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depression
Trump and His GOP Risk Making Depressions Great Again
Today, every one of the fuse lines that set off past explosions is once again being laid by a Republican president and party that have abandoned any pretense of economic stewardship or patriotism.
Aug 01, 2025
Republicans may be fixing to crash the economy again—Republican presidents oversaw 10 of the last 11 recessions and the Republican Great Depression—and they’re doing it to satisfy the greed of the billionaires they serve.
Today, for example, is the day that some of U.S. President Donald Trump‘s worst tariffs are supposed to go into effect, and many folks on Wall Street are deciding where they want to hide when the ceiling starts falling in. The horrible jobs report just released hours ago highlights not only how bad things were in July, but they had to “revise downward by 285,000 jobs” previous reports; it looks like Trump’s people have been cooking the books.
The Financial Times is on it; they published an article this week titled, “The US Economy Is More Fragile Than It Appears.” It’s author, Tej Parikh, points out that our housing market is in trouble and starting to look like it did around the time of the Bush Housing Crash in 2008, that spending patterns are changing in alarming ways (my phrase, not his), and that both the labor and stock markets are vulnerable. The article is frankly alarming.
And former labor secretary Robert Reich titled his brilliant newsletter yesterday: “Be Warned: The Financial Bubble Will Soon Burst.” The former Clinton cabinet member writes:
The financial economy—stocks, bonds, and their derivatives—is in for a big reality check, and I think it will happen soon.
America has stared into this abyss before; three times, in fact. In the 1770s, a brutal financial crisis driven by colonial overextension, monopolistic control by the British East India Company, and political corruption helped spark the American Revolution. In the 1850s, it was wildcat banking, land speculation, and a collapse in trust that helped produce the Panic of 1857 and push the nation toward civil war. And in 1929, Republican deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, financial speculation, and an all-out assault on labor exploded into the Republican Great Depression.
Today, every one of the fuse lines that set off those explosions is once again being laid by a Republican president and party that have abandoned any pretense of economic stewardship or patriotism.
They are actively destabilizing the pillars of our economy, undermining our democracy, and gutting the social contract that held us together for nearly a century. And unless we act—forcefully, quickly, and collectively—we may soon experience a collapse that makes 2008 look like a speed bump.
The risk of a modern economic depression is not academic or merely theoretical. It’s also not fearmongering. It is real, it is avoidable, and it is being amplified by a political movement that openly disdains regulation, despises democracy, and seeks to roll back every gain the American middle class has made since FDR dragged this country out of the last Republican-created catastrophe.
We are now living under a Republican president whose party has:
- Repeatedly held the full faith and credit of the United States hostage in debt ceiling standoffs designed to force cruel cuts to programs that serve ordinary people;
- Demanded the Fed lower interest rates in a way that could push the nation into an inflationary spiral even as wages stagnate and housing becomes unaffordable for the bottom 90%;
- Pushed for the end of regulations on banks, fossil fuel companies, tech monopolies, and Wall Street speculators, even as their recklessness increases systemic risk;
- Championed massive tax cuts for billionaires and multinational corporations, ballooning the deficit while cutting benefits and raising taxes on working people;
- Enabled trade wars and supply chain disruptions while cutting support for green manufacturing and public investment;
- Promoted and made billions from crypto; and
- Perhaps most grotesquely, embraced open authoritarianism and white nationalism, eroding the rule of law and the very stability on which economic confidence depends.
Every one of these moves destabilizes the foundation of modern prosperity. And every one of them echoes the warning signs of past collapses. The mechanisms of economic catastrophe are not mysterious. We’ve seen them before.
Start with sovereign debt and fiscal dysfunction.
In 2023 and 2024, House Republicans repeatedly brought us to the brink of default just to slash food aid, gut Medicaid, and kill green jobs. Now, in 2025, they’re salivating over a new “Balanced Budget Amendment” that would make countercyclical investment during recessions illegal. That’s economic suicide.
When demand collapses, the government must spend to stabilize the system. That’s Econ 101. But the GOP wants a permanent austerity straitjacket. Why? Because billionaires don’t suffer in recessions: They buy everything at a discount and radically increase their own wealth when things rebound. For the morbidly rich, Republican recessions and depressions are “buying opportunities”: It’s class war, plain and simple.
Then there’s financial speculation and asset bubbles.
We’re once again living in an era of rampant unregulated financial engineering:- Crypto Ponzi schemes.
- AI stock frenzies.
- Private equity gutting essential companies and loading them with debt.
- Trillions of dollars sloshing around the system chasing yield, while regulators like the Securities and Exchange Commission and Federal Trade Commission are neutered by courts stacked with right-wing ideologues.
Remember what happened in 1929? The same “let the market police itself” ideology brought the whole thing crashing down. The difference now is that the contagion would be global and could even be instantaneous.
Trade shocks and de-dollarization are looming risks, too.
Trump’s tariffs hurt American farmers and manufacturers. His talk of a new 10% universal tariff could ignite a global trade war and could push countries like China, Brazil, or Saudi Arabia to finally abandon the dollar as the reserve currency.
If that happens—if Treasury bonds stop being the world’s safe haven—we’re looking at a collapse in our ability to finance debt, a surge in interest rates, a crash in the housing market, and mass layoffs. And the Republicans? They cheer it on. They think chaos is good politics.
And then there are tariffs.
There’s a reason the Founders of this country and Framers of the Constitution gave the power to enact tariffs exclusively to Congress. They knew that nobody would build a factory here unless they knew that a tariff defending their manufacturing would be in place for the decades it would take to recover their investment costs.
When tariffs are simply slapped here and there willy-nilly by a single man and can be easily repealed by the next president, no competent business manager would take them seriously: The only thing tariffs do, under these circumstances, is damage the economy. Meanwhile, Trump’s tariffs so far are going to cost the average American family $2,400 this year.
And, from Donald Trump’s point of view, they force foreign leaders to come grovel in front of him, which absolutely delights him. He brags about it, once noting that, “They are kissing my ass.” This is not trade policy; he’s just doing this for his ego.
And what about public confidence and how the loss of it could cause a depression?
You can’t have a functioning economy without trust in government, in institutions, in money itself. But the GOP has made destroying trust its central project.
They lie about elections. They undermine the courts. They spread conspiracy theories. They smear career civil servants. They openly praise authoritarianism.
When half the population no longer believes in the legitimacy of its own government, and when the other half sees that government captured by billionaires and zealots, economic confidence evaporates.
People stop spending. They stop investing. They retreat into cash and hoarding. That’s how depressions spiral out of control.
Now layer on climate instability and its ability to wreck an economy and you have a real mess.
The GOP’s climate denialism is not just immoral, it’s economically suicidal. Hurricanes, wildfires, floods, and heatwaves are destroying billions in assets every year.
Insurance markets are collapsing in California, Florida, and Louisiana. Agricultural yields are falling. Water shortages are hitting the Southwest. Floods are wiping out the Midwest and the South while wildfires torch the West. But Republicans keep slashing climate research, killing green energy subsidies, and banning environmental and social governance investment strategies. They are literally outlawing the future.
It’s a five-alarm fire, and the Republican arsonists are demanding more gasoline.
There is, however, a way out. We’ve done it before.
They’ve created the conditions for collapse, and they’ll blame immigrants, Democrats, or queer kids when it happens.
After the last Republican-created depression, then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected the dogma of austerity and implemented the most ambitious suite of Keynesian policies in world history. He put people to work. He regulated the banks. He taxed the rich. He unionized the workforce. He broke up monopolies. He guaranteed Social Security, unemployment insurance, and the right to organize.
That system—Keynesian demand-side economics—created the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. It lifted millions out of poverty, stabilized capitalism, and gave rise to the postwar economic boom. It literally created the modern American middle class.
But starting in 1981, Reagan and the GOP declared war on that system. They gutted antitrust enforcement. They slashed top tax rates. They crushed unions. They deregulated finance. They privatized public goods. They shifted the burden of funding government from the rich to the working class. And then they blamed the victims of their policies for the resulting inequality and instability.
Now they’re going for the kill shot.
Trump and his Republican Party are not just misguided; they are dangerous. Their policies are not just bad; they are existential threats to economic stability. They’ve created the conditions for collapse, and they’ll blame immigrants, Democrats, or queer kids when it happens.
We can’t let them. We have to take our country back, economically, politically, morally.
That means rejecting trickle-down nonsense and restoring Keynesian demand-side policies. It means breaking up monopolies and rebuilding a regulatory state that works. It means bringing back progressive taxation and closing loopholes for billionaires. It means massive investment in clean energy, public health, education, and infrastructure. It means rebuilding trust in democracy by reversing Citizens United, defending voting rights, rooting out corruption, and calling out fascism where we see it.
This must be at the core of the platform Democrats run on this fall and during next year’s midterms.
The risk of a depression is real. But the solution is in our hands. We just have to stop letting the Republican Party light the matches.
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A Change in Values to Reverse a Nation in Perilous Decline
We need a value to replace greed as our highest goal. Compassion? Justice? Love of truth? We do not know how to name it precisely, but that does not mean we cannot strive for something that can guide us, other than concerns with money.
Apr 10, 2023
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in 2021 almost 60 percent of girls encountered depressive sadness, and one-third seriously considered attempting suicide.
Child labor — and particularly labor in dangerous conditions — is rising rapidly among immigrant children.
Child poverty, which had declined as a result of spending programs during the Covid crisis, is again increasing, in the richest nation on earth.
Sometimes we are so concentrated on specific large issues — Ukraine, global warming, racism — that we ignore the largest dimension of what is happening around us: What is happening to our children, who are the nation's future.
The United States of America is in a state of perilous decline. Our young people can no longer cope adequately with the lives they must live; they are increasingly ignored by our laws and corporations; more and more, they seem unworthy of our collective spending.
When large-scale phenomena, indicators of the health of a society, point toward a difficult future, people should pay attention. But we do not.
There has been substantial commentary on why the young are so depressed and hopeless. There are good reasons to believe that contemporary forces have propelled this rising incidence of depression and suicidal thinking: the rise in social media (and its capacity of bullying), the huge and seemingly uncontrollable forces shaping our society and planet (global warming, racism, sexism), the lack of social cohesion (the decreasing importance of schools-as-communities, the erosion of cultural mores about marriage and sexuality), the decline of community values in a time of concern about individual freedoms.
But lost in these discussions of causality is the simple fact of greed. "If it makes money, it is good." Superficial economic values — individual wealth — have subsumed all other values, be they the good of the community, long-term economic growth, or even long-held ethical concerns like honesty, justice, compassion, and generosity. Greed dominates every consideration. The driving force is always whether a policy will make money for someone.
Superficial economic values — individual wealth — have subsumed all other values, be they the good of the community, long-term economic growth, or even long-held ethical concerns like honesty, justice, compassion, and generosity.
And meanwhile, we drift from strength to weakness, from building a future to undermining it.
It is simple and yet difficult to figure out how to respond to the crisis of an America in decline. Simple, in that making decisions that take "health" rather than individual gain into account is, in fact, simple. Difficult, in that we all disagree about how to go about making such decisions.
Should we pass legislation to require that Facebook and TikTok and Twitter do not allow harassment, bullying, and sexism? Should we limit gun sales and aggressively pursue those who push drugs, including pharmaceutical behemoths? Should we really, aggressively, try to prevent global warming and the proliferation of racial and sectarian hatred? Should we rethink schools, and how they work and what values they inculcate in their students?
There is much to prevent us from moving forward. The anti-vax campaigns, with their successes, show that all too often individual autonomy is more important than communal well-being, that the needs of the individual trump the welfare of the community. The move to limit educational initiatives against racism and sexism, now so highlighted in Florida, show that many are unwilling to limit their boundless autonomy in order to provide dignity and justice to their neighbors.
But everywhere, there is greed. "Cui bono?" Who benefits? That, not "justice for all," not "honesty and truth," not "compassion," seems to determine how our society is shaped, and for whom.
I myself am a well-educated intellectual, a former professor and former chief of staff to Sen. Bernie Sanders. And yet I have no answers, no answers. I see an America in savage decline, and have no idea of how we should go forward. Limit corporations and corporate power, yes. Control our carbon emissions, ditto. Help the young recognize and love one another: for sure.
But what we need, most desperately, is a change in values. We need a value to replace greed as our highest goal. Compassion? Justice? Love of truth? We do not know how to name it precisely, but that does not mean we cannot strive for something that can guide us, other than concerns with money.
The young know this, which is why they so frequently are depressed and even suicidal. We care about the wrong things, and there are consequences. There are consequences.
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Fetterman 'So Happy to Be Home,' Set to Return to Senate After Hospitalization for Depression
"I'm excited to be the father and husband I want to be, and the senator Pennsylvania deserves," the freshman lawmaker said.
Mar 31, 2023
Democratic U.S. Senator John Fetterman is back in his hometown of Braddock, Pennsylvania and looking forward to returning to work soon after being released Friday from Walter Reed military hospital in Maryland, where he was treated for depression.
"I am so happy to be home. I'm excited to be the father and husband I want to be, and the senator Pennsylvania deserves," Fetterman—who was hospitalized for more than a month—said in a statement Friday. "Pennsylvanians have always had my back, and I will always have theirs."
"I am extremely grateful to the incredible team at Walter Reed. The care they provided changed my life," he continued. "I will have more to say about this soon, but for now I want everyone to know that depression is treatable, and treatment works."
\u201cI am so happy to be home. I\u2019m excited to be the father and husband I want to be, and the senator Pennsylvania deserves.\n\nPennsylvanians have always had my back, and I will always have theirs.\u201d— Senator John Fetterman (@Senator John Fetterman) 1680298883
"This isn't about politics—right now there are people who are suffering with depression in red counties and blue counties," the senator—who also suffered a stroke while campaigning during the Democratic primary race last year—added. "If you need help, please get help."
In an interview slated to be aired on "CBS Sunday Morning" this weekend, Fetterman told anchor Jane Pauley that, for him, depression is like "you just won the biggest, you know, race in the country, and the whole thing about depression is that, objectively, you may have won, but depression can absolutely convince you that you actually lost."
"And that's exactly what happened," he added. "And that was the start of a downward spiral."
\u201cSix weeks after entering Walter Reed National Military Medical Center for inpatient treatment for depression, Sen. @JohnFetterman shares his struggle with depression, his health, and more in an intimate interview with Jane Pauley this "Sunday Morning."\u201d— CBS Sunday Morning \ud83c\udf1e (@CBS Sunday Morning \ud83c\udf1e) 1680298547
Fetterman is set to return to work the week of April 17 following the congressional recess, Politico reports.
While still in the hospital on Thursday, Fetterman introduced his first bill—a railroad safety and accountability measure—with Sens. Bob Casey (D-Pa.) and Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio).
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