I Read the New York Times Today, Oh Boy

Trump's incompetence is revealing a broken country — and none of the leaders Democrat or Republican have proposed the kind of systemic change it will take to rebuild it.

Note to readers: I normally publish on Tuesday and Thursday mornings, but I had to get this off my chest after today's news.

Today I read a headline on the New York Times site: "China Halts Critical Exports as Trade War Intensifies." They're cutting off rare earth metals—stuff we need for cars, missiles, computers, power grids, and weapons. And I didn't have to read much to understand what it meant: the United States isn't operational anymore.

Not self-sufficient. Not prepared. Not even awake.

And the people running it? Still pretending everything's fine. Still playing games in Congress and writing op-eds about how to tweak the message.

Here's the reality: If China wants to shut us down, all they have to do is stop sending the parts. Shut off the supply of magnets, minerals, chips, batteries. And we're done. We can't fight a war. Can't keep the grid running. Can't build jack shit. The only thing we still know how to manufacture at scale is denial and US dollars.

Meanwhile, my neighbor with the AR-15 thinks he's ready to defend liberty against tyranny. But none of us can grow food, fix a power station, or purify drinking water without systems that run on parts made overseas. We are a hollowed-out empire with a bunch of guns, mountains of debt, and an odd sense of invincibility. And our neither our business nor political leaders seem to see it.

This could been the moment where it all becomes obvious. China cuts us off, and suddenly the lights flicker. The shelves thin out. The Pentagon can't source components. Maybe, finally, we ask ourselves: how the hell did we get here?

But instead, the people steering the ship are still arguing about who gets to wear the captain's hat. They haven't noticed the engine's blown.

For the last month or so, I’ve been reading quotes from Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Ezra Klein, Jake Sullivan, and James Carville. It was like listening to a podcast from another planet.

"I'm calling for a strategic political retreat. Allow the Republicans to crumble beneath their own weight and make the American people miss us." — James Carville

That's Carville's big idea—"play dead" until Republicans fail, then swoop in without changing a damn thing about the Democratic Party or its approach to governance.

Meanwhile, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is living in an alternate reality:

"We have the Republicans on the run on three core issues... They are on the run in terms of the economy. In fact, Donald Trump and Republicans are crashing the economy in real time." — Hakeem Jeffries

This delusional optimism comes while Democrats control nothing—not the House, not the Senate, not the White House, not the Supreme Court.

And then there's Chuck Schumer, who thinks bipartisanship will save us in the midst of this crisis:

"One of the places is in the gym, when you're on that bike, in your shorts, panting away next to a Republican. A lot of the inhibitions come off." — Chuck Schumer

Sweating together on stationary bikes while the global economy burns? That's the Democratic leadership's strategy?

Pelosi, as always, wants to go back to normal. Like "normal" was working. Like "normal" didn't get us Trump, opioids, school shootings, outsourcing, and a generation that can't afford rent.

They all see pieces of the crisis. What none of them see or admit is the systemic failure. This country has been asset-stripped by corporate greed, gutted by financialization, and paralyzed by political cowardice.

And now the party that used to be the last line of defense against all that? They're quoting Muhammad Ali and calling it strategy.

It's not that the country is "struggling." It's that it isn’t functional. Not without life support.

Tim Cook told us straight: Apple can't bring manufacturing back to America. Why? Because China has 700,000 factory workers, 30,000 engineers, and we don't have enough tool-and-die makers to build a decent socket wrench. We let that capability die.

Warren Buffett saw it. Way back in 2003, he warned that running massive trade deficits meant we were basically trading away our future. We hand other countries paper, and they eventually own our land, ports, and factories. We stopped producing and started printing. That can only last so long.

That scam is breaking. But not the fever.

Ezra Klein, recently wrote about talking to former Biden folks and said that, “Many members of Biden’s staff now bitterly regret it. That includes Sullivan, who described his experience as “profoundly radicalizing.” So when Biden's national security advisor Jake Sullivan was asked if we should change the laws that prevent us from building, his solution was getting exemptions:

"To actually change the National Environmental Policy Act itself—how many times a year do we change major foundational pieces of legislation in major and consequential ways? It's extremely rare." — Jake Sullivan

That's his "radicalizing" conclusion? That we should keep getting exemptions from laws rather than changing them?

It reminds me of the 2007 financial debacle when banks' greed crashed the global economy. People would say these institutions were "too big to fail" and that would be the end of it. I was always shocked that anyone could say financial institutions are "too big to fail" without the next words out of their mouth being "so we have to break them up so this never happens again." Yet somehow, we go through these "radicalizing" episodes and don't actually get radicalized. We don't realize we have to do the hard things.

Many Democrats think what they have is a messaging problem. A policy lag. Something a blue-ribbon panel can study. Meanwhile, China's cutting off strategic resources, Elon Musk is firing half the regulators, and American factories are warehouses for stuff made overseas.

You want to know what broke this country? It's not just Trump. It's not just deregulation. It's not just neoliberalism. It's a ruling class that thinks the problem is that we haven't explained the status quo well enough.

We used to export goods. Now we export bombs, debt, and tech monopolies. And what we've imported is dependency.

What do you call a nation that can't power its homes, feed its people, or manufacture its own weapons? A colony.

You don't fix that with bipartisan Senate workouts. You don't fix it with focus-grouped slogans about defending democracy. You fix it by building again. By taking back capacity. By throwing out the people who traded our sovereignty for shareholder returns.

But let's be clear: we are not going to vote our way out of this with the people currently in power. The consultants, the party leaders, the corporate think tanks — they are not the path forward. They're the wreckage we have to dig through.

What we need is a political movement strong enough to replace Congress, not beg it. We need people who actually understand what it means to govern a country — not just manage decline.

This isn't about left or right. It's about capable or incapable, real or fake, builders or talkers.

This moment could be a turning point. The rare earth export shutdown? It should be a wake-up call. But it won't be. The people in charge don't know how deep the hole is. And if you don't see how deep the hole is, you can't understand the scale of the solution.

We need to replace these people. Almost all of them. Not with different brands of the same cowardice, but with people who understand that the United States can't just be a market. It has to be a country.

That means reclaiming public power, rebuilding industrial strength, dismantling the extraction economy, and erecting something that serves human beings.

Not a slogan. Not a tweak. A political revolution.

Because if we don't, we're not just looking at decline. We're looking at collapse.

Sources: The New York Times (April 13, 2025), CNN polling (March 2025), Ezra Klein interviews with Jake Sullivan, and Warren Buffett's 2003 Fortune article.