I am not an economist, so when attempting to imagine what Trump’s promised ‘Golden Age’ might look like, I felt it would be prudent to consult the subject-matter experts.
The tl:dr version — the Golden Age will be more of a golden shower — which, you know, whatever floats your boat, but will leave most of us feeling somewhat salty.
Okay, expert time:
Ian Verrender says the Golden Age will see a vicious recession, with the ham-fisted, amateur hour antics of the Trump administration entirely to blame.
Alan Kohler says Trumpists are tribal, recklessly macho and inept, and have sounded the death knell to American exceptionalism in a mist of magical thinking.
Daron Acemoğlu fatalistically sees Trump’s reign as the end of American democracy. In the coming Golden Age of fascism in America nobody wins except the wealthy.
Janet Yellen says Trump is destroying consumer confidence and investment in teh US, which will trigger recession and will not restore its fabled manufacturing base. She says Trump’s understanding of basic economics is misguided.
So on and so on.
Legitimately cannot find an expert who isn’t worried what the Golden Age will look like.
Stepping from micro to macro, the collective mood at the World Economic Forum at Davos in January (knowing Trump had won) was “subdued“.
Only 17% of the boffins predict the Golden Age meant an improvement in the global economy.
But it’s not the (global) economy, stupid!
Trump doesn’t give a shit about us. His tariffs are a feint. All that bullshit about the US being “ripped off” by Batswana diamond miners, or sugarcane farmers from Réunion, or penguins??
Yeah, nah.
Trump didn’t sit down one day with his Sharpie and some butcher’s paper to work out a plan for the Golden Age. He asked a bloke named Stephen Miran to do it. Why Trump appointed a eudyptulaphobic economist, not sure, but this is what we got.
As the chair of the Council of Ecconomic Advisors, the tariffs are the first step of the Mar-a-Lago Accord.
The Mar-a-what?
The shadowy plan whereby Trump violently destabilises the global economony to force foreign leaders to come begging to Mar-a-Lago (get it?) on bended knee for a ‘deal’ to end the chaos.
While I’m not sure how this plan segues with his other shadowy plan — Project 2025 — even if it somehow does, I’m not persuaded.
I mean, look at the guy.
For starters, the rest of the world would have to acquiesce to his plan, and I see no sign of that happening.
Plus there is also an obvious fly in his ointment: the world can sit back, buy all the cheap Chinese exports Americans can no longer afford, and let Orange Man fail.
That’s the face of a man who knows he’s made a terrible mistake. He’s on the phone to his boss, Vladimir Putin, begging safe passage and asylum when the Golden Age is exposed as a lie.
He’s not waving folks, he’s drowning.