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Hello everyone and welcome to this week’s edition of Receipts. I’ve been trying to keep track of all the companies Trump has undermined or outright killed via his agenda of tariffs, mass deportations, DOJ probes, and wars. This week’s newsletter compiles a few of the highlights, with a focus on the sectors he’s hurt (mostly) by accident through his ill-conceived economic agenda.
Are there major victims I’ve left out? Or other examples of harmful policies I should dig into? Drop me a note in the comments. And if you’re not already a Bulwark+ member, I hope you’ll consider joining. You can do that right here, with a fourteen-day FREE trial period:
–Catherine
P.S. – I’ll be going live again with JVL tomorrow for Receipts Live. Look for us at 12:30 p.m. in the East on Substack and YouTube. See you then!
The ‘America First’ Corporate Graveyard
An (economic) serial killer is on the loose, and he’s murdering U.S firms left and right.
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IN THE MIDST OF AN ENERGY CRISIS, the Trump administration is paying companies to not build more energy infrastructure.
You read that correctly.
The Trump administration is proudly shelling out almost $2 billion in exchange for agreements from developers to halt wind projects that were already in the works. These projects—wind farms off the coasts of New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, and California—would have generated enough electricity to power roughly 3-4 million households once they came online.
What pot of taxpayer money this payoff comes from, and whether the payoffs are even legal, remain open questions. Even lawmakers don’t know the answers. But these companies should probably count themselves lucky. They got paid to shut down, after all.¹
Dozens of other renewable energy projects around the country have not received the same—forgive me—windfall. Instead, they’ve been canceled, stalled, or quietly snuffed out, with zero compensation. The list includes a gargantuan solar project in Nevada and more than 150 wind developments around the country, which collectively could have powered around 15 million homes.² As a Heatmap headline declared: “Trump is getting away with murdering an American industry.”
Renewables are hardly Trump’s only victim. Our president is basically an economic serial killer, whacking firms left and right.
In addition to the intentional corporate executions—like the deliberate, gleeful “murders” of these wind projects—there are a great many Trump casualties that look more like manslaughter: companies the president is killing by accident, as with the recently departed Spirit Airlines (R.I.P.). The president simply doesn’t understand how his economic agenda of trade wars and hot wars might accidentally kill off already-weakened individual companies—or, in some cases, entire industries.
Just over a year into his second term, the economic landscape is littered with victims mangled by Trump’s agenda. Corporate bankruptcies last year rose to their highest level in over a decade. So join me, friends, for a stroll through the ‘America First’ Corporate Graveyard.
Not already a Bulwark+ member? Give it a try for a two-week trial period at no cost:
Time to Sell the Farm
Trump often boasts about how terrific he is for farmers. The data show otherwise. Farm bankruptcies rose 46 percent in 2025 from a year prior, and this year the number is expected to be even worse thanks to the Iran war.
Farmers have already lost core markets for staples like soybeans, as China stopped buying from America and turned instead to Brazil and Argentina. And now, U.S. farmers are having to absorb higher costs for diesel, fertilizer, and other key inputs thanks to the war. So their margins are getting hammered thin from both sides. Mass deportations and the cancellation of both domestic and foreign food aid programs have done the same.
Persistently high interest rates, necessitated in part by Trump’s inflationary policies, have weighed on farmers, too.
As with Spirit, Trump has attempted a bailout for farmers harmed by his own policies (euphemized as “unfair market disruptions”). So far this hasn’t done much to staunch the bleeding, though Trump has solicited their gratitude all the same.