Overthinking Trumpism

As Donald Trump’s tariffs continue to wreak havoc with the global economy, the media are full of attempts to “explain” what he’s doing – to discern some method in the madness. As is usual with Trump, most of them amount to overthinking the problem. They fall foul of the famous dictum of an anonymous insider in the first Trump administration, that he’s not playing three-dimensional chess, “he’s just eating the pieces.”

If you’re looking for coherence, the best account I’ve seen is by Dalibor Rohac of the American Enterprise Institute, published at CapX (thanks to Nigel Ashford for the pointer). He portrays the tariff policy as an emulation of Vladimir Putin’s political economy, attempting to turn the United States into a “personalistic” state where economic success depends on the boss’s favor. As he puts it:

[T]heir aim is to assert political control over the world’s largest, most dynamic market economy, ensuring that independent economic wealth does not pose a challenge to Trump’s hold on political power for the next four years, and potentially beyond.

I think this is broadly right, although I suspect it’s less a matter of conscious imitation and more a sort of convergence produced by a similar mindset. (I also think Rohac underestimates the extent to which the American economy is already dominated by monopolistic rent-seeking, notably in the defence industries and in intellectual “property”.)

In this environment it’s not at all surprising that Trump’s personnel are going off in a range of different directions. It’s characteristic of fascist regimes that they are generally in a state of controlled internal warfare; typically their leading figures have little in common beyond the desire for power and loyalty to (or at least fear of) the leader. And so we find the “business” wing of the administration, represented particularly by Elon Musk, at war with the doctrinaire protectionists and sending out contradictory messages.

But this too should not be overthought. To treat Trump’s people as representatives of coherent philosophical positions would be to give them too much credit. As AJP Taylor once remarked, “Fascism is the irrational made vocal, and therefore any attempt to reduce it to rational terms defeats itself.” In this case, no doubt, many of the underlings are smarter than their boss, but they are hardly intellectual giants. They too are fundamentally just gangsters, saying and doing whatever seems to serve the immediate purpose of power for themselves and their cronies.

Which brings us to an interesting piece last week by Henry Farrell, reprinted at Inside Story. Farrell sees a deep and unbridgeable divide within the Trump camp between the traditionalist reactionary conservatives and the more “libertarian” tech sector – in his words, “a big, obvious ideological fissure between the hardcore religious right and Silicon Valley.” He focuses on J.D. Vance as the one most responsible for trying to tie incompatible positions together.

It’s well worth a read; he’s got interesting things to say about the (professed) beliefs of both groups. And it’s certainly true that if you take their philosophical claims seriously, there is a deep incompatibility there. But I think one should be wary of doing that.

As we’ve noted here a number of times, religion in America is mostly a matter of politics, not theology; the “integralists” and their like, it seems to me, are taking their philosophical cues from their political interests, not the other way around. This is not quite, as Farrell would have it, “an anti-liberalism, that wants to tamp down society, rejecting modernity and all its ways,” but more a specific political project that will cheerfully accept some incidents of modernity as long as they’re being used to crush liberalism.

I’d suggest that the real gulf is not so much between the traditionalists and the tech bros as between two sub-groups of the latter: the Musk-style control freaks, for whom freedom only ever runs in their favor, and the actual libertarians who have been seduced into thinking that Musk was on their side or that Trumpian chaos would somehow serve libertarian ends. The latter are being rapidly stripped of their illusions.

Farrell fingers Vance for avoiding any mention of Musk in his effort to reconcile the two camps, but what struck me was how little attention Farrell pays to Vance’s and Musk’s boss, Trump himself. It’s important to always keep Trump in mind, because the fealty that both sides pay to him is a telling sign of how little credence we should give to their claims of philosophical depth.

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PS, Wednesday: I’ve now read Paul Krugman’s piece from last week on the same topic, aptly titled “Stop Looking for Methods in the Madness.” He makes the important point that people with real expertise, even if they agree with Trump, tend to get sidelined: “actually knowing what you’re talking about disqualifies you from being part of the inner circle, because people who know something and have reputations to protect might not be loyal cheerleaders.” As a result, as he puts it, “There can’t be any secret agenda behind the Trump tariffs, because there’s nobody around Trump with the knowledge or independence to devise such an agenda. This is all about Trump’s gut feelings.”