It was a surreal week, bursting with surreal news generated by the surreal idiot who sits in the White House, but maybe the most surreal headline of all was the one I saw Thursday morning telling me that Costco was rationing motor oil. The limit they’ve set is very likely more than your average motorist needs, but still. Rationing! Am I in England in the 1950s? And on top of that, the price has nearly doubled since April, to $58 for a 10-quart pack.
Or maybe it was the news that diesel had topped $6 a gallon. Before the war in Iran, it was about $3.60 a gallon. Some stations, in fact, are out of diesel. That’s right, on the signs that normally list the price per gallon of diesel fuel, it just says “Out.” Diesel powers trucks and delivery vans and tractors and other farm equipment. (Harvest season is around the corner, by the way.) Also freight trains. And buses and ships and barges and tugboats. And bulldozers and backhoes and cranes, and I guess that also means forklifts—you know, the kind seen this week crashing repeatedly into the Kennedy Center. The nation’s, and the world’s, commerce, in other words, runs on diesel gasoline.
For years, we’ve wondered whether American democracy would survive Donald Trump. We still do, of course, and by the way, if you haven’t read Judge Michael Luttig’s terrifying piece on that subject that we posted last week, do so immediately (well, after you finish this). But now, we need to fret that capitalism may not survive Trump, and that between now and January 2029, assuming the GOP doesn’t go Twenty-Fifth Amendment on him, he’ll single-handedly bring not only the American but the global economy to its knees.
America is finally coming to terms with just what an ignoramus Trump is. In his first term, he inherited a steady economy with a record 75 consecutive months of job growth. Until the pandemic hit, he didn’t do anything to screw it up. He inflicted horror after horror on the nation in other realms, but until March 2020, his economy was fine to good.
But that was a different Trump. That was the “leashed” Trump—the Trump who still had a few grown-ups in the room who were willing to save him from his worst impulses. In term two, we have the unleashed Trump, surrounded by people who say only “yes” and tell him how brilliant he is. They validate every major decision he makes, and every major decision the unleashed Trump has made has been calamitous.
The first-term tariffs, mediated through more cautious figures like then–Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin (who made his real feelings about tariffs known in early 2025), were comparatively modest. They didn’t do the economy any good, but they also didn’t do much long-term harm.
But these tariffs, these unleashed ones—they’re a disaster. Wall Street hates them, Main Street hates them, farmers hate them, consumers hate them, China hates them, Canada hates them, the markets and bond traders hate them, everybody hates them. Even the normally toadyish Supreme Court said it hated them. A new poll from the Cato Institute confirms all this.
Trump’s other major decision, of course, was the war in Iran, which has been a top-to-bottom disaster. The Strait of Hormuz, no matter what he says, is effectively closed. On Monday, four commodity ships passed through the strait, compared to the prewar normal of 120, 130. And now of course, on the other side of the Arab Peninsula, Iran has the Houthis seizing Saudi pipelines and facilities. Saudi King MBS asked Trump for help. He said no. Twice.
And that’s why diesel prices are headed toward $7 a gallon. They’re already $8.35 in California. As California accounts for nearly 15 percent of the U.S. economy, that’s a pretty big deal. So much of our produce comes from California. Produce prices were already rising over the summer—after all, growing produce requires fertilizer, and getting it to us requires diesel gas to power those refrigerated trucks. A bag of baby spinach or mixed greens runs what, $2.99? Picture that at $4.29 in time for Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Finally, there’s just the general chaos that Trump creates on a daily basis. Every day, he enrages one world leader or another. Every day, he says or does something that makes the global situation more tenuous, and that weakens the United States. And has he met his match in Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney or what? One thing he did not expect was a leader of a soft little icy appendage he viewed as the fifty-first state being smarter and savvier and far more respected around the world than he is.
If a human being with normal cognitive development was presiding over this mess, we could reasonably hope that he’d recognize what has gone wrong and change. But Trump is not a normally developed human being. In an interview with Chris Hayes Thursday night, Maggie Haberman, who knows Trump’s congealed brain as well as anyone, said that she estimates he spends 70 percent of his time on the matter of his monuments—the arch, the ballroom, the aforementioned Kennedy Center. When he does bother to turn his attention to the economy, he says that it’s the best in the history of the country and that gas prices will come down rapidly as soon as X thing happens, which never happens.
In other words, given normalcy, we could hope that a president would huddle with his advisers and ask, What can we do to get out of this mess? Such a president would change course. But changing course requires two things. First, experimentation with ideas that don’t fit comfortably within his preconceived worldview. Second, admission that he might have been wrong about something. Obviously, Trump is capable of neither of those things.
The head of the Postal Service announced Thursday that work has stopped on developing systems to support Trump’s attack on mail-in voting. Looks like we’ve dodged that bullet. There will be more to come, perhaps culminating in the Luttig scenario. Or perhaps culminating in some elaborate attempt to steal the 2028 election. This will never stop.
So far, though, the guardrails of democracy have more or less held. But what about the guardrails of the economic system? They are: a Congress that conducts real oversight and demands accountability; a class of corporate and financial leaders who actually put the good of the country ahead of the next tax cut or earnings statement; a well-regulated market system that is set up to punish short-term excess and wealth creation for the few and reward efforts to produce shared prosperity. Right now, we have none of those things.
Democracy just might survive Trump. But it’s looking more and more like capitalism might not. It wouldn’t be the first time the system was brought to the brink of ruin by men who claim to worship it (see 1929). When will we ever learn?
