The great problem with Trump, predictively, is that he’s fickle. He often doesn’t do what he says he’ll do. Even if he was sincere he’s easily handled by flatterers. The best model for Trump is an arrogant and touchy king who wants to be made to feel he’s amazing.
This means that court games matter even more than in a normal Presidency, and those who play them best have the most power and influence.
But even a good courtier can step wrong with Trump and be pushed out. The limelight has to stay on Trump himself. A courtier can have great power, but the credit and the media must flow to the top. The last thing any courtier wants is to have people saying publicly that they’re the power behind the throne.
Trump also likes to please people, especially mobs of people and he can sometimes get the bit between his teeth and run with an idea no matter what anyone around him says.
Preamble aside, Trump did come back and back to some of the same issues.
Thirty Percent Tariff on Chinese Goods
This will raise costs for American businesses and for consumers. Prices will rise more than the actual cost, as many businesses will use this as an excuse to raise prices even more than their costs. It will not significantly improve US jobs because China’s cost structure is more than 30% cheaper than America’s. It will help other foreign producers, however, and it will lead to a lot of scamming, where Chinese goods are shipped to a third party, scrubbed, and sent to the US, similar to the way Europe is now buying so much “Indian” oil. But…
Mass Deportation Of Immigrants
This is one of those places where I’m uncertain how serious Trump is, especially when it comes to measures like using the national guard. But let’s say he does manage to both massively slow immigration and remove many current immigrants. The effect is an inflation riptide: it will reduce rent, and increase the price of groceries (because most farm workers are immigrants. There will be general wage increases in businesses which can afford them, offset by demand declines. Deported immigrants don’t consume, after all. Because there is a significant and increasing problem with long-term illness and disability, the labor market will wind up even tighter.
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Some people will win from this pair of policies and even win fairly big. If you’re in a business with pricing power, it’ll be able to afford the increased wages, if you’re in one that can’t, the businesses will fail and you’ll lose big. We’ll have to see how much the price of housing and rent drops to have a full feel for this. Ironically, for this to really work would require anti-trust action against large landlords who are colluding to increase rent. Withdrawing some federal price-support for housing prices would help cause a collapse in housing prices which would benefit a lot of people, but hurt the upper classes. Of course those upper-classes went for Biden, not Trump.
NATO
Trump’s going to push hard for increased NATO spending by members. They’ll say they’re going to do it, in most cases, then won’t. At this point there’s a chance that Trump leaves NATO. I think, of all his policies, this is the one where there’ll be the most pushback from elites, including many people in his own administration, so I’d say odds favor NATO surviving, but it’s not a sure thing. If the US does leave NATO, it will be a huge boon for the world, and the best thing which could happen to Europe, forcing them to get serious about handling their own affairs. The policies Europe should follow are not those America wants.
Favoring gas cars and disfavoring Electric Vehicles and Sustainable Energy
Obviously a disaster for the environment and climate change. Effectively a subsidy for American automobile producers, who are behind on EV tech and production, but it also puts them into a national ghetto, as the rest of the world moves towards electric and hybrid and they fall behind even further. I assume Musk will push hard against the EV part of this, we’ll see whether he succeeds.
Trump has more proposed policies and his allies have many more. How much of Project 2025 will be enacted is unclear. Trump repudiated it, but the architects will be a big part of his administration. We’ll touch more on these in a later article.
The basic issue is that policies need support from each other. If you want re-industrialization you need to do a number of things. Tariffs would be part of that, but they aren’t all of it. Mass deportation of immigrants could work economically, but not at the same times as measures aren’t taken to deal with long term sickness in the native population, and so on. Proper automobile policy would be to invite branch plants and insist on local part sourcing in addition to tariffs, so that domestic producers learn and the jobs are in America.
Trump’s fundamentally a scatterbrain. He’s not a systems thinker, and the people in his adminstration are ideologues of a set of policies which won’t work economically, so Trump’s economy is unlikely to be overall great, though there will definitely be some winners. In 2028 there will be an opening for someone with more genuinely economically populist ideas, because many people will have been hurt by the Trumpconomy.
More later.
What strikes me is our loss of leadership competency, from the extremely competent people who managed us through the depression and through WWII to the clowns of today.
I’ve been involved in Youtube exchanges where some idiot creates a video claiming how we “saved” the USSR in WWII via Lend-Lease. First, that is that factually untrue. The USSR saved itself; Lend-Lease was such a trickle in 1941-1942 that it had essentially NO effect on the Battle of Moscow in December 1941, and very little impact on the Battle of Stalingrad in the fall-winter of 1942. Stalingrad at the very least marks the point where “the USSR will survive and not lose” so Lend-Lease didn’t “save” the USSR. Lend-Lease did help the USSR, but the bulk of it (60 %) came in the last 10 months of WWII well after the USSR had turned the tide and driving back the Wehrmacht out of the USSR. The most important part of Lend-Lease help wasn’t the weapons we sent, nor the locomotives, nor the steel, nor the petrol, nor even the trucks (the most common ‘fact’ brought up). It was the food we sent–in 1942 42 % of the USSR’s arable land was occupied, and the USSR instituted a rationing program where soldiers, workers in essential industries, and children got first priority on food. If you weren’t one of those, you didn’t get much, and hunger contributed mightily to the USSR’s civilian death rate in the war. The FDR administration promised the USSR 10 % of US food production to help, but could only manage to deliver 3 %.
But my point in mentioning Lend-Lease is that such Youtubes miss the main reason why we did what we did in aiding the USSR. It wasn’t some act of friendship or mercy, we weren’t just ‘being nice’; we did it OUT OF ENLIGHTENED SELF-INTEREST. George Marshall and the US military leadership were not sure we could win WWII without Soviet help; at the very least if the USSR went down to defeat and Hitler obtained access to the USSR’s resources it would prolong both the length and sacrifice of the US and UK. The military problem the US faced was war both in Europe and the Pacific, with far-flung bases and long supply lines that “ate” up manpower and required a powerful Navy and Air arm to protect. We thus couldn’t raise an army of hundreds of divisions and supply it overseas, to do the work that the Soviets were providing the West by grinding up the Wehrmacht. Keeping the Soviets in the war was quite vital; ergo Lend-Lease.
In short, Marshall and his ilk had a clear and correct notion of what the US could do, and what it couldn’t do. The manpower restrictions on ground forces meant “no land war in Asia” which meant we wouldn’t field armies in China. Instead, we focused on a ground force manpower-minimizing “island hopping” strategy where we only took relatively few key islands and just left Japanese ground forces in elsewhere stranded and cut-off from supply. The bulk of the ground forces we did raise were going be used to defeat Hitler, whom Marshall correctly identified as the biggest threat to the US, given Germany’s technological skills and industrial base.
This kind of calculation is what we’ve lost. In WWII, we knew we were powerful, in some ways relative to the world more powerful then than now, but we knew we couldn’t do everything and that we shouldn’t even try. But after WWII, inside the US spread the notion (largely spread by conservatives and the anti-communists) that we had really ‘done it all’ and won the war without much of anyone’s help. Why did we cave to Stalin at Yalta? Why didn’t we let Patton drive the Soviets out of Eastern Europe? We had the bomb after all! (cue in Henry Stimson rhetorically patting his coat pocket). WE WERE OMNIPOTENT!
The first generation who acted on this belief, a belief definitely not shared by those who planned and executed WWII, was the “Greatest Generation” who had fought it as common soldiers when they assumed leadership—JFK through Reagan/Bush I. It led to Vietnam and to interventions everywhere, because we could and should impose our will upon the world. It was exacerbated when (as you say) financial means of scoring economies replaced measures of actual industrial capacity and output, from Clinton to today. What gets me is that the US’s leadership is more arrogant and more convinced of its supremacy despite the fact by all objective measures, whatever power the US actually has is far less relative to the rest of the world than the US during WWII during Marshall’s and FDR’s time. Yet Marshall and FDR knew we weren’t omnipotent and couldn’t ‘do it all’. And I fear nothing less than a massive comeuppance will change their attitudes.
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