I have 427 followers on Bluesky and 2700 on Twitter(which I barely use now). I recently did a thread critiquing tariffs on both sites. 190 reposts, 433 likes on Bluesky. One like on Twitter. Come see me on Bluesky.

This is the essence of Donald Trump, the origins of the sad menagerie of fear, greed, selfishness, petty revenge, and lust for power and domination that drives everything he does. He is an idiot of historic proportions and we will all suffer for it.

What do you want to know?.

This brings us back to the term I used deliberately at the outset: idiotic. The term goes back to the Greek word idiotes, where it had the meaning not only of an unskilled person but also a person acting only for themselves, separate from society.

Everything is a direct and immediate transaction and the only question is who comes out ahead in each interaction. Building the kind of institutions that create win-win situations for everyone is incomprehensible to Trump.

So Trump is not only pre-mercantilist, he is pre-Hobbesian. There is one central thread running through Trump’s approach to politics, economics, society, and his personal life: transactionalism.

The stock market is starting to price in not just Trump’s tariffs, but the damage that will ensue as the rule of law breaks down and crony capitalism runs rampant. This is why stock markets around the world have outperformed the US for the last two months.

Yet what are Trump and his billionaire buddy Elon Musk doing, apart from tax cuts for the rich and tariffs for everyone else? Dismantling government and the rule of law. Shaking down law firms and universities. Defunding the science that made the US economy the envy of the world.

Here we have to go back to Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes famously argued that in the absence of a functioning state to serve these kinds of functions, life would be a war of all against all. It would be nasty, brutish, and short. Like, short-fingered vulgarian short.

One of the other necessary conditions for a strong economy is institutions: the rule of law. Without enforceable contracts, prevention of monopolies, provision of roads and other public goods, financial transparency, and limits to pollution, society cannot function.

This is not modern economy. Not a sixteenth century Mercantilist economy. Not even a Middle Ages economy. We are in a barter economy. Literally a pre-historic economy. Even hunter-gatherer societies had division of labor. But we’re not done yet.

Imagine this principle applied to the domestic economy. What if nobody could buy groceries, pay rent, or pay utilities unless the store, landlord, or utility company buys an equivalent amount of each person’s labor.

How pre-mercantilist? . Trump’s idea is that the US should have balanced trade with every single country. Not just an overall balance or surplus. A balance with every country.

Just one small problem: the policies Trump advocated will only make things worse. They will raise prices and reduce emplyment (stagflation anyone?). They are pre-mercantilist.

Rural America hollowed out, drug overdose deaths soared, and as Angus Deaton has documented, the gap in life expectancy between those who graduated from.college and those who did not grew to over eight years. It was on this ocean of despair that Trump built his populist appeals.

Winner-take-all practices, reinforced by government policies favored by the wealthy, led to an increasingly unequal distribution of wealth. Those who lost jobs to trade and innovation had a much harder time regaining their wages than economists had expected.

All was not well in the garden of economics however. While economists rightly argued that trade could in principle make everyone better off, in practice this did not happen.

First through GATT and then through the WTO, tariffs were systematically reduced, leading to a phenomenal period of American and global growth.

Seeing the devastation wrought by the Smoot Hawley tariffs (sound familiar?), the Great Depression that they helped cause, and the global war that resulted, the US led the construction of a global free trade system.

In 1817 David Ricardo proved that the division of labor should be international, with each country producing according to its comparative advantages and trading freely. These ideas dominated economic thinking for the next 200 years, but only fully became US policy after WWII.

I mean, who wins an argument so thoroughly that they define an entire field for 250 years?. With impeccable logic, Smith argued that the way to create wealth was through the division of labor, with everyone doing what they did best and trading freely.