Yesterday, while speaking on a recorded line with a state agency official, I was asked a mandatory question: "Are you on the run from the law?" Other than briefly contemplating its absurdity — if a man were evading arrest, would he answer "yes"? — I responded that to the best of my knowledge, only the president of the United States is doing that.
I gathered the official accepted that as a "no"; I was not reasked. The really stunning absurdity, however, is that if Donald Trump were a truthful man he would have had to answer, "Yes, from indictments on multiple felony charges, state and federal." His evasion, one hopes, is but temporary. He demagogued his way back into the White House — thus freedom from criminal prosecution — yet when ultimately booted out, certain conviction and possible incarceration await him.
Such is the insufferable scofflaw whom corporate titans helped ballyhoo into presiding over America's destruction. These "economic royalists," as FDR called them in 1936, fell for a manifestly ignorant malefactor's campaign pledges to boost business and their financial rewards, just as all his former investment partners had once done — and got royally burned. His life history of chiseling con artistry and the screwing of associates was commonly known, except, it would seem, to the best and the brightest of America's most fleeceable.
"They believed Mr. Trump, backed by a Republican-controlled Congress, would follow through on the parts of his agenda that they liked and scale back the more disruptive policies like tariffs if financial markets started to get spooked," writes the Times. "It is increasingly clear they were wrong."
He has jammed even the country's friends with incomprehensibly witless tariffs; called the CHIPS Act — a Bidenesque bipartisan design to ween U.S. industry from reliance on Asian semiconductors — a "horrible, horrible thing" that Congress should "get rid of"; permitted an unelected billionaire bureaucrat to throw thousands of federal workers out of their jobs, killing their spending power; and canceled billions of dollars in business-receiving grants and contracts.
"Trump has so far been undeterred by signs of cracks in the economy or by plunging stock prices," observes the Times. "On Tuesday, as financial markets seemed to be settling down after days of steep losses, Mr. Trump hit them with another shock, escalating his trade war with Canada. Major stock indexes immediately fell sharply on the news."
As the above horror show demonstrates, so much for voters' almost laughable confidence in a "successful businesman" to lead the U.S. economy. But while electoral stupidity is a democratic given, top corporate execs should have known a professional scammer from a macroeconomics moron. They did not. Hence we now add them to the former's near laughability. "There is a shock factor in the business community that we are seeing," understates Thomas Simons, chief economist at a major investment banking firm.
Translation: new hires have slowed, as have capital investments. Next up: a grim recession — the anticipatable consequence of tariffs cranking up prices and draining GDP growth, of crackdowns on needed immigrant labor, of higher unemployment because of government job losses, and of "cuts to federal investments in research and development [that] could [will] leave the U.S. economy less productive in the long term."
What's more, Trump Inflation's broader negative effects will most likely annihilate the Federal Reserve's former plans to cut interest rates. "That’s a stagflationary impulse," says the Fed's Bank of Chicago president, Austan Goolsbee. "There isn’t a generic answer to what you’re supposed to do."
In defense of Trump's undeliberative — or deliberate — destruction of the U.S. economy, his treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, argues that President Biden's thriving economy was something of a Potemkin Village — "that the economy they inherited was not as strong as it appeared," as the Times paraphrases one of his recent speeches.
The former president's chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers, Jared Bernstein, correctly counters that "they inherited an economy that was and remains the strongest among all the advanced economies, and they squandered their inheritance in a mere six weeks with policy chaos that’s tanking business and consumer confidence along with markets."
And therein lies a tale far lengthier than Trump's gross mismanagement of the economy. As American historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted long ago, each time a Democratic administration builds the economy — that too is public record — a Republican administration comes in and ruins it, whereupon another Democratic administration reenters and rebuilds ... time, after time, after time.
Voters don't learn, and neither do corporate executives.
What happens when my SSDI and Medi-cal are taken away from me? Is there any hope anywhere? How can we sustain this break neck speed of destruction for four years?