Back to Pottersville

Not this movie. Not again. And this time, the economy tanks much sooner.

One day during Donald Trump’s last presidential term I emerged from a restaurant near Pennsylvania Avenue, glanced upward at the Trump International Hotel, and thought to myself: So this is Pottersville.

Pottersville is the honky-tonk alternative universe that Clarence the Angel reveals to George Bailey in It’s A Wonderful Life. It’s what George’s beloved Bedford Falls would look like had he never been born. George’s wife, Mary, is the old maid town librarian! George’s brother Harry, whose life he saved as a child, is dead! Violet, the bad girl for whom George helped secure a fresh start in another town, never left town and became a streetwalker! Gazing at the Trump International Hotel, I thought to myself that a 21st century remake of It’s A Wonderful Life would have to present a different counterfactual. We get Pottersville not because a good man wasn’t born but because a bad man was born. The wrong sperm collided penetrated the wrong egg a couple of months after V-J Day and everything turned to shit. If Mel Brooks hadn’t already claimed the title in 1991, you could call it Life Stinks.

I never believed this could happen twice, but it has. This time there is no Trump International Hotel but you’ve got Truth Social stock and a cryptocurrency business and various other venues through which to shred the Constitution’s emoluments clause. And all because voters got it into their heads that Trump would deliver a better economy. Well guess what, as President Joe Biden likes to say. The latest economic forecasts predict that the economy will tank in 2025, all because our George Bailey antitype is back. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.