In 2005, we gathered up all of our college credits and enrolled to complete our baccalaureate degrees. It is no surprise that academia is politically progressive and bringing with me a more open mind I learned a lot mostly about paying attention to questions. What is an art? What is a science? What is proof? What is evidence? What is a theory?
I read The Art of the Deal soon after it was published, courtesy of my local branch library in Lansing, Michigan, and I was impressed: you can always make something attractive to someone else. Over the years, perceptual check marks tagged the news about Donald Trump’s real estate projects and then his television shows, but he was always only somewhere between Lee Iacocca and Madonna. Then he got serious.
Donald Trump was always a Democrat because of his involvements in real estate with planning & zoning commissions and labor unions. So, when he ran for the Presidency, it was clear to me from Day One that his concern was only for the best of all possible marketing.
In my estimation, he did not want to face Hillary Clinton in the primaries where he could be beaten and discarded early on. Instead, he chose the Republican party because he knew that he could take out the lightweights such as Ron Paul, Ted Cruz, and Carli Fiorina. Even if he lost to Clinton in the general election, he still would have run as a major party candidate and earned a place in history. He was greatly helped in 2016 by Robert Mercer who brought him Steve Bannon. (See "Jim Simons and the Quants" on NecessaryFacts.) Bannon convinced Trump to broadcast a narrative that would resonate with the untapped reservoir of available voters.
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Just ahead of the 2016 general election, Michael Moore
warned Democrats (and others) why Donald Trump
would be elected. |
Just ahead of the 2016 election, Michael Moore spoke to several groups, warning them of how and why Donald Trump was going to win by tapping into the unvoiced angst of the masses.
"Donald Trump came to the Detroit Economic Club and stood there in front of Ford Motor executives and said, 'If you close these factories as you're planning to do in Detroit and build them in Mexico, I'm going to put a 35 percent tariff on those cars when you send them back and nobody's going to buy them'," said Moore.
It is the art of the deal, a mass mediated hyper-reality in which the broadcaster Donald Trump played to the people what they told him that they wanted to hear.
Donald Trump treated Marine Corps General James N. Mattis as if Mattis were an Apprentice. And Mattis was not the only one to be summarily fired. Nonetheless, on the second and now third time around, Trump still had the support of people who never thought that he would betray them. Of course, you can only betray your friends because your enemies already do not trust you. Trump had the support of anti-communist Venezuelans in Miami. Having lived here since fleeing Hugo Chavez and then Nicolas Maduro, they had businesses and homes. And then came the revocation of protections against deportation. Just ahead of the 2024 election, Donald Trump stood on a stage in Detroit with leaders of the Arab community, and they believed that he agreed with them.
Those of us who advocate for laissez-faire capitalism easily point to the fact that successful marketing impels toward a common benevolent morality because you have to get along with other people. But there are businesses that succeed “one customer at a time” because there is always a (new) sucker born every minute.
And then there is the “long con,” the somewhat complicated confidence game, portrayed in the 1973 movie, The Sting. In any negotiation, the Art of the Deal can involve offering terms that you do not mind abandoning as the cost of gaining the next and more important advantage. Donald Trump’s wavering and waffling upsets traditionalist markets because uncertainty is uncomfortable to most people.
"An entrepreneur is born with the mentality to take risks, though there are several important characteristics: courage, faith in yourself, and above all, even when you fail, to learn from failure and get up and try again." - Sheldon Adelson, 2013
Scientists and entrepreneurs live with the unknown and therefore with uncertainty. Einstein was married three times and retracted what he called his biggest mistake twice because he was wrong about being wrong. Get over it and move on. Donald Trump is willing to abandon a resource or a plan and try something new, something else. It is the very definition of pragmatism, a distinctly American philosophy.
He has filed four bankruptcies. As the insurance magnate, Thomas Caldecot Chubb said, when his clerks were panicked because a ship had gone down with an insured cargo, “If there were no losses, there would be no premiums.” Investors sometimes suffer losses and at the level of The Trump Organization all investors practice their own due diligence. So, Donald Trump accepts the losses—2200 points on the Dow Jones for Friday, April 5, 2025—but what are the premiums that he expects? President Trump assures us that in the long run, this all will be good for America.
- Some goods will not be subject to the Reciprocal Tariff. These include: (1) articles subject to 50 USC 1702(b); (2) steel/aluminum articles and autos/auto parts already subject to Section 232 tariffs; (3) copper, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and lumber articles; (4) all articles that may become subject to future Section 232 tariffs; (5) bullion; and (6) energy and other certain minerals that are not available in the United States.
- “Made in America” is not just a tagline—it’s an economic and national security priority of this Administration. The President’s reciprocal trade agenda means better-paying American jobs making beautiful American-made cars, appliances, and other goods.
- These tariffs seek to address the injustices of global trade, re-shore manufacturing, and drive economic growth for the American people.-- White House Fact Sheet for April 2, 2025.
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The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell more than
2200 points before settling for a 1600-point tumble |
The economy is the active total of trillions of individual choices. Perhaps no stochastic theory is sufficient to predict the next fashion craze but it is possible to analyze the past, to explain it, and to test that theory against other (different) facts, especially when those are submitted as predictions to allow falsification of the theory.
The rubrics of the early 20th century—broad socialisms and fascisms, anti-democratic coups and attempted coups, the contraction of international trade, the Great Depression, and ultimately, World War II and the Cold War—were not isolated events, unrelated to each other, causeless or chaotic and complicated beyond comprehension.
The Roman senate continued to vote on consuls who really were emperors as the coinage was debased, plagues swept the population centers, earthquakes proved impossible to rebuild from, foreign hordes invaded the outer districts and then Italy. Decline and retreat affected the philosophers at Athens, the scholars at Alexandria, the jurists at Rhodes. In those days, all of that took lifetimes over generations, and each day seemed very much like the previous day. We understand it now by compressing the retrospective.
In high school history, I learned that the real “American revolution” took place in the minds of people between 1756 and 1775, when the leading thinkers and writers expressed the understanding that the Bill of Rights of 1689 would never be allowed to them. The events after the July 1776 were the War for Independence.
The failed Continental dollar and the ephemeral money issued by new States (in paper and copper) presaged the Alien and Sedition Acts. In France, the same kinds of events ultimately brought regicide, the Directorate, the failed assignat paper money, and then Napoleon Bonaparte, initially as First Consul, and inevitably as the Emperor. Again, though, it took 20 years and through each of those 7000 days, people lived their own lives as best they could under the circumstances—which is always true.
Now we communicate at the speed of light with images and sounds enhancing and eclipsing words. Centuries, decades, lifetimes, days, hours, all are compacted into minutes and seconds as historical events become daily news and then hourly updates.
It may become history that cash inflows to the government from President Trump’s tariffs, coupled with his drastic cuts to the federal workforces (both salaried and subsidized) will balance the federal budget and reduce the federal deficit while cutting direct taxes, and all of that will allow the general economy to expand and extend. It may be that a later round of deal-making will bring among nations a broad reduction in all tariffs.
However, reality cannot be cheated. I believe that the likely outcome will be an economic depression and eruptions of armed conflicts all of which President Trump will declare to be fake news, insisting that prosperity and peace are here and we are enjoying them.
Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.
...
The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by Karl Marx.
Transcription/Markup: Zodiac and Brian Baggins for Marx/Engels Internet Archive 1995, 1999; Proofed: and corrected by Alek Blain, 2006, Mark Harris, 2010. --https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/18th-Brumaire.pdf
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Pamela Graves was my professor for Modern Europe
at Eastern Michigan University. She taught me that history
is a science and we write it in the past tense. |
Previously on NecessaryFacts
Tycoon Dough is Democratic
When Did the “Great Depression” Begin?
Venture Capital
Capitalist Culture
The Remarkable Story of Risk
The Cure for a Failing Empire
