Trump is doing really crazy (and illegal!) stuff. But can Trump (or anyone) “make America Great Again”?
He will likely fail, even if he’s appointed President for Life and can rule by decree. And that’s because of limits to economic growth. The reasons MAGA will fail also pertain to most Democratic party proposals for the economy as well. This doesn’t affect our tactics in resisting Trump (keep up those phone calls!), but it does alter our overall strategy.
Failure to pay attention to resource issues (including climate) is at least partially what caused this mess in the first place. The other part of “this mess” is massive social inequality, an issue which is also being ignored by most mainstream political leaders. Limits to growth is the strategic reason that MAGA will fail, but massive and increasing social inequality is the tactical problem. They’re related: the rich elites are the ones consuming all of those resources and contributing disproportionately to greenhouse gas emissions. But even if there was a revolution and we redistributed wealth, while that would greatly help for many reasons, we’d still have climate change and limits to growth generally.
1. The economy wasn’t that great even before Trump took control.
Trump is doing a lot of really dumb things with the economy. Tariffs, cutting government services, and who knows what’s next? As I write this, the stock market has declined significantly and the economic outlook is worsening.
But a key fact that people are overlooking is that the economy wasn’t that great to begin with. Democrats and progressives generally seem to think that the economy was doing just fine under Biden. The March 7 New York Times said that “President Trump inherited an economy that was . . . firing on all cylinders.” Heather Cox Richardson said that the economy that Trump inherited was “booming” and “the strongest in the world.”
Peter Turchin has delivered what seems to me to be a decisive refutation of such careless thinking. He looks at real wages (after adjusting for inflation) of average workers, over the long term (decades). If you average everyone’s income, the burgeoning incomes of the “1%” drags the “average” income upwards. But this “average” doesn’t help many people. The reality is that for many ordinary workers, such as unskilled workers or manufacturing workers, the economy has been stagnating or even declining. (And even some people with Ph.D.’s may be “unskilled” in this economy!) This is a long-term and nonpartisan trend, extending across both Democratic and Republican administrations.
Sure, unemployment may be low, but opportunities for advancement are few. Wages may be rising, but so are prices. Some key items — housing, education, and health care — have gone up continuously.
I am sorry to see that so many intelligent people fail to fully appreciate this and insist that actually the economy was doing well. This sort of “happy talk” is how Trump got elected in the first place. Everything was not OK. Many Trump voters looked at their own situation and were not pleased with how it looked. They voted according to their eyes and ears, not according to the economic statistics, but Democrats just keep focusing on those statistics. The slogan “Make America Great Again” seemed to address those problems. Trump’s solutions are horrible, but he was right about one thing: the economy isn’t working for many people.
What Trump left out in his campaign, of course, was that the economy had been stagnating or declining for decades, under both Democratic and Republican administrations. This economic stagnation (and impending decline) is due to (1) massive inequality (the rich get richer, everyone else is stagnating or declining) and (2) resource limits (i. e., limits to growth). We need to deal with both.
2. “Drill baby drill” won’t work
There was a time when America really was “great” by conventional measures: the decades just after World War II, up until the OPEC oil embargo (1945 to 1973, approximately). This was a time when real wages for average workers really did rise along with the economy. (Well, blacks and women didn’t do as well, but at the time there was hope that this could change, and it did, for a while.)
Trump also doesn’t want to change the basic class structure, so dealing with the massive inequality is off the table. The (seemingly) obvious solution is to make the economy bigger, so that a “rising tide” will lift all boats: the rich get richer, but the poor improve as well. No sense getting into all this “class warfare” stuff.
But we can’t get back to this utopia, because it relied on plentiful and inexpensive resources, especially oil. From 1945 to 1973, the presumed period of America’s “greatness,” the annual average inflation-adjusted price of oil was $32 / barrel; from 2005 to 2024, it was $85 / barrel. In 2024, it was about $72, over twice as much as during the post-war period. So oil is more expensive in purely financial terms. And oil affects the price and affordability of everything. You don’t have to actually get to the point of climate disaster or declining oil supplies before consequences begin, meaning economic consequences.
Critics of “peak oil” often say that oil hasn’t peaked yet or isn’t going to peak very soon. They may be right. However, there is no objective doubt that oil is getting more expensive, even in financial terms. And since oil is involved in everything, the whole economy is going to be affected by the price. You can’t double the price of oil and expect that the economy is just going to go forward as before. People will deal with it as best they can, but the economy is just going to be sluggish. That’s exactly what has been going on for the past two decades. So there’s a certain misguided logic to the MAGA mantra of “drill, baby, drill.”
It doesn’t matter that much when the oil production actually starts to decline (peak oil). (Depending on how you define “oil,” it may have already peaked in 2018). In my book Embracing Limits, I concluded that asking when oil production will peak is the wrong question to ask: “because oil is so central to our economy . . . oil will peak only when the economy peaks. Peak oil won’t be a cause of limits to growth—the fear on everyone’s mind—but rather a consequence of limits to growth.” (Italics in original.)
3. The other costs of oil
If it looked like oil was really and truly peaking, President-for-Life Trump could use political means to change the economy. He could frack everything in sight, drill in national parks, send in the military to keep the oil wells going, and subsidize the cost for the consumer. But none of this ultimately solves the cost problem. It just shifts the problem, from an economic problem (higher prices for the consumer) to a political problem (how do you stay in power and finance these subsidies).
These political costs are what we are seeing right now. To stay in power, Trump is suppressing dissent, trying to deport some of these unpleasant people who disagree with him, and doing his best to subvert the constitution, with (so far) only weak opposition from the courts, the Congress, or from the streets. He hasn’t employed the military or directly subsidized the cost of oil yet. He’s probably hoping that increased drilling will bring the price down. In fairness, the Biden-Harris administration did the same thing in a different way, trying to bring the price of oil down by making releases from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which temporarily increased the supply of oil and somewhat brought prices down. In 2024, both sides bragged that they had increased (or would increase) oil supplies. Climate consciousness is roughly zero.
But oil obviously has environmental consequences as well. These environmental costs don’t always immediately affect the economic situation, but they are real costs. We’ve turned vast expanses of Canada’s pristine wilderness into a toxic waste dump (the Alberta Tar Sands). And we’re polluting our water supplies with fracking. And how about that catastrophic 2012 oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? (Excuse me, I mean “Gulf of America.”) This counts for something, even though our stupid economic system doesn’t immediately respond to that kind of cost.
And we haven’t even gotten to climate change! The recent Los Angeles fires caused HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of dollars of damage. That particular fire may or may not be a consequence of climate change; but it certainly seems suspicious that with rising temperatures, extreme wildfire activity has doubled, fire seasons are getting longer, emissions from wildfires are rising, and fire weather is becoming more common, according to this government website, accessed on March 11, 2025. (I guess Musk hasn’t gotten around to taking down this data yet).
And this is not even counting the added destruction yet to come but “locked in” by our political and economic stupidity. Climate change isn’t just increasing, it’s accelerating. Climate change is now part of the political cost of making oil more affordable, and Trump is trying to erase knowledge of climate change.
Trump wants to transport us magically into a world of an abundance of cheap oil miraculously free from a changing climate. But this is not the world we live in. We are paying financially, environmentally, and politically. The economy may be “growing,” just barely, but I’d say the costs far exceed the benefits — and with climate change and oil supply issues, those costs are just going to increase. This is what reaching “limits to growth” looks like: political, economic, and environmental chaos.
4. Conclusion
So what to do? The default solution for both Democrats and Republicans is to expand the economy. That’s not going to work. At best, we may manage to increase pollution and global warming, and further deplete affordable oil, subsidize oil prices, and manage to prop up an “expanding economy” for a few more years.
Many bad things could happen here. Democracy, which voters seem to be only peripherally interested in compared to the price of eggs, might succumb altogether. Trump might appoint himself “President for Life,” declaring Vance to be his successor, and cancel Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and any further elections as a cost-cutting measure. (By executive order, of course.)
But the one thing, in my opinion, that will NOT happen is that we will be able to recreate the relative American prosperity of the post-World-War-II era. The resources just aren’t there.
We need a new approach. We need an approach that acknowledges human limits and seeks to live rationally and equitably with them instead of digging our collective heads in the sand and living as if Mother Nature can’t touch us. She can, she already has, and she’s just getting started.
So a number of observations. Yes, the economy is bifurcated. GDP is a terrible way to gauge economic success. The economic stats drown out the real plight of the poor and the middle income class is still shrinking. It looks to me like they keep redefining “middle class” by raising the upper limit and lowering the lower limit to include more people as middle income. As if they can trick us into thinking it isn’t shrinking. Maybe I’m wrong.
As far as unskilled labor, it would help if he quit calling it that. You know there is in reality a “skill” to every job. Otherwise, everybody would be more or less equal performers in those fields. In reality, it isn’t so. Go watch them work and talk to their bosses. Some are excellent and others not. If we get rid of the concept of unskilled workers and replace the term with something more dignified that would be helpful in getting these people more money. All these concepts and definitions are for the benefit of all who are at least relatively affluent.
I’m not sure what to call it. Investopedia says it should be called “low-wage labor”. But this doesn’t seem right. Some highly skilled labor, e. g. working for nonprofits, may not pay very well. Writing doesn’t pay very well, I can vouch for that.
The standard definition of “unskilled labor” is high school diploma or less. So technically, such labor does require some skill, as in basic literacy, and so is relative to the economy in which we use the term. And, as I read it, this refers to the labor, not the laborer; some Ph. D.’s are working in coffee shops or as Uber drivers. A basic income is what is needed here, then a lot of “sh*t jobs” would disappear (or would become a lot better paid).
Actually I was trying to say that there are skills that don’t meet the academic definition of skills. It is not the case, for example, that there is nothing to learn at McDonalds or Subway, or in a factory or on an airport tarmac/ramp operation. The range of performance skills varies substantially from one employee to another. Ergo, it is not truly unskilled work.
True. I think the intent of the distinction between “skilled” and “unskilled” is to determine if it needs special training that requires college or some other paid training beyond high school. It’s an economic distinction; did you have to pay to get the training, and does the training require something beyond high school, which is free for almost everyone?
If it’s a skill you can pick up on the job, then you don’t have to go to college (or go to a technical school of some sort) in order to perform the job. If it’s not, then society (and the person wanting the job) needs to think about how to acquire the needed skills to get the job. Usually this requires money, which needs to come from somewhere.
I meant to say it would help if We would quit calling it that, not he.
And . . . just this morning from the NYT, it looks like some younger Democratic legislators do get it: “Younger Democrats are chafing at and increasingly complaining about what they see as the feebleness of the old guard’s efforts to push back against President Trump . . . they are demanding that the party develop a bolder policy agenda that can answer the desperation of tens of millions of people who are struggling financially at a time when belief in the American dream is dimming.”
So signs for hope maybe