Ruthless tycoons, already privileged and empowered, join today’s weird, vigilante clown show hawked by the cartoon scoffer who laughs at rules, laws and norms.
Call me an optimist with a mixed message. If history is the guide, we’re about to find out how quickly arrogant tycoons good at amassing wealth but daft at governance will incite the next crises, then presumably the next “populist” backlash. That doesn’t mean money-grubbers won’t prosper from chaos but nothing comes without tradeoffs. What matters long-term is the blatant default in running government fromelected professionals and savvy experts, suspect or not, to the carnival of grotesquely unqualified Trump yahoos. Black swans loom even more for the over-reaching inept, and that’s a gift for the stodgy, risk-averse Democrats.
Where’s the evidence, delusions aside, that even competent fat cats know how to govern highly complex federalism (and globalism) without direct, massive damage to the majority? When did “austerity politics” suddenly make sense to the complaining impoverished? Name the last time (actually ever) a finance wheeler dealer, especially from the know-it-all, predatory class, successfully ruled the country? That’s even truer today as governance itself verges on the impossible, the world’s most daunting leadership test even for the skilled and less prodigiously self-serving than the president-elect.
Recall the 1920s, with a nod to Reaganism, when out of touch presidents and CEOs shared bragging rights, alleging what was good for big business was good for America. A glaring over-simplification on a good day – quickly negated by the worst depression in our history. Only the banking crisis of 2008 confirmed the wrongheaded soft crisis capitalism of Bush-Cheney. Only history’s most botched pandemic mayhem, with needless fatalities at odds with the medical threats, poisoned the first Trump tenure, easy pickings for the steadfast Uncle Joe.
What, ask cynics, drives politics better than disaster?
Back in those good old days before Trump, at least anti-New Deal, government-hating Republicans talked up the sanctity of law and order and respect for tradition, even compromise, when concocting the next crony capitalist crime spree. Savvier GOPers know that conspicuous mass thievery tied to their tails looks bad, with too many casualties. How else do Democrats regain national power without rightwing infamy? So what’s the likely outcome when Trump 2.0, bloated again as if a political genius, leads overfed, oligarchic sharks who don’t know when enough is enough – and whose ransacking of government will expose crony capitalism at its worst?
Tunnel-vision money grubbers are out in force, rampaging like armed commandos fighting invented terrorists. Indeed, for the fattest cats, “enemies within” are slandered “socialists” pumping out hard evidence that today’s unchecked and unstoppable capitalism is the true enemy within. The best hope is that the “greed is not only good but divinely-mandated” crowd will more than match blundering Trump calamities. Boasting an alliance between big business and power politics unseen since the 19th C, those for whom more is never enough, oblivious to human and earthly costs, will drive the ship of state onto the rocks.
What drives the dim to elect false messiahs? Refusal to take literally what Trump says about being “dictator for a day,” or loving Putin, elevating yokel extremists, axing key allies, and nominating more inept wackos per agency than imaginable. So, these clowns will defeat inflation with higher tariffs and lower taxes for the rich, deporting the lowest cost workers in ag, hotels, landscaping, and construction, then gutting Medicaid, school funding, and critical programs that keep folks alive? Beneficial outcomes from the Trump gang would outshine Biblical miracles.
Just what billionaires want – a default not only to infamous laissez-faire capitalism, but nasty gunslingers who can’t shoot straight. What complex organization, medical or otherwise, has RFK, Jr. ever run? Or Tulsi Gabbard? Or that despicable FOX journalist tapped for Defense? Yet, falling in line, tech titans gain insurance by sending millions of bucks to the next vulgar Inauguration extravaganza. The arguable good news – the potential fallout when oligarchs once with backstage control go very public. What happens when Trump ineptitude stains their corporate legacies? How many (other) fat cats will Trump farces bring down, let alone throw under the bus? The Trump parade of fools goes beyond Incompetence, Inc., capable of returning oligarch domination of government to its disreputable robber baron past. I am confident that Trump’s brattiness can alone expose the cruel ruthlessness of crony capitalism like no one else, devastating the evil trope that “fat cat hustlers serve the public good.”
What disruptions reward ‘populism’?
A long-time friend, top private investigator once quipped that “you don’t know where the line is until you cross it.” So now we have countless headlines that toe that line:
How Trump’s policies will ‘disproportionately harm’ rural areas that voted for him overwhelmingly
Agricultural producers could face worse losses than any other economic sector from Trump’s plans to impose sweeping tariffs on imports and to undertake what he frequently has called ‘the largest domestic deportation operation’ of undocumented immigrants ‘in American history,'” Brownstein explains. “Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face the greatest strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand ‘school choice’ by providing parents with vouchers to send their kids to private schools.”
Or ‘The next recession starts here’: Trump team weighs abolishing bank regulators:
Trump and his advisers are reportedly considering plans to weaken—or abolish altogether—top bank regulators, including the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation and Office of the Comptroller of the Currency. The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that members of Trump’s transition team and the new Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency have asked nominees under consideration to head the FDIC and OCC if the bank watchdogs could be eliminated and have their functions absorbed by the Treasury Department, which is set to be run by a billionaire hedge fund manager and crypto enthusiast.
. . . Observers warned that gutting the FDIC and OCC could catalyze another economic meltdown. “The next recession starts here,” tech journalist Jacob Silverman warned in response to the Journal‘s reporting.
Or what happens when Trump tries to brutally strong-arm Ukraine into accepting a disgraceful peace deal? Or backs Netanyahu to truly make Gaza unlivable, with millions of starving refugees? Or tries to violate the undeniable Constitutional mandate for Birthright Citizen, awarded to all those born in the USA?
Turned on its head, ‘populism’ now serves the fattest cats
Finally, implicit in the oligarchic frenzy for control is a line from Paul Krugman’s last NY Times column:
What strikes me [is that past] optimism has been replaced by anger and resentment. And I’m not just talking about members of the working class who feel betrayed by elites; some of the angriest, most resentful people in America right now — people who seem very likely to have a lot of influence with the incoming Trump administration — are billionaires who don’t feel sufficiently admired.
As with likely Trump outcomes, one only has to wait out poor, unspeakably rich babies whining they are not “sufficiently admired.” Won’t they make decisions based not on evidence, reality or good politics but whether they can magically browbeat voters into worshipping them as widely admired. Good luck with that pipe dream. Even dim Trumpers sense that corporate billionaires are hardly protectors against the infinite adaptability of profit-driven corporate capitalism, its mindset on parade like never before.
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