Mercantilism is an economic theory and system that emphasizes national wealth and power through a positive balance of trade, where a nation’s exports exceed its imports. It was prominent in Europe from the 16th to 18th centuries, and it involved government regulation of the economy to maximize a nation’s wealth, particularly in the form of gold and silver.
Is this Trump’s vision?
On what grounds are you assuming that Trump has a thought out vision?
Trump has no vision. What he has is dementia. He’s a confused old man with paranoid delusions that the rest of the world is “ripping us off” and thinks tariffs are the solution to everything because it’s one of the few things that he actually has seemingly unilateral authority to impose.
Trump’s vision is to be seen as strong. Via economics, propaganda, military strength or any other means. But he’s also strangely cheap - it’s as if the money the government spends is his own inside his mind. If he gives you anything, he wants ALL the credit for it.
As examples, his desires for military parades, such as Russia or (to a far lesser extent) North Korea display. Or his desire to have his name on the Covid Stimulus checks. If he isn’t getting credit for it (USAID for example) then it’s wasted money.
Trump wants the US to look strong (and him for “leading” it that way) and by forcing tariffs down everyone’s throat and then basking in the nations that suck up to him for relief from such, he gets proof of his power as well as his ego expertly stroked. A positive balance of trade or any other coherent economic theory isn’t the goal, it’s an excuse. And per all reporting by the actual professionals, an incredibly poor and shallowly calculated one.
He sort of leans in that direction, mostly by accident. I doubt he actually knows the term, much less understands it.
What he has is a conviction that all transactions are one-sided, with a winner and loser and the other side benefiting at all makes you a “loser”. “Mutual benefit” is a notion he completely rejects. Therefore he wants to eliminate all trade arrangements and alliances, replacing them with tribute and subjugation. The world sending wealth to and following the orders of America (and thus Trump) in return for nothing at all.
Mercantilism is essentially a less extreme, more sophisticated and formalized version of that sort of zero sum thinking.
He has the same mentality as many if his followers, which is why they like him. They feel that the pie is only so big, so you must grab the biggest slice you can and share as much as you can with your family. They cannot conceive of the pie getting bigger by giving everyone a share. So they must protect the pie at all cost from thieves.
Its a poor person’s mentality driven by fear, not some vision. Taking the biggest piece of the pie makes you a hero to your people, not getting your full share makes you a weak provider. Again, they can’t conceive of the pie growing, but can believe it could shrink because that is what they have observed in real life.
They truly believe that people only get rich by cheating other people and screwing them over. Which to them is admirable.
Yeah, and he’s also assuming that Trump understands the differences between mercantilism and free trade.
It’s abundantly clear that he and his advisors don’t understand comparative advantage or absolute advantage, or else they’d realize that sometimes it’s actually cheaper and makes more money for everyone involved to make some things elsewhere.
Combine that with his inability to conceive of the world as anything other than distributive negotiations (i.e. win/lose), and you get the nonsense we’re enduring right now.
@Si_Amigo describes it in a way that’s more down-to-earth; he and his ilk can’t conceive of a bigger pie, or that having someone else make part of the pie is advantageous to everyone.
This.
Yeah this. Trump probably thinks Mercantilism has something to do with the judge who oversaw his felony conviction
It is much, much simpler.
On the one hand, Trump has had a consistent message on the topic since the 90s and certainly has done big dumb things that would push strongly for a mercantilist future.
On the other hand, I don’t believe that I’ve ever really heard Trump give any particular reason for his belief nor displayed any particular passion for it. I also don’t believe that I’ve seen him mention it prior to throwing in with Ross Perot.
I’d lean towards the idea that he just likes things that get attention, so if he finds something that seems to be getting attention then he’ll jump in on it and say it over and over. He also wants to build a base of power so, if there’s some power block that approaches him - like the auto worker union - and says that they’ll vote in his favor if he goes all out for them, then he’ll do it.
I lean towards that idea because, when you look at what he’s doing, he’s generally doing 3 or 4 different things at the same time - often at cross purposes. He’ll have half his staff fighting the other half, to accomplish missions that are mutually incompatible.
At the same time that he’ll have agreed to go strong on worker protectionism, he’ll go strong on cutting taxes, and he’ll go strong on breaking down trade barriers. These don’t work together and the first and the last are exactly opposite.
Ultimately, his followers will appreciate that he “fought a good fight” to get them what they wanted - when he fails - and, when he does something that’s the exact opposite of what they wanted from him - and would, in fact, hurt them - they’ll believe him when he tells them that it was the Democrats that did it.
He doesn’t lean in that direction. He absolutely is a mercantilist. The OP is one hundred percent correct. Sure, he may not use the term mercantilist, but neither did most of the mercantilists back in the day.
Trump thinks you are better off exporting more and importing less and piling up money. Mercantilism.
He’s not acting; he really believes this. He’s believed it for pretty much his entire adult life, because he’s ignorant.
Yeah. Exactly. Mercantilism requires, by definition, losers; if my nation benefits only from a positive balance of trade, the other nation loses. This is why the European powers (well, it’s one of the reasons) were so imperialist, and placed laws upon their colonies guaranteed a positive balance of trade with them.
Agreed.
For some of them not necessarily “admirable” but that This Is Just How The World Is, and but of course anyone smart will take advantage of it (and it’s at best pointless to fight).
Trump showed that in one of the debates with Clinton, when she accused him of not paying taxes:
“That means I’m smart.”
David Frum, when recalling an explanation from his father on why he double checks (old-style handwritten European) restaurant receipts for accuracy:
“If it was just a case that they are bad at math, then half of these errors would be in my favour”
Trump is in the pocket of Putin’s Russia. No other explanation for destroying the post WW2 rules based order of bilateral cooperation and international integration of trade. He says he’s doing it all for the promise to leap back DOWN the value chain (from a services based economy to an industrial one from the 1900’s); which is an insane and wild thing to even promise. For this he threatens all of his neighbours and tariffs the whole globe?
Trump is clearly in Putin’s pocket, no other explanation for all the pro-Putin moves, but what excuse do the rest of Americans have? Blind fecklessness? Woke vaccines are turning the frogs gay? Americans, en mass, have just lost it.
I’ve mentioned this before…
Trump is a criminal. That’s a statement of fact, not an opinion.
He’s thinks like a criminal - that there is easy money to be had by taking it from someone else by force or coercion. The tariffs are just that - he sees them as a way to get money for “free.” Since he is not only stupid, but also uneducated, he doesn’t understand that this view is fundamentally incorrect. The money doesn’t come from other countries, it comes from the US.
But, honestly, as much as I despise him, Congress is worse. This is just taxation without representation, and Congress is too chickenshit to do their jobs are stop him.
He is showing early 80’s thinking. The US had a huge trade deficit and everyone thought it was the worst thing ever due to the loss jobs. So we need to combat it. MAGA!
It’s even dumber than just that. TFG’s absurd table claiming to show “tariffs charged to the United States” when the formula used to calculate the number had nothing to do with tariffs and was clearly (exports-imports)/imports only includes physical goods and entirely excludes services exported from the United States. You know, that little thing the US has the largest trade surplus in. It’s literally stuck in a Mercantilist, pre-service economy mindset. It’s completely detached from reality, acting as if the last 75 years or so of economic changes in the industrialized world didn’t happen and the only value of a nation’s economy is the physical goods it produces.
As I said in another thread, this is the last topic I ever thought I’d say, “and of course Perun has a video about it”, but this being our Brave New World, Perun of the War in Ukraine and defense economics fame has a video about it.
The rural and small-town folks who constitute the hard core of MAGA believe their communities had their heyday during the industrial 1890s when they first got a high school, hospital, electric lights, and a streetcar line, the factories in their town shipped goods all over the nation, and their grandparents didn’t need a fancy college degree to have a job that could buy a house.
Factories moved to the big cities, and then abroad, and universities and white-collar jobs drew their brightest and most ambitious high school graduates away from their town. The ones left were those with the most attachment to the mythos of the town and the sour-grapes mythos of the white-collar urban world (tight-knit community where everyone has a place and everyone cares for everyone, vs. the anonymity and anomie of cities).
Each generation of the pattern of their town getting worse and the kids who can going away to college (or the military in earlier decades) and not returning has resulted in those left being the most resistant to change, the most convinced there was a glorious past stolen from them, and the most convinced that the universities and cities were the malicious source of their downfall.
TL, DR: Take a nation already steeped in the idea that “God made the country, man made the town” and yeoman farmers are the Real Americans, pour into the pot of a small town, boil away the industries that brought a measure of prosperity, repeat for a few generations in small towns across the nation, and MAGA is the resulting sticky concentration of grievances and myths.