In one darkly hilarious moment, Trump’s Secretary of Agriculture told Americans to deal with sky-high egg prices by raising chickens in their back yard. How did we go from “Make America Great Again” to “Everyone needs to become a backyard chicken farmer”? Did Mao Zedong rise from the dead and take over the U.S.A. while I wasn’t looking?
In fact, I do think something a little like that is happening. Unless Trump is being paid by America’s enemies to destroy the country’s economy — something I think is pretty unlikely — what we’re looking at here is an ideological project. Like Mao did in China in the 1960s, Trump is taking a baseball bat to the US economy in order to follow his deeply held ideological beliefs.
But which ideology? I wrote that DOGE is an ideological project, but that’s all about anti-wokeness. Trump’s ideology isn’t the same as Elon’s; he isn’t raising tariffs in order to get rid of DEI or kick trans people off of women’s sports teams. Although his motives are always a bit murky, my best guess is that this is about a different ideology. This is about economic self-reliance.
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