Donald Trump is a stupid man surrounded by cronies who do what he wants or just gestures at. The result is that Trump's policy agenda is a shitshow. This shitshow is demonstrated in odd ways at odd times, such as the catastrophe in Kerr County. The gutting of emergency response is not something Trump himself really ever articulated, but it's a combination of the Republican Party's long standing hostility to effective government, the fact that people like Kristi Noem have their positions because Trump thinks they look good on the TeeVee and they are skilled at kissing his fat ass. So, Trump - who's a slob - surrounds himself with those people who most assiduously kiss his ass, those people are largely ideologically extreme Republicans, and those people give us the rolling policy disasters that typify our sojourn in Trumpistan.
This is how we wind up with the burbling chaos of the Trump's tariff regime. They're on! They're off! Hey, let's put a 50% tariff on copper! Why? Fuck it! Who knows?
All of this is a well established pattern from Trump's life. His business was basically a dozen or so people working out of Trump tower. They were the people around him handling whatever branding opportunity he was pursuing at the moment. Trump wasn't running General Electric, he was running a very lean shop and everyone there catered to the whims of the boss.
Now, he's trying to run the world's second largest bureaucracy and it's gone about like you'd expect. In his first term, there was at least some "grown ups in the room" until he fired them, after which we got the botched Covid response and January 6th.
Krugman decides to give us something else to worry about, as he reminds us that Trump will be able to pick Jerome Powell's successor at the Federal Reserve.
Since its inception a little over 100 years ago, the Fed has tried as much as possible to hew to economic orthodoxy and eschew political pressure. The most obvious example of this is Paul Volcker's war on inflation in the late '70s and early '80s. Both Carter and Reagan saw the economy get drained of capital as he squeezed inflation to death with interest rates as high as 20%. It worked, and until Covid, we really didn't see inflation, certainly not like we did in the '70s.
Trump is likely to put another crony, another lickspittle, at the head of the Fed and that creature will likely cater to Trump's whims. If - as I and others predict - we are in a recession by 2026, putting some hack in charge could be catastrophic.
If Trump were to nominate some incompetent boob like Stephen Moore, do we really think we can count on Thom Tillis, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and some other unnamed Senator to prevent the destruction of the Fed's independence?
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