I think we owe Trump a thank you.
No, really. Stay with me.
Not for the policies. Not for the lies, the tariffs, the daily circus of a man who has somehow convinced half the world that chaos is a leadership style. Not for any of that.
For the crash. For accelerating what was already coming and making it impossible to look away.
Because here is the thing nobody wants to say out loud: a slow decline would have killed us. A managed crisis, a gradual erosion, a series of reasonable adjustments to an unreasonable system — that we could have slept through. That we were sleeping through.
Trump didn’t break a healthy world. He broke the last window in a building that was already on fire.
Thank you, also, for saying the impossible things out loud.
For not bothering to dress it up. Every leader before him knew the same rules — how power converts to money, how money buys more power, how the whole machinery works — but they had the decency, or the cunning, to keep it behind closed doors. Trump just… did it in public. Turned his presidency into a business, his business into a presidency, and dared anyone to call it what it was.
They did. It didn’t matter.
And in a strange, ugly way — that is information. Valuable information. The kind we needed.
Because as long as the corruption wears a suit and speaks in full sentences, we can tell ourselves it isn’t really there. We can extend the benefit of the doubt. We can believe in the institutions.
He took that comfort away from us. Completely, and without apology.
He doesn’t care what you think. He never did. And that — that indifference to the opinion of anyone who isn’t already useful to him — is perhaps the most clarifying thing about him. Not a bug. Not a breakdown. A mirror.
This is what power looks like when it stops pretending.
But let’s not be too generous. He didn’t do it alone.
There is the climate, which has been sending the same memo for thirty years and watching us file it under later. There is AI — not the science fiction kind, but the real kind, already concentrating power in fewer hands than any moment in human history. And there are the hundreds of millions of young people in Africa, in India, across the Global South — a generation that arrived now, did nothing wrong, and is inheriting economies that were never built to absorb them, in a world that is now also handing their futures to algorithms. There is the Middle East, burning with a ferocity that exposes every comfortable Western narrative about progress and civilisation for the thin layer of paint it always was.
And then there is the oldest problem of all, the one that has no Twitter account and needs no election to do its damage: the ME that swallowed the WE.
Not the healthy ME. Not the strong, self-knowing individual who shows up for others because they know who they are. The other kind. The ME that is so vast and so fragile at the same time that it needs the whole world as a mirror. The ego dressed up as vision. The narcissist dressed up as a leader.
We built systems that rewarded that ME. We called it meritocracy. We called it disruption. We called it genius.
Hochmut kommt vor dem Fall. Pride before the fall. The Germans have a word for everything.
So here we are. In the fall.
And I find myself — unexpectedly, and I say this with full awareness of how strange it sounds — not entirely without hope.
Not because I know what comes next. I don’t. Nobody does, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
But because I have lived long enough to know that some things can only be built from zero. Not reformed. Not iterated. Not disrupted in the Silicon Valley sense of the word, which always somehow ends with the same people owning more than before.
Built. From. Zero.
New rules about how money moves and where it goes. Real ones, not the kind that get announced at Davos and forgotten by February. Communities — WEs — that are not sentimental or naive but structurally central. Strong individuals who derive their strength from connection, not from domination. And nature — not as a resource, not as a backdrop, but as the system we are inside of, whether we acknowledge it or not.
I don’t know what that world looks like in detail. Neither do you. That is not a problem. That is the point.
The next one or two years are going to get worse. I believe that with some confidence. The crash has further to go. More windows to break. More comfortable assumptions to expose as the fictions they always were.
The question is not whether to survive it. The question is what you are building in your head, right now, for what comes after.
So yes. Thank you, Donald. Unlikely catalyst. Unwitting demolition crew.
We don’t know what is on the other side. We don’t know if we get there without a war. We might not.
History doesn’t promise a way out. Only a way through.