Mark Humphrey/AP Photo
Donald Trump speaks at the Bitcoin 2024 Conference on July 27, 2024, in Nashville, Tennessee.
Now that Donald Trump has won, again, a furious debate on the left side of the political spectrum has erupted, as Democratic Party factions jostle for position by casting blame on everyone but themselves. For my part, while I can’t help but have some suspicions, it will be six months before we have detailed data on where demographics actually landed, and at time of writing California is not even done counting. Any serious conclusions are premature at this point.
A more interesting conundrum, however, is the maddening fact that Trump paid little or no electoral penalty for his numerous hideously unpopular positions. A developing body of evidence suggests that a critical mass of voters simply did not hear about these positions, or did not believe them if they did. (The most bleak thread in this story are interviews with unauthorized immigrants who say they would have voted for Trump if they could, assuming that surely he would not deport them, as they’re honest and hardworking folks.)
Broadly speaking, it seems this decisive stratum of the electorate (the don’t-knows or those who dismissed Trump’s positions) was dissatisfied with the status quo under President Biden for one reason or another, and cast a protest vote for Trump, assuming things will turn out about as they did during his first term. These people are about to learn the hard way how wrong they were.
First of all, it’s critical to emphasize that Trump will be far less constrained in his second term than in his first. He did many horrendous things that the voting population seems to have memory-holed for some reason—like catastrophically bungling the critical early management of the COVID-19 pandemic, which probably caused a death toll well into six figures. But he was also routinely slowed or stopped from implementing some of his worst ideas by pushback from inside or outside his administration.
This time, virtually all the former officials who argued with him have been run out of the GOP, and replaced with bootlicking toadies. Trump loyalists are also much more prepared than they were in 2016, when they did not expect to win and therefore had to scramble to develop a program. As for outside influence, this time Trump ran a radically more anti-immigrant campaign than in 2016—something akin to the opening stages of Generalplan Ost—and depressingly did better even among Latino immigrants, deflating worries about blowback. Billionaire media oligarchs like Jeff Bezos were kissing his ring even before he won; Elon Musk was kissing more than his ring. And this time around, the Supreme Court has preemptively declared Trump immune from being prosecuted for crimes committed as president. Trump is going to feel free to do whatever he wants.
So consider Tom Homan, who yesterday was announced as Trump’s choice for “border czar,” and put in charge of Trump’s mass deportation regime. Homan was Trump’s acting head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) early in the first term, and he was the architect of the infamous family separation policy that Trump halted in 2018 after relentless criticism. Homan swears he is going to carry out Trump’s plan to deport 15 to 20 million people, or about 4 to 6 percent of the entire American population. There are only perhaps 13 million unauthorized immigrants in total, but the discrepancy might be explained by Homan’s plan to avoid family separation by deporting whole families even if some members are citizens.
This is of a piece with Trumper attacks on the citizenship rights of naturalized immigrants and birthright citizenship, and as the relevant poem goes, eventually anyone Trump doesn’t like. As the proto-fascist Mayor of Vienna Karl Lueger once remarked, “I decide who is a Jew.”
Next year, we are likely to have another rapidly inflating crypto bubble with essentially no regulation or oversight, only this time hooked into the normal financial system.
Even if Trump only manages a tenth of what he promises, the deportations are going to be an atrocity for the record books. By way of comparison, about 12 million Germans fled or were deported out of Eastern Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, and about 600,000 of them died in the process. Now, back in the U.S., fascist thugs—possibly deputized sheriffs and cops—will be busting into houses, dragging families out of their beds, and herding them into concentration camps that are certain to be overcrowded, filthy, and disease-ridden. The construction and agriculture industries, where one-fifth and one-half the workforces, respectively, are undocumented, will be dealt a savage blow. The prices of food and homes will surge.
Speaking of prices, consider the broader economy. Many interviews and polls suggest that swing voters trust Trump on the economy, which makes some sense as in 2019, courtesy of the prolonged Obama recovery, things were pretty good (not as good as today for the working class, but I digress). And indeed, with his devil’s luck, Trump has once again been handed a humming, prosperous economy on a silver platter, with strong growth, full employment, inflation quiescent, investment surging, and wages up.
But any number of Trump’s campaign promises could nuke the prosperity created by Bidenomics. Trump’s promise to put huge tariffs on all imports would jack up inflation, cause a trade war, and probably a large recession. Repealing Biden’s various climate bills would kill the green-investment boom and its associated future manufacturing jobs, because the projects are all premised on federal subsidies. Tearing up the administrative state risks all kinds of disaster, from poisoned food and water supplies to major industrial accidents.
A more uncertain danger, but perhaps riskiest of all, would be a crypto meltdown leading to a general financial panic. During the campaign, Trump did an about-face and became a big crypto guy because the industry gave him tons of money. Now, the industry is certain to avoid any serious regulation under his watch. And like any Republican, Trump is certain to install Wall Street stooges in the SEC and other regulators.
From a 30,000-foot view, crypto is akin to the pre–New Deal securities market that produced phenomena like the deranged property speculation frenzy in Florida swamps from 1924 to 1926, except without the swamps. It’s pure speculation and nothing else, where every type of financial scam is running rampant, perhaps because the post-2008 wariness about financial gambling has subsided, and young people today having no direct experience of the crash. Crypto fanatics are reacting jubilantly to the Trump victory, with Bitcoin surging well past $80,000 and retail investors flooding into crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
We already saw the risks of crypto with the bankruptcy of FTX and several other crypto firms in 2022, brought down by crimes on a Bernie Madoff–esque scale. But many keystone crypto institutions, above all the big stablecoins like Tether that are critical for moving money in and out of crypto, did not collapse during the panic. Tether’s balance sheet is comically suspicious, and even if it weren’t, if the history of finance teaches anything it’s that these kind of institutions always blow themselves up eventually unless government forces them to behave responsibly and protects them from self-fulfilling panics.
Over the last few years, crypto has insinuated itself into the financial system, with big firms like BlackRock offering crypto ETFs (which is also booming). So next year, we are likely to have another rapidly inflating crypto bubble with essentially no regulation or oversight, only this time hooked into the normal financial system, with corrupt Trumper goons at the head of all the financial regulators. Even if they manage to bail out the big companies with tons of free taxpayer money, as Bush and Obama did in 2008, millions of regular people are going to lose their shirts.
This is far from a complete list of the horrors Trump might unleash during his second term. Whatever they turn out to be, it will be critical to pin the blame where it belongs.
