The future, Mr. Gittes, the future

                                                                            John Huston as Noah Cross in “Chinatown”

This is as good a time as any to assess where we are and consider what we can expect.

Donald Trump, despite his pronouncements, is an unpopular, failing president. Despite having a lot of cards, he has overplayed his hand. I’m not going to go into detail about how he has dug himself into a hole other than to mention the Iran war, mass deportations, tariffs, continued high prices and his Panglossian claims about how well things are going. I’m going to refer here to Jamelle Bouie’s excellent column in The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/11/opinion/trump-iran-wartime-presidents.html?searchResultPosition=3

We’re interested in the future. It’s tempting to think that four years from now, when Donald Trump—we can hope—will have departed from the White House, that our public life will return to normal. Tempting but extremely doubtful.

We need to consider several problems.

First, how do we account for the choice of Trump for president and the continued tolerance of him after his manifest incompetence, indifference to his responsibilities, bizarre public behavior and haphazard entry into a costly war?

Second, what can we expect from a national Republican Party with so many public officials—governors, senators, congressmen and women, state legislators—who sold their souls because of cowardice, ambition or true fidelity to Donald Trump?

Third, what are we going to do about our national debt, now approaching $40 trillion? Annual interest payments, which must be paid, are approaching $1 trillion, more than the budget of the Pentagon. Sooner or later—better sooner than later—we’re going to have to deal with this issue before it bites us.

And fourth, we have alienated our allies and undermined the longest lasting security coalition, NATO, in history. How will we, if we try, regain the trust of European countries that have looked to the United States for leadership? What can we do to convince Asian countries trying to resist the magnetic pull of China that we will be a reliable ally?

All four problems are part of a single whole. In one way or another the solution involves restoring something that has been lost over the past 10 plus years. The question for us is whether we can summon the will to undertake the effort.

Maybe I’ve missed it, but I have yet to read an account of the so-called MAGA movement that explains the alienation that underlies the movement. We’ve always had a certain amount of unrest in our society; and being the world’s oldest democracy doesn’t ensure that all our citizens embrace our core beliefs. But something extraordinary has happened. Ordinary Americans, who obey our laws and pay their taxes, have become disenchanted with the consensus that has maintained political stability for generations—perhaps since the Civil War.

Conspiracy theories, which have always inhabited the dark corners of our country, have become mainstream. Characters who once hung out in those dark corners have now taken up residence on our public platforms. It’s unlikely that they’re going to disappear when the moving trucks come to take away Trump’s furniture and whatever else he decides to grab. Whatever it is that has alienated 40 percent of our country won’t disappear when the Demagogue in Chief leaves the stage—if he does.

If the Democrats take power, they’ll have to figure out what to do about having a large minority of the population disaffected from their government and perhaps from our political system. And if the Republicans maintain power, whoever leads them may well be tempted to emulate Trump, whether he or she is successful at it or not.

Consider: Major portions of the federal government have been disappeared. Important health care responsibilities have been dismantled, including patient care and research. Basic research, which has been the foundation of much of America’s technological supremacy for years, has been underfunded for years. As a result, the United States appears to be experiencing a brain drain. A paper prepared for the Century Foundation, citing cuts to research and attacks by the government on academic freedom, asserts, “A recent poll of over 1,600 U.S.-based scientists found that more than 75 percent are considering leaving the country due to these changes, compromising not only our current workforce but our long-term capacity to train the next generation of researchers.”

Restoring our technological supremacy, rebuilding our health care system and medical research capability and attracting the brains that have left us will require money. The government, however, if it wishes to do all or some of those things, will be hamstrung by the recurring budget deficits and the ballooning debt we’ve incurred. Individual income taxes have not been raised in several years and in fact were famously and significantly reduced by the so-called One Beautiful Bill last year.

Ever since Ronald Reagan convinced Americans that the federal government was the problem and not the solution, and that they were being overtaxed, it has become unthinkable to raise taxes and quite fashionable of course to lower them. Americans don’t want their services reduced, just their taxes. We want a great deal, but we don’t want to pay for it. We have a chronic trade deficit effectively financed by the government’s borrowing money because we would rather spend our money on ourselves rather than pay for the programs we demand.

And now we’re involved in an illegal, ill-conceived war of choice that’s costing billions that we really don’t have.

In a few months we’ll be hearing a lot of speeches celebrating the 250^th anniversary of our independence. We should ask ourselves, under the circumstances, how independent are we really?