This column was originally published in Kyle Whitmire’s newsletter Alabamafication. You can subscribe for free here.
Nero is tuning his fiddle. Can you hear him?
America might be in a recession already. It’s impossible to tell officially, as the public officials who make those calls have been furloughed or fired. Nero canned the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics after she delivered some bad news, and the government shutdown has sent everybody else home until further notice.
But private-sector sources tell us the American economy is in a bad way.
This week, Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a private firm that tracks such things, released a report showing job losses not seen since the depths of the pandemic and, before that, the Great Recession. So far, the firm says, American employers have laid off 1.1 million people.
But that 401K is doing great, right?
As Derek Thompson — formerly of the Atlantic and now the coolest wonk on Substack — noted in October, something is happening to the American economy and it started a while back. Since 2022, new job postings have fallen 30 percent, at the same time the S&P 500 has grown 70 percent.
Many are blaming AI already, including the Wall Street Journal, which reports that it’s not just blue-collar workers who are getting cut this time, but middle managers, too.
But the bargain with workers is a familiar one. Amazon is laying off somewhere between 14,000 and 30,000 employees the same year its owner rented out much of Milan for his wedding, and after he and his fiancée splurged on day-trips to outer space.
The American economy is cleaving into the have-nots and the have-yachts.
And what has Nero done about it? He’s building a Big, Beautiful Ballroom.
To be fair, he did strike a deal with pharmacy companies this week to reduce the cost of weight-loss drugs.
Let them eat cake? Eat whatever you want.
Let them eat Trump Steaks.
The irony here is that Nero was elected by the folks who already got shut out of the American Dream, and they’ll also bear the brunt of what’s to come. That’s not the say they deserve what’s coming. They don’t. But he isn’t doing anything to help them. Instead, he’s prolonging a government shutdown and withholding food stamps from people out of work at the same time.
Sharper Image never took EBT, anyway.
Inequality is the underlying force beneath America’s political landscape — a great chamber of angry magma that’s trying to force its way to the surface. That red-hot frustration powered MAGA and put Trump in the White House twice.
And now that he’s there, what’s he doing? He recently pardoned a corrupt crypto scam artist and then denied he even knew who the guy was.
How long before Trump’s supporters realize that they, too, have been had? If they haven’t figured it out yet, the day is coming when they will — a t a feast, for Nero and 900 of his closest friends, in a gold-gilded ballroom, the greatest ballroom the world has ever seen, where they only serve the finest steaks, which for the low-low price of $199.99 you can enjoy in your own home.
This is the way Trumpism ends
This is the way Trumpism ends
This is the way Trumpism ends
Not with a bang but a dinner.
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