Donald Trump may accidentally have told the truth this week. He openly admitted that he was not thinking about the financial well-being of ordinary Americans when deciding his policy on Iran. That matters because it reveals something fundamental about both Trump and the system that created him.
In this video, I explore why Trump's government increasingly looks like a government of billionaires for billionaires, detached from the economic reality facing ordinary people. Rising food prices, fuel costs, inflation, shortages and supply chain failures are becoming real pressures across the world, and yet those at the top appear indifferent to the consequences.
I argue that this is not simply about Trump as an individual. It is about the endgame of neoliberalism itself. A political and economic system built to transfer wealth upwards is now failing economically, politically, socially and even militarily. The warning signs are everywhere: disrupted trade, shortages, financial instability, rising insecurity and growing public anger.
The question now is what comes next. Can politics based on care, security and well-being replace a model built on extraction and inequality before the damage becomes irreversible?
This is the audio version:
This is the transcript:
Every now and again, Donald Trump almost says something that's true. Now it's very rare. Most of the time, I don't believe a word he says. I doubt that he believes a word he says, but sometimes, just occasionally, something slips out, and this week it did.
He said he did not think about the financial position of people in the USA when considering his strategy on the war with Iran. Now, that was an astonishing admission; an admission of utter indifference to the well-being of the people of the USA, and on this occasion, I think we should believe every word that he said.
Trump is arguably the richest man ever to hold the US presidency. He has used his second term to considerably enhance that wealth; that we know. He and his sons have been involved in the most massive amount of trading to improve their financial positions. And his cabinet already contains more billionaires than any other in US history. Patterns of insider trading, now becoming very clear before every one of his press announcements, suggests that those who aren't yet billionaires are intent on becoming so. And this then is a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy, for the wealthy.
Ordinary Americans are simply not part of the Trump world. Trump and his cabinet are totally detached from ordinary economic reality, as most Americans and most people around the world would see it. They can only identify with tech billionaires who backed and funded them.
Rising food and fuel prices are beyond Trump's imagination as a result, and whatever he spends on either, the impact on his well-being is so small that he does not understand that for most Americans, the inflation that he is creating is a real pressure on their well-being.
He doesn't realise that Americans are terrified of inflation, job losses and recession, and he is not. That is the difference between Trump and his electorate. That is what is going to break the MAGA regime.
And none of this is an accident. What is happening is the logical endpoint of neoliberalism. That system was always designed to extract maximum value from working people and to reallocate it to a tiny elite who could claim they were worth it, as the saying goes. Now we can see that not only are they not worth it, but that by pursuing this agenda, they are destroying the American economy, and with it, that of much of the rest of the world.
The warnings that I've given on this channel about forthcoming shortages are now being borne out in real time. What we are seeing is that absolute shortages of fuel and food are emerging, and these will be hitting us from mid-June onwards. They are already hitting Southeast Asia; we know they are coming.
At the same time, business supply chains are already becoming disrupted, and the warning signals are flashing everywhere about the fact that this is going to get very much worse.
And it's not just in the obvious businesses that we are seeing this. You'd think about oil, you'd think about food, but the most recent warning is with regard to insulation materials and paint, both of which are delaying shipbuilding. The crisis is going to emerge everywhere.
Businesses will begin to fail as a result during the autumn, and the banking crisis that I have forecast is going to develop as a consequence, whether we like it or not, unless Trump gets back to the negotiating table, and that's not very likely.
The sequence I'm talking about is not speculation now. It is already visible, and it is highly likely to see its way through to the end.
And in that case, let me make one warning: never underestimate the anger of a mother who cannot feed her children. Faced with that situation, most people, most especially mothers, will do almost anything to feed their kids. That is a reality. Their children matter to them more than anything else in the world, and they will not see them go hungry. That's when we get societal breakdown. The risk is that it may happen.
Steve Keen is talking about world food shortages of up to 20%. I think he may be overstating it a bit, but the reality is, there is going to be real suffering as a consequence of food shortages, and that is the crisis that we face. And this reality is going to hit the USA, the UK, the whole of Europe, and we are already beginning to see it in Southeast Asia. There are food shortages there already. Anyone who does not understand this is out of touch with reality, and that includes the man in the White House.
Is Trump worried about any of this? I take him at his word. He is not.
What he is worried about is losing face over Iran. The fact is that having to stand down there will be the biggest strategic US military defeat in history. It is fear of that which motivates him and not fear of the suffering of his own people. The gap between his priorities and theirs could not be wider, and that gap is now a danger to all of us.
What the evidence shows is that neoliberalism has reached its endgame. It cannot deliver on its own promises, not even to those it claims to serve. It can't even deliver victory in war anymore.
In pursuing wealth and power for an elite, it is destroying the societies it governs. People are already beginning to reject this political philosophy as a consequence, and the USA is heading for both an economic and a political crisis, and that will hasten this rejection. The UK, Europe, and many others will follow in that wake, and this then is the moment when we need to talk seriously about what happens next.
The politics of care is, of course, the answer, but the road to it will be painful. There is going to be a great deal of suffering because of Trump's indifference to the people of the USA and the world, and that suffering is the direct consequence of the choices made by people like him and by all those who supported and enabled him.
The question now is whether we can build something better before the damage is complete. That's what I'm asking myself. That's what I'm hoping for. I don't know whether we can; I fear the consequences of Trump and his indifference, but what about you?
What do you think? There's a poll down below. Let us have your opinions. Please like this video if that's what you do. Please share it, and if you're so inclined and would like to give us a donation towards the cost of doing these videos, we'd be very grateful.
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I am reading Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean. She shows that the neoliberal funders and ” economists” have spent 50 years plus deliberately plotting to destroy democracy.
The Trump Great Depression which will seriously hurt the majority of the world’s citizens.
But maybe the grief that the world has to suffer is the only way to make politicians quickly wake up and reject neoliberalist policies. As happened in the US following the Wall Street Crash and depression.
But this time governments must take back control of the interest rates and properly improve life for the majority.
I have just finished reading ‘The Denny Diesels’ by John Hendy about the three Southern Railway/Region motorships for the Portsmouth- Ryde service.
It quotes a report in ‘The Scotsman’ from 4th April 1946 when the order for the first two Brading and Southsea was placed ‘The Southern Railway had eight vessels awaiting completion which were being delayed by a lack of wood screws, door locks and hinges’
While that was 80 years ago its shows how what are in the scheme of things trivial items can delay even the largest projects.
There seems to be grumblings afoot about ‘shortages’ in the shops so perhaps things are about to kick off
I remember them!
The Iran war is certainly hastening the collapse of neoliberalism and the hastening of nature and climate collapse too. The big geopolitical question now is will China invade Taiwan as well? If this does happen, not only will it be a bloodbath and make the Normandy invasion look like a vicars tea party but will stall the AI revolution and destroy the communication and cyber systems that the world economy relies on from the cutting of the supply of computer chips.
Having use so much of its stock of weapons in Iran, the next few months present a golden opportunity for China to invade Taiwan while the US is distracted and weaker. I doubt the PRC would take the high risk, high reward approach of launching a direct invasion. But they could.
More likely perhaps is that they blockade Taiwan, saying that everyone accepts it is part of One China so the PRC should deal with trade and international relations, including imports and exports and customs duties and tariffs. The PRC probably does have the military force to cut Taiwan off – just as Iran and the US can each close the strait of Hormuz – and the US and other regional powers may not want to intervene. And then it becomes a fait accompli.
As Taiwan controls so much of the global semiconductor business, the US and others may not be able to stand back and let that fall into that hands of China, to control along with their domination of critical minerals.
To the computer chips issue that Taiwan is a major supplier, well America has convinced the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufactoring Company (TSMC) to build a massive complex in Phoenix, Arizona. It is already producing chips, but they are still expanding. So, the US might be more relaxed about China invading Taiwan once this is completed, as they will at least have their own supply of advanced chips. MAGA obviously means that the rest of the World can go hang.
Retired UC Berkeley Geography Professor John Isom now living in Taiwan writes:
“Underlying this week’s Trump-Xi meeting are more than 75 years of China-Taiwan cross-strait relations and a simple question: Would the People’s Republic of China start a civil war with Taiwan?
“Civil war” is operative because Beijing sees Taiwan as an integral part of the People’s Republic of China, and reunification is the only option for the rogue island. Starting a “violent conflict” on one’s own territory with one’s own people constitutes a baseline definition of civil war.
So, civil war? The growing consensus – here in Taiwan, across the Taiwan Strait, and throughout the Indo-Pacific region – appears to be yes, and for good reason, at least on the surface of things. Across the larger region, China continues to try to bully into existence its so-called nine-dash map by illegally creating artificial islands in the sovereign waters of the Philippines, Malaysia, and Vietnam – well south of China’s southern-most land – and arming them with military infrastructure.
In turn, since 2022 China has undertaken significantly more live-fire army, navy and air-force military exercises surrounding Taiwan, invading Taiwan’s Air-Defense Identification Zone with more than 3,500 fighter-jet sorties in 2024 alone, a 15-fold increase in sorties since 2020.”
The rest of his analysis here: https://substack.com/home/post/p-197550574
This is what you get when you believe that wealth ‘trickles down’ – and please don’t tell me that ‘we’ no longer do believe because that is nonsense. All this has done is created a pleonexic elite engorged with money, because their money does not trickle down – they do not share it. They employ their money to make more money (in the process often taking other’s wealth), secure their political safety by buying democracy and hide it from the government.
So, what we have is the both implicit and complicit approval of greed. The obsession with money blinds them/us from seeing that there is too little left for everyone else and means that what is actually needed – systems to manage resources, get things done etc are simply ignored. I know one thing for sure: we are not at the bottom yet, but we’re on the way.
The poll looks a bit odd?
Repetitive and with words incomplete – “visi….”
Good post though!
Richard, can I suggest you re-do the poll? the first three all seem to say, roughly, the same thing.
More than that (re the poll): the first 3 and the 4th are not mutually exclusive.I wanted to vote for both one of the first 3 and the 4th.
Trump is the front man for those who wrote Project 2025. If he dropped dead today, the authors of the strategy would still be there.
As their motivation is selfish, they will end up trying to marginalise each other and miss the big picture, and, I think fail. But as they do that the mass of the population will suffer-unless the people find an alternative to what they offer,
https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/54761-donald-trump-net-approval-holding-steady-near-joe-biden-worst-numbers-may-9-11-2026-economist-yougov-poll
perhaps realisation is dawning.
Despite the carefully worded statements in official press releases, the American economy has been in a slow recession for nearly 4 years. Several sectors are suffering heavily, and social tension is at an all-time high. Journalists only show the bubble of prosperity in New York and Los Angeles but the real America is a completely different story.
The Trump administration has other priorities, and they are listed clearly in the annual National Security Strategy report. Who is winning? The funds, finance and major corporations, which can profit from a global market and shift money and assets globally. Politicians just serve as a “tool”.
Ultimately such excessive inequality would be expected to either be reversed or to end in revolution. The No Kings protests are the tip of an iceberg when looking at the potential destination of insecurity and loss of hope experienced by the majority in the US and the UK.
Some members of groups like Patriotic Millionaires may be among those in a more privileged position who honestly believe that money should be put to good use. Others just recognise that you can only squeeze the majority so hard before instability is the inevitable result, and wish to maintain more tolerable (to the masses) privilege rather than risk unrest and attacks on the rich.
Whatever the motivation, such groups are worthwhile to push for distribution to shift in the right direction from where it is now. They have respect currently gifted to wealth, and hopefully they keep using it to steer the US, the UK and elsewhere away from catastrophe.
Rather than speculate on the probability of a Democratic majority in the US House and Senate being able to displace Trump, I would like to urge people to discuss the period we are entering and how to survive it and build the better future we all desire.
It appears to me it’s probable we are entering an economic period as jolly as the period between the wars. I have not read any analyses suggesting we’re getting enough refined oil before August. We have discussed the consequences before.
A Lakota friend suggested that we gather recipes for lawn grass soup and venison. I understand from the Guardian that England is currently overrun with deer. That is convenient.
Much to agree with