Once we take power, we are going to go absolutely berserk

Alisa Chang of NPR talked to Matt Slaughter, dean and economist at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, about the nasty guy describing the big stock market drop as a period of transition or a detox before a much better economy will come. This will be short term pain. Slaughter says the tariffs being imposed mean there will also be long-term pain. This economic pain will not be temporary.

I think a fundamental reason that President Trump was elected and then reelected was his astute understanding that globalization has not benefited every single worker and company and community. But what is being missed is that for decades, all those connections to the global economy through trade and investment and immigration have really spurred gains for scores of millions of Americans.

The nasty guy has said that tariffs will rebuild US manufacturing. Slaughter doubts tariffs will accomplish that. The strongest companies tend to be globally connected, more productive, and more innovative. They pay higher wages for better jobs. Yes, some companies and their workers will benefit from higher tariffs that limit competition. But tariffs cause greater harm to the economy than the few companies they help. A recession is looking more likely. Tariffs mean American companies will have lower profits. They’ll be less productive. Jobs will be lost. Consumers see the likelihood that prices will go up. I heard elsewhere this week in response to the claim of a temporary transition, a detox, that the stock market doesn’t believe him. The stock market tends to look out a long way. They don’t see the current situation improving in just a couple quarters or just a couple years. In a pundit roundup for Daily Kos Chitown Kev quoted Paul Krugman writing in his own Stubstack:

So the Trumpers are responding in their usual fashion: blaming other people. Yesterday I wrote about the proliferation of conspiracy theories, with a special focus on “globalists,” which, let’s face it, usually ends up meaning Jews. The Trump economic team seems, however, to be pushing a different kind of excuse: The claim that Biden left behind a terrible economy, and that we’ll need to go through a painful period of “detox.” Now, you may wonder how anyone could characterize the economy when Trump took office, with 2.5 percent growth, low unemployment and inflation only slightly above the Fed’s 2 percent target, as terrible. But the Trumpist position, coming from multiple officials, seems to be that the prosperity was fake, that the numbers were exaggerated by bloated government spending and employment. Hence the need for a costly transition to an economy where workers are doing useful things. As usual, one has to ask: Are they ignorant or are they lying? And as usual, the answer is: Why not both?

Sam Gustin of The Nation discussed how the nasty guy wants to manipulate economic data. The Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, is a main calculation of US economic output. Changes in the GDP mark economic growth or decline. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick announced plans to strip out all government spending from the GDP.

By excluding government spending from the official GDP estimates issued by the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Trump administration could downplay the economic damage of firing hundreds of thousands of federal workers and slashing billions from the federal budget. In other words, they could gaslight the public into believing that the economy is doing better than it actually is, which could come in handy if economic conditions continue to deteriorate.

In a second roundup Greg Dworkin quoted the Wall Street Journal which voiced fears the nasty guy will wreck the soft landing:

“On Friday, I would have said I thought the administration was worried about their policies really slowing down the economy, and they were trying to lay the groundwork for the narrative that they inherited a weakening economy,” said Michael Strain, head of economic-policy studies at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. More recent comments seem to have gone beyond that. “Now, there’s almost a sense that if something goes wrong in the economy, then that’s fine,” said Perkins. “That’s making people quite nervous because if you get to the point where you are pushing the economy into a recession, there is no guarantee that that’s just going to pass quickly.”

Brian Beutler from Off Message wrote that public opinion won’t necessary follow a sabotaged economy.

We’re going to test the power of MAGA propaganda techniques. Can concerted lying convince enough people to deny the existence of economic hardship, or celebrate it, or blame it on Democrats, such that it doesn’t become a political drag on Trump? For all the brain poison MAGA propagandists pump into our information environment, these early signs of discomfort suggest they know the truth of the matter. Which means they’re conscious of the coming deception: they’ll blame Biden and foreigners and liberals and Jews for causing economic pain, and circle their wagons around Trump, fully aware of their own lies.

Down in the comments is a cartoon by Joe Heller showing a wife watching the nasty guy on TV. She says, “He wants us to stop talking about egg prices.” Her husband looking at their retirement account says, “Chicken eggs or nest eggs?” In a third roundup Dworkin quoted Paul Waldman of The Cross Section who wrote that Democrats need to start Project 2029 now. He noted Project 2025 didn’t hurt Republicans much.

Project 2025 is doing exactly what it was intended to do. The process of creating it helped conservatives clarify their goals, and as important as its specific recommendations was the tone it set. The implicit but unmistakable theme of the document was this: Once we take power, we are going to go absolutely berserk. No right-wing fantasy will be off the table. There is no limit to the glorious destruction we will inflict upon the federal government and everything it does.

A tweet from Ken Dilanian:

The president just rattled off a series of grossly inaccurate statistics suggesting violent crime, including murder, went up over the last four years. No serious criminologist believes that and the data doesn’t support it. And every murder is counted.

In the comments exlrrp posted a meme by DarrigoMelanie showing:

Trump fired... 80K VA workers 50K IRS workers 10K USAID workers 7K Social Security workers 2K Dept. of Education workers 1100 CFPB workers 1K NOAA workers 17 Inspectors general 1 ethics watchdog lead Trump isn’t dismantling the “deep state.” He’s crippling the country.

The list is not (or no longer) complete. I easily noticed something about these cuts: + If they help people who are not rich, they’re cut. + If they prevent rich people from criming, they’re cut. + If the rich want to make money from what the agencies do for free, they’re cut. The agencies that help the rich get richer haven’t been touched. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos quoted late night commentary. A sample:

“Over the past few weeks, the billionaires who attended Trump’s inauguration have lost a combined 209 billion dollars. Yeah—it’s been a wild time. Elon Musk lost $150 billion. Jeff Bezos lost $29 billion. And Mark Zuckerberg lost his mind.” —Jimmy Fallon

“Oh, gosh, what a shame!” said the 99% of Americans that don’t even have $1 billion.