Why Is the US Economy So Bad?
A nation's economy reflects the competence of those running it. When the president has no public service experience, six business bankruptcies, and a preference for loyalty over expertise — and fills his cabinet with TV personalities, anti-vaccine lawyers, and revenge-seekers — the results are predictable. This is the story of incompetence at scale.
🏢 The Most Unqualified President in American History
Before examining the cabinet he built, it is essential to understand the man who built it.
His resume before the White House consisted of real estate development, brand licensing, and hosting a reality TV show. By the time he took office in 2017, presidential historians at the Miller Center noted that "this man is without experience, and it's showing."
The Business Record: Six Bankruptcies and a Trail of Failure
Trump campaigned on being a brilliant businessman. The record tells a different story. Between 1991 and 2009, Trump's businesses filed for bankruptcy six times:
- Trump Taj Mahal — 1991
- Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino — 1992
- Plaza Hotel — 1992
- Trump Castle Hotel and Casino — 1992
- Trump Hotels and Casino Resorts — 2004
- Trump Entertainment Resorts — 2009
In each case, over-leveraged debt loads collapsed the businesses while Trump walked away relatively intact — he openly bragged about using bankruptcy laws to avoid personal liability while creditors and investors took the losses. After his corporate bankruptcies of the early 1990s, most major American banks — with the sole exception of Deutsche Bank — refused to lend to him further.
Beyond the bankruptcies, a New York state judge ordered Trump to pay $2 million to charities for misusing his own charitable foundation's funds to finance his presidential campaign. His businesses had been involved in more than 4,000 state and federal legal actions. Trump University was shut down after a fraud lawsuit. His foundation was dissolved by court order.
The Learning Curve That Never Ended
Presidential scholar Barbara Perry of the University of Virginia described Trump's first term plainly: "Unless he would be an intern, he would not have a position in the White House — with no educational experience in governance, no military experience, no government, no political experience." Historian Robert Dallek was more direct: "This man is without experience, and it's showing."
Presidents since FDR have faced five times more foreign policy or military crises than economic ones in their first year. Trump had no experience in either. He openly admitted on the record after his first healthcare failure: "We all learned a lot. We learned a lot about the vote-getting process." The American public was paying for his on-the-job training.
Now, in his second term, the learning curve is gone. What remains is a fully formed governing philosophy built on impulse, loyalty over expertise, and the conviction that disruption is the same as achievement.
🎭 The Cabinet of Chaos: Loyalty Over Competence
Trump has been explicit about his selection philosophy. In his first term, he occasionally appointed qualified officials he had no personal connection to, and he found them difficult to control. His second term was designed specifically to fix that problem: every appointment would be someone who owed their position entirely to him.
The result is a cabinet that Lawfare described as embodying "a cult of unqualified authenticity" — where lack of credentials is framed as a virtue, and expertise is treated as elitism.
🎮 Pete Hegseth — Secretary of Defense
What the job requires: Managing 3+ million military and civilian personnel, an $850 billion budget, and the most complex military apparatus on earth. Previous secretaries included former CIA directors, former Secretaries of Commerce, decorated generals, and experienced administrators.
What Hegseth brought: He was a Fox News host. He served as an Army major — rising to perhaps a dozen direct reports in a conventional workplace. He had never run a large organization of any kind. He would be the youngest Secretary of Defense in history, and almost certainly the least experienced. Senator Tammy Duckworth, an Iraq War combat veteran and Purple Heart recipient who sits on the Armed Services Committee, called him the "least qualified" cabinet nominee she had seen: "Mr. Hegseth will jeopardize our readiness simply through his lack of experience."
He was confirmed by a tie-breaking vote from Vice President Vance, making him the only Defense Secretary in modern history to require the VP's vote to be confirmed. At his hearing, he could not name a single member of ASEAN when asked about America's primary national security challenge: peer competition with China.
Since taking office, Hegseth has fired the Army, Navy, and Air Force's top military lawyers, dismissed the Joint Chiefs' legal counsel, placed classified war plans on a commercial messaging app (including to his own wife and brother), and publicly declared at a Pentagon briefing that American forces would show "no quarter, no mercy" — a phrase that legal scholars and former JAGs immediately flagged as a potential war crime.
🧬 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — Secretary of Health and Human Services
What the job requires: Overseeing 80,000 employees, 18 federal agencies including the CDC and FDA, and a departmental budget of nearly $2 trillion. This is the agency responsible for every American's public health.
What RFK Jr. brought: He is an environmental lawyer. He has no medical degree, no public health background, and no administrative experience managing any organization close to HHS in scale. He is widely known as an anti-vaccine activist who spent years promoting debunked claims linking vaccines to autism — despite every major health organization in the world having debunked those claims repeatedly. PBS confirmed: "He does not have a history or expertise in health care, other than the fact that he's an environmental lawyer."
Even Republican Senator Bill Cassidy — a medical doctor — opened Kennedy's hearing by saying: "It's no secret, I have some reservations about your past positions on vaccines." Kennedy was confirmed, and is now in charge of America's entire public health infrastructure during a period of rising measles outbreaks, resurgent infectious diseases, and continued post-pandemic health challenges.
🕵 Tulsi Gabbard — Director of National Intelligence
What the job requires: Overseeing and coordinating 18 separate intelligence agencies including the CIA, NSA, and DIA — arguably the most bureaucratically complex position in the federal government. It requires deep intelligence expertise and the trust of intelligence communities both at home and abroad.
What Gabbard brought: She is a former Democratic congresswoman who switched parties. She had served as a military officer but had never led a large bureaucracy. She had repeatedly praised Edward Snowden — who leaked classified NSA programs and fled to Russia — as a "brave whistleblower," and refused to call him a traitor at her confirmation hearing. She made a secret trip to meet Syrian President Bashar Assad in 2017. Even the editorial board of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal opposed her nomination.
Her confirmation raised alarms on both sides of the aisle. Democratic Rep. Jim Himes, ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, was direct: "These people are manifestly unqualified, and they're not prepared to run the very complicated organizations they've been asked to run."
🔍 Kash Patel — FBI Director
What the job requires: Leading the nation's premier domestic law enforcement agency with a mandate to protect Americans from terrorism, organized crime, and foreign espionage — with independence from political influence.
What Patel brought: A history of publicly threatening to use federal law enforcement against Trump's perceived enemies. He published a book with an appendix he called an "enemies list." He promoted false 2020 election fraud claims. He said on record he intended to "come after" those he deemed enemies of Trump. At his hearing, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin summarized: "The American people deserve an FBI director focused on keeping our families safe from terrorism, drug trafficking and violent crime, not the checklist of grievances in this book."
Senate Republican Chuck Grassley noted that public trust in the FBI was already at a low point, with only 41% of Americans saying it was doing its job well. Patel's stated priorities suggested that number was about to get worse.
🏭 Russell Vought — Director of the Office of Management and Budget
The OMB controls the federal budget. Vought has publicly stated he wants federal employees "in trauma" and has expressed a desire to grant the president unchecked power over federal spending. He is the primary architect of Project 2025's fiscal agenda and denied a congressional subpoena. Critics across the political spectrum called him unsuited for a role that requires adherence to budget law, not dismantling of it.
📉 The Economic Damage: By the Numbers
The consequences of this incompetence are not abstract. They show up in paychecks, grocery bills, market portfolios, and economic forecasts.
GDP growth in 2025 was 2.2% — the worst year for the US economy since the COVID recession, and worse than Biden's 2.8% in his final year. The economy added only 181,000 jobs in all of 2025, down from 1.5 million the year before — the worst jobs year since COVID, and before the pandemic, the worst since 2009. February 2026 then erased 92,000 jobs in a single month.
The St. Louis Fed's Economic Policy Uncertainty Index, which had never surpassed 250 outside of COVID, peaked at 460 under Trump's second term. That is not a fluctuation. That is a systemic signal that businesses cannot plan, invest, or hire with confidence. Business investment — the most volatile and recession-predictive component of GDP — seized up precisely because no one can forecast what Trump will announce next.
Stanford's Institute for Economic Policy Research warned that the biggest risk to 2026 is stagflation — the rare and toxic combination of high unemployment and persistent inflation simultaneously. The Fed faces an impossible choice: cut rates to fight unemployment and watch inflation rise further, or hold rates to fight inflation and watch unemployment climb.
🌎 The Collapse of Allied Trust
Economic strength is never purely domestic. It depends on the confidence of trading partners, the stability of alliances, and the predictability of the world's largest economy. Trump's behavior has systematically destroyed all three.
At Davos in January 2026, it was described as "a volatile week for trans-Atlantic relations, marked by Trump statements that unsettled global markets and strained ties with U.S. allies — on topics ranging from Greenland to Gaza." The Chicago Council on Global Affairs concluded that 2025 was "a highly disruptive, tumultuous, and chaotic year that injected a massive amount of uncertainty into the international order — the United States was a major, if not the only, driver of this global disruption."
The Institute for Global Affairs surveyed American public opinion on Trump's foreign policy performance and found his net approval negative across virtually every category:
- Relations with U.S. allies: −23%
- America's international standing: −22%
- Foreign trade: −28%
- Tensions with China: −38%
- The war in Ukraine: −19%
- Nuclear risk: −21%
Trump threatened Japan and South Korea — two of America's most vital Pacific allies — with punitive tariffs to extract economic concessions, replacing decades of mutual security cooperation with transactional coercion. He withdrew from the WHO and the Paris Climate Accords. He shut down USAID, which the Center for American Progress documents has already resulted in 600,000 deaths and the ceding of America's international influence to China and Russia.
TIME's geopolitical risk analysis named the US itself as a top global risk for 2026, writing: "What began as tactical norm-breaking has become a system-level transformation." Chatham House assessed that "the stability and predictability of the nation's governance is now being upended" — and that this directly threatens the ability of American multinational corporations and institutional investors to operate globally.
For longstanding defense partners considering American military equipment, the Stimson Center noted: "There is likely to be an understandable hesitancy to invest in capabilities from a seemingly unreliable or unpredictable partner." America's $104 billion in proposed arms transfers in 2025 represented a 28% drop from the year before.
💹 Market Instability: When Erratic Is the Policy
Markets hate one thing above all else: unpredictability. They can price in bad news. They can price in good news. They cannot price in an administration that reverses course based on a Truth Social post.
On April 2, 2025 — what Trump called "Liberation Day" — he announced sweeping tariffs on nearly all sectors of the global economy. The market's response was the largest global selloff since the COVID crash of 2020. The S&P 500 fell nearly 20% in seven weeks. Then, with almost no warning, Trump paused the tariffs for most countries. The market rebounded sharply — in the hours before the announcement, options trading volume surged in ways that prompted congressional Democrats to call for insider trading investigations.
This is not a stable economic environment. This is government by impulse. Reuters confirmed that Trump's tariff policies lifted the average US tariff rate to nearly 17% — the highest level since the Great Depression. Brookings found that the Federal Reserve's own independence is under sustained attack: Trump has pressured the Fed to cut interest rates, attempted to fire a Fed governor, appointed a Fed board member who simultaneously served as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, and initiated a criminal inquiry against Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
When the president of the United States attempts to criminally prosecute the independent central bank chairman for not doing what he is told, foreign investors and trading partners take notice. The entire premise of American financial credibility — that its institutions are rule-governed and independent — erodes in real time.
Meanwhile, net US immigration fell from a 25-year median of 1.2 million per year to somewhere between effectively zero and a slight negative in 2025. Economists across the ideological spectrum agree: immigration fuels economic growth. Cutting it to zero, while simultaneously cutting federal workers and reducing aggregate demand, compounds every other economic headwind simultaneously.
🔌 The Bottom Line
Every element of America's economic deterioration leads back to the same root cause: the selection of people whose only qualification is that they owe everything to one man.
A Fox News host running the world's largest military. An anti-vaccine lawyer running public health. A congresswoman who praised an intelligence leaker running the 18-agency intelligence community. A man who published an enemies list running the FBI. A budget director who wants federal employees "in trauma" managing the national budget.
And above them all: a president who came to office having never held a government job, never served in uniform, never run a public institution, filed six business bankruptcies, was cut off by every major American bank, ran fraudulent enterprises, and was ranked by presidential historians as the 41st worst president in American history — even before his second term began.
The economy is bad because the people running it don't know how — and were chosen precisely because they wouldn't ask questions.