Americans are sleepwalking toward imminent social, economic and political collapse on a scale that is, frankly, difficult to fathom. Not by accident mind you – but by design.
Over the last two decades, I’ve predicted some of the world’s most pivotal events including the 2008 global financial crash and the mainstreaming of the far right over the preceding decade. One of the tools I’ve used to do this is a systems lens partly grounded in my study of the radicalisation processes behind genocidal violence as a PhD researcher at the University of Sussex.
I’ve used these tools to track the birth and evolution of a global fascist movement that is currently fighting a ‘network war’ against the foundations of democracy, as articulated in my forthcoming book ALT REICH: THE NETWORK WAR TO DESTROY THE WEST FROM WITHIN. We now stand at one of the most consequential political inflection points of the postwar era. And it hinges around the Musk-Trump economic plan, which would set the US up for a shocking convergence of economic calamity and exclusionary violence reminiscent of the worst genocides of the twentieth century. The very fate of the American republic hangs in the balance.
The planetary phase shift framework helps us to understand the grave risks of this inflection point. As the prevailing industrial paradigm weakens and crumbles in this third stage in the life-cycle of civilisation, we are facing monumental uncertainty as the prevailing system – both its material infrastructure and its cultural organising systems – fray at the seams.
The Musk-Trump plan represents a last ditch effort to salvage this dying order and abort the emergence of a new system. The danger is that, while it cannot really succeed, it might succeed in aborting the phase shift through the fourth stage of our civilisational life-cycle (reorganisation), thus preventing us from moving into a new life-cycle for humanity,
The plan
The Trump campaign has now made exceedingly clear what it plans to do if it wins. It amounts to a project of national suicide.
The plan itself is not viable. But if executed, it would pave the way for a future of total economic catastrophe, environmental disaster, permanent civil unrest, ethnic cleansing and genocidal violence – not to mention, a global economic crisis which empowers Vladimir Putin.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – authored by former Trump officials including several that Trump wants to appoint – proposes to dismantle the “administrative state” at scale by firing most federal employees, and reengineering the entire federal government.
Trump also wants to forcibly deport as many as 20 million undocumented migrants from the United States in what amounts to the largest ethnic cleansing campaign in American history since the era of colonisation (especially since the real number is likely around half that, implying that many legal migrants would be targeted). He plans to appoint Tom Homan, a Project 2025 author, to lead the mass deportation programme.
This idea has been heartily supported by Trump’s prospective efficiency chief, Elon Musk, who also wants to slash £2 trillion of government spending – knowing that this will inflict “hardship” on Americans but claiming it will generate long-term prosperity. Given that the federal budget for fiscal year 2024 was $6.7 trillion, Musk is proposing to eliminate nearly a third of US government spending.
Taken together, these three interlinked actions of a Musk-backed Trump administration would not just be ‘costly’. They would drive the United States to rapid societal collapse in a way which conventional analysts have failed to contemplate, let alone comprehend.
Cleansing America?
Creating an apparatus to deport 20 million people from the United States would involve the establishment of an industrial-scale ethnic cleansing apparatus the likes of which have never been seen before, but which must inevitably draw comparisons with Nazi Germany.
It should be remembered that Hitler did not adopt a ‘final solution’ in the form of the mass extermination of Jewish people until 1941 – about eight years after he took power. This was preceded by a programme of mass deportations. The original plan was to deport European Jews to Madagascar or Soviet Asia.
Underlying Hitler’s hopes was a vision of Nazi economic expansionism inspired by America’s rapid industrialisation, which Hitler attributed to forcible expulsions of indigenous people to acquire vast areas of productive land (Lebensraum) and the deployment of slave labour to ramp up production.
But as the war ground on, it became clear that in the face of British control of the seas and Soviet resistance, the Nazi mass deportation plans would be impossible to implement. Hitler therefore came to believe that his goals could only be achieved by exterminating the Jews within Nazi-controlled territory: hence the final solution.
The normalisation of the Musk-Trump plan to target and remove as many as 20 million people from the United States – all on the grounds of enhancing American economic productivity – falls within precisely the same parameters of an evolving genocidal ideology visible in the decade before Hitler’s adopted final solution. The US is on the brink of a similar trajectory of ideological radicalisation.
To be sure, this is a racist vision in which white people are exempt, while ethnic minorities – and even Jews – are demonised. When an X user declared in 2023 that Western Jews deserved no sympathy because they invited “hordes of minorities” to their countries, Musk wrote, “You have said the absolute truth.”
It turns out that Musk himself, as revealed by the Washington Post, worked in the US as an illegal immigrant early in his career – something his multi-millionaire brother Kimbal, who apparently has admitted doing the same thing, joked about.
One rule for white South Africans who thrived in the era of apartheid – another rule for darker-skinned ethnic minorities from South America, Asia, Africa or the Middle East.
Economic collapse from mass deportations
The problem of course, as many experts have warned, is that the Musk-Trump mass deportation plan cannot possibly produce a beneficial result for the American economy. It would not only cost about a trillion dollars and take a decade to execute, it would result in savage GDP losses that conventional analysts have underestimated.
One report finds that deporting about 8 million migrants would slash US GDP by 7.4% by 2028.
And because undocumented migrants make huge economic contributions that help create more American jobs, US employment will crash by 6.7%.
These figures are huge, but highly conservative because they don’t account for cascading effects across the system.
All the evidence available shows that undocumented immigrants are not replacing US-born workers, but are taking jobs that the latter aren’t interested in. This means that if they go, US-born workers will not just walk in and replace them (unless they are forced to).
Instead, businesses will have to make dramatic cuts to their operations while attempting to replace lost workers with labour-saving tech. There’s unlikely to be much capital available for the latter, however, in this scenario
Undocumented migrants account for 50% of hired field and crop workers, for instance. The loss of these workers would deal a fatal blow to American farming, which would become virtually impossible to sustain with just half the workforce.
Undocumented migrants also make up 20% of construction trade workers, 23% of textile workers, 26% of grounds maintenance workers, 25% of food prep and serving workers in the US – again, American businesses in these sectors would rapidly become economically impossible to manage with such a large loss of workers.
The systemic knock-on effects on key American industries would therefore be colossal. Looking at just two areas - food production and construction - such a vast loss of labour power would result in many companies and enterprises being unable to maintain normal operation, causing many to fail and forcing others to downsize. Agriculture, food and related industries contribute 5.6% of GDP. Construction comprises 4.5%. That’s a total of 10% of GDP that would be potentially jeopardised, in addition to the dire estimates above.
This could take potential GDP losses to as much as 17.5%, and this is still not taking into account the full array of systemic knock-on effects.
Impact of gutting federal spending
Musk’s plan to slash $2 trillion of the government’s budget would have a further catastrophic effect on the American economy. Government spending on public education, food, environmental safety, infrastructure repairs, airspace navigation, and transitioning to clean energy would be largely eliminated. This would wreak massive devastation on American businesses and lead to widespread destabilisation of essential public services.
Musk has justified his plan by saying that Americans needs to live “within our means”. He has signalled his agreement with the idea that this is the most effective way of addressing America’s growing debt crisis and dependence on borrowing.
Yet his plan would only except worsen this problem. Trump’s economic plan for tax cuts and tariffs is projected to increase the US’ $35.7 trillion debt by a further $1.5 billion every year. To offset this would require Musk to slash as much as $3.5 trillion from the federal budget (more than half of it).
This would not just lead to hardship. It would eviscerate the American economy on a scale that would rival the Great Depression of the 1930s. It would also probably slash at least 3% off GDP immediately.
Some of the deepest cuts would go to the fastest growing sectors, especially by eliminating clean energy tax credits for solar and wind. This is a recipe for further economic disaster because clean energy drove just under 5% of US economic growth in 2023.
Economic obsolescence, ecological destabilisation
And yet even this does not capture the full scale of the potential impact. Intensifying US fossil fuel dependence will not only doom the US to a future of escalating ecological disasters, it would act as a damper on economic productivity.
An increasing number of analysts recognise that US shale oil and gas production could be on the brink of peaking this decade, with HSBC suggesting this would happen by 2028. More importantly, the energy return on investment (EROI) – which measures how much useful energy is extracted relative to the amount of energy inputted to get it out – of US fossil fuels has haemorrhaged over the last decades. This has played a key role in the decline in the rate of economic growth in the US and elsewhere, offset through debt-based financialisation and profiteering through the expansion of credit.
By stalling clean energy, the Musk-Trump plan would abort a primary motor of US economic productivity, jobs and resilience; while locking the US into dependence on an economically and energetically declining fossil fuel resource base that is, nevertheless, escalating dangerous levels of emissions.
Given the clear evidence that declining EROI has played a key role in global economic recession, crises and malaise, the Musk-Trump plan would seal the fate of the American economy on a long-term path of deepening recession and crisis.
By 2030, the oil industry is set to consume about a quarter of the energy it produces just to keep producing – a quantity that will rise to about 50% by 2050. This entails a consistent and irreversible decline in GDP over the next decade and beyond if the US remains largely fossil fuel dependent. Far from eliminating debt, this would incentivise reliance on debt instruments as a mechanism to cannibalistically maintain growth.
Ultimately, Musk’s plan suffers from basic scientific and economic illiteracy. The root systemic driver of debt-based asset bubbles is not federal spending in itself – but the very structure of the global capitalist economy. Within this structure, the way in which money is created by being lent into existence on interest, inherently accelerates the expansion of debt in the financial system – in the interests of powerful creditors (banks, hedge funds and beyond). This expansion of debt to underpin profits and growth creates asset price inflation that drives unsustainable debt bubbles that at some point are at risk of exploding – as happened in 2008.
If Musk really wanted to do something about this, he would advocate fundamental monetary reform and transformation of the way capitalism and banking operates (or. Instead, he plans to leave these untouched while systematically dismembering the US economy.
The risk of violent escalation
The risk of mass deportation escalating toward worse forms of violence is worsened by the prospect of the Musk-Trump plan intensifying an unprecedented economic crisis.
The wholesale dehumanisation of Trump’s ‘enemies’ is exemplified in a book by Jack Posobiec, endorsed by Trump’s VP pick JD Vance, called Unhumans. The book reveals the extent to which anyone opposed to Trump can be seen as ‘unhuman’, potentially justifying violence against them in the name of protecting ‘humanity’. This extreme Otherisation lays the groundwork for the conditions of exclusionary mass violence.
These conditions will be further radicalised by the divisive social and cultural consequences of an industrial-scale national mass deportation programme. As the American Immigration Council observes, the mass deportation plan:
… would require the United States to build and maintain 24 times more ICE detention capacity than currently exists. The government would also be required to establish and maintain over 1,000 new immigration courtrooms to process people at such a rate.
The Musk-Tramp plan therefore entails building a national infrastructure of mass detention and deportation facilities (more accurately: concentration camps and ethnic cleansing facilities) that would be multiple times the size of what Nazi Germany wanted to achieve.
In this scenario there is a serious risk of genocidal escalation. That is because the Musk-Trump economic plan will not solve problems but intensify them. Faced with escalating economic crisis and social dislocation, a new Musk-Trump administration would find itself forced to resort to increasingly violent measures of social control through police and military action to maintain power and territorial integrity.
The collapse of the American economy – losing as much as a quarter of its GDP within a few years – would be so catastrophic that it would, in turn, trigger widespread civil unrest on a national scale. People are not going to just lie down as the basic means of survival are dismantled by an ideologically-charged federal regime.
The US economy would be at risk of descending into a hyperinflationary crisis as the dollar value plummets. In such conditions, as prices of staple foods and fuel rocket out of control, the US would likely see prolonged protests and riots across all major cities.
The escalation of such crisis conditions would tend to reinforce ideological radicalisation rather than reduce it. Faced with the growing inability to execute mass deportation plans, and an upswell of domestic civil unrest, a radicalised Musk-Trump regime could over the ensuring decade find itself on a very similar trajectory to that experienced by Hitler’s Nazi regime – in search of a ‘final solution’ to its costly network of mass detention camps sprawling across the American landscape.
The Eurasian geopolitics of alternative facts
An obvious question is – can the forces behind the Trump campaign really be this mad? Part of the problem here is ideology. Many in the Trump infrastructure cannot think or see systemically, even in the most rudimentary fashion. They believe that their programs will work, and ignore data that shows otherwise.
This wilful blindness to reality and the desire to inhabit a universe of alternative facts is illustrated by the mismatch between plummeting rates of violent crime in the US over the last decades and years amidst rising immigration, and the constant propaganda from the Trump campaign claiming that immigration has seen a rising epidemic of violent crimes.
In fact, the exact opposite is the case.
The Trump campaign is premised, therefore, on fuelling crisis perceptions that are entirely false. While an ongoing systemic crisis in the prevailing economic and political order is clearly real and deepening, the Musk-Trump approach is to misdirect unease and anger about this onto constructed ‘Others’, rather than the system itself.
Yet key forces behind the Trump campaign – including Musk himself – know they are pushing disinformation, and fully aware of the grim probable consequences of the Musk-Trump plan. Recent revelations regarding Musk’s intimate contacts with Russian president Vladimir Putin for over two years indicate that the Musk-Trump campaign fits neatly into Putin’s ambitions.
The collapse and “control” of the United States is an integral component of these ambitions, as reflected in Putin advisor Alexander Dugin’s vision of remaking the global order to break-up Europe and pave the way for Russian expansionism.
As American investigative journalist Dave Troy has warned repeatedly, the collapse of the US dollar would be a precursor to a global economic collapse that could facilitate the broader goal of smashing national governments. The end goal of this is to make national currencies ultimately irrelevant, paving the way for a pro-Putin “patchwork” – to quote Peter Thiel’s acolyte Curtis Yarvin – of techno-autocratic regimes enriched by Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies while eroding democratic checks and balances.
The Musk-Trump plan thus represents forces which are deeply invested in the incumbent architecture of the prevailing industrial paradigm – premised on neoliberal extreme market capitalism, fossil fuel dependence, the centralised domination and manipulation of information and sense-making, and the reductionist ideology of homo-economicus.
All this is facing disruption as we move through the third release stage of our civilisational life-cycle, which has opened the way for new technological paradigms, new ways of seeing our relationships with each other and the planet, and new approaches to organising our economies to flourish within planetary boundaries. To get to the next life-cycle for humanity, we will need to choose wisely, to move away as rapidly as possible from the clutches of this dying order as it wrestles through its death throes, while harnessing and mobilising the emerging forces of both technological change and cultural evolution.
The events of the last few years have demonstrated that the unthinkable can become mainstream, the fringe can become normal, at unprecedented speeds. The Musk-Trump plan is the fruition of a global network war aimed at tearing down the entire infrastructure of a viable democracy in the United States – and it would not stop there, but reverberate across the world in an effort to shore-up the global system and protect the interests of the most powerful as the ‘polycrisis’ intensifies. We should stop underestimating the risks, and start waking up to who is fighting this war and why.
Nafeez Ahmed is a systems theorist, change strategist and investigative journalist. He is the author of ALT REICH: THE NETWORK WAR TO DESTROY THE WEST FROM WITHIN which will be available in late November. Sign up to be among the first to know when the book can be pre-ordered.
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