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HOW DO WE REBUILD AFTER TRUMP?  
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Ryan Cooper
October 31, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ The think tank Common Wealth has some ideas. _

, Beata Zawrzel/NurPhoto via AP

 

_Welcome to Big Ideas, a _Prospect _survey of next-generation
solutions for pressing policy problems. Our writers scour the policy
landscape to find out how to bring power back to the people and make
America successful. Visit __BIG IDEAS_
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In the Age of Trump, the idea of discussing policy seems rather
hopeless. What is the point of trying to, say, identify the best way
to untangle the mess of Obamacare subsidy formulas when Donald Trump
and the Republicans are slashing funding for the program, not to
mention tearing the entire government to ribbons? “What can men do
against such reckless hate?
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This surely explains why policy gets so much less attention today than
it did in 2019, when the nitty-gritty details of Medicare for All were
the subject of heated debate
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between sundry centrist “fact-checkers” and leftists. Trump is now
back in power, and no argument or citation of facts has ever convinced
that man of anything, not least because when you start talking about
anything remotely complicated, he wanders off
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and starts watching television.

Still, government policy always matters, and we at the _Prospect_ have
been grimly soldiering on trying to investigate the manifold
consequences
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of Mad King Trump—as well as pondering what to do in the future,
with our new Big Ideas series [[link removed]].

In that latter vein, Common Wealth [[link removed]], a
relatively new lefty think tank based in both Britain and the U.S.,
has been attempting to dial up its ambition both to account for the
yawning abyss into which Trump is plunging the nation, and also the
policy failures that enabled his rise.

Common Wealth’s focus is on public ownership, public provision, and
building state capacity. The first reason for this is simple reality:
Despite the utter madness of what Trump is doing, the mess he’ll
leave is going to have to be cleaned up. A future Democratic
president, should there ever be one, will have no choice but to
rebuild much of the entire administrative state from scratch—so they
might as well build it back better, to coin a phrase. “We’re in a
moment where things feel really perilous politically,” said Common
Wealth’s U.S. program director Melanie Brusseler, “but also
there’s a lot of hope in response.”

Moreover, Trump has also set some unusual precedents that might be
usefully exploited. There are “attempts at industrial policy, the
trade policies, the new forms of state ownership—meaning state, the
federal government, or federal agencies taking equity stakes in
private companies,” said Thea Riofrancos, an associate professor of
political science at Providence College who works on Common Wealth’s
Green Planning Commission.

Obviously, Trump is doing all this in the most corrupt and erratic way
imaginable, but the principles are not inherently terrible. For
instance, when the government ended up owning Ally Bank
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as part of the 2008 Wall Street bailout, it could have kept it and
built it up as a public option for banking. (That’s my own idea, to
be clear.)

Another major focus for Common Wealth is building out a lefty response
to the affordability crisis—one that isn’t just recapitulating the
price-lowering strategy of neoliberalism, where jobs are shipped
overseas to cut labor costs and where supply chain investment is kept
as low as possible. That doesn’t even work on its own terms, as we
saw during the pandemic, when supply shocks led to skyrocketing prices
for goods and shipping. Today, though, the most important prices are
for things that can’t be offshored and imported. “We’re talking
about housing. We’re talking about education. We’re talking about
health care, talking about transportation,” said economist Alex
Williams. “In no situation does offshoring make any of those
cheaper.” (The enthusiastic response to Zohran Mamdani’s
affordability-focused campaign for the mayoralty of New York City is
instructive in this regard.)

What could work is public provision, with Medicare for All, social
housing, free college, and so on. Indeed, the health care system is so
obviously plagued with hyper-complicated rent-seeking, as uncountable
private actors maneuver to swindle each other and/or the government
and thereby claim a fat slice of America’s world-historical spending
on health care, that the case for state coordination of providers as
well as insurance practically makes itself. “If we want to
structurally lower prices and rationalize the provision of health care
in this country, I think that we will need to do much more
comprehensive health care planning,” said Brusseler.

But Common Wealth’s chief focus, naturally enough, is climate change
and industrial policy. Here they are building on the lessons of
Bidenomics. Joe Biden’s administration achieved a considerable
amount by American standards with the American Rescue Plan, the
Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS Act, and the bipartisan
infrastructure law, but it wasn’t enough to reach our climate goals,
and as it was hammered out in a last-minute deal with Joe Manchin,
lacked a coherent overall framework to plan investment and
decarbonization. As Williams points out in an essay
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the fiscal stimulus worked well, Bidenomics struggled on industrial
policy, due to tensions between decarbonization and confronting China,
and a reliance on traditional tax credits and indirect subsidies
rather than direct planning and investment.

That is partly why even before the IRA was effectively repealed by
Trump administration fiat, America could not remotely match China’s
green investment. In 2024, for instance
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the U.S. installed a record 50 gigawatts of solar capacity, but China
installed 329 gigawatts—and in 2025, its pace is accelerating, while
the U.S. is drastically slowing. “The reason that China is able to
build railways, solar, etc., at record speeds, is not because of lack
of regulation, but because it has stellar planning capacity that’s
been built very methodically over many decades,” said Isabel
Estevez, an industrial-policy expert who also serves on the Green
Planning Commission. We don’t have to copy China’s communist
dictatorship to learn from their model of state coordination of
production
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That in turn ties back into affordability. One happy consequence of a
state-led crash decarbonization program would be lots of cheap,
zero-carbon electricity, which would be an input into practically
every good and service. “The adaptations and asset development that
the government would need to do to meaningfully engage climate would
also create a huge volume of publicly owned electrical generating
assets that are totally disconnected from volatile global markets for
oil and gas,” said Williams. “In the long run, fixing these
problems makes everything that everyone wants to do cheaper.”

Many Trump critics are focused on what he is doing to our basic
democratic compact, and rightly so. But there’s a reason that all
the presidents who led us through our worst previous crises also had
an aggressive program of reform—and these also included public
provision and ownership. Abraham Lincoln had greenbacks and land grant
colleges; Franklin Roosevelt had Social Security, a massive public
works program, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and much more. A core
purpose of a democratic republic is to protect the welfare of the
citizenry, and if a future government is to repair the damage
inflicted by Trump and fight climate change as well, they will have to
think even more ambitiously.

Independent media like _The American Prospect_ stands as one of the
last defenses against authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the rest of the
media landscape keeps consolidating—gobbled up by billionaires who
see news as another tool to accumulate more wealth and power. We’re
beholden to no one but our readers, and that independence is exactly
what your donation protects.

* Trump
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* post Trump
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* public ownership
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