The Trump Show

A reality television presidency

Donald Trump wants to be the center of our attention. For a week, he kept our attention on himself by shocking global stock markets with tariffs. Then yesterday, just at it seemed that Trump had destroyed the global economy, he announced victory in his one-man trade war, suspending his tariffs on every country except the two that have pushed back, China and Canada. He was the center of attention again.

No doubt next week he will be at it once more, either raising tariffs or threatening to do so, remaining at the center of our attention.

As I said on Tuesday, tariffs are magic to Donald Trump. While they give vent to the long-simmering discontent with globalization out in the American heartland, tariffs make little sense as actual trade policy. We now know that the tariff list was AI-generated and included penguin islands because it was never a serious long-term plan in the first place.

---

American Brexit: Tariffs Are Magic

---

Trump needed to end the chaos quickly in order for the tariff magic to work. His tariffs lasted only a few days because they were never a serious policy position, just a public position. The next logical question is, how did Trump position himself to profit in the act of ‘winning’ through performative public policy?

One easy way to make some quick cash would be to pump his own stock, DJT, on an unsteady market morning, then announce ‘just kidding on the tariffs guys!’ four hours later, which is exactly what Donald Trump did.

Please note that I am not accusing the president of a crime, here. I am accusing the president of pumping his own stock to paying subscribers of his own social media network four hours before changing his own tariff policy. Believe it or not, there are zero laws against doing this.

Then, if Donald Trump wanted to help a smaller group of people (‘loyalists’) profit bigly, he would share his intentions with those people at the last moment, perhaps using some sort of mass texting app, or direct messaging. Who knows. If he was smart, he would let intermediaries do this for him, since there are in fact laws against insider trading.

If Trump, or someone around Trump, did that, we would expect call options to the S&P 500 as well as the NASDAQ — that is, bets that the market will go up in the next 24 hours — to spike about ten minutes before the White House made its ‘just kidding about the tariffs’ announcement. Oh, hey, look at that:

Now all trading markets are Trump shitcoins, hooray

Donald Trump wiped out trillions of dollars of global market value in a matter of days and upset American trading relations with every country in the world. A few people got rich.

To the American public, however, this was all imaginary money, and the Democrats denouncing the possibly-greatest financial possibly-crime in the history of the world are the same people who already failed twice at convicting Trump.

Sen. Adam Schiff. Sen. Chris Murphy. Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. America has tuned these people out, already, because their impeachments never pan out.

Trump has sent shock waves across the trading world. Markets are following his every signal. One could mistake him for the most powerful president of all time, right now, whatever the approval polls say, because his opposition party has lost so much public trust.

If Trump does it again — and that is what I expect him to do — then it will be harder to get away with it.

Trump already did a head-fake with tariffs at the beginning of his term, and he has done it again three months into his term. A third time will cement his image as a feckless bully, prompting bluff calls instead of margin calls. It might even be enough for Republicans to raise an actual fuss.

If Trump is smart enough to give tariffs a rest for a while, he could very well get away with it. Washington, DC is rife with insider trading. As always, Trump is the first to call out the elite snobs who would judge him for committing the same crimes they do, and that is a big part of his appeal to the politically-cynical.

As I said, however, I don’t expect that Trump will be able to resist his urge for drama very long.

Drama and profiteering have always been entwined with Trump. Back in the Reagan years, when he was a regular on tabloid TV shows like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, Trump famously cold-called New York City-area reporters posing as “Barron” whenever he was “in need of a tough front man or otherwise wanting to convey a message without attaching his own name to it.”

“Barron” started with a controversy over art deco sculptures that Trump destroyed, escalated during his brief foray into professional football as he tried to gouge fellow team owners, and ultimately ended up as his youngest son’s name.

Trump was shaped by the era of Gordon Gekko in profound ways. If I took the 1980s and made them into a reality television show ca. 2005, I would get The Apprentice. Now Trump has the White House for a reality show set. His show still has winners and losers and constant firings, lately with guest star Laura Loomer.

Trump does not care about charges of market manipulation or calls to investigate insider trading. What matters most to this president is that everyone is talking about him, that he appears to be the master of the situation, that his enemies seethe.

He got away with it, will likely get away with it, may even get away with it again. But how many times can he get away with it? There are limits, even for Teflon Don. The only scenario where the GOP loses control of Congress next November is a bad recession brought on by Trump’s trade wars.

Reasserting Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution to reclaim congressional authority over tariffs is well within the powers of Congress. If it gets bad enough, Republicans will act in their own interest. But first, it has to get bad enough. How bad will it get?