When the big depression of 1929 happened, I assumed it was just bad luck all round. But reading I have done recently is convincing me that it was the insatiable appetites of the economic upper-crust coming into a colliding course with the social structure they had set up.
It wasn't just enough to set up factories and schools; they had to find ways to keep the workers (that's us) healthy and happy. Franklin Roosevelt set up Social Security and other welfare systems so that everyone could aspire to a middle-class life, at least in the future. All of us would pay into a retirement savings plan, which the Federal Government would manage for us.
Not everyone was happy about this. The upper-middle-class—the people who owned businesses, and who believed that they were paying an unfair portion of the taxes— didn't like the aspirations of the workers, who hoped to better themselves. It took close to a century, until most Americans felt that Social Security, and Food Stamps, and Medicare and Medicaid were considered a part of a healthy society. But there still were people who thought any taxes were too much.
What Trump has tried to do—and largely succeeded—is to find a large set of scapegoats whom to blame for the dissatisfaction of all these anti-welfare people. It's the fault of Immigrants, first and foremost, then non-whites, then women, then Democrats, and so on. As long as his supporters hate these same categories of scapegoats, Trump is riding high!
Unfortunately, there is another group of people who are interested in what Trump does; these are the people who have funded Trump, and are hoping to make a lot of money from his economic plans.
Most of my readers know by now that these people have lots of investments in Wall Street. If Trump keeps the stock market going up and down, and if he tips his investor friends the wink about exactly when he's going to announce some good news, then they can quickly arrange to buy certain stocks just before he makes his announcement! Once the announcement is made, the value of those stocks shoot up, and the holdings of these speculators gains a lot of value.
Bad news works the same way: if Trump warns his cronies before he makes a bad news announcement, these fellows have enough time to sell off their stocks at reasonable prices. When the bad news is announced, the value of those stocks plummets, but it's too bad for whoever bought those stocks. Stock trading is a silly game anyway; people who do nothing but buy and sell stocks, hoping that their value is going up, very rarely make a killing—unless they know some inside information. Trump is making a game of creating inside information.
But to go back to the dismantling of the welfare services, and Medicare and social security. These are the most vile things that Trump has done; it is singling out people who live in poverty, to make life miserable for them. Many of these people do vote Democrat, but there is a lot of evidence that the GOP is planning to prevent them from voting. This will make a lot of people really see red. In the past, a lot of these people have taken this sort of beating at the hands of Trump and his MAGA buddies, and taken it lying down. This time, are they going to do the same? There's more of us than there is of them.
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