Manufactured problems

Something I've been thinking about for a while now is how almost every major problem the United States is dealing with right now was either created by Donald Trump or made significantly worse by him. When Trump took office, the economy was generally on the right track, our relationships with our allies were solid, there was no chaos in the streets and things felt pretty normal. None of this is true today.

Thanks to Trump's obsession with tariffs and the destabilizing effects of his policies, the economy is not looking great. Consumer confidence is way down. Inflation continues to be a problem. Job growth has stalled. Layoffs are up. It often feels like the AI companies are the only ones making money, and they are holding up the S&P 500.

Of course, we're regularly dealing with violence and disorder in our cities due to Trump's deployment of ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents. There is no need for this to be happening, but Trump can do it, so he's doing it. His racist campaign continues unabated. They've killed a mother. Over the weekend, they killed a 37-year-old VA nurse named Alex Pretti. They're kidnapping children. The courts should put a stop to this.

Trump has likely irreversibly damaged our relationship with our allies in Europe and elsewhere. The tariffs, his actions around the war in Ukraine, his threats to take over Greenland and more have made it so our allies no longer feel like they can trust us. Because we elected Trump twice, they feel they might never be able to trust us. This kind of thing could happen again.

Countless people around the world have died because of Trump's dismantling of USAID. We're talking about hundreds of thousands of people—so far. There was no need to dismantle USAID, but Trump and Elon Musk decided they didn't want to keep it around.

Trump put an anti-vaxxer in charge of the Department of Health and Human Services, and now we're dealing with the worst measles outbreak in two decades. Thanks to RFK Jr.'s lunacy, I suspect we'll see many more issues with public health.

The Trump administration has also, as expected, made the fight against climate change significantly harder and disrupted the energy sector. I wrote about that for Rolling Stone recently. You can thank him for your higher energy bills. This administration seems determined to make our lives worse at every level.

I could go on. Trump likes to pretend that he walked into a "disaster" when he took office, but that's just not the case. Obviously, the U.S. had significant problems that needed to be addressed, but Trump has done nothing to address those problems. Instead, Trump decided to manufacture more problems. Now we've got our old problems and many new ones.

I'm going to keep it short this week, but there's some exciting new stuff on the way. Also, we've moved into a new form of media. I launched a YouTube channel for the newsletter on Friday, so please subscribe to that.

I'm not very experienced with producing videos, so I'm still working out the kinks, but I think this first one is pretty good. I'll be putting these out semi-regularly on the YouTube channel, but the newsletter will stay the same.

Here's the first video: