In June 1897, Great Britain, at the apex of empire, organized an elaborate pageant celebrating Queen Victoria’s 60 years on the throne. The industrial revolution had turned a small island nation into an economic and military superpower. The writer Rudyard Kipling, one of imperialism’s greatest apologists, was asked to contribute an ode for the queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Yet far from boasting about the empire that Kipling adored, the poem he wrote imagined its eventual end. “Far-called, our navies melt away; / On dune and headland sinks the fire,” he wrote. “Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!”
Much less humility was on display as the United States celebrated its 250th anniversary. “We will always be on top,” Donald Trump said in his July 4 speech. “We will never let our country fall.” Yet even as he insisted that U.S. global dominance will last forever, Trump is busily dismantling the very economic underpinnings that would ensure future American might.
When economies lag, hegemony becomes unsustainable. Britain’s decline took only a few short decades. The Soviet Union rivaled America militarily but could not keep up economically, and unraveled as a result of its inability to grow. Americans today enjoy material abundance scarcely imaginable in Kipling’s day. That is the reaped reward of scientific prowess, high-skilled immigration, the rule of law, free trade, and stable monetary policy—all of which Trump is jeopardizing in his current term.
In the postindustrial world, ideas are the ultimate engine of growth. “Productivity isn’t everything, but, in the long run, it is almost everything,” the economist Paul Krugman once remarked. Much of America’s outperformance of Europe in the past two decades can be explained by greater efficiency in creating goods and services. The United States is still the best place in the world to be rewarded for inventions and other advancements. Yet the pace of future discoveries could soon decelerate. Out of distaste for elite universities and the study of disfavored subjects, the Trump administration suspended and canceled nearly 8,000 scientific grants in 2025, according to calculations by the journal Nature. The National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health are issuing roughly 25 percent fewer grants than before Trump returned to office. Federal scientific agencies have seen their workforces slashed. If the president had his way with the federal budget, non-defense research funding would be cut by 35 percent.
One reason for America’s technological ascendance has been its capacity to siphon brainpower from the rest of the world. From 1901 to 2024, 410 Americans have won the Nobel Prize in chemistry, medicine, economics, and physics. Of those, 35 percent were immigrants. Today, America’s lead in AI depends on imported talent: 59 percent of the world’s top AI researchers work in the U.S., and more than 65 percent of them are foreign-born. Even seven out of 10 Chinese-educated AI researchers work in America today. A recent analysis found that 59 percent of America’s “unicorns”—private start-ups worth more than $1 billion—have at least one immigrant founder or co-founder.
This immigration-innovation linkage ought to be easily detectable even from the Oval Office: The president’s biggest campaign booster in 2024, Elon Musk, himself immigrated from South Africa. So did David Sacks, the president’s AI and crypto czar until recently. Yet the Trump administration’s hostility toward immigration is not limited to undocumented or low-skilled entrants. The president has attempted to add a $100,000 fee to applicants seeking H-1B visas, intended for skilled workers in health care and technology. The administration is also close to finalizing four-year limits on student visas—which would make most Ph.D. programs difficult to complete for international students.
In their book Why Nations Fail, the Nobel Prize–winning economists Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson argued that dependable, pluralistic institutions are essential for long-run growth. Perhaps the paramount proof for their case was the United States, a country that both respected property rights and allowed dominant companies to be replaced by competitors. These norms and institutions are buckling under the pressure. The president treats the law as a tool to punish enemies and reward friends.
The private sector understands that favors can be gained—and antitrust enforcement and other painful federal interventions warded off—by demonstrating sufficient deference. So business titans are tiptoeing around the president’s sensibilities, offering gaudy tributes (such as a gilded desk clock from Rolex), and donating copiously to his pet projects such as the White House ballroom. Under Trump, the federal government is gradually becoming more dirigiste, directly involving itself in the operation of businesses: seizing effective control of U.S. Steel, becoming the largest shareholder of Intel, asking for revenue from Nvidia’s chip sales to China. Far from avoiding conflicts of interest and the appearance of impropriety, the president is aggressively monetizing the office—earning $2 billion last year, largely from cryptocurrency sales. The president wields his pardon opportunity to reward his supporters, even those convicted of corruption in elected office and serious fraud. Such capricious governance has not immediately made America less hospitable for investment. However, the risk is not of imminent economic recession, but a steady erosion that becomes apparent only years from now.
Just as British might was once underwritten by the ascendancy of the pound, America benefits from the dollar’s status as the default currency of global commerce. The dollar’s place in international finance is sustained only in trust: in the strength of American institutions, in the full faith and credit of the Treasury, and in the stability of the global financial system. Trumpism is an attack on all three pillars. Trump has tried to undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve, which manages America’s monetary policy, more than any predecessor before him—pointing a weaponized justice system at its officials who do not bend to his will. Because of his tax cuts, the American debt has continued to grow at an extraordinary rate. Trump’s unilateral imposition of sweeping tariffs on the rest of the world—and the abusive way he speaks of allies—weaken trust in both Pax Americana and the dominance of the dollar.
Trump has committed his administration to an idiosyncratic vision of American greatness. It is a greatness so internally brittle that it requires extraordinary governmental pressure against institutions and people who disagree with the administration’s aims. Yet it is also so self-assured that America can safely jettison the postwar international order it built, in trade and military alliances, without risk to American supremacy.
Defenders of the president often point to the performance of the stock markets—which have reached all-time highs thanks to the market’s exuberance for artificial intelligence. But surges in share prices can be transitory—you never know whether you’re in a bubble until you’re out of it. Defenders of Trump’s economic policies argue, more substantively, that they are part of a larger plan to forestall the rise of China. After Silicon Valley made its peace with MAGA, the administration has pledged to put few guardrails on America’s frontier tech companies as they try to outrace their Chinese counterparts.
Thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the president’s signature legislation this term, tech companies, and American corporations generally, have been given permanent reductions in their tax rates and allowances that promote research. Trump, as his defenders tell it, has canceled the expensive clean-energy projects of his predecessor Joe Biden, while supporting fossil-fuel electricity generation that will power the data centers needed here and now. In the AI race between America and China, the country with the most computing power installed may win. Tariffs and direct intercessions into the operations of businesses could be justified on untangling supply chains from dependency on America’s greatest rival. If AI really is the wellspring of future productivity growth, then accelerating it could ultimately be the most consequential decision that Trump makes.
This argument—a monomaniacal fixation on preventing America from being overtaken by China as Britain was overtaken by America—is worth taking seriously. But it is undercut by Trump’s other actions. Today’s advantages in artificial intelligence will be hard to maintain unless the United States keeps attracting the field’s best minds—especially given the declining literacy and numeracy of American students. Building supply chains that exclude China would be easier if allies were not also charged high tariffs. Disregarding the eventual harms of climate change does not just affect future Americans; it also cedes the field of clean-energy technology to China.
In the short term, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act will likely boost growth. But it will also add trillions to American debt, worsening the eventual political crisis that will come within the next decade when the Social Security trust fund runs dry. The bill’s cuts to Medicaid, alongside the cancellation of Affordable Care Act subsidies, are expected to cause millions of Americans to lose health insurance. These problems will be harder to sort in the next decade—when Americans are older, payments on the national debt are higher, and the government’s budgetary flexibility is correspondingly constrained.
A world order led by China’s authoritarian rulers will still be less attractive than the American-led one that Trump is creating. But the more mercurial the United States acts—the more markets are balkanized, private wealth is contingent on political favor—the less advantage the rest of the world will see in choosing Washington over Beijing.
A more measured defense of Trumponomics is to note that it may last only two more years. Courts have also blocked some of the president’s most aggressive actions—such as his attempts to remove a Fed governor and impose blanket tariffs under emergency authority, and his retaliation against law firms that challenge him. Only his tax law is congressionally sanctioned and therefore difficult to repeal. The rest—the attacks on the Fed, the limitations on immigration, even the tariffs—all rest only on executive authority and could be immediately rescinded when Trump leaves office. Even so, four years of such policies will still take a serious toll, both on quantifiable measures such as health-care costs and scientific capacity and unquantifiable ones such as the trust that allies place in America’s security guarantees. Furthermore, Trumpism may linger as the dominant ideology in the GOP even after Trump leaves office. The irony is that policies intended to “make America great again” would instead push it toward Britain’s fate.
For Britain, decline set in slowly. Despite inventing the technologies that permanently altered the world, it eventually fell behind America and Germany in technical prowess and output. This slippage could be obscured for as long as Britain retained its empire and London remained the epicenter of the global financial system. But the productivity gap would ultimately result in Britain’s dethroning. After World War II, the country was saddled with debt, dispossessed of its colonies, and forced to watch the pound’s privileges pass on to the dollar. Then came humiliations—the Suez crisis of 1956, the bailout required from the International Monetary Fund in 1976. What started as a modest loss of economic advantage would ultimately cost Britain everything.
Reflecting on what turned out to be his country’s apogee, Kipling wrote a memento mori, presciently reminding his compatriots that power is inevitably transient. Trump entertains no such thought. “We will always be the best,” he said in his July 4 speech. Perhaps this really is, as the president claimed, “the dawn of the golden age of America.” Or maybe the United States is eroding its supremacy right now—all of its own accord.