir Putin, a lying, murderous dictator. Make that make sense.”

Trump can’t and he won’t. The remarkable thing, as Tuesday’s speech showed, is that he doesn’t even seem to think he needs to.

In the speech itself, however, Trump waxed almost poetic about the beauties of the tariff as a tool of national power. “Tariffs are not just about protecting American jobs,” Trump said. “They are about protecting the soul of our country.” Rather than foreshadow an imminent deal to end the standoff with America’s two neighbors, the President warned his supporters to brace for “a little bit of an adjustment period” and, later, “a little disturbance,” which was as close as he came to acknowledging the threat of spiking prices and crashing stocks that economists have warned about. In fact, Trump said he was doubling down on tariffs, promising that on April 2nd, reciprocal tariffs would go into effect on every country in the world that imposes any duties on American goods. So much for Wall Street’s conventional wisdom.

As for the geopolitical consequences of alienating America’s allies, abandoning Ukraine  and pivoting U.S. foreign policy to a decidedly Putin-esque view of the world, Trump hardly mentioned it. . . . . It was one of those tree-falls-in-a-forest moments with Trump; if he blows up the liberal international order but doesn’t explain why America is now on Russia’s side, how do you know if it happened at all?

Even before the gut punches of the past few days, Trump was already in negative territory with the public. According to FiveThirtyEight, he had a net negative favorability rating of close to two per cent as of today—worse than any other President of our lifetime at this point in his term, except for Trump’s own first term, when he was already six points under water, as the pollsters put it, on this day in March of 2017.

[T]he scene of the night came even before Trump started talking, as he walked down the aisle and was, briefly, confronted by a Democratic congresswoman from New Mexico, Melanie Stansbury, wielding a small, hand-lettered sign. “This is Not Normal,” it said. Almost as soon as she flashed it, a Republican congressman from Texas, Lance Gooden, ripped the sign out of her hands and threw it in the air. Call it the Trump era’s new normal, where members of Congress fight like toddlers on the House floor while Putin gloats over the greatest self-own in modern history. It’s a golden age, of bunk.

Thursday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Trump Is About to Tank the Economy

The Felon promised those who foolishly voted for him either out of ignorance or based on his appeals to their hatreds and prejudices that he would bring a golden age to the nation and lower prices.  Like everything else that comes from the Felon's mouth, so far these promises were, surprise, surprise just more lies.  Currently, the stock market is down, consumer prices are rising, residential mortgage rates remain relatively high, and tariffs and the Felon's international bullying are creating economic instability and uncertainty - things corporations and investors strongly dislike.  As a result, some are expecting the country to slide into recession and those who either deliberately or disingenuously whined about gas prices and grocery prices under Biden are seeing none of the promised relief.  Given the Felon's speech last night that seemed aimed at entertaining and thrill the MAGA base contained little to give hope and confidence to the two thirds of voters who did not vote for him (including those who did not bother to vote at all) were given little to encourage them. One has to wonder at what the Felon views as his end game politically if the economy tanks - or does he plan on fixing the 2026 mid-terms.  A piece in Politico looks at the economic issues:

Investors and consumers expected President Donald Trump to be a pro-business billionaire. What they got instead was Tariff Man.

As Trump was preparing for his second term in office, stocks were soaring, consumers were buoyant and economists were feeling optimistic about the year ahead, their hopes fed by potential pro-growth policies like tax cuts and deregulation.

Fast forward to now, when Trump has imposed 25 percent duties on imports from Canada and Mexico and increased existing tariffs on China. Americans have gotten gloomier about what tariffs might mean for their wallets, consumer surveys show. The odds of a recession have risen. And stocks are roughly where they stood on Election Day, facing a punishing rout as Trump’s new tariffs took effect and largely erasing the gains since he took office.

Everyone should have seen this coming. Trump often talked about tariffs on the campaign trail. He also threatened tariffs after he was elected. Then, he threatened more tariffs after he was sworn in. And yet, investors — like everyone else — weren’t sure how seriously to take those warnings until this week.

“They’re believing him more now,” said Neil Dutta, head of U.S. economic research at Renaissance Macro Research. “He finally shot the hostage.”

The U.S. economy was not entirely out of the inflation woods when Trump took office, but steady consumer spending and a low unemployment rate normally provide a healthy buffer against smaller economic shocks.

But throwing new tariffs on top of broader policy uncertainty and potential economic ripple effects from Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency will mean a hit to growth. The question is how large of a hit it will ultimately be.

“People who would never even think about recession now suddenly have to consider it,” said Mohamed El-Erian, chief economic adviser at Allianz, the parent company of asset management giant PIMCO. “It’s been an incredible transformation in the last four weeks.”

Essentially, Trump, who seems to care about economic stats and the stock market more than almost any other barometer of success, may be knee-capping his own record.

Of course, administration officials argue that’s not the case. Though Trump told reporters in early February that Americans could feel “some pain” from the trade wars, he and his advisers have argued tariffs aren’t a barrier to growth.

But some level of slowdown is essentially guaranteed. Even in Trump’s first term, when tariffs he imposed were much smaller in scope, business investment suffered and the manufacturing sector fell into contraction, prompting the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates in late 2019 amid concern for slowing growth.

This time around, the additional tariffs on Canada, Mexico and China alone could shave a percentage point off of GDP growth, according to Brad Setser, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations who served in economic roles under both Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden.

That estimate is based on the “just-pay-it” cost that assumes trade flows stay the same and companies merely pay the tariff . . . though there could be less damage if companies absorb the higher import costs, or there could be more if some firms decide to stop producing in certain countries altogether.

The trade actions so far could take a huge bite out of consumer spending, which is the main engine of growth. . . . . “There’s a quite significant tariff escalation that seems to be built in in early April,” and the scope of those tariffs could “clearly threaten a recession,” Setser said.

Now, Trump’s tariffs will cause a dilemma for Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who has kept borrowing costs at elevated levels in an attempt to bring inflation to heel but has also committed to trying to keep the economic expansion going. If Trump doesn’t reverse course soon, economic activity will likely weaken, putting pressure on the Fed to lower rates to provide relief to the economy even if tariffs push up prices faster and reignite inflation fears.

Renaissance Macro’s Dutta told me it’s telling that Trump still followed through even though markets were shaky before he committed to tariffing Mexico and Canada.  . . . . Trump’s financial pain tolerance is probably higher than we all thought. Adjust your expectations accordingly.

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Trump Hates Canada for its Decency

The Felon's threatened tariffs against Canada, Mexico and China have arrived and Canada and China are striking back - Mexico is expected to also do so today - and American consumers best get ready for significant price increases as a result of the Felon's bullying of our neighbors to the north and to the south. Car prices will rise, assuming models can even be produced, as will the prices of a host of other products. Based on the way the Covid pandemic was used by many American corporations to raise prices, it's a safe bet some will raise prices even if their actual costs have not increased due to the tariffs. Residents of many red states - e.g., South Carolina with its auto manufacturing - will feel real pain thanks to the individual they voted for last November. Locally, southeast Virginia relies heavily on tourism, including tourism from Canada.  Through the grapevine it appears Canadians are canceling their planned visits which will hurt Virginia Beach and Williamsburg perhaps significantly. All of which raises the question of (i) why the Felon hates Canada so much and (ii) at what point will congressional Republicans put self-preservation at the polls in the 2026 mid-term elections over prostituting themselves to the Felon.   A piece by Paul Krugman looks at the situation.  Here are highlights:

Trade policy mavens sometimes use numeric shorthand that refers to relevant parts of the Trade Act of 1974, which spells out situations in which the president has the right to impose tariffs. There’s Section 201, giving temporary relief to an industry that is being hurt by an import surge. There’s Section 232, protecting an industry vital to national security. There’s Section 301, responding to subsidies or other practices that give foreign producers an unfair advantage.

The tariffs Donald Trump just imposed on Canada and Mexico — nations with whom he himself signed a free trade agreement — don’t fit any of these categories. Maybe they’re Section 000, meaning that the president has simply lost his mind. Or maybe they’re Section 666: he’s just evil.

The newspapers this morning all contain analysis pieces trying to explain why Trump is imposing 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico. You can see the writers struggling, because this is a profoundly self-destructive move — it will impose huge, possibly devastating costs on U.S. manufacturing, while significantly raising the cost of living — without any visible justification. Yet the conventions of mainstream journalism make it hard to say directly that the president’s actions are just vindictive and senseless.

To its credit, the New York Times analysis comes closest, acknowledging that for some reason Trump personally loathes Canada, a nation most of the world stereotypes as “nice.” . . . . And it seems clear to me that Trump hates them for their decency.

To be fair, there are some efforts to explain what’s happening that go beyond Trump’s personal pathology. Some Canadians think Trump covets their mineral wealth. And there’s always the possibility that Trump knows how big Canada looks on standard maps, unaware both of the way that its land area is exaggerated by the Mercator projection and the fact that much of it is tundra, and thinks, “Real estate!”

Trump also goes on about Canada’s trade surplus with the United States, which he keeps saying is $200 billion a year — it’s actually less than a third that size. And nobody has offered a coherent justification for his claim that when Canada sells us cheap oil and electricity, we are somehow subsidizing them.

Canada is a pretty decent place, as nations go. And Trump, whom nobody would describe as a decent person, dislikes and maybe even fears people who are.

I mean, look at the people Trump has chosen to play prominent roles in his administration. I guess if you search hard enough you can find officials without a sex scandal, a financial scandal, a history of anti-semitism or racism, or a record of substance abuse in a senior position. But it isn’t easy. It really looks as if being vile is a fundamental job qualification.

And so we’re having a trade war. Trump appears to believe that we don’t need anything from Canada. Automobile manufacturers who rely on Canadian parts, Midwestern oil refineries that rely on Canadian oil, builders who rely on Canadian lumber, households that rely on Canadian hydropower for their electricity will soon learn otherwise.

Trump may imagine that he can bully Canada into submission. But he can’t; Canadians of all political persuasions are furious. Doug Ford, the conservative premier of Ontario, has the right atttitude: he has threatened to cut off U.S. electricity “with a smile on my face.” And remember that Canada can’t concede to U.S. demands, even if it were in a mood to do so (which it very much isn’t) because there aren’t any coherent U.S. demands; Canada has done nothing wrong!

So I don’t know how this ends. But U.S. voters will soon be feeling real pain, and I very much doubt that it will end in a Trump victory.

Tuesday Morning Male Beauty

 

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The Gilded Age Is Back

For years now the blog has maintained that today's Republican Party has been pushing to launch a new Gilded Age market by governmental policies that favor the very wealthy and push a reverse Robin Hood agenda where the poor and middle class are robbed to give to the very rich. A piece in Politico Magazine looks at the reality that this new Gilded Age with huge wealth disparities and attacks on lower economic classes, including the social safety net that benefit millions of Americans are relentless.   To fund tax cuts for the already obscenely wealthy, the Felon and the GOP are working to slash Medicaid, repeal safety regulations that protect workers and bar child labor, and are threatening Medicare and Social Security - some predicting Social Security payments are in jeopardy of interruption - and otherwise kicking millions to the gutter. Environmentally, the Felon has ordered that national forests be cut for timber (likely to make up for lost imported from Canada due to tariffs) and pushing tariffs that will raise prices for average American consumers.  The piece looks at the Gilded Age of the late 1800's and compares the abuses to what we are witnessing now.  On a brighter note, the piece warns the GOP and the Felon of the backlash that all of this may trigger (not soon enough in my view).  Here are highlights:

At his second inauguration, as President Donald Trump promised to usher America into a new “golden age,” he was surrounded in the Capitol Rotunda by a handful of tech billionaires whose companies account for roughly one-fifth of the market cap of U.S. public equities. It was a not-so-subtle sign that the second Trump administration will be staffed, advised and led by titans of wealth. Which means that Trump’s golden age looks an awful lot like a new Gilded Age.

The Gilded Age was the era in the late 19th century when business and industry dominated American life as never before or since. It was a period of unprecedented economic growth and technological progress, but also of economic consolidation and growing wealth inequality. Titans of industry enjoyed enormous control over political institutions, while everyday Americans buckled under the strain of change. As the gap between the haves and the have-nots widened, political culture ultimately grew coarse — and violent.

Then as now, growing income and wealth inequality opened a rift in American society, with a small group of elites amassing substantial power and influence. In the Gilded Age, industrial magnates like John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie dominated public life, while today, tech CEOs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos hold sway. Political corruption and patronage were rampant then, presaging concerns over corporate influence in politics now. Both periods witnessed intense political polarization and social upheaval, reflecting deep divisions within American society.

Despite Trump’s mass appeal among white working-class voters — and the fact that he performed better with working-class voters of other races than ever before — his coziness with billionaires like Musk and his pursuit of an economic agenda that focuses on tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans both suggest that his presidency will be more of a boon to modern-day tycoons than the average working person. That could mean that the coming of America’s second Gilded Age carries with it a warning for the GOP. By the 1890s, the pendulum had swung so hard in the direction of wealth and industry that America’s brittle social compact threatened to come undone. In response to the extremes of the Gilded Age, a wave of progressive reform swept the nation from the 1890s to the 1910s, fundamentally reordering the social compact between citizens and their government. Should Trump and his allies make good on their promise to refashion America in ways that prove widely unpopular, the counter-revolution they set in place could well be the defining trope of the 2030s and beyond.

On the state and local levels, corruption was equally rampant, though nowhere was more brazen than New York City, where William M. Tweed, the boss of the Tammany Hall Democratic organization, made an art form of public graft and fraud. Through the good offices of Thomas Nast, the staff cartoonist at Harper’s Weekly, Tweed became an emblem for the excesses of the new age.

The [post Civil War] boom proved lucrative to the small number of men who controlled access to local resources, but much less profitable for the hundreds of thousands of workers who supplied the muscle. Rarely did it occur to business and political elites that they had not prospered strictly on their own talent and merit alone. And they didn’t just owe it to workers; they also owed it to the government itself, which lavished moguls with subsidies and contracts. Tycoons like Leland Stanford and Collis Huntington benefited immensely from federal land grants and government-backed bonds that funded the construction of transcontinental railways. Industrialists and financiers like Carnegie and J.P. Morgan profited from lucrative war-time contracts supplying steel, arms and financial services to the Union government.

That story is beginning to repeat itself today. Many of the tech CEOs close to Trump and his orbit are also the beneficiaries of major government largesse. Thiel’s Palantir and Bezos’ AWS, which contracts with U.S. government agencies, defense organizations and intelligence services, rely heavily on taxpayer dollars and public infrastructure. According to new reporting in the Washington Post, Musk’s various companies have “received at least $38 billion in government contracts, loans, subsidies and tax credits, often at critical moments.” And just over a month into Trump’s term, the potential conflicts of interest arising from the tech mogul’s coziness with the administration are already extending beyond the hypothetical: . . . .

In addition to federal contracts and subsidies, the capitalist powers of the Gilded Age also benefited from government allocation of resources. . . . .The end result was a massive concentration of wealth in the hands of a relatively small number of companies. By the turn of the century, roughly 300 corporations controlled two-fifths of all U.S. manufacturing. And that concentration spilled over into politics.

During the Gilded Age, public life was heavily influenced by wealthy industrialists and financiers who represented powerful corporate interests. The U.S. Senate was a perfect embodiment of this reality, with members often assigned monikers that reflected their economic allegiances, such as the “Senator from Standard Oil” or the “Senator from the Railroads.” . . . . . Many of these senators had interwoven financial interests and personal connections, often sitting on the boards of the very companies they legislated on. Their dominance led to the Senate being perceived as a “millionaires’ club,” where corporate interests took precedence over public welfare, fostering an era of rampant corruption and economic inequality.

McKinley’s election as president in 1896 epitomized the growing influence of monied interests in Gilded Age America, as his victory was largely fueled by an unprecedented influx of corporate and industrialist support. . . . . His presidency, in turn, reflected the interests of his benefactors, as he promoted pro-business policies, high tariffs and a gold standard that favored banking and industrial elites over working-class Americans.

Republicans and their industrial allies were right to worry about a populist backlash. The Gilded Age was marked by intense labor unrest, as rapid industrialization led to dangerous working conditions, declining wages and widespread exploitation. . . . . The country seemed as though it were falling into a state of permanent class warfare. When thousands of miners brought operations in the anthracite coal region to a virtual standstill in 1875, Republican newspapers railed against them, deeming them “enemies of society” who believed that “the world owes them a living.” The Great Railroad Strike of 1877 proved especially bloody.

From Washington, President Rutherford B. Hayes ordered the military to break the strike, which it did with overwhelming force, reopening clogged rail lines, busting up union meetings and escorting strikebreakers through the picket line. . . . . It was a pattern that persisted into the 1890s.

These violent conflicts underscored the deep tensions between labor and capital, as industrialists and the government often worked together to crush worker uprisings, prioritizing economic growth and corporate power over the rights and safety of the working class.

Yet much like today, populist anger didn’t always translate into a unified political response. While many small farmers and working-class people in the Gilded Age supported the Democratic Party, factors like ethnicity, geography, partisan loyalty and religion divided the broader working class.

Today, Trump’s GOP has won over many working-class voters. The question that should keep him up at night is whether the excesses of a Second Gilded Age could disrupt that coalition, generating a more unified working-class backlash against him — just as the Progressive Era remade politics following the first Gilded Age.

The parallels between Gilded Age politics and society, and today, are striking. As was the case then, billionaires and industry leaders exert significant influence over policy and governance. Just as McKinley’s presidency was shaped by business moguls like Hanna, Trump’s administration has seen varying levels of support from wealthy figures such as tech investor Peter Thiel, oil magnate Harold Hamm, Musk, Bezos and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Like the Gilded Age GOP, Trump and his party promote policies favoring Big Business, including tax cuts for the wealthy, deregulation of industries and opposition to labor protections.

And just as labor unrest and economic inequality sparked upheaval in the late 19th century, growing discontent among working-class Americans today — facing stagnant wages, high corporate profits and declining labor rights — suggests that the conflicts of the Gilded Age are resurfacing in modern form.

Perhaps the most shocking parallel between then and now is Musk’s work with the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. In the 19th century, powerful bankers and industrialists flouted conflicts of interest to influence government policy. Today, despite being one of the federal government’s largest contractors and a chief beneficiary of government loans and largesse, Musk has arrogated the right to send tech bros into federal agencies and departments to commandeer their systems and dictate which programs will live and die — all with the blessing of the president.

Even the political culture today resembles that of the Gilded Age . . . . political culture in the Gilded Age reflected a near obsession with reclaiming white male authority. Thus, a popular fascination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with performative displays of “masculinity,” ranging from bare knuckle boxing and body building to football, a new collegiate sport that was so unspeakably violent and lethal in its early days that President Theodore Roosevelt led efforts to institute rules in 1906

But there is a warning in this for MAGA and its new compatriots in Silicon Valley: The extreme inequalities and corporate excesses of the Gilded Age ultimately sparked a backlash that led to two decades of progressive reform, as growing public outrage over monopolies, political corruption and labor exploitation led the government to take action.

If the past is prologue, the excesses of the second Trump administration could once again provoke a new wave of political and economic reform — if enough working-class people perceive a connection between their diminished position and the policies Trump and his allies pursue.

Perhaps Trump’s hold on a broad swath of working-class voters will endure. But he’d do well to remember that things that are gilded are not the real deal — and people eventually take notice.

Monday Morning Male Beauty

 

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Trump/Vance and the Sabotaging America

Throughout its history America has done many horrible things - the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow and continued racism and homophobia - but over the last 80 plus years overall, America has supported democracy around the world and used its wealth to fund humanitarian efforts both because they were the morally correct thing to do and because they advanced America's so-called soft power and interests. That America no longer exists or at least not in the current regime of the Felon and today's Republican Party that has betrayed almost everything it once stood for.  Now, at best we have a Russian sympathizer and at worse a Russian asset in the White House who is betraying long time allies and striving to build an oligarchy or dictatorship at home and pushing an agenda that will savage everyday Americans while transferring ever more wealth to the already super wealthy.  Throw in the Felon's threatened tariffs and the outlook for rising consumer prices for average Americans is bleak.  MAGA voters who whined about inflation, gas prices, etc. best get ready to be treated most cruelly. Between the Felon's embrace of Russia and dictators and a wrecking of the economy, one has to hope Americans will rise up in protest and demand a course reversal.  A piece in The Atlantic by a conservative former Republican looks at the shocking betrayal of America's interests: 

At least the Oval Office meeting held by President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was held in front of the cameras. False friendliness in public by Trump and Vance, followed by behind-the-scenes treachery, would have been much more dangerous to the Ukrainian cause.

Instead, Trump and Vance have revealed to Americans and to America’s allies their alignment with Russia, and their animosity toward Ukraine in general and its president in particular. The truth is ugly, but it’s necessary to face it.

Today’s [Friday’s] meeting gave the lie to any claim that this administration’s policy is driven by any strategic effort to advance the interests of the United States, however misguided. Trump and Vance displayed in the Oval Office a highly personal hatred. There was no effort here to make a case for American interests. . . . . “Let me tell you, Putin went through a hell of a lot with me,” Trump angrily explained. “He went through a phony witch hunt where they used him and Russia, Russia, Russia.”

Both the president and vice president showed the U.S.-led alliance system something it needed urgently to know: The national-security system of the West is led by two men who cannot be trusted to defend America’s allies—and who deeply sympathize with the world’s most aggressive dictator.

Through the Cold War period, Americans were haunted by the fear that a person with clandestine loyalties to a hostile foreign power might somehow rise to high office. . . . . The possibility that a person with such secrets in his past might someday go on to head the Department of State or Central Intelligence Agency once tormented Americans.

But what if the loyalties were not clandestine, not secret? What if a leader just plain blurted out on national television that he despises our allies, rejects treaties, and regards a foreign adversary as a personal friend? What if he did it again and again? Human beings get used to anything. But this?

It’s not hard to imagine a president of Estonia or Moldova in that Oval Office chair, being berated by Trump and Vance. Or a president of Taiwan. Or, for that matter, the leaders of core U.S. partners such as Germany and Japan, which entrusted their nations’ security to the faith and patriotism of past American leaders, only to be confronted by the faithless men who hold the highest offices today.

We’re witnessing the self-sabotage of the United States. “America First” always meant America alone, a predatory America whose role in the world is no longer based on democratic belief. America voted at the United Nations earlier this week against Ukraine, siding with Russia and China against almost all of its fellow democracies. Is this who Americans want to be? For this is what America is being turned into.

The Trump administration’s elimination of PEPFAR, the American program to combat HIV infection in Africa, symbolizes the path ahead. President George W. Bush created the program because it would do immense good at low cost, and thereby demonstrate to the world the moral basis of American power. His successors continued it, and Congresses of both parties funded it, because they saw that the program advanced both U.S. values and U.S. interests. Trump and Vance don’t want the United States to be that kind of country anymore.

American allies urgently need a Plan B for collective security in a world where the U.S. administration prefers Vladimir Putin to Zelensky.

The American people need to reckon with the mess Trump and Vance are making of this country’s once-good name—and the services they are performing for dictators and aggressors. There may not be a deep cause here. Trump likes and admires bad people because he is himself a bad person. When Vance executed his personal pivot from Never Trump to Always Trump, he needed a way to prove that he had truly crossed over to the dark side beyond any possibility of reversion or redemption; perhaps his support for Russia allowed him to do that. But however shallow their motives, the consequences are profound.

In his first term, Trump sometimes seemed a rogue actor within his own administration. The president expressed strange and disquieting opinions, but his Cabinet secretaries were mostly normal and responsible people. . . . . This time, Trump is building a national-security system to follow his lead. He has intimidated or persuaded his caucus in the House to accept—and his caucus in the Senate not to oppose—his pro-authoritarian agenda.

The good and great America that once inspired global admiration—that good and great America still lives. But it no longer commands a consensus above party. The pro-Trump party exposed its face to the world in the Oval Office today. Nobody who saw that face will ever forget the grotesque sight.

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