When Breaking the Economy Becomes a Weapon

How Trump’s Second-Term Agenda Turns Economic Collapse Into a Strategy of Rule

I’ve puzzled over the damage Trump has done to the U.S. economy. Dismantling USAID hurt American farmers by closing off foreign markets. Tariffs imposed on a whim provoked retaliation, tangled supply chains, sank markets, and drove businesses under. Cuts to public health, research, and infrastructure—sold as cost-saving—produced long-term economic losses that far outweighed any immediate gains.

It’s tempting to blame this on incompetence or ideological hostility to government. But there’s another possibility—one that’s both simpler and harder to accept. The damage wasn’t accidental. It was useful. What looks like sabotage may in fact be a method of rule.

We tend to think of crisis as failure—something to fix or survive. But under Trump, crisis becomes a governing strategy. When instability is constant, accountability gets harder to locate. The machinery of government no longer promises protection; it manages disaster. And in managing it, manufactures more of it.

Much of what’s framed as disruption follows a deeper logic. Institutions that serve the public are defunded. Regulatory structures are hollowed out. Economic protections are stripped away. What’s left is a population exposed to volatility and less able to act collectively.

Political ecology has a name for this: accumulation by dispossession. Public goods are turned into private gain—not just through resource grabs, but by dismantling the foundations of solidarity. The aim isn’t merely to redistribute wealth upward. It’s to weaken labor, fragment mutual aid, and erode the capacity to resist. What can’t be protected can be taken.

The goal isn’t to fix the economy. It’s to reorganize who benefits from it. Crisis becomes a sorting mechanism. Wealth consolidates through collapse. Political loyalty becomes the currency of survival.

That’s the backdrop for a second Trump term: not growth, but extraction. Not recovery, but enclosure.

None of this began with Trump. Neoliberal policy has spent decades hollowing out public institutions, privatizing risk, and normalizing precarity. What Trump offers is not a break with the past but its culmination. He strips away the pretense of shared prosperity and uses the wreckage as a loyalty test. The myth of the free market gives way to open patronage. The safety net doesn’t fail—it’s withheld.

The story told alongside this collapse is just as revealing. Inflation? Blame immigrants. Housing insecurity? Blame environmental rules. Job loss? Blame teachers, federal workers, or “woke” corporations. Economic decline is repackaged as moral failure. Someone took what you deserved. Someone corrupted the system. Someone must pay.

But it’s not just the economy that’s captured—it’s the narrative. In a disinformation-rich environment, causal chains are severed. The price of eggs is no longer traced to supply chains or monopolies, but to drag queens or asylum seekers. The political economy of storytelling rivals the material one. Confuse cause and effect, and you can redirect rage at will.

This authoritarian project is implemented not just through rhetoric, but through fiscal policy, deregulation, and manufactured crisis. If a government can’t—or won’t—deliver stability, it can still deliver scapegoats.

Collapse becomes a lever of power. It’s not a problem to be solved but an opportunity to exploit. History is full of examples where economic pain served not just as fallout, but as fuel—undermining labor, splintering resistance, and normalizing once-unthinkable policies. The goal isn’t repair. It’s domination through disarray.

What makes this distinctly Trumpian is the orientation of blame. Not upward, toward the powerful, but sideways and down. Inflation isn’t linked to profiteering—it’s pinned on migrants. Rent hikes? Blamed on climate policy. Job insecurity? Laid at the feet of unionized teachers. Each hardship is reframed as sabotage by someone outside the circle of loyalty.

This isn’t an economic argument. It’s a political script. And it works—not by persuading, but by simplifying. It channels diffuse anger into fixed targets and turns grievance into justification.

But this redirection of blame is only part of it. Authoritarianism thrives on emotional reprogramming. Disillusionment becomes grievance. Grievance hardens into moral clarity. And cruelty becomes a source of comfort. The objective isn’t just behavioral control—it’s to recalibrate expectation: so deprivation feels earned, punishment feels righteous, and those suffering most feel least entitled to relief.

The aim isn’t to restore order. It’s to reshape the emotional field—replacing solidarity with suspicion, dissent with shame, and despair with vengeance. As wages fall and prices rise, fear completes the cycle. Desperate people don’t merely tolerate repression—they begin to expect it.

And when it arrives, the targets are already named. Not monopolists or financiers, but the vulnerable and visible: migrants, teachers, regulators, public health officials, labor organizers. Anyone who might resist the consolidation of profit or power.

Even as health, education, and environmental protections are dismantled, the carceral and surveillance state expands. Detention centers proliferate. Border patrols multiply. Police budgets grow beyond civic need. These aren’t parallel agendas. They’re a unified project. Public investment hasn’t vanished—it’s been redirected from care to control. Security becomes the last surviving form of public service.

This isn’t collateral damage. It’s architecture: a political ecology of repression that treats instability as opportunity. Economic destruction clears the path for legal erosion, media capture, and the gutting of public protections. The worse things get, the more plausible the justifications for surveillance, censorship, detention, and purges.

Authoritarianism doesn’t need a blueprint. It needs momentum. Enough chaos to overwhelm resistance. Enough fear to suppress accountability.

What’s lost isn’t just income or insurance. It’s the public infrastructure of trust: the shared assumptions, protections, and institutions that make democratic life possible. Without them, governance gives way to command.

That’s why the economic unraveling we’re witnessing demands more than analysis. It demands recognition—not after the damage is done, but while the story is still unfolding. Before despair calcifies into consent.

Suggested Readings

Brown, Wendy. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, 2015.

Davis, Mike. Late Victorian Holocausts: El Niño Famines and the Making of the Third World. London: Verso, 2001.

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

Harvey, David. The New Imperialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

(Especially Chapter 4: “Accumulation by Dispossession.”)

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019.

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market. New York: Bloomsbury, 2023.

Stoler, Ann Laura. Imperial Debris: On Ruins and Ruination. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013.

Vélez-Ibáñez, Carlos G. The Rise of Necro/Narco Citizenship: Belonging and Dying in the National Borderlands. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2025.