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I did a post a few days ago about how there really is no plan to any of this. The people around Trump are people who fall into two categories. One group is people who do have plans, sorta. They’re often pretty dumb plans, but they’re plans. And they’ve congregated around Trump because he is someone who looks like a useful instrument of their plans or someone who wants sorta kinda what they want or wants to get there in the same way. Maybe kinda. Trump’s Treasury Secretary (Bessent) and Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors (Miran) seem to fall into this category. The second group is made up of sycophants, cultists, shysters and hustlers who are just along for the ride and generally working to retcon different explanations or theories of why Trump and the administration are doing what they’re doing. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick epitomizes this category.
Now as we bear down on the abyss, Trump appears to be alone in a foxhole with longtime trade advisor Peter Navarro. But it’s important to remember that Navarro, now multi-times MAGA true believer (election denier, stop-the-stealer), actually has his origins in group one. It’s been reported many times — and appears to be true — that Navarro was pulled into the Trump orbit in just this way. In 2015, Jared Kushner was looking for an economist who supported Trump’s style of nationalist protectionism, especially vis a vis China, someone who put a PhD and even a university professorship on the same line as Trump’s ideas. He was poking around Amazon and found Navarro’s 2011 book Death by China. And that was that.
As I noted in that earlier post, the presence of these policy entrepreneurs adds a bit of shape and formality to Trump’s impulses. But that’s superficial. When things get bumpy or kinetic, those crack and fall away like so many eggshells. Like Mike Tyson says, everyone’s got a plan until they get punched in the mouth. And we had no plan in the first place.
So it’s those two groups all the way down. But it originates with no theory beyond a love of tariffs, a deep obsession with trade deficits and the desire for a zero-sum sorting of the dominating and dominated. And it’s all turbocharged by profound governing failure by which the entire country is now hostage to the degenerate will of a single man.
Of course it’s easy to overstate the importance of any “plan.” Most plans are stupid. Most should never be tried. A plan doesn’t get you any closer to a successful outcome than unreasoned intuition. Perhaps it’s worse. Having no plan, at least, gives you the benefit of some flexibility. We just find it important because it places us on a map situated in arcs of success and time. Are we on track with the plan? Having a plan helps with this question. Is the plan working? A plan is a set of strategies and/or tactics to arrive at a certain destination. Again, having a plan is pretty important to answering this question. Did the plan work? Again, you get the idea. Having a plan is pretty foundational to answering that question. And this is the heart of Trumpism. It’s at the heart of any model of government based solely on the will and impulses of one man. It becomes especially acute when things seem to be going very, very wrong. Because if there’s no plan there’s no map. So we don’t know where we are or where we’re going.
And that’s where we are.