Who Knew That Trump's Superpower Would Be Destroying Wealth?

Before diving into the substance of today's column, sharing a bit of relevant housekeeping news will help to set the context.  As many Dorf on Law (DoL) readers know, Professor Dorf and I have both been long-time columnists on Verdict, which is essentially the op-ed page for Justia's excellent legal news and information platform.  We both write on a two- or three-columns-per-week default schedule here on DoL, and we are both also slated to write biweekly on Verdict.  On the day that we publish a new Verdict column, we typically (though with some exceptions) write a follow-on DoL piece to carry forward an element of the argument from that day's column.

And Professor Dorf continues to do so, including yesterday's fascinating column about "medical libertarianism" and the RFKJr lunacy, followed by a paired DoL piece.  Over the years, he and I have discussed the differences (if any) between what we do on the two platforms, and it is fair to say that our shared sense is that the Verdict audience -- to the extent that it is not entirely the same people who read DoL -- is a bit broader, and as a result we (especially I) tend to be a bit less personal in our topics and writing style there than on DoL.  This general sense has evolved in a rough, only partially defined decision rule about which topics will go on which platform.

Some readers might have noticed, however, that I have barely published anything on Verdict this year.  Whereas by early September I would normally have written 17 columns or so, this year I have written only seven, the last one in late March.  This is ultimately due to my re-expatriation earlier this year, in ways that are in fact quite surprising and that I will explain further in tomorrow's column.  More to the immediate point, it turns out that I have made an affirmative decision not to write for Verdict again until January of next year.  (Again, details forthcoming.)

As a matter of content, this hiatus has meant that the column ideas that I have been setting aside for future Verdict columns are piling up.  Even though Donald Trump's reign of insanity has meant that my planned topics quite unfortunately never go stale, I have decided not to wait another four months to work these topics into my writing rotation.  As a result, the title of today's column -- "Who Knew That Trump's Superpower Would Be Destroying Wealth?" -- is going to be the subtitle for multiple columns that I will now begin to write (which I would have written as a series on Verdict), along the lines of Professor Dorf's "Wait, Can He Actually Do That?" series here on DoL.

To be clear, Trump's current term has been absolutely awful (at times even worse than my most pessimistic expectations) in ways that have no direct connection to the wealth of a nation.  To point to only one of far too many examples, he put a person in charge of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division who, according to some excellent reporting today in The Guardian, "has moved away from [the Justice Department's] historical focus on expanding voting rights," adding this pointed observation:

The voting rights section of the Department of Justice’s civil rights division has historically been an enforcer of the Voting Rights Act and the principles of greater ballot access and universal suffrage. Under Harmeet Dhillon, the division’s assistant attorney general, that tradition has been turned on its head. Dhillon gutted the department’s leadership and staff in April shortly after being confirmed, and has refocused the department’s mission on preventing voter fraud and prosecuting noncitizen voting – both of which are exceedingly rare.

As an aside, I should note that Dhillon made her bones in Trump's world by being one of the most aggressively dishonest and vicious anti-trans activists in the country, but she has been aligned with Trump at least since 2020 as an advocate of his false claims about election fraud.  And while it is very bad that she is now pushing to disenfranchise people who might vote against Trump, it is also true that the Guardian article quoted above was report a defeat of one of Dhillon's (that is, Trump's) efforts: "Democrats notched a victory against the civil rights division of the Department of Justice, negotiating an agreement to keep about 98,000 North Carolina voters from being prevented from voting."

To the extent that there is anything left to the rule of law in the United States, therefore, Trump lacks the power (much less the superpower) to make sudden pronouncements and immediately get his way.  In a column last week, I wrote that "it is especially frustrating to find that people who are not at all fans of Donald Trump habitually insist on attributing various kinds of superpowers to him."  Even though he lacks those other attributed powers, he does have the ability to unilaterally make things worse economically (even in the rare cases where the courts try to rein him in), and that is the point of this new series of columns.

Two months into Trump's second term, Binyamin Appelbaum concluded a New York Times op-ed with this important observation: "It’s often said that presidents have limited power over the economy, but it’s more accurate to say that they have limited power to increase growth.  They have a lot more power to break things."

Appelbaum's topic that day was Trump's ruinous trade policies.  Very soon, I will turn my attention (again) to that topic as part of this series, and every day does indeed bring new reports supporting Appelbaum's specific point about tariffs and Trump's ability to "break things."  Today, for example, The Times published a news item under this headline: "John Deere, a U.S. Icon, Is Undermined by Tariffs and Struggling Farmers."

Importantly, however, Appelbaum's point is more broadly true, certainly beyond even the disastrous effects (only now becoming visible) of Trump's destructive trade wars.  No President can, say, make the inflation rate drop at his command -- and he definitely cannot count on getting credit even when the inflation rate does go down.  But simply by raging around as an ignorant fool, the current president can make things worse.  It is perhaps the most unfortunate asymmetry in economics.

The theme of this "Trump's Superpower" series, then, will be to discuss the many ways in which he is making the world, his own citizens, and even his own minority of American voters less wealthy.  That is especially ironic in light of Trump's longstanding claim that his wealth (inherited and mostly squandered wealth, but never mind) by its very existence proves that he knows how to make everyone richer.

It is worth adding, however, that Republicans for decades prior to Trump's rise had been pushing the idea that the government should be run like a business, which was always fatuous, because the government is not a business and should not be run like one.  Professor Dorf touched briefly on this topic at the end of a column in late 2023, and Paul Krugman had a piece specifically on this topic in Harvard Business Review all the way back in 1996.  To be clear, it was a tired trope even back then.  He felt compelled to return to the topic in 2012 and 2014, and I have no doubt that I could find many more such columns debunking the Republicans' cherished myth, by Krugman and others.

So the Republicans' mantra, reality be damned, has for decades been that the country should be run by a businessman.  This was even part of their case in favor of George H.W. Bush, a career politician whose jackpot in the birth lottery allowed him during his early adult years to receive a series of gifts from rich uncles, until one of his businesses at least did not end in failure.  Well, not declared-bankruptcy-six-times failure.  And to be fair, the idea back then was presumably that the prospective leader in question would be both a successful businessman and one who did not act foolishly or impulsively.  On that latter point, Elon Musk's argument for being a good businessman is obviously stronger than Trump's -- still an over-hyped lie, but one that is easier to believe than Trump's pose -- but he also acts on impulse to his (and everyone's) detriment.  Trump, however, cannot blame the ketamine.

The point of this series is thus to puncture the claims of success that Trump and his sycophants have been relentlessly pushing.  Recently, Krugman has been arguing that the financial markets are going to have a "Wile E. Coyote moment," in which the finance bros collectively look down and finally notice that only thin air separates them from the floor of the canyon hundreds of feet below.  If he turns out to be wrong about that -- spoiler alert: he is quite right, unfortunately -- there are all kinds of ways that Trump is making the world less wealthy.  Even if the disaster does not manifest in a repeat of the Black Friday-leads-to-the-Great Depression-style sudden meltdown, the damage will be real and extensive.

This is probably not exactly an appetizing teaser for my new series, I admit, but commiseration is part of coping and ultimately of acting.  In any event, there is much more to come.

- Neil H. Buchanan