Trump is dragging our country into collapse

Mar 07, 2026

At approximately 9:30 this morning from inside the White House, the President of the United States took a phone call from CNN’s Dana Bash and confirmed something many of us have feared for months: while we are now involved in a full-blown war he started just a week ago in Iran, he is already planning his next takeover somewhere much closer to home. He has his eye on Cuba next.

“Cuba is gonna fall pretty soon, by the way, unrelated, but Cuba is gonna fall too. They want to make a deal so badly,” he told Bash. “They want to make a deal, and so I’m going to put Marco over there and we’ll see how that works out. We’re really focused on this one right now. We’ve got plenty of time, but Cuba’s ready, after 50 years.”

Then he added, as if he were describing the expansion of a real estate portfolio and not the fate of an entire country: “I’ve been watching it for 50 years, and it’s fallen right into my lap because of me. It’s fallen, but it’s nevertheless fallen right into the lap. And we’re doing very well.”

And just one day earlier, while holding an event to celebrate the visit of the 2025 Major League Soccer champions, Inter Miami CF, he went off on the same tangent and said it even more plainly. He told Rubio that Cuba would be his next project, that they just needed to finish Iran first, and that Cuba wants to make a deal “so badly, you have no idea.” Then he added, “We could do them all at the same time, but bad things happen if you watch countries over the years. You do them all too fast, bad things happen.”

That is, once again, the President of the United States speaking in riddles only he understands while telling us exactly what he plans to do to another country, and doing it the way someone talks about episodes of a reality show. Finish one storyline first. Then move on to the next one that is even more outrageous than the last.

Except these are not television episodes. These are real countries, real people, and real lives that will be upended by the war and violence that follows when powerful nations decide they have the right to take over other nations on a whim.

And the most disturbing part is the tone. There is a kind of excitement in the way he talks about it, as if each new conflict is another victory lap, another big reveal, another moment meant to dominate the headlines. That’s what this feels like. A man who spent decades living inside the world of reality television, now treating international conflict the same way. One spectacle after another. But this is not television. And he is not going to stop. Venezuela. Ecuador. Iran. Now Cuba. And most likely Greenland after that. He hasn’t forgotten about Greenland. He never forgets when he is denied something he wants.

We are watching him feed his ego and desperate need to be seen as powerful while taking country after country, while the rest of us watch the cost of living climb and the job market collapse around us.

And as much as he says any of this is about the economy or safety, it’s not really. It’s about Donald Trump building an empire and bigger bank accounts. And every country he targets, every war he starts, every conflict he refuses to end is costing us here at home in ways that are now impossible to ignore. Because during that same phone call this morning, Dana Bash asked the one question millions of Americans are asking: what about the price of gas? His answer was as dismissive as it was dishonest. “That’s all right,” he said. “It will be short term. It will go way down very quickly.” When she pushed back and pointed out that prices are already high, he simply denied it. “No, they’re not,” he said. “They’re up a little bit, not much. But it will drop to record lows.” That is a lie. It has always been a lie. And today, the numbers made that undeniable.

Let’s go back to August of 2024 with Trump standing behind a table of packaged food, milk, eggs, groceries, looking straight into the camera, and promising that the day he took office, prices would fall. “Immediately,” he said. “Day One.” He repeated it at the Republican National Convention. “We will drive down prices and make America affordable again.” He said it again after he won. “I won on groceries,” he told NBC. “I won the election based on that.” No new wars. Cheaper eggs. The greatest economy the world has ever seen. That was the promise. And almost immediately after being sworn in, the backpedaling began. “It’s hard to bring things down once they’re up,” he admitted. “You know, it’s very hard.” And yet he keeps pretending those promises were kept while the data keeps telling a different story.

Today, March 6, 2026, was the day the full economic picture finally came into focus. The United States lost 92,000 jobs in February. Economists had expected a gain of at least 50,000. Instead, we went backward. The unemployment rate rose to 4.4 percent. December’s jobs number, which had been reported as a gain of 48,000, was quietly revised to a loss of 17,000. January was revised down by another 4,000. Add it up, and we’ve been told 69,000 more jobs existed than actually did. And this isn’t a fluke. 2025 marked the first year since the aftermath of the 2008 financial collapse that saw five separate months of labor market contraction. Since Trump took office, the U.S. economy has averaged fewer than 5,000 new jobs per month. He has slashed the federal workforce by over 330,000 positions, an 11 percent cut. Long-term unemployment is now up to 25.7 weeks, the highest since 2021. Manufacturing just lost another 12,000 jobs. Healthcare lost 28,000. Transportation and warehousing are collapsing, down 157,000 jobs in a single year. And his war is making every single one of those numbers worse.

Oil broke $90 a barrel today, the highest in years. U.S. crude surged nearly 35 percent in a single week, the largest weekly spike in the history of oil futures trading, dating all the way back to 1983. Gas prices jumped 34 cents in just one week to $3.32 a gallon, the steepest weekly increase since the early days of the Ukraine invasion. Experts are warning oil could hit $100 by next week, and Qatar’s energy minister is saying it could top $150 if the war escalates further. And the President told the country this morning that prices aren’t high.

The Dow dropped 453 points. The S&P 500 fell 1.3 percent. The Nasdaq dropped 1.6 percent. All three indexes are now negative for the year. Mortgage rates jumped back to 6 percent, slamming the door on any hope of a housing recovery. Retail sales dropped again in January. And nearly everything we buy is still going up in price.

And it will come as no surprise that there are still industries making money. The oil companies. The weapons manufacturers. The people whose business model depends on permanent conflict. The people who profit every time he pushes another country into crisis. That is who is winning in Trump’s economy. Not us or our families.

And while the economy was bleeding out today, the President of the United States was sitting in a room with the CEOs of the largest weapons manufacturers in America, asking them to build more missiles. He posted about it himself on Truth Social: “We just concluded a very good meeting with the largest U.S. Defense Manufacturing Companies where we discussed Production and Production Schedules. They have agreed to quadruple Production of the ‘Exquisite Class’ Weaponry in that we want to reach, as rapidly as possible, the highest levels of quantity.” The companies at that table: BAE Systems. Boeing. Honeywell Aerospace. L3Harris Missile Solutions. Lockheed Martin. Northrop Grumman. Raytheon.

On the same day we learned just how bad the economy already is, while the president tried to convince us it was great, and while he committed more money for more weapons of war, his administration announced a $20 billion reinsurance program for oil tankers operating during the Iran war. More of our money. Flowing to corporations and wars decided by one person.

This is the pattern of every authoritarian war economy in modern history. It is not new. The leader promises prosperity and national greatness. The money flows to weapons and war. The industries closest to the regime get richer. And everyday people get crushed.

In Nazi Germany, Hitler promised full employment. He delivered it through a massive military buildup funded almost entirely by debt and deficit spending. By the late 1930s, nearly 60 percent of all government expenditure went to the military. Wages for average workers stagnated or fell. Consumer goods became scarce. The economy looked powerful on paper, but it was hollow underneath, an unsustainable machine that could only survive through conquest and expansion. Historian Adam Tooze called it “the wages of destruction.” Every new territory Hitler seized was an attempt to outrun an economy that was already a ticking time bomb. It ended in total collapse and the deaths of tens of millions of people.

The formula never changes. Convince people that you, and only you, can solve all their problems. Get them to believe that there are simple solutions to complex problems. Promise them the world. Spend limitless public money on war. Make sure your friends and donors get rich. And when the bill comes, when prices surge, jobs vanish, and savings are gutted, blame someone else. Blame immigrants. Blame the opposition. Blame the media. Blame the very people trying to hold power accountable. But never take responsibility or admit the truth. Because the entire machine depends on keeping ordinary people too exhausted, too overwhelmed, and too divided to realize who is actually robbing them. Trump is following this playbook step by step. And we are the ones paying for it. With our jobs. With our savings. With our grocery bills. And now, with our fellow Americans’ lives. Six have died so far in Trump’s cover-up war. How many more will it cost?

We wanted affordable healthcare, housing, and food. We wanted our children to get an education and grow up in peace. We wanted advancements in science and medicine. We wanted people to live longer and be healthier. We wanted the LGBTQIA+ community to have the same rights and safety as everyone else. We wanted progress toward ending racism. That is what we asked for. Instead, we are spending our money on missiles and oil tanker insurance and wars that no one voted for, while six members of our military come home in flag-draped coffins and the President says, “That’s the way it is.”

So what do we do now? We keep moving forward with everything we’ve been doing, but we do it louder, and we do it with more intention than ever before. We contact our representatives, and we tell them plainly: we are keeping count. Every dollar this administration has stolen, redirected, or funneled into wars and contracts that benefit the few at the expense of everyone else. We tell them we don’t want our money going to war. We don’t want more Americans killed in conflicts that Congress never authorized and the public never voted for. We want Congress, not one man, deciding when and where this country drops missiles, because that is what the Constitution requires. And if our representatives won’t demand that, we will find ones who will.

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