Brute Force Era
We have entered the brute force era of Trump's second term. His team is just trying to force everything through as quickly and as violently as possible.
If 2025 was Trump and company trying lots of things sloppily and quickly to see what harms the nation, then 2026 is Trump focusing on the absolutely worst actions to bring the nation down quickly. This is because the midterms could bring a lot of those actions to a halt. In other words, Trump is acting like 2026 is his final year to finish his agenda. He could be in his final years, and in many ways, we're in ours.
I'm all for the end of our empire - what I call American dominance, and NatSec people call American hegemony.
We have a cascade of crises in the first quarter of 2026, all of which are Trump's doing.
We kidnapped Venezuela's head of state and his wife, and indicted them on flimsy Federal charges.
Danish soldiers were prepared to die defending Greenland from what seemed to be an imminent US invasion. They still might.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) got ultra aggressive in its deployment of ICE and CBP to US cities, particularly Minneapolis. Under the false pretense that DHS was cracking down on Somali-American white collar crimes (most of whom are citizens who cannot be deported), ICE and CBP terrorized Minneapolis, murdered two of its US citizens, ruined the image of DHS, and this all helped sink the GOP and Trump in time for the 2026 midterm elections.
Meanwhile, the US economy is showing alarming signs of slowing down. Job growth in 2025 was flat. Inflation did not return to 2% as Trump and the GOP promised (and to be fair, no one can predict nor control inflation, but Trump spent all of 2025 insisting that the prime interest rate should be lowered to 1% which would almost certainly increase inflation). To be frank, the economy that Trump inherited is the same one he inherited when he took over in 2017, except with the added activity of AI investment and datacenter construction, which kept the net GDP afloat.
President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio have threatened Cuba. They have both told the world that the US will at least starve the nation of oil and topple the current Cuban regime, or, at worst, "take" the island back as a colony.
And then we have the very illegal, very unwise, very costly crime against humanity known as the US-Israeli war on Iran (and annexation of southern Lebanon by Israel). Over the last 6 weeks, the war has killed virtually all senior Iranian leaders, drove the price of crude oil to $114 per barrel, forced the US Federal Reserve to consider raising interest rates to battle renewed inflation, destabilized the whole Middle East, threatened tourism to Egypt and Israel, and has even made some people in Qatar and Saudi Arabia reconsider funding the purchase of Warner Brothers by Paramount (Skydance / the Ellison family). Simply put, if the misconduct and trampling of rights by DHS didn't doom the GOP in the midterms, the US-Israeli war on Iran most certainly did.
April 2026 is the 64th month under a Donald Trump presidency. It's the 112th month if we accept that the Biden administration essentially froze the nation in place where Trump's first term left off, while Trump was acting like a president in exile during that time. I wrote in August 2019 that Trump had put serious wear and tear on the republic that would take years to clean up.
Now the republic is broken beyond repair. It was broken through brute force. It was broken in defiance of what the American public wants. And it was broken in order to make the billionaire class richer and more powerful, including the Trump family.
We know that now. You can see it in our national mood, our outrageous gambling, and our overall depravity. We're as depraved as the old man in charge.
I don't want to be here. Neither does economist Paul Krugman.
