I’ve chatted with some folks about this and the only conclusion we’ve gotten too about basically alll Trump policy, is it’s not about the actual policy itself, they don’t actually care (and can’t understand it anyways). They just wanna larp as the men who make stuff happen, the big deal makers
His "policies" are animus against people he dislikes, that's literally the only reason they are doing any of this
To rhe extent any actual policy exists yeah (also he loves tariffs but again can’t understand them and wants to be the tough guy making deals)
i mean the most recent large tariff was on Brazil and explicitly punitive because he didn't like that they're jailing Bolsonaro
Every problem (economy not booming) is because some enemy (the fed) is keeping them from accomplishing their perfect plan. Trump needs the power to overcome the enemy in order for his perfect plan to bear fruition. He needs to either cowe or break the enemies to fix it. bsky.app/profile/dnlm...
It's also power. It doesn't really matter to a billionaire to take a 50% haircut on their net worth. It ruins everyday people to have their retirement account's value cut in half. Desperate people are exploitable people.
No different than how employers were going fucking nuts at the workers having some job market power in the Biden economy even though their own earnings were booming like never before, they chose to destroy a bunch of their own value as a power play.
This is a public replay of the last few months before every Trump bankruptcy. A bunch of dumb churn in the hopes that it'll stave off disaster & prove what a genius he was not to listen to everybody who warned him he was just going to screw everything up. The man's a big dummy.
Like LARPing as the big smart deals guy was Trump’s shit for literally 30yrs, it had a TV show called The Apprentice. The entire admin is all about appearing as the the tough guy issuing orders and making big deals, with no understanding of how to actually get there
It's like children playing "business" to a tee
They have a list of about 5 different policy levers (some of which are contradictory in addition to all being incoherent) and they're just playing mad libs to get Deals associated with those things, without any larger goal or thought
Ripping the wiring and plumbing out of the walls to chase the DEALS high, and maybe some friends are looking for The Cathedral
- tariffs - Big Government Action in Trade Sectors That Matter (chips/intel bullshit, US Steel snafu) - interest rates down - """""Manufacturing""""" (white men with hard hats larping at making stuff out of metal)
Masculinity is when mud and pipes.
I think this is part of the motivation, marbled in with wanting to diminish the Fed as an independent actor generally, box Powell in as much as possible to hedge against that potential role, and, most of all, to bully through as many rate cuts as possible before the midterms as a crude OBBB offset.
Trump wants low rates because he's a real estate guy and has had lots of mortgages for most of his life. All his opinions are decades old.
I always took it as something the Andreessens of the world put into his brain because VCs have a ton of overvalued investments they need to offload and inflating a bubble in a low rate environment is the only profitable out.
I think that this is an exception. Trump really has a deeply held belief that low rates good, a belief which is second only to his deeply held belief that tariffs good.
“Low rates good” probably flows directly from him being an untrustworthy real estate guy who is by nature a severe credit risk. He’s facing a premium on his loans.
Real estate guy has touched the interest rates stove.
As others have noted, if Trump had taken office and done basically nothing, he'd probably have had an amazing economy to point to in four years. I think your take is correct, with the caveat that showing he can Make Stuff Happen is core to exerting power over rivals and institutions.