Before you read this post, it’s important to read the preceding piece, which I have linked below for your convenience.
To rescue America requires a new mindset
This week will mark, for some, a welcome change in my writing approach. I aim to be less verbose and deliver information more concisely. I’ll provide a roughly 5-minute read each day, with a longer, more detailed end-of-week post each Friday. The new schedule will see posts delivered Monday to Friday. Meanwhile, weekends will be spent working on the new…
WE DON’T NEED TO INTRODUCE COMPLEXITY
It’s easy to overcomplicate a solution, and in politics, we tend to be very good at it. As of July 1st 2025, the US population stood at 342,034,432. In 2023, there were 128.7 million households. In 2024, 173.83 million Americans were registered to vote, representing 78% of the 222.88 million eligible to vote. The one thing we can be sure of is that consensus among this many people will always be challenging —and that’s a good thing. Healthy disagreement and debate are the foundation of a strong and stable representative democracy.
Trump won the 2024 election with 77.3 million votes. This represents 34% of eligible voters. In many ways, it screams that politics is broken because, as we’ve discussed before, 90 million Americans failed to participate in the democratic process. Depending on the research you study, the causes vary. Pew Research from June 26th, 2025 noted:
In the 2024 presidential election, a higher share of Donald Trump’s 2020 voters than Joe Biden’s 2020 voters turned out to vote. Trump also won a higher share of those who had not voted four years earlier. This is different than in 2020 and 2016, when those who didn’t vote in the previous presidential election favored Democratic candidates...
In the new world of ‘alternative facts ‘ and ‘my truth’, reality has been banished to the broom cupboard. We have to accept that a lie can travel around the world before the truth manages to put its socks on. Lies were the magic sauce that delivered the White House for Trump. Please don’t misunderstand, playing fast and loose with the truth is as old as politics itself, but in 2016, Trump discovered that voters would believe anything as long as you mixed the lies with a grain of truth and kept repeating the same lie over and over again.
Over a decade, Trump has refined the delivery of the lie, creating a new art form to which his opponents have found no countermeasures. Propaganda thrives in a low-education society. The National Literacy Institute notes:
21% of adults in the US are illiterate in 2024.
54% of adults have a literacy below a 6th-grade level (20% are below 5th-grade level).
Low levels of literacy costs the US up to 2.2 trillion per year.
Right-wing ideology flourishes in low literacy, low social mobility environments, and the US is ranked 32nd in literacy. 13.5% of the population earn less than $20,000, with 7.1% earning less than $15,000. Between 60 and 67% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, with more than 25% of the population using the unregulated ‘buy now pay later’ (BNPL) market. A 2024 survey conducted in May 2025 by PartnerCentric.com indicates that over 50% use BNPL for everyday purchases, as fiscally distressed families begin using it for grocery purchases.
Since Trump came to power, he has gutted consumer protections, opening the door to the aggressive extortion of low-income families, some of whom contain people working two and three jobs to put food on the table. Just as BlackRock is buying up trailer parks, the wealthy are using the unregulated BNPL as an instrument to mop up the gravy on the empty plates of the working poor.
If the government wants to instigate savings, there needs to be less focus on performative, made-for-TV, alleged purges of false ‘fraud and waste,' and more emphasis on educating the population, providing affordable healthcare and childcare to facilitate the optimisation of the workforce. A well-fed, healthy, educated workforce would become the most significant domestic driver of growth, as their spending fuels US businesses and services.
The longstanding Republican motto of ‘We know what’s best for you’ has dominated American society from both sides of the aisle. Trump may have taken the flag and the word ‘freedom’ hostage, but freedom is not his to own. It’s a hard-fought-for right that has been defended and fought for by generations of men and women. Patriots who have given their lives so that we might embrace the gift they paid for in blood and suffering. It’s our solemn duty to protect and defend their legacy with our last breath.
That’s why watching eight legislators flush that sacrifice down the toilet and concede ground to a wannabe dictator is a reflection of a society where moral decay is the new norm and decency and integrity have left the building. This was a calculated capitulation by a group of lawmakers who will NOT face a vote in 2026. They chose to abandon the increasing pressure on an administration sinking deeper and deeper in public opinion polls, with the American people overwhelmingly blaming Trump for the shutdown. These lawmakers are surely not so naive as to think that the Republican promise of a vote on ACA subsidies is anything other than a political manoeuvre. Yes, they will hold a vote; they might even pass it as a performative political act, but Moses Johnson will not allow a vote on it in the House.
Democrats may well have, with this single act of capitulation, signed the death warrant on Obamacare in a move that will be recorded in history as the moment when the last vestiges of the credibility of the Democratic Party died. They can claim that it was just 7 Democrats. However, it was much more than that; it was a reflection of failed leadership, in which I believed the Senate minority leader used these handpicked Senators as cover to end a shutdown which Democratic corporate donors never agreed with.
So here we are, with Democrats now pinning their hopes on the seating of Adelita Grijalva and the release of the Epstein Files, something they could have released themselves during the last administration. Don’t misunderstand, I absolutely want to see the files released and for every single person involved in child rape and sexual abuse to be prosecuted to the full extent of the law, regardless of their political affiliation.
When you pin your last hopes on presenting dirt on Teflon Don—a man who has had months to deep-clean the crime scene—I’m not very hopeful this will prove to be the presidency-ending moment everyone believes it to be. I might, of course, be wrong, but Vought and the political undead cabal have now had plenty of time to game it out, and they will have an obstruction plan primed and ready to go.
Democrats are back to square one, with an inept, broken leadership steering a rudderless ship in an ocean filled with MAGA mines. The Democratic base is not broken, the opposition to Trump has never been greater, but the Democratic party is on public sentiment life support, with no recovery in sight. Political vision and ambition sit in the hospital bedside drawer next to the life support machine. It seems to me bizarre to think that the Democrats’ biggest ally is Donald Trump, and I have this sickening feeling that establishment Democrats know it and are happy to sit on the sidelines waiting for Trump to set fire to himself.
I firmly believe that this is their strategy. They wait for Trump to destroy America, then move in to pick up the pieces in the knowledge that by the time they regain power (which they will), their own corporate donors will be comfortable in the knowledge that after Trump, any improvement they can deliver in the lives of a broken America will seem like they are ‘for the people’. It’s cynical, I know, but I have lived and worked around politicians all my life; there are few good ones, and the rest would sell their children into slavery if it earned them a buck or advanced their status.
The Democratic Party, as I have said over and over, are blessed with a deep bench of talent, of which AOC is one of many that could help deliver transformative societal change to this broken nation. A nation regarded by many around the world as a pariah state run by an international extortion gang from the White House. In my next post, we’re going to drill into where leadership can come from and how to combine the technology solution framework I spoke about in my previous post.
This has to be a joined-up strategy which is not proprietary to the Democratic Party, because I don’t believe there is a political solution to the tyranny; it has to be a ‘people revolution’ and for that to happen, they require a tech-driven ‘uprising toolkit’. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel; it's just about a full-stack web-based solution driven by publicly available APIs.
My proposition will likely gain little traction because, far too often, political advocacy groups don’t really play well together when it comes to protecting their own economic turf. The difference here is, I’m not here to make a profit; I really don’t give a damn who takes credit for it either. That’s not my mission here — strange though it may seem in the billion-dollar goldmine that is American politics —philanthropy still exists for the common good. This can work; the technology already exists. What’s missing is the vision, the ambition and a willingness to think outside the box.
Since this post, several people have reached out to ask if there is a way to make a one-time small-dollar donation to the project. I’m pleased to say that I have now set this up using the same payment processor as Substack. Click on the link below, and you can donate any amount up to $50
https://buy.stripe.com/8x2fZi5QKdlh6VFgQTawo03
Martin
It's without a doubt. Truth facts are informed decision making and writers/ journalists are the foundation of an informed society. I thank you for informing us!
Thank you for your thoughtful clarity!