LinkedIn on Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Those of us who follow the news are well aware that President Trump has made us less safe. He’s done so primarily by gross mis-deployment of our military assets, unnecessary depletion of ordinance and by trashing relationships with our allies, by virtue of his generally incompetent leadership and by lying so frequently that, for all practical purposes, you can’t believe anything he says. To our friends and enemies alike around the world, the United States is no longer invincible.
The media follows the President’s lead, talking incessantly about the war with Iran of course, but also about the ballroom, mixed martial arts on The White House lawn to celebrate our independence, whatever, you name it, with one notable exception… What the media doesn’t talk about are the potential consequences of the continuing growth of our national debt that Trump is stoking with the support of Republicans in Congress.
To put it mildly, Trump is a spendthrift, doling out billions and billions of dollars without the slightest concern for the additional debt he’s creating and the implications for our economy. Analytically, he’s dangerously nearsighted, having no vision that includes even routine business cycles and can’t imagine events that might foretell or precipitate significant recessions or worse. As long as it’s not his money that he’s spending, he’s good to go. As long as the relative handful of the wealthiest in our society are tolerant if not outright appreciative of his performance, he doesn’t care what happens to the rest of us.
Here’s the problem… We’re persistently and aggressively spending more than the taxes we collect. Should our economy falter, where will we get the money our government needs to support an economic recovery? To cover extended unemployment benefits. To bail out banks and companies that are failing. We’ll have to borrow it, borrow it by selling government bonds, but who will be buying our paper?
If private sector entities who buy our paper have lost confidence in the United States government to manage its economic affairs responsibly, they won’t invest. Nor will our allies and definitely not countries, China in particular, that want to see us fail, who stand to benefit from a financially weak America.
Without substantial government support, a common downturn, like a simple infection that becomes life-threatening if left untreated, could eventually turn into a serious recession or worse. Depending upon the extent to which domestic and foreign investor interest in our government bonds has declined, financial support for all manner of government programs, including national defense by the way, will be adversely affected, further slowing the pace of recovery. And so on.
The point is, what with our national debt already greater than our Gross Domestic Product and a widespread lack of confidence in our government’s (Trump’s) ability to manage our government, our economy is increasingly vulnerable should anything go wrong. A sudden loss of momentum in the AI and other tech sectors, for example, that have been propping up the stock markets could be catastrophic.
Investor willingness to acquire our paper requires competent government management and a stable democracy. Unfortunately, our President is a reckless grifter who has no idea what he’s doing and couldn’t care less. Curtailing his spending – should the Democrats takeover Congress next January – will only slow the rate at which our national debt is growing. We need to stop the growth of that debt and begin paying it down as quickly as possible.
How do we do that? Pretty much at the expense of the extremely wealthy but, in general, by significantly increasing taxes paid by people earning substantially more than they spend on consumer goods and services. The “K-shaped” economy in which the success of the already wealthy minority continues to grow while the majority of our households are struggling… This dichotomy is destroying the foundation of consumer demand on which our capitalism is based. It’s a trend that needs to be reversed before our ability to prevent or recover from a serious economic downturn is further impaired by the gross and largely illegal mismanagement of our government.
-Les Cohen
