Our Current President Is Bringing Degrowth to America Faster than Anyone Thought Possible

Could there be a pony hidden in this pile of horse manure?

A pony in a very large pile of horse manure. Source: Generated by Google Gemini 2.0. Prompt by author.

While we’re on the subject of ponies and metaphors, let’s take a moment to revisit John Mulaney’s epic metaphor for Trump 1.0, “there’s a horse loose in a hospital”.

In thinking about Trump 2.0, we can now see that the horse in the hospital in Trump 1.0 had a couple of trainers with him who kept him somewhat constrained. But in this second iteration we’re living through now, the horse in the hospital is running free, no trainers and no riders in sight. Most people are just trying to stay out of his way, hoping to avoid being trampled under his hooves. Things are looking … bleak.

In my last pair of posts (here, here), I hinted at a possible “silver lining” in the debacle that is Trump 2.0. In this post, I’m going to swap metaphors. Why? Because Trump 2.0 isn’t a cloud with a silver lining, it’s a steaming pile of horseshit that a cockeyed optimist might believe contains a pony. And even if we find a pony in this particular pile of horseshit, we will still have to deal with the pile of horseshit. And cleaning up horseshit is never a pleasant task. And neither will be cleaning up after Trump 2.0.

America under Trump 2.0 has crossed the Rubicon

America the Beautiful, the City on a Hill, the American Century … these are all expressions describing a nation that no longer exists. America’s beauty is being desecrated, polluted, and sold off by a kakistocratic and kleptocratic government, it is no longer a beacon for others (it is quickly becoming a cautionary tale), and its dominance of the international system, both political and economic, is coming to an end. For someone like me who grew up loving this country (despite spending a large part of my life studying its flaws and shortcomings), who proudly took his children to Washington DC to share the history and grandeur of our great national experiment, this ending is hard to swallow. But here we are. And where we go from here is looking more and more like an inevitability.

America’s government has failed in its most basic function: to represent and protect the people under its jurisdiction. The Trump 2.0 Administration is a clown car of incompetents cosplaying as government functionaries. Its purposes are grift, corruption, and providing unlimited narcissistic supply to one of the most odious human beings ever to walk the earth. Some of the damage these fools are inflicting can be fixed by future Democratic Administrations (e.g., rejoining international organizations, cancelling draconian executive orders), but the worst damage is unlikely to be reversed anytime soon, if ever.

Is America ready for degrowth? It doesn’t think so.

A conversation that does not often intersect with this conversation about the brutal impacts of Trump 2.0 on America’s future is the ongoing conversation about degrowth. I’ve written a fair amount about degrowth as a mental model (e.g., here, here, here). I’ve also written about ecosocialism (here and here), which I believe is a political philosophy within which degrowth can be implemented as a basket of coherent and integrated policy proposals.

The problem with degrowth as a blueprint for responding to the energy descent we are now facing is people. Or more specifically, how people resist change. To understand that resistance, I have found this equation — the so-called Equation of Change — to be extremely helpful:

The Equation of Change illustrates how organizations of any size can overcome resistance and achieve real change. Image created by me in Powerpoint.

What the Equation of Change tells us about voluntary degrowth as a change strategy for the United States is this: change in that direction is extremely unlikely. It was unlikely under Joe Biden and it is essentially impossible under Donald Trump. The problem is with two of the three factors:

• Pain. Although the American people are experiencing extreme pain under Trump 2.0, and that pain is about to get much worse, the people who are running the government and sitting at the top of the economy are still doing quite well. This is because the system is designed to benefit them, and it is still doing so. As long as there is economic growth — a constant ticking up of the holy grail of GDP — our economic and political elites will continue to extract their “vigorish” from all the buying and selling that occurs. But note the caveat … as long as there is economic growth.
• Vision. This is where degrowth is strong. It offers a compelling vision of human society organized around well-being instead of profit (e.g. source). It offers policy solutions to many of the challenges societies are facing today, solutions like universal basic income, fully-funded healthcare and basic public services, lessening of wealth inequality, and reducing energy and material use. But what it sadly lacks, given the world we live in today, is a viable sequence of first steps to achieve its vision.
• First Steps. A system that denies its own weaknesses is in no position to articulate a path to overcome those weaknesses. A system that depends on unending growth is not going to develop or implement strategies for dealing with the end of growth. When it comes to first steps, therefore, voluntary degrowth is stuck. The operating mental model in the developed world today is Pro-Growth Capitalism. There is simply no place for voluntary degrowth in Pro-Growth Capitalism … such considerations are simply outside its Overton Window.

Based on these observations, my conclusion about a year ago was that things were looking pretty grim for degrowth as a voluntary strategy in modern-day America. But then along came Trump 2.0.

Trump 2.0: Bringing involuntary degrowth to America via authoritarian overreach

In a piece called “Divergence from the interests of capital”, journalist Hamilton Nolan discusses all the ways Trump 2.0 is bad for business and, as a consequence, bad for capitalism writ large. While most journalists these days are focusing on Trump’s obvious desire to make rich people richer via his billionaire tax cut plan, Nolan notes that Trump’s other policy moves are in fact going to make rich people poorer, because capitalists and the businesses they invest in require certain foundations in order to keep the engine of capitalist growth humming … and Trump 2.0 is dismantling them all. Nolan mentions four foundations of any economy that is likely to attract capital today:

• A business-friendly government: functioning government services and data to facilitate reliable business planning and operations.
• The rule of law: a system of regulations and enforcement to provide a trustworthy legal framework that protects the interests of both businesses and investors.
• No trade wars: a trading system that is not artificially hampered by politically-motivated barriers like tariffs (or the threat of tariffs).
• No real wars: A country at war is bad for business and investment. A country constantly threatening war (e.g., with Canada, Mexico, Denmark, Panama) is unlikely to be seen as a reliable home for businesses or capital.

Trump 2.0 has taken a wrecking ball to all these foundations that used to support business and investment in the United States. Even though the real effects of Trump’s disastrous policies and authoritarian overreaches are still in the pipeline (i.e., product shortages, price increases, stagflation, recession, possibly depression), business and capital are already fleeing America for safer havens. New trade groups are forming that do not include the US (source). Investors, both foreign and domestic, are dumping American Treasury bonds (source). Discussions are underway to find alternatives to the American dollar as the default currency for international trade (source). These developments will devastate the American economy, the American consumer, and America’s influence in the world.

All of this is going to be terrible for the United States. Even if we managed to undo every one of Trump’s policy debacles tomorrow, the stink would remain. The world now correctly sees the US as untrustworthy and dangerous, more a potential adversary than ally. It sees a country infected with hatred, bigotry, misogyny, and racism that may at any moment explode into another round of suicidal self-destruction. America is now an embarrassment. But the damage goes even deeper.

Who cares if growth ends?

Economic growth is the engine upon which America’s (and indeed the world’s) prosperity depends. It is also the engine driving global warming, ecological overshoot, resource depletion, and biodiversity collapse, but let’s just put that aside for a moment. The indicator we use to measure economic growth — despite numerous academic criticisms of its appropriateness — is Gross Domestic Product or GDP.

Since the turn of the century, America’s annual GDP growth rate has gone negative only twice: in 2009 due to the Great Recession and in 2020 due to the COVID shutdown. On a quarterly basis, America has not had a negative quarter since COVID, and prior to that, not since 2012. That is, until Q1 2025, when the 2.4% growth rate in Q4 2024 suddenly went negative to -0.3%. This period was prior to “Liberation Day” so the decline appears to be completely caused by anticipation of Trump’s tariffs. As Paul Krugman described it:

“If you look at the GDP numbers released yesterday, you see a huge surge in imports coupled with a large surge in inventories. Both of these clearly reflected businesses “front-running” expected tariffs, racing to buy as much from China in particular as they could before the tariffs went into effect.”

One quarter does not a recession make, but economists are nearly unanimous in their belief that this is only a precursor to even more severe economic contractions in the pipeline (source). The fundamentals are simply too overwhelmingly negative to expect a return to economic growth under this regime anytime soon, if ever.

In previous posts (e.g. source, see step 5), I argued that the end of GDP growth would be a trigger forcing governments to spring into action with central bank interventions to jump-start their faltering economies. I never imagined a government would deliberately destroy the underlying fundamentals of its economy. Yet this is what is now happening in the US under Trump 2.0. It is well known that 70% of the US economy is consumption, that is, the stuff individual consumers and families buy. As of 2024, 13% of that consumption came from buying products produced in China. Those products now have a 145% tariff attached to them. Many of them are no longer coming to the US at all, as importers cancel orders they can no longer afford and Chinese exporters find other markets for their wares. And that’s just China. For the rest of the world, the US has become an unpredictable and untrustworthy player on the world stage (aka, a horse loose in their hospital). The Trump 2.0 dream of global domination is rapidly turning into a reality of global isolation, with American economic growth being the first casualty.

“It’s BREXIT on steroids.” — Nadin Brzezinski

If economic growth is the fuel that drives the global economy, what is the fuel that drives economic growth? The answer to that question holds the key to humanity’s future. The fuel that drives economic growth is energy, specifically fossil fuel energy. And that energy is starting to wobble in terms of its accessibility, its cost of production, and its profitability. (I cover these important but often neglected issues in more detail here and here.) It is also starting to face significant competition from renewable energy solutions that are often cheaper and always less environmentally damaging than equivalent fossil fuel solutions (source). So the oil and gas industry is unlikely to become the savior of the American economy that Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric imagines it to be. Why do we know this? Because oil industry executives are telling us so. As one industry executive recently declared in a private industry conference:

“There cannot be ‘U.S. energy dominance’ and $50 per barrel oil; those two statements are contradictory. At $50-per-barrel oil, we will see U.S. oil production start to decline immediately and likely significantly … This is not ‘energy dominance’” (source).

On inauguration day, January 20, the price of a barrel of WTI Crude was $77.39. As of May 3, it was $58.29 (source). The trend is not looking good.

The declining price of oil (so far) under Trump 2.0. Source: oilprice.com.

There is a very good chance that Donald Trump has killed both economic growth and the oil industry in America. Whether permanently or temporarily, we do not yet know. But the end (or interruption) of economic growth in America is going to have far-reaching impacts that will go well beyond empty store shelves and rising prices.

Could America’s fall be so disruptive as to risk the ongoing survival of capitalism itself?

As every capitalist knows, capitalism enables economic growth, but it also requires it. Economic growth, in turn, requires an abundance of dense and affordable energy to build the roads and trucks and factories that produce the growth that generates the wealth that drives the global economy. The correlation between energy production and GDP is undeniable. Since about 1950, when oil began to emerge as the master energy source, world GDP and energy consumption have risen in lockstep, with GDP-per-capita rising and dipping in concert with the accelerating flow of energy.

Excel chart created by the author. Data from Our World in Data.

Each of the tiny dips in the climb up this mountain of energy production represents an economic hiccup in which both energy use and GDP declined — the oil shocks of the early 70s, the Reagan recession of 1981, the Great Depression of 2008–2009, and COVID in 2020. Note that these dips happened for different reasons. Sometimes a deliberate contraction in energy production triggered a drop in GDP (as with the oil shocks), sometimes a recession produced a drop in GDP that then caused demand for energy to drop (as in the 2008 recession), and sometimes an external event caused both consumption and energy use to drop (as with COVID).

The situation we are facing in the United States today is something of a perfect storm: the economy is shrinking, the price of oil is getting dangerously low, and the hollowing out of the American government is making the public much more susceptible to numerous risks with potentially astronomical economic costs: contaminated food; polluted air and water; uncontrolled infectious diseases; climate-fueled superstorms, floods and droughts; to name a few. Any or all of these threats could come together in different ways, but the results are likely to be the same: a further drop in consumer spending; a descent into inflationary recession (aka stagflation); a rise in business failures and unemployment; even greater wealth and income inequality; and an inevitable increase in social and political unrest.

In a nation where over 60% of workers told pollsters in 2023 that they could not afford an extra $500 for an unexpected emergency (source), the Trump tariffs are estimated to add between $4,000 and $8,000 to every household’s annual expenses (source). Who thinks this can possibly end well?

Two outcomes seem certain: America’s demand for oil and gas is going to shrink in proportion to the economic hits it suffers, and the nation’s legacy of predictable GDP growth is going to end.

Why should capitalists be worried? As noted, capitalism as it operates today cannot exist without growth. At the most basic level, the global economy is a system whereby capital (money) is invested, debt is incurred, and repayment (with interest) is obligated. In order for that system to operate, capitalists must be confident they can achieve a positive return on their investment and debtors must be confident they can meet their obligations to repay their debt. Economic growth is an inherent part of this equation. Capitalists may own the businesses they invest in (which is often the case — capitalism is, after all, ownership of the means of production by capitalists), or they may simply be shareholders. In either case, if the businesses they invest in do not grow, debtors cannot pay their debts and capitalists cannot achieve a return on their investment. The incentive to invest disappears, capital has nowhere to go, and the system grinds to a halt.

Capitalism is not a system for maximizing abundance or human wellbeing, it is a system for maximizing capital accumulation, a task it does incredibly well, at least for those at the top of the economic food chain. This is why the world’s political and economic leaders should be very afraid of Donald Trump’s detonation of the American economy. Should America’s economic contraction become a global economic contraction — combining, for example, with a decline in fossil fuel availability and ongoing climate catastrophes — capitalism itself is at risk. If it is true that capitalism cannot survive without economic growth, it is equally true that capitalists cannot survive without capitalism, and the modern neoliberal order cannot survive without capitalists. It follows: the modern global economic system — as we know it today — cannot survive without economic growth.

This is kind of a big deal.

Involuntary degrowth and forced de-consumption in the United States: is this now the world’s best hope for limiting global warming?

Maybe this is where we will find a pony in this pile of horse manure that is Trump 2.0.

Capitalism in the modern world, in addition to being a wealth generation machine, also carries some significant downsides (source). Three in particular are going to play a major role in coming decades:

1. Capitalism inherently increases inequality: We now understand, thanks to the work of French economist Thomas Piketty and others, that capitalism inevitably increases the gap between rich and poor because return on capital historically grows faster than return on labor. So wealth accumulated by capitalists’ investments will always outpace wealth produced by workers’ wages. Over time, more and more of a society’s wealth ends up in the hands of its richest citizens, and the gap between rich and poor widens (source, see also source). Historically, this imbalance has only been partially corrected in one way: not by deliberate redistribution, but by the destruction of wealth in great wars (source).
2. Capitalism demands over-consumption: We tend to assume that consumption is a deliberate choice driven by insatiable demand. But then why do businesses have to spend a trillion dollars a year on “demand creation” (aka advertising)? Consumers are not the drivers of over-consumption, they are its victims. Corporations in pursuit of next quarter’s profits are the drivers here, and their pursuit of growth is driven by knowledge that their access to capital is determined exclusively by their potential to grow. Consumers have very little leverage in this system, but over-consumption is the inevitable result.
3. Capitalism rewards psychopathy: Medium writer Paul Abela recently summarized this nicely, “The characteristics that are most likely to see you reach the top [under capitalism] include being ruthless, selfish, cunning, greedy, hyper-productive, self-serving, and showing a total disregard for the feelings of others — essentially exhibiting every negative trait humans possess.”

Each of these downsides used to be seen as a tolerable cost, tucked away under the idea that “a rising tide of growth raises all boats”. But recently, as global capitalism has entered a phase JD Vance likes to call “late stage capitalism”, all three of these inevitable byproducts of modern capitalism are reaching critical end-states that — even without the depredations of Trump 2.0 — are imposing significant strains on the capitalist system as it operates today. Inequality in the United States has now reached historic levels, surpassing even the deep inequality of the Gilded Age of the 1920s. The American public, already struggling under an economic system that consistently rewards the rich and punishes the poor, has come to depend on cheap, foreign-made goods to get by. And with the rise of billionaire egoists like Trump, Musk, and the rest of Trump’s Cabinet of Broken Billionaires, the world is now seeing what happens when psychopaths are allowed to run the richest country on the planet.

Previously — that is, prior to November 5, 2024 — I believed the collapse of the modern world would pass through four stages, in order: first, environmental collapse; then economic collapse; then political collapse; and finally, population collapse. Now, with the rise and nearly certain fall of Trump 2.0 in America, it is looking like political collapse is going to precede and exacerbate economic collapse, rather than the other way around.

How could the world possibly benefit from this epic failure of American governance? Although Voluntary Degrowth is not a path the United States is likely to follow any time soon (under any of its current political leaders, but especially under Trump 2.0), this is not the only way degrowth can come to America. Now, thanks to the shambolic chaos wrought by the Trump 2.0 Administration, another path is opening up. This is the path I have called Involuntary Degrowth or Energy Descent Realism.

Involuntary Degrowth is a strategy for coping with global warming and over-consumption, it is not a strategy for avoiding global warming and over-consumption. That ship has sailed.

Involuntary Degrowth is, in effect, the Morning After Pill of energy-transition strategies.

It assumes you were thoughtless the night before — you know … ignoring the signs, denying the obvious, continuing to fill the atmosphere with planet-cooking chemicals — but now you realize you were an idiot.

Involuntary Degrowth acknowledges that a certain level of pain is necessary before real change can occur. And thanks to Trump 2.0, that necessary level of pain now appears to be just around the corner. Here are a few ways in which the debacle of Trump 2.0 might paradoxically leave the world a better place than it is today:

1. A collapsing American economy is going to produce a significant decline in the country’s need for energy, which in turn is going to shrink the country’s carbon emissions and slow the rate of increase in global temperatures.
2. American trade wars will cause a decrease in global shipping (America today imports about 15% of the world’s goods), which will also contribute to a decline in CO2 emissions.
3. As America becomes weaker, it will no longer be able to afford its supersized military, another major consumer of energy and source of emissions.
4. As energy demand declines, so will the price of American oil, which will put financial pressure on American oil companies, possibly forcing an earlier “end of oil” than previously expected (source).
5. As pain in the American public reaches levels not seen since the Great Depression, the public’s willingness to consider, and possibly even to demand, degrowth solutions will increase (source). America can finally start crafting the practical First Steps needed to bring degrowth and sustainability to the American people.
6. After experiencing the deprivations of Trump 2.0, America’s MAGA movement will finally collapse and America will correctly blame the Republican Party for its downfall.
7. As Republican office holders come to realize Trump 2.0 is destroying their Party’s brand, they will finally abandon and denounce Donald Trump to save themselves. Their brand will have become so toxic, however, that this last-minute attempt at rehabilitation will fail.
8. With America no longer the world’s greatest roadblock to climate action, collective measures and investments to address climate change and the energy transition can begin to move forward (source).
9. And finally, the collapse of America is going to destroy much of the wealth of America’s morbidly rich, thereby contributing to a rebalancing of wealth inequality that historically has only been achieved as a consequence of great wars (source).

And what about democracy?

Will democracy survive? Let’s just say it is far from a sure thing. America’s founders understood that democracy cannot function without an informed citizenry. America is in the mess it is in today because its political and economic elites have corrupted a large portion of its citizenry. Today, about half of American adults are so soaked in lies and conspiracies promoted by the GOP and rightwing media outlets that they are — in the kindest of interpretations — severely uninformed. Indeed, this is how pollsters identify them … “low information voters”. They are about to become better informed in the most immediate and personal way possible, by having their lives massively disrupted by the very heroes they thought would save them (source). They are about to reap the consequences of their own ignorance and hubris. And yes, this is going to be incredibly painful.

If democracy is to survive in America, it will take much more than a banishment of a rogue political party and its mad leader. America will need to rebuild its commitment to democracy from the ground up: strengthening institutions, reinforcing guardrails, outlawing political bribery, and recommitting to the Constitution and the rule of law. Most importantly, America must free itself from the hatred, greed, fear, bigotry, misogyny, and racism that got it to where it is today (source).

If there is a pony in this pile of horse manure, it is this: As the horrific lived experience of Trump 2.0 plays out, America’s citizens will finally have an opportunity to learn that reality matters, that truth matters, that science matters, that delusion does not make good policy, and that they must, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, ”all hang together, or assuredly we shall all hang separately”.