My kingdom and all of my knights and horses to the journalist that asks Donald Trump live on television if his fantasy of a wave of new factories built in America includes factory jobs that pay a living wage.
Will they pay, dare I say it, a UNION wage?
Will Trump and his profit-obsessed Republican cult pay hundreds of thousands of new American factory workers the current union median earnings of $1,337 a week, which is a couple of hundred bucks higher than non-union workers? The labor force in Vietnam, Bangladesh, and China isn’t being paid $70,000 a year to produce our clothing and electronics.
But Trump and his Wall Street financiers and his Capitol Hill yes-men are going to ensure that White Alpha Male Americans (and child laborers) are paid that good salary, right? The same people that have refused to raise the $7.25 hourly federal minimum wage last set in 2009 are going to push for livable private-sector industrial wages?
Fuck no, they will not. But someone please get him on record explicitly promising such wages. Trump is peddling a 21st century version of the post-war economic boom that saw industrialization fuel growth of the middle class thanks to decent factory wages and defined-benefit pensions negotiated by trade unions. But that lies in direct opposition to modern Republican ideology of crushing organized labor and paying people as little as possible (or replacing them with automation robots and A.I.) to produce low-quality goods that don’t last.
It’s the usual Trump bullshit. His “golden age” rhetoric is built upon the lie that re-industrialization will drench the working class with new wealth.
Trump and his cronies see humanity, including Americans, as little more than a disposable labor force that exists to enrich and venerate them. They are the feudal lords, and we are the serfs. It’s why they oppose organized labor. The ruling class feels entitled to all profits and minimal costs.
Corporations are inherently too greedy to suddenly pay a living wage to the working class, and they also understand Americans will not pay the retail prices that come with a domestic living wage. A new iPhone will cost $2,300 under Trump’s tariff economy, per one estimate, and would cost $3,500 if the phones were built entirely stateside. U.S. households will pay up to $8,000 annually in new costs thanks to the Trump tariffs (which come atop needless austerity measures and destruction of federal government services and agencies).
(UPDATE: As soon as this was published, news broke that Trump jacked up the tariffs on China even higher while doing a 90-day pause on his import taxes for 90 days on many other nations — just the sort of jerk-around uncertainty that markets and corporations love. Either way, the fantasy of new factories remains nonsense.)
Bleating on about “buy American” sounds good until the cost of domestically produced goods and services enters the equation. There’s a reason the cheap crap from Temu and Shein is so popular – and those small-good/fast fashion entities are now getting hit by trade levies that were previously exempt from. Perhaps that’s good on a macro level because of environmental and humanity concerns, but as part of Trump’s wider project, it’s simply more mindless chaos.
Americans are used to cheap goods made possible by the low wages paid to workers in Asia and elsewhere, which also is the subject of a separate moral debate (read this thread for insightful thoughts on textile production). When something that costs pennies to produce overseas suddenly includes $25 an hour labor, there is a downstream retail sticker shock. And in a supposedly free-market economy with free trade, competition is supposed to drive down prices for consumers.
That’s another lie, of course, as we do not actually have a free-market economy (and free trade is being immolated before our eyes). It’s a mixed market, if I am being charitable, and it’s heavily manipulated by the ruling class for competitive and personal financial benefit. They pay off Congress and the White House to get better deals and protections and to fuck over workers and consumers, something that Trump wants to take to mob racket levels.
If there’s an animating force in what Trump is doing, it’s an 18th century desire to make himself a sort of global god-emperor that commands all of the planet’s trade – and all power and wealth that flows from that – by forcing industries and nations to come grovel to him, seeking relief via payoffs and fealty to him personally. But he’s going to let everyone stew in misery for a while first.
Meanwhile, Congress has abandoned its control of tariffs and is instead seeking to provide relief … to big business via fresh corporate tax cuts. Nothing for the people. “Oceania had always been in a trade war with Eastasia!”
It’s why he’s so obsessed with tariffs despite a few hundred years of hard evidence that they will be a gargantuan financial disaster for the United States and the world. Tariffs are costs passed onto the consumer. This is Econ 101. Until Trump, a bedrock of Republican ideology was free trade that avoided these needless costs. Like everything else Trump touches, that died.
Now, the GOP is meekly standing aside, muttering quietly as electoral doom rises in the distance while Trump usurps tariff powers from Congress and slaps enormous new duties willy-nilly on anyone and everything. Even islands of nothing but penguins. Like everything with Trump, it’s sloppy and foolish and will hurt people for no sound reason other than the vindictive madness of a rotting, senile old buffoon that’s convinced he’s king.
Fox News, as the official regime propaganda outlet, is working unpaid overtime to normalize the tariff disaster, plunging markets, and bond worries and will certainly look around for scapegoats to blame when the crisis results in a profound national tragedy. Maybe it’s the Jews. Or Biden. Or Marxists. Or Ukraine. Or immigrants. Or a teenage junior varsity trans water polo player. Or perhaps it’s the fault of those deadbeat woke penguins that your 401K is gone. You’ll just have to work in a New Model Trump Factory until you die, and thank him for it.
Obviously, these factories and jobs are never going to actually appear. I have no idea if Trump truly believes they will, and it ultimately doesn’t matter. His sickly, elderly ass won’t live long enough to find out. Experts say the economic instability caused by his remarkably mistake-ridden tariffs make factories less likely to be built here. And if factories are built, they will service to enrich the 1 percent and not workers or consumers. Wash, rinse, repeat.
It would be wise for independent media, Democrats, Leftists, and other regime critics to keep pounding on the factory jobs issue as part of a broader strategy that emphasizes Trump’s criminality, his fascism, his lies, his cruelty, and his economic bungling. People are pissed about all of it, not just fucking egg prices.
We’re living inside a boiler, and the steam pressure is nearing the breaking point. Trump is vowing to not back down on the tariffs and seemingly doesn’t give a fuck that 401Ks and jobs are being wiped out and costs are rising. Like Hitler commanding fictional armies on a map inside his Berlin bunker as the Red Army nears in April 1945, Trump is not living in reality while the rest of us suffer. He is not secretly wiser than history’s great economists, and he’s not wiser than history itself.
Trump is simply a dumber, uglier Herbert Hoover and is making us all poorer. Even if you don’t own stocks and bonds, the odds are that your job and life are inexorably bound to the whims of the markets. Everything is about to get more expensive.
There’s no reason to build a new Acme Orphan Crushing Widgets LLC factory if no one can afford orphan-crushing widgets. And anyway, it would take many years for new factories to rise, and the reckoning from the damage inflicted by Trump’s global trade war will occur long before any theoretical orphan-crushing widget plants starts operating in Indianapolis or Dallas or East St. Louis.
Who would work in these new sweat shops and Dark Satanic Mills, particularly as Trump’s Gestapo deports not just criminals but protected immigrants and a huge swath of our cheaper labor workforce, documented or not?
Why, it’ll be all the fired federal works! That’s per a recent statement from Treasury Secretary Steve Bessent: “We are shedding excess labor in the federal government … that will give us the labor that we need for the new manufacturing.”
Turns out, the Trump regime is not only rent-seeking mercantilists but also Maoist cultural revolutionaries that plan to force fired IRS clerks to work in textile sweatshops owned by private equity. If there are not enough sacked federal workers, there will be millions of others of out of work thanks to The Big Beautiful Trump Recession.
A social media gag going around lately is that MAGA voters feel betrayed because they voted for him just for the racism and lib-owning, and now they can afford only to lease the libs. They didn’t vote for the sweeping economic destruction that he’s been promising for decades. But the reality is, that’s exactly what they knowingly voted for. Racism and cruelty come with built-in costs, and now we’re all going to suffer for it. We’re all Faust at the end of his bargain now.
The broader MAGA movement, with Trump as the gold-plated calf at the center, is a lethal slurry of pure uncut racism, misogyny, nativism, anti-science cranks, various swindlers and crooks and profiteers, but also (as the political writer Jon Ganz notes) a cabal of Murray Rothbard fanbois that are pushing radical libertarianism or anarcho-capitalism. Those are the guys destroying government agencies and want to take away Social Security, etc.
This Noah’s ark of weird Silicon Valley fascists, cultural far-right Red Guards, and economic terrorists are whispering into Trump’s ear, and he’s too stupid to understand anything but supplicating praise. I suspect the leader of all this is Stephen Miller, who is one of the most repugnant, repulsive oily hyenas in American political history. He fills the vulgar Roy Cohn spot in Trump’s inner orbit.
Project 2025 is the loose framework for a coalition of ultimately divergent right-wing interest groups. Now that Project 2025 is being implemented, that coalition is beginning to fray and collapse as fatal differences emerge (Musk v. Navarro, Musk v. Lutnick, et al). Turns out, hating non-whites and women and LGBTQ people isn’t enough upon which to govern a modern nation. And as the regime cruelly bungles everything and grows increasingly fascist, the general public is angrily rejecting an unpopular agenda.
Several million people gathered around the nation to protest Trump and Musk last week. More rallies are planned, and as the weather improves in the Midwest and Northeast, expect those protests to increase in numbers. And anger. With Congress and the courts failing us, salvation will come only via a mass pushback by the people. The movement is building much faster than I ever thought it could. This summer could look like 1967-68 across America, but with overly-tariffed penguins in the vanguard.
The Trump era will not last, but it will suck as long as it does. And the blame falls entirely on Donald Trump and the people that enabled him. Do not let them off the hook.
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Unpaid Bills 
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