“I Own the Store”

How do you catch a break from the tariffs? You’d better have a friend in Washington, DC.

I have a new piece up at Discourse providing an overview of Donald Trump’s approach to the US economy and his place in it. I am afraid I had to borrow from Senator Elizabeth Warren in calling it an “orgy of corruption.”

This is just being published now, but I first wrote it some weeks ago, about the same time as my other article in The UnPopulist that focused more narrowly on cryptocurrency as a medium for corruption.

This one looks at the broader picture, particularly the fiction of Trump as a pro-business or pro-capitalist president.

Donald Trump promised to be a pro-business president. But instead of getting government out of the way and setting clear rules that everyone in the market can follow, he has instead meddled personally in setting policy on trade and tariffs, deciding who gets prosecuted and who get off the hook, and doling out favors and punishments. And then he set up his businesses as easy conduits for favor-seekers to put money in his own pocket.

This piece focuses more on Trump’s arbitrary imposition of tariffs—timely today, as we get another batch of tariffs being changed randomly by presidential edict with little or no notice—and their potential as a field for corruption.

Nowhere is Trump’s power to exact favors greater than in his assertion of arbitrary and unilateral power over tariffs. Trump has imposed tariffs, lifted them temporarily and threatened to apply them again, while also granting myriad small exceptions for very specific products that affect very specific companies.

Here’s what that exception-granting looks like, according to a report in the New York Times:

When President Trump’s steep tariffs threatened to send the price of iPhones soaring, Apple’s chief executive, Tim Cook, called the White House—and soon secured a reprieve for his company and the broader electronics industry.

That’s one of the deals we know about—though we don’t know what Cook traded in return. The investigative outfit ProPublica provides a wider overview of suspicious patterns of exemptions….

Trump sees himself as owner and manager of the entire American economy, comparing it to a store and boasting, “I own the store.” It’s natural, in his view, to charge everyone a personal fee for their place in it.

There has been a lot of discussion about civil service rules, which Trump derides as the “Deep State” and is seeking to roll back in favor of the old “spoils system” of blatantly political appointments handed out as favors to supporters. But the civil service rules were created as a response to the growth in the size and power of government, as a way of mitigating its dangers.

Harvard scholar Matthew Stephenson has pointed out that the U.S. government used to be much more flagrantly corrupt in the 19th century—but it was also much, much smaller and had only a tiny effect on the economy. We are now moving toward the worst system: Big Government with its tentacles everywhere, but run on the personal whims of the president or anyone who can influence him. And it’s easier than ever to find quasi-legal ways to shunt money to him.

Yet the dynamism of the American economy is made possible by the fact that anyone with a good idea can start a business and succeed, and it doesn’t matter who you know or how much money or status you start with. Highly corrupt economies, by contrast, tend to be stagnant and sclerotic, because no one can do anything unless they first pay rent to a political sponsor.

I think we have greatly underrated the importance of liberal democracy as a complement to our economic freedom and dynamism, and we might be about to learn a big lesson about that.

Read the whole thing.

Donald Trump’s Orgy of Corruption

Speaking of learning a lesson about the economic damage of authoritarianism, we just got a new report on employment that sharply revised downward figures for May and June, when the first tariffs began to hit.

So naturally, Donald Trump responded by firing the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is standard procedure for authoritarian regimes, which need to claim spectacular economic performance and regularly fire bureaucrats who deliver the real truth. Claire Berlinski pulls the most ominous historical precedent: Stalin firing or sending to the gulag the officials responsible for delivering bad news in the 1937 Soviet Census.

As a teaser for my next article, here’s the latest on Donald Trump’s attempt to not look guilty for associating with Jeffrey Epstein, in which everything he has done has simply made him look more guilty. The latest is that he overrode federal prison guidelines to provide better accommodations for Epstein’s convicted accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. You might remember that a few years back, nationalist conservatives started calling their opponents “groomers,” implying complicity in the sexual abuse of children. But that term applies in its fullest and most literal sense to Maxwell, who is now getting special treatment from the Trump administration.

I’ll have more to say about the Epstein case soon, because it is a window into a much bigger and more important moral collapse among today’s conservatives.