David A. Stockman - Trumped! A Nation on the Brink of Ruin... And How to Bring It Back

For Jennifer, Victoria, Rachel and Robert.

FIRST THERE WERE 17. THEN LITTLE MARCO, LOW ENERGY JEB AND LYIN Ted were gone. At length, there was one. And now there is even a chance he may become president.

Donald Trumps wildly improbable capture of the GOP nomination and rise toward the White House is surely the most significant upheaval in American politics since Ronald Reagan.

Yet the rise of Trumpand Bernie Sanders toovastly transcends ordinary politics. In fact, it reaches deep into a ruined national economy that has morphed into rank casino capitalism under the misguided policies and faithless rule of the Washington and Wall Street elites.

This epic deformation has delivered historically unprecedented setbacks to the bottom 90% of American households. They have seen their real wealth and living standards steadily deteriorate for several decades now, even as vast financial windfalls have accrued to the elite few at the very top.

In fact, during the last 30 years, the real net worth of the bottom 90% has not increased at all. At the same time, the top 1% has experienced a 300% gain while the real wealth of the Forbes 400 has risen by 1,000%.

Thats not old-fashioned capitalism at work; its the fruit of a perverted regime of printing press money and debt-fueled faux prosperity that has been foisted on the nation by the bipartisan ruling elites.

To be sure, the proximate cause of this years election upheaval is similar to that in Reagans time. Back then, an era of drastic bipartisan mis-governance generated an electoral impulse to sweep out the Washington stables.

Now, however, it is not just the Beltway political class that is under attack. The very foundations of American economic life are imperiled. What remained of healthy market capitalism in Reagans time is no more.

It has been battered by 30 years of madcap money printing at the Fed. It labors under the $50 trillion of new public and private debt generated by that monetary eruption. And it staggers from the destructive blows of serial financial bubbles.

These bubbles have self-evidently resulted in a destructive boom-and-bust cycle in the financial system, but also much more. Bubble Finance has drained productivity and efficiency from the Main Street economy and has channeled vast resources to speculators and wasteful malinvestments.

Unfortunately, this policy-generated rot at the foundations of the U.S. economy has bred a profusion of public fears and scapegoats. Illegal immigrants, bad trade deals and the unfair mercantilist practices of China and many other foreign governments have taken the blameespecially in Donald Trumps campaign patter.

But these scapegoats are either irrelevant or just symptoms. The real problem is not free trade or free movement of people.

To the contrary, Americas faltering economy was caused by the policy machinations of Washington, D.C., not at the illegal crossing routes on the Arizona border or the containership berths at Long Beach. For more than three decades, the nations central bank has flooded the U.S. and world economies with too much free money (dollar liabilities) and Washington politicians have accommodated the Beltway racketeers and the countrys huge entitlement constituencies with too much free booty.

So the real disease is bad money and towering debts. The actual culprits are the Wall Street and Washington policy elites who have embraced statist solutions, which aggrandize their own power and wealth.

That much, at least, Donald Trump has right. Throwing out the careerists, pettifoggers, hypocrites, ideologues, racketeers, power seekers and snobs who have brought about the current ruin is at least a start in the right direction.

Trump is directionally correct on another great matter as well. The American Imperium abroad has been a fiscal, foreign policy and moral catastrophe, as we outline in depth in .

When the Cold War ended 25 years ago, NATO should have been disbanded and Washingtons vast war machine should have been drastically shrunkeneven as the rest of the so-called free world was invited to share in the pursuit of peace and in shouldering the burdens of its own security.

But what we got, instead, were the Clinton/Bush/Obama wars of intervention and occupation. They have resulted in failed states, sectarian carnage and terrorist blowback, not a more secure America.

Worse still, political demagogues, including Trump, have fanned public fears that the barbarism Washington unleashed in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and elsewhere now threatens every city and town in America. That is a gross exaggeration, to say the least, as we demonstrate later in this book.

Yet there is absolutely no doubt that the arrogant and insular group-think of the Imperial City is the cause of the murderous chaos that rages across the greater Middle East and beyond. Americans are fearful because Washingtons reckless and destructive foreign interventions have not made them more secure; it has put them in harms way.

So far, Donald Trumps solutions have been largely rhetorical, inchoate and often far too bellicose. But he has pinned the tail where it belongs. That is, on the imperial notion that America is the indispensable savior-nation and policeman of the world when Washington should be focused on Americas homeland security first.

What made America great once upon a time, of course, were free markets, fiscal rectitude, sound money, constitutional liberty, non-intervention abroad, minimalist government at home and decentralized political rule.

Whether Donald Trump gets that part of the equation remains to be seen, and already there is much to suggest that he wont.

Then again, the GOP establishment has betrayed these principles entirely; the Democrats are clueless; and the mainstream media and punditry is overtly hostile.

So if the ideals of world peace, capitalist prosperity and constitutional liberty are to survive at all, its up to The Donald.

Admittedly, that seems like cold comfort. There is much that is dark, disturbing and authoritarian about the Trump personality and candidacy.

But a nation that has been Trumped is a people coming back to life. Americans dont want to take it anymore. Instead, they want their existing rulers to take a permanent hike.

Thats a damn good start, and it is the outlaw campaign of Donald J. Trump that has finally lit the flame of rebellion.