Alan Zendell, April 5, 2025

Serious presidents who believe their country’s policies need a major overhaul and care more about their constituents than their own delusions of grandeur surround themselves with the smartest people they can find. The surest sign that a president does not have the best interests of the country at heart is surrounding themselves with zealots and yes-people instead of experts with diverse points of view. Yet, that is exactly what Donald Trump has done. Two of the loudest voices in his White House, Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and Vice President J. D. Vance do not inspire confidence that the administration cares about anything but destroying things they hate.

Diversity has become a dirty word in Trump’s White House, even though every competent leader, whether a corporate CEO or president understands that facilitating a solution by considering every relevant point of view is the is the most likely route to success. The Wharton School of Business surely teaches that. But even the best business school in the country can’t change the impulses of a sociopathic narcissist.

Curing our nation’s economic woes with tariffs that are bashed daily by virtually every prominent economist and financial manager sounds suspiciously like drinking bleach to cure COVID. The main difference between those situations is that COVID presented what a majority of world health experts considered an existential threat. It was a real menace that demanded a real solution. Trump’s love affair with tariffs is more like inventing a problem to fit a solution.

We can be angry at Democrats for failing to be honest about President Biden’s mental state in 2024, but that should not color our view of the effectiveness of his fixes to our post-COVID economy. Biden handed the Trump administration the strongest economy in the world, one as strong as any America has seen since the Reagan administration. Its only major failing was the only thing Trump and his donors care about: it didn’t increase the income gap between the wealthiest Americans and everyone else.

In order for Trump’s ego to be satisfied, and that’s really the only thing that matters in this White House, he needs to posture himself as a knight on a white horse charging in to save the country from catastrophe. In fact, however, the only catastrophe facing America last Election Day was a dysfunctional Democratic Party that did everything wrong and conceded the election to the fantasy world of MAGA.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio addressed the world’s reaction to Trump’s tariff war, yesterday. That in itself was bizarre. Wouldn’t it be better for an economist or the Treasury Secretary to be out front defending a dangerously radical economic policy? He said the financial markets, which lost ten percent of their value in two days, weren’t really crashing. They were simply adjusting to Trump’s new reality. He suggested that that was a good thing, that in selling at rates not seen since the COVID lockdown, and before that since the market crash of 1987, business leaders and billionaire investors were demonstrating their ability to react quickly to changing circumstances. He then absurdly asserted that the stock markets accurately reflect the state of our economy.

Wow! Is that the best they can do? If Rubio was correct, a fifteen percent drop in the last week should scare the hell out of us. More to the point, Rubio doesn’t understand that markets aren’t about the current state of corporate health. The investors who drive markets are interested in future prospects. Stocks rise when corporate earnings are expected to increase, usually by double digit percentages. They fall when investors expect earnings and revenue to drop.

Trump’s mantra is that it’s all about making deals. If that were actually true, the idea of massive tariffs as an opening gambit would at least have some merit. But Trump made it clear, yesterday, that he has no intention of changing his policies, and that’s something we can take to the bank. He didn’t count on the rest of the world fighting back, and now that they have, Trump is uniquely unsuited to fix things. His extreme narcissism makes it nearly impossible for him to compromise, because he interprets anything that suggests backing away from a decision as a sign of weakness, and that will never fly with him.

The reality is that Trump has thrown the economy of the world into chaos, and he is probably the worst possible choice of a leader in those circumstances. All his instincts are about intimidation and playing chicken, and other world leaders understand that when dealing with an ignorant bully, the worst thing they can do is back down. Economists, therefore, are using the R word (recession.) How long before they dust off the D word?