The Stupid Economy | The Nation

Do you remember the golden age? This was the main argument behind Donald Trump’s 2024 re-election campaign: upon his return, he would tame the inflationary legacy of the Biden White House, institute a new tariff regime to strengthen America’s position in the global economy, enact yet new tax cuts for the wealthy, preside over the resurgence of a manufacturing and investment economy, and revive the hallowed extractive industries of America’s oil and coal while shelving federal subsidies for solar and wind power.

A year and a half into his second term, Trump has accomplished almost nothing in his promised series of Gilded Age breakthroughs. True, his 2025 tax and spending bill included drastic tax cuts, but they failed to produce real, broadly distributed economic growth; the gig economy is at a standstill and manufacturing continues to decline in a U.S. economy dominated by services. Even before the Supreme Court declared them unconstitutional, Trump’s tariffs had brought little more than higher retail prices for consumers. And its ill-considered war of choice with Iran has caused the costs of energy, food and other commodities to skyrocket.

Trump’s dismal economic record is more than an indictment of his political agenda: It goes to the heart of the false public image he has lovingly cultivated during his tour through American celebrity culture — the fable that he is a Promethean business genius whose unerring instinct for exploiting market opportunities has dramatically improved both his fortunes and the world around him. This is the origin story that launched Trump onto the best-seller lists with The art of the marketbrought him into the Rolodexes of a generation of bookers and television producers and fueled his mythical political image as an omnicompetent DC outsider who could “fix” all the many ills that besieged our once mighty republic of businessmen.

It was also complete bullshit from the start. Trump’s fortune, like that of many self-aggrandizing business titans, was built on his father’s wealth – amassed in his case through a racist New York real estate empire. The first round of Manhattan development projects launched by Trump became profitable through the exploitation of tax abatements and other government subsidies; and like his political mentor Roy Cohn, Trump further improved his bottom line by stiffing suppliers and contractors on an epic scale. Trump’s media image as a business wizard was brutally upended in the 1990s when his Atlantic City casinos stagnated, joining his airline and United States Football League franchise in the dustbin of Trump-branded properties. Before the end of the decade, the global trader had filed for bankruptcy six times.

You’d think that anyone too ignorant to profit from a casino chain would have their business genius credentials quickly stripped away. But Trump overcame the stigma of bankruptcy the same way he became a national real estate brand in the first place — with massive subsidies of public funds and family money to leverage his debts. The fact that he no longer owned anything that could acquire real economic value no longer mattered; Trump has doggedly brandished his name for licensing rights to a seemingly endless regression of gilded, aspirational consumer items, from vodka and health supplements to motivational speaking engagements and his fraudulent eponymous university.

Like the New Yorkers Scribe Mark Singer wrote of this truly American transformation in a 1997 profile: “Trump’s vaunted art of negotiation has given way to the art of ‘image ownership.’ The apprentice at first. The hit show was in many ways the perfect self-referencing glossary of Trump’s tour as market demigod: He pretended to be the TV boss of a legion of fame-hungry cosplayers miming their own version of market prowess for the cameras. The only real commodity on offer in the entire Kabuki show was fame.

So when Trump pretends to walk back his threats to commit more war crimes in Iran in order to calm the restive spirit of the stock market, it is crucial to understand that this prime mover of the American political economy literally has no idea what he is doing. The same goes for Trump’s fallacious conception of how tariffs and trade balances work.

Trump’s fundamental economic illiteracy appears to be based on a lack of basic arithmetic. He often announces his determination to lower drug prices by up to 1,500 percent; he once vowed that he would ensure that the price of the Wegovy weight loss treatment fell “from more than $1,300 to $199, a difference of 578 percent.” There is also strong circumstantial evidence that the man doesn’t understand what a trillion dollars is – wildly inflating the estimated cost of last fall’s government shutdown by a factor of 100, while adding another trillion to his already false assessment of $2 trillion in estimated customs revenue in the span of a day, fueled by nothing but MAGA-branded hopium.

Many Trump opponents cite these frequent digital grimaces as proof that the President of the United States is simply an idiot, but the truth here is more troubling. Trump’s understanding of numbers, like his understanding of economics, is imbued not so much with rank ignorance as with the commercial piety of positive thinking.

Which is why the most telling of Trump’s many legal actions was his lawsuit against his biographer Timothy O’Brien, for claiming that the ’80s-born trademark scammer was not, as he perpetually claimed, a real billionaire. In his trial deposition, Trump argued that he was a billionaire for the simple reason that, most of the time, he felt like one: “My net worth fluctuates, and it goes up and down with the markets, with my attitudes, and with my feelings… Yes, even my own feelings, about the direction the world is going, and that can change rapidly from day to day.” »

The world is now similarly captive to Donald Trump’s ever-changing moods: only these days, instead of suing his stubborn refusal to play along, he’s sending the message with bombs.