Destroying Trump's Economic Argument

Don't fall for the lies

As we reach the last few days before this freak-out election, I realize there is probably nothing I can do to influence the outcome in the slightest. But I am not entirely ready to give up.

I’ve had a turbulent few weeks. A month or so ago, I completely woke up to the extreme dangers of a Trump/Vance Presidency after reading Unhumans, a new book which sees Fascist dictatorships like Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco as the model for our future. Pinochet and Franco imprisoned and murdered their political opponents, while suppressing cultural expression and dissent. Both Trump and Vance praise this book as the right plan for the US. Of course, Trump supporters argue that this is just rhetoric and he will never do it. But who can say?

I also watched this hidden camera interview with the Heritage Foundation’s Russell Vought, author of Project 25, who intends to immediately replace the government with Christian Nationalists, predominantly white of course, and rush through a nationwide abortion ban without exceptions.

I did a deep dive on Elon Musk to learn how he is enamored of the idea of running the country like a technology company with himself as the putative, behind-the-scenes CEO/Dictator. Musk is playing the world like a video game that you win through manipulation, in order to gain absolute power and control. I find his practice of giving out million dollar checks in Pennsylvania to be cynical and disgusting.

Musk believes empathy is for suckers. Curtis Yarvin, philosopher of the technocratic New Right, jokes that the underclass should be converted to biodiesel for city busses. Trump mega-donor Larry Ellison, founder of Oracle, intends to use AI-based surveillance to keep the entire population of the US “on their best behavior.”

Since then, I’ve been trying to raise the alarm.

What I find is that many once-sane people have gotten lost in dark tunnels of delusion, infected unknowingly by ongoing exposure to intricately crafted disinformation. Once caught in this labyrinth, it is very difficult, if not impossible, for them to find their way out. Their ego and identity gets hooked into the “red pill” ideology. This worldview is supported by what seem to be logical arguments but are actually built on rhetorical tricks and sophistries.

I defined the techniques used by the Right here. This includes the very annoying mirroring technique, where red-pilled people throw every argument back at you, tit for tat, as if there are no meaningful differences. Ben Shapiro uses this technique relentlessly in his recent debate with Sam Harris. It is laborious and exhausting to constantly have to disprove false equivalences, among other deceptive tactics used by the Right, to hide the utter vacuity of their self-serving arguments.

Personally, I believe the collapse we see in the collective American psyche is the result of masterful PsyOp techniques, orchestrated by the worlds’ autocrats aligned with a number of Right Wing billionaires in finance, technology, and fossil fuels. Billions of dollars have gone into this disruptive attack. What makes me so sad is that so many Americans have completely lost faith and feel apathy about the admittedly limited form of democracy we have. It doesn’t occur to them that if so much effort is being made to subvert it by the worst actors and our foreign enemies — pouring billions into this election — it is probably worth preserving.

The vast majority of people who vote for Trump will be voting directly against their own economic interests — just as the British did under Brexit, to their enduring regret. England may never recover financially from their self immolation caused by leaving the EU. Brexit, like Trump, fits into Putin’s strategy to stoke division and dissent in America and its NATO allies. Russia, with an economy the size of Italy’s, has been masterful in its long-range attack on the USA.

It is of course always hard to know what is accident, chaos, providence, luck in the proceeding of world events and what is the outcome of careful planning and Machiavellian strategy.

Right Wing mega-billionaires, closely allied with Trump, warn us that “Trumponomics," which includes more tax cuts for the rich, will be economically devastating for normal people. Musk says they intend to use draconian, disruptive methods to reduce the deficit. This will put a massive strain on American lives “to ensure long-term prosperity.” Musk has said (as all Right Wingers do) that we “have to reduce spending to live within our means. And that necessarily involves some temporary hardship.” As Meidas News reports:

Musk’s words make it clear that the disruption is not an unintended side effect but an accepted—if not desired—outcome. The billionaire went further by responding to an X (formerly Twitter) user who anticipated a market downturn if Trump’s aggressive policies, including mass deportations and extreme deficit cuts, were enacted. The user predicted that with Trump and Musk in charge, the U.S. economy—dependent on debt and vulnerable to asset bubbles—would face a severe reaction before stabilizing under the intended austerity. Musk’s response was a simple acknowledgment: “Sounds about right.””

What makes this so stunning and bizarre is that the US economy is actually doing amazingly well under Biden — better than any other economy in the world, by far.  Biden has made long-term progress on supporting workers, rebuilding manufacturing here, and breaking up monopolies via anti-trust efforts (one reason Musk, etc, hate Biden/Harris), and low unemployment. Unions are on the rise. Sadly, the benefits of Bidenomics may not be recognized by ordinary people in enough time to stop the catastrophe facing us if Trump wins. We’ve seen higher inflation recently, along with price spikes, for various reasons. These seem to be the main reason for the anger against Harris.

According to “The American economy has left other rich countries in the dust,” in The Economist:

America’s outperformance has accelerated recently. Since the start of 2020, just before the covid-19 pandemic, America’s real growth has been 10%, three times the average for the rest of the g7 countries. Among the g20 group, which includes large emerging markets, America is the only one whose output and employment are above pre-pandemic expectations, according to the International Monetary Fund.

Coupling this growth with the dollar’s strength translates into heft for America and wealth for Americans. That can be seen in the huge numbers of Americans travelling and spending record sums overseas. A decade ago (as Chinese travellers too were demonstrating their wealth) many analysts thought that China would, by now, have overtaken America as the world’s biggest economy at current exchange rates. Instead its gdp has been slipping of late, from about 75% of America’s in 2021 to 65% now.

According to Nicholas Lemann’s recent New Yorker article, “Bidenomics Is Starting to Transform America”, Biden’s accomplishments in turning the massive ship of the American economy in a better direction have not been understood or realized by the common people yet, because many of these changes take years to impact people’s lives. Biden has been responsible for more new domestic programs than any President in decades: “On Biden’s watch, the government has launched large programs to move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or to bring onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, to embed racial-equity goals in many government programs, and to break up concentrations of economic power.”

Bidenomics overturns longstanding economic orthodoxy that has shaped both parties' policies over the past 50 years. Biden sees government not as a mere responder to market failures but as an active architect, with a continuous role in shaping and regulating markets from the outset. Departing from decades of bipartisan rhetoric promoting free trade and globalization, his administration has emphasized domestic production and resilient supply chains, prioritizing American industry and jobs over global efficiencies.

Biden’s climate strategy is similarly innovative: Instead of relying on traditional tools like carbon taxes or cap-and-trade systems (which haven’t worked well), he has focused on direct investments and subsidies to promote green technology and clean energy production: ”On Biden’s watch, the government has launched large programs to move the country to clean energy sources, to create from scratch or to bring onshore a number of industries, to strengthen organized labor, to build thousands of infrastructure projects, to embed racial-equity goals in many government programs, and to break up concentrations of economic power,” Lemann writes. He has also been proactive on antitrust enforcement, challenging tech giants like Amazon and Google and other large corporations, seeking to to curb monopolistic practices.

Instead of continuing this slow and steady path to a decent economy that will actually reward workers over time, Trump, backed by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, wants to throw the economy into chaos, potentially bringing about a recession or even a depression, to fulfill the twisted aims of the billionaire class. Dave Troy’s article in The Washington Spectator, “The Wide Angle: Peter Thiel and the American Apocalypse”, explores this in depth.

I suppose one idea could be, if the dollar collapses, they can try to make Bitcoin into the global reserve currency. This seems like a horrifying gamble that could go terribly wrong. I suspect Musk and Thiel are partly motivated by the irrational need for bigger and bigger Dopamine hits or Cortisol spikes, which become harder to find when the whole world is already at your beck and call. You have to keep upping the ante, or you might get bored.

I found Brian Klaas’ “Billionaires and the Evolution of Overconfidence” to be a useful read in understanding the psychological drivers of people like Musk, Thiel, and Bezos (who recently spiked a Harris endorsement in The Washington Post). Klaas writes:

What would you do if you suddenly had a billion dollars?

The way you answer that question will tell you something about how likely you are to become a billionaire in the first place.

For most of us—myself included—the answer to that question gets split into two parts: logistics and philanthropy. First, for logistics, you might consider: what would you change about your life once I never have to worry about money ever again? This is the “would you quit your job?” or “would you move somewhere else?” part of the question. Second, if you’re a decent person, you’d probably consider who you’d help and how you’d allocate a substantial portion of your obscene, newfound wealth to people who need support. To us, money is for something, it’s not a goal in itself.

Billionaires are a self-selected group who seek vast amounts of money as a goal in itself, and when they achieve that goal, become over-confident, tending to believe in their own genius. Klaas notes, “This leads to a dangerous delusion known as illusory control, in which a person thinks they can shape outcomes to their liking even when they can’t.” Billionaires, who succeeded in maximizing wealth, can easily believe they will be victorious in all other domains, such as ruling countries or controlling governments.

I feel very sad for all of us if Trump wins, when the Christian fanatics behind him, in alliance with these massively arrogant tech billionaires, will have the opportunity to resculpt American society according to their deluded ideas. I hope and pray America will rally on Tuesday, and resoundingly defeat this menace.