The Crack in the MAGA Economy
Trump’s fascist economics is backfiring and the rupture is happening in the American heartland.
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When Donald Trump first came to power in 2016, his chief henchman Steve Bannon bragged that the new era would be as “exciting as the 1930s.” That alone should have raised all the necessary alarm bells.
How could anyone long for a return to a decade of intense poverty, economic collapse and fascism? In that same interview, Bannon bragged that “darkness is good.”
We now see darkness descending on the Western world, and it is far from good. But as Leonard Cohen reminds us, there is a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. And there is a serious crack appearing in the gangster fascist regime.
Trump’s attempt to impose 1930s-style economic principles is having a serious impact on the economy and his base. We need to pay attention to this crack. It reminds Canadians that if we hold the line, we can get through this dark time.
The crack is Farmaggedon.
In a year of record harvests, the American farm belt is facing the loss of family farms and the dramatic deterioration of the rural economy. The causes are obvious – high input costs from Trump’s tariff war and collapsing markets.
Trump has brought the ideology of the dirty thirties to the rural heartland.
Trumponomics is based on two seriously bad 1930s economic principles.
The first is the Nazi vision of “autarky” – that a nation can go it alone by cutting ties with the weak liberal democracies.
In The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, author Benjamin Carter Hett writes:
“Autarky was the idea that the country could cut itself off completely from the world economy and rely on its own resources… Autarky was central to the Nazi’s political campaign, and the theme of freeing Germany from its dependence on a hostile world struck a chord with voters… Globalization was not a word anyone used in the 1920s or 30s, but people were familiar with its reality. More than anything, the Nazis were a nationalist protest against globalization.”
What the Nazis soon learned was that an economy without markets couldn’t make it. This necessitated a smash-and-grab foreign policy based on looting the resources and wealth of neighbouring nations.
The Trump version of autarky is to shakedown former allies like Canada to make us subservient to the economic whims of the United States.
The other 1930s-style approach that Trump has embraced is the tariff wall.
The Great Depression is often pegged as beginning on the morning of “Black Monday,” October 28, 1929, when the Wall Street market began a brutal slide. The Wall Street bloodbath of late October 1929 certainly had a major impact on the global economy, but in the new book 1929 Andrew Ross Sorkin writes that by the end of the year, nervous journalists and investors were breathing a sigh of relief that the worst might be over.
As the market began to rebound in early 1930, Congress passed the Hawley-Smoot Act, which raised tariffs on imported goods by 60%. This was America “going it alone” and being “great again.” Other nations immediately responded, and the result was a global economic catastrophe with factories shutting down, credit drying up and mass unemployment.
This is the “exciting” vision promoted by Bannon and the MAGA right. Once again, they are determined to put up the wall and go it alone.
When Bannon gave his 2017 interview about the exciting back-to-the-future promise of the 1930s, Trump was launching a full-on trade war with China.
A new study from the University of Illinois provides the numbers on what a train wreck the farm belt was. Following Trump’s unilateral declaration of economic war in 2017, the bloodletting on American farms was dramatic. The losses to soybeans were 71%, to wheat 61%, and to corn 88%. This led to losses of $14 billion in agricultural exports.
Trump didn’t learn any lessons from this debacle. He went all in with a reprise of the Smoot-Hartley plan with his so-called “Liberation Day” announcement of massive tariff walls. The impacts are now being felt dramatically in farm country.
American farmers are facing $44 billion (U.S.) in losses this year, and the agricultural trade deficit has jumped to $49 billion.
Like the 1930s, Trump has created the perfect domestic storm. The tariff war with Canada, Europe, China, etc, has had a huge impact on input costs on everything from machinery to fertilizer. Trump’s relentless attacks on his former allies are alienating purchasers in markets that American farmers must hold on to.
The result: plunging prices and rising costs.
Trump is pushing hard into the chaos by threatening a “severe” tariff on the Canadian potash that is vital to American farm production. Good luck with that, Donald. Such a move will result in the collapse of the U.S. farm economy.
He is now having to pump $11 billion in emergency funds to deal with the crisis that he has created.
On top of this, American consumers are taking a massive hit from Trump’s tariff war.
A new report shows that it has cost every U.S. household $1,100 in 2025 and will rise to $1,400 in 2026. Trump believed that the rest of the world would obediently go along and pay the gangster administration whatever Trump demanded.
That isn’t happening.
Countries like Canada, Brazil, Australia, and Mexico are moving into markets that were previously dominated by the American brand. Our allies know longer see the United States as a reliable partner.
This has resulted in real benefits for Canada.
We are witnessing a huge increase in corn exports – particularly to Europe, the UK, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland. An RBC report states Canada could increase global sales by 30% with the key element being to diversify from the American market.
At the same time, there has been a huge uptake in domestic production as Canadian farmers and entrepreneurs move into areas once dominated by the U.S. Domestic food security must be considered a vital strategic goal because, as economic losses mount south of the border, Trump will start to play hardball.
The only way we get through to the other side of this dark time is to diversify, hold the line and deny victories to an increasingly desperate MAGA machine. In the fight against the 1930 gangster revival, Canada must last one day longer and be one day stronger than Trump.
We’ve got this.
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