From ‘apprentice' to tycoon to statesman
Donald J Trump may sound mercurial and whimsical, but actually his words, comments, and deeds are neither farcical nor shooting from the hip. His constituency is the humongous crowd of conservatives, rednecks, and fundamentalists all over the fifty states. He has his agenda well-choreographed and researched. He is in no mood to deviate from his game plan no matter what the world thinks of him.
The world will hee and haw, but the world is not his stage. He had in the past proved his forte when he hosted the TV series 'Apprentice'. Neither are those Americans who vent their frustration through caricatures, cuss words, memes, and jokes on talk shows. These Americans, taking advantage of the First Amendment, can beat their chests, pull their hairs, and emit their anger and dissent, but let's face it: Trump is here to stay for four years. The party has just begun.
POTUS took the world by storm from the moment he took the oath as Number 47. He audaciously demanded that Canada join the Union as 51st State and warned Mexico to bow to his terms. Then he went after Greenland. Of course, all three plans are on the backburner because he switched to tackle the immigration issue.
Out with undocumented immigrants, he roared. The US Supreme Court endorsed his demand. Yes, time to clean up despite the fact that a lot many immigrants were working on farms in rural America and many others were gainfully employed as gardeners, cooks, factory workers, and in the construction sector, to name a few. He is dead against granting birthright citizenship.
The US Supreme Court judgement in his favor has bolstered his campaign. At the same time, he pronounced the edict that visa applicants from over a dozen countries should not take the trouble to apply for US visas. They can visit Ulan Bator or Timbuktu for all he cared.
Trump also went after countries exporting billions to the USA. He came up with arbitrary imposition of import duties, which nearly disrupted the global trade regime.
Fortunately, he is an expert in U-turns and provided few months of respite while keeping up the pressure on these countries to make a deal otherwise to get ready and face the music.
China was his main target until Beijing made his eyes pop out when China enumerated a list of items, minerals, and commodities that are crucial to America. Thus, he kept on fiddling around with the duty structure and came up with an agreement with China. Some countries did not even wait and openly announced that they were ready to play ball under rules set by him.
Trump is fixated on winning the Nobel Peace Prize. Hallelujah. If Obama can get it, why should he too not be the recipient? Lady Luck smiled on him pretty soon. Pakistan-India conflict gave him the opportunity to use his 'Art of Deal' and both nations acquiesced to his advice to agree and maintain a ceasefire. If that was not enough, Netanyahu got into the act and began bombing Iran and killing the top Iranian brass and scientists. Iran cannot be allowed to build nuclear strategic assets.
No way, Jose. But Iranian leadership was not sitting and savoring apple pie. The devastation caused due to Iranian retaliatory measures stunned not only Israelis but the world.
Never take Tehran for granted was the message. While Israelis cooped up, scared and shaky in bunkers, the physical infrastructure was systematically destroyed on the outside. All claims of Israeli invincibility and braggadocio went down as Iranian missiles ravaged the belligerent nation.
Trump, just to satisfy pro-Israelis in the US, did his part in bombing selected edifices, but then out of the blue came his advice that enough is enough and there should be a ceasefire. Trump also took credit to defuse the tension between Rwanda and Congo.
Now he has to expertly use his negotiating skills to get Putin and Zelensky to sit and smoke the peace pipe. Will he be able to get this done within the next quarter? If so, then Pakistan was on the right track in officially nominating him for the Nobel Peace Prize.
What will then be the Trump plan to really Make America Great Again? For one, he wants American businesses and industries back into the country. No more outsourcing, no more manufacturing, no more huge investments in foreign lands. Come back under the Stars and Stripes.
A tall order, especially for mega corporations at this stage. Today, less than 8% of workers have jobs in the manufacturing sector and most of them do not possess the skill set to work in modernized factories. Today, factories use robotics, Artificial Intelligence, and high tech technology. Reskilling workers to be part of the new ecosystem would be a gargantuan task for most of the corporations.
Moreover, the wages and salaries in the US are already exorbitant. In fact, the higher cost of production would also impact on these workers because they too are consumers. Will Trump fast-track the return of industries, or would there be a longer period before all this, if ever, is possible?
Trump is primarily a businessman, and he looks to the world through the entrepreneurial prism. Hard sell is his forte and he excels in this respect. He has the knack to increase his own wealth during his tenure. He will also strongly market and peddle American military hardware to whichever country he finds an opportunity.
The Middle East rulers are his favorite customers while he wants pacifist countries, such as Japan and even Switzerland, to enhance the defence budget. He will also use all powers in his arsenal to induce South American countries to do the same.
At the home front, he is beginning to flex his muscle by using law-enforcers to achieve his objectives. This isn't playing well across the fifty states, but he has his hands on his hips and guns in his holsters. Like the scenes from Wild West movies.
Americans will witness what happens to citizens in countries contemptuously known as Banana Republics. Too soon yet, but then the slogan for The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave is Make America Great Again.
American political advisor Stephen Miller once stated that 'everybody who stands against Donald Trump are the people who have been running the country into the ground, who have been controlling the levers of power. They're the people who are responsible for our open borders, for our shrinking middle class, for our terrible trade deals.'
Copyright Business Recorder, 2025
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In a cruel twist of irony, America's Independence Day is being celebrated with the largest upward transfer of wealth in the country's history. By signing the so-called 'Big Beautiful Bill' into law on July 4, President Donald Trump has turned Robin Hood into a bogeyman – and made the rich the rightful folk heroes. With the sweeping tax-and-spending package, Trump has unleashed a legislative juggernaut that brings Karl Marx's warning into brutal focus: 'Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery at the opposite pole.' The bill robs the bottom 90 per cent of Americans of around $700 per household, while funnelling over $6,000 into the pockets of the wealthiest fifth, engineering misery on an industrial scale. With Yale's Budget Lab and the Congressional Budget Office projecting a $3.4 trillion hole in the federal budget over the next decade – before counting interest – it is an ideological project in plutocratic redistribution. In a staged heist against the social safety net, Medicaid, SNAP, clean energy credits and even lifesaving foreign aid are set to become collateral damage in a grand design to enrich the few and abandon the rest. It is a dagger at the heart of America's social contract. Or, in Bernie Sanders' remarks on the floor of the Senate: 'It is the most dangerous piece of legislation in the modern history of our country.' 'It is a gift to the billionaire class, while causing massive pain for low-income and working-class Americans. Actually though, M. President, I'm wrong. This is not a gift to the billionaire class. They paid for it,' he quipped. In Arkansas alone, more than 100,000 people stand to lose their Medicaid coverage. Food stamp recipients will now face stiffer work requirements, a bitter irony at a time when grocery bills are soaring and rural job markets remain fragile. Across the country, the implications are chilling. Already struggling rural hospitals may face accelerated shutdowns. Families living paycheck to paycheck will be squeezed even harder. At the same time, tax cuts for billionaires are made permanent, fossil fuel subsidies are revived with a vengeance and the deficit balloons by an additional $3.5 trillion. Who wins and who loses? Independent analyses from the CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT) show that the bill will kick 16 million people off their health insurance, gut nutrition programmes and make college even harder to afford — all to bankroll massive tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. The bill adds a whopping $3 trillion to the national debt, setting the stage for long-term economic drag and a grim inheritance for younger generations. Households making under $23,000 will lose around $1,600 annually, mostly from Medicaid and SNAP cuts, nearly 4% of their total income. Families earning under $55,000 a year will see a net loss in resources. Meanwhile, the middle class gets table scraps, a meagre 0.5–0.8% gain, barely enough to offset rising living costs. At the top, it's raining gold. Households making over $700,000 will gain $12,000 a year, not counting estate tax windfalls. Meanwhile, the top 10% rake in 68% of the bill's total benefits. Those earning over $500,000 will receive a $168 billion tax cut in 2027 alone while people making over $1 million will see a $93.6 billion tax windfall that same year. For the lowest earners, the pain is twofold: many will actually see tax increases, with those making less than $15,000 a year facing a 12% hike in 2027, ballooning to 73% by 2033 once temporary credits expire. Even crueller than the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the grandly-titled bill doles out nearly double the tax break to millionaires while stripping aid from those who need it most. In fact, TCJA at least gave modest cuts to low-income earners, but the "beauty" of Trump's latest attack lies in its spectacular theft. Generational theft The long-term hit is generational. Penn Wharton's model finds that a 40-year-old median-income earner will lose $7,500 over a lifetime under the bill. However, a 70-year-old with the same income will be $17,500 richer. In other words, the American Dream has been restructured into a senior savings plan, just hang in there till retirement and hope capitalism does not kill you first. For the young, the pursuit of happiness now comes with a warning label: not applicable during your lifetime. In a nutshell, the bill is a ledger of who matters and who does not in Trump's America. The arithmetic is brutally simple: if you're a CEO, hedge fund manager or a defence contractor, your stock just went up. However, if you are a working-class parent, a disabled veteran, a retiree or a single mother in rural Arkansas, you're collateral damage in a cynical calculation. While older, higher-income Americans stand to gain in the short term through generous tax breaks, younger workers and future generations are left footing the bill, both figuratively and literally. Because younger earners are typically in lower tax brackets, they benefit the least from income tax cuts. At the same time, they are disproportionately exposed to deep cuts in Medicaid and student aid — two critical lifelines for young families and students. Medicaid now covers four in ten hospital births in the US, meaning today's cuts are tomorrow's childhood health crises. As Jessica Riedl of the conservative Manhattan Institute puts it, even from the right: 'In the short term, the benefits are certainly tilted towards higher earners, which is often a good proxy for age.' However, the heaviest blow comes in the form of long-term debt. The bill adds $3 trillion to the national debt, which economists predict will push interest rates higher and eat away at future federal budgets, squeezing out investment in education, infrastructure and social services. 'There is an obvious intergenerational transfer here,' says John Ricco of the Yale Budget Lab, which estimates that by 2055, when today's newborns turn 30, the average annual mortgage will cost $4,000 more because of the bill's impact on interest rates. 'Making America white again' Moreover, the bill's border provisions read like the fevered dreams of a security‑state lobbyist. ICE's budget balloons by an order of magnitude, rippling from roughly $10 billion today to over $100 billion in a few short years. Funding for walls, detention facilities and mass deportations soars, reflecting a dark fusion of nationalist spectacle and capitalist discipline. Immigrants, refugees and asylum‑seekers become pawns in a broader project of social control, as the state draws lines in sand and steel across its own land. The Pentagon budget is padded by another $150 billion, ICE gets tens of billions for deportations and even a private border-enforcement army and massive wall project are shoehorned in. In short, if $1 is cut from Medicaid, $1.50 flies to police and walls. As Washington Monthly notes, the bill 'lavishes funding on ICE to raise a private army and set up detention camps'. The movement 'is primarily about… 'owning the libs,' 'Making America White Again,' and cruelty against the marginalised'. Public opinion polls tell the rest of the story: close to half of Americans – 49 per cent – oppose the Big Beautiful Bill, while only 29 per cent support it. Even within Republican ranks, fiscal hawks and swing‑district representatives bristled at the eye‑popping deficits and social carnage baked into the legislation. Three‑headed hydra of class warfare From a leftist vantage point, the Big Beautiful Bill is a three‑headed hydra of class warfare, eco‑fascism and bio‑political abandonment. It rebrands austerity as patriotism, casting the poor as 'undeserving' parasites even as it showers the wealthy with boons. By shredding Medicaid, SNAP, and foreign‑aid programs, lawmakers legislate life‑and‑death outcomes for the poor, the elderly, children abroad and immunocompromised Americans alike. Green betrayal Climate leftists see the bill as an eco‑fascist manifesto: a blueprint for resource control through environmental destruction, with the state's coercive machinery gearing up to enforce a fossil‑fuel future at gunpoint. Perhaps the ugliest manifestation of the 'beautiful bill' is in its astonishing show of capitalism's climate death drive, an embrace of catastrophe for private profit, where planetary care is too high a price to pay. The bill's architects also saw fit to annihilate the scaffolding of the clean‑energy transition. With the stroke of a pen, the EV tax credit that buoyed nascent electric‑vehicle markets vanishes, wind and solar developers find their pipeline choked off and carbon‑capture investments are relegated to the dustbin. Environmental finance specialists forecast the loss of up to 250,000 clean‑energy jobs, even as household electricity bills spike by double digits. In effect, the legislation slams on the brakes of climate progress while flooring the accelerator on fossil‑fuel extraction – an eco‑dead end if there ever was one. The bill quietly scraps much of the Biden administration's clean-energy agenda. Solar and wind tax credits are repealed, even as fossil fuel subsidies persist. Analysts warn that by punishing solar and wind generation the law will devastate energy grids in red states like Texas. The bill is an eco-political undoing: the countryside continues to flood and burn while lawmakers dismantle the very buffers — renewables, efficiency programs and green jobs – that could soften the blow. Instead of weaning us off coal and oil, Congress doubles down on drilling and emissions, casting our children as future sacrifices. The irony is cruel: at a moment of record wildfires and hurricanes, politicians fetishize fossil fuel profits. By design, the working forests and windmills of tomorrow become victims to drive short-term windfall. The bill's very 'beauty' is in its ritualised cruelty. It taps into a perverse collective glee, inviting supporters to revel in the punishment of the 'lazy' and 'undeserving,' all while the architects of the legislation themselves benefit. The broader lesson is clear: the Big Beautiful Bill is the Empire striking back (internally, on its own unwanted), wielding fiscal hammers and regulatory scalpel alike to carve out a new world order – one where the poor are expendable, the planet dispensable and the state an instrument of predatory elites. It is a monstrous legislative conflation of class warfare, climate sabotage and state violence – an apex of neoliberal authoritarianism.
