The Trump National Catastrophe
The Case Against Donald Trump, Part 3
See Parts 1 and 2 of my case against Trump.
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The False Choice Between Capitalism and Democracy
It often seems these days as if we are asked to make a choice between capitalism and democracy.
At least, that is what many of Trump’s more sophisticated backers would like you to think. Sure, they say, we don’t like his “stolen election” talk, and we were horrified by the chaos of January 6. But Trump will be good for business, he will be in favor of free markets and low taxes and deregulation, whereas voting for Democrats will lead to economic collapse and misery and a descent into socialism.
There are a lot of things wrong with this.
First there is the record of the current administration, during which we have not, in fact, careened headlong into socialism, and after a bout of post-pandemic inflation, the economy is objectively good. The Democratic Party is currently being steered by its moderate establishment, not by the crazy Bernie Sanders left, and the result is that America’s recovery from the pandemic has been the envy of the world, with higher growth than other developed nations.
Offered a choice to vote for the status quo—well, we could do a lot worse.
More fundamentally, the choice between capitalism and liberal democracy is a false one. Authoritarian regimes tend to be statist and cronyist. Leaders who don’t have to worry about answering to the voters make the economy into a playground for their personal whims, give government handouts to their favorites, pour the taxpayers’ money into self-aggrandizing boondoggles (more below about Arkadag, pictured agove), and induce an economic disaster.
See an excellent overview in The UnPopulist about how “populists from the right use right-wing rhetoric to sell what used to be left-wing economic ideas.” This piece is particularly relevant because it focuses on Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who has been praised effusively by Trump and held up as model by Trump’s nationalist supporters.
This is precisely what Donald Trump is offering us. Anyone who thinks voting for Trump would be good for capitalism is fooling themselves. He sets forth a vision for increased taxation, economic restriction, and outright central planning—including policies that would plunge the country into an immediate crisis.
The Trump Crash
I have already written about one such policy: mass deportations. Trump is stoking an irrational fear and hatred of immigrants in support of a policy that would constrict the supply of workers in the economy—not to mention the number of small businesses, which immigrants disproportionately start, and the fact that immigrants are also consumers.
It’s important to grasp the scale of Trump’s plans. He proposes to deport 20 million people—nearly twice the actual number of illegal immigrants, according to the best estimates. This means that he will also deport millions of legal immigrants, as he has vowed to do. Trump’s supporters are also proposing plans to greatly restrict the number of legal immigrants. And Trump’s most outrageous plan is to strip citizenship from people who were born in this country, creating a group of at least a million stateless people who have no right to live in this country but have never lived anywhere else. By the logic of authoritarianism, you will be a citizen only if Donald Trump wants you to be a citizen.
Add to this the number of families that will be impacted by these decisions—the spouses and children of the deported and denaturalized—and you can probably double the number of people affected.
Every industry will be hit. The plan to reduce legal immigration would target visas used by tech workers, cutting off a vital pool of talent for those companies. It would hit manufacturing, which already suffers from a shortage of labor. But it would especially hit homebuilding and the food industry. Homebuilding runs on immigrant labor, with foreign-born workers making up 64% of plasterers, and about half of drywall installers, painters, roofers, and tile-setters. Those are the national averages; the numbers are much higher in some states.
The food industry is equally dependent on immigrant labor:
Now, nearly half of the people who slaughter, butcher and package beef, pork and poultry in America were born elsewhere. In some packing houses, more than four dozen languages are spoken. In some, Somali, Sudanese and Burmese refugees alone account for as much as a third of the work force. The fact is, America’s largest meat producers are dependent on the immigrants Mr. Trump is threatening to round up and deport.
The result of Trump’s immigration policy alone would be a swift and sharp contraction of the economy, with widespread shortages and whole industries grinding to a halt.
Then, just to kick us while we’re down, there are the tariffs.
[T]he scale of what Mr. Trump is proposing is larger than any tariff increases that have been seen in nearly a century. He has floated a “universal tariff” of 10 to 20 percent on most foreign products and tariffs of 60 percent or more on China. To ban Chinese cars from coming into the United States via Mexico, he has said he would impose “whatever tariffs are required—100 percent, 200 percent, 1,000 percent.”
“In nearly a century” means “since Smoot-Hawley,” the notorious 1930 tariff act that helped precipitate the Great Depression. The chief economist at Moody’s tells the New York Times that Trump is “going to push this exceptionally good economy into a ditch.”
Remember the shortages and price increases caused by the pandemic’s disruptions to the global supply chain? Trump’s economic plan is to deliberate induce just this kind of crisis, only bigger.
I would go on to belabor the point, but I don’t have to because the Trump inflation is already being prepared.
Across the United States, companies that rely on foreign suppliers are preparing to raise prices in response to the massive import tariffs that former president Donald Trump promises if he wins the election Tuesday….
The planned price increases next year would come as consumers are beginning to enjoy relief from the highest inflation in four decades, and they directly contradict Trump’s repeated assurances that foreigners will pay the tariff tab.
“We’re set to raise prices,” Timothy Boyle, chief executive of Columbia Sportswear, said in an interview. “We’re buying stuff today for delivery next fall. So we’re just going to deal with it and we’ll just raise the prices.… It’s going to be very, very difficult to keep products affordable for Americans.”
Worse, Trump’s own supporters are already beginning to admit that his policies would lead to an economic contraction. In response to a post predicting that mass deportations and tariffs would cause an “initial severe overreaction” and that “markets will tumble,” Elon Musk replied, “Sounds about right.” And this is the guy who is supporting Trump.
But wait, it gets worse.
“Yank These Vaccines Right Off the Markets”
Trump’s policies won’t just tank the economy. They will also kill people. In fact, they are already doing so.
Donald Trump appointed the Supreme Court majority that overturned Roe v. Wade and allowed states to ban abortion. The result is this:
Candace Fails screamed for someone in the Texas hospital to help her pregnant daughter. “Do something,” she pleaded, on the morning of Oct. 29, 2023.
Nevaeh Crain was crying in pain, too weak to walk, blood staining her thighs. Feverish and vomiting the day of her baby shower, the 18-year-old had gone to two different emergency rooms within 12 hours, returning home each time worse than before.
Now on Crain’s third hospital visit, an obstetrician insisted on two ultrasounds to “confirm fetal demise,” a nurse wrote, before moving her to intensive care. By then, more than two hours after her arrival, Crain’s blood pressure had plummeted and a nurse had noted that her lips were “blue and dusky.” Her organs began failing.
Hours later, she was dead….
“Pregnant women have become essentially untouchables,” said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law and policy professor emerita at George Washington University.
Texas’s abortion ban threatens prison time for interventions that end a fetal heartbeat, whether the pregnancy is wanted or not. It includes exceptions for life-threatening conditions, but still, doctors told ProPublica that confusion and fear about the potential legal repercussions are changing the way their colleagues treat pregnant patients with complications.
And there will be no escape. In my recent examination of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation plan that is likely to be the blueprint for Trump’s second term, I noted that it calls for using federal agencies to track state data in order to target so-called “abortion tourism.”
“Abortion tourism” is their term for women from conservative states attempting to seek care in places where abortion is still legal—a particularly pressing problem as physicians have been fleeing conservative states to avoid punitive laws and as women are dying after suffering otherwise treatable complications from pregnancy. Yet some states have already attempted to seal interstate borders to keep women from leaving—a kind of Berlin Wall for pregnancy. Project 2025 would enlist federal agencies in support of this regime of control.
But this is nothing compared to the havoc Trump is planning for all of the government agencies relating to health and nutrition.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—the crackpot who thinks wifi causes cancer, vaccines are dangerous, and organic vegetables are the one weird trick for curing diabetes—has been boasting that in exchange for his endorsement, Donald Trump has promised him “control of the public health agencies, which are HHS and its sub-agencies: CDC, FDA, NIH, and a few others, and also the USDA.” Trump has confirmed this, promising at rallies, “I’m going to let him go wild on health. I’m going to let him go wild on the food. I’m going to let him go wild on medicines.”
And it’s not just Trump and RFK, Jr. The head of Trump’s presidential transition team says Kennedy has converted him to the anti-vax cause.
In an interview on CNN, Mr. Lutnick said he had spoken with Mr. Kennedy for two and a half hours this week, and repeated the false claim that childhood vaccines cause autism.
Mr. Lutnick said Mr. Kennedy wanted access to data on vaccine safety—implying baselessly that it was being hidden—so he could prove vaccines were dangerous and compel companies to recall them.
“He wants the data so he can say these things are unsafe,” Mr. Lutnick said. “He says if you give me the data, all I want is the data, and I’ll take on the data and show that it’s not safe. And then if you pull the product liability, the companies will yank these vaccines right off of the markets.”
The day after Mr. Lutnick made his comments, an episode of Joe Rogan’s podcast was released in which JD Vance, Mr. Trump’s running mate, also expressed skepticism about vaccines in an interview recorded earlier this week.
“The moment where I really started to get red-pilled on the whole vax thing was, the sickest that I’ve been in the last 15 years by far was when I took the vaccine,” Mr. Vance said, referring to the original Covid vaccines and describing normal immune-response side effects that, though unpleasant, are not dangerous.
Bear in mind that this is no longer about “medical freedom” and the ability of individuals to opt out of vaccination. This is about abusing the power of government to get the vaccines withdrawn from the market—to make them unavailable even to the majority who want them. And Trump’s people are specifically targeting vaccinations for children.
A government campaign against vaccines could potentially bring back a massive wave of child mortality.
Potemkin Villages
So while the economy is crashing and children are dying, what is Donald Trump proposing to do to compensate for this disaster? He will pressure the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates and pump credit into the economy, insisting that he is better at setting rates than the Fed.
This is Trump to a tee—not condemning government meddling or central planning, but insisting that he would do it better, based on “instinct” and “gut feeling.” No, really.
“I feel the president should have at least a say in there. I feel that strongly,” Trump said toward the end of his press conference. “I made a lot of money. I was very successful. And I think I have a better instinct than, in many cases, people that would be on the Federal Reserve—or the chairman.”
The former president said that Fed Chair Jerome Powell, whom Trump appointed to the position in 2017, has got the timing of rate moves wrong throughout his tenure.
“He’s tending to be a little bit late on things. He gets a little bit too early and a little bit too late,” Trump said. “I believe it’s really a gut feeling.”
I want to recommend again that piece in The UnPopulist about the economic policy of authoritarians, because the first thing they do is to gain control of interest rates and wreck the currency to achieve short-term growth in the economy—and the second thing they do is to gain political control over the agencies the gather economic statistics, so they can hide evidence of the negative effects. (Last year, China stopped reporting altogether on rates of youth unemployment.)
The most revealing Trump proposal, though, is his grandiose scheme for “Freedom Cities.”
Former President Donald Trump on Friday proposed building up to 10 futuristic “freedom cities” on federal land, part of a plan that the 2024 presidential contender said would “create a new American future” in a country that has “lost its boldness.” Commuters, meanwhile, could get around in flying cars.
And of course, he would be in charge of the whole thing: “In a campaign video, Trump said the federal government would hold ‘a contest to charter up to 10 “freedom cities” roughly the size of Washington DC, on undeveloped federal land.’”
This is another classic move for the self-aggrandizing authoritarian leader: to build a vast new city, often mostly empty, to feed the vanity of its leader. Turkmenistan just did this as a monument to its long-time dictator.
The city is named Arkadag, or protector, an unofficial title by which Turkmen media have long referred to Berdymukhamedov….
All the buildings in Arkadag are white and all apartment blocks are seven storeys high, a number considered lucky.
Only electric vehicles are allowed in the city, which features monuments dedicated to a horse of the Turkmen Akhal Teke breed and to Berdymukhamedov himself, and was built close to his native village in southern Turkmenistan.
Over at Reason, Christian Britschgi gets it right.
Like other products of the marketplace, cities tend to emerge naturally where they make sense….
Trying to bootstrap a whole new city from scratch would almost certainly require a mess of incentives, subsidies, and industrial policy that would be anathema to anything deserving the name “freedom city.”
Trump’s Potemkin villages are the opposite of “freedom cities.” He is offering a fantasy of conservative central planning, where all the buildings will presumably be built in a fake “neoclassical” style.
Don’t Let It Go
How, then, do so many people in the business world talk themselves into supporting Trump? Simply put, they lie to themselves. Shawn McCreesh went to a Trump speech at the Detroit Economic Club and observed the process. I’m going to quote a long passage because you will recognize in these descriptions a lot of people you know.
One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will….
Asked if he believed Mr. Trump would purge the federal government and fill its ranks with election deniers, Mr. Fachini sipped his iced tea and thought for a moment. “I don’t,” he said. So why was Mr. Trump saying he wanted to do that? “It could just be for publicity,” Mr. Fachini said with a shrug, “just riling up the news.”
Mary Burney, a 49-year-old woman from Grosse Pointe, Mich., who works in sales for a radio station, described herself as an independent-turned-Trump-voter. She did not believe the former president would really persecute his political opponents, even though he has mused about appointing a special prosecutor to “go after” President Biden and members of his family. “I don’t think that’s on his list of things to do,” she said. “No, no.”
Tom Pierce, a 67-year-old from Northville, Mich., did not truly believe that Mr. Trump would round up enough immigrants to carry out “the largest mass deportation operation in history.” Even though that is pretty much the central promise of his campaign.
“He may say things, and then it gets people all upset,” said Mr. Pierce, “but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.”
Did Mr. Pierce, a former chief financial officer, believe Mr. Trump would actually levy a 200 percent tariff against certain companies? “No,” he said. “That’s the other thing. You’ve got to sometimes scare these other countries.”
These people assume that Trump won’t do the bad things they don’t like, yet insist he really will do the good things they like. They do this with no basis in Trump’s actual words or actions. It is purely founded on their desire to believe.
There is some truth in the assumption that Trump will not, in fact, be able to do everything he promises—but this applies equally to the good things, like tax cuts and flying cars. More to the point, what Trump is offering us is a kind opposite version of venture capital. The venture capitalist invests in a variety of speculative enterprises on the expectation that many will fail, but if only one succeeds, it will make enough profit to redeem the rest. But what Trump is offering us is a portfolio of disastrous policies—I’ve just given you a half dozen big ones, and there are more. Many of his threats to our economy and political system might fail in their execution, but if only one succeeds, it will be a calamity.
The other way Trump supporters rationalize this disastrous agenda is by claiming that we are already in a state of disaster caused by existing, mainstream policies, so Trump’s solutions can’t be worse.
But this is the big delusion of Trumpism.
Steven Pinker has a new op-ed out doing what he does best: offering a lot of charts and graphs to show how good we have it. The data show us a picture of America, not as the world’s garbage can, but rather a society enjoying a high point of peace, prosperity, and freedom.
It seems like an act of nihilism to take a chance on smashing all of this apart just to feed Trump’s fantasy that he can control the economy and reorganize it around his own self-aggrandizement.
Before he ever ran for president, Trump was exactly like this in the golf industry. Reality was always on a planet far, far away when he would talk to the golf press about his latest resort or golf course. They were always 100% filled, and always the best regardless of any facts a reporter would present to him. I thought this was all just sales puffery that would go away when dealing with the real, serious world of politics. It is not. It is a character flaw, one that threatens to upend 250 years of stable constitutional government that is the wonder of human history. Even if Trump is unable to implement much of his life-destroying agenda no good of any kind will come from giving this man any more power.
Another astute commentary, Rob! The long list of dangers that Trump represents is stupefying. As an economist, I can say that his economic policies, in particular his tariff plan, but also his desire to end the historical independence of the Fed, will be disastrous.
But as a lover of my American liberty, which depends on our constititional institutions, I am horrified at what this Putin, Kim Jong Un, Erdogan, Orban, and Jinping admirer (“lover” in the case of Kim with their “love letters” to each other) represents. Trump is the man who fomented a mob to overturn our election and delighted in the storming of the Capitol and the physical threats to his own Vice President and members of Congress.
The comparison with that infamous German leader (“Fuhrer” to use the German word for leader) is not unjustified. That ruler’s first attempt to physically takeover the government - the Beer Hall Putsch - was laughed off as unserious. Well, no one was laughing a decade or so later when he did take full power. The storming of the Capitol was America’s Beer Hall Putsch. It is to our peril to laugh it off.
On a different note, I hadn’t paid attention to this recent threat from anti-vaxxer and crackpot Kennedy taking over the healthcare agencies. One name came to my mind when I read this: Lysenko.
We are living in dangerous times. I can only hope that he loses on Tuesday. And if he wins, I hope that his worst tendencies and whims are curtailed by our constitutional political institutions that we do have. We did survive FDR who was probably the most authoritarian of our last presidents (or Wilson).