Political Styles of the Rich and Clueless

There are none so blind as those that will not see

As we wait to see what fresh hell awaits us this week, one obvious question is, who put these malevolent clowns in power?

The short answer is ignorant people. But political ignorance takes two different forms.

On one side there are “less-engaged” voters who don’t follow politics closely. And to be fair, ordinary Americans have good excuses for not paying close attention to the news: They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. Unfortunately, many of these voters believed Trump’s fabulist promises. They are only now beginning to understand what they voted for.

There’s now a huge debate among Democrats about how to reach less-engaged voters. But that’s a topic for future posts.

But less-engaged voters weren’t the only people who missed the warning signs and supported Donald Trump. Trump also had a number of ultra-wealthy backers, both on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, who are now shocked, shocked to discover that he is who he always was.

Over the weekend Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, suddenly turned on his champion, declaring on X that

by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.

But Ackman refused to take any responsibility for enabling the destruction:

I don't think this was foreseeable. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.

Indeed. Who could have foreseen that the self-proclaimed Tariff Man, who posts crazy stuff on Truth Social every day, would impose destructive tariffs? Who could have imagined that the many economists, myself included, who warned that a Trump victory would be very bad for the economy would turn out to have been right? Or if we were wrong, it was only because we underestimated the damage.

OK, Ackman is a fool, but he wasn’t alone in getting Trump all wrong. Many wealthy people imagined that Trump II would be like Trump I, mostly a standard right-winger with a bit of a protectionist hobby. They thought he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier. They expected him to back off his tariff obsession if the stock market started to fall. If he ripped up the social safety net, well, they don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid.

And if Trump II really had been like Trump I, America’s oligarchs would be very happy right now.

It's also true that successful businessmen often believe that their financial success makes them experts on economic policy even though they haven’t made any effort to understand the issues.

Even relatively sensible business leaders like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase tend to stumble when they try to play economist. Does anyone remember Dimon proclaiming in 2014 that we couldn’t restore full employment because American workers didn’t have the right skills? Five years later the unemployment rate was below 4 percent.

I was struck over the weekend when Elon Musk (I know, I know), seemingly breaking with Trump, called for zero tariffs between the United States and Europe. I think it’s safe to assume that Musk has no idea that trans-Atlantic tariffs were, in fact, close to zero in 2024: The average European Union tariff on U.S. goods was 1.7%, the average U.S. tariff on EU goods was 1.4%.

Finally, great wealth often enables great pettiness. Some readers may remember Wall Street’s “Obama rage”: Financial titans were furious at the president who bailed them out after the global financial crisis because he dared to hint that they had played some role in causing that crisis. Why, he even called them “fat cats!”

The pettiness has been even worse this time around. A few days before the inauguration the Financial Times ran an article titled “Is corporate America going MAGA?” that quoted one “top banker”:

I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.

I wonder how liberated he’s feeling now.

To be honest, I’m actually glad that Trump II is proving to be such a disaster for the economy. If he had exercised some restraint, if he had simply claimed credit for the very good economy Joe Biden left him, many wealthy people would have cheered him on while he destroyed democracy. Now they may turn on him.

But I hope the rest of us have learned a lesson from the oligarchy’s support for Trump, even if it’s now cracking: Extreme wealth inequality has given great power to people who exert a malign influence on our politics.

MUSICAL CODA