Only The American People Can Save The Country From Trump And The GOP—Do We Still Have What It Takes?

Trump’s revenge against America for turning him out of office in 2020 is manifesting itself in ways that will devastate the whole country. Yesterday, Krugman wrote that “it’s obvious to anyone willing to see— which many people still aren’t— that Trump is, in practice, waging war against American greatness. And the attack is taking place on multiple fronts. For the past few days everyone has understandably been focused on tariffs and the destruction of the world trading system. But in the long run, and maybe much sooner than that, the dire impacts of tariffs may be matched by the havoc Trumpism is wreaking in other areas.” His team is shredding the social safety net, wrecking Social Security, wrecking the U.S. healthcare system, wrecking American democracy, killing scientific research, setting up a recession that’ll make the rich richer and the rest of us poorer…

And trade? It will move on without Trump and, wrote Michael Schuman, without the United States, something few Americans are grasping yet. “Trump is withdrawing the United States from global trade. American families, companies, and investors will pay a price for this, as many commentators have noted. But the repercussions don’t end there. The tariff regime is also destroying a pillar of American global power, and it will further isolate the country at a moment when others stand ready to fill the vacuum.”

Trump’s— and Navarro’s— vision of trade is fully delusional, even apocalyptic and he sees his disastrous tariff agenda as payback— against a system that has helped make the U.S. the richest country in history. “Foreign cheaters have ransacked our factories, and foreign scavengers have torn apart our once beautiful American dream. For decades,” he ranted in the Rose Garden, “our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike,” he said, using his campaign trail rhetoric to try selling a contentious policy. “American steelworkers, autoworkers, farmers and skilled craftsmen … they really suffered gravely… Our country and its taxpayers have been ripped off for more than 50 years, but it is not going to happen anymore.”

Schuman wrote that “Trump’s tariffs are the culmination of a decades-long shift in political perceptions in the United States, in which trade has gone from an unalloyed good to the source of all ills. The U.S. once sought to bring down barriers and open markets globally— forging trade deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and Mexico, and supporting the World Trade Organization. The resulting global trading system lowered the cost of goods, which benefited the companies and consumers of wealthy countries such as the United States. It also connected poorer countries, such as China, to international supply chains, allowing them to create jobs, woo investment, and alleviate poverty. The United States became, in effect, the world’s ultimate consumer, which tied other countries to its economy and its interests. Trade was a glue that held the American-led international order together. But economics always involves trade-offs. As supply chains stretched across the globe in search of lower costs, many factories vanished from the American heartland. Some Americans fastened on trade as the source of the inequality and constrained mobility that plagued the country’s middle and working classes; populist politicians encouraged these sentiments. 

The Trump team sold its tariffs program as a bid to set things straight by forcing America’s lost factories to return home. “You’re going to see the greatest resurgence of factory building and factory production in America,” U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said in defense of the tariffs. Trump is “changing the way people think about production in America.”

The results are unlikely to be what the administration anticipates. Some foreign companies may indeed respond to the tariffs by building factories in the U.S. to maintain their presence in a crucial market. But many others are simply too small, or too integrated into existing supply chains, to make that move. Where the millions of American workers will come from to screw together iPhones or make car parts is also a mystery, especially given the president’s opposition to large-scale immigration. Factories in the U.S. are already struggling to find workers; the manufacturing sector has hundreds of thousands of vacant openings.

…The likely outcome of Trump’s policy will be high prices for what Americans make and buy, whether produced at home at greater cost than abroad or imported from overseas with a punitive tax. By one estimate, tariffs could hike the price of a top-end iPhone to $2,300. The Trump team seems to accept this. “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream,” U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in March. But when consumers buy fewer products at higher prices, companies produce and sell less and hire fewer workers, and growth slows. As French President Emmanuel Macron put it, Trump’s policy will make Americans “weaker and poorer.”

Americans will not be the only ones to suffer in a global trade war. Other countries will likely respond to U.S. tariffs by erecting protectionist barriers of their own. China has already announced an additional 34 percent tariff on U.S. imports. The EU is threatening to retaliate too. The global trade that was once an engine of prosperity may now reverse and become a source of economic competition.

Other countries long accepted U.S. leadership because they saw Washington as a proponent of global economic progress. The role Trump is choosing for the United States is not that. He may eventually roll back tariffs for those countries that negotiate with him, and he may even see this as a show of kingpin-like strength: Trump has already said that he’d be willing to reduce duties on China in return for a deal involving TikTok. But the erratic and arbitrary nature of the policies, and the willingness to exploit U.S. economic might to extort concessions, will undermine American standing nearly everywhere.

…The U.S. remains the world’s largest economy and a key market for many countries’ exports. But it is not the only game in town, either. A social-media account associated with CCTV, a Chinese state broadcaster, posted a graphic showing the extensive trade agreements that America’s partners have with one another and commented that, with the new tariffs, the U.S. is “shutting itself out of the world of free trade.” These countries will continue to expand their economic ties whatever Trump does. During his first term, after Trump withdrew the U.S. from a major trade agreement called the Trans-Pacific Partnership, participants completed the pact on their own.

Tariffs are not going to make other countries respect the United States. But they can make them move on without it.

So will American voters recognize what’s happening— what’s already happening— and stop it at the ballot box before it’s too late? That’s the question on which everything now turns. The danger isn’t just that Trump and the GOP are openly promising more cruelty, more chaos, more corruption. It’s that too many people have become numb to it, or worse, convinced themselves that it’s normal. But this isn’t normal. None of this is.

What Trump and his enablers are implementing for 2025 isn’t governance— it’s vengeance. And the damage won’t just fall on blue states or liberals, immigrants, academics, law firms, Democrats or journalists. It will hit working families across the board: in the form of higher prices, fewer rights, collapsed safety nets, lost jobs, and a diminished, isolated America that no longer leads the world but resents it.

Will enough voters see through the lies, the scapegoating, the nostalgic authoritarianism masquerading as strength? I think so. A staggering 81% of voters believe that American democracy is under threat, with 72% expressing strong agreement.

The recent Wisconsin Supreme Court race serves as a harbinger of the GOP's waning influence. Despite tens of millions of dollars pumped into the race by  Musk, the Trump-endorsed candidate suffered a decisive defeat, underscoring a growing public repudiation of Trumpism and the GOP. Moreover, the GOP's underperformance in traditionally secure districts— in Florida, Iowa, Pennsylvania— signals internal fractures and a disconnect from the electorate's evolving priorities. The party's reliance on incendiary figures and divisive tactics has not only alienated moderate constituents but also raised alarms about the sustainability of their political strategy.

Will more of the electorate awaken to and act on the impending peril and mobilize to avert a descent into authoritarianism? The data— including the recent elections— sure suggest a populace deeply concerned about the trajectory of the nation. We’ll see how far that goes by the end of 2026.