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gilded age
Trump Is Making the Gilded Age Great Again
Trump’s duties on foreign imports will undercut the fiscal foundations of a middle-class American society that we’ve known for more than a century, creating a new age of rising private fortunes and deepening inequality.
Jul 29, 2025
Count on one thing: If Mark Twain, the famed American author of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, were alive today, he would certainly have written a novel about U.S. President Donald Trump. After all, his 1873 novel, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, distinctly caught a 19th-century version of our Trumpian moment, tariffs and all.
“They want me to go in with them on the sly,” says Colonel Sellers, the antihero of that novel. Lowering his voice to a conspiratorial whisper, the colonel explains to his wide-eyed dinner guest how they would “buy a 113 wild cat banks in Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Illinois, and Missouri… and then all of sudden… Whiz! the stock of every one of those wildcats would spin… profit on the speculation not a dollar less than 40 millions!”
With Twain’s uncanny insight into the American character, his novel presaged the quarter-century to follow so accurately that, in the end, it lent its name to “the Gilded Age,” that era of rapid industrialization and rising robber-baron fortunes. Ripped from two centuries of Puritan moral moorings by an “inflamed desire for sudden wealth,” the novel’s archetypal American families are caught in a “fever of speculation” that sends them scrambling across the continent in a frenzied search for jackpot profits.
With money then breeding its own morality, the era’s capitalist excess naturally begat Trumpian-style corruption. When unpaid wages stopped the construction of his railroad out West, Twain’s character Colonel Sellers sent the project’s chief engineer to the head office in New York City to find out what had happened to the missing money.
If we combine the social impact of his recent “Big Beautiful” budget bill, which extends the 2017 tax cuts, with his skyrocketing tariffs, Trump seems to be trying to undo the landmark tax legislation of 1913 by reducing or replacing the progressive income tax with tariff revenues that are really a regressive tax on the poor.
“The matter is simple enough,” the company’s president explained matter-of-factly to the astonished engineer. “A Congressional appropriation costs money. A majority of the House Committee, say $10,000 apiece—$40,000; a majority of the Senate Committee, the same each—say $40,000; a little extra to one or two chairmen of two such committees, say $10,000 each—$20,000; and there’s $100,000 of the money gone.”
Beneath the spectacle of soaring stock prices, spreading railroad networks, smoking steel mills, powerful trust monopolies, and conspicuous consumption by the country’s ever-increasing number of millionaires, Twain discerned a deep underlying insecurity to be the very essence of what became known as the Gilded Age. “It is a time,” he wrote, “when one’s spirit is subdued and sad, one knows not why; when the past seems a storm-swept desolation, life a vanity and a burden, and the future but a way to death.”
Looking at contemporary America through Twain’s somber vision can teach us something significant about our own time that has so far eluded the mainstream media—particularly the profound political implications of President Trump’s wild global tariff regime. Those duties on foreign imports will not just raise prices and stoke inflation, as the media has indeed been telling us, but all too crucially undercut the fiscal foundations of a middle-class American society that we’ve known for more than a century, creating a new Gilded Age of rising private fortunes—in our time, billionaires—and deepening social inequality.
And with Donald Trump in mind, let’s take a little trip through a history that’s anything but Tom Sawyeresque.
Cycles of Change
Give Twain full credit: When writing that novel, he also intuited that the economic juggernaut driving his Gilded Age would come crashing down in what proved to be the devastating panic of 1893. The country had indeed suffered 11 previous panics, most of them regional or relatively short-lived. This one would be different. As New York banks held fire sales of assets to meet a cash crunch, some 340 banks nationwide simply suspended operations, while industrial output shrank by 15%, and unemployment hit an unprecedented 19%. Adding to the difficulties of workers, the McKinley Tariff of 1890, named after then-representative (and not yet president) William McKinley, had imposed record-high duties of 50% on imports and so raised the price of many basic consumer goods, which should sound all too familiar in the age of Trump. The panic then became a full-blown, four-year depression that sent thousands of the unemployed, then called Coxey’s Army, marching on Washington to demand redress from Congress.
Not only was that panic an economic crisis of unprecedented severity, but it was also the first in a boom-and-bust cycle that has marked America’s unbridled capitalism up to the present moment—with each boom producing spectacular private wealth and each bust fostering abject public misery and mass reform movements. Like Icarus of Greek legend, whose wings of wax carried him too close to the sun, the U.S. economy sometimes flies so high that its wax wings melt. The ensuing crash is so searing, immiserating so many for so long, that it can inspire sustained movements for change.
The severity of the protracted 1893 depression that ended the Gilded Age sparked myriad calls for social change and lead to the Progressive Era during which labor unions organized workers, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People started its struggle for civil rights, and women marched for suffrage. Investigative reporters called “muckrakers” also began publishing exposés of financial power and political corruption in mass-circulation magazines like McClure’s and Collier’s Weekly, thereby setting an agenda for political reform. In major cities, middle-class reformers opened settlement houses for poor immigrants, enacted housing codes to ban cold-water tenements, and set up free public schools. At the state level, progressives like Wisconsin Gov. Robert La Follette battled the railroad monopolies that gouged farmers desperate to get their crops to market.
Meanwhile, at the national level in 1913, Democratic reformers in Congress slashed the country’s high tariffs (long a regressive tax on working-class consumers), replacing them with a progressive income tax whose top rate was then 7% on incomes over $500,000. Since the federal government had long used tariffs as its prime source of revenue, Progressive era legislators fully grasped just how fundamentally regressive they were, and fought successfully to cut the tariff rate from President McKinley’s 29% in 1899 to just 6% by 1917. Typically, the import duties that refiners in Brooklyn and Philadelphia paid on raw Cuban sugar would be passed on to consumers as higher prices. And clearly, the cost of a cup of sugar then took a far more significant slice out of a worker’s wages than it did from the kitchen budget of a millionaire’s chef. Requiring those who had the least to pay the most was a glaring economic injustice that would inspire progressive reformers to fight tariffs with an impassioned intensity that seems almost incomprehensible today.
The Roaring ’20s
But all that momentum for change stalled when, in 1917, the United States entered World War I and then segued to a postwar decade of speculative frenzy. At war’s end in 1918, Forbes magazine published its first ranking of the country’s richest men, with oil baron John D. Rockefeller then America’s first and only billionaire, followed by 29 millionaires (whose fortunes, corrected for inflation, would make them billionaires today)—industrial tycoons like Andrew Carnegie (steel), J. Ogden Armour (meat packing), Henry Ford (autos), Daniel Guggenheim (mining), and Pierre Du Pont II (chemicals).
After the stock market started roaring in the 1920s, however, it minted hundreds of new millionaires, while sales of cars, telephones, radios, and appliances boomed. Between 1921 and 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial Average for shares on the New York Stock Exchange surged by 600%.
As a parallel tide of political repression swept the country, American Legion veterans broke up socialist rallies, a young J. Edgar Hoover rounded up radicals for deportation, and bloody race riots swept Chicago and Washington, D.C. While Republican conservatives took control of Congress and the White House, a revived Ku Klux Klan ran the legislatures of a half-dozen states, lobbied Congress to enact immigration restrictions, and presided over some 400 lynchings of African-Americans.
The Depression Decade of the 1930s
The stock market that came in like a roaring lion at the start of the 1920s went out like a bleating lamb at decade’s end. On Black Monday, October 28, 1929, it suddenly dropped 13%, lost another 12% on Black Tuesday, and kept sliding into the summer of 1932, losing 90% of its value in a fall so steep it wouldn’t reach that peak again until 1954.
By the time President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, or FDR, was inaugurated in 1933, the nation was in dire straits. About 25% of the workforce, or some 13 million people, were unemployed—with thousands of “hobos” riding the rails, long lines snaking outside soup kitchens, and shanty towns (dubbed “Hoovervilles” after the indifferent president who had preceded FDR) huddled outside cities large and small. In the industrial northeast, factories shut down. In the Great Plains, thousands abandoned their farms in the country’s “dust bowl” and headed for California.
By the time the New Deal was done in 1945, the Roosevelt administration had brought high-flying U.S. capitalism down to Earth, with regulations that curbed speculative excess, while preventing spectacular crashes.
So deep and desperate was the Great Depression that President Roosevelt had ample public support to enact a “New Deal” of unprecedented socioeconomic reforms, creating nothing less than the modern federal government. To provide work for the unemployed, FDR formed the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration that mobilized nearly 9 million people to build 8,000 parks, 75,000 bridges, and 650,000 miles of roads. Private sector workers won the right to form unions and strike under the National Labor Relations Board, largely ending the union-busting and goon violence of decades past. Since the country had no form of retirement savings, FDR formed the Social Security Administration in 1935 (which currently sends benefits to 66 million Americans).
To fully electrify the economy, the New Deal dotted the U.S. with massive hydroelectric projects like the Fort Peck Dam and delivered cheap power to farms through the Rural Electrification Administration. To make air travel affordable, the Roosevelt administration built 800 airports nationwide, notably LaGuardia Airport in New York City.
To end the bank runs that periodically wiped out customers’ deposits, his Banking Act of 1933 created the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to enforce restrictions on banking speculation, and a year later formed the Securities and Exchange Commission to protect ordinary investors from fraud.
As the New Deal raised the tax rate for the top income bracket from 79% to a historic high of 94% by 1945, the share of all U.S. income earned by the richest 1% fell from a peak of 24% in 1928 to just 10% after World War II and would remain there until 1980. That change would be foundational for the middle-class democracy that many still regard as archetypally American.
In sum, by the time the New Deal was done in 1945, the Roosevelt administration had brought high-flying U.S. capitalism down to Earth, with regulations that curbed speculative excess, while preventing spectacular crashes.
A New Gilded Age
As the Cold War drew to a close during the 1980s, President Ronald Reagan advanced a conservative agenda of tax cuts and deregulation, sparking the start of a new Gilded Age that, over the next 30-plus years, would produce a level of economic inequality not seen for nearly a century. That era also coincided with a succession of financial crises that could have sparked serious economic depressions had they not been constrained by the regulatory mechanisms the New Deal had put in place.
By slashing the tax rate on the highest incomes from 70% to just 28%, President Reagan catalyzed a steady climb in private wealth that would continue unchecked for decades to come. By 2007, the richest 1% were already earning 24% of the nation’s income, putting them right back where they had been in the 1920s.
Just as railroads were the iconic industry of the original Gilded Age, so the Internet and its corporate spin-offs became the prime driver of our current era of excess. The release of software developer programs like Mosaic combined with a sharp increase in U.S. households with a personal computer—from just 15% in 1990 to 35% by 1997—became the prime ingredients for the “dot-com bubble” of the late 1990s. Growing numbers of Americans started shopping at Amazon.com, searching on Google, and booking travel online at Expedia.
As the Telecommunications Act of 1996 opened up the broadcast spectrum and the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 cut capital gains taxes on stock transactions, the Nasdaq stock exchange, which features tech listings, rose by 400% in a five-year frenzy of speculative trading for almost any stock with “.com” in its name. Adding fuel to that blazing fire, in 1999 the White House of President Bill Clinton encouraged Congress to repeal the New Deal’s Banking Act of 1933, allowing financial speculation through the merger of retail and investment banking.
In March 2000, the dot-com bubble finally burst, and the Nasdaq stock index started a sustained fall that virtually wiped out the previous decade’s gains. Over the next two years, markets were also shaken by serious scandals after company officers falsified returns to feed the market frenzy, bankrupting a half-dozen major corporations, including WorldCom, the country’s second-largest telephone company; Enron, a top energy corporation with revenues of $100 billion; and Adelphia, a prominent cable television provider with over two million subscribers. To correct what one leading law firm called “a broader culture of greed and deception that had taken root in the corporate world,” Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act in 2002 that tightened financial regulations to protect investors from systemic fraud.
Nonetheless, an even greater panic soon followed. Freed from the New Deal Banking Act’s restraint on speculation, investment banks began engaging in predatory lending of subprime mortgages and aggressive marketing of mortgage-backed securities, producing a profit-taking craze that came crashing down in the Great Recession of 2007-2009. As the country’s fourth-largest investment bank, Lehman Brothers, collapsed and its fifth-largest, Bear Sterns, was liquidated in a “fire sale,” the financial system trembled at the brink of collapse. Recognizing the seriousness of the crisis, Congress quickly authorized corporate bailouts funded by a $700 billion appropriation under the Troubled Asset Relief Program. By the time the Great Recession ended in mid-2009, unemployment had doubled to 10% and the Dow Jones Average had fallen by 50%. But the country had indeed been spared another Great Depression.
The Advent of Donald Trump
During those 30 years of boom and bust, however, one trend remained remarkably steady: The rich just kept getting richer. The number of global billionaires listed by Forbes magazine would increase tenfold from 291 in 1992 to 2,781 in 2024, with a total wealth of $14.2 trillion. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Forbes included Donald Trump among them, estimating his wealth at $4.5 billion.
In past periods of conservative Republican rule, Congress and the White House served the interests of the richest 1%, whether industrialists or Internet tycoons. But in 2016, for the very first time, the American people put a genuine billionaire in the White House and, to nobody’s surprise, he soon made it clear that his only consistent concern was serving the interests of his peers.
In the first year of his first term, in fact, Trump enacted the 2017 tax cuts that The New York Times called “the most sweeping tax overhaul in decades.” By cutting the corporate tax rate from 39% to 21%, reducing the top individual income tax rate from 39.6% to 37%, and doubling the size of estates exempt from being taxed to $11.2 million, those Trump tax cuts, economists found, produced a marked increase in “after-tax income for high-income households.” Indeed, the bottom 20% of wage earners saved just $60 each, while the upper 1% gained $51,000 each and the top 0.1% at least $193,000.
Without such mass protests and a determined democratic opposition at the ballot box, the Trump administration will persist with a tax and tariff policy aimed at creating the sorts of social inequity and economic privilege not seen since Mark Twain’s original Gilded Age.
Yet even that landmark legislation would pale before the inequitable impact of Trump’s tax policies in his second term in office, which all too literally sought to overturn the fiscal foundations of the Progressive Era reforms that had shaped American middle-class society for more than a century. If we combine the social impact of his recent “Big Beautiful” budget bill, which extends the 2017 tax cuts, with his skyrocketing tariffs, Trump seems to be trying to undo the landmark tax legislation of 1913 by reducing or replacing the progressive income tax with tariff revenues that are really a regressive tax on the poor. When the budget’s tax cuts for the rich are combined with his escalating tariffs that are bound to raise prices for ordinary consumers, those twinned policies are guaranteed to produce a massive transfer of wealth to the wealthiest 1% of Americans, creating an ever steeper version of social inequality that is fast fostering a new Gilded Age (and the economic disasters that are bound to go with it).
Apart from his trade war with China, in his first term Trump actually had little impact on tariffs. By the time he left office in 2021, he had raised the average import duty only incrementally from 1.4% to 2.8%—a far cry from the record 50% rate of the 1890 McKinley Tariff, and so still an insignificant factor in both Federal revenues and the average American’s cost of living.
In his inaugural address last January, however, Trump praised his distant predecessor, saying, “President McKinley made our country very rich through tariffs and through talent—he was a natural businessman—and gave Teddy Roosevelt the money for many of the great things he did, including the Panama Canal.” In a Rose Garden ceremony on his April 2 “Liberation Day,” President Trump ordered record-high tariffs for all the world’s nations, with duties of 50% on imports from Lesotho and 84% on those from China. Then, in an interview with Fox News on April 15, the president suggested, “There is a chance that the money from tariffs could be so great that it would replace” the income tax. As the average import duty started climbing to 15%, his trade adviser Peter Navarro projected that Trump’s tariffs could raise $600 billion in revenues, or more than a third of the $1.6 trillion in individual income taxes the Internal Revenue Service collected in 2024.
During the four-month blitz of tariff orders that followed, the Trump White House has insisted on the fiction that other countries will simply pay those import duties. After proclaiming himself a “Tariff man,” during the 2024 election campaign Trump told his rallies that “a tariff is a tax on a foreign country… A lot of people like to say it’s a tax on us. No, no, no, it’s a tax on a foreign country.”
In May, when Walmart’s CEO exposed the transparent falsity of that statement by stating, “Higher tariffs will result in higher prices,” an apoplectic president told the company to “EAT THE TARIFFS.” In mid-July, when Trump announced another round of tariffs that were to reach a McKinleyesque level of 50%, a White House spokesman repeated that exculpatory falsehood, saying: “The Administration has consistently maintained that the cost of tariffs will be borne by foreign exporters who rely on access to the American economy.”
Rising Resistance
With surprising speed, Americans are starting to see through such sophistry and resistance to the Trump administration is rising. Despite his repeated denials, a Gallup poll taken in April found that 89% of all Americans believe that “higher tariffs will result in… paying more for products.” And in late June, as Trump’s “Big Beautiful” budget bill neared legislative approval with massive cuts to health care for millions of Americans, a Quinnipiac University poll found 55% of the country opposed the bill and only 29% supported it.
Those polls reflected a growing opposition to Trump’s policies. In April, his then-ally Elon Musk poured a record-breaking $25 million into the election for the Wisconsin state Supreme Court, but the opposing Democratic candidate still won a stunning double-digit victory. In June, five million Americans in 2,200 cities and towns across the country marched in anti-Trump “No Kings” rallies, which added up to the largest single day of mass demonstrations in U.S. history.
After only six months of Trump’s term, it is still not clear whether his erratic economic policies—disrupting supply chains, creating labor shortages from mass deportations, and inducing record inflation—will inflict sufficient social pain to inspire a sustained movement for change. But one thing is already quite clear: Without such mass protests and a determined democratic opposition at the ballot box, the Trump administration will persist with a tax and tariff policy aimed at creating the sorts of social inequity and economic privilege not seen since Mark Twain’s original Gilded Age. Consequently, the grim economic results down the line are painfully predictable.
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The $50 Million Venetian Wedding of Robber Baron Jeff Bezos
Like the ruthless tycoons of yore, his business practices are unethical, he has amassed a vast fortune on the backs of his workers, and he has brutally stifled competition and controlled markets.
Jul 07, 2025
With all the fawning coverage of Jeff Bezos’ storybook $50 million Venetian wedding, the news media lost sight of fact that Bezos—the third-richest person in the world—is hardly worthy of veneration. He’s been exploiting Amazon workers for years.
Historians have drawn parallels between the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and what we are experiencing today. Like the first Gilded Age, Gilded Age 2.0 is marked by increasing economic inequality, the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few, and a rise in populism and social unrest.
Jeff Bezos fits the profile of a latter-day robber baron to a T. Like the ruthless tycoons of yore, his business practices are unethical, he has amassed a vast fortune on the backs of his workers, and he has brutally stifled competition and controlled markets.
Amazon terrorizes its workers
With their manifestly unsafe working conditions, Amazon warehouses are a 21st-century version of a Gilded Age sweatshop. Despite the company’s claims that it protects its workforce, an 18-month investigation released last December by a Senate committee led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) found that the nation’s second-largest private-sector employer risks its workers’ health and safety by prioritizing speed and profit, and it is doing quite well on that score. Last year, the company outpaced Walmart, the largest private-sector employer, by netting $59.2 billion—a 95 percent increase from 2023.
“Amazon forces workers to operate in a system that demands impossible rates and treats them as disposable when they are injured,” Sanders said in a statement. “It accepts worker injuries and their long-term pain and disabilities as the cost of doing business.”
Based on Amazon’s own data, the Senate committee found its warehouses recorded 30 percent more injuries in 2023 than the warehousing industry average and that the company systematically underreported injuries to hide the fact that its facilities are significantly more dangerous than that of other companies. It also found that Amazon workers, who represent about 29 percent of the U.S. warehousing industry workforce, were nearly twice as likely to be injured as other company warehouse workers in each of the previous seven years.
The committee, which contacted nearly 500 former and current Amazon employees, also uncovered evidence that Amazon is aware that its oppressive productivity demands are causing frequent injuries. The company drafted plans to lower injury rates but never implemented them because it feared they would undercut profits.
Amazon pays its workers peanuts
Bezos, who stepped down as Amazon’s CEO in 2021 but remains the company’s executive chairman and biggest shareholder, paid himself a salary of $81,840 in 2020 and earned $1.6 million in compensation. That may not seem so excessive, but he makes the bulk of his money from stock. All told, between 2023 and this year, he made about $8 million an hour.
By contrast, Amazon’s 1.2 million warehouse workers are just scraping by. They make anywhere from $8.41 to $20.19 an hour, according to data compiled by Zip Recruiter. Their average hourly rate—$16.35—amounts to only $34,000 a year.
Roughly half of nearly 1,500 Amazon warehouse workers surveyed in the spring of 2024 by the Center for Urban Economic Development (CUED) at the University of Illinois Chicago reported that they struggle to afford enough food or a place to live. A third of them had to rely on public assistance, mainly in the form of SNAP benefits.
“Many Amazon associates cannot pay their bills, they can’t afford proper housing,” one survey respondent told CUED researchers. “Some of my coworkers have been forced out of their homes. We are stuck in a nightmare, living in an economy that puts no cap on worker exploitation, while our wages can’t keep up with the increase in our cost of living. This cycle has to stop.”
Most of the Amazon warehouse workers’ attempts to unionize have been squelched by the company, which spent more than $17 million on anti-union consultants from 2022 through 2023. In 2021, a labor activist group, the Congress of Essential Workers, founded the Amazon Labor Union (ALU), which successfully organized an 8,300-person warehouse on Staten Island in March 2022. ALU affiliated with the Teamsters Union in June 2024, but to date, no other warehouses have been unionized.
Amazon slapped with tens of millions in fines
Since 2000, lawsuits by government authorities and private parties have cost Amazon (including Whole Foods) more than $283 million for a range of violations, notably consumer protection, employment, environment, government contracting, and workplace safety offenses, according to data compiled by Good Jobs First, a nonprofit group that promotes government and corporate accountability. Nearly 60 percent (101) of the 173 violations in those five categories involved workplace safety.
Amazon warehouse and delivery operation violations since 2020 are staggering.
- The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) fined Amazon more than $1.35 million for 23 workplace violations. Three state agencies collectively fined the company nearly $600,000 for similar health and safety offenses.
- Federal and state authorities fined the company nearly $74.2 million for five wage and hour violations, while private lawsuits forced the company to pay $26.45 million in restitution.
- The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice fined the company $25 million for privacy law violations, including illegal surveillance and unauthorized medical inquiries. A similar privately brought case in federal court forced Amazon to pay $95 million.
Less enforcement under the Trump administration?
Will the Trump regime be as aggressive as previous administrations in prosecuting Amazon for its labor infractions? Given the efforts by Bezos and Amazon to curry favor with Donald Trump, probably not.
Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural fund, and in January, it was widely reported that the company will pay a whopping $40 million to license an upcoming documentary about Melania Trump to be released in theaters and streamed on Prime Video. The first lady will serve as executive producer.
In February, Trump nominated Amazon’s former senior safety executive, David Keeling, to head OSHA. During Keeling’s tenure at Amazon, the company was cited numerous times for failing to meet the OSHA requirement “to furnish a place of employment which was free from recognized hazards that were causing or likely to cause death or serious physical harm to employees,” according to the Department of Justice. (The Senate has yet to confirm his nomination.)
Since then, Bezos has gone even further to placate Trump. In late April, Punchbowl News reported that Amazon planned to display on its website how much Trump’s tariffs are inflating the price of each product. In response, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt called it “a hostile and political act” and Trump phoned Bezos to complain. Bezos backed down immediately.
Then there’s what Bezos has been doing to wreck one of the top newspapers in the country—The Washington Post—which he bought in 2013. But that’s a column for another day.
Suffice it to say, the rap sheet on Bezos is long—and damning. Like his fellow robber barons of the day, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, he is not a man who deserves our reverence. Uncritical worship of billionaires like Bezos just may exacerbate an already dangerous level of social inequality. So let’s not go gaga over Bezos’ grandiosity.
This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.
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'Mayday! Mayday!': It's May Day
Unless we stop the damage Trump and his band of billionaire oligarchs are doing to both our democracy and our economy before then, much of it will be irreversible.
May 01, 2025
May Day has two meanings, both of which are directly applicable to today. It commemorates the solidarity of the labor movement (139 years ago today, workers gathered in the streets of Chicago to demand an eight-hour day).
“Mayday!” is also a distress signal used by pilots to indicate imminent danger or a life-threatening emergency (derived from the French phrase “m’aider,” meaning “help me”).
That about sums it up: Our solidarity is necessary to overcome the imminent dangers we now face — all from Donald J. Trump.
I doubt we can wait until the midterm elections to contain him. Unless we stop the damage he’s doing to both our democracy and our economy before then, much of it will be irreversible. It’s not even clear what sort of election we’ll be able to have 18 months from now.
Demonstrations are planned today in more than 900 cities against both the Trump regime and the oligarchy that supports and benefits from it. The official banner under which people will march today is, appropriately, “For the Workers, Not the Billionaires.”
Our solidarity is necessary to overcome the imminent dangers we now face — all from Donald J. Trump.
Under Trump, Americans are relearning the lesson we learned about the oligarchy during the Gilded Age of the late 1890s, when robber barons ran the government and the economy for their own benefit: Oligarchy is incompatible with the common good.
The Republican Party and Elon Musk’s efforts to cut veterans’ benefits, Medicaid, Social Security, food safety, food stamps, and much else that Americans depend on — all to create room in the budget for another big tax cut mostly benefiting the wealthy — is the latest and clearest example of oligarchic muscle-flexing in the Trump regime.
This is forcing the Democratic Party to move toward economic populism. Despite recent discussion in The New York Times among former leaders of the Democratic Leadership Council attributing Bill Clinton’s electoral victories to his neoliberal stances, the energy in today’s Party lies in 83-year-old Bernie Sanders and 35-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — who are explicitly taking on the oligarchy.
Meanwhile, Trump’s polls are plummeting. Almost all now show him underwater, with approval ratings hovering around 42 percent and disapprovals at over 55 percent.
Trump’s trade war is choking off supply chains and threatening to push up prices and create shortages of critical components and products.
It’s already causing the economy to contract — by 0.3 percent in the first quarter, according to a Commerce Department report out yesterday. That’s a huge reversal from the strong 2.4 percent expansion in the final full quarter of Biden’s presidency. Wall Street has chalked up the worst performance at the start of a new presidential term in almost half a century.
At the same time, Trump is edging ever closer to defying the Supreme Court. In a unanimous ruling on April 10, the court ordered Trump to “facilitate” the release of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia — a Maryland man the regime wrongly deported to El Salvador last month.
In a Tuesday interview on ABC, Trump acknowledged that he “could” secure Abrego Garcia’s release — contradicting Attorney General Bondi’s assertion that the U.S. doesn’t have the power to do so — but said he won’t. “If he were the gentleman that you say he is, I would do that, but he is not.”
Hopefully, today’s May Day demonstrations will lead to larger ones (I’m still counting on a “national civic uprising” that even conservatives like columnist David Brooks support).
But what’s the goal of such displays of solidarity? How do they fight the imminent dangers?
Mark my words: If the economy continues to deteriorate, if the regime cuts services that the public depends on in order to give the oligarchy a huge tax cut, and if Trump ever more openly defies the Supreme Court — the solidarity will pay off in such a huge outpouring of national anger that Congress impeaches and convicts the orange menace before the midterm elections.
Mayday! And Happy May Day.
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