Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly disrupting America’s job market. Within the next decade, positions such as administrative assistants, cashiers, postal clerks, and data entry workers could be fully automated. Although the World Economic Forum expects a net increase of 78 million jobs, significant policy efforts will be required to support millions of displaced workers. The Trump administration should craft a comprehensive plan to tackle AI-driven job losses and ensure a fair transition for all.
As AI is expected to reshape nearly 40% of workers’ skills over the next five years, investing in workforce development is crucial. To be proactive, the administration should establish partnerships to provide subsidized retraining programs in high-demand fields like cybersecurity, healthcare, and renewable energy. Providing tax incentives for companies that implement in-house reskilling initiatives could further accelerate this transition.
To ensure inclusivity, community technology centers and libraries equipped with online courses could be deployed in rural and underserved areas, helping workers across the country adapt to the evolving economy.
AI disproportionately affects regions reliant on clerical and manufacturing jobs, exacerbating local economic hardships. Establishing “economic diversification zones” in these communities—offering tax breaks, grants, and infrastructure investments—would attract growth-oriented industries such as advanced manufacturing, green energy, and technology startups, fostering broader economic resilience.
Rural areas, however, face a bigger challenge: they are among the least served by technology infrastructure, including high-speed internet. This digital divide limits access to the tools and resources necessary to participate in emerging AI-driven industries, putting these communities at risk of being left further behind. Many of these areas form the backbone of the Trump administration’s voter base, making their inclusion in the AI economy both an economic imperative and a political necessity. Without targeted investments to bridge this gap, rural regions may miss out on the opportunities AI could bring, compounding existing economic disparities.
Displaced workers often face unemployment and financial instability. Expanding benefits to include income-based retraining and extending coverage duration would offer essential relief. Decoupling healthcare from employment could also reduce stress and uncertainty. Meanwhile, portable benefits—allowing retirement and healthcare coverage to follow workers across jobs—would mitigate career-transition risks and bolster economic resilience.
Employers in emerging industries often struggle to fill vacancies despite high unemployment in declining sectors. The Trump administration must facilitate partnerships between educational institutions, labor unions, and employers to align training programs with industry needs. Apprenticeships and internships in fields like AI and machine learning could provide workers with on-the-job experience.
Micro-credentialing programs—short, specialized training modules—would allow displaced workers to transition into new roles without requiring full degrees, ensuring a faster and more efficient shift to growing industries.
Barriers such as inadequate childcare, eldercare, and inflexible work arrangements disproportionately affect women and low-income families. Subsidizing childcare and eldercare could enable more individuals to pursue retraining and employment. Encouraging remote work and flexible scheduling would expand opportunities for workers in rural areas and those with caregiving responsibilities.
The integration of AI and automation into the workforce represents both a challenge and an opportunity. By investing in retraining programs, economic diversification, and robust social safety nets, the Trump administration could empower workers to navigate this transformative period.
However, given the administration's policy direction, which deprioritizes investments in social safety nets, workforce retraining, and regional economic development, it is unlikely that these comprehensive changes will be pursued. Without a significant shift in priorities, many of the most vulnerable workers will face the full brunt of automation-driven job losses without sufficient support. This stark reality underscores the urgent need for a forward-looking strategy to address these issues head-on. Ironically, this burden will fall most heavily on the administration's strongest source of support—rural communities and blue-collar workers—further deepening the challenges they face.
Robert Cropf is a professor of political science at Saint Louis University.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.