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The ex-president has reached a deal with CAA, one of Hollywood's most storied agencies.
What projects can we expect from the Kid from Scranton? #PUPPETREGIME
Exclusive Echelon/GZERO poll: What would Americans annex?
GZERO partnered with Echelon Polling to uncover how Americans feel about Trump’s expansionary ideas. When asked about acquiring Greenland, the Panama Canal, or Canada, the majority of Americans said they would not support such moves. In the case of Canada, only 16% of respondents supported acquiring the US’ northern neighbor. At the high end, 34% of people supported acquiring the Panama Canal.
The Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of America -- but Trump isn't stopping there. And there's one key world leader who has suddenly figured out how to take advantage of Trump's mass rebranding agenda... #PUPPETREGIME
Watch more of GZERO's award-winning PUPPET REGIME series!
Trump on a rubix cube on top of a dollar.
If you listen to Wall Street and corporate America, Donald Trump’s second term will usher in a new golden age for the US economy. After all, what’s not to love about the return of a business-friendly president advised by a cabinet of self-made billionaires all promising deregulation and tax cuts?
Markets and CEOs have reasons to cheer. Trump inherits a strong US economy from former President Joe Biden. Output is running above pre-pandemic trends, far outperforming other major economies. Unemployment is hovering around 4%, inflation is slowly heading back to the Fed’s 2% target, and interest rates are coming down from their peak. It’s no wonder stocks are partying like it's 1995. But two of Trump’s core campaign promises are set to spoil the party.
First, there’s his plan to jack up tariffs (aka “the greatest thing ever invented”) to correct “unfair practices,” reduce America’s trade deficit, and extract concessions from other countries. While the president didn’t slap any new tariffs on “day one,” as some feared, he did launch investigations that will provide legal cover for significant tariff hikes sooner rather than later.
China will be the primary target as Trump imposes 50-60% levies on some goods and roughly doubles the average tariff rate on all Chinese imports by year’s end, aiming to force a deal from Beijing. But though China’s economy is in shambles and President Xi Jinping would much prefer to avoid a trade war with the US, he’s unlikely to offer concessions generous enough to satisfy Trump and the hawks in his cabinet. Combined with other US moves the Chinese will see as hostile, tariffs will cause Beijing to retaliate and the US-China relationship to break down, hurting American consumers and businesses through higher prices for imported goods and inputs.
Of course, China’s not the only trading partner in “tariff man’s” crosshairs. Trump’s offhand threats on Monday to impose 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada by Feb. 1 may be bluster, but they confirm his determination to target any country he believes is taking America for a ride. That could include having a large bilateral trade surplus with the US, enabling Chinese circumvention of US tariffs, “free riding” off US protection, “over-taxing” US companies, and anything else Trump sees as adversarial to US interests.
Some countries will cave to Trump’s demands. Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, for instance, will likely offer up enough concessions to avoid 25% tariffs. But others will lack the policy and political space to placate Trump. Some, like Canada, will feel compelled to hit back with their own measures, raising the risk of an escalatory cycle and a broader trade war that could tip the US – and the world – into recession.
Even if we avoid that worst-case scenario (as is likely), Trump’s initial tariffs will still disrupt supply chains, distort trade flows, and raise costs for US businesses and consumers – with lower-income Americans taking the biggest hit. And here’s the kicker: Not only will tariffs fail to “enrich our citizens” – Trump’s purported goal – they also won’t meaningfully reduce America’s overall trade deficit or bring back manufacturing jobs.
Then there’s immigration, the second key plank of the president’s agenda. Trump wasted no time showing he means business, on Monday declaring a “national emergency” at the southern border, announcing immediate deportation raids, reinstating his "Remain in Mexico" policy, and designating drug cartels as foreign terrorist organizations. His unexpected (and probably illegal) order to deny birthright citizenship to the children of noncitizens signals just how far he’s willing to go to deliver on this campaign promise. While we won’t see the 15 million deportations Trump threatened on the campaign trail (there may not even be that many undocumented immigrants in the US), with committed immigration hawks like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan running the show, the administration could remove up to 1 million people this year and perhaps 5 million over his term.
That’s a problem for the economy because the labor market is operating at full employment. Removing millions of existing workers (who are also consumers and taxpayers) while curtailing immigration will shrink the US workforce, driving up wages, business costs, and consumer prices, reducing the economy’s productive capacity, and widening the deficit.
The combined effect of Trump’s trade and immigration policies will be slower growth and higher inflation. And the two pro-growth policies that investors and business leaders are banking on – deregulation and tax cuts – won’t deliver enough juice to offset the damage.
Yes, the financial sector, Silicon Valley, the crypto industry, and fossil-fuel producers will benefit from lighter regulation. But the macro impact will be limited: The US economy is already among the most loosely regulated in the developed world, and Trump already picked much of the low-hanging fruit in his first term. Domestic energy production reached record highs during the Biden administration, and low oil prices will discourage much additional output and investment this year.
As for tax cuts, Republicans will make permanent Trump’s 2017 cuts for corporations and the wealthy at a cost of over $4.5 trillion over 10 years. But with the fiscal deficit already at 6.5% of GDP and only a razor-thin House majority, Trump won’t be able to slash taxes much (or any) further without offsetting spending cuts. Even if Elon Musk’s now-official Department of Government Efficiency (whose constitutionality is already being challenged in court) manages to find some cost savings and efficiencies in the federal budget, meaningful spending cuts will be hard to come by – especially as entitlements remain untouchable and Trump boosts defense spending.
The result? Trump’s promises to lower the corporate income tax rate to 15% and eliminate taxes on tips, Social Security, and overtime pay are likely to go unmet. Yet deficits and debt-to-GDP will grow faster over the next four years, putting upward pressure on America’s long-term borrowing costs.
All this – higher inflationary pressures from tariffs and deportations, bigger deficits – will force the Fed to keep interest rates higher for longer to fight inflation, raising your mortgage payments, strengthening the dollar, and further dampening growth. Cue angry tweets from Trump demanding rate cuts, which will spook markets and lead Jerome Powell to double down on demonstrating the Fed’s independence.
Many business leaders and investors are shrugging off these risks, remembering how well the economy performed in Trump’s first term and believing the president will back down or be constrained from following through on his most disruptive campaign promises.
But the starting conditions are very different than in 2017. Corporate valuations are much higher. Government debt has exploded since the pandemic, and deficits are structurally higher. Inflation is still above target, and interest rates remain elevated. The downside risks are significantly greater. More importantly, Trump 2.0 is not Trump 1.0. Not only does the president have unified government and an iron grip on his party, but he’s also consolidating executive power and assembling a more personally loyal team ready to implement rather than block his agenda.
To be sure, many of his tariff threats will prove to be bluster. Logistical and political roadblocks will limit the scale of deportations. Lobbying from CEOs and advisers like Musk might temper his most disruptive impulses. And a large enough market selloff or $15 eggs before the midterms could convince him to soften a long-held position.
But make no mistake: Trump will follow through on his agenda to a greater extent and with a steeper cost than most seem to realize. And the constant guessing game about what the president might do next will itself weigh on trade, investment, and growth.
Over time, this structural uncertainty and policy volatility – combined with the cronyism and pay-for-play that will flourish during Trump’s transactional presidency – risks eroding the foundations that have made America the world’s premier economy.
Putin doesn’t like that Trump is copying his style. So he does what anyone would do ... invade Canada. #PUPPETREGIME
Watch more of GZERO's award-winning PUPPET REGIME series!
Donald Trump wants to take back the Panama Canal, and Bad Bunny’s new album "DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS" is the most streamed record in the world right now. What do these two things have to do with each other?
More than you’d think. That’s because reggaetón, the genre Bad Bunny is best known for, actually has its origins on the the banks of the Panama Canal.
And American foreign policy played a key part in that story.
When the Americans built the canal in the years before World War I, they brought in thousands of workers from across the West Indies, but especially Jamaica, to do the hard labor. Afterward, those laborers were permitted to live and work in the Canal Zone, a strip of US sovereign territory inside Panama that flanked the canal, ensuring US control over the waterway.
The Panamanians didn’t love this arrangement. Many felt the original canal treaties were illegitimate, and resentment at the US presence grew. In 1964, when the US stopped students from flying a Panamanian flag in the Canal Zone, a mass riot left four American soldiers and 22 Panamanian police officers dead. The Soviet Union blasted Washington’s “colonizing policy.” Fidel Castro decried “Yankee imperialism.”
In 1977, US President Jimmy Carter decided to give the canal to Panama. Carter thought this would improve America’s relations with Latin America, and avoid a more costly crisis around the Canal itself.
“Fairness, not force, should lie at the heart of our dealings with the rest of the world,” he said at the time.
Carter’s plan was unpopular at home. The stiffest opposition came from a telegenic young California governor named Ronald Reagan. But Carter’s dogged lobbying – and some help from John Wayne, whose first wife was Panamanian – helped to win narrow passage of the handover treaties. The canal itself wouldn't be given to Panama until 1999, but the controversial canal zone was dissolved almost immediately, in 1979.
And that’s where the music comes back into the story. Many of the Jamaicans and West Indians living in the Canal Zone moved to nearby Panama City. And when they did, they brought with them the popular new sound coming out of Jamaica at the time – “dancehall,” a rawer, streetier, more club-oriented successor to the reggae of the 1970s.
It wasn’t long before dancehall was reinterpreted in Spanish, becoming a new genre called Reggae en Español, a unique mashup made by the West Indians of the Canal Zone and Panama’s own Afro-Panamanian communities.
But we still aren’t in Puerto Rico yet! Right. We’re getting there.
In 1985, one of the pioneers of the Panamanian scene, known as El General, moved to New York. There he introduced the sound to the city’s huge Puerto Rican diaspora, who helped popularize it back on the island where, in turn, local artists brought hip-hop and Puerto Rican traditional styles into a musical mix that would soon go from the streets of Panama and Puerto Rico to the whole globe.
The first documented use of the term reggaeton dates from this period, when a young Daddy Yankee (whose song “Gasolina” would become the first global reggaeton hit in 2004) used it in a freestyle on an early 1990s mixtape. And just a few years after that, Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico.
You now know young Benito as "Bad Bunny."
So why does Trump want the canal back anyway? He thinks it was a “mistake” to give up a canal that handles more than 5% of global trade. As Trump sees it, the US is locked in a zero-sum economic competition with China, and controlling that canal is critical, whether the Panamanians like it or not.
This is the inverse of Carter’s formulation – Trump's world is one where force is squarely at the center of America’s dealings with both friends and foes.
Trump's view echoes older ideas about America’s natural right to expand and dominate the Western Hemisphere. His America will, he says, be one that “expands our territory ... and carries our flag into new and beautiful horizons,” as he pledged in his inaugural address.
But do you know what the last major US territorial expansion in Latin America was? It was the takeover, in 1898, of Puerto Rico, as a result of the Spanish-American war. The island has been, in effect, a colony of the US ever since.
And to come full circle here, the negative impacts of that 127-year relationship – political repression, exploitative neglect, mass emigration, and creeping gentrification – are all major themes of … Bad Bunny’s new album.
If you want to learn more about this story – including the complicated issues of class, gender, and race that are part of reggaeton’s evolution – check out the podcast “LOUD,” a history narrated by Ivy Queen, one of the pioneering women of the genre.
Every January, Eurasia Group, our parent company, produces a report with its forecast for the Top 10 Risks for the world in the year ahead. Its authors are EG President Ian Bremmer and EG Chairman Cliff Kupchan.
Here are brief summaries of the most important risks that will preoccupy world leaders, business decision-makers, and the rest of us in 2025, according to Bremmer and Kupchan. You can read the full report here.
1. The G-Zero wins
A G-Zero world is an era when no one power or group of powers is both willing and able to drive a global agenda and maintain international order. We’ve been living with this lack of international leadership for nearly a decade now. But in 2025, the problem will get a lot worse.
Bremmer and Kupchan argue that we should expect new and expanding power vacuums, emboldened rogue actors, and a heightened risk of dangerous accidents, miscalculations, and conflict. The risk of a geopolitical crisis, they warn, “is higher than at any point in our lifetimes.”
Russia and China remain challengers to the Western-led security order, though in very different ways. Rising inequality, shifting demographics, and warp-speed technological change have persuaded a growing number of citizens in advanced industrial democracies that “globalism” hasn’t worked in their favor. And the world’s military superpower will again be led by the only post-World War II president who rejects the assumption that a US global leadership role serves the American people.
Bremmer and Kupchan detail three ways out of what they call a “geopolitical recession.” One, reform existing institutions like the UN, IMF, and others to operate more effectively and command broad legitimacy. Two, build replacement institutions that better reflect the underlying balance of power. Three, impose a new set of rules by force. Different actors are pursuing all three of these strategies. But in 2025, it’s the third option where challengers to the system are devoting their attention, time, and resources.
This Top Risk is not a single event, the authors suggest. It’s the cumulative impact of the intensifying G-Zero leadership deficit and the deepening geopolitical recession on the breakdown of the global order. The result is a uniquely dangerous period of world history on par with the 1930s or the early Cold War.
And just when we were celebrating the end of 2024.
2. Rule of Don
Donald Trump’s second term will not be like his first, Bremmer and Kupchan predict. Emboldened by the scale of his 2024 election victory and the support of a unified Republican Party, Trump will enter office more experienced and better organized than in 2017. He will populate his administration with loyalists who now have a better understanding of how the federal government works. His consolidated control over Republicans in Congress, a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and a friendlier media environment will help him advance his agenda.
From this solid foundation, Trump will work to purge the federal bureaucracy of professional civil servants and replace them with political loyalists, particularly at the Justice Department and the FBI. This consolidation of power will “stretch the norms of Washington to their breaking point,” according to Bremmer and Kupchan. The erosion of independent checks on executive power and an active undermining of the rule of law, they argue, will leave more of US policy dependent on the arbitrary decisions and personal whims of one powerful man in Washington rather than on established and politically impartial legal principles.
Democracy itself, the report cautions, will not be threatened. The US isn’t Hungary. But Trump’s indifference, in some cases hostility, to longstanding American values will set dangerous new precedents in “political vandalism” for future presidents of both parties.
3. US-China breakdown
The détente established by Joe Biden and Xi Jinping at Woodside in November 2023 kept US-China tensions reasonably contained in 2024. But Trump’s return to office will unleash an “unmanaged decoupling in the world’s most important geopolitical relationship.” That, in turn, risks a major economic disruption and a broader crisis.
Trump will set new tariffs on Chinese goods to pressure Beijing for concessions on a host of issues, and China’s leaders, despite real economic weakness at home, will respond more forcefully to prove to both Trump and China’s people that they can and will fight back.
Tensions over Taiwan will likely rise, though a true crisis remains unlikely in 2025. But Trump administration actions targeting the Chinese Communist Party's legitimacy and visas for Chinese students will further inflame tensions.
Technology policy will be the true frontline in this conflict, Bremmer and Kupchan assert. China’s leaders insist that Washington wants to stunt China’s technological growth to protect the US position as world No. 1. Battles over trade and investment in everything from semiconductors to critical minerals will erupt in 2025.
4. Trumponomics
In January, Trump will inherit a robust US economy. Output has risen above pre-pandemic trends, unemployment remains near 4%, and an inflation rate nearing the Federal Reserve’s 2% target encourages investors to expect interest rate cuts. But Bremmer and Kupchan warn that Trump’s policies will bring higher inflation and lower growth in 2025.
First, Trump will significantly hike tariffs to correct “unfair” practices and reduce America’s trade deficit, which he views as intrinsically bad for the country. When US consumers face fewer affordable options on many goods, inflation will rise again, leaving interest rates higher and slowing growth. The dollar will strengthen, the report forecasts, making US exports less competitive. Some countries targeted by Trump will retaliate with measures that hurt American exporters and raise the risk of a disruptive global trade war.
Second, there is Trump’s immigration policy, which could deport up to 1 million people in 2025, Bremmer and Kupchan argue, and as many as five million over the course of his four-year term. Reduced illegal immigration and mass deportations will shrink the US workforce, drive up wages and consumer prices, and reduce the productive capacity of the economy, they insist, and legal immigration won’t fill the gap.
5. Russia still rogue
Russia is now the world’s leading rogue power by a large margin, the report’s authors argue, and Vladimir Putin will pursue more policies that undermine the US-led global order, despite a likely ceasefire in Ukraine. Russia will take hostile action against EU countries with cyber, sabotage, and other “asymmetric attacks,” and will build on its strategic military partnership with Iran and North Korea in 2025.
Donald Trump will likely achieve the ceasefire in Ukraine he has promised, and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky needs a halt to a war his country is slowly losing. Russia is advancing on the battlefield, but 600,000 Russian casualties and three years of sanctions give Putin good reason to cut a ceasefire deal with Trump. The agreement's terms, Bremmer and Kupchan predict, will freeze forces in place and leave Russia in de facto control of conquered territory. Both sides will rearm, and sporadic fighting will continue along the line of control, the report forecasts. The fragile ceasefire will probably continue through 2025, “but not much longer.”
Yet, the ceasefire itself will create new problems beyond Ukraine. The Nordics, the Baltic countries, and Poland will support a Ukrainian military buildup during the ceasefire. France, Germany, Italy, and others will likely provide security guarantees to Ukraine and bolster Ukrainian and EU defenses. EU sanctions on Russia will remain in place, giving Putin more reason to interfere in their domestic politics, just as they used cyber and other tools to interfere in Romania’s election in November 2024 and in the US too, according to US officials. Bremmer and Kupchan predict Putin will continue attempts at sabotage and even assassination in many Western countries, and continue to use Telegram to instill pro-Kremlin views in citizens of European countries.
NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said in December that Moscow was “preparing for long-term confrontation, with Ukraine and with us.” Russia will do more than any other country to subvert the global order in 2025.
For the rest of the Top Risks 2025, read the full report here.
Disclaimer: Willis Sparks has contributed to these Top Risks reports for the past 20 years.
- Ian Bremmer explains the 10 Top Risks of 2025 - GZERO Media ›
- Unpacking the biggest global threats of 2025 - GZERO Media ›
- Podcast: The Top Geopolitical Risks of 2025, a live conversation with Ian Bremmer and global experts - GZERO Media ›
- What happens when no one’s in charge - GZERO Media ›
- Top Risks 2025: America's role in the crumbling global order - GZERO Media ›
- Ian Bremmer on the forces behind the geopolitical recession - GZERO Media ›
- The rise of a leaderless world: Why 2025 marks a turning point, with Francis Fukuyama - GZERO Media ›