America’s Rebranding under the Trump Organization (April 4, 2025)

Donald Trump is, first and foremost, a businessman.  A successful one, even, by some metrics.  That he is fundamentally little else has been evident, time and time again, in the by-now thousands of public displays of his political ineptitude and stupidity.

But within those laughably insufficient acts of inarticulate buffoonery sit something else, something more professional and identifiable: the modus operandi of a successful businessman.

What doesn’t play well in politics has played pitch-perfectly for him in his life as a billion-dollar business tycoon. 

What’s being witnessed now, in these first few months of Trump’s second term, is his treatment of the United States of America as if it were the organization which bears his name.  These united States have now become a grand, figurative extension of his empire.

What we’re seeing, from the outside, is a whole different kind of faciocranial reconstructive surgery, different than anything the country has seen since the New Deal, which, from 1933 to 1938, largely resculpted the face of the government.  More surgery followed, to some degree, in postwar America, but it wasn’t the same kind of bone-breaking and skin peeling that occurred during the Depression.

But this time around it’s being implemented for the benefit not of the population, but the government itself.  Nationally reconstructive models in the past have been legislated and codified, to a large degree, for the benefit of the people.  In Trump’s America, these deals are cut for the country—for America as “business”.  It is trickle-down economics at its worst, where not only are price hikes and a recession on the horizon for the average consumer, but even the largest of publicly-traded companies are standing by to witness the results, holding out their cups and buckets, licking the walls as they go thirsty.   

Trump loves cutting deals, and, on the bigger geopolitical stage, his administration’s actions toward America’s trade partners are simple, hardball tactics that have, in the past, lead to negotiations.  Sometimes, they’ve led to deals.

(How successful those deals are in the long term don’t really matter.  What matters is the deal is on the table, and either it’s accepted or it isn’t.) 

I could highlight problem after problem with this entire set of dynamics, but I feel like that would insult one’s intelligence, assuming they possess any.  The problems should be obvious.

What may be not so obvious is this:

One of Trump’s biggest flaws, outside of vanity, greed and self-importance, is his demand for loyalty.  This was evident in his meeting with right wing extremist Laura Loomer, an administration outsider, after which, very likely upon her recommendation, he fired several high-level officials at the National Security Council for not living up to the standard. 

A man like this in a position like this, as susceptible to flattery and tattling as he is, surrounded by wolves who are more clever, scheming and ideologically malignant than he is, is now primed to carry out some of the most detrimental policy implementations against a majority of citizens in the history of an American presidency. 

Far from benefiting the population, the outcome of not just this tariff imbroglio but of Trump being in charge (and surrounded by the fruits of what’s known as the “Heritage coalition”) is likely to be the result of greater restrictions on collective bargaining, free speech addressing global atrocities, real wage increases, domestic prosperity, voting rights, education and personal freedom for alternative lifestyles.

But what Trump sees in all this (aside from the bigotry, sexism and classism he sees in nearly everything) is simply a business that needs running, whose books are all in the red, one that’s been bullied, taken for a sucker and dragged through the muck, on behalf of which he thinks he ’s the best man to regain its financial prominence.  Finance, in the end, is the only thing the man really understands. 

Sometimes, though, when you play hardball, people on the bottom suffer.  That’s a reality of life in the business world and beyond.  But America, his America—this new Trump Organization—will be fine in the long run, according to him. 

And if it isn’t, what does he care?  He’ll be long gone by the time anyone comes to collect on the bill. 

In the end, a nation cannot be run like a business.  Its citizens are not employees.  They pay taxes, obey its laws enough or don’t break them so openly that they stay out of prison, have fundamental rights and are supposed to have a say in matters.

The problem with this—one of many, again—is that, like in the business world, no one in a corporate managerial position gets harmed by playing hardball.  Only lower-level employees do, if anyone—those who never really had a say to begin with.   And where does the average American fit into this analogy? 

In a democracy, citizens are supposed to have a voice in their government.  But of course, they most often don’t.  All they do is cast a vote and their voices go silent, unless they forcibly make themselves heard—organize in a coherent-enough way and make enough of a stink that their representatives and authorities have to take heed. 

Which, in the case of the Trump Organization’s America, is a stink that’s not only never going to be acknowledged, but one that’s going to continually be outdone.