Will Trump Break the Biden Boom?

Smooth economic sailing awaits the president-elect—at least until he starts implementing his promised policies.

The president addressed the nation yesterday, accusing his opponents of attempting to steal the election through massive fraud and pledging to stop the transfer of power by any means, including mob violence if necessary.

Oh, wait, no, sorry—that was the last election. Actually, Biden called for unity in the wake of Tuesday’s stinging defeat.

“We accept the choice the country made,” the president said. “I’ve said many times, you can’t love your country only when you win. You can’t love your neighbor only when you agree.”

“I also hope we can lay to rest the question about the integrity of the American electoral system—it is honest, it is fair, and it is transparent,” Biden added. “And it can be trusted, win or lose.” Happy Friday.

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Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally at Avflight at Cherry Capital Airport on October 25, 2024 in Traverse City, Michigan. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images.)

A Booming Economy, If Trump Can Keep It

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump understands that the thing that matters most in politics is branding. When he ripped up the North American Free Trade Agreement early in his first term, promising to renegotiate a deal far more favorable to the United States, it didn’t abash him that the resulting United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement was a near carbon copy. He simply proclaimed that he’d made the “the worst trade deal ever made” into “the best trade deal ever made.”

The same will be true now for the whole economy. Last week, we noted a Wall Street Journal assessment that “whoever wins the White House next week will take office with . . . at least one huge asset: an economy that is putting its peers to shame.” Joe Biden will leave office scapegoated for post-pandemic inflation, while the economy hums along in essentially every other respect: record-high stocks, a tight labor market, and strong wage growth, particularly at the bottom of the economic ladder.

Obviously, Trump won’t waste time in helping himself to the credit. He’ll cheer every new Dow Jones record as his own. He’ll talk about how fundamentally sound the economy now is. And he’ll be buoyed by a major surge in consumer confidence—the kind you’d expect once right-wing media suddenly stop insisting we’re in the worst economy in our nation’s history.

It would be easy for Trump simply to do very little and coast on this. Maybe even juice things at the margins: nibble at some taxes, cut some regulations, and drill, baby, drill. Unfortunately, he seems to be dead set on a number of policies that could seriously complicate the economic picture.

There are, of course, the tariffs. Trump seems genuinely to believe that they come with no downsides for U.S. consumers and that their costs are absorbed by foreign countries that send us their exports. He’s repeatedly floated the idea of ratcheting them so high that they become the government’s primary revenue source—you know, like back in the good old 1890s!

And in the days since he’s won, it’s become clearer that congressional Republicans won’t get in his way. From Politico yesterday:

Advisers close to President-elect Donald Trump have been in discussions with House Ways and Means Chair Jason Smith (R-Mo.) on a broad tax package that is partially paid for by tariffs approved by Congress, according to two people familiar with the conversations who were granted anonymity to describe the internal discussions. . . . 

The discussions come as Republicans are gearing up to pass a massive tax bill, which would include $4.6 trillion of expiring Trump tax cuts and potentially several other tax proposals floated by Trump on the campaign trail. They include Trump’s ideas to remove “tax on tips” and eliminate taxes on Social Security, among many others. . . . the conversations signal that congressional Republicans could be open to imposing tariffs on Trump’s behalf via legislation.

But that’s not the only hit to the economy that Trump will apply himself. There’s the “largest mass deportation in American history,” which he has promised to begin his first day in office.

Setting aside for the moment the alarmingly vast police state such an effort would require and the scale of grinding human misery it would produce: It sure would suck for the economy, too! The federal government, under such an operation, would be spending tens or hundreds of billions of dollars a year to disappear a sizable portion of America’s labor force/consumer base/taxpayers, driving down productivity, destabilizing markets, and driving up costs.

And then there’s the likelihood that Trump will dramatically winnow the workforce of the federal government, which employs several million people. Trump is widely expected to take action to make career civil servants easier to fire, both for political reasons—gotta purge that Deep State!—and as part of the sort of general hack-it-down effort he hopes to hand over to Elon Musk as his “secretary of cost cutting.”

Now, far be it from me to suggest that the federal government currently employs too few bureaucrats. But there is a difference between scaling back and taking a blow torch to the enterprise. Musk has promised $2 trillion in cuts to the government. RFK Jr. has said he wants to eliminate entire FDA departments. At least in the short term, the economic effects of such actions would be uniformly negative, sowing chaos and kicking more people out of employment.

How aggressively Trump pursues these agenda items will say a lot about the presidency he is aiming to chart. The man may be a branding whiz, but he’s also not the best long-term strategic thinker. He could very well ruin the good economic aura he will immediately claim—and do so quickly. If so, he’ll suffer politically for it. The people will suffer in more important ways.

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The Spirit of Horace

by William Kristol

Orwell once said that in our time, “restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.”

So here’s an obvious fact: Even in a well-established and long-functioning democracy, even in the exceptional United States of America, even in the enlightened 21st century, the majority can be wrong.

This shouldn’t be a controversial or startling statement. It’s self-evidently true.

But I will say that I’ve been struck, in the days since the election, by the degree to which we tend to shy away from it. I’ve been impressed—as so many finer thinkers have been before me—by not just the political but the psychological power that the majority wields in a democracy.

Once a popular verdict has been handed down, once the people have spoken, it’s surprisingly hard to say: Fine, that’s the popular verdict and of course we abide by it. But we aren’t going to pretend to agree with it. And, even as we’re going to seek to understand and explain it, that doesn’t mean we excuse it.

In a democracy, the people rule. Which is good! And the majority decides. Which is right! But we don’t therefore surrender to the majority our right, our duty, to make our own judgments about the wisdom of their decisions.

So, as we anticipate many debates in the weeks and months to come, and as we brace ourselves to deal with many challenges to come, we do need to have the confidence not to give too much deference to the judgment of the majority.

We don’t have to go all the way and embrace the words of the poet Horace: “Odi profanum vulgus.” That’s surely a bridge too far.

But we do need a little of the spirit of Horace today. And maybe more than a little. We need to be able to say that it was foolish and short-sighted, and maybe worse, to judge that Joe Biden’s economy was so terrible that Donald Trump’s bigotry and demagoguery counted for nothing. We need to be able to say it was wrong to embrace change if change means the deportation of millions of residents living here peacefully, or abandoning tens of millions of Ukrainians fighting for the survival of their nation and their liberty.

So we need a touch of Horace to fortify ourselves.

And we should spend a few minutes with another great poet, W. B. Yeats:

To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Nothing.

Now all the truth is out,
Be secret and take defeat
From any brazen throat,
For how can you compete,
Being honor bred, with one
Who were it proved he lies
Were neither shamed in his own
Nor in his neighbors’ eyes;
Bred to a harder thing
Than Triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Whereon mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known
That is most difficult.

To be clear, I for one am not planning on taking Yeats’s advice and turning away from the public. And I’m not recommending others do.

But it is worth being reminded that there are harder and nobler things than triumph.

And it is worth being reminded that respecting the decision of the people doesn’t mean surrendering one’s judgment to them.

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Quick Hits

DEMS’ MESSAGING DILEMMA: “There has been no shortage of recriminations and postmortems in the roughly 48 hours since Kamala Harris lost the election to Donald Trump,” Sam Stein writes in a big new piece for the site today. “But one thing virtually every Democrat seems to agree on is that the party dramatically hurt itself by not engaging conservative-friendly and alternative media.” He goes on:

In conversations with a number of top Democratic operatives both in and around the campaign, two bleak conclusions emerged. The first is that the party essentially failed to communicate with a huge swath of the electorate by not meeting them where they are. The second is that absent that direct engagement, Democrats allowed rumors, caricatures, and unfair or misleading attacks on their candidates—Harris and Joe Biden, primarily—to define the ticket. . . .

“I think there is a massive part of the country, well beyond Trump loyalists, who are almost completely insulated from bad news about Trump,” said Jesse Lee, a longtime comms operative in Democratic circles, who has worked for, among others, Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi. “It’s not on their TV because they watch Fox. And their social media filters it all out. The same goes for any positive news about Democrats. It’s absolutely the case that Dems need to look at any opening in those information environments and build whole new infrastructures to penetrate them.”

There’s tons more here—read the whole thing.

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BEG YOUR PARDON: No pardon forthcoming for Hunter, the White House keeps saying. “We’ve been asked that question multiple times,” press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Thursday. “Our answer stands, which is no.”

Meanwhile, in other pardon news:

Moments before a convicted Jan. 6 rioter was sentenced to eight years in prison on Thursday, he sought a full pardon by claiming that Donald Trump’s victory on Election Day vindicated his actions.

Zachary Alam told the court that he wanted a new classification of pardon, which he called a “full pardon of patriotism,” for his actions on Jan. 6, 2021. That would come with monetary compensation, expungement of the charges from his criminal record and the assurance that he would never again be charged for his crimes.

Alam seemed to characterize anything less as a “second-class pardon” and implied that he would not accept it. . . .

Judge Dabney Friedrich described Alam’s action as a “full-throated” attack on the Constitution and “not the acts of a patriot.” She called Alam one of the “most violent and aggressive” rioters that day, noting that Capitol police officers also described him as the loudest among them. At his trial, law enforcement officials recalled him repeatedly telling them, “I’m going to f— you up.”

We’ve had to tweak our expectations for guys like Alam in recent days. At this point we’ll be counting our blessings if he doesn’t get the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

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Cheap Shots

Our brave new presidential era is ushering in exciting new innovations in the field of congressional Republicans pretending not to see the parts of Trump they don’t like: