Imagine

It's May 2029, and President Kate Park has just completed history's most remarkable first 100 days in the White House. Her campaign took place during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — a crisis that started with the collapse of the AI bubble and cascaded into mass layoffs, bank failures, and the disintegration of entire industries, all against the backdrop of the hottest and most destructive summer in recorded history. Hurricanes, wildfires, and floods devastated communities across the globe while millions of Americans lost their jobs to AI systems that could do their work better, faster, and for almost nothing. The combination produced a feeling that the country — and the world — was sliding toward a Mad Max future: a devastated planet where human beings were worth nothing. In the midst of this double crisis, the Democratic candidates rambled about modest reforms. The Republicans shouted about the border. In the end, voters chose Park, a General Motors engineer from Detroit, who ran as an independent calling the nation to a world-war-scale mission to rebuild the American economy and build a clean future that could sustain prosperity for all.

Park's campaign was an accident. She was 46 years old and had spent two decades at General Motors when the company announced it was shutting down its entire electric vehicle division and laying off thousands of factory workers. The reason: "We can no longer compete with China's fully automated production lines." But it wasn't just the factory floor. In the same week, GM told most of its engineers, designers, and project managers that their positions were being eliminated too — replaced by AI systems that could do the work of entire departments for a fraction of the cost.

As Park and hundreds of other laid-off workers filed out of the building, carrying their belongings in bankers boxes, a local news crew stopped her for a comment. What followed was a two-minute rant that would change the course of American history.

"They used to tell us we couldn't compete with Chinese workers because their wages were too low," Park said, her voice shaking with anger. "Now they're telling us our robots can't even compete! Why does anything think China will give us cars if we have nothing to give in return?" She paused. "My parents came to this country because this was the country that built things. My father was a civil engineer. He built roads and bridges and water systems. He believed in this place. How did America become the country that just lays down and goes to sleep when our communities and our industries and all of our infrastructure need rebuilding, and when the whole world is desperate for things that we could make just as well as China?"

A small crowd of her former coworkers had gathered. Some were recording on their phones.

"The whole world needs billions of electric cars and trucks — right now. The whole world is building an entirely new clean economy — right now. And what are we doing? We're firing everyone and hoping AI figures out what to do next." Her eyes welled up. "When my daughter was little, she had so many dolls that she used to carry everywhere. Then one year she didn't need them. They ended up buried in the back of a closet, forgotten. That's what we're about to do to all of humanity."

She looked directly into the camera. "We have the technology to build a clean economy that provides everything everyone needs on this whole planet. And here's the incredible part: we could do it with less work than it has ever taken to do anything this big in all of human history. I grew up watching Star Trek with my dad. He believed that was our real future. And he was right. We are standing at the door of that future right now. But instead of walking through it, we are throwing our society, our economy, and our lives in the trash."

The video hit a hundred million views in 48 hours. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky retweeted it, saying "reminds me of a character I played once" — a reference to the teacher he played on television, whose social media rant made him president, and ultimately propelled the actor to the real presidency. Park had said out loud what millions of people were feeling but couldn't articulate: that the most technologically advanced civilization in history was choosing to abandon its own people rather than put its tools to use. The "Park for President" movement was born.

The AI crisis was escalating fast. Through 2026 and 2027, the layoffs had been steady but containable. But in 2028, the dam broke. Job losses went to several hundred thousand per month most months. And then something unexpected: the great AI companies that had spent trillions building data centers and training models discovered what skeptics had warned about for years: they were mere commodity infrastructure companies competing against free and open-source AI models that were just as capable for all practical purposes. The hyperscalers' staggering debts — financed through exotic shadow-banking arrangements and secured by hardware whose value was plummeting — became impossible to service. One by one, the giants began to topple. Stock prices that had once carried the entire market crashed to fractions of their peaks. The banks that had financed the AI boom found themselves holding worthless collateral. And the industries that had been quietly hollowed out by AI — marketing firms, consulting companies, design agencies, legal services, financial analysis, software development, and dozens more — simply stopped existing in any recognizable form. Companies didn't need to hire a marketing firm to run their AI; they just used the AI themselves. This pattern repeated across the entire knowledge economy.

The laid-off workers, millions of them by early 2028, stopped spending. Businesses that depended on their spending then began to lay off their workers. A self-reinforcing spiral of unemployment, falling demand, and corporate collapse set in, the kind of structural disintegration that no amount of interest rate cuts or stimulus checks could reverse. Meanwhile, the planet was on fire. The summer of 2028 delivered heat waves, floods, and wildfires of unprecedented ferocity across six continents. Entire regions became temporarily uninhabitable. The insurance industry buckled, not only under the pressure of catastrophic payouts but also from millions of consumers using their personal AIs to form independent health, home, and auto insurance pools with dirt cheap premiums. The feeling was inescapable: civilization was unraveling in two directions at once.

Park's rant had made her a celebrity. But what happened next made her a leader. Instead of riding the wave of attention into a conventional campaign, Park spent two years traveling the country, talking to the people who actually knew how things worked: union leaders, engineers, factory managers, community organizers, faith leaders, mayors, scientists, and workers of every kind. In hundreds of conversations — many of them livestreamed to millions of followers — she developed what she called the "Mission for America."

Her message was simple and radical: the economic crisis and the climate crisis have the same solution. "Don't tell me there's no work for human beings," she said in a conversation with steelworkers in Gary, Indiana. "I'm an engineer. I know exactly what we need to build to make a prosperous and clean economy for this whole world. America has a huge share of the industries needed to build that future."

"And now," she said, "the people who own them are shutting them down. Our people built this economy. If these bozos and Bezoses don't know what to do with it, then we're taking it back!"

In a town hall with autoworkers in Flint, she laid out a vision that stunned even her supporters: "Yes, at the end of this, most of our jobs will be automated. And that's amazing. That means we can work half the hours and still have time to spend with our kids, to care for our parents, and to raise up our communities. Put me to work on the assembly lines that I designed as an engineer. I'll take a 20 hour week there over my sixty-hour-a-week rat race career. The question isn't whether the robots are coming. They're here. The question is whether we use them to build something extraordinary. The question is whether we let a handful of billionaires throw away not only their own fortunes but the means of making a living of our nation. And I say, no, we're not going to let them do that."

As Park rose in the polls, she recruited her future cabinet and mission leaders in full view of the public, winning commitments from them in livestreamed conversations that were sometimes tense and emotional. At a campaign event on the auto industry, she asked the leaders of the United Auto Workers and General Motors (her old boss) to commit to building a new auto industry instead of managing the decline of the old one.

"The whole world wants EVs. Americans want EVs. No they don't want American EVs that cost four times more than Chinese EVs. So will you commit to building a modern, highly automated auto industry that gives your customers what they want? Your job is to build that industry. And as president, my job is going to be to give you everything you need to do that — and to guarantee that even with far less work, that there will be high paying jobs for everyone."

Instead of campaigning, she crisscrossed the nation speaking about her plan, one that only could have been created by an engineer, and recruiting the team of business and civil society leaders who would execute it.

In the final month of the campaign, when the news media was forced to admit that Park had become the frontrunner, a billion dollars in donations poured in to her website. Park used the money to flood the airwaves with inspiring campaign ads that called on voters to give the Mission for America a sweeping electoral mandate. On November 7, 2028, she got one.

On the night of her victory speech, with most of the country watching live, Park said that every American needed to make a choice: join the mission to build a new means of making a living for their nation, or watch from the sidelines as it continued to disintegrate. She reminded voters of what was at stake with a directness that had become her signature: "We just spent ten trillion dollars building the most powerful and magical machine in history — one that has the power to cut the burden of work in half while finally delivering real prosperity to everyone on earth. And now we're going to mothball it? That's the best that Elon and Andreessen and Bezos and Ellison can do? Then step aside! Because we are going to take what we built and run it for the benefit of every American. We are going to use it to build the world for our children that our parents never could have imagined."

From that point on, president-elect Park's transition had incredible momentum. Thanks to her status as the first independent president since George Washington, the deepening financial crisis, and lingering climate catastrophe, coverage of the transition drove high ratings across the news media. She fed those ratings with a relentless onslaught of action.

In the first week of her transition, Park announced the two moves that would define her presidency. First: the megabanks made insolvent by their exposure to AI-sector debt, would not be bailed out. They would be converted into mission-driven public banks — community-focused institutions dedicated to financing productive investment in their communities rather than financial speculation. Shareholders would be wiped out. Executives who had extracted hundreds of millions while steering their institutions toward insolvency would face compensation clawbacks.

Second: the insolvent AI companies — their data centers, their models, their computing infrastructure — would not be liquidated in fire sales or absorbed by foreign competitors. They would be converted into mission-driven public AI providers and a National Research Cloud, ensuring that the six trillion dollars' worth of computing infrastructure America had built would serve the nation rather than be scrapped for parts. The technology would be used to power the Mission for America itself — supporting research, accelerating manufacturing, training workers, and coordinating the most ambitious building program in human history.

The spectacle of the most famous names in both Wall Street and Silicon Valley being shown the door — and their empires being converted into public institutions — electrified the nation. Park had done what no politician in a generation had dared: she told the speculators that the era of privatized gains and socialized losses was over. The public would get lasting assets, not another bailout. Park promised that loans would immediately begin to flow to any entrepreneur or any corporation or any community who was willing to build.

Once in the White House, her daily, live "emergency briefings," Park re-introduced America to the national missions that made up the Mission for America, and the leaders she had recruited to accomplish them. Each mission had a specific, tangible goal:

• Build a 100% clean-power grid that produced several times more energy than we do today, making electricity essentially free for residential use.

• Build an electric vehicle industry large enough to double the pace of the global EV transition — employing hundreds of thousands of American workers and earning hundreds of billions in export revenues.

• Develop new zero-emissions trucking and shipping industries for both domestic use and global export.

• Build a national EV charging network dense enough to make electric vehicles more convenient than gas-powered cars.

• Build a national green hydrogen infrastructure for the few industries that can't be electrified.

• Revitalize and expand American steel production using electric arc furnaces and green hydrogen, supplying clean steel for the building boom and for export worldwide.

• Build out a new nationwide water system to get ahead of the regional shortages that were already devastating communities.

• Develop a zero-emissions aircraft industry in a moonshot collaboration with American aerospace companies — making the U.S. the first country to mass-produce and export clean jets.

• Mobilize millions of workers to retrofit America's homes and buildings for energy efficiency and electrify heating and cooking, while building millions of new affordable, zero-emission homes.

• Create a new Civilian Conservation Corps to reforest millions of acres and prevent and control the wildfires that had ravaged the country — and to give a valued role in society to millions of discarded workers.

• Resurrect the World War II-era Reconstruction Finance Corporation to provide financing, coordination, and leadership to ensure the success of all these projects — and to run the converted public banks and research utilities as the backbone of America's economic renewal.

"The world is building a new clean economy," Park told the nation. "The world needs the supplies and machines and technology to do it. We have the capacity to build what the world needs. That is how we survive this crisis. That is how we build a future worth living in. And when the work is done and the factories are humming and the robots are running the assembly lines — we will have built something our ancestors could only dream of. Not unemployment. Not obsolescence. But real, clean, sustainable and universal abundance for all."

From then on, each week she built pressure on Congress to pass the full Mission for America legislative package. She convened leaders from industry to secure conditional commitments to make massive investments in the U.S. as long as Congress passed the legislation needed to make those investments viable. She organized mass stadium rallies where she asked voters to pledge to replace politicians who blocked the mission. She recruited independent challengers in every district with an opposed representative. If Congress balked, it would be up to the people to clear the way.

Park's sky-high approval ratings affirmed what the crisis had made obvious: voters had been waiting for a leader who would throw herself at the country's biggest problems without restraint or excuses — not with another round of bailouts and band-aids, but with a real plan to build something lasting.

By organizing the nation's leaders across every sector of society, and by winning the support of the American people, President Park had set the Mission for America in motion.

Now the nation waited to see if Congress would dare to stop it.