Given how unpleasant they tend to be to their families, I question how many of them even have loved ones.
We’re a looooong way from the days when Irving Kristol could define a Neoconservative as “a Liberal who has been mugged by reality.”
Trump has made it crystal clear that he doesn’t believe the platitudes about how awesome the free market is. He believes all the worst things about the free market that a freshly-minted Marxist does, he just thinks they’re features instead of bugs.
Trump doesn’t believe in the win-win, utility-maximizing transaction where the demand and supply curves cross, like the first day of Econ 101 (which is of course an abstraction with exceptions including externalities and imperfect information, as anyone who pays attention past that first day of Econ 101 learns). He believes every transaction has a definite winner and a loser, it’s just that he thinks himself shrewd and ruthless enough to always be the winner.
It’s one of the sources of his success with the uneducated white lower class: they feel like they’re the definite loser of every transaction they’ve been in, and they think because Trump recognizes it that he’s on their side.
It’s also why he has utter contempt for everyone he does business with. He doesn’t see their success and his as linked in any way (developer-contractor, employer-employee, etc.), he sees them as adversaries he’s already defeated.
Trump also doesn’t believe in free trade, where each nation follows its comparative advantage and makes what it makes best while other nations make what they make best and everyone’s better off. (Which again is an abstraction, as a nation can collectively be better off from free trade and have sectors that aren’t better off, etc.)
To Trump, every nation that sells us something has just fcked us, and the more they sell us, the more they’ve fcked us. And it is nations to him: VW doesn’t sell cars to American individuals, Germany or the EU sells cars to the US. Nobody is a bigger believer in autarky than Trump, he’s more juche than the Kims.
Except his overweening need to be the winner means he wants not an autarkic America but an economically conquering America that sells massive amounts of goods to the world while buying nothing from abroad. However improbable or unsustainable that is.
And that’s another source of his success with his base: people who remember, or were told by their parents, of the postwar years into the '50s when the US seemingly did sell most everything to the rest of the world while buying little from abroad. It’s beyond their ken that such a situation did not exist before the destruction of the war and could not exist too much longer after the war once nations started rebuilding their industry and infrastructure. They’ve convinced themselves, probably because these circumstances prevailed in their childhoods or early adulthoods, that this transient postwar anomaly was somehow the normal situation.
Well said.
Excellent point.
Yeah great post. But we should consider that what Trump “knows” about the economy is probably on par with that annoying barber or cab driver we’ve all met (whose solution to every complex issue starts with “all you gotta do is….”).
However, the people backing his policies surely know better. What’s their angle? To me, it could only mean they are profiting handsomely from trading, volatility, etc. that allows them form a bigger wealth gap between them and the “have nots”, and be part of the oligarchy/kleptocracy. Ultimately Trump’s naïveté and delusion work together to give them power, rewrite the rules, and become part of the ruling class forever. I’d bet many of these people will immediately just stop paying taxes. Who’s going to go after them?
Do they, though?
Maybe some of them do, at least intellectually, but it’s really hard for anybody, particularly those with a vested interest, to truly internalize the concept that just because a situation has persisted for decades, it won’t necessarily continue going.
Also, it is very understandable to put one’s own personal interests over that of the nation.
It happened in Nazi era Germany as well. Several of the Generals and Ministers and other leading figures knew several of Hitler’s policies and directives made absolutely no sense. But very few of them were going to say that to his face. A guy could (and did) get disappeared that way.
No, his economics team is all hacks and lackeys. If they used to know better, they’ve forgotten what they knew to follow the party line.
Nice post. Here’s an additional twist.
You might wonder why getting lots of goods from abroad in exchange for fewer goods that we send them (a trade deficit) wouldn’t be a fantastic bargain for the US. Especially when unemployment is low. You might even wonder how that is even possible - why would foreigner’s do such a thing? You might get confused once you reflect that for every dollar sold on the foreign exchange market, a dollar must be purchased. What is going on here?
If we’re buying more goods from abroad than we’re selling, we must be selling foreigners something to make up the difference. That something would be financial assets – stocks and bonds. We’re doing that because our domestic savings is less than our domestic investment, our domestic purchases of factories, machinery, office construction, R&D. In terms of math:
Net exports == Exports - Imports = (S-I), aka the savings-investment gap.
What is savings? Savings is the difference between output and consumption. What tariffs do is reduce consumption, thereby increasing savings. You can also bring the savings-investment gap back into balance by sharply reducing investment. That happens during recession.
A President who seriously wanted to improve US competitiveness without embracing industrial policy would focus on reducing the federal budget deficit by increasing taxes and reducing spending. That would increase national savings directly. Reagan did the opposite (tax cuts, plus a military buildup), which led to a degree of de-industrialization. China’s decision to buy lots of US bonds during the 1990s and early 2000s also hollowed us out.
Other than Peter Navarro, Trump’s economic advisors probably grasp the above. But Navarro has the President’s ear, and his other advisors are chosen to flatter their mad king, tell him what they think he wants to hear.
I’d like you all to meet Peter Navarro. It’s worth the read:
You can readily see Navarro’s fingerprints on pretty much everything in Trump 1.0 and 2.0.
“Far outside the mainstream” is often a euphemism for ‘bat-shit crazy.’ That’s how I’ve always read Navarro. He seems frankly criminal, too.
Gee. I wonder why/how they picked him…
Wait…the Devil is Jewish??
I prefer to think of the current Trump administration as a beta version; still lots of bugs to work out.
Luckily, a lot of Trump associates have their fingerprints already on file.
“Verdict: Not a Jew.”
Sounds more Jewish in the original Hebrew: “ שטן” (śāṭān).
In the Book of Job, God converses with someone called the Satan, implying it is a position like eg “Special Prosecutor” and not the name of a specific fallen angel.
How are they supposed to lock those shackles if the slave volunteer worker isn’t there physically?
Another thing he has in common with OJ Simpson.
(deepish cut?)
Too soon.
I can see the campaign posters
Lucifer for Satan: In your Heart, you know he’s Right!
Mephistopheles for Satan: Why pick the Lesser of Two Evils?