Buried in Blame: How Debt and Dispossession Fueled American Fury

Why Trump’s Blame Game Works—and What It Hides About Community Collapse, Debt, and Real American Anger

Donald Trump didn’t invent scapegoating. But he rose to power at a time when millions of people were already looking for someone to blame.

That search didn’t start with him. It followed the slow breakdown of a social and economic order that, for all its flaws, once offered a basic sense of stability: steady jobs, rising wages, public schools, affordable housing, and the promise of retirement. That order began to unravel in the late 1970s and was deliberately dismantled in the 1980s during what is now widely recognized as the neoliberal turn. Under Reagan, the federal government slashed public spending, weakened labor protections, and promoted deregulation and privatization as national priorities. Markets were treated as the solution to every problem. In the name of competition and growth, public responsibilities were handed off to private actors.

What emerged was a new system built around corporate power, financial speculation, and the steady withdrawal of government support. Risk shifted onto individuals. Safety nets shrank. Wages froze while the cost of living kept rising. And millions of people were left to bridge the gap with credit and hope.

Wages no longer covered the basics. What used to be a cushion—personal savings, public support, strong communities—was hollowed out. People now survive by borrowing. That’s not poor decision-making. That’s the system working as planned. It’s built to profit from anxiety and keep people off balance.

MAGA popularism didn’t come out of nowhere.

Large swaths of the country have watched their communities fall apart. Factories shut down. Local businesses disappeared. Wages stalled while the cost of everything—housing, food, gas, medical care—kept climbing. The stability people once counted on slowly slipped away.

And when they turned to government, they didn’t see help. They saw bureaucracy that fined them, taxed them, denied them. Agencies that seemed to punish more than protect. It didn’t feel like public service. It felt like being managed by rules they didn’t write, systems they couldn’t reach, and leaders who wouldn’t listen.

Most Americans are buried in debt. So when crisis hits, like it did in 2008 or during the COVID pandemic, it doesn’t just shake the economy. It shatters lives. Homes are lost. Cars repossessed. Businesses wiped out. The pain is real, and the fear runs deep. And with no safety net to catch the fall, people are left with one question: Who did this to us?

That anger is not abstract. It’s personal. It’s rooted in broken promises and everyday struggle. People want someone, anyone, who says they can fix it.

Anthropologists have long known that when economic systems break down, people don’t just lose money. They lose their sense of how things are supposed to work. When hard work no longer leads to stability, and playing by the rules leaves you worse off, you start looking for reasons. And if the real architects of the system stay hidden, people will often turn to the nearest visible target.

Trump didn’t offer real solutions. He offered stories—simple ones. Stories that gave people someone to blame without ever threatening the people actually in charge. He pointed fingers at migrants, teachers, civil servants, protest movements, and transgender kids. He directed anger at groups that had nothing to do with creating the conditions people were suffering under. And in doing so, he protected the corporations, lobbyists, and policymakers who did.

This kind of misdirection works because the public space where people used to feel part of something bigger has been allowed to fall apart. Schools, post offices, parks, buses, libraries—places that once built a sense of connection—have been left to decay or sold off. In their place is a patchwork of private services, limited access, and endless competition. When the physical infrastructure of a shared life disappears, so does the idea that we owe anything to each other. What fills the gap is frustration.

Scapegoating turns that frustration into certainty. It tells people who to blame. And it works because the pain is real. People have been left behind. But instead of helping them understand why, scapegoating replaces explanation with moral judgment: us versus them, the hardworking versus the lazy, the deserving versus the freeloaders.

Social media and cable news amplify this dynamic. What people see is shaped by algorithms designed to keep them angry, not informed. Entire industries profit from keeping people hooked on outrage and fear. Scapegoating isn’t just talk. It’s backed by an economy that runs on division.

Debt holds the whole system together. It keeps people from taking risks or speaking out, and it turns structural failures into personal shame. Because it’s so widespread, the system behind it disappears from view. People are told to blame themselves—or each other.

From a political ecology point of view, that invisibility serves a purpose. When public institutions no longer help, and alternatives seem out of reach, fear does the job of control. The tools of power aren’t just laws and police. They include credit scores, service fees, medical bills, and late notices. And the distractions that keep people from asking deeper questions are everywhere: slogans, scapegoats, made-up enemies.

The damage isn’t just economic. It’s psychological. People stop believing the system can work for them. They’re told government should run like a business, that politics is just theater, and that anyone who hopes for something better is being unrealistic. With those beliefs in place, real change seems impossible. So instead, identity takes the place of solidarity, and performance takes the place of policy. The future becomes whatever you can afford to put on a credit card.

That’s the world Trump stepped into. He didn’t cause the pain. He gave it new names. He took the fallout from neoliberalism, financialization, and disinvestment, and turned it into a story about bad people ruining a good country. In doing so, he left the real system untouched.

The debts are real. The betrayals are real. But the blame has been pointed in the wrong direction.

To change course, we have to stop mistaking distraction for explanation. We have to look clearly at what was taken, who took it, and how they got away with it. And we have to rebuild not only public goods, but the belief that they belong to us all.

Until then, the distractions will keep coming. And so will the debt.

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Suggested Readings.

Ehrenreich, Barbara. Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2001.

Graeber, David. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011.

Greenberg, James B., and Thomas K. Park. Hidden Interests in Credit and Finance: Power, Ethics, and Social Capital across the Last Millennium. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Hochschild, Arlie Russell. Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. New York: The New Press, 2016.

Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. New York: Picador, 2007.

Taylor, Astra. The Age of Insecurity: Coming Together as Things Fall Apart. Toronto: House of Anansi, 2023.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.