By Jeff Mackler, National Secretary, Socialist Action
President Donald Trump’s first-term Secretary of State, former ExxonMobil CEO Rex Tillerson, notoriously called Trump a “f*****g moron.” Tillerson’s remark was recorded after Trump left a National Security Council meeting where he had proposed increasing the nation’s tactical nuclear weapons arsenal one hundredfold.
During that same first term, Trump thwarted the rapid development of the COVID-19 vaccines in deference to pharmaceutical monopolies, resulting in the deaths of an estimated one million people in the United States.
Today, the same Trump is on a rampage, firing willy-nilly tens of thousands—if not millions—of public workers, not to mention top government officials in every quarter. These purges come either in revenge for their past acts exposing his crimes or for their refusal to once again lower interest rates to gift trillions in fictitious capital to the super-rich—capital they instantly reinvest at rigged higher rates.
The same Trump furiously engineers illegal National Guard enforced mass deportations of immigrants, and even U.S. citizens, while gutting public education budgets, health care benefits, and civil rights legislation. Trump knows no limits, as he fires university presidents who allow peaceful students and professors to protest the U.S.-backed genocide of the Palestinian people while imposing billions of dollars in funding cuts for a broad range of university programs.
Is Trump simply a modern-day racist, sexist, homophobic, warmongering bully dictator—or is there a deeper explanation for today’s seemingly irrational policies, backed for the most part by the Democratic Party?
The Deepening Economic Crisis
Author of the 2025 book, “The Twilight of American Imperialism,” economist Jack Rasmus’s [photo below] offers a detailed explanation of the current ruling class dilemma in his August 6, 2025 article, “Recession Door Opens in US.” Rasmus writes:
“The government’s reports in question are the July jobs report last Friday and the advanced (preliminary) US GDP report for the 2nd quarter (April–June) released a few days before. The events associated with these reports were (1) Trump’s announcement imposing widespread tariff hikes ranging from 15% to 41% on more than 40 countries, with even higher tariffs previously announced on China, Russia, Mexico, Canada, as well as ‘across-the-board’ global tariffs on steel, aluminum, copper, and other commodities; and (2) the Federal Reserve Bank’s decision to keep U.S. interest rates at current levels for at least another six weeks.”
Rasmus continues:
“If last week’s 2nd quarter GDP data unlocked the door to recession, then last Friday’s jobs data kicked it wide open. And Trump’s new tariffs now threaten to blow it off its hinges.”
The Jobs Data Tsunami
Rasmus explains in detail that the monthly new jobs created through May–July—50,000 in total—fall far short of the 300,000 new workers entering the ranks of the unemployed over the same period.
“Beyond just July,” he adds, “the Current Population Survey (CPS) revealed that since May 1 the employment level for the U.S. economy in general declined by –863,000. The unemployment rate, also indicated by the CPS only, remains at approximately 8% for the entire U.S. labor force of 170 million—not the ‘official unemployment rate’ of 4.2% consistently reported by the mainstream media and hyped by politicians. The 8% includes the 50 million plus part-time, temp, discouraged, independent contractor, gig, and similar job categories that the ‘official’ 4.2% excludes.”
Rasmus concludes: “Trump’s response to the recent jobs data has been to shoot the messenger, as he quickly announced his firing of the Labor Department’s statistics chief. But there’s no politically ‘cooked numbers’ to make him look bad here, as Trump claims. It’s just that the facts have now deteriorated to such an extent that even efforts to pave over the potholes with marginal underreporting and selective media reporting can no longer cover up the true condition of the deteriorating jobs ‘roadbed.’”
In the same vein, Rasmus debunks the Trump administration’s claim that U.S. Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is rising at a 3% rate instead of the more accurate figure of less than 1%.
Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill”
Rasmus concludes:
“Most of the at least $3 trillion in corporate and individual (and estate) tax cuts are just a continuation of previous [Biden and Trump, editor] 2018 cuts. The effect of the 2025 bill is just to make them permanent. That’s not net new fiscal stimulus from tax cutting. Meanwhile, the so-called working-class $500 billion tax cuts in the bill—for tips, overtime pay, Social Security, interest on new cars, etc.—have been dramatically reduced and made temporary.
“In contrast, the program and employment spending cuts in the bill—for Medicaid, ACA subsidies, education, layoffs of federal workers, and so on—amount to at least $1.5 trillion and take effect immediately.”
As we go to press, the U.S. Congress is debating how many additional billions in debt it needs to approve to meet the requirements of a balanced budget. The U.S. national debt is scheduled to reach $38 trillion by the end of 2025. Rasmus reports that interest payments alone to the super-rich bondholders already exceed $1 trillion annually.
“The Congressional Budget Office,” he reports, “estimates the national debt will reach $56 trillion by 2034, with annual interest payments of $1.7 trillion—and all that before Trump just passed $5 trillion in tax cuts for the super-rich.”
The figures above demonstrate that the U.S. economy is headed for yet another catastrophe—akin to, if not worse than, the Bush and Obama era decades—when, in 2008, the Federal Reserve chief and the Treasury Secretary marched into George W. Bush’s office on their way to a meeting of the U.S. Congress with two pieces of paper in hand. They informed the President that unless Congress immediately passed their near–$1 trillion bailout proposal, drafted literally by a dozen of the leading U.S. bankers, the U.S. economy would collapse. An astonished Bush could only respond, according to the NYT, “Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
With little debate, Congress, two days later, did so and followed up with years of additional “quantitative easing” grants that saved the nation’s largest banks and corporations from bankruptcy.
Trump’s pressure on the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates is a repeat of the same scenario: failing corporations are gifted huge sums at increasingly lower interest rates—if not zero—which they instantly reinvest in speculative ventures they manipulate and control to guarantee instant paper profits.
We say “paper profits” because the official profit rates of many U.S. corporations are in constant decline, approaching zero in key sectors.
Trump’s Militarism, Genocide, and Imperial Policy
Trump’s massive tax cuts for the super-rich are matched by unprecedented boosts in military spending for U.S. imperialism’s “forever wars” around the globe, including its financing of Zionist Israel’s serial attacks on virtually every nation in the Middle East that expresses even the slightest verbal opposition to today’s Zionist-orchestrated genocide against the Palestinian people.
Ralph Nader reported in a recent interview with Chris Hedges that Trump “added $150 billion dollars more to the bloated military budget than the generals had asked for, plus $44 billion more to Homeland Security, not to mention hiring tens of thousands of masked agents, kidnapping people, throwing them into jail without charges, and sometimes exporting them to dictatorial torture regimes.”
With U.S. backing in the form of countless billions, Israel today wages war across the region — in Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Iraq, and Yemen.
Indeed, when the Zionist apartheid terror state bombed Doha, Qatar on September 9—while U.S.-supported “negotiations” were underway between U.S. and Israeli officials and Hamas, supposedly to end the slaughter in Gaza—the “moron” Trump could only blurt out “Oops” as he feigned an apology to Hamas, claiming that the U.S. military, which dominates every aspect of Qatar’s “defense” systems, had merely “goofed” by not intervening to stop the Zionist bombing and murder of Hamas negotiators.
Jeremy Scahill, author of “Dirty Wars” [photo below] details U.S.-abetted Doha, Qatar bombing
Former Intercept journalist and now Drop Site News editor Jeremy Scahill reported in detail about the Doha bombing. We quote Scahill at length to make a central point: what the U.S. did in Qatar was no Trump “Oops” or careless mistake, but rather—as we will demonstrate below—the formal policy of U.S. imperialism worldwide.
Here’s Jeremy Scahill speaking to Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman last week in an interview published by permission in Socialist Action, September 2025:
“Last summer, in July of 2024, the United States was engaged in negotiations with Hamas. Hamas, on July 2nd, accepted a ceasefire deal. This is in 2024, the summer of 2024, that they were told that the United States had signed off on, and that if Hamas agreed to certain amendments, that Israel was going to be on board. And in the midst of those discussions, Israel assassinated Ismail Haniyeh, who was actually the last democratically elected prime minister of Palestine, not just of Gaza. And he was Hamas’s political leader and its chief negotiator, and they assassinated him.
Trump and Biden’s fake ceasefire
“And then nothing happened with the ceasefire, until Donald Trump was running for election, and he and Joe Biden then endorsed a ceasefire that, by all accounts, Trump sort of pushed through with Netanyahu, that went into effect in January. Israel blew up that deal on March 2nd, unilaterally exited it, imposed a full-spectrum siege on Gaza, barring any food, medicine or other life essentials from entering the Gaza Strip. On March 18th, it then resumed its genocidal campaign of terror bombings against Gaza, that have endured to this moment.
Zionist Genocide Forces Hamas to Virtual Surrender
“Then, a couple of months ago, Steve Witkoff, the US special envoy, and Benjamin Netanyahu said that Hamas must accept what they called the Witkoff framework, which was a 13-point plan for a two-month ceasefire, during which half of the living Israeli captives would have been released, and there would have been negotiations on ending the war. It was a very difficult framework for Hamas, because it came very close to crossing some of the red lines that Hamas had defined, that it felt that if it agreed to these terms, it would effectively amount to a surrender of the Palestinian cause of liberation. [Emphasis in italics added, JM.] But on August 18th, just over three weeks ago, Hamas formally agreed to what mediators said was 98% of the terms that had been demanded by Netanyahu and Trump. Israel did not respond to that in any formal way. Trump and Israel then escalated their threats against Hamas, after they accepted it. [Emphasis in italics added, JM]
“And, … Hamas made unprecedented concessions, concessions that include not demanding a clear timeline for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the Philadelphi Corridor in southern Gaza. That was a huge deal for Hamas. They reduced the number of Palestinian captives held by Israel that would be released in a deal. They dropped their demand that the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, this scheme run by the United States and Israel — some 2,000 Palestinians have died seeking aid since the GHF went into effect. Hamas dropped its demand that the GHF be expelled from Gaza as part of a peace deal. And it was willing to accept a full-circle buffer zone totally around the Gaza Strip that would be controlled by Israel and at points would pierce 1,500 meters deeper into Gaza. So, Hamas made these concessions, and then they waited.
Natanyahu’s “Final Solution”
“And Netanyahu’s response was to announce a ‘final solution’ plan for Gaza City, and they began ratcheting up the terror bombings. They continued to burn children alive in tents. And then they started bombing massive residential apartment towers in Gaza, some of which housed hundreds of Palestinian families. All of this happened, … after Hamas had accepted a proposal filled with concessions, that the mediators said was 98% of the demands from Netanyahu and Trump.
“And then, last week, the United States began some back-channel discussions with Hamas, and they said, “Listen, Donald Trump wants to end this war. He has some ideas.” And Trump’s idea, I was told by senior Hamas officials, was that, as an initial gesture, Hamas would release all of the Israeli captives, living and dead, and then Trump would see if he could do something about restarting negotiations to try to end the war.
“Well, Hamas responded to this in a remarkably diplomatic way. They said they’re open to any proposals, either a comprehensive deal, where all captives would be released at once, at the beginning of a deal, if there were proper international guarantees and a guarantee that Israel would stop the genocide and withdraw, or they were open to returning to the original framework that they agreed to, which was packed full of concessions.
Trump’s 100-word Ultimatum
“So, Trump then submits — and we obtained it — a 100-word summary. And it says, within 48 hours, all the Israelis have to be released in exchange for some Palestinians. It says that Israeli withdrawal will be contingent upon a new government acceptable to Israel being imposed on Gaza and that Israel will maintain full security control of the Gaza Strip. It says that aid will be allowed in, but it doesn’t say who will allow the aid in or how much aid would be allowed in. And it says that Trump will guarantee for 60 days that a ceasefire will hold, as long as negotiations are continuing. Now, this violates so many of Hamas’s red lines, but their response to Trump was, “We’re open to any deal.”
“Three weeks ago, they agreed to concessions. Everyone ignored it. Trump then issues a new ultimatum in the form of a 100-word document. They’re meeting to discuss it, and then Israel bombs the Hamas offices in a sovereign nation, Qatar, that houses U.S. Central Command. No air defense systems were activated. The United States security umbrella was nowhere to be found. And then Trump concocts this story about how he — how Steve Witkoff was just a little bit too late in informing Qatar that this happened.
“So, what we see here is part of a long pattern of Israel assassinating the very people, or attempting to assassinate the very people, that the president of the United States claims he wants to negotiate with. ”
The U.S. War Machine and Venezuela
We quote Jeremy Scahill here at length to emphasize a central point: regardless of the lying U.S. propaganda statements regularly repeated by the corporate-controlled media, the U.S. war machine relentlessly pursues imperialist goals around the world. Today its focus is on Palestine and oil-rich Venezuela. Yesterday it was on oil rich Iran, and before that, oil rich Syria and Iraq.
Trump’s overt actions in bombing tiny boats offshore Venezuela, under the pretext of defending the United States from drug dealers, have nothing to do with illegal drugs entering the country. In reality, the U.S. drug industry—backed by some of the largest money-laundering banks in the nation—likely ranks first in the world today.
The U.S. focus on Venezuela, with its unending attacks on its oil infrastructure, punishing sanctions, and embargoes, aims to force the beleaguered Venezuelan government to surrender to naked U.S. economic warfare and now overt military attacks. The same logic drives the recent U.S. aggression against Iran.
The same holds true for the U.S. withdrawal from UN-sponsored COP climate conferences, where even the most modest, non-binding proposals to limit greenhouse gases are unacceptable to America’s monopolized fossil-fuel barons.
Trump, Elon Musk, and “Drill, Baby, Drill”
The same mentality extends to Trump’s firing of Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and soon-to-be first trillionaire, who Trump hired to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to impose massive social service and related spending cuts. But when Musk, also CEO of Tesla, refused to bend to Trump’s demands that he limit production of his relatively non-polluting electric vehicles, he was near instantly dismissed along with the governments massive financial grants to Tesla.
For Trump, advancing the interests of U.S. oil corporations—while incessantly vomiting up his “Drill, baby, drill” hyperbole—was paramount. Coupled with his open rejection of the catastrophic effects of fossil-fuel-induced global warming, Trump is less a “moronic” would-be fascist thug than a stripped-down, corrupt politician serving a declining capitalist order and throwing multiple billions into his own businesses to boot!
Compelled to protect the fossil-fuel oligarchy’s profits, regardless of the catastrophic costs to humanity, Trump envisions virtually no limits on his power to profit, plunder and repress.
A World Without Resistance
In a world tragically, at least for the moment, lacking deeply rooted working-class organizations capable of challenging capitalism’s encroachments on the lives and well-being of ordinary people, we see ferocious bullies like Trump and his ilk imposing increasingly terrible attacks on the world’s oppressed.
We can barely hold back our tears at the sight of Palestinian leaders forced into humiliating concessions at the negotiating table, while mass murderers like Trump and Netanyahu seek their physical annihilation.
In every instance, Trump’s endless war-making, racism, sexism, anti-LGBTQI+ bigotry, and climate-change denial all serve one purpose: to protect the faltering interests of U.S. imperialism.
The Decline of U.S. Imperialism and Global Competition
This is the same U.S. imperialism that, in 2001, agreed to allow China to join the World Trade Organization in exchange for granting U.S. corporations access to the world’s cheapest labor and massive tax exemptions. The deal allowed U.S. companies to offshore production to China, exporting cheap goods worldwide—especially to the U.S.—at prices that undercut virtually all competitors.
In time, Chinese capitalists mastered, copied, and exceeded U.S. manufacturing technology, challenging the monopolies the U.S. once dominated. Over the ensuing decades, the same dynamic unfolded globally, as Europe and other regions pursued even cheaper labor markets—from Africa and Latin America to Indonesia and Vietnam.
Hence Trump’s imposition of punishing tariffs worldwide: U.S. corporations can no longer compete. Higher tariffs on imports inevitably trigger raging inflation—higher prices borne by U.S. workers.
The U.S. War Machine (Redux)
The multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts and the slashing of social services have been gifts to a decaying ruling class. Meanwhile, the bloated military budget ballooned by another $150 billion—topping $1 trillion annually—exceeding even the Pentagon’s own requests. U.S. military spending now rivals, if not exceeds, the total of the rest of the world combined.
The Case of Ukraine
The case of Ukraine is a variation on these same themes. Following the U.S.-financed, fascist-led, CIA-directed 2014 coup, U.S. imperialism sought the dismemberment of Russia, the removal of President Putin, Ukraine’s integration into NATO, and the transfer of its vast fossil-fuel reserves to U.S. corporations—a classic oil war, barely disguised. [See Socialist Action pamphlet Ukraine in Turmoil, Michael Schreiber and Jeff Mackler.]
Waning Confidence in U.S. and World Capitalism
An October 3 New York Times poll titled “Voters Believe U.S. Can’t Heal Deep Divisions” revealed a sharp decline in public faith in the political system: only 33 percent of voters now believe the U.S. can solve its political problems, compared with a majority just a few years ago during the coronavirus pandemic. Needless to say, the poll ignores the even more alienated non-voting population, close to 36% of the total.
Confidence in the two-party system is similarly eroding in the face of rising inflation, massive layoffs, and cuts to critical social services.
Internationally, disgust with the U.S.–Zionist genocide has flooded the streets of the world’s cities. Three hundred thousand marched with recently released antiwar journalist Julian Assange in Sydney, Australia, while 100,000 gathered in Berlin last week. In Genoa, Italy, a general strike led by longshore workers in solidarity with Gaza—supported by teachers’ unions and others—drew wide support.
In New York City, home to the world’s largest Jewish population outside Israel, a NYT/Sienna College poll revealed that “Only 26 percent of registered voters sympathized more with Israel than with Palestinians, while 44 percent sympathized more with Palestinians.”
Indicative of the mass worldwide outrage at the U.S.-backed Zionist genocide, at a mass UN rally last week President Gustavo Petro of Columbia proposed that an international army be formed “to liberate Palestine.”
No doubt the times are rapidly changing as the world’s people endure capitalist crises, endless wars, and ruthless politicians like Trump, determined to preserve an exploitative and obsolete system while enriching themselves, damn the consequences to humanity. Across the globe, the oppressed are stirring again. More and more see socialism not as an ideal, but as a necessity.
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