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Opinion
Why Trump Tried Tariffs: The Turn to Nationalist Capitalism
Trump's trade policies are an admission of capitalism's failures. Perhaps finally enough people have learned the lessons of the past so that we can build an economy that works for working people.
Nov 24, 2025
A short response to this essay’s title is: “because he, and the US system he now sits atop, are desperate.”
A mid-length answer connects certain similarities in the histories of US and British capitalisms. Britain’s declining empire and economy led to Boris Johnson, blaming Europe for that decline, cutting off from Europe via Brexit, and Britain’s downward self-isolation since. The US’s declining empire and economy led to Trump, his blaming that decline on the whole world, cutting off from and punishing the world via tariffs and trade wars, and the resulting US downward self-isolation.
A fuller response is more complicated and requires specifying the historical context. Before the 1970s, US citizens had long been told about the exceptional virtues and benefits of US capitalism. We had achieved unprecedented success, the world’s only truly “middle-class” society. Extremes of wealth and poverty barely existed except for a very few superrich and a few very poor. After the 1970s, we were told a different story, namely that the US government had excessively intervened from the 1930s to the 1970s in the workings of “our optimally efficient private enterprise economy.” Regaining prosperity required ending such government interventions. Since the 1970s, terms like neo-liberalism, globalization, free-trade, and privatization became prominent markers of US capitalism, differentiating it from the 1930s to 1975 when the state’s economic interventions had won praise. After the 1970s, freedom from those government interventions became the dominant dogma governing state economic policy.
Before the 1970s, private capitalism had widely seemed the problem and government intervention had seemed the necessary solution. After the 1970s, the reverse view prevailed. It insisted that government intervention was the problem and privatization was the solution. This reversal reminded many of an important earlier reversal: after 1945, when the US and the USSR reversed their status as great allies to became instead the opposite, great enemies.
After the 1970s, the US government increasingly resumed its pre-Great Depression limitations on economic intervention (associated with classical, i.e. British, liberalism). Increasingly too, after the 1970s, the 1930s New Deal seemed a distant, long-ago emergency time. Its reforms were considered no longer needed or, worse, deemed counterproductive. A few Depression era reforms survived because of working-class pressures from below, plus widespread apprehensions that they might well prove useful to constrain future economic downturns. The US business community had never wanted the New Deal, resented its reforms, and recoiled at the taxes on their profits that helped pay for them. That community’s political goals after 1945 boiled down to undoing the New Deal. That had to be done slowly, gradually, and cautiously for political reasons from 1945 through the 1970s. After that, with Reagan’s election, it could and did accelerate. It has done so still more in Trump’s second term.
After the 1970s, US capitalism’s ceaseless relocation of capital investments from lower- to higher-profit opportunities increasingly took two prominent forms. First was automation: employers sequentially installed computers, robots and AI. Second was globalization: employers increasingly went beyond US borders. They moved jobs abroad and especially to Asia and Latin America. US military bases by the hundreds, originally justified after 1945 as needed to contain the Soviet Union and communism’s expansion, revealed their other and more important purpose. They served nicely to enforce a world trade system (later exalted as a “rules-based international order”) committed to US-led and US-defined “free” trade.
Tying everything together ideologically, a new dogma effectively reversed its 1930s to 1970s predecessor. The old dogma had admitted that private capitalism sometimes encountered serious business cycle problems. For example, those in the 1930s had threatened capitalism itself. Keynes had shown the world how to prevent or at least greatly moderate them. Timely government intervention, monetary and fiscal, could do the trick. Central banks could manipulate the quantity of money in circulation and interest rates to control capitalism’s cycles. Governments could likewise maneuver tax collections, spending programs, and resulting borrowing toward the same end. For a while it was widely believed that capitalism’s long-standing problem of cyclical instability had been solved. Leading US economists, among others, went to work to persuade and explain the Keynesian solution to business, political, and academic leaders. Most of the rest of the economics profession followed by teaching Keynesian economics to successive generations of college students. From the 1930sto the 1970s, economists were mostly the old dogma’s priests.
At the margins of the US economics profession from 1945 to 1975 were some who rejected the dominant old dogma more or less. Among them Milton Friedman refused the premise that capitalism had somehow “failed” in the 1930s. It could have rallied, he believed, to overcome a cyclical downturn as it had many times before. Indeed, he and his co-authors labored to suggest how and why governmental interventions did more to worsen the Great Depression than to prevent or moderate it. Marxist economists such as Paul M. Sweezy, admired Keynes’ critical insights into capitalism’s cyclical dysfunction yet disagreed that his work had or could overcome that cyclical instability. Still other marginal economists demurred, but even taken altogether, the marginalized economists could not undermine the Keynesian dogma. For decades, government leaders believed that they and their business and academic advisers “knew” how to manage capitalism to end its dangerous instability. They ruled the US (and beyond) after the 1930s Great Depression.
What finally undid that dogma were two key movements that converged in the 1970s. The first was the recovery of all the major economies that had destroyed one another in World War 2 (especially Japan, Germany, UK, France, and others except the US). While US capitalism had been the only globally dominant economy from 1945 to 1975, serious foreign competition resumed for the US again by the end of that period. The second development that undermined the Keynesian dogma was technological development: chiefly the computer and jet air travel. They enabled employers to raise profits (1) by exporting jobs to lower-waged regions overseas and (2) by automation that replaced workers with computers, robots and now AI. US employers profited from relocating abroad because they thereby escaped the high wages and costly benefits that US workers had won in rough union and class struggles with employers before and during the 1930s Great Depression. They also escaped the costs of ecological protection.
Of course, automation and job exports represented costs to workers who lost jobs, to their families, and to the businesses relying on their purchasing power. Employers targeted especially the highest-paid workers since replacing them by automation or overseas relocation boosted employers’ profits the most. Often unionized, those workers tried to resist and pushed back. In response, globalizing employers mobilized and funded a massive ideological program to undermine those workers’ resistance. It updated classical defenses of capitalism whenever its social costs, such as automation and relocation, became more burdensome.
A positively defined term, globalization, came to the fore. It replaced terms like imperialism and colonialism that had acquired increasingly pejorative connotations. Economists celebrated globalization for bringing everyone greater efficiency via free trade. The same economists denounced national regulations and controls for restraining global capitalist expansion and the prosperity it delivered. In the US, enthusiasts for capitalism extolled immense gains awaiting capitalists who expanded inside the US and then globally. Not only would profits soar, but societies as a whole—all classes, the claimed—would benefit. Globalization was the greatest of historical tides that lifted all boats.
Within the US employer class, the risk-takers went first. They moved enterprises, built them, or partnered with existing enterprises in China, India, Brazil, etc. The low wages there, accommodating governments, and access to their large and fast-growing markets proved uncommonly profitable. That forced their more risk-averse competitors back in the US to join the relocation. Their exodus shaped the US and most of the world’s other economies over the last half-century.
Yet right from the beginning, there were victims and critics. They tended to arise from among the highest-paid job-holders: unionized, white, male factory workers. They had risen to the top of the working class during the century before the 1970s. There they encountered a tendency of capitalism bitter for workers. The more successfully US laborers had struggled to raise their wages, the greater the incentive that resulted for employers to fire them and substitute machines or cheaper foreign workers.
Globalization as an efficiency-maximizing kind of capitalism became an ideological campaign slogan for US corporations relocating overseas. Celebrating globalization spread from corporate leaders to podcast hosts, journalists, academics, and politicians. The voices of those who objected and criticized globalization found few outlets. Globalization’s celebrants insisted that everyone everywhere would benefit.
The working class, bearing the brunt of globalization, slowly but increasingly turned against it. The richest 10 percent of Americans, invested in the stock market, did not. Corporate gains boosted by relocating production abroad (firing workers and thereby saving on wage costs) enabled higher dividends, capital gains from appreciating stock, and soaring executive pay packages. But that trickle-down got little further than the nation's richest 10 percent. American capitalism thus devolved over many years into two economies. Today, in the rich one, 10% of US citizens account for 50% of total consumer spending. In the poor one, the other 90% do the other half of consumer spending.
For those deprived of good jobs, appealing to their union leaders, both major parties’ establishments, and broad public opinion yielded little. Most unions had long since narrowed their focus and targets to more immediate gains workers could still get or to reducing further losses. Unions devoted relative few resources to educating members on, let alone mobilizing them around, international issues. Most Republicans had long sided with employer interests and thus readily endorsed globalization. For many Democrats, the long post-1950s decline of the labor union movement deprived them of their labor base and also of large numbers of their most skilled union-donated campaign workers. Democratic Party leaders’ resulting turn to corporate donors led them increasingly to mimic Republicans’ endorsements of globalization. The large but amorphous and disorganized US left made some criticisms of corporate globalization but managed only sporadic resistance.
Globalization proved an effective ideological cover as the US replaced the old European empires across the 20th century. The US presented its global position and resulting actions—economic but also political and military—as so many steps leading to “global freedom” as they “helped” liberate other nations caught in doubly backward conditions. Backward economically because they had not sufficiently developed the private capitalist enterprises needed for a “modern, developed economy.” They were not yet integrated into that maximally efficient world economy that globalization could and would achieve. They were backward politically because they had not sufficiently developed the necessary “liberal democratic institutions” credited for making the US the leading global model economy for our times. Establishing US-style “freedom” and “capitalism”—often merged into an identity—became the globally necessary road to social success and progress. Saying so won Nobel prizes.
Until that road no longer seemed necessary. A confluence of social changes finally turned many in the US against globalization while many in China turned in favor of it. China’s state-led and sustained high rates of economic growth after the 1970s plus the relocation to China of many US, European and Japanese private capitalist enterprises combined to make China the manufacturing powerhouse of today’s world economy. “Socialism with Chinese characteristics”—China’s official self-definition—is a hybrid of state-owned and operated enterprises alongside private foreign and domestic capitalist enterprises. Supervisory economic planning and management of that hybrid by the Chinese state and the Chinese Communist Party combined to make China’s economy the world’s fastest growing during the 21st century’s first generation. Ironically, the stable hegemony of the US dollar provided the context for China’s remarkable growth.
A key factor distinguished Chinese from other Global South circumstances. The West had denied post-1949 China the foreign aid and development “assistance” deployed elsewhere. Its resulting self-reliance sped China’s growth. Even the initial assistance China obtained from the USSR vanished when the two nations’ relationship deteriorated (roughly 1960 to 1989). Another key factor was China’s commitment to national economic planning before and after it allowed, invited, and facilitated a private capitalist sector of both domestic and foreign enterprises. Chinese economic growth displays a remarkable mastery of both economic nationalism and openness to the world economy, both state and private enterprises. All were integrated to serve maximum economic growth.
In contrast, the US and the collective West, 70 years after World War 2, transitioned from free trade toward economic nationalism under Presidents Biden and especially Trump. That transition flowed chiefly from (1) steadily rising working class opposition to the globalization after the 1970s in the US and Europe, and (2) growing Chinese challenges to the global dominance of the US in the world economy.
Angry white male unionized (and thus relatively well-paid) factory workers, displaced by automation and globalization, knew that it was their employers who made the decisions that displaced them. They also knew that profit considerations motivated those decisions. However, they also feared the backlash that would crash in on anyone who blamed employers, the employer class, or the capitalist system for anything negative. Seventy-five years of Cold War ideology had taught the US working class how ferociously the US employer class could mobilize the mass media, academia, and most major social institutions to demonize and repress anything that even hinted of anti-capitalism or socialism.
Therefore, US workers hurt by automation or job exports rarely chose to blame corporate owners and leaders. They rarely opposed free trade, globalization, multiculturalism, neoliberalism, nor the anti-communism/socialism usually woven into them. The employer class and its media, political and academic spokespersons, most Republicans and Democrats, all celebrated globalization as the cause and expression of a wonderfully successful capitalism. It brought material prosperity and political freedom. Blaming capitalists was therefore considered irrational, perverse, or both.
The economic theories of the academics simply reinforced the way the economy and politics blocked any revolt. Generations of leaders in business, politics, and mass media learned in their college courses that private enterprises in markets minimally regulated by any state apparatus achieve the “maximum possible utility.” In short, capitalism was the human race’s greatest and finest achievement. Criticizing it thus became, for many, literally unthinkable.
Trump explained to victimized US workers what caused their economic pains: foreign immigrants, China, and indeed foreign nations generally, including even Canada and Mexico. For decades, he said, all had economically cheated and abused the US. Traditional Republicans and Democrats had been complicit. He presented himself as the new and different kind of politician who alone would end that abuse and the pains it caused. He would “Make America Great Again," and the “rest of the world will have to pay for it.” His means: anti-immigrant walls supplemented by mass deportation, tariff walls, and trade wars that would reshore manufacturing (i.e. secure, high-paying) jobs, and reduce federal budget deficits. All that would revive US capitalism and its global dominance; the decline of the empire would be reversed.
More recently, Trump broadened his list of primary targets to blame for US social distress: protesters against ICE deportation actions and critics of his other policies (especially “efficiency” firings of federal employees and government “shutdowns”). He called them all “radical left lunatics.” In the case of New York City’s new socialist mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, who won with more votes than all other candidates combined, Trump’s denunciations peaked in calling him a “communist.” The McCarthyite tragedy of the 1950s returns, but this time already well en route to becoming a farce.
Trump has likewise sharply increased the severity of punishment he decrees for those he decides are “evil-doers.” He has summarily executed an estimated 83 persons in fishing boats in the Caribbean and Pacific whom he has called “drug traffickers in narco-boats.” No trials, no evidence, no lawyers, no judge: Trump simply ordered the killings in international waters (executions without trial or evidence). Trump has likewise attacked or threatened to attack foreign governments (Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Panama, Greenland, Mexico, and Canada).
Trump’s nationalist political theater includes repetitions of his belief that tariffs punish those foreign countries he blames. He seemed not to understand, as every undergraduate economics student learns, that tariffs imposed by the US government fall only on the US businesses or individuals who import goods and services. By saying or implying that foreigners pay his tariffs, Trump makes it appear that he thereby punishes them for causing US workers’ distress. Of course, Trump’s tariffs are a major new tax imposed by a Republican president on US businesses and individuals (those who import tariffed items). For opponents of taxation and Trump followers who blame foreigners for US problems and suffering, it is very politically convenient and comforting to imagine that Trump’s tariffs hurt them.
US tariffs can also hurt foreign economies in so far as US buyers order fewer foreign-made products. This can happen if US importers raise their prices for imported goods and services as a way to pass on (recoup) their tariff costs. To the rest of the world, Trump’s tariffs were aggressive economic warfare: risking losses for them to secure economic gains for the US. The world awaits how each foreign country will decide whether, how, and when to retaliate and how badly retaliations will impact the US economy.
One last point about tariffs can show how systematically Trump protects and serves the employer class in the US. In contrast, what he does for his MAGA base is mostly symbolic and theatrical. Tariffs are taxes that fall directly on US businesses and so might have been expected to anger and provoke them. Trump avoided that problem by means of his “big beautiful tax bill” passed by Congress before Trump presented his tariffs. That bill extended the huge tax cuts for businesses and the rich (originally scheduled to expire in 2025) that were Trump’s first act in his first term as president. That tax bill also provided further tax cuts for them. In other words, Trump cut all business taxes before his tariffs raised them on business imports. The net effect on business and the rich was to protect them even as they proceeded to pass on the cost of the tariffs by raising retail prices for the US employee majority.
Most Republican and Democratic leaders (Bushes, Clintons, Obama) kept on supporting globalization after the 1970s. Increasingly the same donors funded both parties, and those donors were globalization’s chief beneficiaries. The leaders marginalized the few voices that publicly blamed employers for choosing to automate or relocate abroad. Those few voices—people like Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or Mamdani—provoked intense hostility from party leaders. Trump’s rare outbursts focused only and briefly on particular companies, not on the employer class per se as the key and therefore blameworthy decision-makers.
China’s economic growth after the 1980s was unprecedented in its speed. In addition, China built an economic alliance initially with Brazil, Russia, India, and South Africa known as the BRICS; it kept adding various members into the new century. By 2020, the aggregate GDP of China and its BRICS allies had caught up to the aggregate of the US and its G7 allies. Since 2020, China and its BRICS allies have outgrown the US and its G7 allies each year. Before 2010, China was viewed by most in the West as just another poor, subordinate Global South nation slowly being “modernized” thanks to the West’s globalization/free trade program. Unlike them, however, China grew much faster. “Modernization theories and theorists” had often expected China’s economic development to be slower. It was, after all, cut off from much Western assistance, trade, and investment for ideological reasons. Its communist party, presiding over its “socialism with Chinese characteristics” was thought to hamper growth with regulations and planning.
For US and European leaders, as China’s development progressed into the 21st century, it was redefined from a subordinate nation into an evil and aggressive dictatorship. Most established political leaders in the West accused China of outcompeting the West economically by means that were illegal or unfair. That soon broadened to accusing China of threatening the West politically, ideologically, and even militarily. China’s endorsement of free trade (as the global context for its own spectacular economic development over the last 30-40 years) helped to provoke the West’s turning away from it toward economic nationalism instead.
Already during Obama’s presidency, 2009-2017, it became common to hear of the “need to pivot toward China” as the key adversary for the current century. China’s embrace of “free trade” and globalization was interpreted as part of its adversarial position. Of course, many larger US employers who had invested heavily in China after the 1970s also still supported free trade. Those investments assumed access to China’s expanding market plus the profitable export of their outputs back to the US market. Yet China’s rise steadily undercut the West’s support for free trade. Increasing numbers of US business leaders questioned free trade orthodoxy, became supporters of a US turn to economic nationalism, and supported Trump as its emerging champion.
To conclude, statistical projections mostly agree that China’s dominance in world industrial production will grow between now and 2030. Already, China’s industrial output exceeds that of the US, Germany, Japan, and South Korea, combined. There is little evidence to support the possibility that the US can or will reverse its decline relative to China. That decline will impede the reshoring of US manufacturing, balancing the federal budget, and offsetting the likely employment impacts of the AI revolution and other nations’ retaliations to US tariffs. The US working class might then shift leftward politically to solve the problems that Trump’s rightward turn failed to overcome.
A new New Deal (Green or otherwise) might then emerge much as the original did in the 1930s. Then the US working class responded to a sustained capitalist crisis by surging sharply to the left around the New Deal Coalition (the CIO unions, two Socialist parties, and the Communist Party). Today’s coalition would differ from its predecessor because its activists will have learned key lessons from the 1930s as well as from the subsequent period that undid so much of the New Deal. Chief among those lessons is that capitalism itself must be put into question.
That means the new New Deal will not leave corporations in private hands. After 1945, corporate capitalism’s major shareholders and top managers had retained their social positions as receivers of the system’s corporate profits. That position gave them every incentive to protect and boost their profits by, among other strategies, using them to undo the regulations, tax structures, and indeed the whole progressive spirit of the New Deal. That is what they succeeded in doing over the last 75 years. Those 75 years also taught us why we must put capitalism itself in question. Many of us have done that and reached conclusions guiding our contributions to social change now.
The organization of enterprises—factories, offices, and stores—can no longer entail a basic division between a class of employers and a class of employees. Their consequentially different class interests and conflicts provoke and produce capitalism’s difficulties and the obstacles to overcoming them. Reforms of capitalism were the experiment undertaken in and by the New Deal. Those reforms left unchallenged capitalism’s basic class structure. History—the undoing of the New Deal over the last 75 years—has shown those reforms to be insufficient.
Our next step is to democratize enterprises as a needed addition to the 1930s-type reforms of capitalism so that they do not again get undone. If profits flow to the workers in enterprises where employers and employees are the same people, equal components of a democratically organized community, they will not be used to undo reforms generated by those workers. Changing the class structure of enterprises will ramify throughout the society experiencing such change. Democratizing enterprises will make the largely formal democracy elsewhere in that society far more real than it has ever been.
A genuinely new New Deal should remember and build on all the old New Deal accomplished. Yet it must also not repeat its crucial mistake: not challenging capitalism itself. Evidence is accumulating that that crucial lesson is being learned.
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This Thanksgiving, Let’s Feed Families, Not Factory Farms
Nearly 70% of the grain grown in this country—corn, soy, wheat, and barley—never feeds a single human being. Instead, it’s fed to pigs, chickens, and cows packed into industrial animal factories.
Nov 24, 2025
As Americans gather around the table this Thanksgiving to show our gratitude and feast in abundance, we should ask ourselves a simple but uncomfortable question: Who—and what—are we really feeding in the US?
In the United States, the answer isn’t “people.” It’s corporate, industrial factory farms.
Nearly 70% of the grain grown in this country—corn, soy, wheat, and barley—never feeds a single human being. Instead, it’s fed to pigs, chickens, and cows packed into industrial animal factories. Only about one-quarter of US crops are eaten directly by people. That staggering imbalance makes factory farming the single biggest cause of food waste in America—a system that burns through farmland, water, and fossil fuels to produce less food, not more.
When we feed edible crops to animals, we lose up to 90% of their calories and protein before they ever reach a plate. For every 100 calories of animal feed fed into factory farm production, we get back only about 12 calories in meat or dairy. Meanwhile, 44 million Americans face food insecurity, and approximately 1 in 5 children in the US—nearly 14 million kids—are living with hunger.
By reducing the number of animals raised for food and shifting subsidies toward healthy, plant-based foods, we can create a food system that actually feeds people and supports family farmers instead of corporations.
It doesn’t have to be this way.
The US government spends billions every year to prop up this wasteful system. Federal farm subsidies overwhelmingly flow to the corporations that grow feed for factory farms—corn and soy for industrial livestock—while fruits, vegetables, and legumes that could actually nourish people receive a fraction of that support.
In other words, your taxpayer dollars are funding food waste. We’re subsidizing the destruction of the environment, the suffering of animals, and the consolidation of rural America under corporate control.
This isn’t just an agricultural policy failure. It’s a moral one.
Feeding food to factory farms doesn’t feed the nation—it feeds the climate crisis. Industrial livestock is one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases. The endless demand for feed crops drives soil depletion, fertilizer runoff, and water contamination across the Midwest, while fueling deforestation abroad for imported soy.
If we redirected even a fraction of those feed crops toward food crops, we could feed millions more Americans, free up farmland for restoration, and dramatically cut emissions. That’s what real climate-smart agriculture looks like—not doubling down on a broken system driving us toward extinction.
Thanksgiving is supposed to be about gratitude and generosity. But genuine gratitude means stewardship—using resources wisely, sharing abundance fairly, and respecting the lives, human and animal alike, that make our meals possible. There’s nothing thankful about wasting food and warming the planet to keep factory farms afloat.
We can choose a better way forward.
By reducing the number of animals raised for food and shifting subsidies toward healthy, plant-based foods, we can create a food system that actually feeds people and supports family farmers instead of corporations. Imagine if American agriculture rewarded farmers for growing beans, grains, fruits, and vegetables that nourish families, not for producing endless corn and soy to sustain industrial meat factories.
This Thanksgiving, let’s make gratitude mean something again. Because abundance isn’t about how much we produce—it’s about how wisely and compassionately we use what we have.
If we want a food system that truly feeds people, strengthens rural communities, and honors the spirit of Thanksgiving, the first step is simple: Stop feeding our food to factory farms.
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Who's Afraid of a Socialist Mayor? The Corporate Media
These editorial boards are not afraid that Katie Wilson and Zohran Mamdani’s policies will fail—they fear that they will work, thus making a “tax the rich” agenda more popular nationwide.
Nov 23, 2025
New York City isn’t the only city to have elected a democratic socialist as mayor. Seattle voters ousted incumbent Mayor Bruce Harrell for community organizer Katie Wilson, who had the endorsements of unions, Democratic clubs, and the Stranger (7/2/25), the city’s alt-weekly.
She credited her win to a “volunteer-driven campaign among voters concerned about affordability and public safety in a city where the cost of living has soared as Amazon and other tech companies proliferated,” AP (11/13/25) reported. The wire service noted that “universal childcare, better mass transit, better public safety, and stable, affordable housing are among her priorities”—similar to those of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani.
Corporate media are not happy about her victory, priorities or rhetoric. The Seattle Times editorial board (11/17/25) said upon her victory that she “painted her opposition as big businesses content with keeping people down,” and countered that residents will “fear that no one will come when they call 911, that parks will be unusable, that small businesses will shutter because of crime and revenues that don’t keep up with expenses.”
‘Woke Republic of Seattle’
The reliably right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board (11/13/25) called Wilson “Mamdani West,” and described her as “soft on crime but tough on businesses.” The paper scoffed, “Maybe Ms. Wilson will moderate her views once she is confronted with the responsibilities of office, but the campaign had little evidence of that.” The board ended, sarcastically, “Good luck.”
In a smaller editorial, the Journal (11/17/25) mocked the “Woke Republic of Seattle,” quoting Wilson saying:
I will appoint a cabinet of exceptional leaders whose lived experiences reflect the diversity of Seattle’s Black, Indigenous, Asian and Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, and people of color communities, as well as that of women, immigrants and refugees, 2SLGBTQIA+ communities, people with disabilities, people of all faith traditions, and residents from every socioeconomic background.
The editorial board continued:
Now, that is some coalition. But what’s a 2SLGBTQIA+ community? We looked it up. It’s apparently an acronym for Two-Spirit, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer or Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, with the + covering anybody who feels left out.
With all of these groups to satisfy, we’re not sure there are enough jobs to go around. But may the Two-Spirit be with the mayor.
The New York Times (11/13/25) gave Wilson’s win tepid coverage, offering an unexciting news piece that failed to put her victory into context or contemplate the gravity of ousting a powerful incumbent. It also, bizarrely, quoted that defeated incumbent—and never quoted the actual winner of the race.
Childcare and other ‘goodies’
But it was the Washington Post editorial (11/16/25) about Wilson’s win that takes the cake here. And that makes sense: Socialist and left-wing activists in the Puget Sound point fingers at Amazon and other corporate giants as the main drivers of inequality.
The Post is owned by Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people on the planet. Since Donald Trump’s inauguration this year as president, the Post has vowed to become more right wing on the editorial page (NPR, 2/26/25). This fall the opinion page took a “massive stride in its turn to the right by hiring three new conservative writers after losing high-profile liberal columnists,” as the Daily Beast (10/2/25) noted.
First, the Post belittled Wilson’s proletarian life and went on to degrade her political priorities for being tied to her economic position. It said:
Who is Wilson? She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600-square-foot apartment with her husband and 2-year-old daughter. By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back East to cover expenses. To let them off the hook, she seeks to force residents of Seattle to pay for “free” childcare and other goodies.
“Goodies” in this case mean services that make life affordable for a working parent who doesn’t own much, like Wilson. This is in a town with feudal levels of inequality: “While one-third of residents are classified as low-income, 1 out of every 14 is a millionaire” (KCPQ, 6/12/24). Seattle’s housing rental costs are “among the highest in the nation, ranking 16th among the country’s 100 largest cities,” while the city’s “median rent is now also 47.4% higher than the US average of $1,375, placing it on par with prices in Los Angeles and Oakland” (KCPQ, 3/7/25). An op-ed in the Seattle Times (3/18/25) noted that in the state generally “hunger is on the rise” while “Food banks and meal programs are on the front lines of an unprecedented hunger crisis.”
This is truly a “let them eat cake” moment for the Bezos Post. The Post went on:
The mayor-elect’s plans will simultaneously accelerate the exodus of businesses while making the city more of a magnet for vagrants and criminals. For example, Wilson criticized Harrell’s sweeps of homeless encampments. She backed off previous support for defunding the police, but many officers remain nervous.
Like the mayor-elect in New York, Wilson wants to open government-run grocery stores, despite their record of failure. She suggested during a September event that she won’t allow private supermarkets to close locations that aren’t profitable. Instead, she wants to require them to give more notice and pay generous severance packages to their employees. “Access to affordable, healthy food is a basic right,” Wilson said.
It’s bad enough that a paper owned by a Bond villain is mad that the next mayor of an expensive city has too much compassion for the homeless. But the dismissal of the grocery store idea isn’t based in fact, as Civil Eats (8/20/25) noted that “publicly owned grocery stores already exist, serving over a million Americans every day, with prices 25 to 30% lower than conventional retail.” Civil Eats said that “every branch of the military operates its own grocery system, a network known as the Defense Commissary Agency (DeCA),” with more than 200 stores around the world generating $5 billion in annual revenue. The outlet added, “If it were a private corporation, it would rank among the top 50 chains in the nation.”
‘Identifying Class Enemies’
The editorial was an echo of the Post’s earlier pearl-clutching (11/8/25) in response to Mamdani’s victory speech:
Across 23 angry minutes laced with identity politics and seething with resentment, Mamdani abandoned his cool disposition and made clear that his view of politics isn’t about unity. It isn’t about letting people build better lives for themselves. It is about identifying class enemies—from landlords who take advantage of tenants to “the bosses” who exploit workers—and then crushing them. His goal is not to increase wealth but to dole it out to favored groups. The word “growth” didn’t appear in the speech, but President Donald Trump garnered eight mentions.
Bezos, as part of the billionaire class, finds himself as the target of this year’s leftward electoral swing. “Affordability” was Mamdani’s buzzword, an offense to the Bezos board, who wanted to hear “growth,” a catchphrase for the financial elite. Bezos’ position makes sense from his rarefied position, but that is precisely why billionaire-owned media, whether it’s the Ellison family’s consolidation of TikTok and CBS or the Murdoch empire of Fox News and the New York Post, are bad for democracy. These are media that are materially situated to side with landlords and bosses over tenants and workers, but there are no outlets in major media with editorial boards that consistently lean in the other direction.
Once again, these editorial boards are not afraid that Wilson and Mamdani’s policies will fail—they fear that they will work, thus making a “tax the rich” agenda more popular nationwide.
These media don’t grapple with why voters aren’t scared of socialism and want the rich to pay more for services. It is up to them to make a case that voters should choose a political platform of consolidating political power with the billionaire class.
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Trump 2.0 Exposed the Rot at the Top; Now We Must Work to Fix It
Playing the long game requires that the rest of us learn from this revolting era—learn why the wealthy and powerful must be constrained, and learn how to constrain them.
Nov 23, 2025
Ten months of this shit. Enough to make one scream, run stark naked in the streets, mount a revolution.
But we have to play the long game. In that long game, America learns from this catastrophe—and turns those lessons into laws, rules, and norms that prevent this from ever happening again.
Much has been revealed lately, both about President Donald Trump and the rot at the top of our system.
Trump’s attempted cover-up of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein has riveted the nation’s attention to the moral depravity of many rich and powerful men who raped children, with impunity.
None of this is entirely new to American politics, but it has never happened on this scale—or with this much shameless abandon.
Trump’s celebration of the Saudi crown prince who ordered the brutal killing of a Washington Post reporter has shown the moral vacuity of the CEOs who flocked to the White House dinner to honor the prince because they want his investments.
Trump’s blatant threats against corporate media whose journalists ask him hard questions and whose comedians ridicule him—and media executives’ chickenshit, obsequious responses to those threats—are exposing the dangers of giant media corporations controlling our access to the truth.
Trump’s wheeling and dealing with tech company oligarchs are revealing the cozy, incestuous ways wealth and power are concentrating in fewer and fewer hands.
Trump’s acceptance of gifts, bribes, payoffs, kickbacks, and perks from those seeking handouts shows how a demagogue cashes in on his power.
His awards of pardons, government contracts, regulatory exemptions, tax subsidies, and lower tariffs to those who bribe him reveal how an authoritarian builds power through favors.
His uses of criminal investigations, tax audits, regulatory enforcement, withholding of government funds, and vicious public smears exhibit how a neofascist punishes opponents.
None of this is entirely new to American politics, but it has never happened on this scale—or with this much shameless abandon.
Most average working Americans abide by laws and norms. Most are kind and decent.
But there is growing rot at the top of our system. And its stench can no longer be ignored.
It’s the essence of Trump and his regime. It’s also, sadly, the moral squalor of too many rich and powerful Americans.
Playing the long game requires that the rest of us learn from this revolting era—learn why the wealthy and powerful must be constrained, and learn how to constrain them.
Learn what integrity requires at the highest reaches of our government, in the c-suites of our corporations, in our universities, law firms, nonprofits, and media.
Learn that the most significant divide in America is not between the left and the right but between the bottom and the top—between the vast majority of Americans without wealth or power, and a tiny minority holding most all of it.
And resolve to prevent such moral rot from ever again taking over our nation.
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