I am not optimistic in the short term, but I am in the long term. I’ve watched the country go through terrible upheavals, back to the Vietnam War and the election of Richard Nixon as president, which in combination normalized cynicism about whether society is trying to help or hurt ordinary people.
The leaked Pentagon Papers revealed that the Vietnam War had no goal and could not be won, but worse, that the government knew this as it lied to the public and for years continued wasting the lives of soldiers on a hopeless cause. The Watergate scandal, where Nixon, a Republican, tried to rig the upcoming election by sending spies to plant listening devices into Democratic headquarters, and then covered it up, resulted in his forced resignation.
What ultimately protects the nation is not the “checks and balances” taught in school, but the willingness of the people themselves to stand up and say, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” The American Revolution was fought by a bunch of ordinary people who simply did not like being told what to do by a king and parliament thousands of miles away. The 50501 movement (“50 protests. 50 states. 1 movement.”) named its protest events “No Kings” as an explicit evocation of this history, drawing five million participants in June and seven million in October. The widely publicized Lichbach–Chenoweth–Stephan “3.5% rule” is an empirical finding in political science that the probability of a non-violent protest movement to succeed in overthrowing even the most repressive and autocratic government reaches near-certainty if a large enough minority support it, even passively. For the US, 3.5% of the 330 million population is about 11.5 million: The No Kings events, repeatedly breaking their own records as the largest single-day protests in American history, are approaching that.
I see Donald Trump’s MAGA movement not as anything fundamentally new or different, but as the end stage of the Tea Party movement, a point I made in 2019 during Trump’s first term. From the end of World War II in 1945 until the peak of the Nixon era around 1970, the economy grew in such a way that it benefited everybody, raising the income and standard of living of the poor as well as the rich. Since about 1980 and the Ronald Reagan era, almost all of the benefits of the phenomenal growth in national wealth accrued to the richest 20%, leaving the poorest 80% effectively stagnant in real income and standard of living. Such growing income inequality is unsustainable. What is really going on here is a generational transfer of wealth to old people, sticking their children and grandchildren with trillions of dollars in debt, pushing them out of the traditional middle class so they will never, for example, be able to afford to buy a house.
Across the tax cuts by the Trump administration in 2017 and 2025, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) predicts the national debt will increase an additional $4.4 trillion (beyond the already primed-to-occur $1 trillion every 100 days), Medicaid will be cut by $800 billion by removing 11 million people from health insurance, and Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programs (SNAP “food stamps”) will be cut by $300 billion. At the same time, defense spending will increase by $150 billion and immigration enforcement will be increased by a factor of ten to $150 billion. Rural hospitals and medical providers will go out of business.
Trump cuts to international health assistance will result in 4 million AIDS deaths and an additional 6 million HIV infections by 2029. Trump cuts to medical research of $1.8 billion, mostly through the National Institutes of Health, will devastate universities where they will be forced to lay off highly skilled staff and close laboratories, leaving a swath of research destruction that will take decades to repair.
Adding to such political and economic instability, Donald Trump himself exhibits obvious indications of clinical dementia, frequently evidencing paraphasia both phonological (“Thick and thrim,” when he meant, “Thick and thin”), and semantic (“Israel faces the threat of Zionism”). Widespread speculation that he is concealing congestive heart failure or transient ischemic strokes, or both, arises from his swollen ankles, bruised hands, apparent drooping on one side of his face, and unexplained disappearance from public view for days at a time. Recently, Trump claimed to have undergone MRI testing but not to know on which part of his body it was performed. In 2020, during his first term, Trump was clearly hiding information from the press and the public about his testing positive for COVID-19, so there is ample precedent of him hiding health issues.
Trump might get away with lying about tariffs because only 45% of the public know they are taxes paid by American importers and ultimately consumers, but people know from personal experience he is lying about the price of groceries and of electricity. People understand the extremely simple issue of the Epstein files, sensing a cover-up of conduct almost certainly embarrassing if not criminal. These are tenuous lies that are already starting to unravel.
To summarize, during the next year I expect a crack-up of the existing government structure. There is a substantial chance, maybe a likelihood, that Trump will face health issues leaving him unable to function – he may even die – before the midterm elections in 2026. Congress is reverting to polarized paralysis and repeated standoffs, even government shutdowns, every few months, the next due to explode on Jan 30.
One good sign is that Congress will investigate possible war crimes of murdering shipwrecked survivors, after attacks on small Venezuelan boats, a bipartisan effort announced by the House and Senate Armed Services Committee chairs and ranking minority members, the latter including Sen. Jack Reed from RI.
The No Kings protests will get even bigger, but that could go either way in terms of results: Hopefully enough members of Congress will read the handwriting on the wall and assert themselves against the president; or Trump will give in to his gut inclinations and send troops to pacify what he sees as an insurrection.
The way out in the long term, meaning after the midterm election, is for a broad consensus to develop that tax cuts for the old and wealthy, funded by heaping unmanageable debt onto the young and middle-class, has to stop, not only because it is unsustainable in practice, but because it is fundamentally immoral. If we are lucky, the newly elected Congress will be in a position to pursue this. The Founders of our nation wrote in the memorable Preamble to the Constitution that their goal was, “To form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” That posterity thing was not a mere afterthought.