As much as the MAGA folks and friends would like to believe that Trump's Golden Age of American Prosperity is steaming down the pike, and giving him full credit for slaying a lot of political devils like DEI, green energy, weaponizsation of the DOJ/FBI, getting boys out of the girls' swim lanes, ending the disaster in Ukraine, standing up Elon Musk and the DOGE boys, canceling the penny and scuttling daylight savings time, too, the truth needs be told.

To wit, when it comes to economics the Donald is as far out to lunch as Sleepy Joe, Barry, Chuckles, Nancy and the Washington Dems ever were. That's because he's a rightwing statist who would make Louis XIV proud: L'État, c'est moi ("I am the state").

But the thing is, the state can't make prosperity; it can only retard, impair, enfeeble and even crush it. What makes prosperity is just what Milton Friedman said: Namely, the exertions of free men on free markets, enabled by sound money, minimalist government, constitutional liberty and the rights to property and the fruits of their own labors, talents and creations.

As far as we can tell, the Donald has precious little affinity—if any at all—for these bedrock principles of capitalist prosperity and a free society. To the contrary, his policy positions amount to a dog's breakfast of gripes, grievances, histrionics, nativist humbug and MAGA rally pablum. And even most of that turns on a Brobdingnagian ego that filters everything as a zero sum transaction in which he is the grand deal-maker and unparalleled negotiator who alone can score the "win" and save the day for the nation.

Unfortunately, this leads Donald Trump to a frame of mind which sees America as one giant business enterprise where he has been elected CEO and deal-maker-in-chief. From that august perch, in turn, he claims carte blanche authority to deploy import tariffs taxes at will in pursuit of any and all objectives that strike his fancy.

That is, one day he might be battering $950 billion of annual goods and services trade with Canada in order to punish our neighbor to the north for what has been an average of about $400k per year of Fentanyl seized at the border. Then, the next day he monkey-hammers the EU for a 10% tariff on American-made gas guzzlers for which there is scant market in high fuel-tax Europe—even as American consumers lap up luxury BMWs', Mercedes' and Porsche's not because the US tariff is too low and "stupid" at 2.5%, but because these German brands won the US market from Cadillac and Lincoln fair and square via superior engineering, styling and marketing.

Lately, he's also been proposing to use tariffs as a foreign policy cattle prod against any country that doesn't toe the neocon line against Iran or which does business with Venezuela. That is, if you are buying khaki pants from India, which country purchases both Iranian and Venezuelan oil, you're gonna get the Donald's "secondary tariff" stick on the back of the neck right soon.