Carpe Momentum: We Must Seize This Moment

Trump didn’t break the system, he exposed it. Now it’s up to us to decide what comes next: restoration or revolution.

Richard Murphy, a British former chartered accountant and political economist who advises the Trades Union Congress on taxation and founded the Tax Justice Network, said it plainly: Trump is waging war, not on foreign enemies, but on America itself. His latest economic maneuvering isn’t mismanagement; it’s pillage. His $4 trillion tax scam, disguised as the “One Big Beautiful Bill,” is not meant to grow the economy. It’s meant to hollow it out, concentrating wealth in fewer hands, and then blaming the wreckage on the people already struggling to survive it.

Trump didn't emerge from a vacuum. He was midwifed into power by decades of bipartisan complicity: deregulation, corporate capture, endless wars, trade deals that gutted communities, and a refusal to challenge capitalism’s most predatory instincts.

For decades, both Republicans and Democrats helped construct an economy that rewarded consolidation over cooperation, profit over people, and illusion over integrity. They sold off the commons piece by piece, airwaves, water systems, public health, even education, until there was little left to protect from someone like Trump.

Republicans did it through brute force: tax cuts for the rich, deregulation, corporate personhood, and white grievance politics.

Democrats did it through appeasement: triangulation, Wall Street alliances, and a technocratic elitism that mistook market indicators for human well-being.

Together, they paved the gilded path Trump stomped down with gold-plated boots. He didn’t overthrow the system; he used it because the system was built to be used by men like him.

Unless we confront that truth, unless we stop pretending this is just about Trump, or 2016, or the electoral college, we will get someone even more dangerous next time. Someone who doesn’t brag about breaking norms, but rewrites them entirely.

And here’s the deeper truth: Trump isn’t some aberration from the American economic system. He’s its final, bloated form. The system didn’t fail to stop him, it created him.

For decades, we’ve watched capitalism mutate from a framework of markets into a machinery of extraction, of wealth, of labor, of dignity. It monetizes everything: disease, disasters, surveillance, climate collapse. Every hurricane, every cancer diagnosis, every wildfire, every displaced community, someone is making money from it. And someone else is paying the price.

What’s shifting now, what makes this moment dangerous but also filled with revolutionary potential, is that the pain has become visible. Ordinary people may not yet agree on the cause, but they know something is deeply wrong. Their rent is rising, their prescriptions are unaffordable, and their kids’ futures are shrinking by the day. Billionaires tell them the market is strong while they check Zillow and see their home value crater. That dissonance breeds rage. And rage, rightly guided, becomes power.

But that power must be aimed higher than a return to “normal.” Because normal is the problem.

Normal was a political class so entangled in corporate money that governing became performance art, not public service. It was an economy that celebrated gains for the few while offloading the losses onto everyone else, communities gutted, pensions raided, jobs automated, and then blamed for being left behind. It was a climate crisis repackaged as an investment opportunity, a planetary emergency reduced to quarterly earnings potential.

Normal was a society where three men could hoard more wealth than half the country combined, and yet the news told us the stock market was “strong.” Normal was a system so rigged, so brittle, so utterly dependent on public disillusionment, that it practically begged for a strongman to walk in and pretend he could fix it all with slogans and spite.

That system gave us Trump. It wasn’t just the parties or the policies, it was the whole architecture. A political class bought and paid for. A capitalist economy designed to exploit, and a corporate media more focused on clicks and ad revenue than truth, feeding the spectacle while ignoring the stakes. They didn’t just fail to stop Trump, they built the stage he strutted onto. And unless we rewrite those foundations, this system won’t just give us another Trump. It will give us someone sharper, crueler, and even harder to dislodge.

So what do we do with this breach, the tear in the fabric that Trump has widened?

We step through it. Not cautiously, not incrementally, but with revolutionary clarity.

This is not the time for tweaks or gestures. We don’t need to “restore faith in institutions” that have betrayed their purpose; we need to rebuild those institutions from the ground up, this time in service of the many, not the few.

That means de-commodifying what should never have been for sale in the first place: our health, our housing, our ecosystems, our knowledge. It means refusing to launder climate disaster through Wall Street portfolios and call it “resilience.” It means taking back control of the essentials, our energy, our media, our labor, our lives, from the corporations that have treated democracy as just another asset to acquire.

This doesn’t mean chaos. It means design. It means a future built on dignity, not dominance. On shared wealth, not trickle-down myths. On governance by people, not by hedge funds, monopolies, and billionaires playing god.

Because survival isn’t enough. The goal isn’t just to endure Trump.
It’s to make sure his kind can never rise again.

History tells us that when systems crack, people can step in and build something better if they move fast and with purpose. During the Great Depression, mass labor unrest and grassroots pressure forced FDR’s hand and helped usher in the New Deal, fundamentally reshaping the American social contract. In Poland, it was dockworkers and trade unionists who challenged authoritarianism and birthed a democratic transition through the Solidarity movement. And in the American South, it was ordinary citizens, sharecroppers, students, and pastors who stood against state violence and segregation, ultimately rewriting civil rights law and national consciousness. These moments didn’t arise from stability; they emerged from collapse. And they succeeded because people refused to settle for repair when reinvention was possible.

We start by refusing to be gaslit by the old rules. We stop waiting for permission from institutions that no longer serve us. We recognize that change will not come from within systems designed to resist it; it will come from below, from outside, from us.

We begin by organizing, not just in protest, but in purpose. We rally around a new vision of what society owes its people: a modern, radical Bill of Rights for the 21st century. One that guarantees not just the right to speak, but the right to live, with housing, healthcare, clean air and water, access to knowledge, meaningful work, and democratic control over the forces that shape our lives.

We build unions where they’ve been crushed, cooperatives where capital has failed us, and solidarity where the state has retreated. We create media that informs instead of distracts, technology that serves rather than surveils. We join movements already in motion, Indigenous land defenders, climate justice organizers, labor coalitions, tenant unions, mutual aid networks, and we bring others with us.

Think of this moment as a window to renewal. The breach is open. The systems that betrayed us are faltering. And the moment to act, not cautiously, but courageously, is now.

The Trump era is a fever, but the body was already sick. Long before he descended that golden escalator, the infection had taken root: decades of wealth hoarding, institutional rot, bipartisan betrayal, and a culture that commodified everything from health to disaster to democracy itself. Trump is not the cause. He’s the flare-up, the nasty, purulent boil rising on the surface of a system that’s been festering underneath for years.

And now it’s come to a head, the grotesque, visible symptom of a system in long decline. A pustule, swollen with corruption and cruelty, begging to be lanced.

Yet, as painful and disorienting as this moment is, it presents a rare kind of opportunity, one we haven’t seen in a generation. Not an invitation to patch things up or buff the surface and pretend the foundation holds. But the opportunity to finally tell the truth: that the house is crumbling. The blueprints were flawed. That we deserve something better and that we have the power to build it.

What comes next must be a reinvention. We can create something rooted in solidarity instead of suspicion, ecological wisdom instead of extraction, economic justice instead of plutocratic control.

The crack in the foundation has been widening for decades, through Reaganomics, through deregulation, through endless war and austerity. Trump didn’t start it, but he has blasted the hinges off the vault door. Now the contents are spilling out in full view.

Carpe momentum. We must seize this moment before the vault door closes again.