What do you make of this?

Doug Casey: Frankly, it's ridiculous. Whenever Trump talks, it's clear that he knows nothing about either economics or history. Of course, knowledge isn't entirely necessary to steer the Ship of State. It's possible to get by with only luck, bluster, and coercion—but the results tend to be bad. Trump doesn't have any consistent thinking or philosophy, either; it's all seat-of-the-pants feelings.

That's a characteristic of populists. They try to get ahead of popular whims, and they'll say or do almost anything that they think the mob wants to hear.

So far, the big reason for Trump's popularity is that he's a cultural conservative. Let's count ourselves lucky in that regard. He doesn't want to overturn the basis of America itself, as many of the Democrats clearly want to do.

When it comes to economics, Trump is very comfortable with arbitrarily printing wild amounts of money. I suspect he rationalizes it by thinking it will forestall deflationary collapse in the short run and inflate away the otherwise unrepayable national debt in the long run.

He's mostly in favor of mild deregulation, which is good, of course. But most of what he does is flattery-driven. If he likes somebody and they want to suck up to him, he'll do what it takes to make himself more popular with that person and their constituency.

His tariffs are a tax on Americans who import things. Part of his philosophy with the tariffs is to encourage manufacturing in the US. But since over half of the imports are for further value-added manufacturing in the US, it turns out he's really hurting domestic manufacturing. And he's hurting exports too, because when you don't buy things from people, they're less likely to buy things from you.

Apart from generating revenue to distribute to the capita censi, his objective is to encourage domestic manufacturing by making imports expensive and forcing people to make things domestically. Very much like Argentina under the Peronists, whose similar hopes of self-sufficiency wound up destroying the Argentine economy. Building up domestic manufacturing can take many years, sometimes decades. But along the way, a closed, protectionist America will produce uncompetitive products. This results in a lower standard of living for Americans.