The Kennedys Would Like a Word: Trump’s Gala of Decline

As babies die of whooping cough and China posts a trillion-dollar surplus, Trump lectures the nation on gold paint and tariff fantasies.

Good morning! Pour yourself something strong, because the country is waking up today with a migraine that didn’t come from the weather. While Donald Trump spent last night hosting his own discount-bin Kennedy Center Awards, complete with self-awarded prestige, gold-leaf delusions, and an audience stacked with MAGA superfans who clap the way North Korean functionaries clap when the cameras are running. In the background, the actual nation that he was supposed to govern kept falling apart, resembling a collapsing carnival ride while Trump shouted that everything was tremendous.

Let’s begin with the economy, which Trump insists is “roaring” even as the job market is face-planting directly into the pavement. The numbers out this morning confirm what everyone in the real world already knows: layoffs are soaring at a rate we haven’t seen since the Great Recession, possibly even eclipsing COVID once the revisions roll in. More than 1.1 million jobs are gone, gone as in disappeared, vanished, evaporated, and the trend-line points toward 2 million by year’s end. Prices are climbing, wages are not, families are drowning, and the federal government under Trump is playing whack-a-mole with basic services. They’ve stripped affordable housing language out of the defense bill, slashed health benefits for service members, and are still out there bragging about rising Treasury yields like higher borrowing costs are some kind of medal of honor. You’d think a government this incompetent would at least not be proud of it.

As America bleeds, Trump, in between forgetting which year it is and explaining to the nation that “you can’t fake real gold”, is reportedly gearing up to announce a $12 billion bailout for farmers. He’ll present this as heroic, an act of salvation, a benevolent ruler handing grain to the peasants from the palace balcony, but the truth is far simpler: the bailout is only necessary because Donald Trump’s own tariff war kneecapped American agriculture. China didn’t destroy U.S. farm exports. Trump did. China simply reacted like any rational nation under economic attack and bought from someone else. Farmers didn’t need saving until Trump set the barn on fire. Now he’s insisting they thank him for the hose.

Speaking of China, the world’s largest exporter just quietly shattered a historic milestone: a $1.08 trillion trade surplus, the biggest ever recorded, and we haven’t even hit the end of the year. And let’s be perfectly clear: China didn’t hit this milestone despite Trump’s tariffs, but because of them. Trump’s much-hyped trade war didn’t weaken Beijing; it rerouted global commerce around the United States like a bypass around a toxic spill. Exports to the U.S. plummeted 29% in November, and yet China is exporting more than ever to Europe, to Southeast Asia, to every market Trump wasn’t brave enough or coherent enough to pick a fight with. Europe is now choking on subsidized Chinese EVs and solar panels, and Macron is openly threatening U.S.-style tariffs, not because he admires Trump’s genius, but because he’s running out of choices in the economic landscape Trump helped warp.

Trump swore he’d make China “bend the knee.” Instead, he delivered the U.S. economy to Beijing like a tribute payment, which brings me to something I’m writing about in more depth this week: the way Trump has steadily transformed the United States from a sovereign power into a vassal state. China’s trillion-dollar surplus is not just a financial statistic; it’s a flashing indicator on the geopolitical dashboard showing exactly how far American leverage has fallen under Trump’s sabotaged trade policies. A nation that once shaped global markets is now being shaped by them, shoved to the margins while Trump claims victory from inside the wreckage. I’ll have much more to say about this in the upcoming essay, but for now, understand this: the vassalization of America isn’t theoretical anymore. It’s measurable, in dollars, in lost markets, in lost credibility, and in the widening gap between the world’s strategic center of gravity and the place where Trump insists everything is still “tremendous.”

If the economic erosion weren’t enough to raise your blood pressure, the public health news will do the job. Kentucky just lost a third infant to whooping cough, a disease so old it predates electricity, now back from the grave because the Trump–RFK Jr. Axis of Anti-Science gutted the CDC’s advisory committee and stacked it with activists who treat childhood immunization the way Trump treats the Constitution: optional, inconvenient, and in the way. Newborn hepatitis B vaccines, which cut childhood infections by 99 percent, are no longer universally recommended. Surveillance systems for RSV, flu, and measles are being quietly dismantled. Public health experts are telling Americans, with straight faces and shaking voices, not to trust the CDC’s own advisory panel.

And just like that, hospitals in New Jersey and New York are overflowing, flu cases are exploding, and infants across the country are dying from diseases that modern medicine solved decades ago. This is autocracy. As Dr. Haydée Brown, a physician and public-health expert who co-hosts the “ELLA” series exposing the real-time dismantling of America’s health systems, explained, autocracy doesn’t announce itself by telling you what to think; it begins by telling you what you’re allowed to know. If you stop counting outbreaks, the outbreaks no longer make the evening news. If you stop measuring illness, illness ceases to be evidence. No data, no crisis. And without crisis, there’s no accountability, which is the entire point.

You see it everywhere now: from the public health collapse, to the cooked economic narratives, to the “I ended eight wars with tariffs” fantasy, to the Supreme Court case where Trump argued he should be immune from prosecution for crimes committed in office. It’s all the same operating system. Trump weakens the nation’s institutions, then claims the weakness is proof they were corrupt. He sabotages the economy, then blames China. He destroys public health, then blames the experts. He undermines democracy, then declares it broken. This is how a country becomes a vassal state, not to another nation, but to the whims of one man.

While this democratic disassembly line hums along, Trump is on TV answering questions like “What makes a song great?” and explaining his deep thoughts on gold paint. His rambling Kennedy Center cosplay last night was pure decline, a fragile man squinting into the lights, insisting his memory is excellent, insisting the ratings will be huge, insisting he’s running a government even as the government he runs dissolves around him like wet tissue.

Wars are escalating in Congo, in Thailand and Cambodia, in Ukraine, in Gaza. Trump claims he’s the only one who can bring peace, even as leaked audio shows his “peace plan” was written in Moscow and hand-delivered to Zelensky like a ransom note. He boasts that “Russia is fine with it,” which is precisely why the rest of the world should be horrified. And his official national security doctrine literally describes dismantling the EU and treating Canada as a subordinate appendage. Trump doesn’t just want America to behave like a vassal state, he wants America to create them.

This is the backdrop against which he rants about fake gold and drags Kiss to a state function as if he’s directing a roadshow version of his own ego. This is the administration that claims Europe isn’t an ally, that praises Putin’s “strength,” that rejects refugees unless they fit Trump’s racist obsession with “white South Africans,” that skips the G20 in South Africa because Trump invented a genocide that doesn’t exist. It would all be laughable if it weren’t getting people killed.

This is the through-line this morning: a president who sees institutions not as tools of governance but as ornaments for his own self-mythology. A man whose policies burn down the countryside while he insists the glow on the horizon is just “beautiful energy.” A ruling party that believes hiding evidence is the same as solving problems. A government that has replaced science with superstition, diplomacy with blackmail, and economic strategy with protection-racket rhetoric. A nation sliding, not tumbling, sliding toward something smaller and meaner than it used to be.

But the one thing they still fear is evidence. Evidence of corruption, evidence of failure, evidence of babies dying from diseases they let loose, evidence of Europe recoiling from America’s chaos, evidence of China roaring past us while Trump insists everything is “incredible.” Evidence is the antidote to autocracy. Which is why they are trying so hard to shut it down in the courts, in the data systems, in the media space, and on platforms like this one.

Truth is golden, so we stay loud, factual, and above all, annoying.