But the year and a half of Trump mismanaging the post-crash economy had taken its toll. Thousands of Baby Boom retirees descended on Washington to demand a bailout for catastrophic losses in their retirement plans. Modeling themselves on Coxey’s Army, the unemployed masses that flooded into Washington during the Panic of 1893 to demand federal jobs, the Boomers, with Trump in mind, called themselves Cocksu—on second thought, let’s set that colorful detail aside.
Trump’s attempt to reduce 35 percent unemployment by quadrupling the staff of Immigration and Customs Enforcement shrank the workforce by deporting not just undocumented immigrants but also millions of United States citizens, including First Lady Melania Trump, Elon Musk, Ana de Armas, John Oliver, and five dozen white Anglo-Saxon Protestants who traced their lineage back to the Mayflower.
The deportations reduced competition for jobs, but not enough to offset the continuing shrinkage of job openings as Trump jacked up tariffs on the European Union to 10,000 percent. Treasury secretary Howard Lutnick, who succeeded Scott Bessent after Bessent was arrested for beating Bill Pulte to death, encouraged Trump to jack up EU tariffs in retaliation against the euro displacing first the dollar and then the World Liberty Financial stablecoin USD1 as the global reserve currency.
