America’s Polycrisis Has Arrived

Whenever the daily outrage, crisis, or violation of basic norms emerges from the Trump administration, senior Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) are quick to dismiss it as a distraction from “problems that affect average Americans”. Then they try to pivot to health care or the cost of groceries. This worked in the old, pre-Trump days when the U.S. wasn’t in the process of collapsing, and focus testing suggested parties should focus on two, maybe three, issues. This is no longer viable.

The U.S. is in the middle of a (mostly) self-induced, deliberate polycrisis. The concept of a polycrisis, introduced by historian Adam Tooze, describes multiple, interconnected global crises that amplify each other’s effects. The total damage of polycrisis is far worse than the sum of its individual problems. The U.S. has been a stable democracy for 160 years, roughly since the end of the Civil War, and both the public and the elected opposition to Trump is mentally and emotionally unprepared to accept or deal with the reality of the situation—and the reality is sobering.

The Trump administration is in the middle of a successful autogolpe, or self-coup, tearing down any obstacles that might prevent their autocratic attempt to seize power. That power is being used to punish enemies and reward allies with ill-gotten riches. As a result, the U.S. is already experiencing multiple self-inflicted crises in the areas of foreign policy, rule of law, civil rights, and constitutional law. The administration’s ideology is also making existing problems with the climate crisis and health care worse. Add to these the looming disasters with the military, economy, elections, and the perceived legitimacy of the government, and the number of separate crises starts to be overwhelming.

Ten years ago, any one of these crises would have been all people talked about. Now, most of them are being completely ignored by Democratic leadership. Trump carried the election on the swing vote of low information, low propensity voters, who are likely unaware of how the U.S. is collapsing in so many interconnected ways. For others who are following the news, it is still difficult to take it in all at once; it is like trying to count falling rocks in the middle of an avalanche. I can’t count them either, but these are some of the biggest, most lethal boulders.

Foreign Policy

The Trump administration’s foreign policy is Malthusian: The powerful deserve to live and have rights, and the weak do not. They believe that is the natural order of things. We can see this in Trump’s drive to acquire Greenland, likely by force. Similarly, he seems driven to make Canada the “51st state” whether they want it or not. Neither Canadians nor Greenlanders want to be a part of the U.S. It is my firm belief that Trump will try to take Greenland militarily, see how the world reacts, and if the blowback isn’t too much, he will move on to Canada. This is very similar to how Nazi Germany took Czechoslovakia, didn’t get a lot of resistance, and as a result then took Poland.

The world is not ready for a United States that turns on its allies and invades a pair of NATO countries. We can already see the narrative groundwork being laid to justify the act. The NY Post publishes articles about Greenlanders being oppressed, and dark money flooding secessionist campaigns in Canada. War is coming, but the public cannot believe it because it will be against countries traditionally regarded as allies.

The U.S. has decided to abdicate its role as the leader of the free world that it has held since the end of World War II. It is withdrawing from international organizations and treaties signed by most of the world. Trump and the Republican Party are making the U.S. a friend to corrupt dictatorships as long as they pretend to respect Trump, or pay the protection racket, like Venezuela’s new president did. With the destruction of foreign aid and embracing a selfish, bullying, transactional approach to diplomacy the U.S. has destroyed most of its instruments of soft power.

Rule of Law

Trump has made it clear that the Department of Justice (DOJ), FBI, and ICE are his personal weapons to be used against the administration’s enemies. These enemies include journalists witnessing crimes by the government, Democrats who speak out, transgender people and their allies, and immigrants. He is using the system to investigate Governor Tim Walz (D-MN) and Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) after they opposed him. He’s also arresting journalists for reporting on ICE’s crimes.

At the same time, the power of the pardon ensures that no ally or donor will suffer for any illegal acts, as long as those acts enrich the president or support their autocratic end-state. He has pardoned or commuted the sentences of dictators convicted of funneling drugs into the U.S., pardoned over 1,500 January 6th rioters, and pardoned several of his supporters who have repeatedly committed financial crimes. Trump has exploited this ruthlessly to enrich himself via foreign leaders, digital currency scams, and even suing his own Internal Revenue Service (IRS) for $10 billion. Because his lackeys control both the IRS and the DOJ, it is a foregone conclusion that they will settle, allowing Trump to treat the government as his own personal piggybank for the rest of his life, while handing out spoils to those who support him.

What this means is that everyone within the administration is now above the law. The Inspector General offices responsible for investigating internal corruption have been filled with loyalists. The DOJ is utterly corrupt, ignoring (and sometimes encouraging) flagrant violations of law. The Supreme Court has effectively ruled that the president cannot be prosecuted for illegal acts. There are now two sets of laws in the U.S.: one for the rich and Republicans, and one for everyone else. This is the standard playbook for dictators seizing power.

Civil Rights

It is hard to understate how quickly civil rights in the U.S. are crumbling. The Supreme Court appears ready to finish off the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais. The court, via Kavanaugh, has ruled that ICE can grab and detain anyone they want if they think they might be in the U.S. illegally, even based on their race or accent (nationality), which until recently were protected traits. Transgender people, under the guise of “gender dysphoria” in the Skrmetti case, are now protected only by rational basis scrutiny. This means that if the federal government chose to round them all up and put them in “mental institutions” tomorrow, it would likely pass constitutional muster.

ICE is a modern version of the Sturmabteilung (Hitler’s brown-shirts) that roams the streets of blue cities assaulting and shooting people, secure in the knowledge that if they are loyal, they are protected. Warrants are no longer needed to kick in a random door and abduct someone, because the legal and institutional mechanisms to prevent this have been deliberately removed. The Supreme Court is considering Trump’s case to end birthright citizenship.

Constitutional Law

Checks and balances, as well as limitations on executive power, are collapsing quickly. The president is enthusiastically exploiting the Supreme Court’s recent decision that “if the president does it, it’s not a crime”. At the same time, Congress has abdicated its powers to the executive branch (on tariffs, declaring war, and how allocated funds are spent) and the Supreme Court has allowed the executive branch to decide what, if any, funds appropriated by Congress will actually be spent. The court has also largely nullified its own authority to provide a check on the actions of the executive branch by repeatedly deciding that illegal presidential actions cannot be countermanded or questioned. Of course, this free rein only applies to Republicans: the court forbade Biden from merely forgiving student debt.

The Trump regime is also trampling on the 10th Amendment with his attempts to rule over states with National Guard deployments and heavy-handed tactics with ICE to bully them into compliance. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s extortion of Minnesota voter rolls is a prime example of this. Meanwhile, government lawyers are frequently lying to the courts or ignoring their decisions until they are explicitly threatened with criminal contempt.

Environment

The climate crisis is accelerating, with devastating consequences. I have personally witnessed millions of acres of dead pine trees in the West while flying firefighting helicopters, weakened by drought and killed by pine beetles thriving in shorter and warmer winters. The Trump administration response has been to declare anthropogenic climate change a “con job”. He has a strange, obsessive vendetta against wind power, effectively canceling all further development of it. His administration has also been cancelling solar projects, including in Puerto Rico where the electrical grid is in collapse. Efforts to develop renewable power in the U.S. are effectively dead.

Instead, Trump plans to “drill baby drill” and generate more “clean coal”, both of which contribute to climate change, and neither of which is economically sustainable. The dollar and energy cost of extracting oil makes doing so increasingly inefficient. He has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement, and pursued an expansionist foreign policy designed to access more oil for U.S. companies. His Environmental Protect Agency (EPA) has changed policy to only take costs to businesses into consideration, and not the effects on human health and longevity. Thus, if a corporation proposes dumping chemicals into a river as the cheapest way to dispose of waste, the EPA won’t consider the health of the people downstream. These actions will have consequences that are not felt until years later, after Trump has passed.

Other countries are increasingly shifting to renewables, because it makes economic sense. The cost per kilowatt-hour has been dropping for over a decade. The U.S. is pursuing a policy that ensures higher energy costs, lost productivity, and locks in worst case climate change scenarios.

Health

Despite spending more money on health care per capita than anywhere else in the world by a wide margin, life expectancy in the U.S. is low for a supposedly rich county; it is ranked 55th in the world behind places like Panama and just ahead of Cuba. U.S. life expectancy (78.4 years) remains roughly 4.1 years lower than the average of comparable wealthy nations (82.5).

Part of this gap is due to gun violence, which kills younger people. Mortality among pregnant women and infants is also high compared to similar countries. This will only get worse as state and federal governments are systematically cutting off access to abortion and birth control. Health care is simply too expensive for much of the public, and the GOP is making coverage through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) or Medicaid more difficult to obtain.

By allowing ACA premium subsidies to lapse, the cost of health care to over 20 million Americans will rise substantially. Another 7 million will lose insurance altogether, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) are run by people with bizarre, scientifically illiterate ideas about medicine and health. These beliefs run the gamut from rejection of germ theory of disease, anti-vaxxer dogma, Tylenol causing autism, and conversion therapy as treatment for transgender people.

The federal government has terminated its participation in and funding for the Safe to Sleep campaign (formerly “Back to Sleep”), a 30-year initiative that significantly reduced infant mortality. It has blamed autism on vaccines and Tylenol, and backed off most vaccine recommendations. This included the HPV vaccines, which has dramatically reduced rates of cervical cancer. Measles in the U.S. is resurgent and the federal government is engaging in a misinformation campaign to convince people that it’s not dangerous.

The long-term consequences of these decisions will mean more medical bankruptcies, more people rationing care, less people vaccinated, more infant and childhood deaths, more outbreaks of highly communicable diseases, greater health illiteracy among the public, and further decrease in U.S. life expectancy. It is also likely to further drive down tanking birth rates in the U.S. It will take several years for the effects of these decisions to be felt, but in retrospect the cause and effect will be clear.

Military

Trump promised to rebuild the military, but instead is driving it into the ground. His incompetent, vicious idiot of a SECDEF, Pete Hegseth, has been pursuing policies to drive black men, women, and transgender people out of the military. He’s also making it increasingly uncomfortable for lesbians and gays.

Trump’s obsession with Golden Dome is the new “Star Wars”: a $3.6 trillion dollar boondoggle that has only one real use-case: shooting down nuclear tipped missiles. Which, in the nearly 70-year history of ballistic missiles, has never been needed by the US. At the same time, the military is wasting money on vanity projects like paper-battleships that will never be built, to indulge Trump’s need to have things named after him that are the biggest and most expensive items in their category.

Far more corrosive is the destruction of military culture from within. The Administration has fired most IG’s within the Department of Defense. Any flag officer that has qualms about the legality of their orders (like shooting survivors of airstrikes on boats in international waters) is being forced out. Soon, only yes men and those willing to “just follow orders” all the way to the war crimes trials will be left within military leadership. The Trump administration is pursuing charges against members of Congress who reminded military leaders that they should not follow illegal orders. When (not if) Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, this will come back to haunt the country.

Economy

Trump’s economic policy seems to revolve around tariffs and loose money policy at the Federal Reserve. The tariffs are estimated to have a .7% drain on GDP growth per year. This may not sound like much, but as historian Sarah Paine noted, economic growth heavily favors nations with maritime, trade-focused, and rule-based systems over territorial, continental empires. Compounded over time, that drain means the U.S. economy will fall far behind other nations, much the way the Soviet Union did.

There is also strong evidence to suggest Trump is using threats of tariffs to enrich people within his circle via insider trading. Because the administration didn’t like the numbers being produced by the Bureau of Labor statistics, they either stopped producing them, or started modifying the numbers to get the answers they wanted, eviscerating public trust in government economic data.

The U.S., and the world, is also potentially sitting on top of an AI bubble. The eight most valuable publicly traded companies in the US, worth a collective $22 trillion, have all bet heavily on AI. Most stock growth has come from “The Magnificent 7” who are all reliant on the AI boom for revenue. If there is a bubble, and if it pops, it could resemble the 2007-2008 housing crisis in terms of economic fallout.

Adding to the chaos is Trump’s efforts to replace Fed Chairman Jerome Powell with Kevin Warsh, whom Trump believes will support his push for a loose-money policy. The danger of such policy is the risk of runaway stagflation or hyperinflation, which would compound the severity of an AI bubble bursting.

If, and when, the U.S. faces economic hardship, it will be in a poor position to weather it. At the same time, Trump’s chaotic and arbitrary application of tariffs represents a consistent drag on American economic growth. The world may be moving past the dollar as the global reserve currency, and that will have devastating results for a country that entirely relies on debt for economic growth.

Conclusion

Foreign policy, rule of law, civil rights, and constitutional governance are all being quickly, brazenly, and deliberately destroyed before our very eyes in a naked autocratic attempt. They are all designed to create and secure permanent power for the current administration and its party. Any one of them would be a valid crisis under any other regime. For all of them to be  happening at once means the U.S. is vulnerable to extreme hardship and governmental collapse.

What happens if there’s another pandemic? If Trump invades Greenland? The AI bubble bursts? Polio and measles make a big comeback, and schools insist that sick kids help with exposing everyone to boost their immune systems? More massive wildfires, floods, and natural disasters without FEMA, NOAA, and the Department of the Interior to help out? A surge in medical bankruptcies and declining life expectancy? A Trumpified military being activated to put down protests?

I keep coming back to the period of history I know best: Germany of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. There’s something to be learned from the fall of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich. What happened to Jews and homosexuals wasn’t a distraction. The seizure of power via the Enabling Acts wasn’t a distraction. The arrest and imprisonment of political adversaries wasn’t a distraction. The militarization of the Ruhr and taking of the Sudetenland weren’t a distraction.
All of these actions were responsible for the destruction of a free, democratic society, and each amplified the strength of the others. The polycrisis we are in now is no different. If we have any hope of change, we must see the big-picture plan to recreate the U.S. in the MAGA image, whether we want to or not.