Donald Trump and the Interests of Capital

Consider just a few of the ways that Trump is, either implicitly or explicitly, acting against the interests of capital:

• Destroying Government ServicesYes, rich and greedy right wingers want to slash government services that they don’t need anyhow so that they can pay less taxes. What Trump is doing (and allowing Elon Musk to do), however, has veered far into the territory of breaking the load-bearing walls that facilitate America’s position as the world’s richest nation. Gutting libraries and cultural institutions and education will, in the long term, impoverish the work force and create a poorer nation. Firing the employees of the national parks will hurt tourism. Maniacally casting out immigrants harms businesses who need those people to fill certain jobs. And then there are specific things like fucking with the agencies that produce economic statistics, throwing the reliability of US government statistics into question. That is bad for business! They need those! Even traditional Republicans who would be happy to slash welfare and Medicaid and penalize Woke Colleges do not want the Treasury Department’s payment systems to malfunction, or to see the federal government snatching payments out of city bank accounts as a result of obscure political witch hunts.The Trump administration’s actions here have hurt American prosperity in ways that liberals would point out—by failing to invest in public services, you produce a worse educated and less healthy population, which is a drag on economic growth—but also in ways that conservatives would point out, like “stupidly breaking the parts of the government that allow our financial markets to function smoothly with no apparent plan.” This is not “populism” any more than a bite from an alligator is a kiss. This is just nihilism.
• Destroying Rule of LawThe rule of law is a necessary ingredient for long term growth of businesses. Love “free” markets? Then you love the rule of law: it offers predictability of rules, and predictable enforcement of those rules. It is the thing that allows businesses to make long term investments and sign contracts and trust that those things will be governed by a transparent set of rules that all sides of the transaction understand. To the extent that business interests are always trying to carve out exceptions in the rule of law for their own benefit, they are playing with fire. Riddle the system with enough holes and, like a house chewed up by termites, it becomes brittle enough to collapse.The Trump administration is not just weakening the rule of law—it is replacing it with gangsterism, which is to say, the opposite of the rule of law. Trump is corrupt. So corrupt, in fact, that it is kind of alarming to me that we are not talking about his corruption even more than we are already talking about it. I mean, his family started some damn crypto companies and then he, as president, declared that he is going to get the US government to buy a ton of crypto. He is directly selling off pardons and commutations to felons who can pay adequate bribes. He is firing prosecutors who are Democrats and installing buffoonish loyalists in important legal positions, so they can conduct witch hunts on his behalf. The world’s biggest and most complex corporations have been reduced to paying bribes in order to directly beg the president for their priorities, at the club the president owns. Trump is trying to make the Fed a part of his own political operation, endangering financial markets for short term political gain. And he is seriously flirting with defying federal courts and plunging the nation into a constitutional crisis that it may not recover from any time soon.This is not good for business. If you want to chuckle ruefully to yourself, think about all of the corporate executives who were mad at Joe Biden because he wanted mildly higher taxes and the right of unions to exist and therefore supported Donald Trump, who is busy replacing the world’s most sophisticated corporate legal regime with a system in which you must grovel at his toes in a ridiculous red hat in order to get anything done. The sort of government that Trump is building can benefit a handful of select business allies, but at the expense of an entire market economy. Trillions of dollars of wealth are going to drain out of America if this continues. Global companies will not want to be headquartered here. Financial markets and their activity will move elsewhere. No rule of law means no predictability for business means no trust in our nation. Trump and his friends may be able to maintain their own little bubble of wealth, but America as a whole will get drastically poorer.This is not good for big business. It is not good for small business. It is not good for rich people, whose wealth is tied up in businesses and stocks that will be harmed by this collapse of rule of law. Bad!