The Sharp Turn: Global Collapse Picks Up Speed

From tariffs to temperature rise: the compounding chaos of a collapsing world order

I called it.

“We are less than a week from Trump 2.0 and some unknown, but surely brief, time of normalcy before society gets weaker and somehow slightly worse. I am very confident that just due to the brazen, authoritarian and outright weird actions of the 2nd Trump presidency America is going to quickly shift for the shittier. It’s not that we’ll have a sort of immediate catastrophe, it’s just that we’ll have one of those global cultural awakenings to the “system” not being as resilient or impenetrable as we thought it was.” - The Stillness of Impending Change: Navigating Collapse and Clarity

When I started this piece, we were just six weeks into the Trump presidency, and we got:

• An executive order declaring Trump and the AG are the final say on interpreting law, not the courts.

• Complete dismantling of the federal workforce—for example, firing 4,000+ park rangers and leaving just 3 to monitor Yellowstone.

• A tweet from the official White House account with the statement “Long Live The King” and a picture of Trump wearing a crown.

• Inflation is back, and those precious eggs are now 8 bucks a dozen!

• A Nazi salute.

• Trying to actually make Canada into a state (what the actual fuck?... how do you even do that?)

• Republicans have a great plan to finally do the one thing they’ve always, always, always dreamed of—cut American “entitlements” to pay for tax cuts for the rich, while not having to deal with the consequences of it (because, see previous point about the White House calling Trump king).

Now we’re three months into the presidency and I’m finishing this piece significantly poorer than I was when I started it because the US has declared war economically on…literally the rest of the world?! I guess the next “X” in our overshoot graph really did come along, but it wasn’t Trump’s election—it’s this monumentally catastrophic (and stupid) “Amerexit” from the entire rest of the world. Meanwhile, the US Government is disappearing political dissidents inside the country, clearly working their way up to extraditing U.S. citizens to a gulag in El Salvador. Trump has also recently clarified that he “was not joking” about running for a third term.

“Anyone with half a brain can recognize that the United States is descending into Hungarian-style fascism incredibly quickly,” is what I initially wrote, but even that regime didn’t move nearly this fast. Whereas the reaction of the markets and the courts were key checks on Trump’s first administration, it’s clear that this time around, Trump has absolutely no regard for the economy or American courts in order to transition us into something.

What is that something? It seems to be on the tip of most liberals’ tongues, but it’s never said clearly. “Oligarchy,” “Fascism,” “Authoritarianism” are all ways we describe the next thing based on what’s come before—but I’d say the term Fortress America 2.0 is the most apt: a plan to keep the important bits of the US government running (the military) so that the important people can stay comfortable, even as the planet burns and the global human population begins to decline for the first time since the mid-14th century.

Fortunately for the rest of the world, Americans seem to have chosen the dumbest fucking people in the country to carry it out.

Climate Collapse Has Accelerated

The backdrop for all this recent political chaos has been a catastrophically warming planet. We’ve blown past the +1.5°C global goalpost and are already seeing clear evidence of runaway climate change. The oceans aren’t retaining as much heat as they used to, forests are becoming carbon emitters instead of carbon sinks, and cloud and ice coverage is shrinking, decreasing the planet’s albedo. All this results in what seems like an accelerating year-on-year increase in global temperature.

This means that prior modeling done in the 2010s was likely much too conservative, and our climate will collapse faster than we anticipated.

The experience of climate collapse has also changed for me. Weather anomalies used to be something that happened primarily in the hotter months—heatwaves, wildfires, hurricanes. Now, the symptoms of climate change are even present in the winter.

The snowfall patterns in Denver have noticeably changed since I moved here, which is crazy because I’ve been here less than 10 years. We used to have these early snowstorms in October—the past two years we haven’t. We used to get days of real snow, the kind that makes it hard to drive—I can’t remember a day like that in recent years. Whenever we have a snowstorm now, it’s clearly arctic air seeping down into the Rockies. It’s cold for a week max, and then it gets oddly warm again.

Every time it snows—every time it’s actually cold in the winter—I feel a pang of relief that something at least resembling the climate I grew up in is still functioning. To actually look at the climate data at this point is like that moment when you’re driving, you see someone is about to hit you, but you know that the collision is a physical inevitability. That “Oh yeah, we’re about to be in a fucking car crash, I have exited routine life” mode. It’s a lot like how we all feel right now looking at our investment portfolios after Liberation Day.

The Unreality of the Elite

This is the most time I’ve ever spent between starting and finishing an article. When I started it was supposed to be a quick check-in and “I told you so” like my previous dispatch. Then it was going to be an explainer of Fortress America, the military’s strategy for dealing with impending climate change that the Trump administration seemed to be accelerating—especially with all this “we’re going to be invading the northern hemisphere that will supposedly become more arable and resource-rich as the planet warms” talk.

But after Liberation Day, I think we’re just being led by people who live in unreality and any further analysis is just goobly-gook.

Elon Musk, the electric car guy, has just taken too much ketamine and his brain has been seriously fried by his social media addiction. He thinks he’s in a simulation, he’s won it, and so—whatever for the NPCs.

Trump has narcissistic personality disorder and now dementia. He functionally cannot see beyond his own ego. A normal person might actually be punished for that, but the American political system has consistently elevated Donald Trump because of his narcissistic traits, not in spite of them.

Right now, Donald Trump has the world’s attention. He is living the narcissist’s dream life. He also has a serious axe to grind with a majority of Americans for his loss in the 2020 election, when he experienced narcissistic collapse and has never recovered.

The rest of the administration is a complete reflection of these two people. Multiple professionals who went to Ivy League colleges and understand basic math put out charts calculating tariffs as a result of trade imbalance with countries a fraction of our size. People with asset portfolios that were tanking while Trump was in the Rose Garden announcing even worse tariffs than the market imagined were clapping. They are a people living in unreality.

So do they have a grand plan to tank the economy and scoop up the assets again? Do they want to weaken the dollar against global currencies so Americans become a cheaper labor force like the Chinese? Does Trump want to worsen economic or political conditions to instigate unrest and finally get rid of American political dissidents by invoking the Insurrection Act?

I dunno. Yes, maybe, probably all of the above.

Clearly, the United States government is acting with a singular focus to empower Donald Trump and disempower the civil liberties of literally everyone else. The problem is that the people in power are also incredibly inept, so it also acts very chaotically and irrationally.

To such an extent that the U.S. government is not just its own people’s problem—so now we have the rest of the economic powerhouses of the world finally accepting that they will have to remove themselves from the U.S. hegemony. Hence 10-year U.S. treasury bond prices spiking literally as I write this newsletter. Even though the stock market is tanking, no one wants to hold U.S. debt, which subsidizes our living standards.

It’s inevitable that the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency will decline as more countries pull away from trading with the U.S. because of these stupid fucking tariffs. But the real kicker is—there’s nothing waiting to replace it. Yes, the U.S. is about to get poorer. But so is the rest of the world, now that the biggest consumer market on Earth is effectively off the table.

No winners in this war, just losers.

In my very first post I explained the concept of ecological overshoot, and walked through why I am certain we humans have currently overshot the carrying capacity of the planet. In doing so I showed this graph tracking deer populations as they overshot a national park in Arizona.

Each X on this graph represents a catastrophic event that foreshadowed the inevitable collapse. When presenting this graph, I predicted that in 2024 we would elect Trump and that would be our X. I was close—but I’d amend that to say that April 2nd, 2025 (Liberation Day) was truly the next X on our graph.

We won’t know it now, but we will a decade from now.

This is The Break

In 2008, the global economy crashed and never really recovered materially. But due to the intervention of the U.S. government led by Obama, our heavily financialized economy was revived such that financial products could give the illusion of growth.

You know what this feels like because you experienced it during COVID. Trump and Biden’s approach to propping up the U.S. markets through the pandemic was incredibly similar: buy private debt with public money and give public money to private companies. Then, somehow, wealth inequality increases, and life just seems to get a little bit shittier for everyone—and the pain is spread out over a couple years.

But what Trump has done this time is very different. He has fundamentally broken the material economy by putting a huge, sudden, and unexpected amount of friction in global trade—by choice. This disruption is so extreme that financial assets can’t continue to be this detached from the actual material trade they’re supposed to represent.

So what we’re going to see is financial markets finally reflect the reality most Americans already know. We haven’t really seen a growth in the material conditions of the working class since like the ’70s. Due to the social and material degradation of our country from pollution and the forces of late-stage capitalism, we are simply not as productive as we were before—and that trend will continue as global population stagnates, resources take more energy to acquire, and the climate becomes unstable.

A World of Less Control

So, anyway, what’s the point of today’s dispatch? Well, my last dispatch ended saying this:

“Things that happen out there seem to have a somewhat indirect relationship to things that happen here. Yes they shape the context of here but something like my mood, my preparedness, my discipline and health (of myself and people I care about) seem to really shape the experience of here. I know that’s partially privilege, partially delayed cause and effect - but I also seem to only be able to impact things in my immediate vicinity so I don’t see the point in obsessing over things outside of it.” - The Stillness of Impending Change: Navigating Collapse and Clarity

I’d say we’ve now gone past that point, unfortunately.

If you were privileged, your life hadn’t changed much since the second Trump presidency began. But now you’re likely to have been invested in the markets, so you’re much poorer than you were 10 days ago—and the bleeding will not stop.

And if you aren’t invested in the market, you’re still about to experience a huge hike in the cost of living and a serious decay in your earning power as the government tries to push Americans into low-skilled labor—manufacturing, construction, agriculture—that third-world citizens and immigrants used to do. On top of everything else you’re already dealing with.

Everything Trump has done so far has been awful, but it’s hard to convey to someone who doesn’t understand global markets how catastrophic the last few days have been. This is a before-and-after event. We talk about before and after 9/11, before and after 2008, before and after COVID—and we will talk about before and after these tariffs, even if all of them were rescinded tomorrow.

Americans are not good at handling any pain, and that’s what’s coming down the pipeline soon. Inflation is what swept Trump into office, and he has just taken ownership for making everyone—including the capitalist class—a lot poorer.

This is not how a government that fears public will acts. This is how a government acts when it knows it doesn’t have to give any regard to the will of the people it rules.

Post-Script: The Why Of This Work Right Now?

On a personal note, this has made planning what to do with my investments very difficult. Traditional wisdom is to just chill out and wait for it to blow over, but my point here is that one day we just won’t see a rebound.

But, on the other hand, I’ve successfully predicted 3 of the 0 times that’s happened in the last 15 years. The financial markets always seem to find a new way to rebound by getting the government to do new things we never imagined.

Real question is: does the U.S. government even care this time?

I don’t think so.

Which is the other part of this. Writing this project has become increasingly difficult. For one, nothing here surprises me. I remember in January in Paris telling my partner that markets would probably crash sometime in March due to Trump actually invading Mexico like he promised. I was off—but not by much.

The central thesis is always the same. Trump really is as power-hungry and irrational as he tells you. When he says he will or wants to do something, it’s true—and this time around no one is interested in stopping him.

So beyond “I told you so,” I don’t think there’s much to say on the current administration. I told you he would be a tyrant, he told you he would be a tyrant, he is being a tyrant. Whoop-de-doo.

Second, this administration is openly hostile to political dissent, and this newsletter is simply a record of mine.

If this newsletter gains an audience, it could seriously come back to bite me in the ass… but obviously, as a writer spending time writing, I would like someone to read it, respond, and have some sort of impact—no matter how small.

So I apologize to all you new subscribers who are just getting an email for the first time, and all you older friends who have read my earlier work. I appreciate so much that you have subscribed and given me some of your limited attention.

If you are new, I highly recommend reading my article How To Be Happy Amidst Collapse—it’s the capstone of this entire project. If you want a solution to all this anxiety and existential dread… I don’t have one, but that article is a start.

And also a very special thank you to those who have donated via a coffee or Substack’s membership program. Honestly, even those that just comment or write to me. I would probably let this project wither away if not for you all.

But when I get these little notes that show the time I spend thinking, writing, and editing these pieces actually makes people feel seen—or makes sense of current events—it makes me want to keep going, even if it means taking time away from my music and education business.

I think that’s really important for me, though—to be contributing and communicating outside of musicianship.

Fortunately, a recent conversation with my father sparked an urge in me to start another article that’s almost done. The title is something like:

“Centrist Democrats, As Delusional As Trump Cultists” —because at least writing my argument down is more constructive than trying to get an actual capitalist to support sensible wealth redistribution.

But that’s how and why they win all the time, I guess.

For labor, class solidarity above all is an aspiration—

for the capitalists, it’s a reality.

Talk again soon,
Jordan Sinclair Lovinger
Tuesday April 8th, 2025