It certainly seems like Trump knows what he’s doing is going to cause chaos, and potentially a deep worldwide recession. I don’t personally think we’ll see total collapse, but who knows.
We have a bunch of threads that touch on the economy, but for this one I want to focus on something that I just can’t wrap my head around: What is the goal?
We have to take for a given that many, many people even among those Trump trusts, have told him what he’s trying to do won’t work. And many of the people in his orbit are from the moneyed class, which means this IS hurting them.
So feel free to engage in speculation and conspiracy theories (though I’ll note that I don’t personally put much stock in CTs), but I am curious if anyone can explain this in some rational way.
Trump knows little enough about finance (hence why so many of his business ventures have failed, often spectacularly) and nothing whatsoever about economics. It’s anyone’s guess as to what goes on inside his head; it’s basically a bag of dyspeptic cats. He just likes the control of being able to apply tariffs and change his mind on a whim.
Trump’s backers (at least some of them, at least) want economic disruption and chaos because it will let them grab more government controlled resources (oil and gas, mineral deposits, land) and ‘privatize’ (i.e. buy for pennies on the dollar) essential services to squeeze even more money out of the shrinking middle class. The Peter Thiel and Elon Musk-led broligarchs want to go even further and collapse the entire economy so they can create their anarcho-libertarian dystopian landscape of independent corporate city-states, and the Christian Nationalists want a White-dominated theocracy (and aren’t even shy about openly saying so), and some just want to set the stage for the Biblical Apocalypse they sincerely belief is coming while many others are just grifters who have glommed onto the world’s oldest long con.
I’ve read that he is trying to weaken the dollar to make domestic manufacturing more cost effective than importing goods. Of course this is kind of a nutty theory and a terrible way of going about it, but fascists are always surrounded by nutty advisors with simplistic crackpot ideas.
He is in stage 1 right now. Stage 1 is " Take me seriously". His first 4 years were met with a lot of disrespect and mockery at a world level. His first order of business it to change that.
When he was first getting national security briefings before beginning his first term, more than once, Trump asked briefers why we had nuclear weapons if we weren’t going to use them. Well, now he has discovered the economic equivalent of nukes; tariffs. Why have this powerful tool - rather toy -, if you’re not going to use it? The same with executive orders and presidential immunity. He has never learned that just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. You go to the playground to play with your toys; not to achieve any actual goal.
I don’t think Trump is intending to cause economic chaos. He isn’t playing 5d chess, he just genuinely isn’t very economically literate, and after his first term he eliminated anyone who would say no to him. For the rich people around him there are ways to make money in a downturn, and if they cared enough about the country to do anything, they wouldn’t be there.
Agree. I think he genuinely does aspire to be a successful president with a good economy, he just has no idea HOW, and for some reason he got it into his head that tariffs were the key, and he’s so oppositionally defiant by nature that getting expert advice to the contrary makes him double down.
Trump’s main goal is to be seen as strong, and he does this by picking on others. Especially by those who have made him look small, or rebuked him in the past. That, plus basic avarice.
His whole worldview can be boiled down to “I’m going to make them pay”. It doesn’t matter if it actually works or not. All he really cares about is the validation he gets from hearing the hooting and jeering from the crowd when he says he’s going to do something amazing, and someone else is going to pay for it. Plus the desperate pleas when people beg him not to do the thing because it’s likely to be a catastrophe.
The whole tariff theory feeds directly into this.
Moreover I think he, Musk, and other right-wing luminaries want to destroy the “Biden economy” because they look like clowns after insisting Biden was going to crash it but didn’t. They want to create a crash in order to “prove” the Biden economy was fake, so they can then build the Trump/Musk economy without having to share the credit for what Biden built.
His goal with tariffs in his second term is presumably the same as his goal with tariffs in his first term: to try to force economic concessions from the targeted country. Like the renegotiation of NAFTA in 2017.
Has Donald Trump ever once, in his decades as a public figure, nearly a decade of being a Republican political candidate and twice elected (also twice impeached) President, expressed a notion that would lead you to believe he has any deep knowledge of economics?
As for his degree from Wharton, his ‘fixer; Michael Cohen had this to say to a House of Representatives panel investigating Trump’s activities:
The one problem I have with “crash it so the billionaires can buy it all” is this:
The market cap of the S&P 500 is about $50 trillion
The market cap of all publicly traded US companies is for some reason proving hard to find, but is presumably more than that.
The total wealth of the 800 or so US billionaires is $6.2 trillion.
I just don’t see how $6.2 trillion buys up $500 trillion, even at a 50% discount. Even if you only need 51% of that discount to take control, you’re still at $125 trillion.
In the case of Russia, the oligarchs took advantage of the transition of state owned enterprises to private enterprise, in an environment where desperately poor people were being issued stock that they didn’t even understand in those entities. That mechanism isn’t available here.
Not that I don’t think Trump dreams of an oligarchy, and I wouldn’t be shocked at all if he and the billionaires talk of their dreams of realizing one. Just that I don’t see how the math here works.
There’s a very simple and obvious answer to this question; Trump really is as dumb as he appears. He doesn’t have a hidden master plan. He’s just fumbling.
Trump was born into a very wealthy family. So he achieved financial success in life by having large sums of money handed to him. That takes no more intelligence than winning the lottery does.
Trump’s college history shows that if you offer colleges large gifts they’ll give you a degree.
Trump’s business career shows that when he was given large sums of money he did a poor job of managing it.
Trump’s public image as a successful businessman is due to a TV producer deciding to cast him as one for a reality show. But playing a successful businessman on a TV show doesn’t mean you actually are one in real life.
And finally, Trump is not smart enough to recognize his own weaknesses. He is dumb enough that he looks around at all the things he has been handed and thinks that he achieved those through his own abilities. So he mistakenly believes he is smart.
Trump’s presidency has been a string of people who know what they’re doing trying to explain things to Trump and him being too dumb to understand. He stubbornly insists on doing things his way because he thinks he’s right. And when reality asserts itself, rather than realize he was wrong and learning from the experience, Trump just lashes out at other people and blames them for the problems he caused.