I’ve described Trump II (47) as Joe Biden’s second term based on Trump’s threats of prosecutions of businesses who might have to raise prices to survive the increased costs from his tariffs, something straight out of the Biden/Elizabeth Warren/AOC/Gavin Newsom playbook of 2021 to 2024. Recall “price gouging”, especially you Californians? Trump is not done shape-shifting. He mutated from a Reagan conservative in much of his first term to the occasional Biden of Trump II, and now full Ross Perot.
So, my first prognosis of Trump II, as Biden II, was correct in part, and then he peeled away his mask exposing his inner Ross Perot in his second time at the plate. Trump is finally getting the opportunity to implement Ross Perot’s spiel of the 1990s (see #1). It’s where he was all along. What we see in Trump II, the real Trump, is more of Perot’s Reform Party of the 1990s with its predilection for isolationism and protectionism, a general antipathy to foreign relations, and much less constrained by the influence of Republican Reaganism in Trump I.
That 1980s Reaganism, though, worked. A government committed to letting the economy work and a foreign policy determined to protect our allies and confront our adversaries sparked an economic wave that subsequent recessions, financial crises, and successive Leviathan-loving Democrats couldn’t fully suppress, and an era of relative international calm with the rollback of communism and the eventual fall of the USSR.
When Trump I followed the Reagan script, he and we succeeded. Red lines were enforced with swift actions. The Congressional Review Act deregulations of the 2017 Republican Congress and major tax cuts led to a second economic wave, only to be sidelined by a virus let loose from a ChiCom lab. By the time of the 2020 election, his own coarse behavior and the shutdowns turned Trump into a foul-smelling pariah to many swing voters. Many decided to give a declining octogenarian a try. Instead, the voters quickly got in 2021-2024 a radical-left culture war targeting children, the family, biology, education, the nation’s history, chaotic immigration, and bloated budgets, inflation, and an assault on energy and transportation.
It turned out once again that the coarse nose-pinching pariah became preferable by 2024 to an administration intent on aligning our lives to the wishes of a college sociology faculty. Back in 2020, I doubt if many people forecasted a left-wing war on their way of life. Now, in 2024, few expected a global tariff war or a foreign policy resuscitated from 1940, from Lindbergh’s America First Committee, in attempts to revive Obama’s Iran nuclear deal and the zeal for a deal, any deal, with Russia even if it meant humiliating and abandoning the first victim of blatant aggression on the continent of Europe not seen since the Third Reich.
To be clear, though, this latest round of electoral betrayal didn’t come from the right. It came out of Trumpism, a hodgepodge of opinions that mostly paralleled those of Ross Perot in the 1990s. The 1990s locked Trump into his current frame of mind. Perot had it in for George H.W. Bush, opposing Gulf War I and NAFTA. Negotiations creating a North America trading bloc, what later came to be called NAFTA, started with Reagan and proceeded through HW and finally concluded under Bill Clinton. In a 1992 presidential debate between HW, Clinton, and Perot, it’s clear that the Perot rhetoric of 1992 is the Trump rhetoric of 2024. Perot lambasted NAFTA as creating “a giant sucking sound going south” (see #2). Trump’s hot air about other countries “ripping us off” is a recycling of the rhetoric. For people as simple-minded as Perot and Trump, a “trade deficit” is a national expense, a debit from the nation’s nest egg going to starving foreign peasants willing to work for a pittance, thus that “giant sucking sound”.
It’s a child’s view of the world. They use “trade deficit” to describe a transaction whenever currency is exchanged for goods, which is what happens in international markets and between us and the supermarket down the street. By this slipshod reasoning, a “trade deficit” is likely to culminate every time a deal is struck with a Vietnamese clothing manufacturer or between us and Safeway. Life is filled with those horrifying “trade deficits”.
Many MAGA “elites”, the thought leaders of the movement, are consumed in hostility to imports, just like their orange man skipper. They are captivated by the abstract calculation of GDP, in the subtraction of imports in the formula, as if imports reduce a people’s economic well-being. There’s more to the story. Imports are subtracted to void double-counting since they are already an element in the “consumption” component (C) in the equation GDP=C+I+G+X, X being trade, the exports minus imports.
From this, the movement’s devotees point to a hollowed-out Rust Belt, to the “deaths of despair”, and almost any other measure of social decay as proof of a “subtraction” from our national inheritance, the alleged impact of imports. The tactic makes it easy to blame others and not consider what we did to ourselves. Little thought is devoted to the role of our extortionate labor unions or our discouraging tax rates at all levels or the vast expansion of the regulatory Leviathan that made the upper Midwest uncompetitive with the rest of the world, and the American South! Historically, one can scout the flight of American manufacturing from the Northeast (late 18th to early 19th centuries) to the Midwest (19th to the middle 20th) to the South of today in the unrelenting search for hospitable economic climes.
Though, it must be said that the adolescent thinking works well in the realm of politics. Politics does not exist if there isn’t a government to exploit, or enlisted to serve a group’s self-serving definition of the national interest. Self-interest does not take a holiday within the corridors of power. In fact, it is heightened. Narrow interests have a field day when government is getting ready to inject itself into another facet of life. It is true whether we are talking about mammoth infrastructure bills or the onset of a tariff war. Watch as these highly motivated scavengers scramble for as much of the public carcass as they can get. What comes out the other end is far removed from anyone’s conception of our Constitution’s public welfare.
Throughout the 2024 presidential contest, Trump and Biden, and then Harris, were running for the presidency of Pennsylvania in the words of the economist Dominic Pino (see #4). Why? No need for advanced physics here. They needed Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes, and were stumbling over each other to pander to the powerful steel workers union. Trump had more “outsider” credibility to suck up to them, and had the additional advantage of a brawling background of protectionist pimping, the Ross Perot thing. That’s how the protectionist sausage is made. It’s the nature of politics, of government. It’s the angling to hitch government power to a narrow group’s covetousness at the expense of the everyone else not in position to be heard.
This is not the self-interest of individuals in a free market, where people are free to walk away. It’s the self-interest of special interest groups to make economic war on rivals using state power. Under the aegis of government, there is no freedom to walk away. Our hegemonic labor unions love nothing better than to use government’s whip against their labor competitors – foreign and American non-union workers (88% of all U.S. workers) – and the better to insulate these labor monopolists from economic accountability for their excesses.
Case in point is the 2024 dockworkers’ strike. Historically, American organized labor married the federal government back in the 1930s (and some state governments sometime before) with Davis-Bacon (1931) and the National Labor Relations Act (1935). The mandate to pay union wages for government work, under the jargon of “prevailing wage”, and a union’s power to corral all workers at a place of employment put government in the hip pocket of these avaricious interests. More pay and less accountability on the job are at the top of the group’s list of demands. The dockworkers’ ILWU has no appetite for efficiency, innovation, and automation, only an interest in more pay, bennies, and featherbedding. Thus, the country that gave to the planet the world wide web has ports more antiquated than Mexico’s.
This is the reality of protectionism. Yet, protectionism is lauded as the pragmatic choice and free trade an idealist’s dream. Robert Lighthizer, Trump’s trade negotiator in Trump I, wrote that free trade is “mythical” and “never existed except in the minds of academics” (see #5). This logic ignores the mud wrestling of political decision making that produces the protectionist policies. Right now, the chief proponents of this blinkered thought process are Trump and Vance. They and their MAGA courtiers, inveigh against “deindustrialization” and the need for “self-sufficiency”. Vance trots off to Europe in March and spouts an attack on free trade, among other things (see #3). Of course, he fails to acknowledge that the government in its free-for-all jostling of parasitical interests will define these terms and the means to address them. Forget about a true national interest. And they assume that free trade is “mythical” and “fair trade” (?) is the practical alternative, as if amazingly sanitized of self-serving political manipulation. Who’s naïve here?
Welcome to the mind of Ross Perot updated in the thoughts and deeds of Donald Trump, his sidekick J.D. Vance, and their MAGA cadre of influencers.
No doubt, this “populism” has a fervent inward demeanor. It applies to foreign policy as well as trade. Foreign relations that cannot be reduced to widget totals and dollars and cents are suspect in the Perot/MAGA psyche. A world made safe for our people and our civilization has less purchase with this crowd. It leads to absolutely disgraceful national policy vis-à-vis the world.
The Ukraine imbroglio brought out the worst in the MAGA ecosystem, Trump, and his people. Now in the seat of power, eager to fulfill Trump’s boast of “I’ll settle the war in 24 hours”, the Trump consiglieri quickly launched a bashing of the . . . victim, the only leverage at their disposal to effectuate a deal, any deal. In an April meeting in the White House, Trump and Vance berated Zelensky over highly contentious charges of corruption and waste of American aid. On Truth Social, Trump could not resist lambasting Zelensky as a dictator, and nary a word about the real thug in the deadly game, Putin. The waterboarding of Ukraine was intensified with threats of cutting off aid and ceasing intelligence sharing. You want to talk about a world turned upside down?
It is often repeated that patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Wrong! It is “peace”, peace at any price, divorced from moral judgment, and repeatedly bloviating on the loss of life and destruction as if there is nothing to die for, not freedom, nor independence, nor honor. It is disgraceful. It is all that Trump talks about whenever the subject of Ukraine arises. It sounds like cover to hide the self-centered zeal to get a “win” no matter the cost to our nation’s reputation or the safety and security of a people fighting remain free.
Do not think for a moment that other nations fail to notice the treachery, this abandonment of honor for dishonor, of virtue for ignominy. It will be hard for them not to look upon us with greater cynicism, making our job of building alliances more difficult. We are turning our back on America as the shining city on a hill, as a beacon of a free and democratic moral order.
America’s premiere place in the world cannot be dismissed in the banal caterwauling about an American “world policeman”. The descent into national solipsism has extended into the silencing of our national voice in support of beleaguered peoples in China, North Korea, Russia, Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, etc., by regimes not content with tyrannizing their own people but striving to threaten others within their reach. The administration’s wielding of the meat axe on all operations of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM) including Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, Radio Martí, Radio Farda (Iran), Radio Free Asia, et al, is typical Trump, using a 150mm howitzer to silence the occasional fly of wokeism. The world’s miscreants are dancing a jig from Moscow to Beijing to Teheran to Pyongyang to Havanna.
Trump in his executive order cripples all the USAGM operations to the “minimum presence and function required by law”. So much for the Constitution’s Article II command that the president “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”. So much for “faithfully”. So much for the $860 million that Congress has appropriated for the agency this year. Keri Lake, appointed as “senior adviser” to the agency, and her people have issued a suicide note for the program in describing USAGM as “not salvageable”, and further, “From top-to-bottom this agency is a giant rot and burden to the American taxpayer—a national security risk for this nation—and irretrievably broken.” (see #7)
What’s MAGA’s main complaint? Left-wing bias. According to a senior Trump aid, “[USAGM] serves as the Voice for Radical America and has pushed divisive propaganda for years now.” If so, Mr. President, do your job and administer the program by removing the malefactors and their baleful influence, and manage the program more in line with our foreign policy imperatives.
In a continuum from Ross Perot to Donald Trump, a reboot of isolationism has taken hold. An America of outward responsibilities and moral clarity comes in a distant second to America First, aka America Alone. A great deal of naïveté is necessary to have an America Alone and not have the world crumbling down around you. In the 1920s, a general popular reluctance to engage the world was replaced with the fantasies of outlawing war (Kellogg-Briand Treaty) and disarmament-lite (Washington Naval Treaty). It did not take much longer than a decade before Hitler tore up the Versailles Treaty and the Wehrmacht went on a growth spurt, ditto for Italy, and Japan was laying the keel for the two largest battleships in history (Musashi, Yamato). The Third Reich, New Roman Empire, and Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere were on the march. The vacuum of naïveté is filled with aggression, and much worse.
What is Trump’s reaction to naked aggression? It goes something like this: they don’t attack us, we don’t care; we’ll bring “peace” by punishing the victim; and we’ll close down our efforts to bring uncensored voices to subject peoples because they upset the tender sensibilities of authoritarians.
One thing remains true about Donald Trump. Frankly, if there is not anything in it for him, like a Nobel Peace Prize, he does not seem to care. It is shameful.
This whole ignoble scene taking place before our eyes can be summed up in the presence of Laura Loomer around Donald Trump. She has peddled rantings about 9/11 being an inside job. She is a provocateur drawing attention to herself and specializing in dark conspiracies. She is to MAGA what Dylan Mulvaney is to the woke Left. She marches to the White House and shortly thereafter (April 3) Trump fires six National Security Council staffers. Like the dark web, there appears to be a dark Right that has privileged access to our president, a Right consumed in dark cabals whose number stretches into infinity.
A person like Laura Loomer has access because we have a president who dabbles in the political occult. It is a legacy of Ross Perot.
RogerG
Sources:
1. For a conservative critique of Perot’s trade claims, turn to “Setting the Record Straight: Evaluating Ross Perot’s Allegations Against the NAFTA”, Michael Wilson, The Heritage Foundation, 9/30/1993, at https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/setting-the-record-straight-evaluating-ross-perots-allegationsagainst-the-nafta. Today’s Trump-loving incarnation of the Heritage Foundation is busy eating those words.
2. 1992 presidential debate in “NAFTA 20TH ANNIV – PEROT GIANT SUCKING SOUND”, CNN, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3LvZAZ-HV4
3. The affection for protectionism is resplendent in both Trump and Vance. Trump’s most beautiful word in the English language is “tariff”. Vance speaks in Europe and clashes with conservative writers over the alleged beauties of protectionism, euphemistically referred to as “fair trade”, in bombasts on X at https://x.com/TimesBChanging/status/1906201911453171977. Dan McClaughlin in “Sorry, Mr. Vance, Things Are Not the Same as People” in National Review, lays out the buffoonery In Vance’s thinking at https://www.nationalreview.com/2025/03/sorry-mr-vance-things-are-not-the-same-as-people/.
4. Much thanks to Dominic Pino in “Free Trade Is How You Live Your Life”, National Review Magazine, May 2025, at https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2025/05/free-trade-is-how-you-live-your-life/
5. “The Free Trade Folly”, Robert Lighthizer, The American Compass, at https://americancompass.org/rebuilding-american-capitalism/productive-markets/the-free-trade-folly/
6. If you have the stomach for it, watch the entire 1993 Ross Perot/Al Gore debate on CNN’s Larry King Live and you will see Perot mannerisms in the current edition of Trump alongside the Trump spiel on free trade in the person of Perot. You’ll also notice the Perot pandering to organized labor like Trump. It can be viewed at https://youtu.be/0fi8OOAKuGQ?si=NnjfldhZK0VDLj7h.
7. “Trump orders the dismantling of government-funded, ‘propaganda’-peddling media outlet”, Emma Colton, Fox News, 3/16/2025, at https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-orders-dismantling-government-funded-left-wing-media-outlet-voa?msockid=287a0b967a9564c61c991f537b2f65ee
8. “Voice of America goes silent as Trump signs executive order gutting network’s parent agency”, Ariel Zilber, New York Post, 3/27/2025, at https://nypost.com/2025/03/17/media/voice-of-america-goes-silent-as-trump-guts-networks-parent-agency/
9. “Federal judge blocks Trump administration from dismantling Voice of America”, Michael Kunzelman and Rebecca Boone, AP, 4/22/2025, at https://apnews.com/article/voice-of-america-trump-f30c48df0c16de622ec5fd99ee6c627c