To many of us Americans, it feels as if the world has been turned upside down. Why?
First of all, we are torn between two radically different truths, the MAGA truth and the Democrat truth. Those two truths are what led Newt Gingrich, a person I’ve worked with, to say on Wednesday, June 4, that there is “a cultural civil war underway.”
In the MAGA world, our president proclaims on Truth Social that “because of tariffs, our economy is booming.” And a White House press release says that, “President Trump is Supercharging the U.S. Economy.”
But Democrats like me see an economic collapse in the making. Why? According to us Democrats, our president’s roughly sixteen changes in tariffs in just five months have had disastrous consequences. Foreign investors are growing increasingly leery of our stability.
They have loaned us 8.5 trillion dollars. They have financed our national debt. Now, according to Democrat Stephanie Ruhle on MSNBC, we risk these foreign lenders pulling out.
And Ruhle points out that the rate foreign lenders are charging the USA for long-term loans is climbing. The higher rates climb, the more money we will have to pay every year just to stay afloat.
In fact, every year, we currently pay 949 billion dollars in interest. Almost a trillion dollars. That figure is triple what it was in 2020. And with the Big, Beautiful Bill, that amount is about to go up.
What’s more, our dollar is falling against gold. In the past year it’s crashed by 45%. Which means really big inflation could be right around the corner.
But that’s the least of our problems. Just a few months ago, our stock market lost 6.6 trillion dollars in value in a mere two days. Some Democrats believe that the more the world is appalled by our president and his wildly gyrating tariff policy, the more likely another crash becomes.
What’s more, the more debt crises and threats of a government shutdown we go through, the more we spook the international investors we rely on. And our next debt-ceiling crisis is coming in only two months, in August.
But the precariousness of our economy is just one reason the world is feeling upside down. There’s another.
We are no longer regarded as the most powerful nation in the world. In fact, we are being laughed at. An official Chinese state video called “Never Kneel Down” portrays the USA as a “small stranded boat.” That video has gone viral.
So has a new term coined on Monday, June 2nd, by Robert Armstrong, a columnist for England’s Financial Times. That term is TACO. It stands for Trump Always Chickens Out. And TACO has become a wildly popular buzzword.
But that’s not the end of the mockery. North Korea calls us a “paper tiger.” A tiger that threatens, but has no bite. And Iran’s Supreme leader, yatollah Ali Khamenei, said today about our nuclear negotiations, negotiations in which we demand that Iran discard its nuclear weapons uranium enrichment program, “The rude and arrogant leaders of America repeatedly demand that we should not have a nuclear program. [But] …They cannot do anything about this.”
That doesn’t sound like what we have been accustomed to: fear and respect for American might. Meanwhile, for the last five years, China has used the slogan “East rising and West declining.” Now, in the showdown between our president and China’s Xi Jinping, China seems to be winning.
Among other things, Beijing is bringing us to our knees by choking off our supply of rare earth minerals and high performance permanent magnets. The resulting crisis has forced Ford to shutter its Explorer plant in Chicago for a week and threatens Stellantis and General Motors, not to mention the American factories of Mercedes Benz and BMW.
Even in military might, we are lagging. China and Russia have had hypersonic weapons, weapons that travel over ten times the speed of sound, for seven years. Our troops haven’t got a single hypersonic missile.
And China is developing hypersonic drone networks, smart swarm weapons, and drone carriers transporting 100 drones each. What’s more, China is producing drones by the millions. In other words, China has weapons we are utterly unprepared for.
No wonder Iran’s Supreme Leader calls us “a regime in decline.” Others agree. Way back in 2022, Harper’s Magazine ran a cover proclaiming that “The American Century is Over.” And Chinese media use the January 6th riot to prove without a doubt that, in their words, “Western democracy is a failure.”
Adding to our confusion is a simple fact. We were once the leaders of the free world. Now we seem to be switching sides. A strange relationship has been making headlines all over the world, the “bromance” between Vladimir Putin and the leader of the USA, Donald Trump. It’s a sign that Donald Trump is trying to move us from a constitutional democracy to an autocracy, a dictatorship. And it’s a sign that President Trump is trying to align the USA with the bad guys, leaders-for-life like Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un.
So the “cultural civil war” Newt Gingrich talks about is just one of the things that’s turning all that we’ve known during your lifetime and mine upside down, inside out, and backwards. Yes, just one.
References:
https://www.mid.ru/en/foreign_policy/news/1957107/
Xi Jinping’s “East is rising, West is declining” narrative: https://globalvoices.org/2025/03/08/chinese-president-xi-jinpings-prediction-of-a-rising-east-and-a-declining-west-is-shared-by-odd-believers-amid-donald-trumps-isolationist-policy/
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/04/world/middleeast/iran-nuclear-uranium-trump.html
Saudi Arabia’s openness to yuan-based oil trade with China: https://www.scmp.com/economy/global-economy/article/3277788/saudi-arabia-open-petroyuan-closer-china-ties-minister-says
BRICS expansion to include Saudi Arabia, Iran, and UAE: https://en.mehrnews.com/news/232366/BRICS-security-chiefs-meeting-held-with-Iran-s-participation
China and Russia’s advancements in hypersonic weapons: https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/hypersonics-and-alliances/
Russia and China’s leading role in hypersonic innovation: https://fortune.com/2024/03/15/russia-china-hypersonic-innovation-holding-us-back-politics-tech/
China’s evaluation of Russia’s use of hypersonic weapons in Ukraine: https://www.rand.org/pubs/commentary/2024/01/china-evaluates-russias-use-of-hypersonic-daggers-in.html
U.S. lagging behind in weapons development: https://www.cpr.org/2024/09/21/u-s-lags-behind-china-and-russia-in-hypersonic-weapons-colorado-rep-doug-lamborn-says/
https://www.specialeurasia.com/2025/03/24/united-states-polarisation/
https://www.politico.eu/article/usa-popularity-collapse-worldwide-trump-return/
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/trump-americas-coming-age-instability
BRICS expansion and future world order perspectives: https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/03/brics-expansion-and-the-future-of-world-order-perspectives-from-member-states-partners-and-aspirants
Saudi Arabia’s consideration of yuan for oil sales: https://www.wsj.com/articles/saudi-arabia-considers-accepting-yuan-instead-of-dollars-for-chinese-oil-sales-11647351541
https://fixedincome.fidelity.com/ftgw/fi/FIYieldTable
https://ycharts.com/indicators/10_year_treasury_rate
https://www.indmoney.com/blog/us-stocks/nasdaq-in-bear-market
https://www.wagento.com/wagento-way/2025-us-stock-market-crash/
https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/latestreleases/202406/29/content_WS66800cfcc6d0868f4e8e8b15.html
https://www.marketplace.org/story/2025/06/04/chinas-curbs-rare-earths-exports-hurting-carmakers
https://quincyinst.org/2022/07/13/imperial-detritus-henry-luces-dream-comes-undone/
https://harpers.org/archive/2022/07/what-comes-after-the-american-century/
https://time.com/7263996/the-u-s-no-longer-the-worlds-only-superpower/
https://www.newsweek.com/peak-trump-bromance-dead-chaos-remains-opinion-2078620
https://www.splinter.com/trump-and-putins-bromance-is-on-the-rocks
https://link.motherjones.com/public/34085783
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in scientific journals and in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute