Last Friday (August 1, 2025), the US Bureau of Labor Statistics published their latest – Employment Situation Summary – for July 2025. What followed was somewhat extraordinary. The data and the revisions to the previous two months data releases (which is standard practice) showed that the US labour market is in decline. It starkly runs counter to the official Trump narrative that the US is booming. While we don’t have enough evidence to really establish causality – it is likely (based on theoretical conjecture) that the highly volatile policy regime that Trump runs and his tariff flip flops is undermining the confidence in the economy. We need a few more months of data yet before we can be sure. But the BLS results certainly support the view that Trump’s economic policies are not working to advantage the American public. The extraordinary thing was that Trump then sacked the BLS head and signalled a further descent towards totalitarianism.

Last week, the – 2025 Canadian federal election – was held and the Liberal Party won for the fourth consecutive time securing 169 seats (in the 343-seat House of Commons), just short of a majority. They also won the popular vote (43.7 per cent of the vote – up 11.1 per cent), which was the first time they had achieved that since 2015. The Opposition Conservative Party leader lost his own seat in the election. On January 7, 2025, national polling saw support for the Conservatives of around 47 per cent and support for the government around 20 per cent. By the time the poll came, that had shifted dramatically in favour of the government. In between, came Trump. The UK Guardian analysis (March 19, 2025) – Canada’s Liberals on course for political resurrection amid trade war, polls show – said the shift “has little precedent in Canadian history, reflecting the outsized role played by an unpredictable US president”. To some extent, the craziness of the US political situation at present also impacted on the – 2025 Australian federal election – which was held on Saturday (May 3, 2025). The incumbent government, which was well down in the opinion polls before Trump took power, won in a landslide achieving the highest two-party preferred outcome in Australia’s electoral history. The parallels with the Canadian outcome are strong despite the different voting systems in both countries. Moreover, the conservative Liberal-National Coalition in Australia, the dominant party in the Post-WW2 era has been reduced to being little more than a far Right populist party. Similar to the Canadian situation, the Opposition leader also lost his seat, which was the first time that has ever happened in Australia. So Trump is undermining the very movements he is trying to promote. But what is very clear is that Australia is nothing like the US, despite some commonalities (language – sort of!).

So from January 20, 2025, Donald Trump will inherit the on-going genocide that the US government has been party to in the Middle East. He will then have no cover and will be judged accordingly. What follows are a few thoughts that I had when I watched the unfolding disaster for the Democrats and the amazing victory that Trump has recorded. It was obviously a Hobson’s Choice facing the US voters (from an outside perspective), which also tells us something about the way the US society has evolved. Both candidates were in my view unelectable. But the voters didn’t agree with me. And, one candidate was much smarter that the other and better understood the plight the American voters are in after several decades of neoliberalism. Spare the thought.