TNGD: Trump's New Great Depression

Trump’s New Great Depression: Notes from the Quiet Aisles of America

by the artist Jeno

I knew something was wrong the day before Thanksgiving.

If you’ve lived in America long enough, you know what that day is supposed to feel like in a Costco. It’s loud. It’s chaotic. Carts overflowing, kids hanging off the sides like figureheads, adults panic-grabbing pies, cream, butter, wine, rolls, “just one more thing.” It’s ridiculous in that uniquely American way: we overbuy, we overdo, we overspend, and somehow that excess gets wrapped up with the word gratitude.

This year, at two in the afternoon on the day before Thanksgiving 2025, my Costco was… quiet.

Not a brief lull. Not just a little slow. Wrong quiet.

The aisles were strangely calm. People pushed half-full carts. They hovered longer over prices. They picked things up and then put them back. The place that used to buzz with holiday frenzy felt hollow, like someone had turned the emotional volume all the way down.

And I’m not watching this from the corporate vantage point I believed I’d have at this point in my life. I’m not up in an office in a power suit, scanning dashboards.

I’m out there with my Costco badge, on my feet—some days clocking five miles in-store, other days eight to ten miles in the Lot—lining up carts, boxing up baskets, greeting members at entry.

Like many of you, I had a six-figure career. The kind of job that comes with titles and Teams calls and the illusion of stability. I did what we were told to do: go to school, work hard, climb the ladder, be a “team player,” save for retirement. Then came the never-ending tech restructures, consulting gigs, more restructuring due to management "decisions," the “change in business needs,” the pink slip.

Now I’m here. And I’m not alone.

All around me are people in their forties, fifties, sixties—people who once ran departments, launched products, led teams. Now we’re working retail. We are grateful to be working. Grateful that Costco pays better than most. Grateful to be moving, contributing, earning.

But if you listen closely in the quiet aisles, under the gratitude there’s something else. A heaviness. A grief. A quiet, constant question:

What happened to this country?

That’s why I keep coming back to this phrase that landed in my mind and won’t leave:

Trump’s New Great Depression.

Not the Great Depression of history books (yet?), with bread lines photographed in black and white. This is a new kind of collapse—economic for many, yes, but also moral, spiritual, and psychological. A depression of spirit that lives and gets expressed in our bodies as much as in our bank accounts.

We’re not just broke. We’re heartsick.

When the charts say we’re fine and everything feels broken

If you look at the official language, we’re not in a depression. Economists talk about GDP, interest rates, unemployment numbers. Politicians brag about stock market highs and holiday sales figures as proof that everything is basically okay.

Come walk eight miles on the Costco lot with me and tell me that story again.

From where I’m standing, America is stumbling around in Trump’s New Great Depression. You see it in people’s shoulders, in their faces at self-checkout, in the way they hesitate before they press “Pay.”

It’s not just that things are more expensive—though they are. It’s not just that six-figure jobs vanished overnight and never came back—though they did. It’s the feeling that the game they are playing is not the game you are playing—and the dealers are 100% laughing at us from the VIP room.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that sets in when you realize the people running the country are not even pretending to act in good faith. That’s what this era feels like. That’s what Trump’s New Great Depression feels like: the slow, grinding realization that for the people in power, we’re not citizens—we’re human resources.

Resources to be harvested, distracted, divided, and blamed.

The moral floor has collapsed

The original Great Depression was about jobs, banks, farms, factories. This one is also about character.

I don’t just mean the price of "grocery", brutal as that is. I mean the cost of watching the moral floor collapse in real time. We are living under a political administration where corruption is casual, cruelty is policy, and shamelessness is a feature, not a bug. The ruling party treats America like a personal rewards program: cash back for donors, perks for loyalists, self-referential ego-stroking, contempt for everyone else—you know, the invisible people who make sure you have food to purchase and put on the table.

Lies aren’t rare; they’re strategy.

Empathy isn’t weakness; it’s treason.

Public service is a joke unless it pays.

When that becomes the energy at the top, it trickles down through everything. It tells people: This is how things are now. Don’t bother hoping for better. Don’t expect integrity. Everyone is out for themselves. Americans cannot be trusted.

In that environment, depression is rational.

I don’t only mean clinical depression, though plenty of people are dealing with that too. I mean a collective emotional state where hope feels naive and engagement feels pointless. When you see corruption go unpunished and cruelty rewarded over and over again, your nervous system eventually does the math: Nothing I do matters.

That’s Trump’s New Great Depression in a sentence: A country where more and more people quietly believe that nothing they do will matter.

Starting over at 52 in a warehouse nation

I walk my miles each shift and while I'm running carts and doing go backs, I think about all the people whose stories we never hear.

The man in his sixties who used to be an engineer.

The woman who created a best-selling garment for New York Fashion Week.

The guy two registers over who longs to sell fine wine, as he’d done for 30 years.

They’re all wearing badges now. They’re lifting, scanning, pushing, stocking. They’re doing honest, necessary work. But they’re also quietly carrying the knowledge that the “social contract” they were sold never really existed. And most of them feel like they failed. Fuck that. Market forces and a lack of will for community did that.

We were told: Work hard, follow the rules, and you’ll be secure.

What we got: Work hard, follow the rules, and you’re still disposable the minute you or your salary become inconvenient, or you hit 50, whichever comes first or is best for us.

Trump didn’t invent that betrayal. But his brand of politics poured gasoline on every fire and salt in every wound: greed without shame, division as entertainment, contempt for anyone who isn’t immediately useful.

In Trump’s New Great Depression, respect is reserved for billionaires and bullies. Everyone else is supposed to be grateful for whatever scraps they get.

So yes, I am incredibly grateful for my job. And I’m also furious that an entire generation is being thrown into the bargain bin of the labor market and told it’s just “the new economy" while younger generations futures are ... questionable, at best.

Grieving the America we thought we lived in

I’m not nostalgic for some perfect past. This country has always been a glorious mess. But there’s a difference between a gloriously-messy country trying to grow and a hatefully-messy country giving up on even pretending to be better.

For a long time, America ran on a story:

Americans are imperfect, but we are striving. Americans (used to) stand for courage, fairness, and some kind of honor. We at least (used to) say the words “liberty and justice for all,” even if we don’t fully live them.

America's story has always been uneven and exclusionary. But it still gave many people something hopeful to push against, something to move toward.

In Trump’s New Great Depression, even the story feels dead.

The prevailing narrative now seems to be: Win at any cost. Own your enemies. Take what you can. If someone falls, it’s their fault for being weak. If you have plenty of money you "earned" it and therefor deserve it.  

Ethics are a punchline. Humility is weakness. Admitting a mistake is political suicide.

We’re not just mourning lost jobs, lost homes, or lost savings.We’re mourning the version of America that at least acted like character mattered. This grief doesn’t show up on an economic chart. But it shows up in how people move through a warehouse the day before Thanksgiving. It shows up in the way they talk about the future—or don’t.

The depression you can’t diagnose with a spreadsheet

Officially, we are not in a depression. Unemployment figures are not at 25%. Airports are full. Online shopping carts still churn.

But stand at the entrance of a big box store for six hours. Walk ten miles in the lot. Watch people not buying the extra dessert, or the fancy flowers, or the second bottle of wine. Listen to them mutter to each other:

“Not feeling it this year.”

“We decided to keep it simple.”

“We’ll make do.”

There’s nothing wrong with living simply. In fact, Americans could really do well by pulling back and needing less of everything, all the time ... right f'n now. The problem is when “make do” in 2025, this is code for we’re really frightened, and we don’t trust that we’ll ever be okay.

Trump’s New Great Depression is not measured only in dollars. It’s measured in lessened quality of life and shorter time horizons. Trumps New Great Depression will ensure people never stop dreaming beyond making next month’s bills. Trumps New Great Depression is reflected back in citizens who stop believing their voice matters because, as of today, the loudest voices in America belong to bullies, liars, and profiteers. None of them give even a whiff of a fuck about you or me.

We can’t fix this with a stimulus check. We fix this with trust, truth, and tangible care—things in very short supply in our political culture.

Small rebellions in the aisle

So where does that leave me and my Costco badge, walking my miles inside and out?

Here’s what it doesn’t leave me:

• It doesn’t leave me pretending everything is okay.

• It doesn’t leave me parroting “We’re so blessed!” while people secretly shed tears in the restroom over this month's final grocery bill numbers.

• It doesn’t leave me blaming myself, or my age, or my résumé for a system that is clearly failing millions.

What it does leave me with is this: a small circle of control and a big stubborn streak of humanity. I can’t personally end Trump’s New Great Depression. I can’t force accountability into institutions that no longer seem to recognize the word. I can’t legislate decency from a parking lot.

But I can DO Something:

• I look people in the eye and let them know they’re seen.

• I treat my coworkers with respect, regardless of their title or compensation.

• I refuse to swallow the lie that my worth is measured by external wealth or trinkets.

• I will name what I’m seeing without gaslighting myself into thinking it’s “just me.”

These are tiny acts. But in a culture that runs on denial and distraction, telling the truth about our reality is a kind of rebellion. Maybe the next “New Deal” won’t start as a bill. Maybe it will start as a million micro-truths shared amongst ordinary people who stay kind when it would be easier to go numb, who stay honest when it would be easier to self-deceive or be quiet, who stay awake when the easiest option is to scroll ourselves to sleep.

Naming it is the first crack of light

We are in Trump’s New Great Depression.

Even if the experts won’t call it that.

Even if the linear models and padded graphs don’t reflect the soul-loss.

We feel it in the quiet aisles.

We feel it in the miles we walk to get by.

We feel it in the gap between what this country promised and what it’s delivering.

Naming it is not surrender.

Naming it is refusing to be gaslit.

I’m not going to pretend that everything is fine. It isn’t. But I’m also not going to give the architects of this collapse the final victory of turning me into someone bitter, cruel, or numb.

So I’ll keep putting on my badge. I’ll walk my miles. I’ll smile when it’s real and stay quiet when it’s not. I’ll hold the line on my own humanity, even as the country around me feels like it’s forgetting hers.

Maybe that’s not the grand, cinematic answer. But in Trump’s New Great Depression, it might be where the next America begins: one badge, one shift, one honest, unbroken heart at a time.

Peace, love, and self sovereignty to all

~ Goddess

About the Author

Jennifer “Jeno” ONeil (aka Goddess) is a program manager, artist, and founder of Modern Goddess, a creative fitness & wellness company. After decades in tech and leadership roles, she now balances her professional life with hands-on work at Costco— where she walks five miles instore and or eight to ten miles in the Lot watching America move through the aisles and the parking lines.

Jeno's essays, art, and comedy blend personal truth with social reflection, exploring what it means to stay human, ethical, and radically present in complicated times.