Jeffrey D. Sachs is a University Professor at Columbia University. He is the Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University and President of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. He has served as an adviser to three UN Secretaries-General and currently serves as an SDG Advocate under Secretary-General António Guterres. Sachs has authored and edited numerous books, including three New York Times bestsellers: The End of Poverty (2005), Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (2008), and The Price of Civilization (2011).
America is a country of undoubted vast strengths – technological, economic, and cultural – yet its government is profoundly failing its own citizens and the world. Trump’s victory is easy to understand. It was a vote against the status quo. Whether Trump will fix — or even attempt to fix — what really ails America remains to be seen.
The rejection of the status quo by the American electorate is overwhelming. An NBC national news poll in September 2024 found that 65% of Americans said the country is on the wrong track, while only 25% said that it is on the right track. In March 2024, according to Gallup, only 33% of Americans approved of Joe Biden’s handling of foreign affairs.
At the core of the American crisis is a political system that fails to represent the true interests of the average American voter. The political system was hacked by big money decades ago, especially when the Supreme Court opened the floodgates to unlimited campaign contributions. Two types of groups own the Congress and White House: super-rich donors and single-issue lobbies.
Many (though not all) of the super-rich donors seek special favors from the political system, and those favors will now be duly delivered by the Congress, the White House, and the regulatory agencies staffed by the new administration. Many donors also push for further tax cuts on corporate income and on capital gains, no matter their impact on the federal deficit, which now stands at nearly 7 percent of GDP, and no matter that pre-tax national income has shifted powerfully away from labor income to capital income.
Many business donors, I would add, are forthrightly on the side of peace and cooperation with China, as very sensible for business as well as for humanity.
Single-issue lobbies are the second group with their hold on power. These lobbies include the military-industrial complex, Wall Street, Big Oil, the gun industry, big pharma, big Ag, and the Zionist Lobby.
American politics is well organized to cater to these special interests. A hundred million dollars of campaign funding by a lobby group can win a hundred billion of federal outlays and/or tax breaks.
These special-interest lobbies do not depend on, nor do they care much about, public opinion. Opinion surveys show that the public wants gun control, lower drug prices, an end of Wall Street bailouts, renewable energy, and peace in Ukraine and the Middle East. No matter.
The lobbyists ensure that Congress and the White House deliver continued easy access to handguns and assault weapons, sky-high drug prices, coddling of Wall Street, more oil and gas drilling, weapons purchases for Ukraine, and wars on behalf of Israel.
The two most dangerous lobbies are the military-industrial complex and the Zionist lobby (as detailed in a scintillating new book by historian Ilan Pappé). The military-industrial complex has led America into disastrous wars, covert regime-change operations, illegal economic sanctions, and destabilizing color revolutions (led by the National Endowment for Democracy).
The Zionist lobby has been at least as damaging, and perhaps more. The Zionist Lobby has stoked America’s serial wars in the Middle East, including Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Sudan.
While the US plutocracy has delivered wars of choice for the MIC and for Israel, and tax cuts for the rich, it has offered no real solutions for working-class Americans.
During the period after 1980, automation hit American industrial workers very hard, and the working class found itself in lower-paying jobs. Meanwhile, the returns to capital soared, with the overall stock market valuation rising from 55% of GDP in 1985 to 200% of GDP today. In addition, soaring costs of healthcare and college tuition further squeezed the working class.
Trump’s voter base is the working class, but his donor base is the super-rich and the lobbies. So, what will happen next?
Trump’s purported answer is a trade war with China and the deportation of illegal foreign workers, combined with more tax cuts for the rich. Yet these policies will not deliver the promised results for workers. Manufacturing jobs will not return in large numbers from China since they never went in large numbers to China. Nor will deportations do much to raise living standards of average Americans.
This is not to say that real solutions are lacking. Four key policies are hiding in plain view.
The first is to face down the military-industrial complex. Trump can end the war in Ukraine by telling President Putin and the world that NATO will never expand to Ukraine. He can end the risk of war with China by making clear that the US would not defend Taiwan if it were ever to try to secede from China.
The second is to face down the Zionist lobby by telling Netanyahu that the US will no longer fight Israel’s wars and that Israel must accept a State of Palestine living in peace next to Israel. This is the only possible path to peace.
The third is to close the budget deficit, partly by cutting wasteful spending – notably on wars, hundreds of useless overseas military bases, and sky-high prices the government pays for drugs and healthcare – and partly by raising government revenues.
The fourth is an innovation policy (aka industrial policy) for the common good. The goal of innovation policy should be to ensure that the new and emerging AI and digital technologies serve the common good, including the poor, the working class, and the physical environment.
All four of these steps are within Trump’s reach, and would justify his electoral triumph. I’m not holding my breath for Trump to adopt them. American politics has been too rotten for too long for any real optimism in that regard, yet these four steps are all achievable, and would greatly benefit not only the business leaders who backed Trump’s campaign but the tens of millions of disaffected workers whose votes put Trump back into the White House.
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