The US economy is in the grip of Trump true believers

With Trump 2.0 it really is different, in no small part because the people around him are different.

- JAMES MOORE

They are either enablers, who are apparently incapable of providing any meaningful pushback of the sort politicians badly need, or true believers.

Last time around, he had people like Steve Mnuchin, who pulled off the remarkable feat for a Trump lieutenant of spending his entire term in post as treasury secretary. There was also Gary Cohn, his chief economics adviser for two years. Alumni of Goldman Sachs, who followed a well-trodden path from the powerful investment bank into public office, they brought an economically orthodox, conservative view with them.

The rest of his first government was full of establishment Republicans who actively worked to moderate – even to undermine – the president’s most destructive instincts.

Today, it is very different.

Trump traded Mnuchin for Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager and someone whom Wall Street had hoped would be the moderating influence Mnuchin was.

That hasn’t happened. Bessent’s talk about the US economy needing a “detox period” aligns with the “transition” rhetoric we’ve heard from other members of the administration. This would involve it taking a hit ahead of a mass move of manufacturing back to the US. That’s how the theory goes.

It does not have many supporters on Wall Street, which has had to wake up to the fact that its supposed champion has bought into the Trump agenda – at least in public – despite the damage such punitive tariffs do to the American economy and to the wallets of American consumers.