Trump's image of America is straight out of Shogun: columnist

President Donald Trump's economic policies are turning the U.S. into 'a nation of serfs,' according to Slate senior writer Ben Mathis-Lilley.

“So far, the story of the Trump administration when it comes to the economy is a tale of two countries,” Mathis-Lilley wrote. He believes, “What country America is becoming at any given time depends on which member of the administration is speaking on television and/or what mood Trump is in.”

“The first country is a more dynamic version of the current one, in which the stock market keeps rising and America remains an international center of innovation and production,” Mathis-Lilley said.

However, the second version of the U.S. Mathis-Lilley called a “modern version of shogunate Japan,” which is a reference to the hereditary Military government that led Japan from 1192 through 1867.

In this second world Mathis-Lilley claimed, “Tariffs are enormous and permanent, foreign professionals are actively excluded from the country, science and medical research is nonexistent, children’s dolls are as precious as gold, and Americans are funneled into manual labor jobs like making screws for Apple.”

Mathis-Lilley called American citizens in this reality, “A nation of serfs—who are happy, despite being serfs in 2025, because the country has been returned to its prior state of cultural homogeneity (read: most of the population is white people) and spiritually rewarding manual labor.”

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“Financial markets would very much like the first country, rather than North Korea with Energy Drinks,” the senior writer said. However, “The administration’s Isolated Peasantry Caucus has been racking up some wins.”

This includes the GOP-controlled House pressing “forward last week with a budget bill that would create $4 trillion in deficits (LOL!) in order to cut the heck out of tax rates for millionaires and billionaires.”

He also railed against “The administration told Harvard it has to expel all its international students.” Mathis-Lilley said the move “probably doesn’t make the world’s smartest and most innovation-generating biomedicine and computer science graduate students more likely to apply to U.S. schools."

Another issue Mathis-Lilley foresees is the “slowdown of vaccine approval under vaccine-truther Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.”

What he found most concerning is how the markets reacted to Trump’s “out of nowhere” social media post, claiming that Trump informed Apple CEO Tim Cook "that he intends to eventually put a 25 percent tariff on iPhones unless they’re entirely manufactured and assembled in the United States.

Mathis-Lilley noted "Apple stock, as they say, took a tumble.”