Trump’s obsession with GDP rebuked by voters

n the most astounding election of our lifetimes, Donald Trump’s growth-at-all-costs approach to public policy has been roundly rejected! All across the country, winning Democrats have erected a massive STOP sign. It’s a STOP sign of multiple connotations:

• STOP the coddling of billionaires!
• STOP the resource wars!
• STOP the fire sale of our public lands!
• STOP the gutting of our hard-won environmental regulations!
• STOP the censoring of science!

STOP the long, long list of greedy, corrupt, ham-handed decisions geared to grow the GDP (and enrich political cronies) at the cost of our democracy, middle-class jobs, health care, natural resources, international standing, and sound money.

For Democrats, it’s a big beautiful STOP sign to start from. In fact, it’s a START sign toward a fair distribution of wealth. It’s a START sign toward international diplomacy. It’s a START sign toward an environment protected for posterity. It’s a START sign for moving toward a sustainable, steady state economy with meaningful jobs for all.

The STOP sign stands firmly planted, right in front of Trump. Now it’s up to the Democratic Party to start moving in the right directions. And it won’t amount to a lasting victory if they try to outdo Trump on his own terms of GDP growth.

Dissecting Concerns About “The Economy”

Several themes pulsed through election night. The re-taking of long-lost seats, the rejection of Big Tech billionaires, and the election of diversity were hard to miss. Based on the polls, though, the single biggest concern on voters’ minds was the economy.

Oddly, the broadcast media hardly dissected what this meant, this concern with “the economy.” Some polls, and by extension the media, seemed to incorporate inflation—aka “affordability”—as part of the economy. But most treated inflation as a distinct issue in the list of concerns, thereby leaving “the economy” wide open to interpretation.

Meanwhile, “jobs and the economy” was a label mostly eschewed during this election cycle. In the past, concerns about the economy would often imply a problem with unemployment, so “jobs and the economy” would be used by pollsters and the media. But with unemployment at historically low levels, it seems “the economy” means something else this time around.

Could the “something else” be the unsustainability of a bloated, sickly $31 trillion GDP? This unsustainability may not be particularly palpable yet to pollsters and politicians—or even to the voters themselves—but a vague, latent sense of it is at the heart of “the economy” concerns. It explains the gnawing angst of voters.

I suppose this possibility will be rejected by commentators curating the conventional wisdom. They think sustainability is a non-issue. They’ll point to polls revealing complacency over climate change compared to healthcare, crime, and Trump’s war in Iran. They’ll point to the lukewarm concern over the national debt, too.

But that would be a shallow interpretation of the polls. Not to mention the shortcomings of the polls themselves. Voters never get a chance to rank phrases such as “limits to growth,” “global heating,” or “biodiversity collapse.”

Polls were never meant to be arbiters of nuanced social psychology; they’re more like windsocks hinting at the political weather system. So, let’s take a deeper look at American concerns—explicit, implicit, and latent—with “the economy.”

It’s the Unsustainability, Stupid

In the philosophy of science—and in common sense—we distinguish between “proximal” and “distal” causes. If you’re tired today, you probably got little sleep last night. Lack of sleep has caused your fatigue. It’s obvious; a proximal cause usually is.

At a deeper level, your fatigue might stem from anxiety that caused you to sleep poorly. Anxiety, then, is a “distal” cause. It’s not as obvious as the proximal cause; a distal cause seldom is. And this is unfortunate, because the distal cause is always the more fundamental, profound cause, and therefore the most important to address.

Addressing a proximal cause without correctly identifying the distal cause is unlikely to solve the problem, at least not sustainably. Sure, you can take a sleeping pill to address your fatigue, and probably sleep ok for a night or two. Yet if nothing is done about your anxiety, you will succumb to chronic fatigue.

In the midterms, yes, it was clear that inflation—whether couched as part of “the economy” or distinguished as its own issue—was the top concern of Americans, given the categories offered by pollsters. (In some polls, democracy was a close second, but that’s for another column.) More than anything else, relentless inflation was the proximate cause for the blue wave.

So then, what was the distal cause? Economists and politicians will argue about that, but there are two clear frontrunners: resource shortages and loose monetary policy.

Resource shortages—highlighted this year by Mideast oil supplies choked off in the Strait of Hormuz—lead to cost-push inflation. Loose monetary policy leads to demand-pull inflation. When both occur at once, even at moderate levels, inflation is sure to be discomfiting, especially for middle class and lower-income families with no financial instruments designed to take the edge off rising prices.

But in a condition of macroeconomic supply shock (not just sectoral) coupled with aggressive quantitative easing, disastrous hyperinflation is a real possibility. That’s enough to start losing sleep over.

Macroeconomic supply shock (as I described in Supply Shock, no less) is the case whereby all major supply curves are moving in more rapidly than the growth economists and politicians could have imagined. These ecologically oblivious technological optimists are stumped to the point of being shocked by the tepid increases in total factor productivity (TFP, a measure of the technological progress contributing to GDP growth).

The technophiles are nearly as oblivious to the cruciality of soil, water, timber, fisheries, cropland and rangeland for supporting a big, healthy economy. They think that research and development, AI, financialization, and “free markets” will grow the economy forever, substituting for natural resources whenever necessary.

Then, when TFP and GDP stop rising as fast as they expected, they try to “stimulate” the economy with loose money, cutting interest rates and bloating the money supply.

It’s true that a president doesn’t conduct monetary policy; that is the prerogative of the Federal Reserve System. But the president appoints the Board of Governors. Meanwhile and invariably, the Chairman of the Board is him or herself a committed growthist.

The current Chair, Kevin Warsh, is a technophile who has bought into the notion that AI will resurrect TFP and bring us into a long wave of GDP growth. Never mind the skyrocketing demands of AI data centers on already-strained water and energy resources.

When it does become apparent that resources are actually the limiting factor—not low interest rates for developers—the greedy impatience for GDP growth motivates politicians to bully, threaten, and invade other countries. Trump’s war in Iran, his abduction of Maduro in Venezuela, and his sabre rattling on Greenland, Canada, and Mexico is an all-time, classic example.

Each of these processes—resource shortages, loose money, international strife—are at once signs of today’s unsustainability and contributors to tomorrow’s unsustainability. They are subjective signs and indicators, red flags and warnings. The best objective measurement we have is GDP itself, the widely available proxy for the ecological footprint of economic activity.

Americans Connecting the Dots to and from “The Economy”

In the wake of the 2026 blue tsunami, let’s give Americans some credit. There may be some boneheads roaming the country, as in all countries. As a whole, though, Americans are smart enough to connect the dots from distal causes to proximal causes to current problems, and eventually solutions.

They’ve been hurt by inflation, a proximal cause of their current financial strain. They’ve pegged the war in Iran as a distal but crystal-clear cause. The solution, they decided, was to plant a STOP sign in front of a GDP-obsessed president. They couldn’t put him on the ballot, so they ousted his party and elected a Congress to rein him in.

It won’t take Americans forever to connect the dots from GDP growth to a litany of additional woes beyond inflation. Sometimes the woes stem not from GDP growth per se, but from futile growth policies. That’s because, at this point in history, limits to growth are setting in, so a growing GDP can be hard to come by without fudging the numbers. But the misguided, desperate efforts to keep it growing can be just as damaging as the growth itself.

Let us consider a basic list of “bads and disservices” stemming from too much GDP, ill-advised growth policies, or a combination of the two:

• Rampant fossil-fuel development, including of coal, tar sands, and shale oil
• Climate change, including global heating, severe storms, and sea-level rise
• Depletion of natural resources including soils, water, timber, fisheries, and minerals
• Air, water, and soil pollution
• Biodiversity loss, endangered species
• Diminished hunting and fishing opportunities
• Proliferation of data centers
• Artificial intelligence → artificial superintelligence → humachines
• Sprawl; traffic congestion and noise
• Crimes of passion (road rage, for example)
• Maldistribution of wealth; K-shaped economy
• Financial crimes
• Incessant advertising
• Disease; obesity, cancer, heart disease
• Shorter lifespans

This inventory of ills is the dark underbelly of economic growth, and there are far more specific examples, such as the thousands of individual byproducts we lump into the category of “pollution.” It’s scarily unsustainable. It’s gnawing at the peace of mind of the body politic.

I’m a voter, I know many voters, and I believe voters at large are starting to figure out the connection of “the economy” not only to goods and services, but to bads and disservices. They are in the process of recognizing the distal cause—the push for GDP growth—of so many problems. They are coming to realize that, this far into the 21st century, the bads are outweighing the goods. It won’t take them much longer to identify the solution: a steady state economy of sustainable size. An economy where the goods are great and the bads aren’t too big to deal with.

In closing, congratulations to the Democratic Party! May their strategists, pollsters, and politicians explore the nuances of “the economy,” the issue that brought them to power. And, unlike Trump, may they handle with great dignity the inconvenient truth about limits to growth.

A blue wave would be a terrible thing to waste.