When Systemic Pathology Threatens the Nation
Part Two: The Economy, Corruption, and the Public
Introduction: Part One of this series began with a premise: the following two statements are closely related, their relationship threatens national security, and America’s democracy crisis does not begin and end with Donald Trump.
Benito Mussolini reportedly defined fascism as “the merger of state and corporate power.”
Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee, M.D., MDiv., warned that fascism is “a society-level mental disorder cloaked in political ideology.”
Psychologist Drew Westen, Ph.D., argues that President Trump’s public behavior reflects three missing capacities central to normal psychological functioning: empathy, moral conscience, and reality perception.
Dr. Lee describes Trump’s psychological impact on America as an ongoing presidential psychiatric emergency — a mental-health pandemic spreading through followers, institutions, and systems that believe they can profit from Trump.
Part One argues that Trump’s psychological profile — which Dr. Drew Westen says includes DSM-5 clinical markers of delusional psychosis and behavioral traits associated with grandiose or malignant narcissism — closely reflects the operational behavior of the billionaires, industries, and ideological extremists who have aligned themselves with Trump for profit, wealth, and control over others.
It argues this shared pathological operating logic represents a dangerous threat to America’s national security and material harm to its people. Part Two will show that it’s equally dangerous to America’s economic health and harmful to the public interest.
It will reveal that Trump’s personal grift is not separate from corporate or oligarch control of Congress and America’s regulatory agencies; it is the presidential version of the same operating logic.
The leader uses office for wealth, protection, leverage, and revenge.
Corporations use the leader for deregulation, tax cuts, subsidy, and impunity.
Billionaires use access and chaos to weaken the agencies that constrain them.
Ordinary people pay through higher prices, weaker protections, lost benefits, toxic communities, retirement risk, and public institutions that no longer serve them.
Snapshots:
Trump began his second term by firing 17 federal inspectors general without proper explanation or notice to Congress. Inspectors general are the internal watchdogs who investigate waste, fraud, abuse, illegality, and corruption inside federal agencies. Removing them weakens one of the government’s most important nonpartisan oversight systems at the very moment Trump and his allies were moving to consolidate control over federal power.
Pathology link: refusal of accountability; contempt for oversight; power treated as personal property.
Trump handed Elon Musk sweeping influence through DOGE while federal agencies had been investigating Musk-linked companies. The Economic Policy Institute describes Musk’s benefits from the first 100 days of the Trump administration as “corruption in plain sight,” including halted or weakened investigations into Tesla, Neuralink, and SpaceX. Wired also reported that DOGE-related access records at the National Labor Relations Board were deleted, preventing full verification of what DOGE personnel did inside an agency that handles sensitive labor data and cases involving Musk’s interests.
Pathology link: billionaire entitlement; self-dealing; evasion of scrutiny; government power redirected toward private interest.
Public cost: agencies meant to protect workers, consumers, and taxpayers become vulnerable to the billionaires they are supposed to oversee.
The Washington Post reports that Trump’s second administration included 12 billionaires — not including Trump himself — with a combined net worth of about $390.6 billion as of March 2025, making it the wealthiest White House in history. The Post also reports that, excluding Elon Musk, those billionaires and their spouses gave more than $52 million to Trump, pro-Trump PACs, and the Republican National Committee during the 2024 campaign cycle, while Musk alone spent $294 million to boost Trump and other Republicans.
Truthout, citing an Institute for Policy Studies analysis based on Forbes data, reports that U.S. billionaire wealth surged 21 percent in 2025. The top 15 billionaires gained roughly $800 billion, while the country’s 935 billionaires controlled $8.1 trillion — nearly double the wealth held by the bottom half of Americans. Together, the two reports show the same pattern: billionaire wealth does not merely sit outside government; under Trump, it enters government, shapes government, and then profits while ordinary people face affordability, health-care, and safety-net stress.
Pathology link: grandiosity, entitlement, instrumental use of government, and in-group supremacy
Public cost: ordinary people face higher costs, weaker services, and diminished democratic representation while billionaires gain wealth, access, appointments, and influence over the institutions meant to restrain them.
The Trump administration moved to paralyze the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, ordering it to stop investigations and suspend rules. The CFPB exists to protect consumers from unfair, deceptive, or abusive practices by banks, lenders, credit-card companies, debt collectors, and financial firms. Consumer advocates note the agency had previously delivered more than $21 billion in relief to more than 200 million people harmed by financial misconduct.
Pathology link: predators freed from oversight; indifference to harm; donor-class protection.
Public cost: ordinary people become easier targets for junk fees, predatory lending, debt-collection abuse, mortgage abuses, credit scams, and financial fraud.
Trump’s personal income surged more than $2.2 billion in the first year of his second term, with reporting tying much of that windfall to crypto ventures, real estate, investments, and business activity while he retained ownership interests rather than separating himself through a blind trust. The Financial Times describes this as an unprecedented fusion of presidential power and personal enrichment.
Pathology link: public office as private wealth machine; right and wrong reduced to self-benefit; grandiosity without restraint.
Public cost: government becomes a marketplace for insiders while public trust collapses and policy becomes inseparable from private financial opportunity.
Nearly one million investors in Trump’s memecoin reportedly lost about $3.8 billion, while Trump personally profited hundreds of millions from the venture. The Daily Beast reported that the token collapsed after Trump and his family had already benefited from the crypto boom surrounding his political brand.
Pathology link: exploitation; manipulation; indifference to foreseeable harm; political celebrity converted into financial extraction.
Public cost: ordinary supporters and small investors lose savings while the leader profits from the trust and loyalty he cultivated.
A Washington Post investigation found that funds linked to Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump have invested heavily in defense technology companies benefiting from the Trump administration’s accelerated Pentagon spending and procurement priorities. Companies tied to the brothers’ investment networks have received at least $3.2 billion in direct government business and another $3.1 billion in future contract options since the investments were made. Some have also gained access to contractor pools covering nearly $200 billion in potential future government work.
Most of the Trump-linked investments occurred after Donald Trump was reelected. The Post also reported that Donald Trump Jr. has publicly described helping shape Pentagon messaging and assisting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth with personnel decisions while seeking officials interested in spending more money on drones.
The companies and Trump representatives deny preferential treatment or conflicts of interest. But the financial alignment is unmistakable: the president’s administration is accelerating defense technology spending while investment firms linked to his sons hold stakes in companies positioned to benefit from that spending.
Pathology link: a self-interest definition of what’s right or wrong; willingness to exploit public trust and political power for personal and family financial gain; ethical indifference to shifting public costs toward private benefit.
Public cost: taxpayers fund expanding defense priorities while Trump-linked investment networks are positioned inside industries receiving billions in government business and future contract opportunities.
Trump’s tax agenda heavily favors corporations and the wealthy while shifting costs onto ordinary people. The NAACP Legal Defense Fund says the One Big Beautiful Bill Act extends, expands, or implements more than $4.5 trillion in tax breaks, mostly for billionaires, while making more than $1 trillion in cuts to programs many people rely on for health care, nutrition, and student loans. The Center for American Progress reports that the bill cut taxes for the rich, including permanent cuts to marginal tax rates.
Pathology link: zero-sum thinking; wealth entitlement; indifference to public need; donor benefit treated as national interest.
Public cost: health care, nutrition support, student aid, and household stability are weakened so corporations and the ultrawealthy can keep more.
Trump’s tariffs function as a consumer tax. The Tax Foundation estimates the 2026 Trump tariffs amount to an average tax increase of about $700 per U.S. household and have not meaningfully altered the trade deficit. Tariffs also raise costs for businesses that rely on imported inputs and can expose American exporters to retaliation.
Pathology link: dominance theater; reality distortion; refusal to admit who pays.
Public cost: families pay more for goods, businesses pay more for inputs, exporters face retaliation risk, and workers face lower wages or job insecurity.
The Trump administration moved to cap NIH indirect research-cost reimbursements at 15%, a change universities warned would undercut medical research. Higher Ed Dive reported that the cap would apply to current and new grants and was challenged by universities and state attorneys general because it could damage medical research and U.S. competitiveness; courts later blocked the plan, and STAT reported the administration dropped its court fight in April 2026.
Pathology link: knowledge suppression; political control over science; indifference to future harm.
Public cost: research into cancer, paralysis, Alzheimer’s, diabetes, rare diseases, disability, and public health slows while existing pharmaceutical markets remain more protected from disruption by research breakthroughs.
Trump’s EPA launched what it called the “biggest de-regulatory action in U.S. history,” announcing 31 actions to advance Trump’s Day One orders. The de-regulatory agenda included reconsidering rules affecting energy, manufacturing, chemical sectors, emissions, environmental justice, and other protections. AP also reported that the Trump administration finalized a rule narrowing the definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act, making it easier for activities such as logging, mining, and oil and gas drilling to proceed in critical habitats.
Pathology link: externalization of harm; refusal of accountability; corporate freedom treated as more important than public health or ecological stability.
Public cost: people pay through dirtier air, climate damage, disaster costs, impacted health, insurance stress, habitat destruction, and increased toxic pollution.
The administration’s handling of PFAS and chemical safety shows the same pattern at the bodily level. The Guardian reported that the Trump FDA rejected a petition to set enforceable PFAS limits in food, while other reporting found the administration moving to weaken or delay PFAS limits in drinking water. AP reported that activists frustrated with the EPA’s stalled “Make America Healthy Again” agenda pointed to contradictions between public-health promises and deregulation involving harmful chemicals and pesticides.
Pathology link: indifference to suffering; industry convenience over bodily safety; harm normalized when it is delayed, dispersed, or hard to trace.
Public cost: families face the health risks of known carcinogens in their food, water, soil, neighborhoods, workplaces, and bodies.
Financial firms want greater access to the roughly $10 trillion in America’s 401(k) system, and ProPublica reports that the Trump administration is pursuing regulatory changes that could encourage less-regulated and often riskier investments, including private equity and cryptocurrency, inside retirement plans. ProPublica also reports that the Trump Administration is softening one of the strongest protections American workers have: the right to hold employers accountable when retirement savings are mishandled.
Pathology link: instrumental use of workers; hidden extraction; evasion of accountability through complexity.
Public cost: retirement savings become a larger profit stream for Wall Street while workers absorb more risk and have fewer protections when things go wrong.
Trump’s aviation policy also fits the deregulation and politicized-oversight pattern. The White House ordered an immediate review of aviation safety standards and hiring under the prior administration, framing the issue through anti-DEI politics, while aviation-industry legal analysis noted that the incoming Trump administration had strongly signaled its intent to narrow the role and scope of government air-safety regulation. Aviation remains a safety-critical system, so the danger is not only one rule change; it is the replacement of sober safety assessment with ideology, deregulation, and industry convenience.
Pathology link: oversight treated as burden; indifference to harm
Public cost: the lives of passengers and air crews face increased risks when ideology, politics, and industry convenience suppress air-safety expertise.
Why this matters to the economy, corruption, and the public
Part Two shows how systemic pathology converts government into a profit shield.
Corruption is not only bribery. It’s what happens when public power is redirected away from public protection and toward private benefit. It happens when oversight is removed, watchdogs are fired, billionaires are placed inside government, consumer-protection agencies are paralyzed, polluters are freed, science is de-funded, and people are told the resulting harm is efficiency, freedom, patriotism, or growth.
That is why pathology matters to economic life.
When a leader lacks empathy, the people harmed by policy disappear from view.
When right and wrong mean only what benefits him, public office becomes a tool of personal enrichment.
When truth is unwanted, economic policy becomes theater and propaganda.
When accountability is intolerable, inspectors general, regulators, scientists, prosecutors, watchdogs, and consumer advocates become threats to be removed or neutralized.
When grandiosity dominates judgment, tariffs, wars, tax cuts, deregulation, and market manipulation become performances of strength even when ordinary people pay the price.
When powerful systems share the same pathology, the damage multiplies.
The Trump family’s growing financial connections to defense technology make that convergence unusually visible.
The issue is not whether every defense contract is corrupt or every Trump-linked company is undeserving. The issue is what happens when the president’s family can invest in industries financially shaped by his administration’s spending priorities while the watchdogs, inspectors general, and ethical safeguards meant to police conflicts of interest have been weakened, removed, or intimidated.
Public power creates spending priorities. Spending priorities create winners. Politically connected investment networks position themselves around those winners. Taxpayers supply the money.
That is where executive pathology and corporatist incentive systems meet.
To a person who defines right and wrong solely by self-interest, public office becomes an instrument of private benefit and ethical norms become a nuisance. A willingness to exploit others makes public trust another resource to use. Indifference to harm makes the costs imposed on others irrelevant so long as the outcome benefits the leader, his family, or his in-group.
The pathology explains not only why boundaries are crossed, but why, in the leader’s mind, those boundaries do not apply to him. As Trump declared on Truth Social:
“He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”
The lucrative financial incentives explain why powerful people surrounding the leader may reward him for crossing those boundaries — or deleting them entirely.
Corporations do not need Trump to be sane. They need him to be useful.
Billionaires do not need stable democracy. They need access to power, immunity, deregulation, tax cuts, crippled oversight, and public institutions too frightened or hollowed out to restrain them.
That is the economic impact of systemic pathology merged with executive pathology.
Trump’s personal corruption is not separate from corporate or oligarch capture. It is the presidential version of the same operating logic. The leader uses office for wealth, protection, leverage, and revenge. Corporations use the leader for deregulation, tax cuts, subsidy, and impunity. Billionaires use chaos and access to weaken the agencies that constrain them. Ideologues use the same machinery to force compliance from universities, nonprofits, scientists, schools, public-health systems, and civil society.
The public pays in every case:
They pay when watchdogs are fired and corruption becomes harder to detect.
They pay when Elon Musk receives government power while agencies overseeing his companies are weakened.
They pay when the CFPB is paralyzed and financial predators face fewer consequences.
They pay when Trump turns political loyalty into crypto losses and personal profit.
They pay when corporations and billionaires receive tax breaks while safety-net programs are cut.
They pay when tariffs raise prices and threaten wages.
They pay when medical research is slowed, cures are delayed, and scientific independence is punished.
They pay when fossil-fuel and chemical companies receive freedom to pollute.
They pay when retirement savings are opened to higher-risk, higher-fee financial products.
They pay when military contractors benefit from engineered global instability.
They pay when aviation safety, environmental safety, workplace safety, consumer safety, and public-health safety are treated as obstacles to profit.
That is how corruption becomes ordinary life. It shows up as higher prices, weaker protections, dirtier air, poisoned water, delayed cures, unsafe workplaces, uncertain retirement, larger bills, lost services, and public agencies that no longer serve the public.
The pathology explains the behavior.
The incentives explain why the system enables it.
The public pays when they operate together.
If fascism is, as Mussolini reportedly said, “a merger of state and corporate power,” the above evidence shows that America under Trump is rapidly becoming a fascist state.
Likewise, the above evidence shows that fascism is, as Dr. Lee warned, “a society-level mental disorder cloaked in political ideology.”
For the sake of America’s safety and its continued democracy, Congress must remove Donald Trump from office and begin repairing the damage he has caused.
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James P. Kelly,
author of Weaponized Division: What Broke America — How We Repair It