Trump’s Twisted Economic Vision Is Based on Capitalist Myths

Broadly speaking, the two big ideas among the MAGA set are: (1) Liberalism is almost solely culpable for our national ills (though the RINOs, Republicans in Name Only, are up there), and (2) Trump is the greatest fixer God ever created. Most of those who voted for Trump—including, especially, MAGA supporters—want him, and by extension, the federal government, to heavy-handedly intervene in commerce. This despite the fact that the same crowd would call it communism, socialism, or Marxism if a Democrat suggested doing the same thing. Confusion is mutually shared between me and many Trump voters; it’s confounding when everything is mythological.

I cannot, to some extent, fault those looking for a hero like Trump. The 2008 financial crisis placed the ills of capitalism front and center. What’s more, it spawned an understandable skepticism in banks and government. And no small amount of justifiable rage, as well: Ordinary people watched their leaders bend over backward to indemnify scofflaw financial institutions while the dreams and livelihoods of those not lucky to work on Wall Street went up in smoke. But what made that episode particularly deleterious is the political decisions that came afterward. We are not suffering from too much regulation, but too little; the laissez-faire ethos that guided our faltering response to a very real systemic crisis is one of the pillars—perhaps the most central one—of American capitalism.  

One reason we are in the mess we’re in today is that we suffered such an immense trauma during that period, a trauma that’s ongoing because of these two powerful notions that live in our heads: the capitalist myths in which we’ve been inculcated and the memory of the day those gods failed. Where has that trauma led us? To the idea that a singular person, Donald Trump, can be an economic savior—the messiah who alone can usher us into utopia. This belief is much more rooted in the weird, Soviet-era Communist Great Leader than in anything to do with capitalism.