Donald Trump ‘s ‘Golden Age’ is quickly losing its luster. (Photo: Gage Skidmore)
Donald Trump is living in a fictional world, spinning a non-stop fabric of lies to cover up social, economic and immigration turmoil and the looming Epstein scandal.
Prices, inflation and unemployment are rising. Key economic sectors– agriculture, manufacturing and tourism among others — are getting crushed. Job growth has stagnated and turned negative.
Ugly scenes from Trump’s violent, shadowy federal police force air daily on television and social media, a frightening visage of unrestrained government lawlessness.
Heavily armed, masked men in full military gear are violently detaining people who are not criminals or gang members. The arrests are mostly without probable cause or due process, crossing a line that had long set the nation apart from the world’s most repressive regimes.
Meanwhile, Trump preoccupies himself with golf and excesses, symbolized by his grandiose, golden oval office, a garish ballroom overshadowing the White House, and now, a proposed, towering arch overshadowing the Lincoln Memorial dedicated to… yes, himself.
Trump’s excesses also extend to his own personal greed. His cryptocurrency investments present a significant conflict of interest, and have become a major issue since he took office.
A two-billion-dollar investment from a fund controlled by the Saudi crown prince; a luxury jet from the Emir of Qatar; profits from at least five different ventures peddling crypto are just a few of Trump’s grifts.
He or his family are also reaping fees and lining up mult-billion international projects that would be unlikely without Trump’s presidency.
“When it comes to using his public office to amass personal profits, Trump is a unicorn—no one else even comes close,” Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of Democracy 21, and an expert on campaign finance reform, told The New Yorker, in August.
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The Founding Fathers expressly rejected such imperial pomposity.
They favored cloth coats that communicated American values, like modesty, self-sufficiency and equality as opposed to the extravagant silk and gilded velvet of European royalty.
The founders correctly feared the capriciousness and tyranny of absolute power in the hands of a single ruler and crafted a government of three, co-equal branches with safety valves to short-circuit a dictatorship.
Trump is the first president to test what they defined as the very essence of tyranny.
A complacent Republican Congress and right-wing dominated Supreme Court have handed Trump nearly unbridled power. He’s used it to run roughshod over laws, precedent and the Constitution itself — exactly in ways the founding fathers feared most.
Trump’s actions go beyond dismantling the “welfare state.” He is bent on perpetuating one-party, authoritarian rule, backed by the military and his secretive ICE police force.
Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s authoritarian manifesto, is his roadmap. Trump explicity disavowed it during the election, but has embraced it since, a typical Trump con.
It would be bad enough if Trump stopped there, but he has gone beyond even Project 2025. Many of his copious executive orders are based on whim, driven by his own narcissitic personality, vindictiveness, greed and selfishness
They are often destructive, cruel or ridiculous, like the executive order on showerhead water pressure (EO 14264).
Critics say many of his executive orders actually weaken our democratic institutions, hurt the economy, roll back public health and environmental protections, and put health care and Social Security benefits at risk.
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Trump has issued the orders as if they were royal decrees to attack colleges and universities, threaten law firms, detain and deport foreign students for protesting, strip power from independent agencies, give DOGE access to private personal data, freeze federal grants, defund USAID, end birthright citizenship, and a host of other disruptions.
He has politicized two institutions that have managed to stay above politics as the founders invisioned — the U.S. Justice Department (DOJ) and the Department of Defense (DOD).
Hundreds of lawsuits have been filed challenging executive orders as well as administrative actions, including Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency or DOGE. The courts have agreed to block the president almost 100 cases, and many are under appeal, according to The Associated Press.
Donald Trump’s salacious birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein was confirmed in Congress.
The cornerstones of his 2024 election campaign were the economy and immigration reform. He promised to lower prices “on day one” and deport what he claimed were the worst-of-the-worst immigrants, a suposed legion of criminals and gang members.
Both efforts have turned out to be his biggest fiascos.
Trump’s aggressive tariffs are a direct tax on American consumers that are raising prices and fueling inflation. He refuses to admit consumers pay them — despite the views of dozens of economists, business executives and others.
The conservative Tax Foundation describes Trump’s tariffs as one of the largest tax increases in U.S. history. It estimates that they will raise $258 billion in revenue alone for 2025, equivalent to an average of $1,300 per household.
They act as a regressive tax, disproportionately burdening low- and middle-income households through higher consumer prices. Whatever happened to “no taxation without representation?”
The Constitution gives Congress the power to regulate foreign commerce, impose tariffs, and raise revenue. Congress can only delegate tariff power to the president in limited circumstances; but in this case, it’s engaged in a wholesale abdictation of its authority.
The Court of International Trade and a federal Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C. have both found that Trump illegally imposed most of his tariffs. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the administration’s appeal in November.
Until then, the tariffs remain in effect.
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Trump has repeatedly withdrawn, delayed and reimposed some tariffs creating uncertainty that has cause the dollar to fall 11 percent in the past six months, the largest drop since 1973, according to The New York Times.
He most recently threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on China. But in typical fashion, he quickly walked it back after it roiled the stock market and caused cryptocurrencies to crash.
Small businesses, 40 percent of the nation’s GDP, are being crushed. Economists say it’s a warning for the economy.
“They’re kind of like the canary in the coal mine here,” Kent Smetters, a professor of business economics and public policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told CNBC.
A survey conducted with Harvard Business School researchers Zoe Cullen and Ebehi Iyoha, and MIT economist David Atkin found that 44 percent of small business owners saw their revenues drop in June.
Even more concerning: one in five entrepreneurs fear their businesses won’t make it to 2026, if disruptions caused by Trump’s tariff flip flops continue.
Midwestern farmers have also been devastated. Their products have become uncompetitive and countries like China, have refused to buy U.S. farm products to protest Trump’s misguided trade war.
Farm bankruptcies so far in 2025 exceed bankruptices for all of 2024, and the Trump administration is scrambling to create another multi-billion dollar taxpayer bailout, like the one caused by his 2018-19 tariffs.
Despite Trump’s promise to revitalize manufacturing, the sector has lost an estimated 78,000 jobs so far this year, continuing a six decade decline, according to the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Center for American Progress (CAP).
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The automotive and electronics sectors have been hardest hit. Fortunately, job growth in other sectors, such as technology, engineering and financial services, have offset some losses.
The unemployment rate expected to hit 4.5 percent in the third quarter compared to 4.1 percent at the end of last year.
Farm equipment maker John Deere cited tariffs for a decline in sales and operating profts from a year ago, after racking up roughly $300 million in tariff-related costs.
Ford CEO Jim Farley told CNBC two weeks ago tariffs on imported parts would cost the company an estimated $2 billion net this year. Current tariffs could give rivals, particularly Japanese automakers, an advantage, he said. (See video)
The nation is also experiencing a signicant decline in international tourism. Given current trends, the Tourism Economics and the World Travel & Tourism Council (WTTC) predicts a 14 percent decline in 2025 tourism.
Every 1 percent drop in international visitor spending equals $1.8 billion in lost in export revenue annually, or a $21 billion loss in travel-related exports, according to the WTTC.
Many international travelers are reconsidering their trips to the United States directly because of tariffs, immigration enforcement and global political tension caused by Trump’s “America First” agenda.
Trump said during his campaign he would be deporting up to 10 million undocumented immigrants targeting criminals and gang members — “the worst of the worst” — who supposedly entered the country illegally under President Biden.
Trump and his minions have repeatedly lied, claiming 20 million immigrants entered the country during Biden’s term. The actual number is 3.5 million and 4 million were deported.
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The Trump administration told Congress last year that, as of July, it had identified 435,000 unauthorized immigrants with criminal convictions who were not in custody. Of those, 13,099 were convicted of murder and 15,811 were convicted of sexual assault.
The Department of Homeland Security claims two million “llegal aliens” have been deported forcefully or voluntarily self-deported so far this year. But as of the end of May, ICE had arrested only 752 non-citizens convicted of murder and 1,693 convicted of sexual assault.
Instead, ICE agents have been prowling job sites and even Home Depot parking lots to round up anyone suspected of being in the U.S. without proper documentation. ICE’s presence in mainly large cities has triggered protests and resulted in violent arrests, which have become a daily staple in social media videos.
Trump’s deportations are causing signfiicant economic impacts, decreasing Gross Domestic Product (GDP), reducing tax revenue, increasing deficits, and exacerbating labor shortages, particularly in key sectors like agriculture and construction.
These actions lead to job losses, higher consumer prices, and increased economic instability, with potential GDP reductions exceeding those of the Great Recession and impacting states like California, Texas, and Florida the most, according to the Penn Wharton business model at the University of Pennsylvania.
The government is also spending tens of billions of dollars to arrest, detain, and processing millions of immigrants for deportation.
The four-year policy would increase primary deficits by about $270 billion before economic effects and $350 billion after. The 10-year policy would cost about $862 billion before economic effects and $987 billion after, the Penn study found.
Trump promised to lower oil prices, and they are falling, but the reason has nothing to do with Trump. Higher OPEC production and a worldwide economic slow down have created a supply glut as demand falls, according to CNBC.
“These glut fears are now descending onto the market, particularly looking forward into 2026. We will start to see floating storage pick up and inland tanks get filled,” John Kilduff, partner with Again Capital, told the business network.
“This is a real bearish narrative that we have not seen in some time,” Kilduff added.
Lower oil prices are helping consumers, but crushing the U.S. oil industry, one of Trump’s key constituencies. The industry’s profit margins are falling, and it’s shedding thousands of jobs.
Ghiselle Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein were a golden couple in high-flying social circles until their downfall. (Photo: White House)
Trump’s claim that DOGE “found hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud” is highly misleading, according to an AI analysis by Yale Insights, a Yale School of Management publication.
The national debt keeps piling up. The United States borrowed $1.8 trillion in Fiscal Year (FY) 2025 according to the latest Monthly Treasury Statement
This deficit is similar to last year’s, despite an additional $118 billion of tariff revenue and roughly $200 billion of lower deficits from recorded changes in the expected future cost of the student loan portfolio.
Another darkening cloud lingers over the administration.
The pedophile sex scandal involving Trump’s close friend for a decade or more, Jeffrey Epstein, is like a cancer eating away at Trump’s presidency.
Reportedly, thousands of unseen documents and videos exist in which Trump and other rich and powerful individuals are mentioned.
The Epstein scandal is a clear lose-lose proposition for the administration. Trump cemented himself to the scandal when he pledged to release all the files during the 2024 presidential campaign.
Since then, the administration has lied, obfuscated, denied and tried to cover up the matter, aided and abetted by Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
Trump has called the case “a hoax” since returning to office. He has also played down his relationship with the convicted child sex offender.
But a week after the Justice Department and the FBI effectively closed the investigation and refused to release any new files; 63 percent of voters disapproved, according to a Quinnipiac University national poll of registered voters released in July.
Yet, damning evidence, most recently his purported birthday note to Epstein, continues to surface.
In Congress, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a medacious Trump sycophant, has become a key player in the coverup.
The House of Representatives is one vote away from compelling a vote to release all of the Epstein files. Johnson has put a finger in the dike by refusing to seat Democratic Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva of Arizona.
She has promised to cast the deciding vote to bring the Epstein scandal to the floor. Johnson’s action, which is unethical, unprecedented and possibly illegal, can only delay the day of reckoning for so long.
Arizona lawmakers gathered in front of the Capitol on Wednesday (Oct. 15) and accused Johnson of protecting pedophiles and obstructing the will of voters.
“This delay is not procedural, it is intentional,” said Grijalva. “He is doing everything in his power to shield this administration from accountability. That is not leadership, that is obstruction.”
Trump’s alleged involvement in the pedophile sex ring is dynamite across the political spectrum.
More than three-quarters of the public (77 percent) want the files released, according to a recent poll. Sixty-one percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the scandal.