Turning back from life at Collington to the news we routinely read about or see on television ….

Every day it seems there is a new revelation of a Trump atrocity or excess. This week it was about all the money he and his family have made the past year, most of it after he was inaugurated—a net worth increase to the tune of $2.9 billion, according to Forbes (April 2025)—and we are now only at the beginning of his second term. Trump casinos, Trump championship golf courses, and Trump high rise luxury hotels seem to be on the drawing boards all over the planet, and there appears to be no end in sight. The new “Executive Branch” in Georgetown, a club just started by his oldest son, which hints of special access to the President for a mere $500,000 membership fee, is reportedly already a hot ticket item, and Trump’s bit coin business is booming. And having your own personal, multibillion dollar, luxury jumbo jet, compliments of Qatar, is shrugged off by the President as nothing unusual.  Nor has there been a peep of outrage among members of the Grand Old Party, which in days of yore has stood for good government, anti corruption, and fiscal responsibility. Fearing being “primaried out” by MAGA extremist candidates financed by Elon Musk and other billionaires, formerly moderate Republican senators and congressmen have caved.  Using Trump’s words, “The world has never seen anything like it.”

No, we haven’t.

The excesses, grifting, and pay-to-play Trump kleptocracy are not the worst of his presidency. There are more, even worse, disasters. The first is the Trump/House FY 2026 budget, fueled by more tax breaks for the rich, which if it becomes law or anything even close to its current form, will result in an increase in the deficit of the United States of between $4 and $5 trillion according to the CBO. No economist with a brain thinks that these horrendous deficits are sustainable. The deficits—due mainly to more tax cuts for the wealthy— will eventually bring us down.

Then there is the needless harm and cruelty inflicted on so many people both in the U.S. and abroad. Embry has been counseling on the phone people laid off from USAID and who live all over the world. These are good, hardworking people, people who were making a difference. A majority are not Americans. Few have any real options for a job that is anywhere near what they had at USAID. And what about all the millions of people that these programs were helping? Estimates are that thousands will die due to the AID money termination. Add to that the thousands of other federal workers and government contractors whose jobs have been eliminated.

Next is the harm caused by his targeting immigrants and the poor. We are very good friends with one undocumented immigrant family, who is terrified as are most of their undocumented friends fearing that knock on the door or the call into the office of their supervisor who has an ICE official standing beside him with a weapon in his hand. There are an estimated 12-13 million of these people in the United States. Trump has pledged to  rid the country of immigrants, an action which will destroy lives,  cost many billions of dollars to accomplish, and hurt the US economy.

What about the children, the poor, the elderly, and the disabled on Medicaid?  What will happen to them when Medicaid is crippled and the ACA subsidies vanish? How many rural and inner city hospitals, which depend on those subsidies to keep their doors open, will be forced  to shut down? What will happen to all the establishments that hire undocumented workers to do the work that no one else wants to do? To the farmers who depend on these workers to harvest the crops, to the restaurants, the hospitals, the landscaping and construction firms?

What about the millions of children who depend on SNAP ( food stamps) for a decent daily meal?

What about the tariffs, which economists tell us will surely cause inflation if enacted. Many economists believe it could throw world economies into chaos. And the attack on higher education and elite research universities? Where will this end?

This is insanity. It is as if some alien creature somehow clawed his way into the White House in the middle of the night while no one was looking. But we were looking. Our country voted for this guy. How did this happen and how do we claw our way out of this morass?

I suggest there are several reasons for Trump’s reelection:

The first is what I call “The Era of Great Discontent” caused by the increasing gap between the haves and the have nots in our country. Starting in the 1980s the income gap began to widen due to changes in the tax laws favoring the wealthy, diminished power of labor unions, technology causing disruption in the job market, and the exodus of American manufacturing to lower cost countries. A lot of people in the country are struggling paycheck to paycheck and are not happy campers. Many of these people are in the working class, or are people without a college degree. The average worker made more money (adjusted for inflation) in 1980 than he or she did in 2024. A CEO of a typical major corporation in 1980 made about 30 times the income of an average worker in that person’s company. In 2024 the number was over 300 times as much. The likes of Warren Buffet pay a lower tax rate than his secretary. Trump realized this malaise and anger and made a faux populist pitch that if elected he would be their president and right the ship that the Democrats sunk. This message resonated, even though it was a blatant lie that the Democrats were solely responsible for this. While the changes happened under both Democratic and Republic presidents, the tax cuts for the ultrarich and major corporations have been championed by the Republicans, not the Democrats, and are a major factor.

The second cause are  missteps made by Democrats. Over the last several decades the base of the Democratic Party has morphed from the working class to the “educated class.” There are lots of reasons for this –some related to the progressive thinking of people with college degrees and their (our) increased awareness of lingering racism. Whether fair or not, racism became associated mainly with working class white people. College educated, white people were perceived by many in the working class as snobs and elitists, who dissed those whom they considered racist and beneath them. Diversity, Equity and Inclusion was perceived by many in the working class as rubbing salt in the wounds of people who themselves were struggling. Shame on the Democrats for allowing Trump to get away  with proclaiming that now the Republicans are the working class party.

The third is “un-leveling” the playing field. Big money and gerrymandering are not limited to Republicans. Both parties are guilty. Yet the dark money in politics favors the Republicans. There is something basically wrong with our system when the likes of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel and other tech bros and billionaires can tip elections to right wing extremists by spending millions of dollars in races at every level they consider important.

And finally–and perhaps most important– we come to the age and health of Joe Biden. While he accomplished a lot in his first term, does anyone think (now) that he should have run for a second term? He pledged early on that he wouldn’t and clearly did not have the mental capacity or acuity to take on another four years. If he had announced at the midterms that he would not be running, there would have been time for a legitimate Democratic primary. I am an admirer of Kamala Harris but given the hand she was dealt and the limited time she had to win over a divided nation, the deck was stacked against her. It is remarkable that she did as well as she did.

So here we are, facing what could be the greatest crisis in the U.S. since World War II, not knowing how we will maneuver through these troubled waters or how our nation will recover. Stay tuned. And feel free to weigh in now in the comments section with ideas as to how we get out of this mess. That will be the subject of my next blog post.