Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Donald Trump is a dangerous president. His rallying slogan, “Make America Great Again,” bespeaks a crisis that not only defines the nation but one he is incapable of honestly – and successfully – addressing.
To celebrate his 79th birthday he squandered upwards of a $45 million on a massive miliary parade which happened to be the U.S. Army’s 250th anniversary. It took place while the nation witnessed upwards of 5 million citizens march in “No Kings” parades in 2,100 cities and towns across the country protesting Trump’s authoritarianism.
Trump briefly attended the recent “G-7” gathering but failed to acknowledge the “7” — the U.S., Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom — is not what it was in 1975 when it was established nor in 1995 when Russia joined let alone in 1945 when WW-II ended. Missing from the gathering were Russia, China, Brazil and India, among other economic players.
Trump, like preceding presidents, has blood on his hands. The U.S. has been Israel’s primary arms supplier for decades and in 2016, under Pres. Obama, agreed to a “Memorandum of Understanding” pledging $38 billion in military aid from 2018 to 2028. More recently, in August 2024, Pres. Biden approved a $20 billion arms sale to Israel, including F-15 fighter jets and tank and mortar shells. In July 2024, Trump approved approximately $3.3 billion a year to Israel and resumed the transfer of 500-pound bombs to Israel.
Trump’s foreign policy of “peace through strength” is failing. As of mid-June 2025, an estimated63,000 Palestinians have been killed in the Gaza Strip by Israeli force since the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, often with U.S. weaponry and intelligence support. More blood is being shed in Iran due to Israel’s ongoing attacks and with Trump’s bombing campaign of its nuclear sites. No one knows how this latest war effort will play out.
Trump promotes the politics of bluster, of contractions. He champions making American “great” by undercutting law and order with his pardons of January 6th insurrectionists. Going further, he wants to make the nation “great” by providing less foreign aid; by cutting scientific and health research; by cutting the income taxes of the rich and super-rich; and by cutting support for social safety programs like Medicare for the nation’s vast majority.
As Jason Stanley, author of How Fascism Works, noted: “Once you undermine consistency, the shared sense of reality, you’re undermining the basis of democracy.” Adding, “If there’s no shared sense of reality, we can’t collectively make decisions. So the only decision maker will be the disrupter in chief.”
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Trump is a child of the postwar “American Dream.” He was born in 1946, and grew up in Jamaica Estates, Queens. It was a well-to-do, all-white neighborhood with up-market homes set back on tree-lined streets, about 35 miles east of Manhattan. Donald’s father, Fred Trump, was a real-estate developer who did not serve during WW-II but made a fortune from the postwar housing boom.
Few remember that in 1927, father Trump was arrested with six other racists at a Ku Klux Klan rally in Queens, NY. Senior Trump, 21 at the time, was a long-time racialist and, like his son, a real-estate conman.
On Memorial Day 1927, supporters of Mussolini’s Italian fascism and Klansmen rioted in the Bronx, killing two Italian men. In Queens, 1,000 white-robed Klansmen marched through Trump’s Jamaica neighborhood, and he was busted. The white nationalist confronted 100 policemen and, as a local report claimed, “staged a free-for-all.” Trump senior reportedly wore a Klan robe and, while arrested, no charges were brought against him.
Trump the younger is the quintessential representation of the post-WW-II “American Dream” becoming its own nightmare. He was born at the dawn of the postwar recovery when growing affluence — fueled by the GI Bill and an upsurge in domestic manufacturing — brought an improved quality of life to many. The recovery facilitated the rise of suburbia enabling urban renters to become first-time home buyers and saw high-school grads go to college.
Growing postwar affluence fueled a mass consumer revolution marked by the purchase of millions of cars, TV sets and other products. Marriage and birth rates rose exponentially. And sexuality was ever-increasingly commercialized in advertising, fashion and popular culture. However, restrictive covenants and other policies blocked African Americans from much of the postwar prosperity.
Now, three-quarters of a century later, America is a very different country.
Something profound is happening to the U.S. and Trump is blind to it. This change is often identified as the shift from a unipolar to a multipolar global order; it’s also being conceived as the shift to a “technopolar” global order.
Sadly, a 2023 report from Forbes magazine warned: “The American Dream is feeling less and less tangible for people in the United States, with confidence rapidly plummeting.” On January 31, 2025, the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis issued a report that cautioned: “Since the 1980s, the US has experienced not only a steady increase in income inequality, but also a contemporaneous rise in residential segregation by income. “
Most troubling, the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies reports that between 1989 and 2022, the median mortgage debt for homeowners aged 65-79 increased over 400 percent, rising from $21,000 to $110,000. And the 65-79 generation is Trump’s “American Dream” generation.
Trump’s economic policies, especially as detailed in the House’s “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” (HR 1), furthers this increase in income inequality. As detailed by Democrats on the House Budget Committee, “the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) and Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) shows that the bill worsens inequality, gives the ultra-rich a historic tax break, and makes working people worse off. Adding insult to injury, when including the cost of debt service, CBO finds that this bill adds $3 trillion to the national debt.”
Equally troubling, Trump inept foreign policy is grounded in bluster. He’s repeatedly made promises after promises, yet with little or no results. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump claimed he would settle Russia’s war with Ukraine “within 24 hours” if elected. In August 2024, Trump stated at a National Guard Conference, “Before I even arrive at the Oval Office, shortly after I win the presidency, I will have the horrible war between Russia and Ukraine settled.” Now, nearly one year later, the Ukraine war continues with no end in sight – and Trump remains “buddies” with Vladimir Putin
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Three critical issues further illuminate Trump’s contradictory – and, at times, bullying – policy approach:
+ Trump’s anti-immigrant campaign is anchored in contradictions and orchestrated by Stephen Miller’s racist ideology. In early May, Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, told reporters when the group of white South Africans, “Afrikaners,” were admitted to the U.S. that they were the first of several “much larger-scale relocation effort” to follow.
More telling, by early May ’25, since Trump launched his anti-immigrant campaign, more than 72,000 immigrants has been deported. However, Trump has recently called upon the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to pause immigration raids at farms, hotels and restaurants.
+ Trump tariff policy is fueling economic uncertainty. His administration imposed tariffs on steel, aluminum and other goods from Canada, Mexico, China and European countries, among all others. While these tariffs remain in effect, they have gone through repeated renegotiations, all in an alleged effort to bring manufacturing back to the U.S., thus making American “great again.”
While there was an uptick in manufacturing when Trump first announced the tariff increases to avoid the likely price increases. However, as Investopedia reported, “Goldman Sachs found that the economic damage from the tariffs would outweigh the benefits, costing five jobs for every one they create.”
+ Trump’s support for anti-transgender youth medical procedures is part of a broader call among Christian fundamentalist for a return to the eugenics movement of a century ago.
As the ACLU notes, Trump’s polies will “deny transgender youth access to medically-necessary care, like puberty blockers and hormone therapy, even as these same treatments remain readily available to their cisgender peers.”
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Donald Trump is a dangerous president. His rallying slogan, “Make America Great Again,” is a powerful call to many Americans who feel the system is leaving them behind or failed them. The real question remains: which America is he talking about? In all likelihood, he is referring to the post-WW-II era of the “American Dream” originally inspired by James Truslow Adams’s 1931 book, Epic of America, and was realized in the wake of vast federal spending for war and the postwar recovery.
Sadly, Trump’s vision of American “greatness” more readily suggests the America of the late 19thcentury-plus when the U.S. was ruled by a cabal popularly known as the Robber Barons. In 1859, Henry J. Raymond, editor of The New York Times, made a comparison between Cornelius Vanderbilt, the railroad tycoon, and “those old German barons, who from their eyries along the Rhine, swooped down upon the commerce of the noble river and wrung tribute from every passenger that floated by….”
The notion of “baron” stuck and, in time, it was joined by “robber” to forge a new concept, the “robber baron,” to define a group of powerful individuals destroying competitors, controlling markets and shaping the nation’s economy. Other robber barons included Jay Gould (railroad and finance), Andrew Mellon (finance), Andrew Carnegie (steel) and John D. Rockefeller (oil). Over time, their rapacious reputations were whitewashed by charitable foundations, university buildings and hospital wings.
Today, the country is witnessing the return of a new generation of Robber Barons best exemplified by Elon Musk (SpaceX), Jeff Bezos (Amazon) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook). With the exception of a global vs nation reach, they are – sadly — little different from the original generation of robber barons of old. Like their great-grandfathers of yesteryear, they possess a combination of greed and political cunning that enables them to have considerable influence, if not control, over the federal and state governments throughout the country. Like the Robber Barons of old, today’s baron’s ruthless business and political practices are masked, like the flesh of a fan dancers, by their support for major bourgeois cultural institutions.
While the robber-barons of old stayed out of politics, the 2024 election witnessed the return of a new generation of robber barons exemplified by Musk. With the exception of George Soros and a few others, today’s robber barons have aligned with Trump, pouring millions of dollars into his – and other Trump-supporting elected officials – coffers. And it’s for them, the billionaire super-rich, that Trump is making America great again.
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