Unraveling the Threads: Market Turmoil, Tariffs, “Hands Off” Protests, and the Decline of U.S. Hegemony

Apr 06, 2025

By Yusuf from the Heartland

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The first week of April 2025 was a wake-up call, loud, sharp, and impossible to ignore. A cascade of events; massive market losses, sweeping protests, and global economic fallout. It shattered any illusion that things were stable. President Trump’s new wave of tariffs didn’t just hit the elite; it hit everyone, everywhere. Wall Street tanked. Factories paused. Protesters filled the streets from coast to coast, even in places like rural Indiana small towns that don’t usually make national news and voted overwhelmingly red in every election basically ever.

And yet, as real as this shock was, something deeper is moving beneath the surface: class consciousness. Working people, whether they’re unionized or gigged-out, red-state or blue, are starting to realize the system isn’t just broken. It was never built for us. But here’s the warning: if we let the Democrats, the fake left, or controlled opposition co-opt this moment, the fire will be snuffed out. The movement will get pacified, redirected, and ultimately betrayed. Again.

This is the inflection point. Either we let the status quo reshape our anger into another round of campaign soundbites and meaningless votes, or we build something rooted in solidarity and truth, a working-class movement with real teeth.

I. Tariffs, Tremors, and $8 Trillion Gone

When President Trump reimposed sweeping tariffs in April 2025, blanketing all imports with a 10% base rate and hitting select goods and countries with up to 49%, the media called it “bold,” “unprecedented,” “aggressive.” But it wasn’t any of those things. It was familiar. We’ve seen this movie before. It’s economic nationalism repackaged for another desperate election cycle.

Back in 1930, the U.S. passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, jacking up import duties on more than 20,000 goods. The goal was to protect American industry during the Great Depression. The result? Retaliatory tariffs from U.S. trading partners, a collapse in international trade, and deepening global economic despair. Nearly a century later, we’re running the same play, with eerily similar consequences.

This time, the damage came fast. Within days, over $8 trillion vanished from global stock markets. Headlines blared panic. Analysts warned of a looming global recession. But let’s get real: that $8 trillion didn’t just evaporate from billionaire portfolios, it threatened pension funds, 401(k)s, and the already precarious savings of working people. These are the same people who’ve been told to “invest in their future” while wages stagnated and costs skyrocketed.

And for what? A populist flex that sacrifices everyday stability for political optics. The tariffs weren’t about rebuilding U.S. industry. They were about stroking the illusion of strength while the foundations rot. Instead of real industrial policy, investing in domestic production, green manufacturing, and labor protections, Trump gave us blunt-force economics: slap tariffs on everything and see who flinches.

Spoiler: it wasn’t China. It was us.

The myth of tariffs as a tool of liberation ignores their real function in this era: as weapons of class war. They protect profits, not people. When companies get squeezed by higher costs, they don’t eat the loss, they pass it down. Through price hikes, job cuts, supply slowdowns. The pain lands squarely on the working class, not the boardroom.

And here’s the kicker: this isn’t just Trump. Biden’s administration kept many of Trump’s first-round tariffs in place for years. Obama paved the road with pro-corporate trade deals like the TPP before public pressure killed it. This is a bipartisan failure to build a just, sustainable economy. The tariffs are just the spark. The fire’s been building for decades.

We are living through a slow-motion collapse of an economic consensus that was never built to serve us. Deregulation, globalization, trickle-down lies, corporate trade deals, all wrapped in patriotic branding. Tariffs may look like a rejection of neoliberalism, but they’re just a reshuffling of power, one that keeps capital safe while workers absorb the shock.

II. Corporate Whiplash

When the tariffs hit, corporations didn’t waste time pretending they’d absorb the blow. They moved fast, not to protect jobs or communities, but to protect margins. Jaguar Land Rover announced it would pause all shipments to the U.S. for a month. Not to recalibrate in the interest of workers, but to see how badly the new 25 percent vehicle tariff would cut into their profit forecasts. Thousands of workers at their Solihull plant were told to wait it out. That’s 9,000 people with families, mortgages, and bills suddenly thrown into uncertainty.

This isn’t a glitch in the system. This is the system working exactly as it’s built to. When capital gets nervous, labor pays the price.

Nike’s playbook was similar. Their supply chain is tangled up in Vietnam, which has become central to their manufacturing footprint ever since American companies started chasing cheaper labor markets in the 90s. That’s the legacy of deals like NAFTA and the permanent normalization of trade with China. Jobs flowed out, profits flowed up. Now, as Vietnam gets hit with supply chain chaos and tariff confusion, Nike cuts its revenue forecast and lets the implications trickle down. Shipping delays. Factory slowdowns. Hiring freezes. Then layoffs.

Again, no surprises. This is exactly what corporations are built to do. They move faster than governments, have more agility than workers, and fewer moral obligations than either. When there’s a bump in the road, they don’t slow down. They swerve, and it’s the people who go flying.

This isn’t the first time either. Remember 2008? The banks gambled, crashed the economy, got bailed out, and then turned around and gave each other bonuses while workers lost homes, jobs, and retirements. Or look at how corporations responded to COVID. Stock buybacks and executive pay surged while frontline workers got hazard pay for a month and “hero” signs slapped on the break room wall.

What we’re seeing now with these tariff-related corporate decisions is just another version of that cycle. Crisis at the top, pain at the bottom. No matter how global the supply chain gets, the impact always comes home to working people. Always.

And this isn’t just about foreign companies exporting to the U.S. The entire model of “just-in-time” production, global sourcing, and speculative capitalism is cracking. When that model breaks, companies don’t rethink their priorities. They just dig deeper into the people below them.

This moment is not just about a few companies tweaking their operations. It’s about a global economic model that treats labor like ballast. When the ship gets shaky, we’re the first ones tossed overboard.

III. “Hands Off”: From Coastal Cities to Cornfields

On April 5, people poured into the streets in every single state. Cities, suburbs, and, maybe most tellingly, small towns. The protests didn’t just happen in L.A. or Brooklyn. They happened in places like Wabash, Indiana, where over 100 people stood outside the courthouse with hand-painted signs and union jackets, some homemade fliers, and a bullhorn that barely worked. Wabash has a population under 10,000. This wasn’t a blue enclave. It wasn’t “the usual suspects.” It was people who’ve been quiet for a long time, but not because they were content. Because they were tired.

The “Hands Off” protests hit a nerve. Not because they were slick or organized top-down, but because they tapped into something deeper: a sense that people are being squeezed from all sides and nobody in power gives a damn. The tariffs were just the latest insult. What really brought people out was the bigger picture. Cuts to federal programs. Corporate power grabs. Billionaires like Elon Musk flexing influence over public infrastructure, public policy, and even public speech. It’s not just a political disagreement anymore. It feels like a hostile takeover.

What made these protests different wasn’t just their size. It was the shape of the coalition. Federal workers marched next to immigrants. Laid-off warehouse staff linked arms with retired teachers. Some wore union gear, others wore camo jackets. It wasn’t neat. But it was real.

We’ve seen this kind of spontaneous coalition before. The 1930s strikes weren’t tidy either. In Flint, Michigan, auto workers sat down in their factories and wouldn’t leave. They didn’t wait for permission. They didn’t ask for media coverage. They shut the system down until someone listened. And it worked. The early civil rights sit-ins? Same thing. It started with four Black students sitting at a lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, just refusing to move. It spread like wildfire because it was rooted in dignity, not branding.

What’s dangerous now is not that people are waking up. It’s that the political establishment sees it and is already moving to contain it.

Groups like Indivisible and MoveOn helped coordinate the April 5 actions. But these are organizations deeply tied to the Democratic Party machine. They push people into protest and then funnel that energy back into safe electoral channels. Vote blue, write postcards, hope for the best. But this moment is too raw, too urgent, for another round of symbolic gestures and performative politics.

If we’re not careful, the same system that crushed us will rebrand itself as our savior. The same Democratic Party that helped write trade deals, deregulate banks, and gut welfare will show up in protest photos and act like they’ve been in the fight all along. They weren’t. They aren’t. And if we let them set the agenda, they’ll lead us in circles until the fire dies out.

That’s the real danger. Not just disillusionment, but misdirection. Because disillusioned people are still looking for answers. Misdirected people are told they’ve already found them.

The energy in the streets right now is raw material. If we build with it, we can create something strong and lasting. If we leave it exposed to the political weather, it’ll rot or get stolen.

The people in Wabash and thousands of towns like it didn’t show up for photo ops. They showed up because they’re fed up. They deserve more than another pep rally for a party that forgot them decades ago.

IV. Declining U.S. Hegemony: The Empire Fumbles the Bag

The global order is shifting, fast. But to be clear, it didn’t start with these tariffs. That’s just the latest crack in the foundation. The decline of American power has been playing out for decades, ever since the U.S. started treating its own people like an afterthought in service of global dominance. When Trump rolled out his new trade measures in 2025, hitting all imports with a 10 percent baseline and punishing certain countries with nearly 50 percent levies, it didn’t signal strength. It signaled desperation.

The backlash was immediate. China and the European Union didn’t blink. They started planning countermeasures within hours. The EU alone announced nearly $30 billion in retaliatory tariffs on U.S. goods. And they weren’t bluffing. These countries have spent the last decade building ways to work around the U.S., forming trade deals, investing in regional alliances, and reducing their dependence on the dollar. They saw this coming.

You can draw a line from the Bush-era invasion of Iraq to this exact moment. That war, sold on lies and oil dreams, burned through America’s post-Cold War legitimacy like gasoline on dry brush. Then came the 2008 crash, when U.S. banks tanked the global economy and walked away richer. Then Trump’s first round of tariffs. Then Biden’s proxy war with Russia. All of it chipped away at the myth that the U.S. is the stable hand at the wheel.

The tariffs of 2025 were the final confirmation that the empire has no clothes. The United States, for all its talk of rules-based order, is now just playing defense. It’s trying to protect its market share with blunt instruments instead of building a sustainable future. Other countries see that. And they’re planning accordingly.

You can already see the realignment. China has been deepening its economic ties with Africa and Latin America, bypassing Western institutions entirely. The BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, are testing new currencies and trade mechanisms to weaken the dollar’s grip. The EU is investing in a new generation of domestic manufacturing hubs, so it’s no longer held hostage to U.S. tech giants or oil tantrums. These moves aren’t just about trade. They’re about power.

Meanwhile, back home, working people are told to cheer on tariffs as a form of patriotism. “Buy American,” they’re told, even when their jobs are outsourced, their towns hollowed out, and their wages undercut. The truth is that empire always requires sacrifice. But it’s never the CEOs who make it. It’s warehouse workers in Illinois and shrimp boat crews in Louisiana. It’s teachers in Arizona and truckers in Ohio.

This is how hegemony ends. Not with an explosion, but with a whimper and a rerun. The United States is trying to replay the post-WWII economic miracle without the actual miracle, without the industrial base, the social safety net, or the political will to invest in ordinary people.

But here’s the twist. The decline of U.S. dominance doesn’t have to mean chaos. It could mean opportunity. It could be a turning point where Americans finally stop buying into the myth that our well-being depends on global supremacy. It doesn’t. It depends on solidarity. On dignity. On building something real, something local, something that lasts.

We’re at a crossroads. One path leads to more flag-waving nationalism, more fearmongering, more violence. The other leads to internationalism rooted in shared struggle, because working people in Toledo have more in common with garment workers in Bangladesh than they do with any senator in D.C.

The empire is losing its grip. Let it. But don’t let it take us down with it.

V. The Two-Party Trap and the Urgency of Class Consciousness

If there’s one thing both Republicans and Democrats can agree on, it’s this: working people should never be allowed to organize their anger in a meaningful way. That’s the real bipartisan consensus in America. Keep the public divided, confused, exhausted, and endlessly distracted. Let them protest, sure, but only if those protests stay safely within the lines. Chant, vote, go home, repeat.

The Republicans are easy to clock. They’re naked about it. Trump’s tariff campaign is just the latest in a long string of nationalist stunts meant to look like populism while protecting elite interests. Working-class rhetoric, billionaire policies. The 2025 tariffs, like his first round in 2018, aren’t about economic independence. They’re about using working people’s pain to score political points. He plays the victim card for the American worker, then hands the deck to corporate America once the cameras are off.

But the Democrats are the real trap. Because they sound different. They speak the language of empathy and resistance. They show up to protests with good signs. They’ll march with you on Saturday and fund the police on Monday. They don’t shut movements down. They smother them. Slowly. Politely.

Look at the reaction to the “Hands Off” protests. Democratic leadership didn’t condemn them. They embraced them, just enough to manage them. Just enough to co-opt the energy, reframe the demands, and channel the outrage into Get Out the Vote campaigns. If the goal was Medicare for All, suddenly it’s “protect the ACA.” If the call was to end militarized policing, suddenly it’s “elect more progressive prosecutors.” Every radical demand gets shaved down until it fits neatly into a donor-friendly platform.

This isn’t new. It’s the same pattern that played out during Occupy Wall Street. During the George Floyd uprisings. During the climate marches. The movements were real. The pain was real. But the political class knew exactly how to absorb that energy without ever surrendering power.

Even now, as the country reels from economic shocks, supply chain breakdowns, and corporate price gouging, both parties are sprinting to define the narrative. Republicans say it’s about foreign threats. Democrats say it’s about Trump. Neither wants to admit the truth, that the crisis is structural, and they both built the structure.

That’s why class consciousness is the threat they fear most. Because it cuts through the noise. It refuses to play red versus blue. It asks better questions. Who owns what? Who profits? Who pays the price? It refuses to settle for symbolic wins. It demands material change.

The people who marched in Wabash and Wichita, Oakland and Omaha, they didn’t show up because they suddenly got interested in party politics. They showed up because they’re broke, angry, and out of options. That’s not something you can “mobilize” with a mailer and a hashtag. That’s fuel for something bigger, if we let it be.

The key is staying grounded. No more illusions about saviors in suits. No more chasing representation without power. No more mistaking viral moments for victories. The left doesn’t need to become more electable. It needs to become more organized. More local. More rooted in workplaces, neighborhoods, unions, and mutual aid networks.

This isn’t about purity. It’s about survival. Because if we don’t build something real, the fake alternatives will win by default. The Democrats will offer diversity with no justice. The Republicans will offer belonging with no security. And working people will keep swinging between the two, looking for someone to blame, while the real looters cash out in peace.

So here’s the choice. Do we keep playing the game they designed, or do we flip the board?

VI. Now or Never: Build Class Power or Get Burned Again

We don’t get many windows like this.

Economic collapse, global realignments, mass protests, bipartisan failure, and rising class anger, all happening at once. Moments like this are rare, and when they come, the people who are organized win. The rest get steamrolled or absorbed.

That’s the risk right now. People are waking up, but they’re scattered. Some are marching in the streets. Some are quitting their jobs. Some are arguing online. Some are just trying to survive. The anger is real, but unless it’s given direction and rooted in power, it will fade or be rerouted into useless channels. We’ve seen this movie before.

In 2008, people were furious at Wall Street and got handed Obama and the “most transparent administration in history,” which promptly bailed out the banks and left homeowners underwater. In 2016, working-class frustration got weaponized by Trump and turned into nationalist theater. In 2020, millions marched for justice and got increased police budgets and slick campaign ads. Anger without power leads to betrayal. Every time.

So this is the line in the sand. Either we organize that anger into something real, or we watch it get stolen again.

That means building class power. Not symbolic wins. Not performative politics. Real power, on the job, in communities, across movements. The kind of power that doesn’t beg, it demands. The kind that can’t be deflected with a press release or a performative vote in Congress.

And that starts small. It always does.

Start at work. Get coworkers talking. Even if there’s no union, even if it feels risky. Every conversation chips away at the isolation. The boss wants silence, not solidarity. Break the silence. Learn what people are mad about, what they need, what they’re willing to risk. Build from there.

Start in your town. Every city budget is a moral document. Where does the money go? Who profits? Who gets crumbs? Fight for housing. Fight to defund surveillance and reinvest in people. Demand public services that actually serve the public. And don’t just vote for someone else to do it. Show up. Get on the board. Pack the meetings. Make them afraid to ignore you.

Start with what you can touch. Mutual aid networks, strike support, bail funds, eviction defense, these are not charity, they’re infrastructure. They build the relationships that movements run on. And they prove we can take care of each other better than the state ever will.

Don’t wait for national permission. The Democratic Party isn’t going to lead this. The nonprofit class isn’t going to lead this. The people who keep losing elections and getting promoted to MSNBC contributor gigs aren’t going to lead this. They’re trying to manage the crisis, not end it. Stop looking up. Start looking across.

And when you build something, make sure it’s built on class. Not vibes. Not identity alone. Not personality cults. Identity matters. Representation matters. But we’ve seen what happens when movements become marketing campaigns. You get symbolism without substance. You get “historic firsts” that leave working people in the same place they started.

Class cuts through all that. It connects the Amazon warehouse worker in Kentucky to the grad student organizer in California to the undocumented construction crew in Texas. It makes the fight bigger than one issue or one moment. It’s how we stop being just a reaction to crisis and start being a force that can shape what comes next.

Because there is a next. This system will reinvent itself if we don’t offer something better. It will take your protest and sell it back to you in the form of a branded T-shirt. It will take your despair and repackage it as patriotism or nostalgia or a return to “normal.” It will do anything to avoid reckoning with the truth, that working people are done playing along.

This isn’t about utopia. It’s about power. The power to say no. The power to strike. The power to shut things down. The power to take back what was stolen. And that only comes when we stop waiting and start building.

Now or never. There’s no middle ground left. Either we get organized, or we get used. Again.

VII. Conclusion: Hope Isn’t a Hashtag, It’s a Fight

This isn’t the bottom. It just feels like it.

The crash, the tariffs, the layoffs, the protests, it all feels like collapse. But collapse isn’t the end. It’s the moment something else tries to be born. The only question is what replaces it. That’s what’s up for grabs right now. And if we don’t get serious about shaping that future, someone else will shape it for us. Again.

The system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as it’s designed to. When working people suffer, markets get protected. When elites cause a crisis, they get a bailout. When we fight back, they flood us with distractions, divisions, and false choices. That’s not dysfunction. That’s strategy.

But for the first time in a long time, the strategy is slipping. People are seeing through the façade. Not just on the left, not just in activist circles, but in small towns, at kitchen tables, on shop floors, in places that used to feel politically quiet. There’s a crack forming. And what we do right now determines whether it widens into a breakthrough, or gets sealed up with another round of performative politics and broken promises.

Hope doesn’t come from candidates or parties. It doesn’t come from a slogan or a trend. It sure as hell doesn’t come from a billionaire promising to “fix” things. Real hope is built. In struggle. In organizing. In choosing to stand with people who are told to stay quiet, stay patient, stay grateful. It’s in the strike line, the community garden, the tenant meeting, the budget fight, the late-night planning session. Hope is what you get when people stop waiting and start acting together.

That’s what this moment demands. Not inspiration. Not empty unity. Not another cycle of disappointment wrapped in a new marketing pitch. What it demands is a break.

A break with the two-party trap. A break with learned helplessness. A break with waiting for permission. We have everything we need to fight back: numbers, history, the will to survive. What we need now is courage. Discipline. And each other.

Because this is it.

The right has a plan. The corporations have a plan. The centrists have a plan. Do we?

If we want something different, we have to build it. No one’s coming to save us. But we can save each other.

That’s not a slogan. That’s a fact.

And it’s time we acted like it.

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References

Associated Press. (2025, April 6). Jaguar and Land Rover maker pauses shipments to US as it develops post-tariff plans. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/britain-carmakers-jlr-pause-ad5d4cfdca70975ab357e2cb5a8d698c
Associated Press. (2025, April 6). Tariffs will make sneakers, jeans and almost everything Americans wear cost more, trade groups warn. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/8eb3c697da9541ca849f6ed52d7279b2
Berger, M. (2025, April 6). EU Is Prepared to Retaliate but Prefers to Negotiate, Says German Diplomat. The Wall Street Journal. https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/trump-tariffs-trade-war-markets-04-05-25/card/eu-is-prepared-to-retaliate-but-prefers-to-negotiate-says-german-diplomat-FFeV1NP4uzaN2GK4pVxK
The Times. (2025, April 6). ‘Hands off’ protests in every US state against Trump and Musk. The Times. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/anti-trump-protests-hands-off-tariffs-elon-musk-nst7tfqv0
Associated Press. (2025, April 6). Nike slumped 5.5% after it forecast a steep decline in revenue in the current quarter, blaming geopolitical dynamics, new tariffs by the Trump administration and a less confident consumer. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/stocks-markets-rates-trump-4c7b6fd3ccd80ba81d76e813c278f803
Associated Press. (2025, April 6). EU delays retaliatory trade action to mid-April to work out the impact of Trump’s reciprocal tariffs. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/europe-trump-tariffs-trade-retaliation-df1d05f1602719bcb5c4659fbd3190de
Associated Press. (2025, April 6). Wall Street heavyweights take a drubbing, from airlines to Big Tech. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/financial-markets-tariffs-trump-trade-cea98013c677e5b9bd6ce6166f4ce659
Associated Press. (2025, April 6). EU says its countermeasures to Trump’s tariffs will go into effect on April 1. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/trump-eu-tariffs-countermeasures-806a3b9bcc9cd4e45817e672d95f0070
Associated Press. (2025, April 6). Elon Musk says he hopes for zero tariffs with Europe someday. AP News. https://apnews.com/article/us-trump-tariffs-f13faade3ab79ed3e66b172f6c4568ff
Associated Press. (2025, April 6). Protesters gather in Charlotte for a ‘Hands Off!’ rally against Trump and Musk. AP News. https://apnews.com/video/protesters-gather-in-charlotte-for-a-hands-off-rally-against-trump-and-musk-f8bcc61d4a994c0cbadadc0a58e26cab

About “Hope in the Heartland”

“Hope in the Heartland” is a Substack publication dedicated to exploring the intersections of class, culture, and politics in America’s Midwest. Through a blend of personal narratives, political analysis, and cultural commentary, it aims to shed light on the challenges and resilience of working-class communities in the region. The publication seeks to bridge divides, challenge prevailing narratives, and offer insights grounded in lived experiences.

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