The future seems to free the mind from reality’s restraints and let the imagination soar. Yet it has also proven full of political pitfalls.

For writers, the future has long been a tricky terrain. While the past can prove unsettling and the present uncomfortable, the future seems to free the mind from reality’s restraints and let the imagination soar. Yet it has also proven full of political pitfalls.

Sometimes writers can tweak a trend of their moment to produce a darkly dystopian future, as with George Orwell’s omniscient tyranny in 1984, Margaret Atwood’s institutionalized misogyny in The Handmaid’s Tale, or Ray Bradbury’s book-burning autocracy in Fahrenheit 451. And ever since H.G. Wells’s novel War of the Worlds (about technologically advanced Martians invading this planet) was published in 1898, space has been a particularly fertile frontier for the literary imagination. It has given us Isaac Asimov’s seven-part galactic Foundation fable, Frank Herbert’s ecological drama Dune, and Philip K. Dick’s post-nuclear wasteland in Blade Runner, opening us to possible techno-futures beyond our mud-bound presence on this small planet.

From the time that Henry George published his influential futuristic treatise Progress and Poverty in 1879, inspiring many of the Progressive Era’s key reforms, American writers across the political spectrum have used the future to frame an agenda for present-day political action, sometimes progressive, sometimes violently regressive. Published in 1938, Ayn Rand’s second novel, Anthem, was a futuristic saga whose hero, named “Equality 7-2521,” rejected the socialist society that raised him and struggled to rediscover his inherent individuality, articulating libertarian ideals that would inspire generations of American conservatives. And amid the social turmoil of the 1970s, William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries imagined a future armed revolt against the U.S. government that has provoked violence from generations of White nationalists.

So, with some trepidation, let me venture into the immediate future and imagine what the United States will be like when President Donald J. Trump finally leaves office (if, of course, he does) in January 2029. To keep such projections within the bounds of possibility, let’s clip the wings of our imaginations and hew closely to Trump’s policies and policy statements.

America’s place in the world of 2029

In just 11 action-packed months since his January inauguration, President Trump has already demolished the fundamental geopolitics that have undergirded U.S. global hegemony for the past 80 years. Even if he simply persists in his policies for another 37 months, his impact on the American version of a world order will undoubtedly prove so profound that it will strain the limits of language.

To grasp something of the scope of his impact, it’s necessary to briefly outline the world order Washington built over those 80 years. After fighting for four years and sacrificing 400,000 lives during World War II, Washington captured vital bastions at both ends of the vast Eurasian land mass and spent the next 40 years of the Cold War ensuring its control of that strategic continent with circles of steel — military alliances like NATO, hundreds of overseas military bases, powerful naval fleets, and a massive armada of nuclear-armed aircraft and missiles. With the Sino-Soviet communist bloc largely trapped behind what came to be known as the Iron Curtain, Washington crushed most of their attempts to break out of geopolitical isolation with deft covert operations. As the communists flailed, the U.S. continued to build a global order, while patiently waiting for those socialist economies to implode.

When the Cold War finally ended in 1991, Washington got busy knitting the world into a unified market through massive capital exports, free-trade agreements, and a grid of global communications, thanks in part to satellites and fiber-optic cables. Beyond its awesome array of raw economic and military power (and the distinctly less than successful wars that it fought), Washington prettied-up its intrusions into sovereign societies worldwide through its advocacy of universal human rights, its commitment to the rule of law (unless it got in the way of American interests), and its support for international institutions like the United Nations that assured inviolable sovereignty for even the smallest of countries. Thanks to a delicate balance of force, beneficence, and self-interest, the United States would enjoy both great national wealth and historically unprecedented global dominance.

Washington’s world order, like any complex global system, was distinctly flawed and its failings were (to say the least) legion, but its achievements weren’t inconsequential either. After two world wars that left 100 million dead, there has not been a major global conflagration for 80 years (though from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq, there were all too many disastrous American-inspired local or regional wars). The share of the world’s population living on less than $3 a day dropped markedly from 43 percent in 1990 to just 11 percent in 2020. Reflecting those improved conditions, average life expectancy worldwide rose sharply for the first time in several centuries, from 46 years in 1950 to 72 years in 2020. Similarly, the world literacy rate climbed from 66% in 1976 to 87 percent in 2020. Whether from choice or necessity, we humans have enjoyed increasing freedom of movement, with the number of migrants globally reaching a record 304 million in 2024, representing nearly 4% of the total global population.

Not only did the U.S. have the largest economy and military budget, but until recently, it was the world’s leading donor for public health and poverty eradication, sparing many millions of the world’s poor from the worst kinds of hunger and disease. All of those significant improvements in the human condition had complex causes, but the fundamental fact remains that they were products, direct or indirect, of Washington’s world order.

Then came President Donald Trump. From the first day of his second term in office in January 2025, he set out to tear down the U.S. global order and transform America’s place in the world. With billionaire Elon Musk serving as his in-house wrecking ball, he quickly demolished the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), slashing more than 80% of American nutritional and medical aid in ways expected, by 2030, to lead to a staggering 14 million extra deaths globally (including more than 4.5 million children). The misery now being inflicted on poor people crowded into cesspool camps from the Congo to Bangladesh defies description. In addition, by shutting down Voice of America broadcasts along with those USAID programs, the U.S. has committed what one former NATO official called “soft power suicide,” clearing the way, as political scientist Joseph Nye put it, for China “to fill the vacuum that Trump is creating”.

Throughout the Cold War and its aftermath, a key U.S. force multiplier was its global network of alliances—the Rio Pact for the Americas, five key bilateral pacts along the Pacific-island chain from Japan to Australia, and, above all, the extraordinarily effective NATO alliance for Europe. In 11 short months, Trump has already ruptured all the alliances that assured America’s security for some 75 years. On April 2nd (or what he called “liberation day”), the president also slapped punitive tariffs on imports from loyal allies, ranging from 20% for the European Union to 24 percent for Japan.

Reflecting his longstanding hostility to the NATO alliance, particularly its Article Five mutual-defense clause, Trump’s recently released National Security Strategy (NSS) states that Europe faces “the stark process of civilizational erasure,” battered by “regulatory suffocation,” multi-racial migration, and “cratering birthrates” that raise the question of whether its nations will stay “strong enough to remain reliable allies.” Through their supposed “subversion of democratic processes,” the president has also claimed that European governments are resisting U.S. attempts “to negotiate an expeditious cessation of hostilities in Ukraine.” To save Europe from itself, in that NSS the Trump administration came out for the growth of “patriotic European parties” (in other words, far-right ones), while discouraging the very idea of NATO “as a perpetually expanding alliance”.

In case anyone missed the meaning of that message, Trump told a Politico interviewer on December 8th that some European leaders are “real stupid” because their tolerance of immigrants from places like the “prisons of the Congo” will ensure that key European nations like Germany “will not be viable countries any longer”.

The Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine

More broadly, President Trump has put forward a tricontinental geopolitical vision for the world’s major powers—with Russia dominant in the old Soviet sphere, China acting as an Asian hegemon, and the U.S. securing the Americas. By claiming Greenland, branding Canada “the 51^st state,” and threatening to reclaim the Panama Canal during his first weeks in office, Trump articulated a strategy grounded, not in global hegemony, but in geopolitical dominance over the Western Hemisphere.

Formalizing that strategy in the recent NSS, the White House proclaimed a ”Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine” aimed at a “potent restoration of American power” to achieve an unchallenged “American preeminence in the Western Hemisphere”. To that end, the U.S. will reduce its “global military presence to address urgent threats in our Hemisphere”, deploy the U.S. Navy to “control sea lanes”, and use “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” to make the Western Hemisphere “an increasingly attractive market for American commerce”. It will also push out “non-Hemispheric competitors” (think: China), giving the U.S. distinctly preferential access to the region’s “many strategic resources”. In essence, according to the NSS, “the United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity”.

In reality, Trump was miming the convoluted Victorian rhetoric of President Theodore Roosevelt’s famed corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. In a December 1904 message to Congress, Roosevelt disdained any “unmanly” inclination to a “peace of tyrannous terror, the peace of craven weakness, the peace of injustice”. Instead, he embraced the manly duty of the “great civilized nations of the present day” to ensure that the countries of the Western Hemisphere remain “stable, orderly, and prosperous”. Cases of “chronic wrongdoing… may… force the United States, however reluctantly… to the exercise of an international police power”. Faced with the “intolerable conditions in Cuba” (then under Spanish rule), T.R. proclaimed it “our manifest duty” to take “justifiable and proper” action “in asserting the Monroe Doctrine”.(Think Venezuela at the moment!)

Though he promised the use of only a restrained “police power” in the Western Hemisphere, Roosevelt opened the door to decades of U.S. interventionism, with the Marines occupying Nicaragua for 20 years (1912-33), Haiti for 19 years (1915-34), and the Dominican Republic for nine years (1916-24). Just as Trump’s chatter about making Canada the “51st state” has sparked “anger and incredulity” in America’s closest ally, so his proclamation of a Trump Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, exemplified by his recent devastating gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean Sea, is likely to inflame the anti-imperialist sentiment that lies just beneath the skin of Latin America, thereby corroding relations with our southern neighbors.

Trump’s Asia-Pacific policy

While Trump’s posture toward Latin America is grimly clear, his Asia-Pacific policy seems muddled by ambiguity, if not outright confusion. In early October, oblivious to the rapid erosion of U.S. hegemony in Asia, Trump declared a “trade war” with China, imposing a 130 percent tariff on its imports and a complete ban on exporting “critical software” to that country. By month’s end, however, he had to swallow his bravado after Beijing retaliated by barring the export of strategic rare earth metals needed for the U.S. military’s weaponry (and so much else). That forced Trump to “fold” during his October 30th summit with China’s President Xi Jinping in South Korea—quickly rescinding his high tariffs and removing the ban on the export of Nvidia’s semiconductor chips that China desperately needs for Artificial Intelligence.

In the seven years since Trump’s last trade war with China in 2018, as the Wall Street Journal reported, that country has pursued “greater self-reliance in food and energy… for an era of sustained hostilities with the U.S.” According to the New York Times, the vivid diplomatic defeat at that South Korean summit was an historic inflection point, showing that “China could now face America as a true peer” and had already become “America’s geopolitical equal”.

Trump’s delusions of dominance over China pervade his recent National Security Strategy. Amid all its self-indulgent palaver, it displays a dangerously willful ignorance about fast-changing geopolitical realities in the Asia-Pacific region. By the time Trump leaves office in 2029, China’s gross domestic product will already be larger than America’s and it’s expected to become 36 percecnt bigger in the years to follow.

Trump’s domestic legacy

Just as Trump’s “America First” foreign policy is damaging the country’s diplomatic relations with Asia, Europe, and Latin America, so his domestic policies are likely to cripple this country’s economic competitiveness. Despite his stated commitment to building “the world’s most robust industrial base,” his energy policy is damaging, if not destroying, the country’s largest industry—automobile manufacturing. In 2024, the U.S. automobile industry produced 3% of the country’s gross domestic product, created more than 8 million jobs, supplied transport for 92 percent of all American households, and accounted for $1.6 trillion in consumer finance, second only to home mortgages.

By his aggressive attack on the very idea of climate change and on America’s once-promising green-energy infrastructure, President Trump is inflicting serious damage on Detroit’s future capacity to compete against China’s rapidly rising production of electric vehicles (EVs). According to the International Energy Agency, EV purchases will reach 20 million in 2025, or one-quarter of world auto sales, and are on track to hit 40% by 2030, with China already accounting for 70 percent of global EV production. While EVs are still 30 percent more expensive than gas vehicles in the U.S., in China they are less expensive and now account for 60 percent of that country’s car sales (compared to just 11 percent in the U.S.).

With massive robotic factories cranking out EVs by the millions, a fleet of dedicated ships to carry those low-cost cars to global markets, and new factories opening in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, China seems poised to conquer the global car market with models like BYD’s self-driving Seagull EV priced at only $9,000. Just as making an iPhone in America now seems almost unimaginable, by the time Trump leaves office, the U.S. automotive industry could find itself incapable of producing a competitive EV, potentially losing access to half the world’s auto market. “I have 10,000 dealers around the world,” said Ford’s CEO Jim Farley recently. “Only 2,800 are in the U.S. So you do the math.” And given Trump’s costly tariffs on steel and aluminum imports (among other things), that core American manufacturing industry is likely to be in truly unsettled shape by 2029.

More broadly, the Trump administration is crippling this country’s overall economic competitiveness by cutting its scientific research and conducting a shotgun wedding between fossil fuels and the nation’s electrical grid. According to the International Renewable Energy Association, in 2024, solar power was 41% less expensive (and onshore wind 53% less) than the cheapest form of fossil fuel. When backed by cost-effective storage batteries, those alternative energies now provide the quickest, most affordable means to expand electrical infrastructure in developed and developing nations.

But by slashing EV tax credits, blocking offshore wind farms, and opening yet more federal lands for oil and natural gas drilling, President Trump is using the full powers of his presidency to derail America’s adoption of cost-competitive green energy. And keep in mind that he’s doing so at the very moment when a boom in energy-intensive data centers for Artificial Intelligence (AI) is straining the national grid, while simultaneously raising electricity costs for households and businesses. By the time he leaves office in 2029, American industry, still wedded to costly fossil fuels, could be paying double the price of foreign competitors for energy, rendering its products unaffordable, even at home.

Through a mix of ignorance and arrogance, the Trump administration is also hampering this country’s ability to conduct basic scientific research, the seedbed of its economic innovation for more than a century. Although immigrants have won 36 percent of the country’s Nobel Prizes in science over the past 125 years, the White House has now restricted H-1B visas for skilled immigrants and imposed a nearly 20 percent cut in foreign graduate students at U.S. universities. By denying university science labs such critical student workers and slashing the nation’s budget for basic science by up to 57 percent, the Trump White House is liquidating the world’s most successful research industry and effectively ceding the rest of the twenty-first century to China.

A witch’s brew of failure

Since the start of his second term, Donald Trump has used a seemingly random mélange of policies to mix a malevolent brew. Think of it as akin to the one that the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth cast into their cauldron to see the future, as they chanted:

“Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog… For a charm of powerful trouble, like a hell-broth, boil and bubble.”

Indeed, by 2029, Trump’s inept mix of foreign and domestic policies will confront American workers with a “hell-broth” of powerful economic troubles not seen since the Great Depression of the 1930s. By 2030, Trump’s tariffs will have cut U.S. consumption by a projected 3.5 percent and, over the longer term, are likely to reduce average wages by 5 percent and GDP by 6 percent—a major change for an economy that has long enjoyed steady growth. With AI data centers projected to consume as much as 12 percent of the nation’s electricity by 2029, and Trump blocking the green energy that’s the only quick fix to meet rising demand, consumers could face an average increase of 20 percent in their electric bills by 2030 (and a possible 25 percent rise in states with data centers). While AI might raise living standards over the long-term, its unchecked expansion, as mandated by one of Trump’s executive orders, could contribute to the loss of 300 million full-time jobs globally and negatively impact two-thirds of all employment in the United States.

Worse yet, his demolition of the Biden administration’s attempt at a green energy revolution will have untold consequences for the U.S. economy (not to say for the planet itself). As China, with its low-cost, high-efficiency EVs, conquers the global auto market by 2030 (and the larger green-energy production market as well), it will become the world’s largest economy, with exports surpassing its present record-breaking trillion-dollar mark and its currency increasingly dominant in global trade.

With the U.S. global retreat leaving China and what’s likely to become its satellite state, Russia, dominant on the Eurasian land mass, home to 70 percent of the world’s population, Washington will be forced to fall even more fully back on the Western Hemisphere (where its welcome is already wearing ever thinner). With its presence certain to shrink across the planet, the dollar’s role as the global reserve currency will, as J.P. Morgan noted in a recent study, certainly “come into question.” With erratic U.S. government policies undermining “the perceived safety and stability of the greenback” and U.S. tariffs causing “investors to lose confidence in American assets,” there are already clear market signs of a global “de-dollarization” that will raise the cost of servicing this country’s national debt and cut into every aspect of the American economy. By 2030, the sum of those changes—compounded by a 20% increase in household electricity prices, soaring health care costs, and a “white collar bloodbath” as AI kills off half of all entry-level jobs—will have distinctly begun to reduce the quality of life in this country.

As Shakespeare’s witches saw the future in their cauldron’s bubbling brew and said of Macbeth, a man who would be king (whatever the cost), “Something wicked this way comes,” they also caught our Trumpian moment so many centuries later.

First published on TomDispatch.com.

Shared via Creative Commons.