Few presidents have ever faced the kind of economic nightmare President Donald Trump is inflicting on the American people—and none of them survived it politically. From a stagnant job market, rising health care costs, and soaring inflation to what experts are calling an “armageddon scenario” for gas prices, Trump’s economic malpractice has the United States teetering on the edge of a once-in-a-generation meltdown.
Do you feel rich yet?
Donald Trump promised jobs while campaigning in 2024.
Outgoing Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell kicked the malaise into overdrive on Wednesday when he admitted that “[t]here’s zero net job creation in the private sector,” with “very, very low—nonexistent, really—growth in the labor force, which of course we’ve never had in our history.”
Powell’s comments are especially damaging because they come at a time when Trump is touting hypothetical future job growth as the way out of America’s looming economic crisis. So much for that plan.
Things are about to get even worse for workers, because companies aren’t just freezing hiring: They are planning another round of brutal, AI-driven layoffs.
Jack Dorsey, the Twitter founder and current CEO of financial services firm Block, announced the company will fire half of its workforce—over 5,000 people—in order to replace them with artificial intelligence. Fiverr, a company built on the idea of real people providing low-cost services like web design and copy editing, announced similar cuts amounting to one-third of their workforce. Tech titan Meta, formerly Facebook, is considering its largest layoffs in years, with up to 16,000 workers at risk.
There are also perverse stories like DoorDash, which announced this week it will pay couriers extra to train AI robotics models by taking videos of tasks like washing dishes and folding clothes. In the most literal sense, DoorDash is paying human beings to train their own AI replacements, with the ultimate goal of firing as many of their 8 million gig workers as possible.
DoorDash cofounder and chief technology officer Andy Fang is thrilled about the idea of offering humans a few bucks now in exchange for long-term unemployment later.
“We think this will be huge for building the frontier of physical intelligence,” Fang wrote in a LinkedIn post announcing his new job elimination program. “Look forward to seeing where this goes!”
Related | Yes, Trump’s economy really is as bad as it seems
No one is hiring, and hundreds of thousands of currently employed Americans are facing layoffs, but none of that has put a damper on skyrocketing consumer prices. February inflation blew away analyst predictions, leaping 0.7% for the month and 3.4% annually, the most in a year. Food prices alone rose nearly 2.5%, with fresh and frozen vegetables rising an eye-popping 48.9%.
Yeah, you read that right—a nearly 50% increase in the cost of your lettuce and tomatoes. The latest cost-of-living crisis is not a drill.
Meanwhile, incomes aren’t remotely keeping pace with inflation, meaning American households have less money to meet even higher price demands for everything from vegetables to medicine.
Last year saw all forms of household debt rising, to nearly $19 trillion total. That’s nearly double the debt households carried in 2013.
The share of that debt that goes to expenses other than a mortgage is also rising rapidly, which has led economic experts like investor Mohamed El-Erian to predict a crisis in private credit markets similar to the Great Recession of 2007-2008.
In short, there’s real trouble ahead for working families. Or rather, families who were working until their companies laid them off in order to get ahead of the next big recession.
None of that matters to the Trump administration, of course. Their recent demand for over $200 billion to fund the war in Iran will come directly from taxpayer pockets despite Republican lawmakers claiming last year that there simply wasn’t enough money to help people struggling with rising health care costs.
The GOP’s Iran funding request amounts to nearly twice as much money as it would cost to reinstate the popular Affordable Care Act subsidies for 22 million Americans.
As Daily Kos writer Oliver Willis so excellently said, the Trump administration doesn’t care if the Iran war breaks your bank—especially not when some of Trump’s closest allies are profiting handsomely from investments in drone and AI companies that just got fat Pentagon contracts.
One company backed by presidential failsons Eric and Donald Trump Jr. last year, Powerus, just landed a huge government contract that nearly quintupled the company’s valuation. The Trump kids will pocket a hefty profit while regular people have to set up a savings fund to buy celery.
Related | Trump team doesn’t care if Iran war breaks your bank
Don’t expect any action from Congress to alleviate the economic pain millions of Americans are feeling. Corporate megafarms pocketed almost all of Trump’s much-hyped $12 billion “farmer bailout,” while the GOP’s plan for a $2,000 “tariff rebate check” appears likely to fail in the Senate.
But even those programs won’t be enough to protect workers from the economic disaster we’re already seeing unfold in the labor market. For that, Trump and his Republican enablers would need a comprehensive plan to boost the economy and spur hiring.
Instead, they are focused on carving the president’s face into a special golden coin. Trump’s promised Golden Age, it turns out, only applies to him.
