As the saying goes: "everything Trump touches dies."
In recent days, that's become true of cryptocurrencies, too.
After declaring himself the "crypto president" as early as 2024, Trump made himself the poster boy for Bitcoin, which surged above $100,000 even before his 2025 re-inauguration.
Today, in the wake of Trump's most recent crypto corruption scandal (this one involving a massive bribe to the Trump family from the UAE's "Spy Sheikh"), Bitcoin is collapsing.
On Thursday, Bitcoin traded at levels 50% below its October 2025 high. The currency, which emerged from its 2021-22 "crypto winter" to more than double under Biden, is now down about 40% since Trump moved back into the White House.
Perhaps you lack sympathy for the crypto "whales" and the suckers who have been manipulated by them every step of the way.
But spare a thought for everybody else.
Because Bitcoin isn't the only thing dying under Trump's reverse-Midas touch.
Here's a quick update on some of the cascading crises I've covered in the past, and which Trump is still making all of us suffer through.
Trump Jobs Crisis Update
During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised that "jobs and factories will come roaring back" if he were re-elected.
So far, the only thing that's roared back is the kind of unnecessary, Trump-induced manufacturing recession we last saw in 2019.
Job openings in America are now at Trump pandemic levels, after December vacancies fell to the lowest level since September 2020, reports AP.
The bad news doesn't end there.
"Planned layoffs soared 205% to 108,435 last month," reports Reuters, quoting data from global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. It's the highest reading for any January since the Great Recession of 2009.
And there's more.
Applications for unemployment benefits surged 22% to 231,000 last week, reports AP, "significantly" above forecasts.
From January 2026: Trump Isn't Working
Trump Affordability Crisis Update
Trump keeps calling the affordability crisis a hoax. Nine out of ten Americans disagree.
A new survey out this week from Talker Research reveals:
- 87% of Americans believe we’re in a "cost-of-living crisis"
- 52% are struggling to pay rent on time
- 50% are struggling to afford groceries
- 78% said “everything” became more expensive in 2025
- 46% believe things are going to become even less affordable in 2026
Healthcare costs loom large in Americans' lives, reports KFF:
- Just under half of U.S. adults say it is difficult to afford health care costs
- Three in four (75%) uninsured adults under age 65 say they went without needed care in the past 12 months because of the cost
- Four in ten adults (41%) reported having debt due to medical or dental bills
And the news keeps getting worse for anyone who believed Trump would bring grocery prices down "on Day One."
In 2026, food and rent costs are still going up.
From November 2025: The Trump Affordability Crisis
Trump Infectious Disease Crisis Update
Just one year into Trump's second term, the diseases that rebound fastest when vaccination rates slip — measles and whooping cough — are surging.
Measles: As The Atlantic reported this week:
Since last January, the country has logged its two largest measles epidemics in more than three decades. The second of those, still ballooning in South Carolina, is over 875 cases and counting. In April, measles may be declared endemic in the U.S. again, 26 years after elimination.
And 2026 is already shaping up to be worse than 2025, reports The Guardian:
In January alone, the US saw 25% of the total confirmed (measles cases) in all of last year, and the outbreak shows no sign of slowing as federal officials stay silent on vaccination.
Whooping cough: As cases soared, NBC News reported in December 2025 that an analysis of data from 31 states showed that "about 70% of counties and jurisdictions fell below the target vaccination rate needed for community protection."
Flu: Not for the first time, Trump turned a bad flu season into a disaster. This time around, he allowed RFK, Jr to oversee the dismantling of standard response protocols and impose new restrictions on vaccine options. The result: a continuation of the steady downward trend in flu shot uptake even as the vicious Subclade K flu variant swept the nation.
From June 2025: The Trump Infectious Disease Crisis
Trump Food Safety Crisis Update
Trump — and RFK, Jr. — began 2025 promising to "Make America Healthy Again."
But they immediately allowed Elon Musk to conduct a chainsaw massacre on America's food safety infrastructure, cutting critical staff and crippling the FDA's and the USDA's ability to track foodborne illnesses.
Trump has, of course, a track record of corruption when it comes to food safety.
In August 2025, he found a new way to make US consumers even less safe when he threw a chicken bone to a major donor by withdrawing "a Biden-era proposal" that would have:
Created new safety standards in an effort to prevent the sale of raw chicken and chicken parts contaminated with certain levels or types of Salmonella. It would have also overhauled safety procedures and testing for poultry slaughterhouses to prevent Salmonella contamination.
In November, things got worse for food eaters everywhere when extremists in the MAGA Senate further gutted U.S. food safety laws in the bill to end the Trump shutdown.
The result: 2025 saw a sharp increase in recalls and, ominously, a surge in large-scale recalls that saw the actual volume of food withdrawn from shelves reach levels not seen in years.
Examples:
- On 2 February 2026, a Class I recall—the highest risk level warning issued by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)—was issued for six varieties of juice in 24 states.
- In December 2025, nearly 2,000 products distributed by Gold Star Distribution, Inc., including Coca-Cola, Hershey's, and Tylenol, were recalled in Indiana, Minnesota, and North Dakota due to storage in an unsanitary facility with rodent and bird droppings.
- In Q3 2025, 58 million pounds of food were recalled due to dangerous "foreign materials," primarily chunks of wood in popular brands of corn dogs.
- In July 2025, 10.59 million ice cream bars were recalled due to Listeria concerns.
- 2025 also saw multiple recalls due to radioactive (Cesium-137) contamination in shrimp.
Trump's lax approach to food safety will continue to poison and kill more Americans in the days and weeks ahead.
Listeria contamination is a particular concern because, unlike many bacteria, listeria grows at refrigerator temperatures and survives on processing equipment and slicers, making ready-to-eat foods particularly risky.
And because symptoms can appear up to 10 weeks after exposure, it's hard to trace outbreaks before they spread widely — especially in a country where the president is actively weakening food-safety regulations and oversight.
From May 2025: The Trump Food Safety Crisis
Trump Climate Crisis Update
As I wrote in July 2025:
In enacting the Project 2025 agenda he previously disavowed, Trump has already set environmental progress back by decades.
Two days after that article appeared, the NY Times wrote that the decision by Trump's EPA chief Lee Zeldin to rescind the 2009 "endangerment finding" that planet-warming greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health, would leave the EPA "with no authority under the Clean Air Act to regulate the greenhouse gas emissions that are accumulating in the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels."
As Earth Justice wrote on 1 August 2025:
The losers are the American people who will suffer from more heat and extreme weather events, more air pollution from fossil vehicles, and more delays in responding to the climate crisis.... There’s only one winner: the fossil fuel industry. The companies that bankrolled President Trump’s campaign are getting what they paid for: regulations that delay a cleaner, cheaper, and more reliable future.
In 2026, Trump's EPA has already told us that it will from now on calculate "the monetary value of a human life... as zero."
But it's not just Americans who will suffer due to the Trump climate crisis.
As Trump withdraws America from all major international climate agreements and initiatives, the whole warming world will continue to pay the price.
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