America in Freefall: A Rant on Empire, Tariffs, and the Delusion of Power

Nancy O'Brien Simpson

Photo: weather.gov by Полицейское управление Пунта-Горды, https://creativecommons.org/public-domain/pdm/

Смерч над рекой Пис во Флориде

The country is trembling, trembling in the teeth of its own delusion. I heard that voice, that yawn of a Treasury Secretary, and I nearly wept into my morning coffee—what comes out of that man’s mouth is not policy, it’s the sound of a dry leaf dragging across asphalt. Embarrassing, humiliating, a spectacle of a dying empire calling itself king while the court dissolves into dust.

He said China was “technically smart.” Can you believe that? Like we’re grading science projects in a 7th-grade classroom, and China just built a volcano that actually erupts. Seventy years ago, they were barefoot in the fields, Pearl Buck’s Good Earth digging its hunger deep into the soil, and now—now they’ve woven bullet trains like silk ribbons across the map while we still wait for Amtrak to not break down between Trenton and Philly.

China rose from the ash heap while we dug a hole and called it progress. They are not pretending to succeed. They have. And here we are, wagging fingers, chanting some incantation about numbers being untrustworthy. Even the IMF—no fan of Beijing—tells us they’re growing twice as fast. Five percent growth? While we crawl at two point something and call it a miracle?

And still, they smear them, spit at the mirror because the reflection shows a younger, sharper face. We used to build railroads. Now we build debt. Trillions, billions—paper castles that sway with every gust from the bond market’s twitch. Monday comes, panic strikes, and Wall Street wets itself. Wednesday follows, and suddenly the policy’s reversed like a drunk driver slamming into reverse on the freeway of history.

Tariffs are the crack in the windshield. The President opens economic war on the world like a circus barker inviting a crowd to watch him juggle flaming debt and raw steak. Desperation wears a suit and tie now. And when the debt ceiling trembles, when the market blinks, they flinch like schoolboys caught cheating, rushing to clean the chalkboard of their own arithmetic.

The Chinese smirk

The rest of the world sees it. The Chinese smirk, the Europeans half-mutter their doubts, but they know. They’ve been handed a gift. Trump, blustering through it all like he’s playing Monopoly with real cities, has given every other leader a scapegoat. "Blame me," he all but says. And they will. And it’ll ring truer than his own lies ever did.

You see it, don’t you? He’s not desperate. He’s calculated. He wants to cut taxes. He has to. Because that’s the only prayer left in the gospel of greed. He looked back into history—dug deep into 1776 through the smokestacks of World War I—and found the sweet scent of customs revenue. Tariffs. They financed the government before there was an income tax. And that light bulb went off in his brain—dim as it is, it flickered.

Tariffs don't hurt the barons

Tariffs don’t hurt the robber barons. Tariffs don’t tap the vaults of real estate kings and private equity phantoms. Tariffs fall like hammers on labor, on factories needing foreign steel, on workers buying things made far away because we don't make them here anymore.

Trump’s got this dream. A sepia photograph of William McKinley in a dollar-store frame. He thinks cutting taxes and raising tariffs is how we bring back the miracle. But he forgets—or never knew—that it wasn’t the tariffs that built industry. It was public investment. It was a government that tried, at least pretended, to give a damn about workers, infrastructure, futures.

But Trump isn’t reading The Good Earth or even The Wealth of Nations. He’s reading his own bank statement. And every line item says, “Keep the cash, screw the rest.” The robber barons of his dreams were villains in the novels we read in school. But he thinks they were heroes, legends, gods with gilded canes. So he cosplays Rockefeller, forgetting that monopolies don’t build—they strangle. They don’t nurture—they hoard.

So now we wait. Ninety days. Three months of limbo. Tariffs on, tariffs off—nobody can plan, invest, build. No one knows what tomorrow costs. And when the capitalists wait, Keynes told us, the rest of us suffer. The whole system’s held hostage by the few who hold the keys, and if they won’t turn them, the engine dies.

Inflation. Stagnation. Stagflation. Pick your poison—it’s all sour. And in the shadows of this catastrophe, the rich keep climbing. The tariffs are just a smokescreen to keep the spotlight off the real theft—the reengineering of the tax code into a personal ATM for the already obscenely wealthy.

So here we are. Watching an empire try to feed on its own myths. Confused by its own mirror. Terrified by a rising China not because of what China is, but because it reminds us what we no longer are: builders, dreamers, strivers.

The desperation isn’t just in the policy—it’s in the soul.

And the soul is tired.